[rvrs]

>I've been dipping my toes into the JS ecosystem, and I keep bumping into the fact that using mentally cheap signals of quality (such as stars or DL counts) almost never indicates the quality of the thing itself. Winners seem to be randomly chosen, almost! The only way to assess is to read the code and try integrating it in.

I wish morep people understood the "Kardashian effect" as I like to call it -- the most popular thing is only most popular because it was already popular. I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

A year or two ago on HN I read a short blog post about omitting the word "best" from internet searches and being more specific in your criteria (e.g. "car with best resale value" instead of "best car"), and it has made my life and way of thinking a lot better

[Aurornis]

> I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

I like to explore alternatives to the most popular choice, but more often than not I end up back at the #1 consensus choice.

I have some friends who simply must pick the #2 or #3 choice in every domain. They always have an elaborate justification for why it’s better. From my point of view it seems driven by contrarianism.

Some times they pick some interesting alternatives that I explore. Most of the time they end up with also-ran purchases that die off. I joke that my one friend is the best predictor of impending product line cancellation that I know. He used a Zune when everyone went iPod. He went Windows Phone when iPhone and Android were front runners. He event eschewed Instagram for some other platform that he was sure was going to win the social media wars, but was actually so unnoteworthy that I can’t even remember the name right now.

[robocat]

Called the Harbinger Effect

  the same group of consumers has an outsized tendency to purchase all kinds of failed products, time after time, flop after flop

You really don't want these people as customers:

  In a key part of the study, the researchers studied consumers whose purchases flop at least 50 percent of the time, and saw pronounced effects when these harbingers of failure buy products. When the percentage of total sales of a product accounted for by these consumers increases from 25 to 50 percent, the probability of success for that product decreases by 31 percent. And when the harbingers buy a product at least three times, it’s really bad news: The probability of success for that product drops 56 percent

https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...

[Terr_]

And then you get sales channels designed specifically to sell short-term cheap thing to such folks, which reminds me of As Seen On TV.

[fransje26]

> As Seen On TV.

Always a great cue to instantly stop considering a product.

[hyperdimension]

"Wasn't successful on TV"

[dpkirchner]

Sounds like a market opportunity to me!

[akoboldfrying]

Fascinating (and, dare I say it, pretty funny too).

[hoseja]

Cause, effect.

[sfink]

I'm somewhat this way, but more than somewhat when it comes to TV shows. I think something like 80% of my favorite shows were cancelled early. Firefly, Freaks & Geeks, Shadow & Bone, ...

Perhaps I should set up a Patreon where people can give me money to not watch things.

(Admittedly, this may be a mathematical artifact. Cancelled shows have less opportunity to decline in quality. At one point, The Dragon Prince was my all-time favorite show. I haven't even bothered to watch the last several seasons. It is even possible that the people cancelling the show are able to accurately predict that something is going to go downhill in the future, though I doubt it.)

[the-chitmonger]

For what it's worth, I watched the show while working/cleaning and the later seasons felt pretty decent. Its seventh and (I believe) final season is premiering in two days. I can definitely feel the influence of Aaron Ehasz, and although I've probably aged out of the target demographic, the ATLA-like worldbuilding/character writing is nostalgic. Not bad to have on in the background IMO if you ever get curious about what happens.

[thechao]

My life, growing up, was: lockblox (v legos), construx (v meccano), vectrex (v nintendo), macintosh (in 1985!), etc. My dad is epically contrarian.

[bloopernova]

Oh lord. My father also always seemed to pick gifts that appealed more to him and his impulsivity.

I got the vectrex too, and an Atari STM I think, it wasn't quite the same as an Atari STFM. When I wanted to learn piano/keyboard, he bought me a frickin keytar, a Yamaha SHS-10, instead of lessons or a simple full size like I asked for.

Instead of a gift certificate to get some clothes, he got me a gimmicky Canon SLR that ate batteries and that I couldn't afford to develop the film.

He was a very strange person. Sometimes incredibly funny and generous, other times hateful and selfish.

Edited to add: sorry for the trauma dump. I have no idea what point, if any, that I was originally trying to make.

[sneak]

All things considered, it's better to have a strange father than a boring/typical one.

[dullcrisp]

*your experience may vary

[yehat]

Well I can understand your father better than you in this case. I bet time will come when you'll start appreciating what he did for you. Fathers are not like mothers, dude... Geez - dreaming for clothes and not appreciating a Canon SLR instead.. The time and the maturity will help you appreciate at some point you've had an amazing father.

[bloopernova]

Added context: my father didn't pay child support. I wanted clothes because all I had was school uniform and old hand me downs.

I would have liked to have eaten something other than boiled potatoes and peas in my birthday. I would have liked to go to the ice rink with my friends. Instead I got a camera I couldn't afford to use.

[thechao]

I'm there with ya, bud. There should be a term for this — for those of us in our situation — and we should be able to unite!

[Brian_K_White]

"My dad gave me a gold brick. It's sooo heavy."

[bloopernova]

Those gifts listed were the few times I saw him. He didn't pay child support, so I grew up hungry. I just wanted a normal childhood.

[Brian_K_White]

What the hell does that have to do with this topic? The problem you describe, now, is totally different and it wouldn't matter what the gifts were, whether they were things most people valued or things that ended up being flops or things you liked or didn't.

[karmakaze]

I might be one of these people. I don't have to pick #2 or #3, but I will give them a thorough reviewing as I will critically for #1. Sometimes I just want something different for the sake of it, but I want it to at least do the job reasonably well. Something about a fork in the road and taking the one less travelled by...

Since that can often mean extra effort/support, I won't recommend such things to others. I'll try to pick something that will be the least trouble for them.

[ptmcc]

Fascinating observation, and now that you point it out I know several people like this. It's like they are pathologically contrarian consumers. Then they often complain about the suboptimal situations they get themselves into.

Not to say that every #1 popular item is always the best, but definitely a lot more than never.

[PittleyDunkin]

> I like to explore alternatives to the most popular choice, but more often than not I end up back at the #1 consensus choice.

Popularity is only a decent proxy for consensus if people actually look at the other options. I've been burned by trusting this metric more times than I can count.

[pammf]

Hah, plus one on this one. Once I went as far as buying a French car famous for the suspension problems due to the terrible quality of pavement in my country, mainly to prove everyone was wrong about the unreliability claims (and it was unreliable btw). I guess I was often feeling I was outsmarting the dumb crowd... got me screwed so many times.

[atomicfiredoll]

[TL;DR: Hindsight is 20/20, but if you did a good job with your requirements and you had good information about if a product meets each one, then it doesn't always matter that other products which didn't meet the requirements as completely eventually win out.]

I may be one of these types, but at least in many of my cases, I don't really know that it mattered in the end?

Maybe after a review I pick something that didn't win in the long term or even eventually exited the market because it wasn't popular enough. But, my requirements are almost never strictly that it's popular. What I end up with does typically do the job very well for the time I have it, and after few years the requirements may change or the need may go away completely. If one of my requirements is that a device is built with metal instead of plastic, maybe I never have to replace it.

Another example: Your friend had a Zune, but then I'm guessing they moved on to a phone, [because phones eventually] became better music players. If the Zune did all the things they wanted while they had it, especially if they had a unique need, maybe were happy with it. (Although, that isn't necessarily always the case.)

This doesn't seem quite as applicable for selecting software, though. Popularity often is part of what I look at there, because I want to know dependencies won't need replacing and support will be available. Additionally, you can potentially work with the developers so the selection iterates and grows into your requirements.

[webmaven]

See also "Harbingers of Failure":

https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...

[chias]

> I think in almost everything in my life and in every domain, #2 or #3 is better-suited (for my preferences and needs).

Depending on the domain, there's a good chance #1 may also be a sponsored result.

[fhe]

I have friends who routinely go for #2 or #3 (occasionally even further down). The typical justification they gave is that one's paying a lot of price premium/marketing cost for #1, whereas with #2/3 one gets comparable or slightly worse quality for a lot cheaper.

[int_19h]

Part of the problem, though, is that winners of the popularity contest get more support from the rest of the ecosystem, which doesn't take that long to turn into a moat.

[dehrmann]

> "Kardashian effect" as I like to call it

Alternatively, the Mickey Mouse effect.

[ashoeafoot]

The stars is the issues solved to issues open ratio.

[IgorPartola]

This really depends. Some examples where the number one choice is IMO justified:

- ZFS. There are other filesystems that provide checksumming, CoW, etc. but ZFS is a proven solution in this space. I am happy work on BRTFS and bcache continues but they are not yet there.

- Debian. There are distros that do things better and differently but nobody has quite as smooth an experience, hardware support, security, and software availability all in one package. Alternatives are really good so it really says something about Debian that it is as popular as it is.

- ssh. There are some alternatives but when was the last time you heard an argument made in their favor?

I could go on but hopefully I’ve made my point. Sometimes the standard choice is the right now. And yes I know me picking Debian as a good distro can start a flame war :)