10 ms·

I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make. By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn

by folken 2y ago

I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make. By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized. You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income. And this is why we can't have nice things.

duxup 2y ago
There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid. It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast. They got beat out by Salesforce... We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.
- awuji 2y ago
  But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work. As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
  - NikolaNovak 2y ago
    Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM? They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole. It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
    - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
      Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      >why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument. the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input. the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
- wpietri 2y ago
  > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance. A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop. But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare. For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...
  - campbel 2y ago
    Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
  - DwnVoteHoneyPot 2y ago
- whizzter 2y ago
  The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough. Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually. https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers
  - duxup 2y ago
    IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features, granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy software based on features for sure.
- throw0101a 2y ago
  > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce? Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere? You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same. And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners). >And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them. Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me? I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
- maxrecursion 2y ago
  I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact. We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be. Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion." So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
- wyager 2y ago
  > We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
  - duxup 2y ago
    I like to think I do too. However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.
- sunnybeetroot 2y ago
  I think part of Apple’s success is because they give people nice things.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    They do indeed treat customers well. The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
- j45 2y ago
  The market is always looking to be seen, understood and helped. Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be. Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.
- feoren 2y ago
  > [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid. I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Most companies have terrible code 1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out). 2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.
GTP 2y ago
> And this is why we can't have nice things. Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.
hyperadvanced 2y ago
This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics
throwaway48476 2y ago
Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.
- forrestthewoods 2y ago
  > The audience is primarily children Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25
  - Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
    Sure, but a lot of people are besides brain-dead slop-consumers. That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content. (I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)
    - throwaway48476 2y ago
      Algorithm moderation is not content moderation. A recent court case found that algorithmic recommendations don't fall under section 230 protection.
  - kenmorechalfant 2y ago
    The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
montag 2y ago
Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on YouTube.

by folken 2y ago

duxup 2y ago

There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid. It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast. They got beat out by Salesforce... We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

awuji 2y ago
But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work. As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.
- NikolaNovak 2y ago
  Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM? They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole. It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)
  - PhasmaFelis 2y ago
    Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument. the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input. the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM
wpietri 2y ago
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance. A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop. But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare. For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...
- campbel 2y ago
  Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 2y ago
whizzter 2y ago
The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough. Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually. https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers
- duxup 2y ago
  IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features, granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy software based on features for sure.
throw0101a 2y ago
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce? Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere? You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same. And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners). >And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them. Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me? I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.
maxrecursion 2y ago
I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact. We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be. Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.
MisterTea 2y ago
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion." So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.
wyager 2y ago
> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things. I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)
- duxup 2y ago
  I like to think I do too. However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.
sunnybeetroot 2y ago
I think part of Apple’s success is because they give people nice things.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  They do indeed treat customers well. The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.
j45 2y ago
The market is always looking to be seen, understood and helped. Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be. Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.
feoren 2y ago
> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid. I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Most companies have terrible code 1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out). 2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.

GTP 2y ago

> And this is why we can't have nice things. Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.

hyperadvanced 2y ago

This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics

throwaway48476 2y ago

Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.

forrestthewoods 2y ago
> The audience is primarily children Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25
- Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
  Sure, but a lot of people are besides brain-dead slop-consumers. That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content. (I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    Algorithm moderation is not content moderation. A recent court case found that algorithmic recommendations don't fall under section 230 protection.
- kenmorechalfant 2y ago
  The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.
johnnyanmac 2y ago

montag 2y ago

Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on YouTube.