We live in a time when large companies will divest themselves of profitable but not growing businesses because it gets in the way of the core mission, which for large public companies is only one thing. Growth.
In that light, I think the chance of a product being allowed to sit and fulfill it's purpose gracefully, at least for services that are major moneymakers, is essentially nil.
Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company. At least, that is, until some large public company sees a way they can "improve" on that model and either buys them up or uses their size to bully them out of market (it's not really free market competition to use billions of VC money to undercut competitors until they fold and you have all of the market).
It's all horribly broken.
This is a "Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house" situation.
Not unrelatedly, I strongly support Debian and think everyone else should, too. Software in the Public Interest (https://www.spi-inc.org) accepts donations for them.
that idea being that systemic change cannot be achieved within the system that is to be changed.
on edit: I am not necessarily a believer in the idea, as I think the 'if voting' expression of the idea can be shown to be wrong by various historical examples.
It’s powerful because it’s a personal challenge in the context of white supremacy. And whenever you use the phrase, some decent percentage of your audience will be put off by it and wonder why you’re bringing race into a conversation that’s not about race. If that’s not something you want, you shouldn’t use the phrase when not talking about issues of race.
And claiming Lorde was only talking about race is simply incorrect.
It’s the same reason you can’t say things like “final solution” — the phrase has societal context and its use is distracting at best when used in another context.
> Private companies can sometimes get away with it, as long as the people backing them don't start to see them as investment vehicles like any other public company.
I'm probably just naive or missing something obvious, but fundamentally it doesn't seem obvious to me _why_ public companies should be treated differently as investments. Ostensibly the original reason stocks had value is that when companies were making money, they'd pay dividends, but like you said, this isn't really the mentality anymore. The stock is worth something because someday if the company makes more money, someone will buy it for more money than you paid...but why? So they can sell it when the company is making even more money later? It seems like if companies don't end up eventually paying dividends at some point, there's no reason why the price of the stock should be related to the amount of money the company makes. The only other thing that shares really do is give very limited voting rights, but this seems like it's not remotely worth enough per share given how much you'd need to have to even begin to influence board elections, which in itself is a very indirect way of influencing the company.
It's hard to say though, because the market in which he made his initial chunk of capital is not the same market today, and it's impossible for me to parse out the self-reinforcing effect of "price goes up because Buffett has taken a large stake" versus the sort of fundamentals I'm referring to.
edit : Having said that, I do believe there is a class of people who are able to make money off of the stock market in a way totally unrelated to the reality of the underlying instruments - profiting on churn, market-making, small percentages on massive positions, etc. But I don't think that means the underlying instruments are actually worthless/not tied to real value.
at one point the free money being thrown around then spent on saas, cloud and marketing with fb / google will be pulled back. and then we will see who's naked. it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but it will happen.
hence buying a piece of a sound business like buffet does, will win at the end of the day. it's not glamorous but it will win.
The method of Buffet/BH obviously works, but it also seems like it requires a lol it knowledge and skill and patience, otherwise it would be much more popular. Rolling a new mark (or the same marks with a game with a new name) is much easier and reliable for those with less skill.
With a public company there's always going to be a shareholder to sue you for not maximizing profit.
https://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/09/articles/series/s...
> According to the company, the short-term demands of shareholders conflict with his long-term ambitions.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121515/will-el...
I don't know if anyone has any chance if Stack Exchange can't stay independent. Like the product was arguably "done" years ago if you ignore monetization.
» As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (AEX:PRX) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for 1.8 billion dollars.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/06/02/prosus-acquires-stack-...
» Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.
» This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announ...
Sometimes I wonder if the people writing these are actually as oblivious as they sound or is they're self aware enough to now be using this verbage to actually be messaging the exact opposite, given how many times this has been written and shown to be false, no matter how much people want it not to be.
Does anyone actually believe that SO isn't beholden to the owning entity, and that no control will be exerted?
We are likely to introduce changes, over time; but these will all be completely focused on Serving our users’ needs more effectively.
Kind of refreshing. I’m working for a 501(c)(3), and we don’t need to show “growth”; just Serve our community.
I say that jokingly, but honestly, a non/not for profit is probably an really good way to structure some of these things to do an end run around both the market and people's expectations, so I sincerely wish you the best in whatever your endeavor is (and you can consider this me politely asking what it is, so you don't have to feel like you are injecting it into the conversation). :)
You can always contact me (via my Web sites), and I could talk about it a bit more.
It's engrained in the money system (money as debt) but I guess the cause stems deeper from human nature.
As nomads, keeping things was near impossible, so aquiring was a permanent necessity. (And pollution no issue btw)
That's what we were for 300k years, and isn't easily changed with a few compliance rules.
What we need is balancing rules, that take the anthropologic reality into account. Not personal wealth maximisation.
If you have good product-market fit, then “shrinking” is growth. By “shrinking” I mean automating more, becoming more efficient, streamlining. Pay off excess staff in shares and free them up (and yourself) to work on something else.
The focus on growth is disgusting and cancer for the real world, the environment as well as society
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Edited: Downvoted without a comment, why?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? You broke more than one of them here—I'm sure unintentionally.
Hardly any economic motivations are removed by getting rid of shareholder capitalism; you still have markets, a growing population, and you still need productivity to increase.
Oh, and eliminating growth would destroy the environment because 1. environmentalism is a luxury good 2. low-productivity technologies consume much more resources than modern ones do.
Blaming Product Managers chasing "impact" is a fashionable thing to think/say here, but I don't think thats entirely true for consumer apps, and especially not for social networks. If it were, you'd expect that the each successive generation of apps to be a return to form. However as we've seen with the migration from FB -> IG -> Snapchat -> back to IG -> TikTok, the core concept behind the "best" product is always changing. That is because "best" is not just about being feature complete, it's about what is "cool", and "cool" will aways be a moving target.
Shipping stuff that turns out to just be useless clutter absolutely happens - the problem is it is hard/impossible to know the difference going in.
Exactly. Look at the fashion industry: pants are pants, shirts are shirts, and there hasn't been a major step forward since decades. Still, brands birth and die continuously, without the underlying product being any better or worse, or cheaper, than the one that comes to replace it. Products are overrated, success as a business is far more complex than ticking a feature list and delivering it to the right people.
They care that the whole experience delivers them what they value: fit, trendiness, status, consistency of the experience and the product, etc.
They care about innovation only when it reliability delivers an obvious gain on any of those stats, or when the market has moved to the point where keeping up with trendiness demands it.
So many brands are “premier” because they know all of this and just relentlessly deliver that familiar experience, maintaining their market position.
Software hasn’t quite, as an industry, figured out that sweet spot of innovation and consistency to be truly lasting. We’re too familiar with disruption - which is true, by and large, and sets us apart. Except once a category is defined enough not to need it. No one’s really disrupted email, despite many attempts, because it’s too ubiquitous and the consistency of experience demands are too great. It’ll happen eventually, but only as a long term evolution of overall trends and underpinning standards. Like the move away from breeches and onto pants.
I'm not so sure about that... https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/a20962322/balenci...
See: $4k sleeping bag coat https://modesens.com/product/vetements-black-and-green-vagab...
It's not that hard. Plenty of A/B testing is done along the way, and yet useless clutter still ships. Why? Partly because it's pretty easy to goose one or two metrics at the expense of a small global regression, partly because everyone needs shipped product at the end-of-year review to justify bonusses/raises/promotions, partly because there are 100+ individual teams working on the product and they all think their feature will benefit users more than the next one... a multitude of localised decisions will necessarily gradually erode the product experience as a whole.
You see this most starkly in fairly decentralised companies like FB, Google, or Valve, less so in companies with centralised command-and-control over product experience (Apple, Amazon's device org, etc). But even centralised command-and-control can only hold this is check for so long at massive scale. Amazon's larger and less focused divisions, post-Jobs Apple... all on the slippery slope
That is true, but again I think it's more complicated than that. AB tests are good for measuring incremental changes, but really bad at predicting the impact of 0 to 1 type products / features, because so much of the success or failure depends on public perception and network effects. Twitter couldn't AB test "Fleets" and have any confidence as to what the product adoption would look like. So companies have no choice but to launch and see.
So you have two options. One is to keep iterating on features. Two is to increase stickiness, of which the easiest way is by locking people into a social network.
But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...
"Free" platforms are a dead-end, and will inevitably be ruined by the irrational demand for infinite growth.
The future is decentralization* and open protocols/standards. Anything controlled by a single company is bound to turn into a growth/engagement zombie.
*Real decentralization, no blockchain bullshit.
To me, it seems like the team size should actually follow more this trend:
Early: small | Growth: big | Mature: medium
As an anecdote, I just downloaded Windows 11 and it truly feels like a product invented to keep designers and engineers busy. It has a nicer UI, yes, but was it really worth the investment compared to Win 10? Probably not.
Reminded me to close that account and finish the transition to Postmark.
This is impossible for other reasons. When you are feature-developing a product, you will hire tons of employees, and then what do you with them when you are done with the feature development? Fire them? Lay off? When has that ever happened? Bugfixing, even if complicated takes less people than peak scale high growth development and nobody wants to maintain old cruft or refactor anyway. (cough HR cough). I'm willing to bet no company has ever downsized after feature development finished, they either go insolvent after they bolt on the kitchen sink or become IBM.
The real solution seems to be hiring a good, but sustainable sized team that you can maintain perpetually, but that never happens because your competitors will outgrow you if you do that. (Especially salespeople) We don't live in an economy of rational growth, because you'd be living on the streets if you tried to do that.
(Also remember if I'm not wrong GM makes most of its money from financing, it's not a problem unique to the computer software/hardware industry)
end of day, it's all the same shit.
it's probably the same product managers moving to new companies
I never look at the news feed on facebook. About the only thing I use it for is specific groups that exist for a reason, like trading bike parts or finding apartments. FB lost its entertainment appeal years ago, other than occasionally ironically enjoying a boomer meme.
That's when the promos happen and the bonuses are paid out.
> but ultimately kill engagement.
Too late. The PM's already jumped ship to the next gig.
Maybe if you give zero incentive for your people to jump ship they'd be more likely to stay and actually care about the company's long-term?
I wouldn't count FAANG pay as "shit".... and yet here we are.
At any stage of a business (which product is part of) you focus only on those things that contribute to your business model. All the metrics you’ve listed: engagement, retention, MAU — all of these are parts of the startup’s unit economy. Every single new feature is mapped against one of these metrics, especially at early stages of the product/business, when there are not many features, and resources to develop new ones are scarce. These metrics actually _drive_ any new features. That’s product management 101.
Back to Instagram, they’ve rolled out huge chunk of functionality this year: Reels. It’s basically another app inside the old one. All done seamlessly. Imagine amount of design and decision-making work that had to went into this. Even for very mature product like Instagram “building functionality” phase never stops.
The moment any organism stops growing is the moment it starts dying.
Software devs need to start thinking seriously about the world they're building. "Just doing my job" isn't an excuse. The only way to a sane future I can see is to quit and start using federated services for everything.
Progress has to happen. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong, but you have to try.
Facebook trying to turn Instagram into Tiktok ruins the ability to use Instagram as Instagram.
It's more like Mr. Coffee saw that smoothies took off in popularity and decided to start making coffee machines that are also blenders, but now suck as coffee machines.
I like living in a world where people have ambition. I won't ever fault Mr. Coffee for trying to become Mr. Beverage, best case they succeed and give me an amazing experience, worst case it allows for a ton of new players to satisfy the people who "just" want a Mr. Coffee.
I guess some people see this as greed. I just think we should all be constantly be striving to be better, including companies. Again, sometimes you get it right like Instagram allowing video, which also allowed for pure photsharing apps, and sometimes you get it wrong.
But I get what you're saying. I just wonder though why so many people tolerate crap — simply because it's all there is right now.
Cable TV with all its commercials was crap, so I nixed it over 20 years ago. I didn't tolerate it until something better came along, I just did without it.
IMO modern mainstream operating systems are also a good example of this. An operating system has basically three jobs: abstract the hardware from application software, provide libraries for commonly used functions, like GUIs, and provide the user with some kind of environment/shell to run their applications in. But somehow, this shitshow of an industry has converged on needing to release a major update every year. Imagine being forced to come up with new features for, and release a major update of, a feature-complete product every time the planet completes a lap around its star just because the marketing department exists and demands that it so happens because reasons. Oh, and what if you run out of feature ideas? Then of course you redesign the UI! UI redesigns never get old.
The internet is interesting in that it can bypass a lot of consumer protections that have been hard fought in government.
One that I recently saw on here was the government (not sure which level, federal I think) declaring that click to sign up, call to cancel is illegal.
There is so much user hostile behavior online it's crazy, generally speaking it seems we all need to find our way back to morals.
Hang in there with the despair.
That gamification is a relevant feature to someone.
As a ADVERTISER
I want ATTENTION
So that MORE MONEY
Best example for me: Revolut. The app and product as a whole was so simple and good.
One year ago (or maybe 1.5 years ago) it started going downhill, fast. The app got so complicated that I often simply cannot find what I'm looking for (my card or the balance in a specific currency). Everyone I know using Revolut has the same complaint, especially older people like my parents or in-laws.
I don't get it and it makes me sad.
I agree with the thrust of your comment and wonder how we might get there. Software companies did look more like you describe in the past, and a few like (some parts of) Apple and some game companies still do. Mostly these are companies that ship a chunk of finished software rather than a "service" -- a big release once a year, little post-hoc tracking and engagement optimization. I think there's fundamentally an incentive problem with most (all?) free-to-use software services. If revenue directly correlates to engagement time it's really hard to avoid this trap because it's a very rational path to go down to optimize the business.
Refuses to put the categories in a consistent order, even things like "my list" and "continue watching" move around in the UI.
Categories available for you to browse also change randomly.
Autoplay while browsing and autoplay of other content when you finish a show or movie.
Images used in show/movie thumbnails are different for different users based on what they think you are likely to click on.
Mobile app has a tiktok style feed for comedy shows. I believe they are also testing or have already rolled out a tiktok style feed for kids Netflix.
HBO is happy to show me an alphabetical list of all of their content but Netflix will not.
But then they figured out there's more money in not just giving you what you'll like best.
I’d love to pay a small monthly for an app that just used their old recommendations engine. I’m guessing there is not a large enough market for that sort of thing to offset the costs of you leaving their ecosystem.
So far.
I see them frequently flirting with BS tangential solutions to problems that the user doesn't care about. Like, they're hosting games on the phone app now? No thanks. And I'm counting the days until the "play something" button goes away.
In other words, we can pay with money or by allowing ourselves to be monetized (via attention to ads or other manipulations and invasiveness) *OR* we can actually have things be free. There's negligible cost to enjoying Mozart or Mark Twain, and a few orders of magnitude more stuff could be public domain if that status weren't sabotaged to support our cancerous growth-forever economic model.
Anyway, I agree with you completely about Netflix vs Instagram. And while Instagram can be described as pay-with-attention-to-ads, it's definitely valid to see it as most users are the product for the actual paying customers (the advertisers). The reason I like the "pay-with-attention" framing is to prompt everyone to always be asking "how am I paying?" and sometimes the answer is "I'm not, it's actually free, no catch" as that opens more options to consider than the binary "am I the customer or the product?"
I'd love to hear from the decision makers behind such changes, whether it was an attempt to improve an already-good situation or if it was an attempt to correct a declining situation.
Why wait? Like you it disgusts me now.
I don't use Facebook but I'm under the impression they've done this somewhat with local market places, games & video streaming.
It sounds to me that you're sick of common abused marketing tactics or maybe it's just that I am & therefore that's how I read your post. Gamification, Deadly Sins, Reciprocity, etc..
To many it happens after hitting 40.
We might think of Web 2.1 composed by socially responsible apps.
Why? I do not consider it self evident that such developments are necessarily bad.
I think OG Twitter sent you an SMS every time someone you follow tweeted.
Probably why a lot of these changes make apps less engaging for people like the author and commenters here. That random boomer photo is probably popular among the average person even though it doesn't fit into your feed. Facebook/Instagram don't care about your interaction and revenue in particular, they care about getting the most interaction and revenue in general.
We don’t need industrial pipelines for everything.
Centralize logistics of biological necessity, privatize self exploration.
We should only industrially build industrial machines we need, and personal gadget fetishism can go in the bin.
Our wealth is a mathematical quagmire. No one knows who owes what really, and Dick Cheney was saying the quiet part out loud before Trump: deficits don’t matter.
It’s an emotional boondoggle. Future people will renegotiate or blow ourselves up.
Whatever product it is, whether a social media platform or an online learning platform, it will slowly be zombified into an attention sucking machine, whose goal has now become to keep you interacting with the app as much as possible (using ML and DL of course).
I mean, Twitter now sends me daily notifications that a person I follow made a random tweet (wasn't this the purpose of the news feed?), Udemy now has a notification service and an inbox that fills up with automated messages that are just a "welcome to the course" message. Everywhere I look, the pattern is the same, Product is good > Product adds social features > Product attempts to cluster user activity and make recommendations based on social features.
We, as in the IT industry, need to come up with a culture or methodology of 'declaring a product complete' whereby all product managers are gracefully allowed to move on and a product is put into a state of stasis, where bugfixes and the occasional relevant feature is built. If a product was not designed to show intelligent recommendations, use gamification or become a notification dashboard then that should be bared from ever appearing in its Backlog.
I'm deeply worried about the long-term effects of an industry that is booming by sending sending some of our brightest minds to scale the economy of distractions Or to innovate Ad-tech.
I really hope we'll look back at this age with the same wisdom-fuelled disgust we have when we look back at the early industrial age. Where smog factories were built in the middle of cities and dusty kids were shovelling coal. We lack any sort of foresight wrt. the digital economy we're building. Maybe one day we'll find a healthy alternative to make software-products users love.
But until then, seldom are the days where I do not look at the internet with such savage despair.