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How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of th

by xmprt 4y ago

How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. I think the same thing applies to technology infrastructure. ETH came out in 2015 but it took a few years before it became as ubiquitous as it is today. Basically, it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product.

smsm42 4y ago
> How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you don't understand the industry, you can't. That's what hype is for - to make you unable to distinguish those. If you really need to do that - you find somebody who knows the industry and who you can trust, and ask them. Otherwise, you just accept that you have no idea and would have to wait till the results are clear to know. > it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product. Yes. Even for people that know what it is about. Virtually impossible for people that don't.
giantrobot 4y ago
> If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. You've omitted a significant portion of YouTube's history. A dating website turned video sharing platform that struggled for years until one of the world's largest bought them, has become a bedrock of the content creator community. The core of what YouTube was has little relation to their current position in the industry. No one would have laughed at you for saying in 2002 that a video sharing website would enable people to make money. Video streaming (Real, QuickTime, Flash) had already been around for years. Porn websites were already selling access to videos (MPEG-1 or WMV) in 2002. Affordable DV cameras existed as did user friendly editing software. The first 3G cellular services were rolling out as were phones that could stream video over those networks. Computing power, storage, and bandwidth were limitations in 2002 but no one at that time would have laughed if you said "this will improve over the next two decades". Apple was by 2002 selling computers by advertising how easy video editing was on their platform. You'd have a better point if your horizon was a little further off. YouTube (in concept) would be far more laughable to someone in 1992 or 1982 than someone in 2002. Everything for YouTube needed to exist was extant in 2002. YouTube itself was only two years from existing. Cryptocurrency is a lot less interesting today if it's utility will take another 30 years to become evident.

by xmprt 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago

> How can you distinguish between infrastructure products and hype products? If you don't understand the industry, you can't. That's what hype is for - to make you unable to distinguish those. If you really need to do that - you find somebody who knows the industry and who you can trust, and ask them. Otherwise, you just accept that you have no idea and would have to wait till the results are clear to know. > it's hard to predict what's going to be an important infrastructure product. Yes. Even for people that know what it is about. Virtually impossible for people that don't.

giantrobot 4y ago

> If you said that a dating website turned video sharing platform would become on of the bedrocks of the online content creator economy you'd probably be laughed out of the room 20 years ago but that's what YouTube is today. You've omitted a significant portion of YouTube's history. A dating website turned video sharing platform that struggled for years until one of the world's largest bought them, has become a bedrock of the content creator community. The core of what YouTube was has little relation to their current position in the industry. No one would have laughed at you for saying in 2002 that a video sharing website would enable people to make money. Video streaming (Real, QuickTime, Flash) had already been around for years. Porn websites were already selling access to videos (MPEG-1 or WMV) in 2002. Affordable DV cameras existed as did user friendly editing software. The first 3G cellular services were rolling out as were phones that could stream video over those networks. Computing power, storage, and bandwidth were limitations in 2002 but no one at that time would have laughed if you said "this will improve over the next two decades". Apple was by 2002 selling computers by advertising how easy video editing was on their platform. You'd have a better point if your horizon was a little further off. YouTube (in concept) would be far more laughable to someone in 1992 or 1982 than someone in 2002. Everything for YouTube needed to exist was extant in 2002. YouTube itself was only two years from existing. Cryptocurrency is a lot less interesting today if it's utility will take another 30 years to become evident.