Aaronsw: We'd set out to make something people want -- but what if they didn't want to want it? | Hacker News Reader

Aaronsw: We'd set out to make something people want -- but what if they didn't want to want it?

aaronsw.com

36 pointsjoshwa17 comments

It's true that making something people want, if you push it too far, would cause you to make something dangerously addictive. But very few startups are that successful; 99.9% of them err on the side of not making something attractive enough.

So "Make something people want" is like "Get more exercise."

Plus, if you want to try to replace this rule with one that works in that additional .1% of cases as well, it's hard to say what it should be. "Make something people should want?" Then you're on the road to fascism (if you have a lot of power) or failure (if you're just a little startup). I suspect that "Make something people want" is optimal in the same way democracy is. As Churchill said, it's the worst form of government except all the others.

As consumers, we are in charge of our own consumption decisions. Its aggravating to see people try to pass that responsibility to others.

The most successful product, service, or even startup is going to be the one that people use. Sure, instead of building a site that serves electronic "junk food," Steve could've designed a website that cuts War and Peace into "bite size chunks." But if nobody uses it, and I have a feeling nobody will, then there will be no incentive to build it.

The best way to change the web is to change your own consumption decisions. Bothered by reddit? Don't visit it. Can't resist? Block it. If enough do that, I'm sure Steve and Alexis will respond with a "healthier menu."

Is one of the main benefits of YC advice on how to make something more attractive and/or how to find customers for whom it would be attractive?

Yes, but if you stop to think about it, what you've described is 95% of what doing a startup consists of. So saying yes to that = yes, we help people with their startups.

Are you confident that YC has the knowledge and/or connections to help a startup whose customer base is fundamentally different from those you've worked with in the past? What if the customer base has shown years of resistance to following the lead of technology early adopters? Would you be able to either penetrate such a market directly or find another market whose lead they would follow? Or, how much more likely would you be to succeed at this than a hacker who applies his/her problem-solving skills to the question and tries a few things?

Sure. Most of what we do isn't based on specific domain knowledge anyway.

Making "something people want" is always good advice. I thought the interesting issue raised by this article was the particular situation where "making something people want" involved playing to the lowest common denominator. Facile content at the expense of intellectual depth. Mars Bars instead of balanced meals.

During seed-stage development, driving users by any means possible seems like great advice. (Or, at least, great advice 99.9% of the time.) Seems like it could be an increasingly dangerous strategy over time, though, at least to the extent that it encourages you to focus on lots of users/pageviews instead of finding committed users who really need your product.

Social systems are a combination of:

1) The intrinsic qualities of the people there.

2) The systemic forces that drive their interaction.

Let's assume the people who visit Reddit are fixed, at least in the short term. So what can we do to alter the ways they interact so that each one leaves the site a better person than when they came?

The current design simply rewards stories that are the most popular. The problem with this is that there are basically four types of valuable stories: Insightful, interesting, informative, and funny (a la Slashdot).

In terms of what makes you a better person, the order is generally:

1. insightful

2. informative

3. interesting / funny

The problem is that the stories that are interesting and funny tend to get votes very quickly, driving the insightful and informative stories off the screen. (Partly this is because you can tell if something is interesting or funny from the headline, but you need to read the whole article before deciding if something is insightful.)

The are currently subreddits based on topics, but once again it's the interesting stories in each subreddit that are pushing out the insightful ones. If we have Anna Nicole Smith on the front page, then we have whatever the science equivalent of ANS is in science and the programming equivalent of ANS in programming.

So of course people aren't coming away from Reddit as better people. Because all the stories that would make them better people are being squelched because of the systemic forces of the system. I don't even read Reddit anymore for this reason.

It's not as if it can't be fixed though. Reddit has the stories it does because they designed the systemic forces to encourage those types of stories. They could just as easily be redesigned to encourage other types of stories.

And, IMHO, in the long term (a few years) they will steadily lose viewers to sites with a better algorithm for quality (insightful and informative) if they don't make these changes.

You're making the assumption the majority of people want insightful and informative. The fact that there is a huge market for content like Survivor and Fear Factor makes me doubt this assumption.

I'd say that Reddit has more to worry about from niche copycats than another large site. Why go to Reddit for your celeb gossip and pictures of cats with dumb text when there's a site dedicated to it? It's like oh-mah-gawd-with-justin-timberlake on top awesome, without all the nerdy stuff that makes my brain hurt.

If the reddit recommendation engine ever gets really good, I think it could actually be part of the solution, not the problem. As Aaron quotes, "people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." If we take the quote to be true, then looking at the most popular news items will always be problematic, but people will still need a way to find what interests them.

In the short run, lowbrow material can be quite successful. In the long run, though, quality wins out. People still read the classics, the Simpsons is still around because it's complex and smart.

I think the same is true of companies. There is a lot more value (both morally and monetarily) in building for long-term popularity (via quality) than in brief cheap thrills.

And so, specifically, I'm betting that YouTube will soon be replaced by sites that offer higher quality (production values, intellectual material, better organized) content...the popularity "Farting in Public" will soon pass!

It just takes longer to evaluate the worth of a novel than the worth of a blog post, so if you read only novels, it might be weeks before you find one you really like, but if you're reading blog posts, you're likely to find something you really like later today. For equally good blog posts and novels, the worth of the novel is less than the proportionately longer length would suggest.

Here is my response as I wrote on my blog(http://www.zaid360.com/?p=107):

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It is getting tiring to hear folks complain about the corrupting impact of web2.0 ventures on daily life. I think such arguments make for great philosophical papers. But really they have little practical meaning.

Two things:

1. the argument that stuff like Twitter and YouTube are time wasters and thus amoral can be debated to death and debates are the last thing entrepreneurs like to get into; we would rather build more YouTubes and more Twitters

2. if you think that Twitter and YouTube are nothing but time wasters, you are simply being short sighted.

Ya'll need to realize that many new tools in their initial stages are used for fun, and that is the stage most of the new generation of web2.0 ideas are in. It has been what less than three or four years since facebook took off, and YouTube sucked us in? And already we are hearing of YouTube 's use in catching stupid crooks, facebook as a tool to find lost wallets and Twitter's potential to help during a SF earthquake. Such waste of time, eh.

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The challenge is in creating something with near-instant gratification while maintaining substance.

Usually it's hard enough to get a high demand hit, so we concentrate on just that. If we can achieve that part, we can then worry about not becoming a short-lived flavor du jour. It's there that we evaluate the differences between offering something people desire and providing something people value.

People's hidden desires will continue to be fulfilled by a free market society. People can feel free to try to swim against the tide, but nature abhors a vacuum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_Of_The_Self

A topical music video about "progress":

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zwAk6yusvFY

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