What the hosting and the meat market have in common

http://blog.fortrabbit.com/what-the-hosting-and-the-meat-market-have-in-common/

by franklaemmer • 14 years ago

13 17 14 years ago

blog.fortrabbit.com

BenBoone• 14 years ago

Sweet analogy.. But, you missed to mention the ecological effects.

retube• 14 years ago

I don't get this analogy at all. What is he saying, that consumers discriminate on the basis of price for both meat and hosting solutions? So what? This is hardly an insight. Most products and services are largely discriminated by price.

Meat is so cheap in the US due to a mix of lax regulation (around animal care, feed, bulking products, hormones etc) and various financial incentives (subsidies, tax benefits etc.). No idea what this has got to do with the costs of hosting or what the parellels are between the two industries.

davidkatz5• 14 years ago

I think the point was that the quality of both meat and hosting products varies greatly but is not easily understood by consumers. When consumers don't understand what makes something good, you're left with no choice but to compete on price, driving quality down even further. In the end you could get a market where most offerings suck, very little people are aware of it, and almost everyone is worse off.

I do however agree that the article provided very little insight.

davidkatz5• 14 years ago

The direction seems fruitful, but there was very little to learn in this article. More insight into what is actually wrong with hosting providers would have made this a lot better.

I now feel about Hacker News round about how I felt with TechCrunch a few months before I stopped reading it completely. I'm mainly here because of inertia, and because there is still great content from time to time and I don't want to miss it.

My attention is very much up for the taking. The moment something better comes along, I'd be the first to switch.

I wish PG put more love into HN. It used to be amazing, now it's just nice. At least, that's my opinion.

swader2• 14 years ago

Perhaps you can help us all turn Quibb (http://quibb.com) into something like that?

davidkatz5• 14 years ago

Quibb seems interesting, but from your homepage it's hard for me to get a sense of value. May I ask why you don't let me see your content?

grep2• 14 years ago

What would be required to grab your attention? Curated content? A better discussion platform? Or just plain more signal per noise?

One approach I'd like to see implemented is some monte carlo comment display algorithm. Assign every user a base point level (based on his contributions/selectable?), show every comment/post with score above this level, but comments below with decreasing probability.

This has the advantage of allowing new/initially low-ranked stuff to get picked up faster than a hard threshold, while keeping the noise at a level acceptable for the user.

Or is this nonsense?

davidkatz5• 14 years ago

Sounds like a good direction, like most things it probably needs to be tested in the wild. I'm not sure that it addresses the heart of the problem though, which might be this: as communities get larger, quality drops.

This is a hard problem to solve, and all I can do is offer some ideas. One idea might be to have a hierarchy of influence, where some users have more power than others, and users get promoted automatically according to their activity.

Off the top of my head, here's one possible way this could work:

Say you have three member tiers - reader, contributor and editor, and let's further say that the power of each tier differs in order of magnitude. readers can grant items 1 point, contributors 10 points, and administrators 100 points.

If members at a higher tier than you consistently upvote stuff after you upvote it, at some point you get promoted. In the same way, if they downvote stuff after you upvote it you get demoted.

I'd be interested if HN or Reddit ever experimented with something like this.

One other important thought - you'll probably never be able to completely automate a great community. Or put another way - everything else being equal, a community that is also actively curated by someone with great taste is probably going to be better.

riffraff• 14 years ago

related, our davidw's seven years old article that hosting is a market for lemons

http://www.welton.it/articles/webhosting_market_lemons

franklaemmer2• 14 years ago

great article indeed, thanks for pointing us.

zacharyvoase• 14 years ago

So part of the solution for meat is to "vote for a party that supports meat market regulation." But no such recommendation is made for hosting providers.

Regulate all the industries—except mine!

The first comment on the article is also quite lovely.

auggierose• 14 years ago

Is this really number 2 ranking on HN right now. Time to get the hell outta here ...

IsaacL• 14 years ago

People buy hosting based on (RAM / CPU / bandwidth) for your buck. They don't buy based on customer service.

I think this is OK for the middle of the market - VPS customers, for whom a Linux shell is an adequate interface. (I don't know about the higher end of the market, dedicated servers and up, but I imagine those kind of customers are willing to pay more for quality service).

It really sucks for the low-end web hosting market - the kind of services where you get a shared folder on Apache to upload PHP scripts, and a cPanel-type interface for one-click install of Wordpress, Magento, etc.

If you're charging customers less than £10/month, any support tickets they open are going to eat massively into your margins. So all these sites have really crappy outsourced service.

I once helped a friend who was struggling to install Prestashop on his webhost. The support thread was like "I'm having problem X". "It seems to be fixed now, ticket closed". "No, I'm still having the same problem". "It appears to be fixed now, ticket closed". "It's not fixed, I'm still having the same problem..." Every reply was from a different support rep, meaning their attempt to cut corners in the name of efficiency turned into a massive inefficiency.

hausburger• 14 years ago

Exactly. You get what you pay for, no matter the market.

franklaemmer2• 14 years ago

THX for all the comments on my article.

I have learned that it was a bit too short and maybe a bit too superficial for the HN community. In fact the original version was much longer but i decided to trim it to the core message.

What the hosting and the meat market have in common

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