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Comment by blitmap | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to sound like an ass because I wholeheartedly agree with you. The experience is hollow.

But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.

I think what worked 10 years ago no longer flies now. How we socialize on the web has changed, and we're turned off by the traditional mechanics to keep us viewing. There are many alternatives to the service Facebook offers, but I'd like to people aren't 'showing off' as much anymore and are having more 1-to-1 or small friend-group experiences. The larger community is almost always toxic.

Look at cord-cutting: For the longest time we just ignored commercials, until we didn't.

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"But you can't invest in things you can't quantify."

From:https://genius.com/Frank-zappa-drooling-midrange-accountants...

Once upon a time, a record company had A&R people in it who would take a chance, make a decision, use their gut reaction, sign a group, and see what they could do with it. Okay? That was, whoa, a long time ago. It's not that way anymore. All decisions about who get signed and what happens to the record are made by these drooling little midrange accountants. And everything is based on the numbers games in there. And the taste of the accountants is what is ruling the mass media."

Continues at link.

This attitude is like trying to predict the weather tomorrow by just guessing it'll be the same as today. You're right most of the time...

`A&R` by Bill Flanagan[0] is a fun read about the now deceased world of A&R. Of special interest to anyone interested in the music business who wasn't around pre-internet.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1163779.A_R

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify.

I hope you mean the current world of VC and the greater finance world can't do that. Because as individuals and small companies we can absolutely invest in anything we want whether there's a metric or not. Granted, you can't organize a mega corporation or a hypergrowth startup around vague values because you're so far past Dunbar's number that any kind of shared understanding of anything more complex than simple metrics is tenuous at best.

However it's worth recognizing that there's a real thirst in the world for authenticity in a world driven by global brands and corporate behemoths. There's plenty of room for other approaches, it's just not what interests the financial world whose interest is directly proportional to the number of zeros involved.

But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics.

Sure you can. It's how Jobs turned Apple around. By all accounts, nobody had metrics saying consumers wanted less choice. No metrics suggested that a music player with "no wireless [and] less space than a nomad" would be a market leader. No metrics, as far as I'm aware, showed that there was a huge demand for Unix-like stability and command line tools but without the need for tinkering just to get a great UI and commercial software support.

It's difficult, certainly, and requires a nearly pathological drive to make your product as good and polished as possible - a drive that most people don't have today, including Tim Cook. But it can be done.

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics. Snapchat and the like have thrown enormous money at understanding humans and have the best people in their fields to get this right.

Not everyone can, but great products often have a bit of genius or perfect timing in their creation. Snapchat - disappearing picture messages! - wouldn't have been arrived at by analytics alone.

Quantifiable metrics can amplify good instincts, but it can't replace them, and most of Facebook post-newsfeed, or Snapchat post-stories, has been just the metrics-driven iteration part.

Cord cutting isn't just about commercials (indeed, there is an ad supported tier of Hulu).

It's about control over what you get to watch, when. No more waiting around for a particular time, no forgetting to set the DVR. This has always been a nuisance.

Indeed, even before full-on cord-cutting was a thing, Tivo was (and still is, AFAIK) a thing, including speculative recording of content (i.e. it became more than just a digital version of a VCR).

There's evidence that this has been an evolution rather than a revolution.

> (and still is, AFAIK)

Yep, my condo just cut a deal with our collective internet+cable provider that includes a Tivo for everyone.

> But you can't invest in things you can't quantify. You can't make money off of good vibes and authenticity without metrics

Having metrics is important, but thinking that metrics - any set of metrics - capture the whole of reality is delusional. And anyway, in the end you can always quantify your ROI in terms of money.

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