People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed before—but cars also existed before the Ford Model T).
But sometimes, I really want a faster horse.
Netflix in 2012 was a super fast horse. It had a simple but massive catalog of movies and shows, solid recommendations, and basic library management. Compared to my limited local media library it was great. You could actively tune your tastes and rate things with a 5-star system.
From all the steaming platforms I like the Parasite TV the most and it isn’t about worms. Alright it’s called stremio
My mom is my main partner in crime, as a boomer she adjusts incredibly quickly when she hears free or dirt cheap lmao with only questions such as “will they catch us?”
No mom, they will never catch us
The author hits on exactly what’s happening with the comparison to carcinisation: crustacean evolution converges to a crab like form because that’s the optimization for the environmental stresses.
As tiramichu said in their comment, digital platforms are converging to the same form because they’re optimizing for the same metric. But the reason they’re all optimizing that metric is because their monetization is advertising.
In the golden days of digital platforms, i.e. the 2010s, everything was venture capital funded. A quality product was the first goal, and monetization would come “eventually.” All of the platforms operated this way. Advertising was discussed as one potential monetization, but others were on the table, too, like the “freemium” model that seemed to work well for Google: provide a basic tier for free that was great in its own right, and then have premium features that power users had to pay for. No one had detailed data for what worked and what didn’t, and how well each model works for a given market, because everything was so new. There were a few one-off success stories, many wild failures from the dotcom crash, but no clear paths to reliable, successful revenue streams.
Lots of products now do operate with the freemium model, but more and more platforms had moved and are still moving to advertising ultimately because of the venture capital firms that initially funded them have strong control over them and have more long term interest in money than a good product. The data is now out there that the advertising model makes so, so much more money than a freemium model ever could in basically any market. So VCs want advertising, so everything is TikTok.
This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.
When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.
From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.
The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.
Hmm. You see, a car is better than a horse. Not only because of speed. Because of the convenience of usage too.
You don’t want a faster horse. You just don’t want more bullshit for more price.
You want convenience.
Horses can go places cars cannot. You have completely missed the point.
Some cars can go places horses cannot. You have completely missed the point. I’m not discussing the intricate nuances of the provided analogy.
OK, I’ll bite. Where can cars go that horses cannot?
Car wash?
“A horse walks into a car wash” is a Vaudeville joke, not an impossibility.
Space, apparently.
Horses can absolutely go into space. No use in beating them at that point.
If I bought a horse and got bull shit, I’m returning the horse and not buying from “Bob’s horses, definitely not bulls” store again.
Better is relative. Also its unfair to compare one species (car) against many possible specialized species (cars). In example you don’t need to repair an expensive car, you don’t need electricity or oil and fuel (and many other stuff). Depending on where you are in the world, a horse might be “better” suited than a car.
My actually bingo is complete
