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The AI takeover of the startup space makes me feel a bit crazy because there are still thousands of world-changing app ideas that have zero to do with AI but no

The AI takeover of the startup space makes me feel a bit crazy because there are still thousands of world-changing app ideas that have zero to do with AI but nobody's funding or building them. We can't possibly have run out of consumer app ideas in a decade or two, right?

morkalork 2y ago
It feels like we ran out in the first decade since the iPhone (2007-2017) and have been running on fumes since. Can you name some world changing consumer app or company outside of AI fluff that came to be in that post 2017 to end of 2022 period when chatgpt was released?
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  Slack, Zoom, TikTok And those are just off the top of my head
  - robenkleene 2y ago
    Those all predate 2017: - Slack: 2013 - Zoom: 2011 - TikTok: 2016 Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.
  - singpolyma3 2y ago
    Neither slack nor zoom did anything new or interesting. Just a clone of stable tech that worked out in marketing
    - baby_souffle 2y ago
      Maybe they didn't have innovative functionality initially but the user experience was certainly better. Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together convenient apis on top of IRC...
      - entropicdrifter 2y ago
        Right, so iterations that ate up the old-school competition, not revolutions
        brookst 2y ago
        What was the last major tech company that was a revolution and not mere iteration?
        samrus 2y ago
        Maybe Netflix?
        brookst 2y ago
        That’s a good one. Which suggests Amazon as well; similar revolution in distribution and scale. But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.
        entropicdrifter 2y ago
        Netflix and Amazon were the first to effectively scale their revolutions up to mainstream accessibility that made them clearly superior to the competition. You could say they brought already-simmering revolutions to boil. Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings
    - zombiwoof 2y ago
      Slack was skype
      - kulahan 2y ago
        Absolutely not. Skype figured out how to build an integrated login experience. Every morning using slack I keep having to remind myself it’s not early FOSS!
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord
  - morkalork 2y ago
    According to Wikipedia, Discord is 2015, Only Fans and TikTok are 2016. I'm as surprised as you are, I'd like to be proven wrong here!
  - forgetfreeman 2y ago
    But these are all marketing wins. The underlying technology (let people post shit and talk to one another) had been stable for like a decade before they came along.
    - daedrdev 2y ago
      No, they are product development wins. Discord is far more popular than alternatives because they provide a far superior product that also has many normal features that their competition somehow fails on, like voice chat, video chat, steaming, images and videos in chat that don't disappear, spam protection and good moderator tools, etc.
      - kulahan 2y ago
        It’s an incredibly buggy experience with a user interface that fails many basic design cues (like not hiding things until you mouse over, not making the friends list icon inexplicably identical to a server icon and also the add server icon, etc.) It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.
    - emseetech 2y ago
      | The underlying technology ... had been stable That's my point. There are still creative ways we can use or improve stable technology to build new consumer applications. I'm not seeing much creativity lately.
- quantified 2y ago
  Tiktok was released in its current form in 2017, I believe. Is that before the period you're asking about?
- pedalpete 2y ago
  I think this is the cycle. Take a look at the S curve, things move in jumps with leveling out/adaption periods in between.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  There’s a lot of B2B stuff. How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it. Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.
Macha 2y ago
Honestly even before it was AI, it felt like everything was blockchain or "Uber for X". The majority of startups have been trend chasing for a while.
- baby_souffle 2y ago
  To a broader extent isn't this kind of the history of silicon valley ever since the dot com bubble? For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit... I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...
  - bradlys 2y ago
    This is exactly how Silicon Valley works because this is how investors work. Investors aren’t really looking for true innovation - they’re looking for an idea that will let the next sucker take the hit. When one company is doing very well, clearly there’s some suckers out there buying the stock. Therefore, if we have a stock that is similar then maybe we can also get suckers to buy the stock. That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is. Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return. There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
    - maccard 2y ago
      > You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return. > There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end. I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that. What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.
sho_hn 2y ago
Honestly, as a guy working in open source at the time, the massive brain drain when crypto came along and young people wanted to get rich instead of solving problems was increadibly dispiriting and frustrating. Seen in comparison, the AI stuff has a much bigger application space, is building tools, and is far less frustrating to me.
- nicbou 2y ago
  Not only get rich, but do so in the least productive, most destructive way imaginable.
  - boringg 2y ago
    Totally vapid class of people working in there minus a few notables.
bamboozled 2y ago
I wonder...what sort of world changing apps do you think we're expecting to see? I think about it quite often and there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.
- UncleOxidant 2y ago
  And human attention is a limited resource that just might be tapped out at this point.
- Bukhmanizer 2y ago
  > there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy. There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to. But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.
  - YetAnotherNick 2y ago
    It takes lot more than 5 years for people to recognize the need and the product to deliver. It took desktops and smartphones and internet decades before it got out of "I don't need it" zone. Now you need it. Even robot vacuum was there for decades.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Driver assist technology has been a pretty amazing improvement, but it's also getting "old".
pram 2y ago
How quickly we forgot the “Web 3” revolution!
- jongjong 2y ago
  Well it was a scam. The ultimate scam. Literally, they only supported scams and suppressed projects with real potential. I say that as someone who worked in the space and saw it turn into a scam... Started back in 2017.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Ultimate, you say? I think the future for scams is looking bright. Scams will one day look back at web 3 and reminisce about their quaint beginnings.
    - jongjong 2y ago
      Ah yes I exaggerated there. The global debt-fueled fiat monetary ponzi is the ultimate scam, crypto just plays a supporting role in giving people false hope that you can fix corruption with corruption.
  - kulahan 2y ago
    So who is this specter that somehow and for some reason killed off all useful projects and made sure there was no way to even exploit it for unscrupulous profit?

morkalork 2y ago

It feels like we ran out in the first decade since the iPhone (2007-2017) and have been running on fumes since. Can you name some world changing consumer app or company outside of AI fluff that came to be in that post 2017 to end of 2022 period when chatgpt was released?

AbstractH24 2y ago
Slack, Zoom, TikTok And those are just off the top of my head
- robenkleene 2y ago
  Those all predate 2017: - Slack: 2013 - Zoom: 2011 - TikTok: 2016 Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.
- singpolyma3 2y ago
  Neither slack nor zoom did anything new or interesting. Just a clone of stable tech that worked out in marketing
  - baby_souffle 2y ago
    Maybe they didn't have innovative functionality initially but the user experience was certainly better. Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together convenient apis on top of IRC...
    - entropicdrifter 2y ago
      Right, so iterations that ate up the old-school competition, not revolutions
      - brookst 2y ago
        What was the last major tech company that was a revolution and not mere iteration?
        samrus 2y ago
        Maybe Netflix?
        brookst 2y ago
        That’s a good one. Which suggests Amazon as well; similar revolution in distribution and scale. But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.
        entropicdrifter 2y ago
        Netflix and Amazon were the first to effectively scale their revolutions up to mainstream accessibility that made them clearly superior to the competition. You could say they brought already-simmering revolutions to boil. Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings
  - zombiwoof 2y ago
    Slack was skype
    - kulahan 2y ago
      Absolutely not. Skype figured out how to build an integrated login experience. Every morning using slack I keep having to remind myself it’s not early FOSS!
KoolKat23 2y ago
Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord
- morkalork 2y ago
  According to Wikipedia, Discord is 2015, Only Fans and TikTok are 2016. I'm as surprised as you are, I'd like to be proven wrong here!
- forgetfreeman 2y ago
  But these are all marketing wins. The underlying technology (let people post shit and talk to one another) had been stable for like a decade before they came along.
  - daedrdev 2y ago
    No, they are product development wins. Discord is far more popular than alternatives because they provide a far superior product that also has many normal features that their competition somehow fails on, like voice chat, video chat, steaming, images and videos in chat that don't disappear, spam protection and good moderator tools, etc.
    - kulahan 2y ago
      It’s an incredibly buggy experience with a user interface that fails many basic design cues (like not hiding things until you mouse over, not making the friends list icon inexplicably identical to a server icon and also the add server icon, etc.) It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.
  - emseetech 2y ago
    | The underlying technology ... had been stable That's my point. There are still creative ways we can use or improve stable technology to build new consumer applications. I'm not seeing much creativity lately.
quantified 2y ago
Tiktok was released in its current form in 2017, I believe. Is that before the period you're asking about?
pedalpete 2y ago
I think this is the cycle. Take a look at the S curve, things move in jumps with leveling out/adaption periods in between.
Spooky23 2y ago
There’s a lot of B2B stuff. How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it. Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.

Macha 2y ago

Honestly even before it was AI, it felt like everything was blockchain or "Uber for X". The majority of startups have been trend chasing for a while.

baby_souffle 2y ago
To a broader extent isn't this kind of the history of silicon valley ever since the dot com bubble? For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit... I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...
- bradlys 2y ago
  This is exactly how Silicon Valley works because this is how investors work. Investors aren’t really looking for true innovation - they’re looking for an idea that will let the next sucker take the hit. When one company is doing very well, clearly there’s some suckers out there buying the stock. Therefore, if we have a stock that is similar then maybe we can also get suckers to buy the stock. That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is. Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return. There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
  - maccard 2y ago
    > You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return. > There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end. I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that. What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.

sho_hn 2y ago

Honestly, as a guy working in open source at the time, the massive brain drain when crypto came along and young people wanted to get rich instead of solving problems was increadibly dispiriting and frustrating. Seen in comparison, the AI stuff has a much bigger application space, is building tools, and is far less frustrating to me.

nicbou 2y ago
Not only get rich, but do so in the least productive, most destructive way imaginable.
- boringg 2y ago
  Totally vapid class of people working in there minus a few notables.

bamboozled 2y ago

I wonder...what sort of world changing apps do you think we're expecting to see? I think about it quite often and there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.

UncleOxidant 2y ago
And human attention is a limited resource that just might be tapped out at this point.
Bukhmanizer 2y ago
> there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy. There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to. But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  It takes lot more than 5 years for people to recognize the need and the product to deliver. It took desktops and smartphones and internet decades before it got out of "I don't need it" zone. Now you need it. Even robot vacuum was there for decades.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Driver assist technology has been a pretty amazing improvement, but it's also getting "old".

pram 2y ago

How quickly we forgot the “Web 3” revolution!

jongjong 2y ago
Well it was a scam. The ultimate scam. Literally, they only supported scams and suppressed projects with real potential. I say that as someone who worked in the space and saw it turn into a scam... Started back in 2017.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Ultimate, you say? I think the future for scams is looking bright. Scams will one day look back at web 3 and reminisce about their quaint beginnings.
  - jongjong 2y ago
    Ah yes I exaggerated there. The global debt-fueled fiat monetary ponzi is the ultimate scam, crypto just plays a supporting role in giving people false hope that you can fix corruption with corruption.
- kulahan 2y ago
  So who is this specter that somehow and for some reason killed off all useful projects and made sure there was no way to even exploit it for unscrupulous profit?