Hacker News Comments on
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.I highly recommend The Paradox of Choice http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-more-less/dp/006000...To quote from the article: "People who constantly try to always get that great deal end up spending all their time chasing those deals and never actually get things done. I’ve seen people do this their entire lives, and it is debilitating."
You can say the same about people who spend all their time trying to constantly get "the best" product. Figure out a few things that are important to you and maximise these - whether on quality or price. For the rest, learn to accept "good enough" and get on with your life doing things that matter for you.
Having only a light or superficial engagement with the content... is probably what the site is supposed to be avoiding.If you think that the secret to encouraging engagement is to flatten out the structure of the information, and ask everyone to read everything in order to discover the influential, popular, or insightful bits...
... you desperately need to read The Paradox of Choice:
http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...
There is nothing engaging about thirty screenfuls of undifferentiated choices. When presented with that, I'll just leave. If I wanted a firehose of undifferentiated, recent, quality content, presented in a way which made it very difficult to nucleate a conversation or form a community, I'd be using Google Reader.
[EDIT: Incidentally, if not illustratively, I should point out that I haven't actually read the entirety of The Paradox of Choice myself. I listened to the author lecture about it for an hour in a podcast, and I started to read it, and I appreciated the concept, but I felt that the book kept repeating the same point too many times and I had other uses for my time... ;]
Google "too many choices": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22too+many+choices...A very interesting set of top results.
There is also this 2003 book on the matter:
"The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less": http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...
There was some buzz and a number of articles on the topic published around the time the book came out.
See also (where I got the more descriptive phrase in the title): http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93 http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...To me, it also ties in with embodiment theory (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123243). We think we'd rather have the buffet, especially on first sight and with an empty stomach. But after gorging ourselves we realize we would have much rather had one really good dish than twenty mediocre ones.
⬐ jkushI agree with you. What I'm more interested in however, is who really gets to say what dishes are on the buffet? The cooks? The consumers? My gut tells me the consumers have a lot less choice than it appears.⬐ robgIf it's your restaurant, you do! Now, if you want to stay in business better to offer a few dishes (not a buffet) that people would kill to eat delivered by cooks who love great, simple food.(And yes, we can run with this line of thought all day. Mmmmmmm, embodiment.)
⬐ lgAh, the Jobsian theory of restaurants.