Comment by senordevnyc
3 months ago
Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…
3 months ago
Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…
When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01% will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing changed.
Hmm. This is hand made clothes and furniture vs factory mass production.
Nobody doubts the prior is better and some people make money doing it, but that market is a niche because most people prioritize price and 80/20 tradeoffs.
> Nobody doubts the prior is better
Average mass produced clothes are better than average hand made clothing. When we think of hand made clothing now, we think of the boutique hand made clothing of only the finest clothing makers who have survived in the new market by selling to the few who can afford their niche high-end products.
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As we see with tech, mass production isn't an instant advantage in this market. In fact, something bespoke has a higher chance to stand out here than most other industries.
And no, I don't think people are seeking demand for AI website slop the way they do for textiles. Standing out is a good way to get your product out there compared to being yet another bloated website that takes 10 seconds to load with autoplay video generic landing text.
I'd liken it to Persona 5 in the gaming market. No one is playing a game for its UI. But a bespoke UI will make the game all the more memorable, and someone taking the time for that probably pjt care into the rest of the game as well (which you see on its gameplay, music, characters, and overall presentation).
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A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves the needle for 90% of companies.
Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend that works across all browsers and devices and not just on the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the bills.
If you're telling a craftman to ignore their craft, then you're falling on deaf ears. I'm a programmer, not a businessman. If everyone took the advice of 'I don't need a good website' then many devs would be out of business.
Fact is there's just less businesses forming, so there's less demand for landing sites or anything else. I don't see this as a sign that 'good websites don't matter'
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Amazon has "garbage as a website" and they seem to be doing just fine.
> When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website
When you think 99.99% of company websites are garbage, it might be your rating scale that is broken.
This reminds me of all the people who rage at Amazon’s web design without realizing that it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
>it might be your rating scale that is broken.
Or it could mean that most websites are trash.
>it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
Yeah, sorry. I will praise plenty of Amazon's scale, but not their deception, psychological manipulation, and engagement traps. That goes squarely in "trash website".
I put up with a lot, but the price jumpsa was finally the trigger i needed to cancel prime this year. I don't miss it.
>it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
which can easily be garbage. it only has to be not garbage enough to not cause enough customers to shift enough spending elsewhere
Lots of successful companies have garbage as a website (successful in whatever sense, from Fortune 500 to neighbourhood stores).
Are they successful companies despite a bad websote, or companies successful because they knew where to stop cutting corners that lead to success?
I suspect it's the former.
Which describes a gigantic swath of the labor market.