12 ms·

Waymo has no viable business model

20 points by morpheos137 5y ago

DangitBobby 5y ago
If I were a city, I'd want people spending all of their money on food, drinks, music and other attractions, right? Not necessarily parking and taxis. This might be off base, but I feel like some cities would happily help pay for the cost of having the mapping done and kept up to date.
eloff 5y ago
These are reasonable points, but there's no hard numbers showing why Waymo cannot scale and why it can never be profitable. In my opinion, despite the cost of the self driving hardware, which is much more than just Lidars, it can still be profitable. Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City. Certainly the costs for Waymo are far lower and scale better with volume. 3D mapping is another cost, but it's also potentially doable since it's a big upfront cost with small ongoing costs. Taking it one (or a few) city at a time could well work. At least nothing I've read here convinced me otherwise.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Not to mention that most hardware has this magical deflationary property - gets cheaper over time. Look at lithium batteries or infrared sensors, for example.
  - lumost 5y ago
    This is ultimately the bet. Even if Waymos taxi business does nothing more than start scaling up hardware manufacture and building trust. This isn’t a cheap strategy, but it’s believable that waymo could own most IP for self driving 10 years from now if they just outlast everyone else. They’re already on year 14 what’s wrong with another 2 decades?
- breput 5y ago
  I upvoted your comment because you make great points, but... > Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City I'm not defending the medallion system and it was corrupt af, but there were ordinary decent people who were destroyed by the subversion of this (completely corrupt and anti-competitive) system. As for the software, eh, the Google Streetview vs. Waymo requirements were one of the weaker points of this article. We don't actually know what data Google collects with their cars (we do know they collect WiFi data[1]), and it isn't inconceivable that they were collecting precise data. It is true that this data ages faster than Google can refresh it, though. I really believe that the software can scale but it is the real world/physical issues that will prevent this from ever becoming a real business. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/
nojito 5y ago
Lidar isn’t expensive. You can easily get the cost savings elsewhere in the vehicle or just target the premium market.
rkagerer 5y ago
The article leads with "Waymo already solved the self-driving problem." I don't dispute all their points but I sure disagree with that one.
sirmoveon 5y ago
You have a fleet of self-driving cars at level 4 that have multiple cameras, and you claim it's going to fail because the system can't keep a street map updated? Does the author even understand how software and automation works?
- harles 5y ago
  I’m not aware of any HD maps built entirely automatically. As soon as manual steps creep in, the cost skyrockets. The backhaul and processing power required for updates can also be staggering.
  - throwawaysdcman 5y ago
    Why do you think the cost of building the HD maps is prohibitive? How much do you think it would cost to say, keep a square mile of a dense urban HD map updated for a year? It's probably way lower than you think.
    - harles 5y ago
      I didn’t say it was prohibitive but it’s certainly not cheap. The cost is per km rather than per square km. DeepMap charges $5k / km for example (the big companies don’t publish their costs, but it’s widely known in the industry to be on par with this). I can’t seem to find the stats again, but map invalidation happens on the order of weeks to months.
  - bsder 5y ago
    Sure, but the point is that the car can flag something that doesn't look like the map so a human can review it. ie. closed road, new road, construction markers, etc. That's way less intensive than having to build the whole thing from scratch or having it be fully automated. Humans are good at exceptions. Let the humans do that while the machines do the rote task of "Yep, road still looks like the map. Nothing to see here."
    - harles 5y ago
ezekiel68 5y ago
I found myself agreeing with the cons mentioned in this article -- but, where is the insight? All of these challenges must have been known since before the company was formed. For example, people didn't suddenly learn yesterday that lidar has trouble in rain & snow. I suppose there may be value in stating all of the downsides in one place (as this article does).
gfodor 5y ago
Analysis that covers points that were almost certainly on the whiteboard of Waymo of risk factors before the first line of code was written is weak analysis. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess they considered this a decade ago and have a reason to think these aren’t a long term problem.
- WatchDog 5y ago
  Perhaps, but 10 years ago you didn't have viable competitors with pure or near-pure camera based self-driving systems. Now we have little lightly funded companies like comma producing quite compelling experiences using cheap hardware. Not to mention tesla with near-unlimited funding, leading the way in the space.
  - ahahahahah 5y ago
    comma.ai is a joke. nobody in the industry thinks about them because they are so far from viability. the idea of tesla having unlimited funding is a joke. They are barely spending across r&d for the whole company. what portion of their r&d is dedicated to self-driving do you thing? even if 100% is self-driving it's still less than the real players in the space.
    - WatchDog 5y ago
      Tesla have access to boat loads of capital in the public markets, they are spending heaps on AI, developing their own silicon, not only for the cars, but for their training computer as well. Who are the real players in the space? There might be bigger players focused more on general AI, but Tesla seem like the biggest player by far, focused on automotive mainly.
rank0 5y ago
The premise of the article is incorrect. Waymo has not “solved the self driving problem”.
NoblePublius 5y ago
“You don’t need lidar to drive a car, so why should the car need lidar to drive the car?” -Elon Musk, like six years ago I’m sure George Hotz also has some pithy takes on this. Anyway, this all completely misses the point. Waymo was born of a DARPA challenge and continued to exist to search for even more DoD money. But we don’t need self driving tanks when we can pilot them remotely.
- NonContro 5y ago
  So why don't we have remotely driven cars?
  - NoblePublius 5y ago
    Because they don’t solve any real problems.
    - NonContro 5y ago
      If AI is suitable for 99% of driving, why not use remote drivers for the remaining 1%? (eg. accidents, construction, adverse weather) You could have a central office in a cheap location of the USA for professional drivers to take control as required. We already do it military for drone strikes...
breput 5y ago
The biggest issue for all of the self driving taxi service ideas is fleet maintenance. First of all, you need to own and insure a fleet of rolling depreciating assets. Maybe not as much these days with the crazy used car prices, but still, you have put these cars on the books. You can't even really lease the vehicles because of all of the LIDAR and other self driving modifications that are required. Next you have to keep these vehicles fueled - either gasoline or electricity, so you are going to need to pay people to handle that. And you have ongoing maintenance for brakes, fluids, etc. And space to park them overnight and in low demand times. And you also have the interior maintenance. Someone has to clean up the puke and garbage and just general messiness of having humans in the backseat of this car. Throughout the day, every day. And this has to be repeated in every single city while competing against Uber and Lyft and traditional taxi companies that already know that the driver is probably the least expensive part of this whole system.
- _vertigo 5y ago
  Yeah, can't agree more. The main thing stopping self driving taxi services is maintenance and cleaning.
- woofcat 5y ago
  Aren't these all issues that car rental agencies have? Somehow they turn a profit on renting you a car for $80/day which I imagine is less than a tax takes in for fares per day.
  - breput 5y ago
    They do, but they buy or lease ordinary unmodified vehicles for a year or two then flip them at auction. Zero overhead here except for the buying/disposing of vehicles. $80/day is probably a decent estimate, but once you include the optional insurance upsells and other add-ons (full tank of gas?) I bet they make way more than $80/day per car. They also have very limited liability for what the driver does in their car while Waymo basically has unlimited liability.
    - 5y ago
throwawaysdcman 5y ago
I work in the space - whoever wrote this clearly isn’t familiar with how Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, etc. actually function. Just going to address a few particularly egregious takes: >Waymo relies on 3D digital maps. The cost of HD mapping is vastly overstated in popular press and blogs. It’s not at all a limiting factor. You can update it using the same cars that are part of your service. I've seen hard numbers that back this up. Google’s unable to keep street view up to date because they have a fleet of hundreds of mapping vehicles spread throughout the entire world, vs hundreds of cars in a small service area that Waymo has. >Waymo is LIDAR depdendent. This has been discussed to death - the weather point applies to both cameras and LIDAR, and you can train ML models to deal with noise from weather the same way you can with models running on cameras. Cost has also been addressed a million times before- it’s coming down drastically. >Waymo is GPS dependent This one is particularly inane. HD map based AVs localize themselves to the HD maps with their sensors - they’re not actually GPS dependent. The 2-4m of accuracy GPS has is not enough for AVs. >Internet connectivity issues >Waymo depends on 3D HD maps. Therefore, the vehicle needs to have onboard downloaded maps at all times. Waymo must download these maps in realtime, or you have to download these 3D maps on your Waymo vehicle before you visit a new Area. I don't know why the author thinks you'll be able to drive robotaxis from city to city. Regardles, AV companies design their cars so that they don't need a continuous internet connection to function. They know cell connections can be spotty or blocked while going through a tunnel. See https://readwrite.com/2017/01/11/google-waymo-security-tl4/ https://readwrite.com/2017/01/11/google-waymo-security-tl4/ >No Viable Business Strategy >Waymo’s primary business strategy is to sell its technology to the vehicle manufacturer. This is just wrong and I have no clue where the author got that from. The model is robotaxis, and maybe partnering with trucking fleet operators to outfit their cars. >Simulated driving is not real world driving. The data stuff has been discussed before in detail but suffice it to say AVs generally aren’t a data problem - they’re a robotics problem. >To be successful Waymo has to work very well not only in the USA but also in Canada, Mexico, etc The revenue from ridesharing services is hyperconcentrated in a few dense urban areas in the US. If you got a robotaxi service working well in just a few of those tiny areas, you could capture a huge amount of revenue to fund tackling other areas.
- neural_thing 5y ago
tsycho 5y ago
What a closed-minded article! The real hard part here was to solve self-driving, which is what Waymo focused on, and is at L4 already (or close enough to it). The other points that the author raises are obvious things known for a decade, and Waymo doesn't even have to solve them, unless it really wants to. - The cost of Lidar has fallen a lot already, and is likely to continue to do so. - Waymo doesn't have to manufacture cars at scale. Carmakers would love to license FSD tech from Waymo and sell premium cars. I would happily buy such a car for $100k. - Uber/Lyft will fight over themselves to license the FSD tech, Waymo has no need to build its own taxi services.
- nceqs3 5y ago
  The patents too. An IP lawyers dream...
- sidibe 5y ago
  The article makes more sense if you 100% buy all of Tesla's marketing.
- slinkyblack 5y ago
  Wasn't part of the reason for LIDAR getting cheaper because of tech that Waymo developed?
Animats 5y ago
LIDARs are not inherently expensive. The volumes are tiny. Continental was prepared to put a good, low-cost automotive LIDAR into production. They're an auto parts company. Someone has to order a few hundred thousand units. Good color TV cameras cost thousands of dollars 25 years ago. The one in your cell phone costs about $10 and is much better. The business model problem is real. A big disappointment has been the lack of self-driving shuttle buses. The cost problem isn't so bad, and at moderate speeds the sensing problem isn't that bad. Shuttle buses are expensive from a labor perspective - they don't carry that many people, and you want a lot of little ones running frequently all day and night. servicing airport parking lots and such. Not a big bus every half hour. There are a few companies selling them, and they work OK on fixed routes at slow speeds. But they're not selling well. There are a few in various places around the world, but not many. A big name not well known seems to be set to change this. New Flyer is the largest big-bus builder in North America, and they have come out with an automated model.[1] This should be interesting. [1] https://www.newflyer.com/bus/xcelsior-av/ https://www.newflyer.com/bus/xcelsior-av/
debarshri 5y ago
Lately, I have been seeing lot of youtube videos of unruly passenger boarding uber. I wonder what happens in that scenario. It seems like it is common thing during weekends in big cities. Is car aware of the fact that some body puked or took a dump inside it? Unruly passengers without supervision who destroy properties might just be the reason it won't be a viable business.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Doing that on interior camera that the cars are sure to have … that is some evidence that goes way beyond “he said she said.”
- throwawaysdcman 5y ago
  There are cameras inside of the cars in AVs that face towards the passenger area - it's trivial to have someone check for crud in the back of the car before rides and send it back to the depot for cleaning. And automating that via ML would be easy considering the simple environment.
paxys 5y ago
I hate that HN's voting system allows low-effort, factually incorrect, borderline spam articles like this one to get boosted right to the top because the title is catchy and supports people's biases.
- pedroma 5y ago
  I've always hated any karma-based forum. I just don't participate in it. I've gone as far as to block karma displays on Reddit and HN through element hiding and running custom userscripts. It allows me to type without trying to please random nobodies.
taywrobel 5y ago
I never trust articles without a byline. Who wrote this? Who funds them? How can I know that they aren’t introducing bias to their assessment in their own self interests?
morpheos137 5y ago
I am curious why this was flagged?
burnished 5y ago
This wasn't convincing. Sweeping statements about viability and scaling do not constitute an argument, I think.

20 points by morpheos137 5y ago

If I were a city, I'd want people spending all of their money on food, drinks, music and other attractions, right? Not necessarily parking and taxis. This might be off base, but I feel like some cities would happily help pay for the cost of having the mapping done and kept up to date.

eloff 5y ago

These are reasonable points, but there's no hard numbers showing why Waymo cannot scale and why it can never be profitable. In my opinion, despite the cost of the self driving hardware, which is much more than just Lidars, it can still be profitable. Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City. Certainly the costs for Waymo are far lower and scale better with volume. 3D mapping is another cost, but it's also potentially doable since it's a big upfront cost with small ongoing costs. Taking it one (or a few) city at a time could well work. At least nothing I've read here convinced me otherwise.

H8crilA 5y ago
Not to mention that most hardware has this magical deflationary property - gets cheaper over time. Look at lithium batteries or infrared sensors, for example.
- lumost 5y ago
  This is ultimately the bet. Even if Waymos taxi business does nothing more than start scaling up hardware manufacture and building trust. This isn’t a cheap strategy, but it’s believable that waymo could own most IP for self driving 10 years from now if they just outlast everyone else. They’re already on year 14 what’s wrong with another 2 decades?
breput 5y ago
I upvoted your comment because you make great points, but... > Before uber, taxi medallions could fetch $1.5M in New York City I'm not defending the medallion system and it was corrupt af, but there were ordinary decent people who were destroyed by the subversion of this (completely corrupt and anti-competitive) system. As for the software, eh, the Google Streetview vs. Waymo requirements were one of the weaker points of this article. We don't actually know what data Google collects with their cars (we do know they collect WiFi data[1]), and it isn't inconceivable that they were collecting precise data. It is true that this data ages faster than Google can refresh it, though. I really believe that the software can scale but it is the real world/physical issues that will prevent this from ever becoming a real business. [1] https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

nojito 5y ago

Lidar isn’t expensive. You can easily get the cost savings elsewhere in the vehicle or just target the premium market.

rkagerer 5y ago

The article leads with "Waymo already solved the self-driving problem." I don't dispute all their points but I sure disagree with that one.

sirmoveon 5y ago

You have a fleet of self-driving cars at level 4 that have multiple cameras, and you claim it's going to fail because the system can't keep a street map updated? Does the author even understand how software and automation works?

harles 5y ago
I’m not aware of any HD maps built entirely automatically. As soon as manual steps creep in, the cost skyrockets. The backhaul and processing power required for updates can also be staggering.
- throwawaysdcman 5y ago
  Why do you think the cost of building the HD maps is prohibitive? How much do you think it would cost to say, keep a square mile of a dense urban HD map updated for a year? It's probably way lower than you think.
  - harles 5y ago
    I didn’t say it was prohibitive but it’s certainly not cheap. The cost is per km rather than per square km. DeepMap charges $5k / km for example (the big companies don’t publish their costs, but it’s widely known in the industry to be on par with this). I can’t seem to find the stats again, but map invalidation happens on the order of weeks to months.
- bsder 5y ago
  Sure, but the point is that the car can flag something that doesn't look like the map so a human can review it. ie. closed road, new road, construction markers, etc. That's way less intensive than having to build the whole thing from scratch or having it be fully automated. Humans are good at exceptions. Let the humans do that while the machines do the rote task of "Yep, road still looks like the map. Nothing to see here."
  - harles 5y ago

ezekiel68 5y ago

I found myself agreeing with the cons mentioned in this article -- but, where is the insight? All of these challenges must have been known since before the company was formed. For example, people didn't suddenly learn yesterday that lidar has trouble in rain & snow. I suppose there may be value in stating all of the downsides in one place (as this article does).

gfodor 5y ago

Analysis that covers points that were almost certainly on the whiteboard of Waymo of risk factors before the first line of code was written is weak analysis. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess they considered this a decade ago and have a reason to think these aren’t a long term problem.

WatchDog 5y ago
Perhaps, but 10 years ago you didn't have viable competitors with pure or near-pure camera based self-driving systems. Now we have little lightly funded companies like comma producing quite compelling experiences using cheap hardware. Not to mention tesla with near-unlimited funding, leading the way in the space.
- ahahahahah 5y ago
  comma.ai is a joke. nobody in the industry thinks about them because they are so far from viability. the idea of tesla having unlimited funding is a joke. They are barely spending across r&d for the whole company. what portion of their r&d is dedicated to self-driving do you thing? even if 100% is self-driving it's still less than the real players in the space.
  - WatchDog 5y ago
    Tesla have access to boat loads of capital in the public markets, they are spending heaps on AI, developing their own silicon, not only for the cars, but for their training computer as well. Who are the real players in the space? There might be bigger players focused more on general AI, but Tesla seem like the biggest player by far, focused on automotive mainly.

rank0 5y ago

The premise of the article is incorrect. Waymo has not “solved the self driving problem”.

NoblePublius 5y ago

“You don’t need lidar to drive a car, so why should the car need lidar to drive the car?” -Elon Musk, like six years ago I’m sure George Hotz also has some pithy takes on this. Anyway, this all completely misses the point. Waymo was born of a DARPA challenge and continued to exist to search for even more DoD money. But we don’t need self driving tanks when we can pilot them remotely.

NonContro 5y ago
So why don't we have remotely driven cars?
- NoblePublius 5y ago
  Because they don’t solve any real problems.
  - NonContro 5y ago
    If AI is suitable for 99% of driving, why not use remote drivers for the remaining 1%? (eg. accidents, construction, adverse weather) You could have a central office in a cheap location of the USA for professional drivers to take control as required. We already do it military for drone strikes...

breput 5y ago

The biggest issue for all of the self driving taxi service ideas is fleet maintenance. First of all, you need to own and insure a fleet of rolling depreciating assets. Maybe not as much these days with the crazy used car prices, but still, you have put these cars on the books. You can't even really lease the vehicles because of all of the LIDAR and other self driving modifications that are required. Next you have to keep these vehicles fueled - either gasoline or electricity, so you are going to need to pay people to handle that. And you have ongoing maintenance for brakes, fluids, etc. And space to park them overnight and in low demand times. And you also have the interior maintenance. Someone has to clean up the puke and garbage and just general messiness of having humans in the backseat of this car. Throughout the day, every day. And this has to be repeated in every single city while competing against Uber and Lyft and traditional taxi companies that already know that the driver is probably the least expensive part of this whole system.

_vertigo 5y ago
Yeah, can't agree more. The main thing stopping self driving taxi services is maintenance and cleaning.
woofcat 5y ago
Aren't these all issues that car rental agencies have? Somehow they turn a profit on renting you a car for $80/day which I imagine is less than a tax takes in for fares per day.
- breput 5y ago
  They do, but they buy or lease ordinary unmodified vehicles for a year or two then flip them at auction. Zero overhead here except for the buying/disposing of vehicles. $80/day is probably a decent estimate, but once you include the optional insurance upsells and other add-ons (full tank of gas?) I bet they make way more than $80/day per car. They also have very limited liability for what the driver does in their car while Waymo basically has unlimited liability.
  - 5y ago

throwawaysdcman 5y ago

I work in the space - whoever wrote this clearly isn’t familiar with how Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, etc. actually function. Just going to address a few particularly egregious takes: >Waymo relies on 3D digital maps. The cost of HD mapping is vastly overstated in popular press and blogs. It’s not at all a limiting factor. You can update it using the same cars that are part of your service. I've seen hard numbers that back this up. Google’s unable to keep street view up to date because they have a fleet of hundreds of mapping vehicles spread throughout the entire world, vs hundreds of cars in a small service area that Waymo has. >Waymo is LIDAR depdendent. This has been discussed to death - the weather point applies to both cameras and LIDAR, and you can train ML models to deal with noise from weather the same way you can with models running on cameras. Cost has also been addressed a million times before- it’s coming down drastically. >Waymo is GPS dependent This one is particularly inane. HD map based AVs localize themselves to the HD maps with their sensors - they’re not actually GPS dependent. The 2-4m of accuracy GPS has is not enough for AVs. >Internet connectivity issues >Waymo depends on 3D HD maps. Therefore, the vehicle needs to have onboard downloaded maps at all times. Waymo must download these maps in realtime, or you have to download these 3D maps on your Waymo vehicle before you visit a new Area. I don't know why the author thinks you'll be able to drive robotaxis from city to city. Regardles, AV companies design their cars so that they don't need a continuous internet connection to function. They know cell connections can be spotty or blocked while going through a tunnel. See https://readwrite.com/2017/01/11/google-waymo-security-tl4/ https://readwrite.com/2017/01/11/google-waymo-security-tl4/ >No Viable Business Strategy >Waymo’s primary business strategy is to sell its technology to the vehicle manufacturer. This is just wrong and I have no clue where the author got that from. The model is robotaxis, and maybe partnering with trucking fleet operators to outfit their cars. >Simulated driving is not real world driving. The data stuff has been discussed before in detail but suffice it to say AVs generally aren’t a data problem - they’re a robotics problem. >To be successful Waymo has to work very well not only in the USA but also in Canada, Mexico, etc The revenue from ridesharing services is hyperconcentrated in a few dense urban areas in the US. If you got a robotaxi service working well in just a few of those tiny areas, you could capture a huge amount of revenue to fund tackling other areas.

neural_thing 5y ago

tsycho 5y ago

What a closed-minded article! The real hard part here was to solve self-driving, which is what Waymo focused on, and is at L4 already (or close enough to it). The other points that the author raises are obvious things known for a decade, and Waymo doesn't even have to solve them, unless it really wants to. - The cost of Lidar has fallen a lot already, and is likely to continue to do so. - Waymo doesn't have to manufacture cars at scale. Carmakers would love to license FSD tech from Waymo and sell premium cars. I would happily buy such a car for $100k. - Uber/Lyft will fight over themselves to license the FSD tech, Waymo has no need to build its own taxi services.

nceqs3 5y ago
The patents too. An IP lawyers dream...
sidibe 5y ago
The article makes more sense if you 100% buy all of Tesla's marketing.
slinkyblack 5y ago
Wasn't part of the reason for LIDAR getting cheaper because of tech that Waymo developed?

Animats 5y ago

LIDARs are not inherently expensive. The volumes are tiny. Continental was prepared to put a good, low-cost automotive LIDAR into production. They're an auto parts company. Someone has to order a few hundred thousand units. Good color TV cameras cost thousands of dollars 25 years ago. The one in your cell phone costs about $10 and is much better. The business model problem is real. A big disappointment has been the lack of self-driving shuttle buses. The cost problem isn't so bad, and at moderate speeds the sensing problem isn't that bad. Shuttle buses are expensive from a labor perspective - they don't carry that many people, and you want a lot of little ones running frequently all day and night. servicing airport parking lots and such. Not a big bus every half hour. There are a few companies selling them, and they work OK on fixed routes at slow speeds. But they're not selling well. There are a few in various places around the world, but not many. A big name not well known seems to be set to change this. New Flyer is the largest big-bus builder in North America, and they have come out with an automated model.[1] This should be interesting. [1] https://www.newflyer.com/bus/xcelsior-av/ https://www.newflyer.com/bus/xcelsior-av/

debarshri 5y ago

Lately, I have been seeing lot of youtube videos of unruly passenger boarding uber. I wonder what happens in that scenario. It seems like it is common thing during weekends in big cities. Is car aware of the fact that some body puked or took a dump inside it? Unruly passengers without supervision who destroy properties might just be the reason it won't be a viable business.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Doing that on interior camera that the cars are sure to have … that is some evidence that goes way beyond “he said she said.”
throwawaysdcman 5y ago
There are cameras inside of the cars in AVs that face towards the passenger area - it's trivial to have someone check for crud in the back of the car before rides and send it back to the depot for cleaning. And automating that via ML would be easy considering the simple environment.

paxys 5y ago

I hate that HN's voting system allows low-effort, factually incorrect, borderline spam articles like this one to get boosted right to the top because the title is catchy and supports people's biases.

pedroma 5y ago
I've always hated any karma-based forum. I just don't participate in it. I've gone as far as to block karma displays on Reddit and HN through element hiding and running custom userscripts. It allows me to type without trying to please random nobodies.

taywrobel 5y ago

I never trust articles without a byline. Who wrote this? Who funds them? How can I know that they aren’t introducing bias to their assessment in their own self interests?

morpheos137 5y ago

I am curious why this was flagged?

burnished 5y ago

This wasn't convincing. Sweeping statements about viability and scaling do not constitute an argument, I think.