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What's incredible about this is how negative the top 5-10 replies are. For as visionary as this community is, sometimes it really does miss the future right und

What's incredible about this is how negative the top 5-10 replies are. For as visionary as this community is, sometimes it really does miss the future right under its nose.

koolba 6y ago
If you shit on every idea that gets pitched to you, you'll be right the vast majority of the time. I bet the failure rate where the pitcher claims to be "Changing the world" is even higher.
tebbers 6y ago
Unfortunately I have come to realise that this is sadly a common issue with HackerNews. The now-famous first response on HN to Dropbox comes to mind...I still love the community here though.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  Something people tend to ignore is that the overwhelming majority of comments in the Dropbox thread were positive. It was really only that one comment that was skeptical. edit: ok I just checked and it's more like four or five. Still, they were mostly positive.
taytus 6y ago
>For as visionary as this community is I love HN, but c'mon... we are a bunch of nerds or people with nerd tendencies haha, 99.99% of us (statistics made up by me...) are not visionaries at all.
adventured 6y ago
> For as visionary as this community is Where do you get that impression from? There's a reason why threads like this one are routinely posted here (as famously with DropBox), and the comments are always so negative. You see a similar outcome in most Show HNs that gain attention. HN is hyper cynical, mildly negative, and very tech-interested (which means new tech things are often posted / discussed). Visionary? If you were placing bets, you'd want to figure out the majority position of the comments then bet against that. SV and techies in general are every bit as prone to regressive, myopic, stagnant thinking as the wider world, despite the self-touting nature of the industry as supposedly being forward looking.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  > If you were placing bets, you'd want to figure out the majority position of the comments then bet against that. I already posted a similar comment elsewhere, but I wanted to test your theory out myself on the original Dropbox thread. Sentiment of top-level comments, as judged by me: Negative or skeptical: 5 Positive: 26
mjr00 6y ago
But the way the idea was pitched... they were right to be negative. Brian Armstrong was talking about using BTC to compete with Visa and Mastercard. Bitcoin hasn't done anything to impact CC fees. At this point, it's pretty clear Bitcoin isn't even used to trade for goods and services by the vast majority of people who own it. Coinbase pivoted to being an exchange for crypto speculators, which is why it's worth billions. Something like BitPay continue to focus on being a crypto payment processor, which is why it's an also-ran, despite being even older than Coinbase. If Brian had phrased the request as "Bitcoin will be digital gold" and people were dismissive, you'd be closer to say that people lacked vision. If the pitch were "Bitcoin will be an asset class that allows institutional investors to evade the regulations applied to traditional financial instruments in a time of unprecedented government money printing during a global pandemic that also drove huge numbers of retail investors into the space," you'd be right (and also from the future).
stiltzkin 6y ago
About naysayers of HN not able to predict the future maybe this has been spoken in other threads but this case who would have thought about NFT market?, DeFi?, Visa planning to use another cryptocurrency network called Ethereum?. the naysayers of HN wont be able to predict this industry the next years i believe.
Leary 6y ago
A lot of the times the top comment will be a rebuttal on the main thread. Although the rebuttal received a lot of upvotes, the main thread did too. It's just part of the HN dynamic, the people who are against the main thread will feel the need to contradict it.

What's incredible about this is how negative the top 5-10 replies are. For as visionary as this community is, sometimes it really does miss the future right under its nose.

koolba 6y ago

If you shit on every idea that gets pitched to you, you'll be right the vast majority of the time. I bet the failure rate where the pitcher claims to be "Changing the world" is even higher.

tebbers 6y ago

Unfortunately I have come to realise that this is sadly a common issue with HackerNews. The now-famous first response on HN to Dropbox comes to mind...I still love the community here though.

dorkwood 5y ago
Something people tend to ignore is that the overwhelming majority of comments in the Dropbox thread were positive. It was really only that one comment that was skeptical. edit: ok I just checked and it's more like four or five. Still, they were mostly positive.

taytus 6y ago

>For as visionary as this community is I love HN, but c'mon... we are a bunch of nerds or people with nerd tendencies haha, 99.99% of us (statistics made up by me...) are not visionaries at all.

adventured 6y ago

> For as visionary as this community is Where do you get that impression from? There's a reason why threads like this one are routinely posted here (as famously with DropBox), and the comments are always so negative. You see a similar outcome in most Show HNs that gain attention. HN is hyper cynical, mildly negative, and very tech-interested (which means new tech things are often posted / discussed). Visionary? If you were placing bets, you'd want to figure out the majority position of the comments then bet against that. SV and techies in general are every bit as prone to regressive, myopic, stagnant thinking as the wider world, despite the self-touting nature of the industry as supposedly being forward looking.

dorkwood 5y ago
> If you were placing bets, you'd want to figure out the majority position of the comments then bet against that. I already posted a similar comment elsewhere, but I wanted to test your theory out myself on the original Dropbox thread. Sentiment of top-level comments, as judged by me: Negative or skeptical: 5 Positive: 26

mjr00 6y ago

But the way the idea was pitched... they were right to be negative. Brian Armstrong was talking about using BTC to compete with Visa and Mastercard. Bitcoin hasn't done anything to impact CC fees. At this point, it's pretty clear Bitcoin isn't even used to trade for goods and services by the vast majority of people who own it. Coinbase pivoted to being an exchange for crypto speculators, which is why it's worth billions. Something like BitPay continue to focus on being a crypto payment processor, which is why it's an also-ran, despite being even older than Coinbase. If Brian had phrased the request as "Bitcoin will be digital gold" and people were dismissive, you'd be closer to say that people lacked vision. If the pitch were "Bitcoin will be an asset class that allows institutional investors to evade the regulations applied to traditional financial instruments in a time of unprecedented government money printing during a global pandemic that also drove huge numbers of retail investors into the space," you'd be right (and also from the future).

stiltzkin 6y ago

About naysayers of HN not able to predict the future maybe this has been spoken in other threads but this case who would have thought about NFT market?, DeFi?, Visa planning to use another cryptocurrency network called Ethereum?. the naysayers of HN wont be able to predict this industry the next years i believe.

Leary 6y ago

A lot of the times the top comment will be a rebuttal on the main thread. Although the rebuttal received a lot of upvotes, the main thread did too. It's just part of the HN dynamic, the people who are against the main thread will feel the need to contradict it.