wpietri

52 ms·

961.
by wpietri 3y ago
It's not free to run a platform. But this is not about platform costs. This is about the standard pre-IPO juicing of the stats to maximize IPO pop, allowing insiders and VCs to sell shares and make bank. People here should understand t
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by wpietri 3y ago
Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub. The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the
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by wpietri 3y ago
Yeah, the way I think of it, the modern dogmas of Increase Shareholder Value and The CEO is Always Right might work for some businesses, but fall down badly when applied to user-generated content. They treat broader stakeholders as both mor
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by wpietri 3y ago
I'd also point out it's not Reddit who wanted a $30 ARPU. It's a small number of Reddit execs and venture capitalists. Reddit, by which I mean its vast user community, does not give a shit about ARPU as long as the site stays
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by wpietri 3y ago
Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's s
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by wpietri 3y ago
I guess I'll kick it off. One thing I've changed my mind on over my career is the practical importance of specific technologies. There are languages I love and languages I think are wet garbage. But when I look at products succeed
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by wpietri 3y ago
Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mod
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by wpietri 3y ago
I talked about this with an architect friend, who also mentioned that at-scale humidification is difficult, expensive, and prone to molding. In thinking about air exchange, it seems like they would have to desiccate the outgoing air and shi
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by wpietri 3y ago
One interesting concern this raises is what this is doing to the housing stock. A well-known problem in cars is that people without much money tend to buy used cars, while those with more buy new. That means that new cars tend to be aimed a
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Ask HN: What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?
13 points by wpietri 3y ago|11 comments
971.
by wpietri 3y ago
Maybe you could trust that these enduringly good humans have decided to do things for reasons that suit them?
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by wpietri 3y ago
Asking you to be more precise where it matters isn't pedantry. The behavior is "perfectly rational" only in the economics sense of that term. On a human scale, we often call it things like "sociopathic". I will also
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by wpietri 3y ago
Formally, that's true. But as we see in the writer's strike, unions definitely try to influence business decisions, and sometimes they succeed.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Unfortunately, it's worse than a tantrum, because it's calculated.
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by wpietri 3y ago
From the article: "The greenhouse is a volunteer affair, and it yields enough for herbs and the occasional salad! It’s also the only place on station with humidity! Since the rest of the station has near-zero humidity, it’s a treat to
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by wpietri 3y ago
I find that a weird comment when he just explained why it was hard.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Sure, but the point is not whether or not the thing has been tried. It's that at McMurdo they haven't tried them.
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by wpietri 3y ago
I agree it's terrible and very American, but I don't think it's recent. There's a good bit in this Backstory podcast where they talk about how part of the shift to sleeping straight through the night (as opposed to the p
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by wpietri 3y ago
I suspect it's too late to stop much of the madness. Reddit took $1.4 billion in VC money, and like mobsters, VCs like to get paid back without much regard to how it happens. Even if the Reddit workers unionized, I suspect that Reddit&
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by wpietri 3y ago
Unions can definitely influence them. E.g., that's a big part of the point of the German Betriebsrat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany
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by wpietri 3y ago
I believe the referenced "lying" is not in the call, but when afterwards he claimed internally that the incorrect understanding was the true one.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Sorry, but "the market" doesn't think anything. That's a category error. If by that you mean something like "VC investors", sure. They are people whose job is trying to turn money into more money while filling
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by wpietri 3y ago
Exactly. I'd argue the true freeloaders at Reddit are the Reddit execs and the venture capitalists squeezing for profits. Everybody here developer here knows they could rebuild Reddit in short order; there's no technology moat. Th
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by wpietri 3y ago
> It is really astounding to see the CEO of Reddit being caught in a blatant lie denigrating a third party developer whose work has done a lot for the platform and who has the ear of a reasonably sized and loud portion of the community.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Again, you seem to be arguing, but I don't see the connection to points I'm actually making.
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by wpietri 3y ago
I understand not everything is perfectly literal. However, your literal point is bad and foolish, and if you were making a different one, it's still not clear what it is. So I'm just going to collapse this discussion believing tha
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by wpietri 3y ago
Thanks! This is a very interesting comment. It definitely stands in contrast to the people suggesting here that monitoring technology usage is easy-peasy.
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by wpietri 3y ago
Ardent crypto fans will of course disagree. They say that you have to really get involved in the space to understand the true potential of smart contacts, defi, DAOs, and many of the other places where active development is happening. Other
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by wpietri 3y ago
You literally did not use a metaphor. You claimed that other people were making comparisons. But a metaphor is just one kind of comparative tool.
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by wpietri 3y ago
It might take time. But we can't assume that. Like 3D movies or 3D TV, it might get pushed for a while on a wave of investor and corporate money before it goes back to being irrelevant. Sometimes a modest success is the harbinger of gr

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