16 ms·

Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

237 points by jayliew 16y ago

InclinedPlane 16y ago
Summary: people have worse problems than you, stop being so self absorbed, stop hanging out with your friends, stop having fun, join the peace corps and change the world. Or something.
megamark16 16y ago
And I was getting down on myself lately because I hardly ever hit Twitter anymore. How will all my tens of followers remember who I am and what projects I'm working on if I don't tweet about them twice a day? I guess I shouldn't feel to bad, Twitter really isn't doing me much good, at least not as much as just sitting down and focusing on knocking out new functionality for my customers. there'll be time to talk about what I'm doing later...
abcxyz 16y ago
Those who has the ability to program has a moral obligation to drop everything to help the homeless? Classic slave morality, cliched moral self righteousness. "Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me. If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.
zone2 16y ago
thank you jolie. this has been on my mind for nearly 2 yrs. i'm glad some one wrote about it.
davidu 16y ago
So stop living in a world of bread and circuses. I don't use foursquare because I get no value. Nor do most people I know. I use Twitter for work, nothing else. I produce, I do not consume. I am not special. There are lots more like me. There is an entire world of startups focused on societal betterment -- some with the stated goal of just being self-sustaining rather than profit centers. in finance: kiva, prosper, even greendot which is now worth $2b, banksimple, etc. etc. in energy: bloom, kitegen, blacklight energy, etc. etc. And the list goes on... for a really really long time.
- davidu 16y ago
  And I forgot my other comment to make which is, as someone else before me once remarked, many startup's problem space early on appears to be a toy or something of little utility or value, but that is rarely the case in the long-run. Just look at Facebook!
- cemregr 16y ago
  I'd add kickstarter too to the first list.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all. Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck.... The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions. Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.
- dbingham 16y ago
  Those were just example problems. A way to represent a class of problem. The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle, it might be that it's really difficult to live that healthier lifestyle in the face of a food system designed to make you live the unhealthy one.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle... You just did the exact same thing Jolie O'Dell did - you picked an action, identified a problem that the action solves, and declared that new problem to be the original problem.
    - sprout 16y ago
      Not at all. Dbingham identified a possible root cause that is more specific and actionable than the originally stated problem. You took a qualified hypothesis and claimed it was stated as the totality of the situation. More importantly, the possible root cause could conceivably be mitigated by a variety of solutions we know how to build - webapps for improved meal planning, recipes, health information, and so on.
      - 16y ago
tgriesser 16y ago
It really depends on whether you look at the startup as the means or the end. For example, while the creation of Microsoft did not directly fix the problem of healthcare or hunger, it allowed for Bill Gates to create his foundation, and thus indirectly created a ton of good for the world. Same goes for Facebook, yes of course keeping up with your friends has no direct impact on real issues, but the fact that 110m went to public schools in an area that really needs it - that is a pretty big impact. The same goes for any other person who creates wealth from web startups or any business in general - I don't think that web startups themselves are going to do much directly but when you take the knowledge and potential wealth that you acquire in the process and put it toward a good cause, that is one way that you can fix a social or human problem with your app as the author challenges. Just my take on it.
- alex1 16y ago
  In some ways, Facebook does have a direct impact on real issues. It is much easier now for non-profits to get their message out to people, through Facebook. Applications like Causes makes it easier for organizations that do have an impact on real issues to collect donations from Facebook users.
  - tgriesser 16y ago
    Agreed, I actually think all of them have direct impacts, it seems however the author is implying that if the app is not built specifically for the means of doing something altruistic it is in some way greedy or frivolous or something. I'm arguing that the applications doesn't have to be directly focused on a particular issue, and it still has legitimate uses as you pointed out, and make real world changes that are on the scale that the author thinks that technology apparently should be used for.
sovande 16y ago
A classic mistake; The parish pump generalizing.
- deleted 16y ago
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- sovande 16y ago
  I see I get down-voted on this. I agree. It was presumptuous of me to suggest that the blog post author maybe should look beyond her henhouse. Of course her generalization of web-app's and observation of lack of world changing startups is correct.
toast76 16y ago
How any one who writes a blog can consider themselves anything other than self-serving is beyond me. You can't get any more narcissistic than having your own blog and prompting people to subscribe to it whilst telling everyone what movie you're out seeing with the hip crew du jour. People like entertainment. People like socializing. Whoop dee doo. How is that any more self-serving than telling the world you're seeing "Waiting for Superman with the Facebook crew".
brownleej 16y ago
I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements: They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems. and: But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity. In the first statement, she is saying that these technologies do not do what technology should do. In the second, she says that their intention is not to do what technology should do. I think that the latter is more the point of the article, but the former is the more interesting question. Great scientific discoveries can be produced by accident. If a process regularly produces good things, we should be hesitant to malign it just because it was not the intention of those producing the initial technologies. The classic example is that penicillin was discovered by accident, but there are more. One of the motivations for the initial development of Unix was the desire to play games. Computers themselves started out as tools to crack codes and calculate ballistic trajectories. Technology naturally grows beyond its initial limits, and given how fresh these technologies are, we should be hesitant to characterize them as being without meaningful value for society, which I saw as the author's intent with this article.
- moultano 16y ago
  I might be putting words in the author's mouth, but I think the things he's talking about are "products" not "technologies." This isn't to say that the same sort of beneficial serendipity doesn't apply, but it applies less.
marknutter 16y ago
Suppose we solved all these "real problems." What then? We're done? No more startups or apps?
jeromec 16y ago
Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. Er, not sure where the author has been since the November 2008 election, but President Barack Obama made tackling this decades long problem a signature issue of his presidency, and actually got the problem addressed comprehensively. Sure, there is still work to do, but health care which makes up 1/3 of the economy was never going to be solved by programmers building web apps. And there are projects pushing technology forward in this area to increase efficiency. Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. There are technology projects working on improving this, both within the school system and in the tech arena. Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. I'm not sure how technology might solve homelessness, but there are actual real world answers like food banks and soup kitchens to address the hunger issue. The homeless experiment posted on Nev Blog shows how relatively easy it is for real homeless people (not those that panhandle, then jump into sports cars, or those with addictive habits to feed) to acquire food. (http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/ http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/) The author reflects on some problems in America -- where even the poor are really not that poor by the standards of many other nations -- and seeks solutions in technology because technology is good at solving certain kinds of problems, especially ones mechanical in nature. This doesn't mean it can solve any kind of problem. Large, longstanding, complex socio-economic problems can't be solved by Twitter type applications. The kinds of problems of which the author speaks require a combination of educated people, politics, and economic focuses for making any real difference. Technology may certainly help, but it's not the sole answer.
- PStamatiou 16y ago
  Just wanted to say thanks for the link to nev's homeless experiment. I rather enjoyed reading it (and keeping my mind off getting my wisdom teeth pulled in the AM)
  - jeromec 16y ago
    I enjoyed reading it too. For the wisdom teeth extraction, when not going to sleep, a trick I used was trying to recall the details of the more positive points of stories I'd read to keep the mind busy and happy. It helped me, at least. :)
patrickgzill 16y ago
I fail to see how overly bureaucratic paper-pushing and stiflingly ridiculous licensing and regulatory frameworks (which are the REAL reasons that medical care is the problem) can be solved by technology. That is, it is not a technology problem, it is a problem of regulatory capture.
- replicatorblog 16y ago
  I work in medical and regulatory compliance isn't that big a burden. The simplest way to reduce health care costs in the US would be reducing obesity which tends to cause the most expensive diseases (Diabetes, Heart Disease, Stroke).
  - patrickgzill 16y ago
    No offense, but I find that a little hard to believe. Every doctor's office I have ever visited in the last 10 years had more admin staff than nurses and doctors. That is, for each doctor there were perhaps 1.5 admin people doing paperwork. While they are cheaper than doctors, that is a still a large expense (figure $60K per person as a minimum, thus $90K per doctor per year in additional expense). However I do agree that obesity is a problem in the US.
    - Empact 16y ago
      Yeah, but I'd argue the solution isn't to nice up the regulatory system, but to step outside of it. Clinics like Qliance in Seattle provide direct primary care (cash only, no insurance) largely because it's much nicer for both the doctor and the patient, because you can circumvent the bureaucratic nonsense and admin busywork. http://qliance.com/ http://qliance.com/ The founder, Dr. Garrison Bliss, does a great job summarizing his approach in this talk: http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?EvId=2008030136C&bhcp=1 http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?EvId=2008030136C&#3...
    - astrange 16y ago
      Did you ask the admin staff what they were doing? They could all be working on insurance paperwork.
replicatorblog 16y ago
I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc. The same with education, the problem with inner city education isn't technical, its that vast swaths of the population do not respect education. My wife taught in an inner city, had amazing technical resources thanks to grants and well meaning donors, but had parents who were totally checked out. Furthermore, because some people use tech in a frivolous way doesn't mean there aren't noble uses. e.g. Foursquare - Learn about resources in my town and places I visit I wouldn't have otherwise. Lets me provide info about areas I know well to those who don't. Makes my consumption choices visible and potentially incites me to make better decisions for the community and my health. Groupon - Helps support local merchants who have difficult challenges marketing against national chains. Reduces risks for customers to try new things. Twitter - connects me to people and bodies of knowledge that would otherwise be hard to tap. Lets me connect job seekers with job holders. Zynga games - Creates a meeting place/activity for friends/family. Sure, at its worst it has "junkie" characteristics, but used sparingly it gives me a way to say hi to a friend and keep a little social bonding going. Commerce isn't bad and tech isn't the solution to every problem.
- timr 16y ago
  "Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheap building materials, or any of a thousand other different things that people with big brains might be doing to better the world. People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. There's just not much of an economic incentive to do it, when it's easier to sell to the vices of the first world. That said, I realize that I'm a hypocrite on this point: I'm in this wacky social-network-hoo-hah business as much as anyone else. I just wish the economic forces were aligned differently.
dasil003 16y ago
Reading this resonated with me. I knew that the responses here would pretty much rip it apart, but I'm surprised that as of right now only one of 15 comments is positive. It's pretty easy to find ways to criticize this post. It's not particularly well written, it's not inspirational, and of course you can poke holes in any kind of argument this vague. But if you don't agree, I think it's worth it to stop and be honest with yourself about whether you really think it's complete bullshit, or if there is maybe a tinge of guilty defensiveness mixed in. I'm not claiming that this article is anything close to the whole truth—after all, we can't make a difference if we can't make a living—but if there wasn't at least a seed of truth here then I don't think "changing the world" would be part of the standard entrepreneurial goals.
- sbov 16y ago
  Its similar to something I have thought before - this isn't only a problem with tech startups, its a problem with the majority of businesses in the world. I half-joked about it with friends before, saying that people should only be allowed to do jobs that weren't "bread and circus" (to borrow a phrase) from 5-9, then after work hours could do what they pleased. Realistically though, this poster probably contributes to the bottom line of many bread and circus businesses. And so do I. Today I bought a box of hot tamales (the candy) and a cherry coke - these are all bread and circus and only serve for my enjoyment. I ate a steak dinner on Saturday night - totally bread and circus, as I could get my nutritional value through better methods. The people who work to produce these things could be put to work doing something better, while the government provides a tasteless, odorless, white paste for all our nutritional value. Some of the most enjoyable parts of life tend to be surrounded by bread and circus. But if they were never invented in the first place, I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing.
- smokeyj 16y ago
  Another blog heard from. Group A thinks group B doesn't do enough for society. Instead of describing a system to overcome of the selfish tendencies inherent in all humans, she chose to belittle an entire industry and the aspirations of entrepreneurs trying to learn to be productive.
- zaidf 16y ago
benreyes 16y ago
Not everything has to be solving a direct problem, secondary benefits have to considered. Let's take Dailybooth (YC Summer 09)which was mentioned in this article. Whilst the creator may have just created the site because it sounded like a "fun" idea the value of the website is with the micro community that thrives. Heck, I'll even go as far as saying Dailybooth has helped to save lives. It's dedicated users consists of a subsection of society that may be outcasted in real life. Lets take a teenager who lives in a small town, whom may feel more accepted in a city but has no similar peers within a small town. Dailybooth facilitates this teenager to connect and belong to like-minded individuals people whom they have never met before. Over time real friendships are created over a shared connection which is the website and community. I heard of actual stories where a teen attempted to commit suicide due to being perceived as an outcast. In this case Dailybooth has facilitated friendships and connections with similar peers which in turn reduces the feeling of being outcasted in a small town, thus indirectly reducing the chances of suicide. There are even a number of Dailybooth users who travel across different countries to facilitate in real friendships and connections. It allows for boundaries of prejudice to be broken. So Dailybooth may not be solving a direct problem. But does it have value in our society? I would argue is certainly does. (I have researched extensively into the userbase and mechanics of Dailybooth and have been involved in it's community)
techiferous 16y ago
Yelp is not fluff. It solves the problem of information asymmetry in the marketplace. Since Yelp makes it easier to tell lemons from businesses that shine, it makes the market more efficient. This means your money goes further. Which means you have more of it to spend on education, health insurance, etc.
waterlesscloud 16y ago
This is shallow thinking. Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs. There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did. Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities. On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful. I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group. I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative. Shallow thinking.
- marshallp 16y ago
  The OP is talking about getting "work" done, like solving cancer. The "togetherness" stuff can be defined as entertainment. Watching movies and playing games is meaningful, as is staying in touch with friends, but these things don't make the trains run on time.
  - greendestiny 16y ago
    Most of us would like to survive cancer so we can spend more time doing togetherness things with our friends and family. I've never seen an argument about whether various pursuits were worthwhile or not that was itself worthwhile. Its simply a topic that doesn't bear inspection, if it puts food on you and your families table then its worthwhile enough for me.
gamble 16y ago
I've worked for healthcare and education startups. These are very, very hard markets for a startup to tackle. They combine the slow, expensive sales cycle of a large business with the regulation and bureaucracy of essential government services. It's a long, hard slog that most investors won't touch with a ten-foot pole. Programmers start companies that solve their own problems because they understand those problems. Few programmers understand the problems in health care or education, and it's not a market to screw around in when you don't know what you're doing.
- marshallp 16y ago
  Write the software and sell/rent it on to businessfolk who can navigate the regulatory hurdles.
jamesaguilar 16y ago
I understand the feeling, it's one articulated by people around the world every day. But look at the commonalities between the things she mentions as real problems. What is the shared thread? They're all about people who can't afford certain things. There are some businesses built on serving these markets, but they aren't typically internet technology businesses.
ryan 16y ago
I find it really difficult to read such an argument (whether I agree with it or not), if it doesn't come from someone who is actually out there trying to solve these problems himself or herself. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena Edit: at least the gladiator image in the post is apt :)
- marshallp 16y ago
  So you're saying OP isn't allowed to point out that the emperor wears no clothes, or that roger ebert is useless.
  - ryan 16y ago
    Maybe if she was pointing out facts, but this strikes me as an opinion piece and I have a hard time reading this particular opinion unless the author is actually practicing what she preaches. FWIW I tend to agree with the opinion. I don't know who roger ebert is so I can't comment on whether he is useless, but I guess he has no relevance to me.
    - marshallp 16y ago
      roger ebert - the most famous and celebrated movie critic in america - he's never made a movie, but writes opinions about movies all day long and is still highly respected
mmmmax 16y ago
I wonder how many addictive, self-referencial and narcissistic tweets it took for the author to convince 16,402 people to follow her on Twitter.
deleted 16y ago
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resdirector 16y ago
I think Don Draper's "wheel" pitch nicely summarizes my counterpoints to this article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY
callmeed 16y ago
"Many Americans can’t afford a decent education" Baloney. I worked in the CA community college system. It's $26 per unit. TWENTY SIX dollars. Oh, and if you're poor, it's nothing. A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it.
- marshallp 16y ago
  The high schools generate students that aren't even capable of doing community college, or have enough sense to "want" to do community college.
  - robryan 16y ago
    It's hard to help people if they don't want to help themselves first.
    - marshallp 16y ago
      There aren't people who don't want to help themselves - it's a basic instinct in every life form. There are people who "don't know how" to help themselves though.
- gatsby 16y ago
  "A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it." Agreed. And even throughout the world thanks to small startups like Khan Academy.
- apsurd 16y ago
  We have this problem that Universities are GREAT at marketing. Jane doesn't want to go to some stooooopid lowly community college, she wants to go to USC because ahem, it's better!
  - jayliew 16y ago
    You take as many classes as you can at community college then you transfer to a real university and technically graduate from there. Massive $avings.
jasonkester 16y ago
It occurs to me that my latest project actually gets me off the hook from this guy. Problem: People in developing countries have to work for 3rd world wages, selling products and services to people who really can't afford to buy anything. Thus, they are doomed to remain poor by western standards. Solution: Jason's website that lets them teach Spanish online to rich Americans, and doesn't let them pay themselves less than ten bucks an hour. Dodged a bullet there!
- jolie 16y ago
  1) That's kind of awesome! 2) "This guy" is actually a lady. =)
- marshallp 16y ago
  By setting an arbitrary floor of ten bucks you've also cut off that opportunity for many though.
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    Possibly, but hopefully it'll stop the thing from turning into rentacoder, where everybody competes on price to the point where it's essentially free. A site where people who normally make less than $1/hr can sell their services online for less than $1/hr doesn't really help anybody. On the other hand, requiring people to charge the fair market value for their service forces them to compete on quality rather than price, which has the added benefit of making the service better, as well as getting people paid a fair wage.
    - marshallp 16y ago
      The one dollar foik wouldn't go for the sub dollar work so it's a nonissue. There's nothing wrong with rentacoder, it's a great site creating efficiencies (it only worries you if you were one of the inefficiencies in the system before - american/european programmers/writers)
      - robryan 16y ago
mr_twj 16y ago
This only confirms my conviction that solipsism syndrome should be studied more closely in relation to the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.
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tomjen3 16y ago
With what right do you presume to tell people what problems they have? Surely that would be the choice of the individual free person?
earl 16y ago
Similar thoughts come to me from time to time, mostly when I realize I spend 50-60 hours a week making advertising more efficient. Still... there are upsides. I left a career as a scientific programmer creating medical research software because selling out offered me a 90% raise. That's not an exaggeration. And a chance to work for companies that offer enough equity that it might change my life, even if it's just a hefty downpayment. And the chance to work in my choice of cities on America's coasts.
alexqgb 16y ago
This is such a ridiculously ridiculous post. I'm saying that having worked on a number of media campaigns for a small but excellent medical research charity that has benefited enormously from the technical progress made in the last few years. That benefit comes from making savvy use of everything from (now) cheap digital cameras and video editing, to carefully cultivated email lists, dedicated web-pages for outreach teams, and growing profiles on social networking sites. All that seems like basic stuff, I know, but that's what's so amazing. Five years ago it was either much more expensive, or nonexistent. Today, it's ubiquitous (Facebook, for example, had 1% of its current base in 2005, and today I can shoot a better picture with a $5k camera than a $75k camera could capture back then). That massive and very sudden shift has allowed organizations to do things (real, saving lives and avoiding death things) that simply wouldn't be imaginable - let alone possible just a few years ago, at least not with the limited resources they had for outreach. So, Jolie O'Dell, if you want to see homeless people getting help, stop waiting for 'tech to do it'. Instead, just go out and talk to some homeless people. You don't need an app for that. Nor, you'll find, do they. And when you do figure out what's most likely to help, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how helpful all these new resources can be - provided you're creative enough to use them imaginatively. Separately - all of you working on this 'pointless' stuff; you're awesome. And thank you. You're making vital connections. You've helped tremendously. The world is a better place because of you. Please, by all means, carry on.
radu_floricica 16y ago
> Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. > Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. > Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. I agree with the whole article, but this stuck to me. (except the "American" part... European here). It's a problem, a big problem waiting to be solved. And I found I'm itching to give it a shot. Like somebody else already said in this thread, this kind of problems can usually be approached only with a ton of money and prior experience - but on the other hand, there should be much less competition then in writing the next killer Android app.
Empact 16y ago
Alright, a few of the top comments point out the good of the Foursquares and Facebooks of the world. Except, that's not the point - on anything beyond the personal scale the question is not, "which of these two do we want?" but "how much of each do we want?" She asks: "How well are our resources allocated?" I think there's a strong case that we're under-invested in some of the largest problems of society - personally I'm working towards reforming government http://votereports.org/ http://votereports.org/, and I can tell you the government directly spends some 40% of the GDP, and indirectly affects every other bit of it. Do we have anything close to 40% of developers working on disrupting our stodgy old government? How about 5%? 1%? I know of 3 good folks I work alongside (including these folks: http://circlevoting.com/ http://circlevoting.com/), and a handful of other part-time, side-job efforts. But is that a proper reflection of the relative return of the problem, when compared to hundreds of facebookers or dozens elsewhere? Health care is 17% of GDP. What are the big, disruptive health care startups? Who is going to build the tool that enables doctors and patients to circumvent the worst of the system? Or something that serves the economic purpose of insurance while avoiding the onerous regulations thereof? I've had the pleasure to meet with Jay Parkinson of http://thefuturewell.com http://thefuturewell.com, and I'll bet he could put the 30-some foursquare developers to better use. Again, this isn't an either/or question, but a question of resource allocation. Perhaps what we've done so far has made sense because those are the easy questions to answer - the money is there and the consumers are willing. But sooner or later we're going to have to recognize that the biggest problems of society deserve more of our attention.
- daeken 16y ago
  I also have to ask: Where are all the education startups? We have a massive, high-speed communication tool and I don't see much changing with respect to education. There are a few things out there (the Khan Academies of the world), but they're very few and far between.
  - mmorris 16y ago
    While it may not be considered by most as a "startup" at this point, I think that in the long run Wikipedia will have a major impact on education, in the sense of the knowledge base of the average individual. I can't quantify the amount I've learned from wikipedia articles over the years, but I'm quite certain it's an awful lot. If I had grown up with access to it I'm pretty sure the impact would be far greater. Sure, when I was a kid we had an encyclopedia, but A) a lot of kids don't, and B) wikipedia is thousands of times more powerful than an encyclopedia (and reading one article will often lead one down a path through various other articles too). Is it going to replace public schools? Obviously not. But it has and will change education for the better.
BjornW 16y ago
I haven't read all comments on this, but I get the feeling a lot of HN-ers are not too fond of the article. Personally it struck a chord with me. In a previous life I worked at a non-profit aimed at doing 'R&D' in a social context (yes, this is vague and that was just one of the things making me leave...). Although I've left this organisation disillusioned and a lot more cynical about non-profits and their methods / goals, I still strive to use my skills for the betterment of all. Not that I always succeed (I'm by far not a saint), but I try to give something back. In my case I do this by offering a lot of my stuff under a open source license or Creative Commons license. Still, I sometimes wonder if I could/should strive to do more in the real world with tangible / physical results. Staring at a screen all day long and hoping my virtual work will lead to some positive results in the 'real' world and be meaningful for people occasionally makes me feel like I'm fooling myself. Therefore I think that the gist of Jolie's article hits the nail right on the head and asks the difficult question (for all of us regardless of skills or area of expertise): what have you been trying to do not just for the betterment of yourself, but also for the betterment of other's? Trying to combine this in your work is something I belief is worth striving for, even if we cannot always achieve it.
chegra 16y ago
Stage 1: Create a massively successful app. Stage 2: Give back at Stage 1.5: Jolie complains that we aren't doing stage 2. Well for most of us we aren't at stage 2. Didn't Zuckberg who has just finish stage 1 give 100 million to education? Didn't Bill Gates, another stage 1 success, get 40 billionaires to give away most of their wealth to charity? The question arises why don't start at stage 2 first. Well, sequence matter. Think of stage 1 as taking off your clothes and stage 2 as bathing. You do stage 2 first you end up without your skin being washed and wet clothes. So far there isn't much technology that has been successful in those areas Jolie think start-up should focus, but with the apps you criticize, they have been making loads of money. In terms of risk, it is better to choose the latter type of business and then seek to help solve the other problems with the money generating from the first, same outcome but lower risk. As Jay-z would say: "And the music i be makin I dumb down for my audience And double my dollars They criticize me for it Yet they all yell "Holla" If skills sold Truth be told I'd probably be Lyricly Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense (But i did five Mil) I ain't been rhymin like Common since When your sense got that much in common And you been hustlin since Your inception Fuck perception Go with what makes sense Since I know what i'm up against We as rappers must decide what's most impor-tant And i can't help the poor if i'm one of them So i got rich and gave back To me that's the win, win"- Moment of Clarity Paraphrase, if solving homeless problem made money that is what entrepreneurs would be doing, but since it is not they choose problems with lil significant and give back that is the win,win. They are still changing the world but in a different sequence that reduces risk and ensures changing the world is more likely.
- trustfundbaby 16y ago
  Had to upvote for the Jay-Z lyrics son!
csomar 16y ago
I think the article is not attacking Facebook or Twitter. It's attacking the infinite clones of them. I'll give you a problem: There isn't a PHP Qr Code decoder in the web. Why hadn't anyone gave a damn about it? Because it's hard, take time and you simply don't know how to start and how to monetize. I'll give you another problem: Google don't happen to give the best search result. You'll (in many cases) get SEO spammed results. Why not re-invent a new search engine? Sure there are SE startups, but not enough for the solution to get solved.
- s3graham 16y ago
  I'll bite: why would one want a PHP QR Code decoder?
timinman 16y ago
Fantastic. Inspiring, and a little bit of a kick in the back-side. There's nothing wrong with games or social media, but they shouldn't be the only thing we have to offer. You've probably seen the Nathan Myhrvold quote: 'the old Silicon Valley was about solving really hard problems.' While a Web App Startup may not be able to solve every problem, we can do more than offer empty self-gratification.
Mz 16y ago
I wrote a long post. It timed out. It's probably a bit ranty anyway. Shorter version: I got well when doctor's were trying to convince me I should accept a slow torturous death as my only due in life (I guess so they could feel they knew something and deserved their high salaries) by eating better food and routinely buying new clothes (and throwing out the old stuff when it got too unclean for my needs). I prefer pissing my money away on cheap clothes from Kmart and affordable, decent food from various eateries to pissing my life away on doctors and antibiotics (which I had free access to at one time because I was a military dependent -- and I walked away from that). This person has no clue what it takes to solve really hard problems. PS: "Bread and Circus" is a form of Roman wisdom. Quit trying to give it a bad name. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" and empty bellies are worse. In times of crisis, I practice a policy of "bread and circus". Making sure my sons and I are well fed and have something entertaining to do so we don't go stir crazy and can mentally focus on something other than our overwhelming problems has been critical to our track record of success.
rodh 16y ago
I've gone a couple of times to Social Innovation camps, here in the UK (http://www.sicamp.org/ http://www.sicamp.org/). For those who don't know, it's a get-together where hackers gather with social problem experts, such as youth offending teams (YOTs) and people who work for charities, etc. It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems. The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator. I don't know how to solve this.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I ran into a great quote the other day, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." I'm going to start keeping this in mind with every one of my technology interactions. Two days before that, I spent probably 20 minutes of my day playing around with a flash gravity simulator somebody posted over here. Why? Am I to be in charge of hand-manipulating the orbital mechanics for dozens of bodies any time soon? Probably not. Because the interface has become the app. It's not about value any more, it's about stickiness. Tens of millions of folks spend hours on Farmville each day. Is this because they are just technically inept people who would be wasting their time doing something else anyway? I know this is what some folks would like to believe -- it makes them feel better about making more of the same stuff. But I don't buy it. Even if it were true for 90% of Farmville players, that still leaves 10% of the remaining users who would have done something that had more long-term value to them. Taking self-perceived long-term value away from millions of folks for days or weeks should be at least very noteworthy. Many web startups have found the magic equation: stickiness beats value. Expect to see more of the same.
srwh 16y ago
We need more articles like this one or Max Klein's Dark Angels, the web startup world is like being at Disneyland the whole year! After reading the article only hope nobody came with a social network for homeless...
edw519 16y ago
Those relatively comfortable "problems" of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I doubt that you'd get many of the 7 million small and mid-sized businesses in the United States to agree with this. Many of them have an unquenchable thirst for information: more, better, faster, in order to survive. Thousands of developers (and start-ups!) are working furiously to provide it to them. In fact, they're so busy that they don't have much time to tell you what they're doing. Which may be why OP doesn't realize they exist.
- peterbessman 16y ago
  Really, the OP is complaining that she thinks people want the wrong things. There's nothing here particular to web apps.
agentultra 16y ago
And in the meantime, ask yourself, “Does my work as a technologist really help people? Am I solving a real problem, or am I chasing personal success?” If you don’t like the answer, change something about what you do or how you do it. Tall order. Also, can personal success not align with more humanitarian goals?
Bostwick 16y ago
I think my main problem with the article is that the three big, meaningful problems it presents are so vague as to be virtually unsolvable. Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem. The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve. Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable. I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.
wmeredith 16y ago
This is utter bullshit. It's the same reasoning that leads people to say that video games or guns cause violence. Web apps are just tools, you can't out-code human nature, just like you can't legislate morality. It doesn't work. For example: Twitter is a powerful platform for sharing information. This could be leveraged for dissent or education, and it is in some ways. However, most people just follow Justin Bieber and Lada Gaga. "Bieber Fever" allegedly consumes about 3% of Twitter's entire infrastructure. (Source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/ http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/) Take that stat with salt, but it's certainly not improbable. The argument put forth in this post is older than dirt and completely false. I'll wager a bet that this argument is just slightly older than it's cliché response, "You can lead a horse to water, bu you can't make it drink." There are plenty of web apps that are truly kick-ass implementations of "doing good" (http://mycharitywater.org http://mycharitywater.org comes to mind), but they aren't going to ever be as popular as something like Farmville, because of human nature. Making your "do good" web app kick more ass won't make people want to do more good.
preichen 16y ago
you missed the point completely.your focus is too narrow. there are vast quantities of people on this planet who are working to solve the "real" problems that you mention. your argument does not hold because you are only talking about the base of the maslow hierarchy of needs. OF COURSE there are people whose most basic needs are not solved yet on this planet. You are only argumenting for the lowest levels of the pyramid! Once someone has covered his basic needs and moves up the pyramid "other" types of problems emerge like "how do i watch my favorite tv show on my mobile phone" etc. you have to segment your argument and make it very clear that you are addressing the lower levels of the pyramid.
jasonwilk 16y ago
Just re-read this (8 Best Questions We Got While Fund raising): http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-best-questions-we-got-while-raising-venture-capital/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-bes...
misuba 16y ago
If there were money in solving real problems, there wouldn't be any real problems!
rubinelli 16y ago
In my experience, people who ask "why aren't you working on a cure for cancer?" never had to build a HIPAA-compliant system, much less get something as harmless as a nutritional supplement approved by the FDA. You can't disrupt a "serious" field with two college buddies and a few AWS instances. Anyway, this "bread and circus" discussion reminds me of all the authors -- Tolkien in particular -- who were accused of wasting their talent in escapist works.
bendmorris 16y ago
So, if a person has a great idea for a web app that might be useful to some niche group of businesses, they should throw it out and keep thinking about how to feed the hungry or cure diseases - problems they have no expertise in and that they are unlikely to ever solve? Smart people should figure out what they're good at and what they're interested in, and do that. If you have a good idea that has worth to some group, you should try to implement it. A good idea is a good idea. And while we're at it, things like Google and Facebook, in addition to facilitating wasting time for those with no motivation, can also be used by, oh I don't know, medical research companies or nonprofits trying to feed the hungry to get the word out.
Natsu 16y ago
Actually, I've been thinking about ways to improve education. Many of them are already out there for those motivated to seek them. With MIT's stuff online, you can learn from them for free. A lot of more basic stuff is also out there if you know how to look for it. But there are a lot of teachers out there who have their education budgets spent on crazy toys and scoreboards that don't do the kids a whole lot of good. Educational software is a mixed bag, though I have fond memories of Number Munchers. I don't know if that led me to learning as much math as I did, but it sure didn't hurt. Right now, a lot of money is wasted on new versions of textbooks. Most of the underlying material hasn't changed and isn't really going to, except for the meddling of various government types who want to add or delete things they disagree with from the curriculum. Most of the publishers have been around for ages. I have to think there's some opportunity for someone to automate certain kinds of tests. For example, simple math tests could more easily be randomized and each student could have their own set of problems (no more photocopies with kids cheating off the guy next to them). Word problems can be autogenerated. Stuff like that. Unfortunately, most of my knowledge comes second-hand. My mother was a teacher, but she's dead now, so whatever I know about the problems they face has probably gotten out of date. But I have a feeling that education money, especially their tech budgets, getting spent on things that do little good is something that probably hasn't changed. I have to think that there are still quite a few things that could be improved.
d99kris 16y ago
It would be interesting to see more startups in the genetic programming area (or related). Once/if reaching singularity I'm sure there's gonna be more than bread and circuses.
makeramen 16y ago
Notable contradiction: Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. ... I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set. How about we broaden our scope to beyond "Americans," which I believe she actually means "United States Citizens." Don't forget all the other countries and continents doing much worse than we are.

237 points by jayliew 16y ago

Summary: people have worse problems than you, stop being so self absorbed, stop hanging out with your friends, stop having fun, join the peace corps and change the world. Or something.

megamark16 16y ago

And I was getting down on myself lately because I hardly ever hit Twitter anymore. How will all my tens of followers remember who I am and what projects I'm working on if I don't tweet about them twice a day? I guess I shouldn't feel to bad, Twitter really isn't doing me much good, at least not as much as just sitting down and focusing on knocking out new functionality for my customers. there'll be time to talk about what I'm doing later...

abcxyz 16y ago

Those who has the ability to program has a moral obligation to drop everything to help the homeless? Classic slave morality, cliched moral self righteousness. "Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me. If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.

zone2 16y ago

thank you jolie. this has been on my mind for nearly 2 yrs. i'm glad some one wrote about it.

davidu 16y ago

So stop living in a world of bread and circuses. I don't use foursquare because I get no value. Nor do most people I know. I use Twitter for work, nothing else. I produce, I do not consume. I am not special. There are lots more like me. There is an entire world of startups focused on societal betterment -- some with the stated goal of just being self-sustaining rather than profit centers. in finance: kiva, prosper, even greendot which is now worth $2b, banksimple, etc. etc. in energy: bloom, kitegen, blacklight energy, etc. etc. And the list goes on... for a really really long time.

davidu 16y ago
And I forgot my other comment to make which is, as someone else before me once remarked, many startup's problem space early on appears to be a toy or something of little utility or value, but that is rarely the case in the long-run. Just look at Facebook!
cemregr 16y ago
I'd add kickstarter too to the first list.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all. Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck.... The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions. Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.

dbingham 16y ago
Those were just example problems. A way to represent a class of problem. The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle, it might be that it's really difficult to live that healthier lifestyle in the face of a food system designed to make you live the unhealthy one.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  The real problem might not even be that Americans need a healthier lifestyle... You just did the exact same thing Jolie O'Dell did - you picked an action, identified a problem that the action solves, and declared that new problem to be the original problem.
  - sprout 16y ago
    Not at all. Dbingham identified a possible root cause that is more specific and actionable than the originally stated problem. You took a qualified hypothesis and claimed it was stated as the totality of the situation. More importantly, the possible root cause could conceivably be mitigated by a variety of solutions we know how to build - webapps for improved meal planning, recipes, health information, and so on.
    - 16y ago

tgriesser 16y ago

It really depends on whether you look at the startup as the means or the end. For example, while the creation of Microsoft did not directly fix the problem of healthcare or hunger, it allowed for Bill Gates to create his foundation, and thus indirectly created a ton of good for the world. Same goes for Facebook, yes of course keeping up with your friends has no direct impact on real issues, but the fact that 110m went to public schools in an area that really needs it - that is a pretty big impact. The same goes for any other person who creates wealth from web startups or any business in general - I don't think that web startups themselves are going to do much directly but when you take the knowledge and potential wealth that you acquire in the process and put it toward a good cause, that is one way that you can fix a social or human problem with your app as the author challenges. Just my take on it.

alex1 16y ago
In some ways, Facebook does have a direct impact on real issues. It is much easier now for non-profits to get their message out to people, through Facebook. Applications like Causes makes it easier for organizations that do have an impact on real issues to collect donations from Facebook users.
- tgriesser 16y ago
  Agreed, I actually think all of them have direct impacts, it seems however the author is implying that if the app is not built specifically for the means of doing something altruistic it is in some way greedy or frivolous or something. I'm arguing that the applications doesn't have to be directly focused on a particular issue, and it still has legitimate uses as you pointed out, and make real world changes that are on the scale that the author thinks that technology apparently should be used for.

sovande 16y ago

A classic mistake; The parish pump generalizing.

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sovande 16y ago
I see I get down-voted on this. I agree. It was presumptuous of me to suggest that the blog post author maybe should look beyond her henhouse. Of course her generalization of web-app's and observation of lack of world changing startups is correct.

toast76 16y ago

How any one who writes a blog can consider themselves anything other than self-serving is beyond me. You can't get any more narcissistic than having your own blog and prompting people to subscribe to it whilst telling everyone what movie you're out seeing with the hip crew du jour. People like entertainment. People like socializing. Whoop dee doo. How is that any more self-serving than telling the world you're seeing "Waiting for Superman with the Facebook crew".

brownleej 16y ago

I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements: They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems. and: But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity. In the first statement, she is saying that these technologies do not do what technology should do. In the second, she says that their intention is not to do what technology should do. I think that the latter is more the point of the article, but the former is the more interesting question. Great scientific discoveries can be produced by accident. If a process regularly produces good things, we should be hesitant to malign it just because it was not the intention of those producing the initial technologies. The classic example is that penicillin was discovered by accident, but there are more. One of the motivations for the initial development of Unix was the desire to play games. Computers themselves started out as tools to crack codes and calculate ballistic trajectories. Technology naturally grows beyond its initial limits, and given how fresh these technologies are, we should be hesitant to characterize them as being without meaningful value for society, which I saw as the author's intent with this article.

moultano 16y ago
I might be putting words in the author's mouth, but I think the things he's talking about are "products" not "technologies." This isn't to say that the same sort of beneficial serendipity doesn't apply, but it applies less.

marknutter 16y ago

Suppose we solved all these "real problems." What then? We're done? No more startups or apps?

jeromec 16y ago

Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. Er, not sure where the author has been since the November 2008 election, but President Barack Obama made tackling this decades long problem a signature issue of his presidency, and actually got the problem addressed comprehensively. Sure, there is still work to do, but health care which makes up 1/3 of the economy was never going to be solved by programmers building web apps. And there are projects pushing technology forward in this area to increase efficiency. Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. There are technology projects working on improving this, both within the school system and in the tech arena. Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. I'm not sure how technology might solve homelessness, but there are actual real world answers like food banks and soup kitchens to address the hunger issue. The homeless experiment posted on Nev Blog shows how relatively easy it is for real homeless people (not those that panhandle, then jump into sports cars, or those with addictive habits to feed) to acquire food. (http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/ http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/) The author reflects on some problems in America -- where even the poor are really not that poor by the standards of many other nations -- and seeks solutions in technology because technology is good at solving certain kinds of problems, especially ones mechanical in nature. This doesn't mean it can solve any kind of problem. Large, longstanding, complex socio-economic problems can't be solved by Twitter type applications. The kinds of problems of which the author speaks require a combination of educated people, politics, and economic focuses for making any real difference. Technology may certainly help, but it's not the sole answer.

PStamatiou 16y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for the link to nev's homeless experiment. I rather enjoyed reading it (and keeping my mind off getting my wisdom teeth pulled in the AM)
- jeromec 16y ago
  I enjoyed reading it too. For the wisdom teeth extraction, when not going to sleep, a trick I used was trying to recall the details of the more positive points of stories I'd read to keep the mind busy and happy. It helped me, at least. :)

patrickgzill 16y ago

I fail to see how overly bureaucratic paper-pushing and stiflingly ridiculous licensing and regulatory frameworks (which are the REAL reasons that medical care is the problem) can be solved by technology. That is, it is not a technology problem, it is a problem of regulatory capture.

replicatorblog 16y ago
I work in medical and regulatory compliance isn't that big a burden. The simplest way to reduce health care costs in the US would be reducing obesity which tends to cause the most expensive diseases (Diabetes, Heart Disease, Stroke).
- patrickgzill 16y ago
  No offense, but I find that a little hard to believe. Every doctor's office I have ever visited in the last 10 years had more admin staff than nurses and doctors. That is, for each doctor there were perhaps 1.5 admin people doing paperwork. While they are cheaper than doctors, that is a still a large expense (figure $60K per person as a minimum, thus $90K per doctor per year in additional expense). However I do agree that obesity is a problem in the US.
  - Empact 16y ago
    Yeah, but I'd argue the solution isn't to nice up the regulatory system, but to step outside of it. Clinics like Qliance in Seattle provide direct primary care (cash only, no insurance) largely because it's much nicer for both the doctor and the patient, because you can circumvent the bureaucratic nonsense and admin busywork. http://qliance.com/ http://qliance.com/ The founder, Dr. Garrison Bliss, does a great job summarizing his approach in this talk: http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?EvId=2008030136C&bhcp=1 http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?EvId=2008030136C&#3...
  - astrange 16y ago
    Did you ask the admin staff what they were doing? They could all be working on insurance paperwork.

replicatorblog 16y ago

I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc. The same with education, the problem with inner city education isn't technical, its that vast swaths of the population do not respect education. My wife taught in an inner city, had amazing technical resources thanks to grants and well meaning donors, but had parents who were totally checked out. Furthermore, because some people use tech in a frivolous way doesn't mean there aren't noble uses. e.g. Foursquare - Learn about resources in my town and places I visit I wouldn't have otherwise. Lets me provide info about areas I know well to those who don't. Makes my consumption choices visible and potentially incites me to make better decisions for the community and my health. Groupon - Helps support local merchants who have difficult challenges marketing against national chains. Reduces risks for customers to try new things. Twitter - connects me to people and bodies of knowledge that would otherwise be hard to tap. Lets me connect job seekers with job holders. Zynga games - Creates a meeting place/activity for friends/family. Sure, at its worst it has "junkie" characteristics, but used sparingly it gives me a way to say hi to a friend and keep a little social bonding going. Commerce isn't bad and tech isn't the solution to every problem.

timr 16y ago
"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheap building materials, or any of a thousand other different things that people with big brains might be doing to better the world. People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. There's just not much of an economic incentive to do it, when it's easier to sell to the vices of the first world. That said, I realize that I'm a hypocrite on this point: I'm in this wacky social-network-hoo-hah business as much as anyone else. I just wish the economic forces were aligned differently.

dasil003 16y ago

Reading this resonated with me. I knew that the responses here would pretty much rip it apart, but I'm surprised that as of right now only one of 15 comments is positive. It's pretty easy to find ways to criticize this post. It's not particularly well written, it's not inspirational, and of course you can poke holes in any kind of argument this vague. But if you don't agree, I think it's worth it to stop and be honest with yourself about whether you really think it's complete bullshit, or if there is maybe a tinge of guilty defensiveness mixed in. I'm not claiming that this article is anything close to the whole truth—after all, we can't make a difference if we can't make a living—but if there wasn't at least a seed of truth here then I don't think "changing the world" would be part of the standard entrepreneurial goals.

sbov 16y ago
Its similar to something I have thought before - this isn't only a problem with tech startups, its a problem with the majority of businesses in the world. I half-joked about it with friends before, saying that people should only be allowed to do jobs that weren't "bread and circus" (to borrow a phrase) from 5-9, then after work hours could do what they pleased. Realistically though, this poster probably contributes to the bottom line of many bread and circus businesses. And so do I. Today I bought a box of hot tamales (the candy) and a cherry coke - these are all bread and circus and only serve for my enjoyment. I ate a steak dinner on Saturday night - totally bread and circus, as I could get my nutritional value through better methods. The people who work to produce these things could be put to work doing something better, while the government provides a tasteless, odorless, white paste for all our nutritional value. Some of the most enjoyable parts of life tend to be surrounded by bread and circus. But if they were never invented in the first place, I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing.
smokeyj 16y ago
Another blog heard from. Group A thinks group B doesn't do enough for society. Instead of describing a system to overcome of the selfish tendencies inherent in all humans, she chose to belittle an entire industry and the aspirations of entrepreneurs trying to learn to be productive.
zaidf 16y ago

benreyes 16y ago

Not everything has to be solving a direct problem, secondary benefits have to considered. Let's take Dailybooth (YC Summer 09)which was mentioned in this article. Whilst the creator may have just created the site because it sounded like a "fun" idea the value of the website is with the micro community that thrives. Heck, I'll even go as far as saying Dailybooth has helped to save lives. It's dedicated users consists of a subsection of society that may be outcasted in real life. Lets take a teenager who lives in a small town, whom may feel more accepted in a city but has no similar peers within a small town. Dailybooth facilitates this teenager to connect and belong to like-minded individuals people whom they have never met before. Over time real friendships are created over a shared connection which is the website and community. I heard of actual stories where a teen attempted to commit suicide due to being perceived as an outcast. In this case Dailybooth has facilitated friendships and connections with similar peers which in turn reduces the feeling of being outcasted in a small town, thus indirectly reducing the chances of suicide. There are even a number of Dailybooth users who travel across different countries to facilitate in real friendships and connections. It allows for boundaries of prejudice to be broken. So Dailybooth may not be solving a direct problem. But does it have value in our society? I would argue is certainly does. (I have researched extensively into the userbase and mechanics of Dailybooth and have been involved in it's community)

techiferous 16y ago

Yelp is not fluff. It solves the problem of information asymmetry in the marketplace. Since Yelp makes it easier to tell lemons from businesses that shine, it makes the market more efficient. This means your money goes further. Which means you have more of it to spend on education, health insurance, etc.

waterlesscloud 16y ago

This is shallow thinking. Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs. There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did. Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities. On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful. I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group. I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative. Shallow thinking.

marshallp 16y ago
The OP is talking about getting "work" done, like solving cancer. The "togetherness" stuff can be defined as entertainment. Watching movies and playing games is meaningful, as is staying in touch with friends, but these things don't make the trains run on time.
- greendestiny 16y ago
  Most of us would like to survive cancer so we can spend more time doing togetherness things with our friends and family. I've never seen an argument about whether various pursuits were worthwhile or not that was itself worthwhile. Its simply a topic that doesn't bear inspection, if it puts food on you and your families table then its worthwhile enough for me.

gamble 16y ago

I've worked for healthcare and education startups. These are very, very hard markets for a startup to tackle. They combine the slow, expensive sales cycle of a large business with the regulation and bureaucracy of essential government services. It's a long, hard slog that most investors won't touch with a ten-foot pole. Programmers start companies that solve their own problems because they understand those problems. Few programmers understand the problems in health care or education, and it's not a market to screw around in when you don't know what you're doing.

marshallp 16y ago
Write the software and sell/rent it on to businessfolk who can navigate the regulatory hurdles.

jamesaguilar 16y ago

I understand the feeling, it's one articulated by people around the world every day. But look at the commonalities between the things she mentions as real problems. What is the shared thread? They're all about people who can't afford certain things. There are some businesses built on serving these markets, but they aren't typically internet technology businesses.

ryan 16y ago

I find it really difficult to read such an argument (whether I agree with it or not), if it doesn't come from someone who is actually out there trying to solve these problems himself or herself. "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena Edit: at least the gladiator image in the post is apt :)

marshallp 16y ago
So you're saying OP isn't allowed to point out that the emperor wears no clothes, or that roger ebert is useless.
- ryan 16y ago
  Maybe if she was pointing out facts, but this strikes me as an opinion piece and I have a hard time reading this particular opinion unless the author is actually practicing what she preaches. FWIW I tend to agree with the opinion. I don't know who roger ebert is so I can't comment on whether he is useless, but I guess he has no relevance to me.
  - marshallp 16y ago
    roger ebert - the most famous and celebrated movie critic in america - he's never made a movie, but writes opinions about movies all day long and is still highly respected

mmmmax 16y ago

I wonder how many addictive, self-referencial and narcissistic tweets it took for the author to convince 16,402 people to follow her on Twitter.

deleted 16y ago

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resdirector 16y ago

I think Don Draper's "wheel" pitch nicely summarizes my counterpoints to this article: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY

callmeed 16y ago

"Many Americans can’t afford a decent education" Baloney. I worked in the CA community college system. It's $26 per unit. TWENTY SIX dollars. Oh, and if you're poor, it's nothing. A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it.

marshallp 16y ago
The high schools generate students that aren't even capable of doing community college, or have enough sense to "want" to do community college.
- robryan 16y ago
  It's hard to help people if they don't want to help themselves first.
  - marshallp 16y ago
    There aren't people who don't want to help themselves - it's a basic instinct in every life form. There are people who "don't know how" to help themselves though.
gatsby 16y ago
"A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it." Agreed. And even throughout the world thanks to small startups like Khan Academy.
apsurd 16y ago
We have this problem that Universities are GREAT at marketing. Jane doesn't want to go to some stooooopid lowly community college, she wants to go to USC because ahem, it's better!
- jayliew 16y ago
  You take as many classes as you can at community college then you transfer to a real university and technically graduate from there. Massive $avings.

jasonkester 16y ago

It occurs to me that my latest project actually gets me off the hook from this guy. Problem: People in developing countries have to work for 3rd world wages, selling products and services to people who really can't afford to buy anything. Thus, they are doomed to remain poor by western standards. Solution: Jason's website that lets them teach Spanish online to rich Americans, and doesn't let them pay themselves less than ten bucks an hour. Dodged a bullet there!

jolie 16y ago
1) That's kind of awesome! 2) "This guy" is actually a lady. =)
marshallp 16y ago
By setting an arbitrary floor of ten bucks you've also cut off that opportunity for many though.
- jasonkester 16y ago
  Possibly, but hopefully it'll stop the thing from turning into rentacoder, where everybody competes on price to the point where it's essentially free. A site where people who normally make less than $1/hr can sell their services online for less than $1/hr doesn't really help anybody. On the other hand, requiring people to charge the fair market value for their service forces them to compete on quality rather than price, which has the added benefit of making the service better, as well as getting people paid a fair wage.
  - marshallp 16y ago
    The one dollar foik wouldn't go for the sub dollar work so it's a nonissue. There's nothing wrong with rentacoder, it's a great site creating efficiencies (it only worries you if you were one of the inefficiencies in the system before - american/european programmers/writers)
    - robryan 16y ago

mr_twj 16y ago

This only confirms my conviction that solipsism syndrome should be studied more closely in relation to the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism_syndrome Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.

deleted 16y ago

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tomjen3 16y ago

With what right do you presume to tell people what problems they have? Surely that would be the choice of the individual free person?

earl 16y ago

Similar thoughts come to me from time to time, mostly when I realize I spend 50-60 hours a week making advertising more efficient. Still... there are upsides. I left a career as a scientific programmer creating medical research software because selling out offered me a 90% raise. That's not an exaggeration. And a chance to work for companies that offer enough equity that it might change my life, even if it's just a hefty downpayment. And the chance to work in my choice of cities on America's coasts.

alexqgb 16y ago

This is such a ridiculously ridiculous post. I'm saying that having worked on a number of media campaigns for a small but excellent medical research charity that has benefited enormously from the technical progress made in the last few years. That benefit comes from making savvy use of everything from (now) cheap digital cameras and video editing, to carefully cultivated email lists, dedicated web-pages for outreach teams, and growing profiles on social networking sites. All that seems like basic stuff, I know, but that's what's so amazing. Five years ago it was either much more expensive, or nonexistent. Today, it's ubiquitous (Facebook, for example, had 1% of its current base in 2005, and today I can shoot a better picture with a $5k camera than a $75k camera could capture back then). That massive and very sudden shift has allowed organizations to do things (real, saving lives and avoiding death things) that simply wouldn't be imaginable - let alone possible just a few years ago, at least not with the limited resources they had for outreach. So, Jolie O'Dell, if you want to see homeless people getting help, stop waiting for 'tech to do it'. Instead, just go out and talk to some homeless people. You don't need an app for that. Nor, you'll find, do they. And when you do figure out what's most likely to help, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how helpful all these new resources can be - provided you're creative enough to use them imaginatively. Separately - all of you working on this 'pointless' stuff; you're awesome. And thank you. You're making vital connections. You've helped tremendously. The world is a better place because of you. Please, by all means, carry on.

radu_floricica 16y ago

> Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. > Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. > Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. I agree with the whole article, but this stuck to me. (except the "American" part... European here). It's a problem, a big problem waiting to be solved. And I found I'm itching to give it a shot. Like somebody else already said in this thread, this kind of problems can usually be approached only with a ton of money and prior experience - but on the other hand, there should be much less competition then in writing the next killer Android app.

Empact 16y ago

Alright, a few of the top comments point out the good of the Foursquares and Facebooks of the world. Except, that's not the point - on anything beyond the personal scale the question is not, "which of these two do we want?" but "how much of each do we want?" She asks: "How well are our resources allocated?" I think there's a strong case that we're under-invested in some of the largest problems of society - personally I'm working towards reforming government http://votereports.org/ http://votereports.org/, and I can tell you the government directly spends some 40% of the GDP, and indirectly affects every other bit of it. Do we have anything close to 40% of developers working on disrupting our stodgy old government? How about 5%? 1%? I know of 3 good folks I work alongside (including these folks: http://circlevoting.com/ http://circlevoting.com/), and a handful of other part-time, side-job efforts. But is that a proper reflection of the relative return of the problem, when compared to hundreds of facebookers or dozens elsewhere? Health care is 17% of GDP. What are the big, disruptive health care startups? Who is going to build the tool that enables doctors and patients to circumvent the worst of the system? Or something that serves the economic purpose of insurance while avoiding the onerous regulations thereof? I've had the pleasure to meet with Jay Parkinson of http://thefuturewell.com http://thefuturewell.com, and I'll bet he could put the 30-some foursquare developers to better use. Again, this isn't an either/or question, but a question of resource allocation. Perhaps what we've done so far has made sense because those are the easy questions to answer - the money is there and the consumers are willing. But sooner or later we're going to have to recognize that the biggest problems of society deserve more of our attention.

daeken 16y ago
I also have to ask: Where are all the education startups? We have a massive, high-speed communication tool and I don't see much changing with respect to education. There are a few things out there (the Khan Academies of the world), but they're very few and far between.
- mmorris 16y ago
  While it may not be considered by most as a "startup" at this point, I think that in the long run Wikipedia will have a major impact on education, in the sense of the knowledge base of the average individual. I can't quantify the amount I've learned from wikipedia articles over the years, but I'm quite certain it's an awful lot. If I had grown up with access to it I'm pretty sure the impact would be far greater. Sure, when I was a kid we had an encyclopedia, but A) a lot of kids don't, and B) wikipedia is thousands of times more powerful than an encyclopedia (and reading one article will often lead one down a path through various other articles too). Is it going to replace public schools? Obviously not. But it has and will change education for the better.

BjornW 16y ago

I haven't read all comments on this, but I get the feeling a lot of HN-ers are not too fond of the article. Personally it struck a chord with me. In a previous life I worked at a non-profit aimed at doing 'R&D' in a social context (yes, this is vague and that was just one of the things making me leave...). Although I've left this organisation disillusioned and a lot more cynical about non-profits and their methods / goals, I still strive to use my skills for the betterment of all. Not that I always succeed (I'm by far not a saint), but I try to give something back. In my case I do this by offering a lot of my stuff under a open source license or Creative Commons license. Still, I sometimes wonder if I could/should strive to do more in the real world with tangible / physical results. Staring at a screen all day long and hoping my virtual work will lead to some positive results in the 'real' world and be meaningful for people occasionally makes me feel like I'm fooling myself. Therefore I think that the gist of Jolie's article hits the nail right on the head and asks the difficult question (for all of us regardless of skills or area of expertise): what have you been trying to do not just for the betterment of yourself, but also for the betterment of other's? Trying to combine this in your work is something I belief is worth striving for, even if we cannot always achieve it.

chegra 16y ago

Stage 1: Create a massively successful app. Stage 2: Give back at Stage 1.5: Jolie complains that we aren't doing stage 2. Well for most of us we aren't at stage 2. Didn't Zuckberg who has just finish stage 1 give 100 million to education? Didn't Bill Gates, another stage 1 success, get 40 billionaires to give away most of their wealth to charity? The question arises why don't start at stage 2 first. Well, sequence matter. Think of stage 1 as taking off your clothes and stage 2 as bathing. You do stage 2 first you end up without your skin being washed and wet clothes. So far there isn't much technology that has been successful in those areas Jolie think start-up should focus, but with the apps you criticize, they have been making loads of money. In terms of risk, it is better to choose the latter type of business and then seek to help solve the other problems with the money generating from the first, same outcome but lower risk. As Jay-z would say: "And the music i be makin I dumb down for my audience And double my dollars They criticize me for it Yet they all yell "Holla" If skills sold Truth be told I'd probably be Lyricly Talib Kweli Truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense (But i did five Mil) I ain't been rhymin like Common since When your sense got that much in common And you been hustlin since Your inception Fuck perception Go with what makes sense Since I know what i'm up against We as rappers must decide what's most impor-tant And i can't help the poor if i'm one of them So i got rich and gave back To me that's the win, win"- Moment of Clarity Paraphrase, if solving homeless problem made money that is what entrepreneurs would be doing, but since it is not they choose problems with lil significant and give back that is the win,win. They are still changing the world but in a different sequence that reduces risk and ensures changing the world is more likely.

trustfundbaby 16y ago
Had to upvote for the Jay-Z lyrics son!

csomar 16y ago

I think the article is not attacking Facebook or Twitter. It's attacking the infinite clones of them. I'll give you a problem: There isn't a PHP Qr Code decoder in the web. Why hadn't anyone gave a damn about it? Because it's hard, take time and you simply don't know how to start and how to monetize. I'll give you another problem: Google don't happen to give the best search result. You'll (in many cases) get SEO spammed results. Why not re-invent a new search engine? Sure there are SE startups, but not enough for the solution to get solved.

s3graham 16y ago
I'll bite: why would one want a PHP QR Code decoder?

timinman 16y ago

Fantastic. Inspiring, and a little bit of a kick in the back-side. There's nothing wrong with games or social media, but they shouldn't be the only thing we have to offer. You've probably seen the Nathan Myhrvold quote: 'the old Silicon Valley was about solving really hard problems.' While a Web App Startup may not be able to solve every problem, we can do more than offer empty self-gratification.

Mz 16y ago

I wrote a long post. It timed out. It's probably a bit ranty anyway. Shorter version: I got well when doctor's were trying to convince me I should accept a slow torturous death as my only due in life (I guess so they could feel they knew something and deserved their high salaries) by eating better food and routinely buying new clothes (and throwing out the old stuff when it got too unclean for my needs). I prefer pissing my money away on cheap clothes from Kmart and affordable, decent food from various eateries to pissing my life away on doctors and antibiotics (which I had free access to at one time because I was a military dependent -- and I walked away from that). This person has no clue what it takes to solve really hard problems. PS: "Bread and Circus" is a form of Roman wisdom. Quit trying to give it a bad name. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" and empty bellies are worse. In times of crisis, I practice a policy of "bread and circus". Making sure my sons and I are well fed and have something entertaining to do so we don't go stir crazy and can mentally focus on something other than our overwhelming problems has been critical to our track record of success.

rodh 16y ago

I've gone a couple of times to Social Innovation camps, here in the UK (http://www.sicamp.org/ http://www.sicamp.org/). For those who don't know, it's a get-together where hackers gather with social problem experts, such as youth offending teams (YOTs) and people who work for charities, etc. It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems. The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator. I don't know how to solve this.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I ran into a great quote the other day, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." I'm going to start keeping this in mind with every one of my technology interactions. Two days before that, I spent probably 20 minutes of my day playing around with a flash gravity simulator somebody posted over here. Why? Am I to be in charge of hand-manipulating the orbital mechanics for dozens of bodies any time soon? Probably not. Because the interface has become the app. It's not about value any more, it's about stickiness. Tens of millions of folks spend hours on Farmville each day. Is this because they are just technically inept people who would be wasting their time doing something else anyway? I know this is what some folks would like to believe -- it makes them feel better about making more of the same stuff. But I don't buy it. Even if it were true for 90% of Farmville players, that still leaves 10% of the remaining users who would have done something that had more long-term value to them. Taking self-perceived long-term value away from millions of folks for days or weeks should be at least very noteworthy. Many web startups have found the magic equation: stickiness beats value. Expect to see more of the same.

srwh 16y ago

We need more articles like this one or Max Klein's Dark Angels, the web startup world is like being at Disneyland the whole year! After reading the article only hope nobody came with a social network for homeless...

edw519 16y ago

Those relatively comfortable "problems" of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. I doubt that you'd get many of the 7 million small and mid-sized businesses in the United States to agree with this. Many of them have an unquenchable thirst for information: more, better, faster, in order to survive. Thousands of developers (and start-ups!) are working furiously to provide it to them. In fact, they're so busy that they don't have much time to tell you what they're doing. Which may be why OP doesn't realize they exist.

peterbessman 16y ago
Really, the OP is complaining that she thinks people want the wrong things. There's nothing here particular to web apps.

agentultra 16y ago

And in the meantime, ask yourself, “Does my work as a technologist really help people? Am I solving a real problem, or am I chasing personal success?” If you don’t like the answer, change something about what you do or how you do it. Tall order. Also, can personal success not align with more humanitarian goals?

Bostwick 16y ago

I think my main problem with the article is that the three big, meaningful problems it presents are so vague as to be virtually unsolvable. Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem. The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve. Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable. I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.

wmeredith 16y ago

This is utter bullshit. It's the same reasoning that leads people to say that video games or guns cause violence. Web apps are just tools, you can't out-code human nature, just like you can't legislate morality. It doesn't work. For example: Twitter is a powerful platform for sharing information. This could be leveraged for dissent or education, and it is in some ways. However, most people just follow Justin Bieber and Lada Gaga. "Bieber Fever" allegedly consumes about 3% of Twitter's entire infrastructure. (Source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/ http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/) Take that stat with salt, but it's certainly not improbable. The argument put forth in this post is older than dirt and completely false. I'll wager a bet that this argument is just slightly older than it's cliché response, "You can lead a horse to water, bu you can't make it drink." There are plenty of web apps that are truly kick-ass implementations of "doing good" (http://mycharitywater.org http://mycharitywater.org comes to mind), but they aren't going to ever be as popular as something like Farmville, because of human nature. Making your "do good" web app kick more ass won't make people want to do more good.

preichen 16y ago

you missed the point completely.your focus is too narrow. there are vast quantities of people on this planet who are working to solve the "real" problems that you mention. your argument does not hold because you are only talking about the base of the maslow hierarchy of needs. OF COURSE there are people whose most basic needs are not solved yet on this planet. You are only argumenting for the lowest levels of the pyramid! Once someone has covered his basic needs and moves up the pyramid "other" types of problems emerge like "how do i watch my favorite tv show on my mobile phone" etc. you have to segment your argument and make it very clear that you are addressing the lower levels of the pyramid.

jasonwilk 16y ago

Just re-read this (8 Best Questions We Got While Fund raising): http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-best-questions-we-got-while-raising-venture-capital/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/good-question-the-eight-bes...

misuba 16y ago

If there were money in solving real problems, there wouldn't be any real problems!

rubinelli 16y ago

In my experience, people who ask "why aren't you working on a cure for cancer?" never had to build a HIPAA-compliant system, much less get something as harmless as a nutritional supplement approved by the FDA. You can't disrupt a "serious" field with two college buddies and a few AWS instances. Anyway, this "bread and circus" discussion reminds me of all the authors -- Tolkien in particular -- who were accused of wasting their talent in escapist works.

bendmorris 16y ago

So, if a person has a great idea for a web app that might be useful to some niche group of businesses, they should throw it out and keep thinking about how to feed the hungry or cure diseases - problems they have no expertise in and that they are unlikely to ever solve? Smart people should figure out what they're good at and what they're interested in, and do that. If you have a good idea that has worth to some group, you should try to implement it. A good idea is a good idea. And while we're at it, things like Google and Facebook, in addition to facilitating wasting time for those with no motivation, can also be used by, oh I don't know, medical research companies or nonprofits trying to feed the hungry to get the word out.

Natsu 16y ago

Actually, I've been thinking about ways to improve education. Many of them are already out there for those motivated to seek them. With MIT's stuff online, you can learn from them for free. A lot of more basic stuff is also out there if you know how to look for it. But there are a lot of teachers out there who have their education budgets spent on crazy toys and scoreboards that don't do the kids a whole lot of good. Educational software is a mixed bag, though I have fond memories of Number Munchers. I don't know if that led me to learning as much math as I did, but it sure didn't hurt. Right now, a lot of money is wasted on new versions of textbooks. Most of the underlying material hasn't changed and isn't really going to, except for the meddling of various government types who want to add or delete things they disagree with from the curriculum. Most of the publishers have been around for ages. I have to think there's some opportunity for someone to automate certain kinds of tests. For example, simple math tests could more easily be randomized and each student could have their own set of problems (no more photocopies with kids cheating off the guy next to them). Word problems can be autogenerated. Stuff like that. Unfortunately, most of my knowledge comes second-hand. My mother was a teacher, but she's dead now, so whatever I know about the problems they face has probably gotten out of date. But I have a feeling that education money, especially their tech budgets, getting spent on things that do little good is something that probably hasn't changed. I have to think that there are still quite a few things that could be improved.

d99kris 16y ago

It would be interesting to see more startups in the genetic programming area (or related). Once/if reaching singularity I'm sure there's gonna be more than bread and circuses.

makeramen 16y ago

Notable contradiction: Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care. Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck. Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat. ... I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set. How about we broaden our scope to beyond "Americans," which I believe she actually means "United States Citizens." Don't forget all the other countries and continents doing much worse than we are.