
Aaronsw: We'd set out to make something people want -- but what if they didn't want to want it? - joshwa
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/everythinggood
======
pg
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.

~~~
brlewis
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?

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
brlewis
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?

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

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Alex3917
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.

~~~
sethjohn
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.

~~~
jward
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.

------
divia
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.

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sethjohn
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!

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randallsquared
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.

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

\-----

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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danielha
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.

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richcollins
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>

------
Alex3917
A topical music video about "progress":

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

