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Comment by tubalcain | Hacker News Reader

I suppose we could also frame the question as which tech companies and industries will NOT do well during the recession.

I think that streaming services will not do well. People will return to torrenting and piracy. Same with crypto trading platforms. Basically any place where Joe Average can't afford to spend more than he has on hand. Tesla will see a big drop too, as people will cash out to buy their groceries.

As for what will: free for the end user services that get by on ad revenue and data mining. Alphabet, Facebook, stuff like that.

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I would disagree - when average Joe loses his job due to a recession they are going to need some form of entertainment to fill their now wide-open schedule. People here might find torrenting and piracy pretty trivial but the average Joe is going to find it a much bigger hurdle than simply logging into Netflix and pressing go.

But how does average Joe pay for the account, if the prices for groceries, electricity, heating and transportation explode? If things go really south, average joe will be happy if he can afford food and heat his rented flat at least a little bit in winter.

We already know that governments are likely to just start throwing loads money in every direction if they believe that things are going to go ‘really south’.

He probably will keep paying for a single service he really likes and share it with a bunch of people/family and split the costs. But yeah of course if it is between beans and rice and Netflix the person is gonna choose food. But that would be extreme poverty

I think this assumes they can't get food through other programs (unemployment, snap, food bank, etc). They could have their food and Netflix too.

Average Joe will use the cheaper, ad-based plan that Netflix is working on.

He'll finance it with credit card debt.

I agree with you. The rational HNer thinks of course streaming services should be the first to go when money gets tight. But people don't behave rationally.

The cord-cutting trend didn't really kick off during the depths of the Great Recession, but in the years after when better online alternatives came around.

I agree most people won’t turn to privacy. I still think streaming services like Netflix will take a massive hit though, not because people are turning to privacy but because the market is saturated and people have lots of different streaming subscriptions. If a recession hits, I think it’s unlikely every user cancels all their subscriptions, but many will likely reduce the number to just one or two. For some people, they might axe Disney+ and keep Netflix. Others may opt for Hulu and get rid of Netflix. I think virtually all of them will see a sizable loss of subscribers.

> ad revenue and data mining

Ad spend will go down when companies have less to sell.

> I think that streaming services will not do well.

Entertainment does well in time of recession. People want to take their minds off their problems.

Most people do not know how to pirate films. Piracy won't be a huge deal.

Netflix is losing out to Disney and HBO. Traditional media caught up and pulled the plug, and great content has never been a core part of Netflix's DNA. They're more algorithmic than taste makers, and unfortunately they've got a low dimensional projection of what people really want.

Torrenting and piracy will do well in part because streaming on Netflix now sucks compared to what it was 10 years ago.

Whether Tesla does well depends on partly why the recession occurs. Persistent high energy costs can cause recessions, but high gasoline costs benefit Tesla.

If Tesla wasn't a luxury car brand, maybe.

Most people will go for cheaper electric cars, which aren't plentiful but do exist.

The three cars OEMs are capable of producing have already been accounted for.

AI/ML is a bit of a wildcard for me.

On the one hand, I’m certain many companies will be eager cut costs through automation. On the other, investors will likely grow cold if the results just can’t live up to the hype fast enough.

And the hype won’t deliver fast enough. What has not been automated today will not be automated (robustly) in two years time.

There is hype and then there is practical ML which is integrated and working in lots and lots of companies today

The results are living up. ML is integrated into the core of so many companies at this point it’s not like it was 10 years ago. ML is here to stay and it will be almost the entire economy in the not to distant future

I think the results are mixed. I don’t think anyone is claiming ML will die off. But in my own experience, for every company with a healthy ML environment, there are dozens that are kind of just throwing money and data around without much success, or without even the type of problems ML can solve. And at many companies that do have a solid ML use case, you often have teams of data scientists looking to find new projects that justify their existence because the maintenance of existing ML products doesn’t take up capacity.

ML will always be around, but it’s also definitely in a bubble right now in my opinion and there will likely be a contraction before the profession matures and gets to a healthy place.

Thats fair, everything is in a bit of a free money bubble right now. And yeah I've seen team looking for ML solutions that didn't really have any.

I’m in ML and looking to pivot to web dev due to this. My personal view is that ML is in the midst of its own dot-com bubble. There are plenty of valid use cases for ML currently, but on the whole it’s a solution in search of a problem, and a bit of a figurehead at most companies who are at the very least wanting to use ML/AI/data driven in marketing materials. If a serious recession hits, I think a lot of these companies will make the realization these initiatives aren’t worth much to them and cut their losses.

Eventually the field will stabilize in a much healthier place, but only after some dark days.

My guess is you haven't worked anywhere where ML is a part of the core product. think e.g. search and recommendations.

I have. But at that job we got the ML system to a very solid state where it simply became a matter of maintenance. That didn’t require a whole lot of time, which meant people started looking for other ways to use ML, unsuccessfully, to justify keeping themselves around.

Torrenting is really inconvenient compared to streaming. Yes I had a Plex server set up that I could use from anywhere. It isn’t worth the hassle.

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