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Completely agree but you’re missing the one thing that makes it really classic HN. > What’s so great about New Thing? It’s just Existing Technology but with a

Completely agree but you’re missing the one thing that makes it really classic HN. > What’s so great about New Thing? It’s just Existing Technology but with a Small Improvement. This is exemplified in the best HN comment of all time where someone showed their new product called “Dropbox” and this dude was like “but I can get the same with FTPFS and versioning with a version control system”. Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually.

echelon 6y ago
> Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually. Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks. The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation. You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad. A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold? I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out. I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  > You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad. I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own. As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.
- nindalf 6y ago
  Yeah that's fine. I'll take Dropbox and Spotify over "curl + ftpfs + git" and Winamp any day. If that makes me less intelligent than you, that's fine. I'm not going to bother explaining why I think either of those services is superior to these handrolled solutions. But fortunately, both have 100 million+ paying users. You can ask one of them why they're foolishly paying for something when a superior alternative exists.
  - echelon 6y ago
    I only mentioned intelligence in jest because you did. (It seemed snarky.) I'm not talking about hand-rolling solutions. WinAmp was just an analogy. An analogy. Spotify sucks because it's a draconian walled garden. Yes, they have millions of customers. But there are no alternatives. They all want to lock you in. It sucks. Back in the day, people were building tools left and right that were interoperable. They were writing importers and exporters and playlist managers. It wasn't just music - there were tools for RSS and everything else you could imagine. It wasn't as "easy" as things are today, but there were so many novel things you could do. Now it's all shrink-wrapped plastic that's rented to us. And we don't get to change the paint. The world is less flexible, less free. Want another analogy? Look at modern Reddit and the disappearance of the 3rd party Twitter clients. We're serfs. It sucks. I hate it. Period. That's my argument.
    - grep_name 6y ago
      It's still possible not to be a serf imo. If you look into self-hosted alternatives to these things the communities online still have a lot of the vibrant and open spirit you're describing, built on collaboration, open protocols, and basic tools. I very strongly felt the way you do until a couple years ago when I started following those communities and eventually started hearing non-technical people IRL start asking about how to cut toxic centralized products out of their lives. I think the internet that inspired you is still out there, maybe even the same or bigger in size, it's just harder to see because the larger centralized serf net is so distracting.

echelon 6y ago

> Technically correct, but completely missing the point. OP is worse, because he can’t even acknowledge the value that Spotify brings to hundreds of millions of people. Implicit is the claim that they’re only using it because they don’t know any better. If they were as intelligent as OP they would use Winamp and share songs manually. Clearly this was my intent, and I'm glad you appreciate the intelligence of my remarks. The substance of my argument isn't to point out that WinAmp should have a 50 billion dollar market cap instead of Spotify. It's an observation that the trends in our industry are disappointing because they favor lock-in, simple interfaces for non-power users, monopoly, and consolidation. You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad. A hypothetical "good" company could provide much more than what Spotify does and in the same breath not monopolize all the podcasters or prevent data export. But why do that when you can capture 90% of the market, hold them completely captive, and not do these things which take effort or risk your stranglehold? I dislike the future we found ourselves in. There was a lot of promise, I suppose wholly imagined, that never panned out. I'm angry because I imagine better. This shit sucks.

dividedbyzero 6y ago
> You get "sharing" with a whole lot of bad. I really doubt the anemic social sharing they offer is all that compelling to that many people. Sure, it has its uses, but if did nothing else, I doubt it would see much use. What's extremely, extremely compelling to me personally, though, is that for the price of half a CD a month, I get access to almost everything I'd ever want to listen to, on all my devices, everywhere, without any friction whatsoever. Even if I really wanted, I could never replicate that with Winamp on my own. As to the rest for your argument, I'm basically with you and I think you have an important point, I guess you've just made it in a needlessly incendiary way. There are many things to be said in favor of capitalism, but I'm severely disillusioned with the way the currently-favored brand of capitalism is shaping out on the internet and in computing in general.
nindalf 6y ago
Yeah that's fine. I'll take Dropbox and Spotify over "curl + ftpfs + git" and Winamp any day. If that makes me less intelligent than you, that's fine. I'm not going to bother explaining why I think either of those services is superior to these handrolled solutions. But fortunately, both have 100 million+ paying users. You can ask one of them why they're foolishly paying for something when a superior alternative exists.
- echelon 6y ago
  I only mentioned intelligence in jest because you did. (It seemed snarky.) I'm not talking about hand-rolling solutions. WinAmp was just an analogy. An analogy. Spotify sucks because it's a draconian walled garden. Yes, they have millions of customers. But there are no alternatives. They all want to lock you in. It sucks. Back in the day, people were building tools left and right that were interoperable. They were writing importers and exporters and playlist managers. It wasn't just music - there were tools for RSS and everything else you could imagine. It wasn't as "easy" as things are today, but there were so many novel things you could do. Now it's all shrink-wrapped plastic that's rented to us. And we don't get to change the paint. The world is less flexible, less free. Want another analogy? Look at modern Reddit and the disappearance of the 3rd party Twitter clients. We're serfs. It sucks. I hate it. Period. That's my argument.
  - grep_name 6y ago
    It's still possible not to be a serf imo. If you look into self-hosted alternatives to these things the communities online still have a lot of the vibrant and open spirit you're describing, built on collaboration, open protocols, and basic tools. I very strongly felt the way you do until a couple years ago when I started following those communities and eventually started hearing non-technical people IRL start asking about how to cut toxic centralized products out of their lives. I think the internet that inspired you is still out there, maybe even the same or bigger in size, it's just harder to see because the larger centralized serf net is so distracting.