People in tech business circles love this quote by Henry Ford:
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
The idea is to think outside the box and create entirely new markets instead of just new products in existing ones. Like Apple creating the iPhone (sure, smartphones existed before—but cars also existed before the Ford Model T).
But sometimes, I really want a faster horse.
Netflix in 2012 was a super fast horse. It had a simple but massive catalog of movies and shows, solid recommendations, and basic library management. Compared to my limited local media library it was great. You could actively tune your tastes and rate things with a 5-star system.
Netflix today is very different. It’s not a library—it’s an experience. Instead of reliably showing me what I "have" and recommending what I might like, it shuffles content on each interaction, sometimes changing the cover images of shows in real time, like some black-market charlatan. It has no meaningful catalog, no real categories—just short-lived, auto-generated groups like “Binge-worthy” or “Festive spirit.”
Even the “New” section is meaningless. It opens with a “For You” row (huh?), then “Continue Watching”, followed by generic "Popular in " rows. It feels like YouTube search: ask for something specific, get a few hits, and then a flood of unrelated "popular" and "recommended" content.
“My List” on Netflix randomly shuffles items and changes their covers every few hours. “Continue Watching” may or may not include what I actually watched recently. Sometimes, the engagement algorithms resurrect some random Slovakian cartoon I opened three years ago—one and immediately closed because it that had no English subtitles here in Finland, even though they do exist in other regions.
I just want a faster horse.
Spotify in 2015 was also a super fast horse. It was like my iTunes library, but with millions more tracks. Getting new music became faster, but it didn’t change the nature of my relationship with music.
Spotify today is... basically Netflix. An inconsistent stream of ever-changing content, weak library tools, and an endless barrage of podcasts.
Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok—which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It's like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.
The list goes on:
- YouTube. YouTube: Once a video catalog with social discovery. Now? TikTok.
- LinkedIn. Once a network of resumes. Now? TikTok.
- Substack. Yeah, a newsletter platform... now launching TikTok-style videos. Seriously.
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