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Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. I

by geebee 5y ago

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it? Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page? Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page? social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS? youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search? twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do?? Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode. Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.

gustavo-fring 5y ago
I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for the user. edited by me for content
- gustavo-fring 5y ago
  I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no? We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit any rough patches? Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now. Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and people when they talk a little too different from you. That's why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males of the same demographics.
  - adwn 5y ago
    > I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations – before you edited and completely changed it, that is. And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, far from it.
    - gustavo-fring 5y ago
      What part is baseless? Sorry for the edit, I know that it's too critical for dang and HN readers, but I promise, having been on Reddit since the summer it came out, that it is as accurate as it can be from my perspective. You call it rambling because you don't agree with it.
      - dang 5y ago
        Posting something trollish, then replacing it with reasonable text and saying it was "too critical for dang and HN readers" is an abusive trick. You even smeared someone as being responsible for someone else's death. That's just vicious. I'm not sure what to do. This is easily a bannable offence. You can't post things to HN like your original comment, which was horrible. Editing in so misleading and nasty a way is also egregious. Even the posts you left up, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 are egregious, and the latter is a shameful personal attack to boot. On the other hand, I can give you the benefit of the doubt in a couple of ways: everyone goes on tilt sometimes, and most of us post things that we have reason to feel ashamed of later. Since we try to err on the side of giving people second chances, I'm not going to ban you for all of this. But please clean up your act if you want to keep posting to HN. We're trying against the odds to have an internet forum that hovers at least an inch or two above the bottom of the barrel, and behavior like you've contributed here just pushes it all the way down. HN commenters need to at least try to follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Regardless of what you feel you owe pg or YC or HN mods or me personally, you owe this community much, much better if you're participating in it.
graeme 5y ago
Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.
- gustavo-fring 5y ago
  Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has. But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf. We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309 This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196 This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?
    - gitrog 5y ago
      They're his posts?
      - 5y ago
dvt 5y ago
> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom. I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!
- bmmayer1 5y ago
  What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?
  - easton 5y ago
    This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
  - MsMowz 5y ago
    When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since then, including between the two themselves. >I have a few qualms with this app: >1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account... From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
    - BrandonM 5y ago
ergot_vacation 5y ago
"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??" This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.
- graeme 5y ago
  I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic weeks before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter. There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull" that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to make it happen. MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.
- theonionknight 5y ago
  I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's platform.
- newbie2020 5y ago
  Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it never dies
pgwhalen 5y ago
I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.
- geebee 5y ago
  No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.
  - pgwhalen 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
tlogan 5y ago
There are two types ideas: 1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.) 2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones) The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.
mgranados 5y ago
Good heuristic.
- kabes 5y ago
  It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.
btbuildem 5y ago
That's just the realization that opinions of technical people don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.
emrah 5y ago
Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.
splithalf 5y ago
In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.
dd36 5y ago
Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.
swivelmaster 5y ago
> twitter: couldn't you just not? This is, actually, still true :)
allenu 5y ago
I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect. the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page" youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days. Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"
- geebee 5y ago
  I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed, in part because I thought didn’t see how they addressed the minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an unusually limited interface). Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense. Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about! EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...
- munk-a 5y ago
  For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites with relative ease and to write a post history that other folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that software to easily throw together a stream of articles had common value. That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.
defaultname 5y ago
Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days. I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic. There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure. [1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.
pjmorris 5y ago
This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
tjs8rj 5y ago
I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary. Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear. Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way. My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step. You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”. Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone. Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change. I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising. We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.
catears 5y ago
This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say. While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible. I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.
c01n 5y ago
The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much money you can make from a product and not about how the product improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather then fixing the real issues.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been effectively thrown off from their perch.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      Exactly and the pandemic basically disrupted the traditional celebrity info market.. you can't go to a party or restaurant etc... no photo ops.
  - bordercases 5y ago
    What locks celebrities in after they get big? Why isn't it perpetually volatile? Or if it is, what explains the rate of change in the volatility?
  - maxwell 5y ago
    Luck also seems to plays a big role in the programming lang market. Yet the behavior of lang maintainers seems to have an outpaced influence over that luck: individual programmers actively chose Guido over Larry or Matz. In turn, Armin's framework looks about in line popularity-wise with DHH's at present, but the trend seems clear. We trust Node because Ryan rage quit. Oracle has cast a shadow over Java, and their TIOBE descent is finally manifesting. K&R may never be unseated, e.g. A Deepness in the Sky. Anyone who's seen Anders in person has witnessed his presence. I wouldn't discount the effects of actual human characteristics and behavior, even if choices end up mostly based on fashion and a fascination with infamy. One can influence their own luck.
hanniabu 5y ago
> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____" Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies
mikesabbagh 5y ago
u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive. This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can bend light. I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!
heavyset_go 5y ago
This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP" comment.
qshaman 5y ago
This argument have been attempted already, you can also take Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea" , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this product. Just because some successful companies had bad feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder comment fiesta...).
louissm_it 5y ago
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- llaolleh 5y ago
  I knew this would show up again. It's a comment that will live in infamy.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  I love how what ended up happening was "Or you can pay Dropbox to not have to do any of this".
  - sjg007 5y ago
    I don't want to manage my backups or I guess file syncs between machines.
tshaddox 5y ago
The problem I see with this heuristic is that it is going to give false positives for, well, the vast majority of cases where there's a supposedly new idea that actually is just an unnecessary rehash or combination of things that already exist but with a new coat of paint. I don't see how the heuristic can possibly have any predictive power. Look at pretty much every tech startup, every get-rich-quick scheme, every cryptocurrency project, etc. and they'll be making grand claims that their idea is groundbreaking, and technical people are going to say "couldn't you just x?" or "isn't this worse than the existing x?" and those dismissals are actually going to be reasonable and proven valid in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, your heuristic will also catch the tiny number of cases that do turn out to be groundbreaking (or at least extremely successful or popular).
amykyta 5y ago
I think there is an analog here to the great man theory vs zeitgeist. Maybe this tech was underwhelming and its massive impact was due to fortuitous timing. So you weren’t wrong about the tech just how it would mix with the spirit of the moment.
throwaway2037 5y ago
That is a great list. I also felt the same about many of those technologies, but I never thought to put it so succinctly -- as you have! For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter. Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise. Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!
hndamien 5y ago
Canva - couldn't you just use photoshop? This isn't a dig at Canva, but praise.
bserge 5y ago
All of those examples boil down to making technology more accessible for the millions or billions of less technologically savvy people. Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.
johbjo 5y ago
Another perspective; blogs and wikis are two use-cases of essentially the same interaction. The different designs guide and inspire people how to use them. Then, they discover that the use-cases are beneficial. In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.
lambdatronics 5y ago
Great observation! It feels to me kind of like the 'blub' problem [0], in that these are both cases where technical folks misjudge the utility of something new (to them) because it merely makes it easy to do something, instead of making it possible to do something. And maybe that 'something' they either don't know they want, or don't realize how often they would use it if it were available, or don't appreciate that others want. Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial. [0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
failwhaleshark 5y ago
There are incremental/larger/easier improvements and then there are populism "improvements." The one tends to amplify the other. Facebook was incrementally better than Myspace at first, and then became more popular and much better. Myspace was much better than Friendster. It's an evolutionary model where some improvements are made, some features are lost, and specialization meanders. I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
Except for twitter, all the alternatives you wrote doesn't even fit the criteria of "couldn't you.." because it is not replacing the given product MVPs. What do you mean by update a page. Blog and wiki just "update the page" more than most other form of sites.

by geebee 5y ago

gustavo-fring 5y ago

I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for the user. edited by me for content

gustavo-fring 5y ago
I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no? We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit any rough patches? Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now. Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and people when they talk a little too different from you. That's why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males of the same demographics.
- adwn 5y ago
  > I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations – before you edited and completely changed it, that is. And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, far from it.
  - gustavo-fring 5y ago
    What part is baseless? Sorry for the edit, I know that it's too critical for dang and HN readers, but I promise, having been on Reddit since the summer it came out, that it is as accurate as it can be from my perspective. You call it rambling because you don't agree with it.
    - dang 5y ago
      Posting something trollish, then replacing it with reasonable text and saying it was "too critical for dang and HN readers" is an abusive trick. You even smeared someone as being responsible for someone else's death. That's just vicious. I'm not sure what to do. This is easily a bannable offence. You can't post things to HN like your original comment, which was horrible. Editing in so misleading and nasty a way is also egregious. Even the posts you left up, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 are egregious, and the latter is a shameful personal attack to boot. On the other hand, I can give you the benefit of the doubt in a couple of ways: everyone goes on tilt sometimes, and most of us post things that we have reason to feel ashamed of later. Since we try to err on the side of giving people second chances, I'm not going to ban you for all of this. But please clean up your act if you want to keep posting to HN. We're trying against the odds to have an internet forum that hovers at least an inch or two above the bottom of the barrel, and behavior like you've contributed here just pushes it all the way down. HN commenters need to at least try to follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Regardless of what you feel you owe pg or YC or HN mods or me personally, you owe this community much, much better if you're participating in it.

graeme 5y ago

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.

gustavo-fring 5y ago
Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has. But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf. We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309 This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196 This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?
  - gitrog 5y ago
    They're his posts?
    - 5y ago

dvt 5y ago

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom. I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

bmmayer1 5y ago
What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?
- easton 5y ago
  This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
- MsMowz 5y ago
  When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since then, including between the two themselves. >I have a few qualms with this app: >1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account... From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - BrandonM 5y ago

ergot_vacation 5y ago

"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??" This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

graeme 5y ago
I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic weeks before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter. There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
aerosmile 5y ago
Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull" that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to make it happen. MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.
theonionknight 5y ago
I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's platform.
newbie2020 5y ago
Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it never dies

pgwhalen 5y ago

I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.

geebee 5y ago
No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.
- pgwhalen 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.
- mdoms 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

tlogan 5y ago

There are two types ideas: 1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.) 2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones) The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

mgranados 5y ago

Good heuristic.

kabes 5y ago
It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.

btbuildem 5y ago

That's just the realization that opinions of technical people don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.

emrah 5y ago

Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.

splithalf 5y ago

In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.

dd36 5y ago

Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.

swivelmaster 5y ago

> twitter: couldn't you just not? This is, actually, still true :)

allenu 5y ago

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect. the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page" youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days. Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

geebee 5y ago
I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed, in part because I thought didn’t see how they addressed the minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an unusually limited interface). Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense. Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about! EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...
munk-a 5y ago
For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites with relative ease and to write a post history that other folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that software to easily throw together a stream of articles had common value. That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.

defaultname 5y ago

Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days. I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic. There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure. [1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

pjmorris 5y ago

This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

tjs8rj 5y ago

I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary. Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear. Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way. My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step. You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”. Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone. Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change. I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.

galaxyLogic 5y ago
I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising. We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.

catears 5y ago

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say. While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible. I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

c01n 5y ago

The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much money you can make from a product and not about how the product improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather then fixing the real issues.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market
- ignoramous 5y ago
  The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been effectively thrown off from their perch.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    Exactly and the pandemic basically disrupted the traditional celebrity info market.. you can't go to a party or restaurant etc... no photo ops.
- bordercases 5y ago
  What locks celebrities in after they get big? Why isn't it perpetually volatile? Or if it is, what explains the rate of change in the volatility?
- maxwell 5y ago
  Luck also seems to plays a big role in the programming lang market. Yet the behavior of lang maintainers seems to have an outpaced influence over that luck: individual programmers actively chose Guido over Larry or Matz. In turn, Armin's framework looks about in line popularity-wise with DHH's at present, but the trend seems clear. We trust Node because Ryan rage quit. Oracle has cast a shadow over Java, and their TIOBE descent is finally manifesting. K&R may never be unseated, e.g. A Deepness in the Sky. Anyone who's seen Anders in person has witnessed his presence. I wouldn't discount the effects of actual human characteristics and behavior, even if choices end up mostly based on fashion and a fascination with infamy. One can influence their own luck.

hanniabu 5y ago

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____" Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies

mikesabbagh 5y ago

u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive. This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can bend light. I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!

heavyset_go 5y ago

This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP" comment.

qshaman 5y ago

This argument have been attempted already, you can also take Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea" , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this product. Just because some successful companies had bad feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder comment fiesta...).

louissm_it 5y ago

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

llaolleh 5y ago
I knew this would show up again. It's a comment that will live in infamy.
StavrosK 5y ago
I love how what ended up happening was "Or you can pay Dropbox to not have to do any of this".
- sjg007 5y ago
  I don't want to manage my backups or I guess file syncs between machines.

tshaddox 5y ago

The problem I see with this heuristic is that it is going to give false positives for, well, the vast majority of cases where there's a supposedly new idea that actually is just an unnecessary rehash or combination of things that already exist but with a new coat of paint. I don't see how the heuristic can possibly have any predictive power. Look at pretty much every tech startup, every get-rich-quick scheme, every cryptocurrency project, etc. and they'll be making grand claims that their idea is groundbreaking, and technical people are going to say "couldn't you just x?" or "isn't this worse than the existing x?" and those dismissals are actually going to be reasonable and proven valid in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, your heuristic will also catch the tiny number of cases that do turn out to be groundbreaking (or at least extremely successful or popular).

amykyta 5y ago

I think there is an analog here to the great man theory vs zeitgeist. Maybe this tech was underwhelming and its massive impact was due to fortuitous timing. So you weren’t wrong about the tech just how it would mix with the spirit of the moment.

throwaway2037 5y ago

That is a great list. I also felt the same about many of those technologies, but I never thought to put it so succinctly -- as you have! For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter. Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise. Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!

hndamien 5y ago

Canva - couldn't you just use photoshop? This isn't a dig at Canva, but praise.

bserge 5y ago

All of those examples boil down to making technology more accessible for the millions or billions of less technologically savvy people. Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.

johbjo 5y ago

Another perspective; blogs and wikis are two use-cases of essentially the same interaction. The different designs guide and inspire people how to use them. Then, they discover that the use-cases are beneficial. In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.

lambdatronics 5y ago

Great observation! It feels to me kind of like the 'blub' problem [0], in that these are both cases where technical folks misjudge the utility of something new (to them) because it merely makes it easy to do something, instead of making it possible to do something. And maybe that 'something' they either don't know they want, or don't realize how often they would use it if it were available, or don't appreciate that others want. Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial. [0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

failwhaleshark 5y ago

There are incremental/larger/easier improvements and then there are populism "improvements." The one tends to amplify the other. Facebook was incrementally better than Myspace at first, and then became more popular and much better. Myspace was much better than Friendster. It's an evolutionary model where some improvements are made, some features are lost, and specialization meanders. I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

Except for twitter, all the alternatives you wrote doesn't even fit the criteria of "couldn't you.." because it is not replacing the given product MVPs. What do you mean by update a page. Blog and wiki just "update the page" more than most other form of sites.