Leaders, Followers and Ad Blockers

Normally when a company starts being shitty, the best people start leaving. E.g. when you make bad design decisions for a video game, you start losing your highest skilled players disproportionately. They leave at a higher per-capita rate than medium or low skilled players. Similarly you start losing content creators, bug hunters, strategists, early adopters, etc.

But ad-driven websites covertly/accidentally use a two-tiered system. I barely know how shitty the ads on YouTube are because I use ad block. I don’t leave over them. I just turn them off using tools that, for various reasons, many other people do not use. There are lots of websites that, if ad block didn’t exist, I would dislike and stop using. I think many of the best people are the same. With a video game, everyone gets the same experience. With a book or TV show, everyone gets the same story. But with YouTube or Worldometer, the better people are disproportionately likely to get a better user experience, so they keep using it, linking it, talking about it, etc., and helping lead the masses to it. But then it sucks for a lot of the masses.

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I agree. This reminded me of the first 20s of this video that is relevant: (from Coffeezilla – a finance-y YT channel; not always high quality, but popular.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-BaG09PbFY

I think a lot of tech products are two-tiered. Only instead of ads the savvier people can skip, the tiering is based on the user’s need for help/support, especially when the product isn’t technically ‘broken’.

The best people, who are skilled enough to handle setup and within-spec operation completely on their own or by searching web articles, can have a good experience with lots of tech that’s supremely shitty for the masses.

The same products create a shitty experience for most people because they’re not simple enough for most people to handle on their own and support sucks badly.