

What the hosting and the meat market have in common - franklaemmer
http://blog.fortrabbit.com/what-the-hosting-and-the-meat-market-have-in-common/

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davidkatz
The direction seems fruitful, but there was very little to learn in this
article. More insight into what is actually wrong with hosting providers would
have made this a lot better.

I now feel about Hacker News round about how I felt with TechCrunch a few
months before I stopped reading it completely. I'm mainly here because of
inertia, and because there is still great content from time to time and I
don't want to miss it.

My attention is very much up for the taking. The moment something better comes
along, I'd be the first to switch.

I wish PG put more love into HN. It used to be amazing, now it's just nice. At
least, that's my opinion.

~~~
grep2
What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better
discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise?

One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display
algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his
contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this
level, but comments below with decreasing probability.

This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get
picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level
acceptable for the user.

Or is this nonsense?

~~~
davidkatz
Sounds like a good direction, like most things it probably needs to be tested
in the wild. I'm not sure that it addresses the heart of the problem though,
which might be this: as communities get larger, quality drops.

This is a hard problem to solve, and all I can do is offer some ideas. One
idea might be to have a hierarchy of influence, where some users have more
power than others, and users get promoted automatically according to their
activity.

Off the top of my head, here's one possible way this could work:

Say you have three member tiers - reader, contributor and editor, and let's
further say that the power of each tier differs in order of magnitude. readers
can grant items 1 point, contributors 10 points, and administrators 100
points.

If members at a higher tier than you consistently upvote stuff _after_ you
upvote it, at some point you get promoted. In the same way, if they downvote
stuff after you upvote it you get demoted.

I'd be interested if HN or Reddit ever experimented with something like this.

One other important thought - you'll probably never be able to completely
automate a great community. Or put another way - everything else being equal,
a community that is also actively curated by someone with great taste is
probably going to be better.

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IsaacL
People buy hosting based on (RAM / CPU / bandwidth) for your buck. They don't
buy based on customer service.

I think this is OK for the middle of the market - VPS customers, for whom a
Linux shell is an adequate interface. (I don't know about the higher end of
the market, dedicated servers and up, but I imagine those kind of customers
are willing to pay more for quality service).

It really sucks for the low-end web hosting market - the kind of services
where you get a shared folder on Apache to upload PHP scripts, and a cPanel-
type interface for one-click install of Wordpress, Magento, etc.

If you're charging customers less than £10/month, any support tickets they
open are going to eat massively into your margins. So all these sites have
really crappy outsourced service.

I once helped a friend who was struggling to install Prestashop on his
webhost. The support thread was like "I'm having problem X". "It seems to be
fixed now, ticket closed". "No, I'm still having the same problem". "It
appears to be fixed now, ticket closed". "It's not fixed, I'm still having the
same problem..." Every reply was from a different support rep, meaning their
attempt to cut corners in the name of efficiency turned into a massive
inefficiency.

~~~
hausburger
Exactly. You get what you pay for, no matter the market.

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zacharyvoase
So part of the solution for meat is to "vote for a party that supports meat
market regulation." But no such recommendation is made for hosting providers.

Regulate all the industries—except mine!

The first comment on the article is also quite lovely.

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franklaemmer
THX for all the comments on my article.

I have learned that it was a bit too short and maybe a bit too superficial for
the HN community. In fact the original version was much longer but i decided
to trim it to the core message.

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auggierose
Is this really number 2 ranking on HN right now. Time to get the hell outta
here ...

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riffraff
related, our davidw's seven years old article that hosting is a market for
lemons

<http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons>

~~~
franklaemmer
great article indeed, thanks for pointing us.

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BenBoone
Sweet analogy.. But, you missed to mention the ecological effects.

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retube
I don't get this analogy at all. What is he saying, that consumers
discriminate on the basis of price for both meat and hosting solutions? So
what? This is hardly an insight. Most products and services are largely
discriminated by price.

Meat is so cheap in the US due to a mix of lax regulation (around animal care,
feed, bulking products, hormones etc) and various financial incentives
(subsidies, tax benefits etc.). No idea what this has got to do with the costs
of hosting or what the parellels are between the two industries.

~~~
davidkatz
I think the point was that the quality of both meat and hosting products
varies greatly but is not easily understood by consumers. When consumers don't
understand what makes something good, you're left with no choice but to
compete on price, driving quality down even further. In the end you could get
a market where most offerings suck, very little people are aware of it, and
almost everyone is worse off.

I do however agree that the article provided very little insight.

