There's a fundamental reality that shapes both Netflix and Spotify's trajectory: content licensing. 2012 Netflix had access to vastly more of everyone else's library, so it was closer to an indexed search of what was available that one could watch and then getting that video onto your screen. Over time, other companies understood that they were underpricing their content and Netflix was reaping the benefits. Once external forces adjusted, the TV/film bidding wars began. Today, netflix doesn't have nearly as much content as they used to have.
That risk (losing all content and facing extinction) is what pushed Netflix in the direction of being a content-producer, rather than a content aggregator. I agree with everyone's points on the influence of the median user in diluting the quality of the content Netflix produces, but that's not the only forced that pushed us here. Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.
Being a faster horse wasn't an option available to either Netflix or Spotify; there is no path for a 'better 2012 version of netflix or spotify' in 2025. They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.
The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.
Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?
I don't get it.
I've heard this called the "Tyranny of the Marginal User".
To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.
These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for.
Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.
And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.
And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them to consume.
I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your top seller, instantly.
Most people just do the default thing everyone does—and we're probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and that's who many experiences are designed for.
I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously.
But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic.
The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.
It is very hard to find something to watch because they still show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you are not interested anyway.
And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating experience.
In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you scroll.
My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content, so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.
But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated, impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.
Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time!
It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
The root problem seems to be monopoly and fragmentation.
When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation.
But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies.
Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops you from competing.
If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can build faster horses and compete.
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade.
Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
I am astonished by how much less delightful software has become. Computers used to feel like a magical tool, that would respond instantly and allow me to perform complicated transformations at the press of a button.
Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticated user. Nothing wrong with allowing such users to use the software, but please retain the functionality and speed for the power users!
Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want.
I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.
I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.
The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.
Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.
I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
That Netflix screenshot looks fucking great: clear, usable, no distractions, more than 5 items on a page. What a mess "modern" UX/UI has turned into.
All the result of A/B tests. Everything will converge to give you an engaging experience for most people. The only not too bad student is reddit which lets you keep using their older UI if you want to. But everything else is pushing new driven by A/B tests UI optimized for engagement.
> Spotify today is... basically Netflix
Yep, Spotify keeps showing me podcasts right at the top, even though I've never listened to one on their platform ever. Sometimes with titles like "how we f**ed yesterday", while I keep it open on my work computer. It looks like they know better what I want!
OPs specific complaints about Netflix and Spotify are mostly a result of their success. Back in 2012 Netflix had a lot of movies because Hollywood didn't value streaming and were willing to sell the streaming right for most of their content for tiny amounts of money. And there were no other streamer.
Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog to the one player in the ecosystem (or in the case of music, to everyone for the same low price)
But also, personalization actually drives a ton of revenue. When I worked at Netflix, when the recommendation system went down and we defaulted to curated lists, streaming would drop 20%. And that was in 2013. I can only imagine what the drop is today when that system goes down.
Personalization drives a ton of revenue, and TikTok is the best at it, so it's no surprise that OP sees everything "going to TikTok"
All of the examples listed have something in common: they are services for accessing content you don't own. So it is in the provider's interest to find ways to satisfy you with less and/or cheaper content.
The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better. They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or quality of available content.
By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and BluRay players from another company, everyones incentives are better aligned.
People overuse the original quote as an excuse to never listen to customers, but the real wisdom is to ask why they’re asking for a faster horse (to get around quicker) and see if you can think of a better way to meet that goal.
As others have said, the "faster horse" analogy only goes so far. Even more than a century after cars became practical, you can still go get a faster horse.
The analogy would be "I want to go back to the pre-ensh*ttified, simple version of X that we used to have. But with an updated web experience, or smartphone app, there's no way to go back. I have at least three apps on my phone that I wish I could still have the older version of. But I can't.
One upside: by degrading the experienceÂą Netflix did make it a lot easier to simply stop your subscription and hop over to another streaming service for a few months.
A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber internet) could choose a free 'gift'². The gift is a choice from a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. And you get to switch monthly if you want to. So we ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+ for now. Perhaps we'll switch in a few months.
These services probably realise that their customers are made up of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the distribution for each service is.
1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).
2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with them (i.e., it saves me €9 a month).
I wouldn’t give TikTok too much credit or blame. The process started earlier, with snapchat stories UX dominating platforms, and feeds UX becoming popular before that, etc...
There is an aphorism that with enough A/B testing every website turns into a porn app or a gambling app. I guess we’re observing something similar.
I don't really know how to form this into words on a short-form text medium like this. So please read charitably.
I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align"[0].
And incentives align really easily.
Every company has some form of market analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.
Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.
Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.
All creative content-based products face a similar fate once they receive VC money or go public. In both cases, it places pressure on them to grow at a rate that is not sustainable for creative content. This is one of the main reasons why Ed Catmull of Pixar backed selling the company to Disney. He realized that even if Pixar produces a blockbuster every year and is a profitable company, the fact that it's publicly traded will require them to always deliver increasing growth year-over-year. Selling to Disney helped shield them from the fate that has befallen many other studios.
Everything is converging on TikTok because it's unregulated addiction. The Chinese hit the sweet spot on how to hook people.
Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god there are countries already banning phones from schools and there's talk of banning minor from social media.
This gets especially interesting when you consider that horses are still better than motorized vehicles at accessing certain terrain. For example, a horse can trivially climb a steep hill in the wilderness with no road, or ford a river with no nearby bridges, that even rugged ATVs can't really handle. The vast majority of transportation needs are better served by motorized vehicles, but horses still have some unique advantages and in some areas are unbeatable. Now that said, some of the freaky AI robots with legs might finally render horses inferior, but those are pretty inaccessible to most people.
If you want faster horses, breed your own horses.
Ford wasn't interested in either your horse, or your transportation need. Ford was interested in what you'd buy. That means when there was ample competition, you'd likely get something that very much felt like a faster horse, because... you did want to go faster than your existing horse, and you didn't care the new thing wasn't horse-shaped.
Fast-forward until meaningful local competition is gone, and you get the F150, the Bronco, and the Mustang. It isn't really what you want (for most people, I know some of you love yours, moving on), but given the other choices, general availability, and popular sentiment, it's close enough that enough people will say, "OK, fine, definitely not a horse any more, but still sorta works for me."
You'll get bland pablum that's smeared out across the average opinion of a sufficient amount of people while maximizing total profit under the curve. That's the logical outcome of any mass production.
IOW: If you care about what you need, support open source authors. Write open source. And be prepared to tinker to tailor it to your needs. Horses are individual, and need care and support more than your car does.
Doesn’t matter what you want anymore. You are not the client, but the product. They are the ones getting faster horses.
I hate the modern dark-pattern shop UIs, which tries to make it as difficult as possible to enumerate what is actually available. One example is when queries reply with 'what is most like' what you asked for, instead of honestly answering "no, even though movie X exists, we dont currently have it in our offering". Even though amazon prime is the poorest streaming option, I appreciate that they make it possible to exhaustively page through their entire offering, which I have done on a few occasions ("possible", because it is the usual user-intelligence-hostile ajax-javascript cursorless experience, where your browser is staggering in gigabytes as you approach the 3000-movie mark)
This sounds like an economic problem with no obvious solution: network effects => monopoly => "optimising" for typical user. Where there isn't a monopoly (or anything close to a monopoly) you find different firms specialising in different ways. For example, small independent restaurants survive by being distinctive, not by trying to imitate McDonald's.
YouTube and LinkedIn are practically monopolies. Netflix isn't a monopoly in the same way but you usually don't have a choice of streaming services for watching a particular film or series so it's different from being able to buy the same cheese or the same wine from any of several different supermarkets.
As bad as Netflix is, honestly the UX is the best amongst major streaming services.
For me, the cardinal sin of a streaming service is, if I open your service every single day and watch the next episode of ONE show, then the next time I open your service, PLEASE HAVE MY SHOW AT THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE.
This is such a simple and obvious user journey, but the majority of streaming services, on purpose or not, fuck it up. The number of times I've opened a streaming service, scroll through the entire home page with the shitty tv remote, then had to type the name of my show manually in search. Makes me want to unsubscribe right then and there and just use Plex instead.
The examples in this blog are of online streaming media changing from a wide searchable library to an unsearchable tailored recommendation feed.
As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed their design to make the best of the more limited library.
"Lisp and Email" ... all languages grow a half-baked lisp, all programs expand to read email. Now: all content/social sites devolve to tik-tok?
So happy to read this and all the comments in agreement. I thought it was just me.
In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".
Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
I hate algo feeds that change each time I refresh.
On LI I lost already like 3 articles that I really wanted to read but I clicked notification and I can never get that articles back.
Great read!
I think what we must keep in mind with many modern products and services, especially popular ones, is that they are not becoming TikTok, they are becoming things competing for our attention in the most perverse ways possible. The potential to make these systems even more manipulative and exploitative is there, I see great potential for UX design that is even "worse" than what we already know.
There is a flip side to this graph.
Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.
Every discussion platform becomes political.
As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like politics, this is really bothering me right now.
Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps instead of the website.
Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
So many of the burrs on my experience with anything are that I still expect the paradigm I had with my discman as a kid to the nth degree, back then I would load my favorite songs onto a disc, then play them, or play an album on repeat. I-tunes lets me do this still, but it's trying to push more of its streaming features on me like when I search my library, it defaults to searching Apple's network music volume, that I'm not interested in. I fear that the iphone will continue to hamper one's efforts to download media until you are forced into more fiscally expedient platforms like Spotify, where my favorite PM dawn song was replaced by a "superior" remaster where the artist was much older and lost the tone of his voice. Sadly one of the consequences of convergence is that so much else in the phone is done right I'd probably still have to use it.
Then we need start optimizing for horse-speed, and stop optimizing for "engagement". The first step is to get away from building ad-funded widgets. Until we do that we will always have to listen to somebody who cares less about what the user wants and more about what can be profitably done to that user.
> Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok
You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same environment?
The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario? Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
Here is the thing: netflix and spotify are not in the "my X collection" business. They sell subscriptions to content and the apps reflect that. I am 100% in your/OPs boat but i would expect (niche and /or open source) apps to pop up that just make my collections of my content from other sources nice and the way nerds like us want. We have a right under EU data portability laws to do exactly that BUT companies break the laws to prohibit users taking control of their data. The only reason this is not changing is that we are not organised and there is no funded organisation suing the crap out of these companies until the final instance to give us our data.
I just want to pile in that the old netflix layout was top tier. I LOVED it and because of it, stumbled onto tons of awesome movies I never heard of at the time and were actually interesting. Their algorithm back then was the best. I never had a problem finding movies to ACTUALLY WATCH. The whole reason I quit my subscription a few years ago was for the fact I end up burning up time "looking" for something to watch. Then don't. I stopped paying for the "movie browsing simulator" a little after The Witcher 1st season. A few months ago, I got another month because I thought it might be better. Ha. No.
In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the experience worse."
I don't understand the draw of Spotify. There's no network effect that I can see (even if it is built into your car, the other services have good experiences in your car too), everyone complains about it, they pay less per stream to artists than their competitors, and their library isn't any bigger than the competition. (It was smaller the last time I compared.)
On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?) terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last open corner of the internet (podcasts).
Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel more premium.
What am I missing?
That carcinisation convergent evolution effect is real. But so is the reality that outside of network dependent companies like the Netflix example in the post, those faster horses do still exist, just in niches. In Kevin Kelly's book What Technology Wants he writes about going through a 100-year old catalog and then finding that there are people today who still make all the items (some now obscure) that were popularly sold back then. But the difference is that if you're talking about individual companies like Netflix, YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack in the post, you won't see that.
If you want a faster horse, your best bet is to make it yourself.
For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.
I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.
I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.
And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
With LLMs the ability to create your own experience whilst using services as "databases" is really possible.
My crazy though is that this is where the internet will go.
One of the big problems with SaaS is that the apps are tuned to increase company profit - not user agency.
All that will flip. Agents are the first barrage in that direction but the movement is only just starting.
One barrier is configuration (code at scale) - ie a way to communicate exactly what you want.
Once we have that we compile from our needs (configuration) to an app thats exactly what we want backed by our accounts on amazon, uber, google, openai as databases and processing.
This is pretty much why we are taking this "faster horse" approach when building Volumo, our music download store for pro DJs (an alternative to Beatport - if you know, you know)[1]. Downloads, not streaming (you get FLAC files right into your hands); pay as you go instead of a subscription (why don't you pay a lump sum for this track you want, of which 75% will go straight to the author); gentle human curation instead of the ubiquitous "we make decisions for you" algorithms.
If people can't find a sustainable business model around that thing you want, it's just not going to be widely available.
It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so.
You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically just luck when it does.
> An inconsistent stream of ever-changing content
Instagram. I have clicked through an ad, yes AN AD, and came back to get to another ad and had it refreshed away.
I hope they are doing this because it works for them, somehow.
PS: LinkedIn does this too.
Nothing has ever felt better than my student days with DC++. The whole campus had a server we all used and I could search for stuff I liked and see what other people who had that on their disks also had, and explore that. I found a lot of music that way, as well as other stuff. Before that we had had a list of ftp servers which was also good once I wrote an indexer, but DC automated all that and made more people able to participate.
I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies other ways even though I have access to it.
What this is describing is not what the Ford quote is talking about. Netflix and all the rest didn't TikTokify because they were trying to create some massive visionary innovation, but the opposite.
They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with addiction. To do that you have to have control over what people see and use algorithms to optimize that to "maximize engagement." You need your users mindlessly scrolling, not searching and categorizing and exploring. You need to disengage the neocortex and engage the brain stem.
TikTok is being copied by everyone because they nailed this formula better than anyone. They didn't invent it, just perfected it. I'd say Meta/Facebook invented it, which is why Zuckerberg should be known as the man who destroyed the Internet.
The next step beyond TikTok is a 100% AI generated algorithmic feed. Drop the human creators entirely. Everyone gets a personalized feed of low-quality AI slop tuned for maximum engagement.
Addiction is the best business model.
For those with large video libraries on their local hard drive, please consider trying my MIT Open Source Video Hub App - with scrub-able thumbnail previews of all your videos.
https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
> YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery. Now? TikTok.
I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.
Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just don’t want to play them when they are connected.
There can be no good technical reason for this. It’s just delivering a bad experience because it can.
>The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones
It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.
SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
It comes down to less is better. You don't want a faster horse, you want less horses on the road so your horse isn't traffic, it's a horse. You don't want less TikTok, you want less crap using TikTok. Horses were the same, leaving crap all over the cities until Henry Ford's Model A. So we can solve this problem by inventing a lot better, much cleaner TikTok. In the meantime, sell manure shovels.
OP is dunking on Tiktok, but the comments and quality of dialog on Tiktok are far better than any other social network, even with more than a billion users.
https://www.whats-on-netflix.com is a good way to search for stuff.
Self driving cars, where you have to supervise and occasionally have to reign in from going off the path, are essentially faster horses.
So they are finally here.
Welcome to what happens when everyone optimises for the same metrics, and looks at the same companies for inspiration as to what to do.
At most of these corporations, over time they've learned to be product and financially oriented, because it's what the markets reward and it's easy to do, rather than customer orientated, because as long as they're not unusably shit for the majority of their customers, then that's good enough.
It's an attempt to reverse backwards to the worst possible thing that works, because that gets you more ad revenue, rather than the best possible thing.
I say this as someone who's walked away from strategy consult gigs for multinationals where the objective was literally to do things like this. Revenue and margin maximisation in ways the stock market and PE/VC investment rewards is frequently orthogonal to building the best thing for the customer.
Developer steps:
1. Make useful product for smart people
2. Change product to be useful for average people.
3. Change product to be handy for dumb people.
4. Let investors think even dumb people can rule the world.
5. Cash out.
Agree. I want an advanced filtering system, not an algorithm curated list of movies based on what I've seen before. How many times does "Bright" have to keep appearing on my list before it goes away, even after I've watched it already???
Netflix and Spotify are designed this way because they're subscription services. They need to convince you they always have a lot of new stuff, all the time, so that you don't cancel your subscription.
They don't want you to think they're some static libraries of content. They make their websites like interactive billboards.
Not quite the point of the article, but Kawasaki recently announced the Coreleo, a (faster?) robot horse you can ride and holy shit I want one. No chance this thing sees the light of day, and the video is a CGI render, but oh man.
I think Spotify was perfect in 2008. I think people's need to justify their existence by constantly doing things creates an unfortunate incentive where perfect products are mutated beyond recognizability.
(This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)
I was just thinking today about how much better my media experience had been in 2010s with XBMC on a spare e-waste even then pc plugged into the TV than anything available today, and how much I enjoyed listening to the music of my music neighbors last.fm from my listen history I scrobbled from foobar2000..
That quote is pretty dumb, I see it quoted a lot. It's arrogant, assuming, demeaning, elitist. And I don't think it's true. Who would say "a faster horse"? It doesn't make any sense, because people know/knew that horses are what they are.
A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are building, and then go build it.
Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that will change the entire structure of society, much like the internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless. Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
You are the horse. Platforms realized they don't have to keep making faster horses or cars or whatnot if they just turn their users into zombie-like creatures who mindlessly click on what's presented to them albeit just to chase that next carrot of dopamine.
There seems to be some laws of (human) nature about these sorts of things at work here like how all programs eventually evolve into either Microsoft Excel or an operating system (or both) or how all basic cable channels eventually end up programming Law & Order reruns.
Quote Investigtator has a nice piece on the "faster horse" quote
Spotify doesn’t seem like a good example. I use Spotify to search for artists and listen to songs from their albums. I make my own playlists. If you basically want a better iTunes, it seems like it still works for that.
(You do have to ignore the other features, but that doesn’t seem very hard.)
On trips to remote sites I never miss an opportunity to explain to the younger guys that "when I was younger Spotify was called MP3s and it was made of files that you had on your device!" and then proceed to play late 90s EDM until we get back into mobile range.
Companies work on averages, statistically what retains, engages the users.
But Spotify is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I still have playlists, I can still instantly find any song I want. The added bonus is the discovery engine. So the UX now is a superset of what it was before.
I definitely want a plaid horse with a dashboard, a round steering wheel and turn-signal/drive-select stalks.
and I want to use a buggy whip to smack the fingers of people reaching for their touchscreens to spring for the in-car-purchases and seat-warmer subscriptions
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
This line is especially silly when making B2B products, especially very expensive enterprise ones. It's often used to justify building "great ideas" from some exec or overzealous PM/engineer over concrete asks from customers. Like you really think that a team of 20 experienced people paying >$1M to help run their multi-billion dollar business, both have no idea what they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new technologies in the market? Totally condescending.
This is such a good article. No notes. I share the same annoyance with how often algorithms are used - if we could give power users an ability to say "yes, I know what I want" and bypass all the recommendations, that would be ideal.
The diversity of mediums chart at the end doesn't make any sense. What are the multiple lines? And at the end if he is saying everything converges to TikTok, wouldn't the TikTok point on the graph be on the axis for 0 diversity?
Me too, but you and I cannot afford a faster horse, or even the same horse we once had. The horse they use to offer was an illusion, a bait for the new Tiktok thing. Sooner or later, people will forget that horses once exist.
Is this the logical conclusion of the marginal user effect? If your business model depends on growth, you need to keep changing the product to attract new users even at the cost of quality to old ones that are unlikely to leave.
Sometimes I want a faster horse. Problem is horses are no longer in high demand. It's a niche market now. I may have to pay a premium or put in some extra work to get the horse I want. It's just the way of things.
If it didn't fuck about with things and act like it's here for you, why would you pay a recurring fee for it?
"Recurring revenue stream" is an answer in search of problems, and it's ready to destroy all alternatives.
I wouldn’t mind Spotify’s changes if they actually worked well. But the podcasts thing is a nightmare and doesn’t work well, and I have no interest in Audiobooks or courses as part of my subscription.
Product Managers that have nothing better to do than A/B testing.
And the curse of "AI" and extensive machine learning. As if machine learning can adequately represents a person's tastes and preferences.
The title is a great hook, but it doesn't really cover what's being described... which is the TikTokification of everything and (implicitly) that there's some bait & switch going on.
I feel like they just want the era of movies that existed in 2012 (as opposed to the ones they get on the front page today). The experience hasn't changed that much
For over 100 years, people have been focused on faster cars.
That graph at the end is brutal. But perhaps not incorrect.
Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
I feel that it basically comes down to promotion driven development. Things are changed because they are justifications for someone promotion. Cut the bloat!
Is Spotify TikTok-ifying itself? I don't use either app. I wonder if songs will get shorter now that video content is getting preferably shorter.
I'm not really sure the metaphor holds up, Netflix was a jetliner compared to a minivan. We still had movie rental stores in the late 00s.
I to miss old internet where everything is placed under a catalog, instead of endless stream of crap I dont like.
Sorry, no money in horses, donkeys are all that we can offer you. What color would you like your donkey in?
This is why I pirate movies and shows. The user experience is infinitely better than Netflix and Disney.
I am not sure Netflix 2025 is a car. I would go with a carnival ride on a bunch of ponies analogy.
Netflix Revenue 2012 - $3.5bn Netflix Revenue 2024 - $39bn
Apparently the market disagrees.
Highwaymen still have those fast horses, up on the lawless mountain passes... ;)
I simply hate that good services get ruined because there's money to be made by providing a different service to a broader group of people. It's not quite enshittification, it's companies making something that serves a relatively small group of folks well into a thing that serves a very large group of people in the highest-ROI way possible.
Companies no longer have a target user. The target user is whoever can be juiced for as many pennies or eyeball-seconds as possible. There's no persona for user stories, it's "literally whoever we can get this in front of for as long as possible". It's about the lowest common denominator.
Which implies, these products are not "designed" anymore. "Designed" implies that the creator made choices to make the product better for a target user. But there's no target user. When your service has a billion users, it's not possible to design for _anyone_. Mouse traps aren't "designed" for the mice, they're built for the people who don't want mice around. Services aren't "designed" for a billion people to interact with, they're built for the owners to make as much money as possible.
Funny I use the recommmender to listen to music in Plex a lot these days.
Could we have more things that don't work like TikTok?
We don't fight enough to keep software that works for us.
Honestly that last sentence about Substack hit me hard.
I just want them to import a syntax highlighting library but instead they are pushing video content into my face
What if I still believe in leaches to fix my headache
I feel strongly like this about Google Maps. The underlying product is nothing short of miraculous, but the UI is infuriating. If I create a route, my markers disappear. Clicking on the map doesn't show businessses anymore. Why can't I navigate to another city and browse the map at the same time? Why hasn't Maps graduated to the equivalent of tabbed browsing?
Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!
I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
Well, I see it sort of like, yes, people might want faster horses. And maybe they'd prefer cars to horses. But if your cars start poking me in the eye and flashing blinding lights at me, I'm going to consider going back to a horse.
Part of the process of enshittification is changing the set of needs served by a product, and, almost invariably, adding new functionality that no one asked for and that they probably don't want. And usually that new functionality is a sort of Trojan horse (a faster Trojan horse?) that offers something superficially interesting but is really just a means of wedging some kind of revenue generation into the experience the user really wants to have.
People often do want cars rather than faster horses, but they want the cars they want, not the ones that will make someone else the most money.
The fastest horse will always be media piracy.
I just stop paying for things when they do this.
TLDR:
The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.
Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
did anyone commenting here did a shot to taste dot io?
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
Going back to horses sounds so nice.
tiktokification of content sites ... tinderisation of dating apps ... similar interaction model
What frustrates me is that many people that claim to want a faster horse don’t actually use them where they are available
Bandcamp to me is the ideal “horse” for music (and I’m praying it stays a horse)
Those complaining about Chrome dominance but still not personally using Firefox is another example (even with all of Mozilla’s controversies, Firefox is still the “fastest horse” available imo)
Not being satisfied with the horse selection is understandable, but actively furthering the obsolescence of the available horses is not (even if the individual impact is minimal)
The "faster horses" comment is unfortunate, both because Henry Ford was a huge Nazi and because it's a dramatically wrong idea of what people actually wanted that only makes sense if you're already so car-brained[0] to think that the only alternative to a car is a horse. At least in cities, you had trains, trams, and omnibuses; not to mention walking was also an option.
There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into car-dependent suburban prisons.
Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.
[0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class solidarity and durable political movements against large business interests.
[1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had almost everything, because physical media has really robust consumer protections?
[2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait until I talk about AI.
did anyone try taste dot io?
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
That quote is more about the blunders of asking people what they want and expecting deep and innovative insights.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
A mention for Amazon search here. Which is a very slow horse and always has been, when even a horse that can walk would greatly benefit their customers.
I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.
But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
Welcome to the web 3.0 mindset: changing for the sake of changing and having more bullet points on advertising, moving fast and breaking things because the innovation behind a fancy page can't be wrong even when it ruins the experience of most users. Thank you, Open Source, for giving me the tools and freedom of choice I can use to completely ignore or at least make less painful the experience.
Welcome to the world of restoration and restomods!
Remember Google Reader?
What if I want a better Google Reader?!
* beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
Related: enshittification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Dang. Now I’ve got to go listen to Tom T Hall.
Enshitification ensues
Enshittification. The UX is not for you—it’s to maximize you.
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Henry Ford's point wasn't that people didn't want faster horses but that they'd buy the car they never knew they needed - instead of a horse.
With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.
For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.
If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.