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Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy?

• red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Broadly speaking, yes. Lot of hype men, lotta promises, lot of scams.
• f0ld 4y ago
  This is depressed people only discussion that don’t fit here. However if you want answers just research thirty years war and how people used newly invented printing press at the time. Don’t fall down conspiracy theory rabbit hole such as why is the middle east desert and how is that related to fire worshipping religions.
• drewcoo 4y ago
  Yes, it's always been scammy. And I don't just mean Silicon Valley tech. All of it, throughout history. It's because that's the bleeding edge of new information and laypeople can't know for sure what information is true and what isn't. That sets the stage perfectly for con artists. Snake oil was scammy tech when it was sold by traveling medicine shows, before silicon snake oil was even imagined.
• muyuu 4y ago
  I don't think the hype itself is scammy, it's normal that the passionate will be louder either way. There are certainly scammy trends in tech, but I don't think this is that - except in the cases they're doing it to secure funding or sell stuff, and perhaps to benefit indirectly by hyping their sector.
• tacosbane 4y ago
  I'm not old enough to remember pre-2009 well enough to comment, but since then, yes, it's been scammy. The SV/SFBay idea of success is what the rest of us would call a pump and dump: burn a bunch of money to drive existing enterprises in the rest out of the country out of business; while providing at best marginal, and usually no, product benefit to consumers; and dumping the money losing venture on institutional and retail investors. That's success. "Exiting." Not building something new, valuable, or sustainable. "Oh, but wait, there are sustainable businesses," you might say. With few exceptions, they are advertising companies. Advertising is a fixed pool drawn from the real economy; all they've done is divert it from existing businesses. Just make sure to pretend you're changing the world.
• codevark 4y ago
  [dead]
• coldtea 4y ago
  Tech was less scammy in the past because it was OK with sustainable profits and long term building of a company selling actual products. The products were more basic, and less vapour. If they were vapor, 99% of the time was because they couldn't deliver a promised more complex program in time, not because the concept they were selling itself was totally vague and ill-thought out. Starting somewhere around the 90s and ever since, they desperately need to pull a rabbit every few years to prop up the stocks.
  • bruce511 4y ago
    I suppose it's useful to define "the past" in the original question :) In one sense, sure, 90's is the present (consumer tech has been around for let's say 50 years), but in the context of computers the 90;s is the distant past. Personal computers (as in one's regular people could buy) become available (more or less) during the 70's. By the 80's things like Apple 2, Commodore, Spectrum etc are "main stream" - in the sense that "some people had them". But "some people" was a tiny minority. When I was at school most people didn't have them. Businesses were just getting going with them. The 90's (windows 3.1) makes them a bit more accessible, but still "rare". Windows 95 brings PC's (and the internet) "to the masses", but most homes still don't have them. Adoption has picked up though - lots of internet hype, FOMO and so on. More or less at this point the hype machines build up. There's always been over-hype, but up to this point it's limited to those geeks who read Byte or PC Magazine. Now it's gone "full consumer". Dot Com (bubble) ensues. There are fortunes to be made by those in the right place, at the right time, with the right product. But there's also a lot of weird. (pets.com et al). The hype-machine has never stopped. New languages (Java), Touch-phones, tablets, facebook, farmville (remember farmville?). We still recognized the survivors, but the failures quickly fade. Alta Vista? Dare I say, Yahoo? AOL? Compuserve? Geocities? 3DTV? So, to answer the question, sure, "scammy" hype has been with us, certainly since tech went mainstream. Everyone has the next great idea. Some stick around more than others. AI is having a moment in the sun. It's a new shiny toy at Christmas. Whether it has staying power - I don't know. But sooner or later it'll fade, and the next big thing will come along.
    • coldtea 4y ago
• ofalkaed 4y ago
  Nothing new and it goes back to ancient times. It is easy to make a quick buck off of the new.
• BMc2020 4y ago
  Naw, it's always been going on. Let's pick a pre-internet example, on cable TV back in the day there was a pill that the commercials implied, but didn't actually clearly state, that would make your penis bigger. If there actually was a pill that would actually make your penis bigger, would it: A) be advertised only on the high number cable channels late at night? or B) Be shouted from the rooftops? So, develop a healthy sense of skepticism about everything you see on the media. It's nothing new.
• jrmg 4y ago
  The dot com boom?
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's worse than it was. Here are some trends. (1) Big Tech in the U.S. is like the way the car industry was in the 1970s in the U.S. Still thinking it is the best of the world and many onlookers agreeing but deeply rotten inside. Facebook and Google, for instance, are still riding high on monopolies in two sided markets. Advertisers have nowhere to go because the audience is there, but without revenue from advertisers, new publishers and social media can't fund efforts that would get them an audience. Amazon, Netflix, and Uber on the other hand look "successful" because they are overcapitalized and able to lose money on all or some of their product lines. You'd have an easy time selling half-priced taxi rides too if you had $25 billion of investor's money to spend. The real innovation in e-Commerce and social media is happening in India and China because the markets aren't locked up tight by monopolists there, that's the real story behind Tik Tok. AMZN was a leader in e-commerce 25 years ago but... That was 25 years ago and that is how you say "Sears and Roebucks" in Internet time! (2) Crypto and NFT are obviously an effort to move money from one pocket to another without any value being created or transferred, not much more to say there except... (3) Facebook has been chasing the virtual reality dream for quite some time, you might recall there was an AR scam being pushed by "Magic Leap" in the last decade and Hololens was a thing too, the Army even was talking about buying a Hololens for each and every soldier until they discovered that soldiers couldn't shoot straight while wearing one. Last year though, Facebook got universally panned when they linked their successful efforts in VR Hardware to their unsuccessful efforts in VR Software (Hint: Horizon Worlds isn't fun, it's like a summer camp where you're expected to entertain itself) and with the NFT moment. It was a big mistake. See the following for a good analysis of why "the metaverse" is doomed as it is conceptualized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiZhdpLXZ8Q (4) Eliezer Yudkowsky is up in arms about ChatGPT because ChatGPT is superhuman at bullshitting and can bullshit better than he can! People who were hoping they could get rich without trying with NFTs now think ChatGPT can write their pitch deck. Medium.com is in crisis because the kind of person who was too lazy to maintain or promote a blog was always too lazy to write a blog. What I'll say is this though. NLP stuff that was beyond state of the art at a startup I was working at 5 years ago is now easy, and if you look here https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour you'll see 13 uses of transformers listed and prompt-driven text generation is just 1 of them. Seduced by ChatGPT's bullshitting capabilities people will be amazed at the 70% accuracy of GPT-3, the 75% accuracy of GPT-4, the 77% accuracy of GPT-5, the 78% accuracy of GPT-6. People who learn how these models actually work how to train them on specific tasks will (a) run them on their own computers under their own control, (b) run models orders of magnitude smaller, (c) get 95%+ accuracy on well-specified problems with modest amounts of data, (d) have access to much better models 6 months from now.
• wmf 4y ago
  There have always been hype waves; in the aughts I remember DHTML, AJAX, Web 2.0, user-generated content, Second Life and before that in the dotcoms there was VRML, portals, push, P2P and the 80s had fourth generation, PCs, workstations, etc. Maybe the latest ones are bigger (due to ZIRP?) or maybe they're just fresher in our minds.
• rcarr 4y ago
  The AI/ChatGPT hype is starting to piss me off, it seems like about 50% of HN is now articles about AI. Meanwhile, stuff like the genuinely incredible Unreal Engine 5.2 demo that hit Youtube six days ago only got 14 upvotes on here. What the fuck is going on? I've been using ChatGPT for the last week or two and it's not got a single coding question I've asked it right. Seems alright as a 'rubber duck' for generating ideas and seems okish for creative writing but for not a hell of a lot else at the minute. The visual AI art stuff does seem worth the hype though but yeah, I'm feeling burnt out on this shit too. Based on everyone I speak to, I think the majority of people are. The pandemic probably didn't help.
  • TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    I've not seen the Unreal Engine demo, but I think GPT-4 is a big leap in a much more general purpose innovation than an improvement in a video game engine. The improvements to the GPT system have created quite a lot of buzz, as we are all still trying to figure out what it means. One thing to note is that ChatGPT is still GPT-3.5 sometimes. Their page says it is GPT-4 if capacity is available, but I suspect GPT-4 might be pretty busy right now. You can pay $20/mo for GPT-4, which I am close to doing just to try it more. But from what I have heard, GPT-4 is going to be better at answering those coding questions, and plenty of people here are paying for that, so this might explain why you are underwhelmed and other people are enthusiastic. I was pretty dismissive of this stuff, recently tweeting that ChatGPT made for a poor rubber duck, but my friend has convinced me to pay a little more attention, and now I am seeing some of the value people are talking about.
    • rcarr 4y ago
      I'll bare that in mind, I'm not convinced by what I've seen so far of it though. The two main Unreal demos for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj60HHy-Kqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj60HHy-Kqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaKyc3mQVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnaKyc3mQVk
      • ffhhj 4y ago
• xrcws 4y ago
  In short, no. https://tylerberbert.substack.com/p/cooperation https://tylerberbert.substack.com/p/cooperation
• fxtentacle 4y ago
  Yes. But it was less annoying. Back in the day, I got all of my gaming news out of a physical magazine. That means people with a hyped-up scammy product had no way of reaching me unless they could convince the writer at that magazine that they were legit. Nowadays, all of the grifters can email me directly and/or create SEO-optimized websites and/or pay Google/Facebook to shove ads into my face. The democratization of communication has made scams much more annoying.
• pengaru 4y ago
  > Was tech always so scammy? No.
• Mc91 4y ago
  > Ask HN: Was tech always so scammy? Yes
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I'm somebody who is usually extremely skeptical of new technologies, to the point of being wrong on the overly conservative side (e.g. I vastly underestimated the impact mobile phones would have on society). And in some of the examples you give, primarily crypto, nfts, and the metaverse, I was highly skeptical about them from the beginning, and (in my opinion) I think I was right. I do not feel that way about GPT-4-level AI. I am continually blown away by the value I get when I use it. I ask it programming questions, and while it doesn't always get things 100% right, it saves me a ton of time. I've asked it medical questions (I used the prompt suggested by this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35319988), and it was invaluable. I even showed the chat to my doctor, and while I could tell at the beginning she was feeling a bit "Oh lord, I thought it was bad with 'Dr Google', now it's going to be much worse", but by the end of it I felt she was even a bit shaken by how good the responses were. I totally agree there is a ton of snake-oil with respect to "BS AI" pitches, and it seems like there are lots of companies calling everything under the sun "AI". But that doesn't mean there isn't "real" AI, and GPT-4 has been the most mind-blowing piece of technology I've ever used.
• foobarbecue 4y ago
  Don't forget self-driving cars and drone delivery.
• atemerev 4y ago
  Yes. The dotcom boom of 1999-2000 was something to observe. Things were getting ridiculous. Like a food delivery company (Webvan?) planning to seed the US with thousands newly built warehouses and logistics centers, and hiring freaking Bechtel to do that (didn’t end well, of course). And before that, there was a tail of previous AI hype cycle. I remember training an actual neural network on IBM PC 80286, as our school competition project, back in 1992. And before that, the minicomputers boom, but I’m not old enough to remember it. VAXen and Usenet, this sort of thing. Hype cycles are the natural state of affairs in tech.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kristopolous 4y ago
  it's the money part. there's a big difference between doing tech to make money and making money to do tech. It's about finding a purpose that's not just "accumulate maximum cash" with some thin veil on it. Lots of things fit this unless you want to be insanely cynical and reductive. You can always construct some conspiracy theory about how say, someone working for Debian or at say the EFF is really, secretly, trying to pad their resume and, even if they don't admit it, chase after wealth with some future lucrative payout, but people in practical terms, have different motives. Some people work on say, astronomical data, because they want to work on astronomical data. They like having a roof over their head, but they're not looking for it to be made with gold. Choose what you work on wisely with caution and discretion. If you want a yacht and a bugatti, go for it, have fun. But if you don't, then, really, just don't.
• ssivark 4y ago
  LLMs might be a bit of a special case, but branding these other things as "tech" is basically part of the hype game -- to vicariously exploit the aura of beneficence around "tech". That said, take a look at the Gartner hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle The same game has been playing out across varying contexts over a long time. This is nothing specific to "tech" -- "tech" just happens to be a brand with positive connotations, for today. For a deeper take on the dynamics of the evolution of a new social trend, see https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths Once tech became "cool", the scene would inevitably expand beyond the "geeks" to attract people would would want to exploit it selfishly.
  • alex-moon 4y ago
    Yes this would be my answer as well. The phenomenon OP is referring to is "hype" and it has existed for as long as money has existed. Specifically, once leverage (debt financing of investment) gets involved, you enter what we now call the "Minsky moment", after Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis (FIH), specifically the third phase, what Minsky called the Ponzi phase, after famed scam artist Carlo Ponzi. The first recorded example of a Minsky moment is the so-called Tulip Mania of the 1630s. ETA: OP specifically mentions "tech" - so the first appearance of consumer tech is in the 1920s (cars, radios, etc.), a decade which was, in fact, characterised by Ponzi-esque overleveraged speculative investing. In reality, this wasn't investing only in tech specifically, but a massive spike in consumer tech purchasing was one of the key signals for investors at the time. This ended with the now very famous Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression.
• closeparen 4y ago
  SEO, growth hacking, Bangladeshi click farms, social media clones, the "idea guy" archetype, "Silicon [insert distressed region]" boosterism. Tech's economic success has always attracted desperate, pathetic wannabes. Feeding technical due diligence to the competition, diluting a cofounder into irrelevance, patent trolling. It also attracts sharks. Android flashlight apps, Facebook personality quizzes, Amazon affiliate spam, drop shipping, pay-to-win games. The shining, prestigious "platforms" are necessarily in symbiosis with their ecosystems of (mostly) slimy, bottom-feeding tenants. Rails discourse, NodeJS discourse, MongoDB discourse, AWS discourse, Docker discourse, Agile discourse, TDD discourse, etc. Tech has always had cycles of hype, counter-hype, disillusionment, and eventually sorting tools and approaches into their proper niches in view of tradeoffs.
  • auntienomen 4y ago
    This comment needs to be recast to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire.
    • commonfan 4y ago
      I asked chatgpt to do that: SEO, growth hacking, Bangladeshi click farms, Silicon Valley boosterism, idea guys with no charm, Patent trolling, due diligence leaks, Sharks lurking, waiting for the opportunity to sneak. Android flashlights, Facebook quizzes galore, Pay-to-win games, Amazon affiliates who always want more, But these slimy tenants sustain the prestigious platforms we see, It's a cycle of hype, disillusionment, and finding niches uniquely. Rails discourse and NodeJS chatter, AWS and MongoDB, Agile and TDD, they all matter, Tech's economic success always attracts the wannabes, But eventually everything falls into their proper niche and degree. So next time you're scrolling through the latest tech news, Remember the hype can be misleading, and always consider your dues, Take a moment to reflect on the balance of tradeoffs and gain, Tech is a dynamic industry that always evolves again and again.
      • imartin2k 4y ago
        Now I got reminded of this gem https://youtu.be/I6IQ_FOCE6I https://youtu.be/I6IQ_FOCE6I
• kjrose 4y ago
  I remember reading many books on how when electricity was invented for decades there were tons of scams which essentially were vaporware hypestorms. Look at Victorian England and the myriad medical scams around electricity. Same with many chemical discoveries in the 1800s, and with nuclear discoveries in the 1950s. The snake oil salesmen will always race to some new tech to try and make a quick buck. Partially because the new tech actually does do some interesting things and partially because it's new enough no one can call them on it quite yet. Even now there are tons of new science and tech in other fields that the general public are more convinced than ever work for health, etc. And at best are hopeful thinking and at worst are massive scams which are straight out hurting millions.
• bhawks 4y ago
  Any tech that has the chance to truly disrupt is guaranteed to be swamped with gold rush speculators hoping to hit it big. It is really difficult to suss out the winners and losers are going to be. VCs take the approach of spreading across as many bets as possible - hoping to get lucky. Companies will try to add the next big thing to their existing products to stay relevant (purely defensive maneuvers). Employees looking for jobs in the gold rush must either _really_ believe in the product/company they're working on or have the ability to move quickly off a sinking ship. Tl;Dr it's always like this. Also it's not purely a bad thing - try to find ways to be positive.
• ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Meh... it was always the same, but you forgot (or are too young to remember) the past things. Just look at the huge number of failed game controllers that will "revolutionize" gaming,... or try watching an old computer show (eg. computer chronicles) where they are trying to hype and sell some "new, revolutionary" tech, that "everyone will use in a few years"...
• fhd2 4y ago
  I've been in this field for 20 years and I'd say no. Compared to back then, the market for software seems incredibly saturated, there's more people making (or trying to make) money from these kind of hypes now than in the past, and it seems increasingly desperately so. That said, humans do have a tendency to romanticise the past - forgetting the bad and the weird.
• keyle 4y ago
  No it certainly wasn't. But you have to go way back when... way back when google wasn't a thing. Back then, the internet was made of people with intent. I remember the first time I rode a train where two passengers next to me read out a URL for a local newspaper and how it was going to change their world. Before that, I don't think I actually heard someone spell out "w, w, w, yes 3 of them, dot..." Since then, the web industry has gain tremendous growth, roles were created. Roles that frankly, don't need to exist. Let me remind you of SEO experts, Crypto bros, Cybersec "one click security guys" that don't understand TCP, reverse proxying, NAT, incapable of knowing which IP range is on the VPN, but are fully qualified... Recruiters since forever, 8 front-end developers for 1 SPA, one dude dedicated to the build system! AI prompters are around the corners... A cyber security team operating "WAF" - the idea that we are so far gone from knowing what runs on our own servers that we need to firewall them. 30X slower code because it's abstracted by virtual pods, running in virtual machines, operating virtual cpus... Social media experts: FML! Social medias have given every village idiots a loud planetary voice. Search is seen as the true north, fuelled by echo chambers and agendas. Linkedin is a dystopian nightmare. There is definitely a bubble, and it has blown so far out of proportions we can't even see the surface anymore! If you're one of the guys that call BS on any of it, you're being isolated as a mad man. But, just, look around. It's okay though, AI generated content will destroy what is left of the internet of information. Village idiots will now have not only a planet wide reach, but they will also write like nobel laureates!
• mo_42 4y ago
  My explanation for this is complexity. Let’s take a bridge as a comparison. It’s also technical but it’s understood very well and there not much variability. A bridge doesn’t serve too many purposes. Mainly to allow heavy objects to move across something. Software on the other hand is complex. Rather simple applications can have many purposes and even more internal execution paths. Sure, we need to develop a software just once. So all the engineers concentrate on a single thing, whereas we need many civil engineers to build and maintain the bridges. Apparently, it still doesn’t work. Usually for software, there is no liability. Imagine civil engineers building bridges like software engineers. Maybe they would all look different and fancy and we would run around to take nice pictures of them. Also they would break down much more and people would just expect it and live with that.
  • arroz 4y ago
    And die
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  Seems like a good place to recommend "The Guy I Almost Was": https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/ https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
• Lerc 4y ago
  One of my most valued books is A copy of dream machines/computer lib that comprises snippets from 1974 and 1987. The entries in the update were in Italics. Many of the names of technologies and companies have changed, but there is much that is familiar.
• thefz 4y ago
  Q: Was tech always so scammy? A: No, it started being this way when web usage reached the general population. I blame smartphones for that, but it was inevitable.
• BigCryo 4y ago
  Would you care to buy some tulip futures sir?
• reportgunner 4y ago
  It's marketing that's scammy, not tech. And yes it was always so scammy.