8 ms·

Stupid Apps and Changing the World

73 points by dmnd 12y ago

quaunaut 12y ago
Kinda exactly what I needed this week. Every time I go on HN, Reddit, really much of anywhere all I see are people bitching and moaning about the most inane things, criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced. The last paragraph is important. As much as I've enjoyed being on HN the past few years, and Reddit the past 8, I'm fairly close to swearing myself off of them entirely so I can focus better without rampant discouragement for the sake of the commenter's ego.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  > criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced. The inverse, where everything is positive and criticism is ignored, is just as bad, if not worse. The fact that we may not be able to predict the next big thing does not give everything immunity from critique.
  - quaunaut 12y ago
    There's a pretty obvious difference though between criticism for the sake of stroking your own ego, and criticism as a means of trying to better a product or legitimately point out its flaws. One introduces better conversation, another one is crowding around something to be kicked.
    - StandardFuture 12y ago
      I believe it's called: Constructive Criticism.
eliben 12y ago
I'm having a hard time understanding what he means by "hyperexponential". If N grows exponentially and there's some function of N that's O(N^2), it's still exponential. He can't mean the hyperexponential probability distribution, that's something different.
- minimaxir 12y ago
  Hyperexponential I would assume is an order of magnitude higher than exponential. Although if I remember my video game terminology correctly, the proper hierarchy is exponential, then superexponential, then hyperexponential.
- idlewords 12y ago
  I think it means he can't math.
- tdaltonc 12y ago
  I think he's pointing either to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function
  - gipp 12y ago
    Neither of these are applicable to the situation he described, though.
- sama 12y ago
  combo of a n^2 and 2^n function--i think non-US english speakers call it a double-exponential function.
- pzxc 12y ago
  I think he was using that word not as a technical term, but as a way of saying "even faster/sharper than exponential". I.e., hyper- (the prefix meaning above) + exponential. Certainly O(N^2) is not at the top of the food chain -- for example, it is beaten by O(2^N) or O(N!) or O(N^N). All of these could, colloquially, be referred to as "hyper"exponential. Imagine a hockey stick graph (exponential). Now imagine that hockey stick graphed on a logarithmic scale -- the logarithms more or less cancel out the exponentiation if done right, making the graph appear to be linear even though the data is exponential. Now, imagine data that, even when graphed on a logarithmic scale, still looks like a hockey stick. That is hyperexponential. And I think I just proved Sam's point -- that it is hard to visualize/grok.
adamzerner 12y ago
> Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out. With the exception of the internet itself, I think they still are. Are we really that much happier with our social media and iPhones than we are without them? I think that for the most part, the answer is no. Most use is superficial and procrastination rather than meaningful connection with people. Check out The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. He talks about how we've made all of this "progress" in our standard of living, but that it isn't actually making us happier. However, I agree with the central idea that "toys" are often dismissed prematurely.
- finishingmove 12y ago
  Spot on. Capitalism generally is all about the illusion of progress, rather than real progress.
  - cglace 12y ago
    And what is real progress? Do you define it?
    - candu 12y ago
      More importantly: can you measure it?
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        It's harder, though it is correlated with profit, so that's why we could be using it as a proxy and get away with it for so long.
        pinkyand 12y ago
        There's a long debate whether profit correlate with value. The simple example the rise in GDP due to car accidents.
finishingmove 12y ago
"Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out." So, are Facebook and the iPhone bettering the world right now?
- tannerc 12y ago
  In many ways, yes. In foreign countries (not first world), Facebook has persisted as a primary means of communication; including finding lost relatives or friends and connecting people who have lost someone or something during catastrophic events. There's a lot of additional ways other countries are using the technology that we, here in the US, haven't dreamed of: setting up stores and selling things via Instagram, forming action groups and protest events on Facebook, etc. The iPhone helps in many of those same instances, by connecting people to resources and other individuals. Can there be simpler ways to accomplish the same goals? Absolutely! But the argument isn't to say these technologies are the be-all end-all. Instead, the point is to make it clear that these technologies can absolutely do good for the world if used to do so. Just because you and I use Facebook to stalk our exes doesn't mean it's a useless tool for good.
ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
Why would we blame Silicon Valley for this? Silicon Valley largely builds problems that solve issues for Silicon Valley. This isn't a bad thing, it just means that we have to decentralize the concentration of developers and entrepreneurs from one concentrated physical location. If only there were a way for people to communicate at large distances with each other in an interconnected way....like a network of devices or something.
gamesurgeon 12y ago
If you build something you love, chances are someone else will love it, too. If you use something you love, chances are someone else will love it to. Incremental things that we love can spread like wild fire (Facebook, Twitter, and reddit), and they have changed the world; further incremental products will likely do so, too. ...An interesting discussion is whether these things we love make the world a better place. Another interesting discussion is if engineers and entrepreneurs focus too much on the things we love instead of the things the world needs.
- grossvogel 12y ago
  Yes. It's easy to argue that Facebook has changed the world, but that's not inherently good or worthwhile. We could stand to pay more attention to direction of the impact, not just the magnitude.
pinkyand 12y ago
While there are many useless critics, i wonder - was it really that hard to imagine Facebook("the identity layer of the web"),Reddit("democratic news"),The internet("duh") or smartphones("The versatility of computing, everywhere") becoming valuable under the condition that everybody uses them ? Doesn't seem so. But there are many apps, that even under that condition, that it would be hard to imagine any unique value over what we have today, And do warrant criticism .
- scott_s 12y ago
  I think you're suffering from hindsight bias. Less than two years ago, I was still explaining to people that the emergence of online social networks is a Big Deal.
  - pinkyand 12y ago
    This is not hindsight. At the beginning of those products, at least some people described it that way.
    - scott_s 12y ago
      Based on the content of the article, and you language you used, I assumed you were wondering if it really was hard for most people to imagine the impact of things like Facebook, Reddit, smartphones and the internet. Not that there was a small number of people who did, but most people. And for all of those technologies, I think the answer is, yes, it was hard for most people.
      - pinkyand 12y ago
        When reading the article , i was thinking more about the criticisms we hear at hacker news. People here are not "most people" and can have vision, but still there's a lot of criticisms about useless apps. But maybe i read the article wrong.
rvn1045 12y ago
> Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact. Couldn't this just be explained with power laws? Some small percentage of companies will have a disproportionate share of the impact.
sayemm 12y ago
This reminds me of one of PG's old essays, "The Power of the Marginal" - http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html People never see disruption coming and by its very nature, the best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked, by insiders early on. And probably the same is true of the founders behind them. WhatsApp and Jan Koum are perfect examples of this.
- idlewords 12y ago
  "The best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked" is a tautology.
rvn1045 12y ago
I think the real issue is not that these companies might not be changing the world, but rather that a lot of these companies don't have sustainable business models.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  That't a feature, not a bug. It all makes sense when you realize that the "products" are all throwaway, their only reason to exist is to get many people onboard fast, so that the company can be sold for lots of money (the product usually gets killed at this point; users are only score, why would anyone care about them anway).
larrik 12y ago
Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).
- gfodor 12y ago
  Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.
  - giarc 12y ago
    OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.
    - larrik 12y ago
      I remember it, but I also remember Twitter's contribution to it be largely overblown PR.
- tdaltonc 12y ago
  I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.
- pachydermic 12y ago
  I think its more about the magnitude of innovation. Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does. I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language. The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows. Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker. And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves? I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.
StandardFuture 12y ago
The value of a piece of tech is not determined by the number of users, but by a change in the quality-of-life a user of the technology receives. Meaning "value" varies from individual to individual. Companies should focus on the individuals that they bring the most value too. Probably what pisses people off about the "arrogance" of companies like Facebook is in their claims of bringing value to everyone (who uses their product -- and sometimes beyond). Which is not true (and is arrogant/obnoxious). Also, Facebook is not the only company to have this attitude. Companies building something for the long-term are certainly not claiming value for anyone in the present (SpaceX is not claiming to be significant in your life now). But once their inventions (rockets, cures, transportation, etc.) are actually bringing benefits to the mass majority of humanity, then they have the right to brag. But, the climatic 'era of benefit' from an invention usually comes after the inventors/founders have died. Edison's and Tesla's ambitions bring far more value today then they did in their time. On the other hand, Facebook will very likely 'die as a fad' within 5-10 years. In other words, the greatest figures/companies (should) appear very humble in their day. So did Facebook change humanity? Did Reddit change Humanity? Yes, they are a temporary perturbation on the 'average state of human condition' over the grand scale of time. But, other inventions bring much longer-lasting benefits/changes to a greater number of people. Those are the inventions that people classify as truly "changing the world". Those are the inventions that should be worked on more so than the 'perturbative' & temporary world changers. We are not seeing that. It's a reflection on the abysmal failures of humanity (in its entirety) rather than on any sub-set (Silicon Valley) or individual.
coldtea 12y ago
>People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter Not really. And the counter-examples he gives either didn't look trivial at first (the iPhone: actually everyone gapsed upon its introduction), or aren't really "world changing" (Facebook, Twitter: just some social networks). As for the "Arab Spring" thing. Revolutions happened all the time without them. There were huge movements and shakedowns throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, including in the Arab world (Iranian revolution anyone?). It's mostly Silicon Valley and western media bullshitting that made some believe Twitter et co role in Egypt etc was "crucial". Plus it's easy to make starts out of the few Egyptians who tweet etc, and are usually of the more affluent and easier to talk to the press classes).
- Smudge 12y ago
  By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Things that seem truly revolutionary are, more often than not, incremental changes on previous ideas that were easier to miss. As such, many movements and uprisings may be largely inevitable, and probably aren't the result of individual products like Facebook and Twitter, because they could've happened without them. But that line of thinking is COMPLETELY missing the forest for the trees. The world changes exactly because of such products -- specifically, because of the confluence of every idea and product up until that point in history. The Arab Spring may have been largely inevitable, but it was spurred by everything leading up to it, including the advent of social networks as a new communication platform.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Only I never made such an argument. Email and the internet (www) for example were truly important.
    - Smudge 12y ago
      Pshaw, those were just some protocols built on top of a network.
d--b 12y ago
It's not about the amount of change one is bringing, it's about the arrogance. It's about giving oneself more importance than anyone else. It's about believing that what you shitcode is golden
TomSattel 12y ago
Facebook, Twitter, reddit are still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I have those things and they didn't. The internet isn't trivial but I wouldn't say that my life is SO MUCH BETTER because I have internet. My parents did great without internet.
- candu 12y ago
  "Farming is still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I grow food instead of hunting for it. My parents did great as hunter-gatherers."
  - TomSattel 12y ago
    Hunter gatherers had violent lives, experienced starvation and died in their thirties. So it's not a fair comparison.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      They also had happy lives, didn't have to slave themselves for 2/3 of their lives to get food and shelter, and no, they didn't die in their thirties, they lived as long as we do. Oh, and also they didn't have so many diseases - it's another thing we got from settling down and becoming agrarian.
      - TomSattel 12y ago
        The point is, just because we have reddit and facebook now doesn't mean we're all just so much better off. The contribution of those products to our lives is rather trivial. Even the internet, while it's very impressive and useful and interesting, has not made everyone in our generation better off. It's cool to have but like I said, my parents and grandparents were fine without it. In fact they were probably more fine than many of technologically most advanced people on this forum.
        TeMPOraL 12y ago
hagope 12y ago
>build something that some people love but most people think is a toy best quote...
- general_failure 12y ago
  dildo fits the description :)
  - beenpoor 12y ago
    I just donno man..this is easily the funniest comment in a long time.
6nne 12y ago
Why is it that intermediate companies do not end up having a big impact? And what are some examples of such companies?
- oskarth 12y ago
  The overly ambitious aren't expected to succeed, and the frivolous aren't seen as amounting to anything. What they both have in common is that - when they work - they come as surprises, and surprises means you've probably discovered something new. Middle-of-the-ground companies are more predictable in a sense, less likely to stumble upon something new, and thus less likely to have a big impact.
roymurdock 12y ago
I've got a few bones to pick with this post. 1. Its main message, "build things you love" and "let the haters hate" seems to be pretty well-worn at this point. There was no value added in the way it was conveyed (no personal story, no anecdotes, no real insights). In fact, there was value subtracted by the jarring, undeveloped thoughts and the use of profanity that was censored in the original story on Businessweek. 2. I don't think anyone dismissed the internet or the iPhone as "incremental" or "trivial" when they first came out. Especially not in the way we often wonder about services like Snapchat and Secret. This seems like quite a silly comparison to me. 3. I don't agree with the idea that the value of a service is solely defined by its user base. User acquisition is only one part of a complex equation. "Hyperexponential growth" is worthless in the long run without a system that can capture and monetize user interest over time. Plenty of fads come and go: -Planking -Swag, #YOLO -Pet Rocks -Livestrong Bracelets -Pets.com (symptom of the .com investing fad) My opinion is that these fads add very little value relative to advances in healthcare, infrastructure, education, and technology that have made quantifiable progress towards a better quality of life for billions of people all over the world. Fads are like tumors that grow off of cultural and psychological excess.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
It's actually quite simple - Silicon Valley nowdays is an engine of money making, not technological progress. Those two values are correlated with each other, albeit not perfecly, and I'd hazard a guess that they are becoming more and more disconnected. So SV is optimizing for profit, and it's easier to make money by doing stupid throwaway stuff than by doing something actually useful. Also things seem to have changed in the last few years; profit and usefulness are becoming visibly more disconnected. Startups nowdays lie about their "products" - the goal of New App X is not to be useful for you (the user/customer). Any actual use is a lie used to get userbase growth. When the "product" has enough users, it gets slaughtered, the team lands dream jobs, money changes hands, and everyone except the users is happy.
- FD3SA 12y ago
  Meant to upvote you but may have fudged it. You've hit the nail precisely on the head. SV is now a well oiled machine for taking ideas and turning them into money for investors via IPOs. Technology and "saving the world" have got nothing to do with it, other than being convenient tools and marketing to achieve the primary goal of money making.
fred_durst 12y ago
There is this funny thing about progress that I think about sometimes. Most old people I've spoken too say that things were better when they were young. They also say that things are easier now. Sometimes I wonder if that is the disconnect technologists don't quite grasp.

73 points by dmnd 12y ago

Kinda exactly what I needed this week. Every time I go on HN, Reddit, really much of anywhere all I see are people bitching and moaning about the most inane things, criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced. The last paragraph is important. As much as I've enjoyed being on HN the past few years, and Reddit the past 8, I'm fairly close to swearing myself off of them entirely so I can focus better without rampant discouragement for the sake of the commenter's ego.

minimaxir 12y ago
> criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced. The inverse, where everything is positive and criticism is ignored, is just as bad, if not worse. The fact that we may not be able to predict the next big thing does not give everything immunity from critique.
- quaunaut 12y ago
  There's a pretty obvious difference though between criticism for the sake of stroking your own ego, and criticism as a means of trying to better a product or legitimately point out its flaws. One introduces better conversation, another one is crowding around something to be kicked.
  - StandardFuture 12y ago
    I believe it's called: Constructive Criticism.

eliben 12y ago

I'm having a hard time understanding what he means by "hyperexponential". If N grows exponentially and there's some function of N that's O(N^2), it's still exponential. He can't mean the hyperexponential probability distribution, that's something different.

minimaxir 12y ago
Hyperexponential I would assume is an order of magnitude higher than exponential. Although if I remember my video game terminology correctly, the proper hierarchy is exponential, then superexponential, then hyperexponential.
idlewords 12y ago
I think it means he can't math.
tdaltonc 12y ago
I think he's pointing either to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function
- gipp 12y ago
  Neither of these are applicable to the situation he described, though.
sama 12y ago
combo of a n^2 and 2^n function--i think non-US english speakers call it a double-exponential function.
pzxc 12y ago
I think he was using that word not as a technical term, but as a way of saying "even faster/sharper than exponential". I.e., hyper- (the prefix meaning above) + exponential. Certainly O(N^2) is not at the top of the food chain -- for example, it is beaten by O(2^N) or O(N!) or O(N^N). All of these could, colloquially, be referred to as "hyper"exponential. Imagine a hockey stick graph (exponential). Now imagine that hockey stick graphed on a logarithmic scale -- the logarithms more or less cancel out the exponentiation if done right, making the graph appear to be linear even though the data is exponential. Now, imagine data that, even when graphed on a logarithmic scale, still looks like a hockey stick. That is hyperexponential. And I think I just proved Sam's point -- that it is hard to visualize/grok.

adamzerner 12y ago

> Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out. With the exception of the internet itself, I think they still are. Are we really that much happier with our social media and iPhones than we are without them? I think that for the most part, the answer is no. Most use is superficial and procrastination rather than meaningful connection with people. Check out The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. He talks about how we've made all of this "progress" in our standard of living, but that it isn't actually making us happier. However, I agree with the central idea that "toys" are often dismissed prematurely.

finishingmove 12y ago
Spot on. Capitalism generally is all about the illusion of progress, rather than real progress.
- cglace 12y ago
  And what is real progress? Do you define it?
  - candu 12y ago
    More importantly: can you measure it?
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      It's harder, though it is correlated with profit, so that's why we could be using it as a proxy and get away with it for so long.
      - pinkyand 12y ago
        There's a long debate whether profit correlate with value. The simple example the rise in GDP due to car accidents.

finishingmove 12y ago

"Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out." So, are Facebook and the iPhone bettering the world right now?

tannerc 12y ago
In many ways, yes. In foreign countries (not first world), Facebook has persisted as a primary means of communication; including finding lost relatives or friends and connecting people who have lost someone or something during catastrophic events. There's a lot of additional ways other countries are using the technology that we, here in the US, haven't dreamed of: setting up stores and selling things via Instagram, forming action groups and protest events on Facebook, etc. The iPhone helps in many of those same instances, by connecting people to resources and other individuals. Can there be simpler ways to accomplish the same goals? Absolutely! But the argument isn't to say these technologies are the be-all end-all. Instead, the point is to make it clear that these technologies can absolutely do good for the world if used to do so. Just because you and I use Facebook to stalk our exes doesn't mean it's a useless tool for good.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago

Why would we blame Silicon Valley for this? Silicon Valley largely builds problems that solve issues for Silicon Valley. This isn't a bad thing, it just means that we have to decentralize the concentration of developers and entrepreneurs from one concentrated physical location. If only there were a way for people to communicate at large distances with each other in an interconnected way....like a network of devices or something.

gamesurgeon 12y ago

If you build something you love, chances are someone else will love it, too. If you use something you love, chances are someone else will love it to. Incremental things that we love can spread like wild fire (Facebook, Twitter, and reddit), and they have changed the world; further incremental products will likely do so, too. ...An interesting discussion is whether these things we love make the world a better place. Another interesting discussion is if engineers and entrepreneurs focus too much on the things we love instead of the things the world needs.

grossvogel 12y ago
Yes. It's easy to argue that Facebook has changed the world, but that's not inherently good or worthwhile. We could stand to pay more attention to direction of the impact, not just the magnitude.

pinkyand 12y ago

While there are many useless critics, i wonder - was it really that hard to imagine Facebook("the identity layer of the web"),Reddit("democratic news"),The internet("duh") or smartphones("The versatility of computing, everywhere") becoming valuable under the condition that everybody uses them ? Doesn't seem so. But there are many apps, that even under that condition, that it would be hard to imagine any unique value over what we have today, And do warrant criticism .

scott_s 12y ago
I think you're suffering from hindsight bias. Less than two years ago, I was still explaining to people that the emergence of online social networks is a Big Deal.
- pinkyand 12y ago
  This is not hindsight. At the beginning of those products, at least some people described it that way.
  - scott_s 12y ago
    Based on the content of the article, and you language you used, I assumed you were wondering if it really was hard for most people to imagine the impact of things like Facebook, Reddit, smartphones and the internet. Not that there was a small number of people who did, but most people. And for all of those technologies, I think the answer is, yes, it was hard for most people.
    - pinkyand 12y ago
      When reading the article , i was thinking more about the criticisms we hear at hacker news. People here are not "most people" and can have vision, but still there's a lot of criticisms about useless apps. But maybe i read the article wrong.

rvn1045 12y ago

> Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact. Couldn't this just be explained with power laws? Some small percentage of companies will have a disproportionate share of the impact.

sayemm 12y ago

This reminds me of one of PG's old essays, "The Power of the Marginal" - http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html People never see disruption coming and by its very nature, the best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked, by insiders early on. And probably the same is true of the founders behind them. WhatsApp and Jan Koum are perfect examples of this.

idlewords 12y ago
"The best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked" is a tautology.

rvn1045 12y ago

I think the real issue is not that these companies might not be changing the world, but rather that a lot of these companies don't have sustainable business models.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
That't a feature, not a bug. It all makes sense when you realize that the "products" are all throwaway, their only reason to exist is to get many people onboard fast, so that the company can be sold for lots of money (the product usually gets killed at this point; users are only score, why would anyone care about them anway).

larrik 12y ago

Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).

gfodor 12y ago
Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.
- giarc 12y ago
  OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.
  - larrik 12y ago
    I remember it, but I also remember Twitter's contribution to it be largely overblown PR.
tdaltonc 12y ago
I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.
pachydermic 12y ago
I think its more about the magnitude of innovation. Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does. I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language. The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows. Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker. And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves? I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.

StandardFuture 12y ago

The value of a piece of tech is not determined by the number of users, but by a change in the quality-of-life a user of the technology receives. Meaning "value" varies from individual to individual. Companies should focus on the individuals that they bring the most value too. Probably what pisses people off about the "arrogance" of companies like Facebook is in their claims of bringing value to everyone (who uses their product -- and sometimes beyond). Which is not true (and is arrogant/obnoxious). Also, Facebook is not the only company to have this attitude. Companies building something for the long-term are certainly not claiming value for anyone in the present (SpaceX is not claiming to be significant in your life now). But once their inventions (rockets, cures, transportation, etc.) are actually bringing benefits to the mass majority of humanity, then they have the right to brag. But, the climatic 'era of benefit' from an invention usually comes after the inventors/founders have died. Edison's and Tesla's ambitions bring far more value today then they did in their time. On the other hand, Facebook will very likely 'die as a fad' within 5-10 years. In other words, the greatest figures/companies (should) appear very humble in their day. So did Facebook change humanity? Did Reddit change Humanity? Yes, they are a temporary perturbation on the 'average state of human condition' over the grand scale of time. But, other inventions bring much longer-lasting benefits/changes to a greater number of people. Those are the inventions that people classify as truly "changing the world". Those are the inventions that should be worked on more so than the 'perturbative' & temporary world changers. We are not seeing that. It's a reflection on the abysmal failures of humanity (in its entirety) rather than on any sub-set (Silicon Valley) or individual.

coldtea 12y ago

>People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter Not really. And the counter-examples he gives either didn't look trivial at first (the iPhone: actually everyone gapsed upon its introduction), or aren't really "world changing" (Facebook, Twitter: just some social networks). As for the "Arab Spring" thing. Revolutions happened all the time without them. There were huge movements and shakedowns throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, including in the Arab world (Iranian revolution anyone?). It's mostly Silicon Valley and western media bullshitting that made some believe Twitter et co role in Egypt etc was "crucial". Plus it's easy to make starts out of the few Egyptians who tweet etc, and are usually of the more affluent and easier to talk to the press classes).

Smudge 12y ago
By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Things that seem truly revolutionary are, more often than not, incremental changes on previous ideas that were easier to miss. As such, many movements and uprisings may be largely inevitable, and probably aren't the result of individual products like Facebook and Twitter, because they could've happened without them. But that line of thinking is COMPLETELY missing the forest for the trees. The world changes exactly because of such products -- specifically, because of the confluence of every idea and product up until that point in history. The Arab Spring may have been largely inevitable, but it was spurred by everything leading up to it, including the advent of social networks as a new communication platform.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Only I never made such an argument. Email and the internet (www) for example were truly important.
  - Smudge 12y ago
    Pshaw, those were just some protocols built on top of a network.

d--b 12y ago

It's not about the amount of change one is bringing, it's about the arrogance. It's about giving oneself more importance than anyone else. It's about believing that what you shitcode is golden

TomSattel 12y ago

Facebook, Twitter, reddit are still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I have those things and they didn't. The internet isn't trivial but I wouldn't say that my life is SO MUCH BETTER because I have internet. My parents did great without internet.

candu 12y ago
"Farming is still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I grow food instead of hunting for it. My parents did great as hunter-gatherers."
- TomSattel 12y ago
  Hunter gatherers had violent lives, experienced starvation and died in their thirties. So it's not a fair comparison.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    They also had happy lives, didn't have to slave themselves for 2/3 of their lives to get food and shelter, and no, they didn't die in their thirties, they lived as long as we do. Oh, and also they didn't have so many diseases - it's another thing we got from settling down and becoming agrarian.
    - TomSattel 12y ago
      The point is, just because we have reddit and facebook now doesn't mean we're all just so much better off. The contribution of those products to our lives is rather trivial. Even the internet, while it's very impressive and useful and interesting, has not made everyone in our generation better off. It's cool to have but like I said, my parents and grandparents were fine without it. In fact they were probably more fine than many of technologically most advanced people on this forum.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago

hagope 12y ago

>build something that some people love but most people think is a toy best quote...

general_failure 12y ago
dildo fits the description :)
- beenpoor 12y ago
  I just donno man..this is easily the funniest comment in a long time.

6nne 12y ago

Why is it that intermediate companies do not end up having a big impact? And what are some examples of such companies?

oskarth 12y ago
The overly ambitious aren't expected to succeed, and the frivolous aren't seen as amounting to anything. What they both have in common is that - when they work - they come as surprises, and surprises means you've probably discovered something new. Middle-of-the-ground companies are more predictable in a sense, less likely to stumble upon something new, and thus less likely to have a big impact.

roymurdock 12y ago

I've got a few bones to pick with this post. 1. Its main message, "build things you love" and "let the haters hate" seems to be pretty well-worn at this point. There was no value added in the way it was conveyed (no personal story, no anecdotes, no real insights). In fact, there was value subtracted by the jarring, undeveloped thoughts and the use of profanity that was censored in the original story on Businessweek. 2. I don't think anyone dismissed the internet or the iPhone as "incremental" or "trivial" when they first came out. Especially not in the way we often wonder about services like Snapchat and Secret. This seems like quite a silly comparison to me. 3. I don't agree with the idea that the value of a service is solely defined by its user base. User acquisition is only one part of a complex equation. "Hyperexponential growth" is worthless in the long run without a system that can capture and monetize user interest over time. Plenty of fads come and go: -Planking -Swag, #YOLO -Pet Rocks -Livestrong Bracelets -Pets.com (symptom of the .com investing fad) My opinion is that these fads add very little value relative to advances in healthcare, infrastructure, education, and technology that have made quantifiable progress towards a better quality of life for billions of people all over the world. Fads are like tumors that grow off of cultural and psychological excess.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

It's actually quite simple - Silicon Valley nowdays is an engine of money making, not technological progress. Those two values are correlated with each other, albeit not perfecly, and I'd hazard a guess that they are becoming more and more disconnected. So SV is optimizing for profit, and it's easier to make money by doing stupid throwaway stuff than by doing something actually useful. Also things seem to have changed in the last few years; profit and usefulness are becoming visibly more disconnected. Startups nowdays lie about their "products" - the goal of New App X is not to be useful for you (the user/customer). Any actual use is a lie used to get userbase growth. When the "product" has enough users, it gets slaughtered, the team lands dream jobs, money changes hands, and everyone except the users is happy.

FD3SA 12y ago
Meant to upvote you but may have fudged it. You've hit the nail precisely on the head. SV is now a well oiled machine for taking ideas and turning them into money for investors via IPOs. Technology and "saving the world" have got nothing to do with it, other than being convenient tools and marketing to achieve the primary goal of money making.

fred_durst 12y ago

There is this funny thing about progress that I think about sometimes. Most old people I've spoken too say that things were better when they were young. They also say that things are easier now. Sometimes I wonder if that is the disconnect technologists don't quite grasp.