Such a dire outlook. There is a huge chasm between Domino's and great pizza, and between great movies and Netflix assembly-line productions. A lot of people care enough to land somewhere in between, not at the lowest common denominator. There is room for both pop culture and art.
The comment on the photography is also clearly misguided: people might not be able to explain why, but the vast majority will feel that the more professional picture is pleasing/better in some way.
My take: people "don't care about the details" when it's beyond understanding, but the outcomes are still materially different and meaningful at a subconscious level. Ask anyone on the street to name a movie Elvis was in... meanwhile [insert your favorite movies here] still show up in popular vote even decades after going out of fashion. Selling mediocre products might be more lucrative, but not everything is about money.
When I lived in NYC I had access to great pizza and I would take advantage of this. But there were times when I wanted Dominos (usually a hangover or similar state of mind/body) and I'd just order it because it's a totally different thing. I don't even know if I'd call it pizza (their pan pizza, etc) per-se but rather a simulacrum of pizza that was engineered to stimulate very primitive impulses in my brain.
I know I didn't go to the right places but all the pizza I had in NYC was either bad, or bad and expensive. So while there is good pizza there, there's also a ton of bad pizza where I would have rather had <chain pizza> because at least I know what I was gettting.
Now the bagels on the other hand...do bad bagels even exist there?
This is the reality. A lot of NYC style pizzerias have opened in Cincinnati lately. They are spot on but it is not good pizza. The dough was designed to be eaten while walking the streets. Therein lies the root of all the compromises to quality. All the pizzaiolos are paranoid that you are going to try to eat it luke warm and practically beg you to heat it up before eating. Some include instructions sheets with every pizza. Ugh.
Grandmas are actually decent if they manage to ferment the dough long enough. I have bit into my share of 24hr dough. Not recommended.
As someone who lives in the NYC area I feel the same about Dominos. It's different from what I really consider pizza, but sometimes it's exactly what I want and that's totally fine.
My take is that the differences matter according to purpose. If I'm eating a Big Mac to avoid being hangry, the fact that it isn't a gourmet experience may not matter to me.
If I'm putting on a movie as a distraction to have sound in the background -- perhaps I am only half-watching it as I do other things -- I may not care that isn't all that good. I might not notice subtle characteristics anyway.
There are levels of quality -- e.g., level 0 of the hamburger might be ending hunger -- and how much they matter depends on your purpose. If I'm looking for a movie to inspire me or make me think, that's different from playing something in the background as I clean the apartment. Etc.
Nah. You misunderstood OP about photography. There's a level in photography, as is in many other fields, where it's good enough to be used in print or on the Web without it being a major disaster. Anything beyond that will only speak to professional photographers, and not to all of them at that.
In other words: yes, there's a bar you need to pass, but it's low. Anything beyond that is not accessible to the general public, it will never know the difference. There are very few areas of expertise where anyone can easily measure / understand the quality. In most areas the only way to know is to rely on experts, subconsciousness isn't going to help you there, just like you wouldn't be able to divine the composition of the concrete with which the house was built prior to it possibly collapsing (if the concrete was low quality) without knowing how to use the tools necessary to measure that (subconscious level isn't going to help you here).
Even for professionals, testing for quality is very hard because of how many factors come into play, and how to weight those factors against each other, and often the impossibility or expense associated with testing. It's beyond naive to think that subconsciousness will somehow solve this problem...
I've spent most of my software career in the Medical Devices industry. One point that stands out to me is when a previous employer released an instrument and Marketing focused on its high quality, only to find out that customers (large hospitals and medical labs) didn't care about quality.
Made no sense: it's a medical instrument. Who doesn't care about quality?
Well, digging deeper, they found that the customers simply assumed that by virtue of being FDA approved, pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!) so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
Yeah, there's a bar and often it's much lower than you think it is.
> pretty much everything had a similar quality level (pro-tip: no!)
But presumably they all had adequate quality level. As in they all met strict requirements.
> so us providing them with White Papers attesting to high quality didn't move the needle on their purchase decisions.
This is not that surprising to me. How does quality translate to profit is always the question. Sometimes there is a direct relationship (better quality requires less maintenance, or the number of adverse events is lover) but sometimes it doesn't.
Imagine if you are a company CEO and I come to you proposing that I can supply the same computers your workers already use but with a solid gold case instead of the aluminium one. I could even provide you with white papers saying that the new solid gold cases are much much more resistant to corrosion. And that is true. Gold in that sense is better than aluminium. Higher quality! Would you buy my laptops? Does that sound like a good deal? I don't think you would, unless you have significant laptop case corrosion problems.
> But presumably they all had adequate quality level.
They all do what they claim in the sense that they set forth Safety and Efficacy goals and achieve them. From that perspective all Approved Medical Devices are essentially the same.
But as you say, translating quality to profit isn't obvious. Expressing quality aspects of speed, throughput, reliability, etc. was a clearer benefit to the customer than, e.g., showing that our fluid handling had a Coefficient of Variation of under 5%.
The problem is that all of the qualia that can only bee seen and articulated by a professional practitioner aren't necessarily stacked in a heap. It's more of a Jenga tower of mutually reinforcing practices. Maybe some of the blocks lost to cost cutting weren't load bearing, but as each one comes out the structure gets more fragile.
There's the lure towards disruption and cutting the right thing to win big. Everyone already knows that strategy though, and the market is full of different stratifications of disruption - streamers disrupt the networks, creator economy sites disrupt the streamers, short form socials disrupt the creators. Any new thing needs a real reason to exist in that ecosystem beyond just being worse.
I'm talking from a perspective of someone working with QA in my day job. And I do have to answer questions about the quality. Like, "did the quality of the product increase in the last release?" or "is our quality higher than the competition?" or "will this drop in quality be acceptable for the majority of our customers?"
And, really, every time I'm called to answer questions like these, I know full well that no matter how much time I spend analyzing the test results, coverage, test strategies, dissecting JIRA etc. my answers will be based on little more than a guess (and no, it's not the subconsciousness, it just means that I'll be probably wrong!)
I wish I could just "let it go" and observe the gestalt of the product and say lgtm! (or not). Just because my subconsciousness told me it's so. :)
No, it's not like Jenga. It doesn't reinforce each other. There's always a possibility to drill down to details, which makes the discussion and comparison easy (or easier), but the more complex the thing I'm trying to assess the quality of, the worse it gets.
Is ZFS better than Ext4?
Is MariaDB good enough, or should we switch to a more "high quality" PostgreSQL? How about Oracle?
Is Python 3.13 objectively better than Python 3.10?
What about Ethernet vs IB?
Answering any of these questions would get experts twisted in a knot of endless arguments precisely because quality is very hard to assess. It has too many faces, too many metrics...
Everything in the first post are very obvious errors that anyone can avoid if they think about it for a few minutes. You can take decent photos with a phone either by learning a bit or just by accident with enough attempts.
The issue with dating apps has more to do with women being able to be incredibly picky. Better photos let’s a average looking guy get a chance. The top 1-5% that all women want to match with don’t need to bother with this at all.
Maybe OP didn't describe the intricacies of photography well enough, but I had to take photography in an art college... but I have a better story to tell.
So, my father is a somewhat famous persona in the world of animation. When I was little, he used to take me to the festivals. And that being the time when movies were distributed on film, in anti-tank mine shaped containers... the editing was done with glue and scissors.
We were friends with the editor who usually worked with him on his films. I remember leaving the screening with her once, and she was talking to my dad, and in excitement she said: "Oh, had you seen the cuts? Such an amazing job!" And by that she meant the few frames between shots that the editors used to leave for their own navigation and other conveniences in the film they edited. Like, you may remember random letters and geometric shapes flashing for a split second on the screen? -- She was super excited to see that! Not the movie itself.
When it comes to photographs: you need to speak the language. Same things done deliberately or accidentally will mean different things. Overexposure? -- perhaps done deliberately for dramatic effect, or perhaps just an accident. Choosing a more grainy film over a finer one? -- Maybe just a lens with not enough light, or maybe the author was going for a special feeling of an older photographs. The main character in the portrait not in focus? -- you cannot tell if that's intentional or not, unless you can tell why.
There was a fashion movement in fashion where high-end clothes were photographed with extremely bright flash mounted on the camera (as opposed to more typical studio setting with diffused light from multiple sources). An artistic adaptation of amateur style. Go figure! It was hip like 20 years ago. But, to read it, you need to know the history. You need to know that it was the style at the time, and through that lens you can look at it and find other things the author had to tell you (whereas w/o the background you might just dismiss it as poorly lit picture).
I’m going to apply this to an unpopular opinion on web development, just as one example:
Most users don’t care about your SPA.
I have built every app as a MPA with page transitions for a nice fade. I have had multiple complements on how it’s so fast. Nobody, not one person, among 8000 users, has complained about the page reloading.
This is just one example where I think the article is accurate: engineers tend to overshoot the mark on metrics nobody cares about, or try to improve “experiences” that nobody cares about, or rationalize complexity forgetting that even Amazon doesn’t bother with an SPA.
I think your last para is spot on. There are dimensions of quality people care about, and dimensions they do not.
Websites are a good example. The article says a designer will notice jank. I usually do not care about the design: I want the content, and I care a but about usability (in a limited way - e.g. things that are hard to find annoy me).
Websites and UIs in general are often made worse by people whose measure of quality is aesthetics rather than usability - there have been multiple HN discussions about articles on this topic.
Different people may care about different ones (e.g. one person might want a high performance car, another a comfortable one).
I found the bit about actors accents amusing. American attempts at British accents are always annoying, and it even happens with British actors in American produced things having weird or wrong accents. It is sloppy but its rarely puts me off something I like otherwise. Dealing with other countries and cultures is often done sloppily. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a good example too to anyone who recognises the language people in one village are speaking which is spoken a very long way (certainly well over a thousand miles) from where it is set.
As for SPAs, I do not think preferring MPAs is an unpopular opinion on HN.
> I found the bit about actors accents amusing. [...] It is sloppy but its rarely puts me off something I like otherwise.
From a non native english speaker's point of view it's even more amusing. Why should I care that the accent is from the wrong borough of one of the anglo-saxon countries? They all sound like english to me...
> Websites and UIs in general are often made worse by people whose measure of quality is aesthetics rather than usability
Let's take this opportunity to remind them designers that there are things like contrast and readability, and marking items that can be interacted with as items that can be interacted with...
it just sounds wrong if you know the difference. Imagine you are watching something like that and a character shows up supposedly speaking your native language, but actually speaking another language that sounds vaguely similar.
> Let's take this opportunity to remind them designers that there are things like contrast and readability,
Many years ago I worked for a website aimed at people of, or approaching retirement age. The designers initially used small grey text on a white background.
How often do you flush the coolant in your car?
How often do you jack it up and check for play in your ball joints?
How often do you clean your Refrigerator Coils?
How often do you clean your exhaust fans in your home?
Do you seal any grout every year?
Do you test your GFI outlets monthly like recommended?
When was the last time you Lubricate Garage door springs and tracks?
You drain your water heater yearly and remove sediment, right?
These are basic life tasks that everyone can and should do as a basic functional adult adulting 'properly' and 'correctly' with best outcomes more important than finding/eating good pizza, but probably don't. People just can't sweat all of the details of daily life, and they definitely can't for basic daily sustenance nor entertainment, and that is OK and actually a good thing.
Talladega Nights is extremely mediocre no matter how it's ranked/placed. Elvis movies weren't meant to be remembered 60 years later, they were meant to give people a happy afternoon in the moment, and by their success at the box office it looks they did that. A fleeting moment of happiness doesn't need to be a 60 year artifact. It can be just a fleeting moment of happiness. (But the fact you are talking about them 60 years later actually kinda says something, doesn't it?)
Domino's is better than the majority of rich people ate throughout history ate. It's delicious. The fact that there is something more delicious doesn't change that. It's hot and comforting and comes right to my door quickly and consistently in a way I can afford. I'm not going to enjoy it less just because... something else exists. Something else ALWAYS exists. It's a bajillion times better than a bowl of oatmeal which is the other staple food I can have for the same effort.
Temu mass produced textiles washed and cleaned before each use are better than the 'we'll just brush it a bit and it's clean' fancy, worn all winter for 10 years with just some brushing, wool suit 'custom tailored' to fit a now much changed body.
Take a breath and appreciate rather than critic. The world is AMAZING. Anyone can be a critic. It's the easiest and least regarded job in the world. Ever had a QA department that thought their job was to be critics instead of do actual QA? They were always the worst/most useless/annoying QA department when it came to actual good software. This whole Netflix hate thing is the same. If Netflix did somehow turn into an art house it would SUCK at it's intended purpose. We need fleeting moments of entertainment as much as we need 60 year relic films.
A weird case on photography is dating. Apparently absolutely flawless professional-grade photos are entirely mandatory for men, and heavy depth of field is a hard requirement.
It comes off as total nonsense to me. Smartphone pictures of people look great to me and depth of field isn't something I give a shit about on a dating profile, in fact in any picture I'd prefer to be able to check out the background details. But I apparently live on a different planet from the people judging these photos. Even as a bi person I can't empathize at all with these fellow androphiles who apparently vomit and convulse at the sight of an unblurred background in a profile picture.
So it's one case where the fine details absolutely matter to outcome, even if the women on the other end may have a hard time articulating what's better about one photo than another.
(God, being a man with a dating profile is so exhausting - where has our species gone that something like this guide with millions of words is required for men to be successful? Wasn't there a time they could just be themselves? I'm eternally grateful I don't have to play that game anymore now that I'm in a great relationship.)
> from the evidence, you need to be a highly skilled photographer with expensive equipment and perfect photos to get responses on those apps
I don't know, I'm not in the market... But if you want to learn what it takes to "score a date", going to a website called "killyourinnerloser" where a guy describes how he has all the sex and threesomes and foursomes and knows how to please all women, posts a bunch of erotic/pornographic material, and literally asks for $1 to change your life is very much like going to an actual porn site to learn what it takes to satisfy a woman.
Not showing your dirty dishes or toilet in the background, and not taking pictures in the dark is common sense. No need for macho photographer to tell you how to sex the ladies.
But let me put your mind at ease further. I needed a chuckle and read the mistakes to avoid, together with his own fine example of nine winning pics. In no particular order:
- Don't wear the same clothes in multiple pics. Proceeds to wear the exact same sweatshirt and gold chain in no less than four pics in different settings, even restaurant and gym because it's his "everywhere" sweatshirt. Then wears the exact same overall outfit in another two pictures. Then the same cap in two pictures.
- Don't be too far away or bad angle. Posts a picture with his back to the camera in which he is ~1-2% of the whole frame.
- No staged or stiff pose and definitely no static posture. Posts three pics with the exact same blank and stiff facial expression and static posture. All but one picture look extremely staged poses.
It has always historically been that significant portion of males don't find a mate and there is a small percentage who get many, just because of the status, hierarchy, etc. So men have always needed to outcompete each other. With so little material in dating apps to compete with, these details will matter so much. Having professional photos also implies a lot of desirable qualities about you, like you had money and wisdom to do that in the first place.
It's weird because when I see super polished professional photos on a dating profile, I feel like I'm looking at a stock photo or an advertisement, not a genuine person on my level. I don't even find those pictures inherently pleasing, if anything I have an urge to skip over them immediately in the same way I've been subconsciously trained to skip over ads on a website without adblock.
The comment on the photography is also clearly misguided: people might not be able to explain why, but the vast majority will feel that the more professional picture is pleasing/better in some way.
My take: people "don't care about the details" when it's beyond understanding, but the outcomes are still materially different and meaningful at a subconscious level. Ask anyone on the street to name a movie Elvis was in... meanwhile [insert your favorite movies here] still show up in popular vote even decades after going out of fashion. Selling mediocre products might be more lucrative, but not everything is about money.