Comment by simi_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simi_ | Hacker News Reader

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And yet nobody sees a problem in creating stupid crap for stupid users and expecting to ~break even~ get rich selling ads.

This reminds me of a recent article [0], where this line stood out:

> “We just introduced an emoji feature and comments are there so you can have conversations, and there’s more stuff in collaborative streaming that we’re going to introduce,” he added.

"We found a new niche and Twitter is trying to bully us out of it, but look, we'll have emoji soon. Comments too, and more social stuff. It's going to be great!" Sorry to cherry-pick Meerkat, they're actually an OK bunch, but that quote just stuck with me.

Add to this silliness how much money/interest is garnered by apps like Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp (actually, arguably solving a real problem), and it's hard to argue we're not in a similarly idiotic bubble to the previous one. Of course, this also creates valuable stuff (my favourite recently being Slack), but I'd be willing to bet that this huge BS-to-usefulness ratio isn't sustainable in the long term.

0: http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/meerkat-founder-on-getting-...

edit: instant downvote - if you don't just disagree with my tone, please explain why you think I'm wrong

edit 2: I'm not saying I have an answer, but at least I tried to pick something that seemed worth doing (I work at Lavaboom, we're trying to make encrypted email easy to use - with extra privacy sprinkled on top)

I think the issue people have with your comment is that you seem to label things you don't use as stupid crap for stupid users. Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp solve a very real problem and are very useful for the hundreds of millions of people that use these services multiple times a day.

It seems that you only label stuff as valuable if it solves problems you have (Slack and Lavaboom).

I'm not a daily Instagram user, but some of my friends love it. They're not dumb, they just get more enjoyment out looking at and sharing pictures of cool shit and their friends.

It seems that you only label stuff as valuable if it solves problems you have

The idea that things that are popular are "solving a problem" is a really bad trend in my opinion. "A problem" is something that has generally identifiable boundaries and detrimental implications if not solved - for example not being able to send someone money is a problem, and one big enough that it warranted the creation of paypal and the like.

I doubt highly that the millions of snapchat users at some point said "If only there were a service that deleted my pictures 10 seconds after I took them."

The major differentiation in my mind between a service that "solves a problem" and another "bullshit service" is whether people are willing to pay for it.

That's not to say you can't get rich off of bullshit, the E! network among others is proof of that, but lets not fool ourselves into thinking these things actually make the world better.

"How do I quickly share pictures without having to worry to much about them sticking around" is the problem snapchat claimed to solve (and does a reasonable job of solving, despite obvious limitations).

People might have actually been willing to pay for that, but if you charge money from the beginning for this kind of thing, someone else just offers it for free and tries to monetize it after they got all "your" customers.

"How do I quickly share pictures without having to worry to much about them sticking around"

See, to me that falls into the "problems I didn't know I had" - like for example a lack of a terra cotta animal that I can grow sprouts on.

And "How can I take better looking photos with my iPhone" is the problem Instagram has gotten famous solving.

> The idea that things that are popular are "solving a problem" is a really bad trend in my opinion.

Ohh, I think the opposite. Admittedly the "problem" solved by some popular solutions is "novelty" but they tend to rise and fall swiftly (poster child: Secret).

> I doubt highly that the millions of snapchat users at some point said "If only there were a service that deleted my pictures 10 seconds after I took them."

Well actually Snapchat does solve a real problem. encoderer put it well in comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9517657 :

> Snapchat is the teenagers answer to the question many millennials have fretted about -- "how will ppl born today deal with having all 18 years of their development online". The answer is: they don't put it online.

I made this mistake underestimating YouTube: it seemed like any other video site and I figured anyone who wanted to host video could just put it on their own web site -- I am interested in stuff by topic, not medium, and isn't everyone like me? But in fact YouTube solved several hard problem: 1 - hosting and bandwidth, even for people who didn't want to make a site (they were undifferentiated from other sites in this way, but the need was and is there); 2 - they dealt with infringements/DCMA restrospectively rather than prospectively which meant they could move faster at lower cost and 3 - they were first/early at embedding, so you could use video on your site without implementing a lot of crud. Those were all real needs.

There is a completely unrelated problem which is: if you don't have a monetization approach early on, it's hard to graft one on later. And using my Youtube example: it's my understanding they've never made a profit. But in aggregate their costs are lower (by riding on google's infrastructure, expertise and scale) and add other values to their parent company.

It's hard but not impossible to see that most of these Unicorns could provide value to an acquirer in excess of the acquisition cost. It's possible Uber has enough revenue base to make it worthwhile for (say) Daimler-Benz to buy them at a non-terrible multiple. It's harder to say the same for airBNB.

WhatsApp is not that different from a hundred other messaging services, but people pay for it. I have no reason to believe it's worse than the other messaging services, but it doesn't solve some fundamental problem fundamentally better, either; it mainly just had good luck with network effects.

People also pay for Candy Crush...

>People also pay for Candy Crush...

True. I guess that theory isn't actually that useful.

People pay money for flickr, as a service to host your photographs. By your standard that would make it a non-bullshit service, however it is very annoying to sign up for it. Instagram is simpler, yes, its focus is mobile rather than DSLR cameras but I for one cannot see how that makes it a bullshit service.

The problem with your analysis, eg of Instagram, is that history contradicts you across the board.

Photos Inc. has been a serious business, and generally extremely valuable for a century. There's a reason every smart phone has a camera built into it, and in the near future 2/3 of all humanity will own a digital camera.

Facebook generated $12.4 billion in sales and $3 billion in profit last year. Facebook regards photos as a linchpin to their success. Why? Because photos (sharing, saving, viewing) are one of the most important social activities people do.

The value of photos has remained true through countless technology shifts, and will remain true for the next century, because it's based on a simple principle: people want to save visual memories, and share them with others.

It's not the interest in Instagram that's wrong, it's your incorrect appraisal of what other people value.

Instagram deserves the Unicorn title. It is very useful for both personal and professional ends, and has changed photography fundamentally.

The problem is with its business model - that it will monetize people's attention via ads - and that Instagram is "media." In my view, both Instagram and Twitter are communication networks and should be monetized as such. Advertising is adversarial to the user (privacy) and will kill the networks.

I agree; it seems like Scooby Doo sometimes, where the gang all hop into the Mystery Machine to go track down a guy in a mask hoping to scare off the owners and buy it cheap. In the case of tech, they're going to build an amazing world-changing experience and a huge user-base before smacking everyone with ads just before selling to Goohoocrosoftr and live the rest of their filthy rich lives out on their own private cruise ships.

>Goohoocrosoftr

Zoinks! That just about says it all. I love how you implied that "Goohoocrosofter" was taken so they had to drop the final "e" to register Goohoocrosoftr.com.

> it's hard to argue we're not in a similarly idiotic bubble to the previous one

No, it's not hard at all. It's nothing like the late 90s.

> I'd be willing to bet that this huge BS-to-usefulness ratio isn't sustainable in the long term

I dispute the premise here. Humans are social creatures who enjoy each other. And as we mature economically, we have more leisure time than ever before. And say what you want, but to me you seem blinded by your own personal tastes and temperament. You don't get 100,000,000 people using an app every month without tapping into something bigger than "BS".

Building software that connects people, that people enjoy using, and that speaks to millions is IMO rewarding and worthwhile and no less noble than what you're doing with encrypted email.

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