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Comment by maxt | Hacker News Reader

> Dr. Srikumar created a life changing business school course so powerful that it has its own alumni association. He is the author of Happiness at Work and has helped thousands of executives find greater fulfillment in both life and work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGBoXTaitr0

Worth watching because his words of advice did help me when trying to grow my own business. I didn't reach my numbers, but having a goal gave me a sense of direction, and there was a sense of movement. I think we're only at a loss in business when everything falls still. I'm no expert, but I don't sense that Twitter is falling still just yet, and there's still movement.

As you said: "Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter". I can't imagine the web without Twitter and it still feels like some sort of plumbing, or public utility at this stage. Twitter is there like water (hopefully). You turn on the tap, and it's there like water.

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I have to point out that this last point is totally ridiculous. Twitter is functionally just like like Xanga or Livejournal or any other dead blogging platform you care to name. Just because you have a community of dedicated users and a better UI doesn't mean the service is unique. It's as if you thought Evian(R) or Dasani(TM) are public utilities.

Frankly, I think we're going to see a backlash against information overload - social media has lost its novelty, and most consumers need far less of it than the producers want to provide.

"than the producers want to provide"

Yes this is the analogy to TV where the market provided precisely 3 channels (plus PBS) for decades and a third of the population reliably watched each show on each channel, but that was 1970 and now in 2010s there's 500 cable channels and a wildly success narrowcast might reach as many as 1 in 40 citizens. Usually far less, of course, as little reach as 1 in 300 is possible with aggressive enough advertising budgets. Of course there is the superbowl but its only a couple hours per year and there's only one and that one is already here.

It has certain implications for future startups. It would be doom for current startups that financed assuming they'll be the one site that all 6 billion humans use. If the social media market follows the TV model, in 20 years we'll be back to multiple tribal sized BBSes, more or less, with the occasional temporary cultural fad resulting in short term scaling headaches. For about a month, about a billion of us, will try to simultaneously log into the pokemon go server, then we'll all try to forget it ever happened, which actually is a big enough problem to keep many engineers employed.

I'm not sure the financial markets know what to think of legacy TV right now, much less what will, by then, be legacy social media.

How do you finance or account for a one month pokemon go, times hundreds per year, when thats the new normal not an aberration?

Not sure tv analogy plays out.

We have many shows because people want different stuff to watch sure.

Why couldn't Reddit be the only BBS of the internet? Everyone in the same website, but live in a unique subreddit.

TV doesn't work like that.

The problem with Reddit is its bigger than the Dunbar number so its possible to predict there's going to be severe problems with politics and censorship (and hey, golly, it turns out there is!).

Meanwhile in the Slashdot 90s a weblog discussion type site took a lot of money and an entire corporation to kinda run, but in the 10s a splinter group like Soylent News takes like three part time dudes, if that much, to serve up more than Slashdot ever did in the 90s.

So anything big automatically leads to political problems and 20 years ago, or even today, people just have to tolerate it, but as technology advanced eventually you'll be able to do more than reddit does with a simple $30 model 2025 raspberry pi and a sd card, so people will just move there instead.

Or rephrased the primary network effect of sharing Reddit is the joy of being a victim of raids from SRS, so people will be quite happy to leave.

Also I'd say we have very few TV shows because of expense and the resulting risk aversion. We have many nearly identical shows none worth watching. If the cost of TV shows scaled downward with technology we'd have some pretty interesting diversity of TV shows, but we don't.

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