alt Hacker NewsI both agree and disagree with this article (which is mostly an ad for the studio, but such is life). The premise that now taste is the differentiator is one I see shared a lot. I think it's easy to agree with the sentiment because it's sneakily optimistic - we all think we have good taste, so we're all going to make it out of this alright.
> What the Gen-AI-enabled world needs now is better taste. It’s easy—trivial, even—to stand up a site or a basic app. But so what? Are you looking at the user experience from end to end? Are you questioning your own premises? Have you considered a completely, fundamentally different approach?
I think it's not just better taste that gets people to consider user experience end-to-end, or to question their own premises, or to try different approaches. It's effort. It's going in, using your app, considering how it will be used, and tweaking it (manually or through AI) until it's reached a standard you set. This process will also refine your taste and improve it - your taste is not something you're born with that sets your apart.
This process of repeated incremental effort and improvement is one that ultimately imbues the resulting work in your own style and creativity - not just the fact that you are a 'creative person'. Effort is still the moat. I struggle to explain this point as well as I want - I wrote about it a little here, but it's still messy in my head:
It's not taste. 90s and 00s web design was often kitschy, loud, and tasteless.
But it was novel because it was a new medium with (fairly) low cost of entry, which meant a lot of people could play with it. And the experimentation and play, and some of the kitschy garishness, defined that culture.
2020s culture does optimisation, not play. There are no rewards for experimentation and originality, no matter how fun it is.
You need a certain amount of wealth and free time to experiment and play, and the people who have those disapprove of everything which isn't about self-promotion and money. The people who don't, can't.
So that kind of creativity only happens on social media accounts with a couple of hundred followers, on a good day. It's not a collective interest, and it's certainly not marketable.
Which means creativity isn't a moat at all. People want what they want, and currently that the appetite for surprises and wonder is not high.