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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

You are not alone.

I have been struck with amazement at the rise of apps like Snap, Twitter, and Instragram. They have captivated an entire generation, leaving me on the sideline. As a developer, I suppose I'm not the most social being on the planet, but it does concern me that I have become "detached" from everyone else.

I spoke with an Uber driver the other day whos 14 year old son has 700,000 instragram followers and is making money selling advertising to big brands like Target. I'm not old, but that sure as hell made me feel old...

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I think there's a socioeconomic side of this that isn't discussed enough.

I have a highly engaging, challenging job that pays well. I'm a holder of an advanced degree, regularly read long-form books, and am engaged and will be married soon.

Frankly I think I'm pretty typical a lot of people on HN, and developers in general. I don't consume much media, though. I entirely checked out from facebook and haven't looked back.

When I think about who the heaviest users of facebook and snapchat are, I think of people who have boring jobs that don't require their full attention: working retail in a mall, gym attendants, hotel workers, basically anyone working a minimum wage, customer-facing job with a lot of time to kill. These people tend to be young, but they also tend to be less educated and not earn that much.

Looking at my own life, I remember thinking how backward the rich were when I was young, they were late to the internet and some still don't even use email (I think Buffett does this?) It's ironic that as developers have risen in prominence and income, we may be excluding ourselves from using the very mass-market products we ourselves create. It's weird. Are we drug dealers?

Yes, a bunch of modern software dev is drug dealing.

social opium

> Are we drug dealers?

Developers build the infrastructure that manufactures the drugs. The owners of that infrastructure are kingpins. The users of these platforms are drug dealers. Each follower or friend is an addict.

Welcome to the future. The economy's mostly driven by incredibly invasive advertising, normalized spyware, and kids sending each other naked pics. It's far worse than any 80s film ever imagined.

The "economy" is much, much larger than a few social networking apps.

I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Don't forget Google makes its money from advertising. And as more people grow up expecting to have everything for free, more people will bawk at paying for ownership of anything. It's why so many people will sustain countless invasive advertisements to play a mobile game over weeks/months/years instead of just paying a 1 time fee of a few dollars.

Advertising has transformed our economy over the past century, and especially this past decade.

> And as more people grow up expecting to have everything for free

I’m convinced this is more of a service problem than an inherent generational problem. At the moment many of the best-in-breed applications are ad supported because their whole raison d’être revolves around network effects and making people pay in or subscribe cuts against that.

As time goes on, though, places where a subscription based business model can fit will start to catch on as the underlying technologies mature to the point where you can get any old dude out of college to run them rather than needing top-quartile development talent. This is especially true as you become able to position applications or services as ‘premium’ products.

It’s easy to make people uptake new things with freeware business models. But as the products and services get more buy-in you’ll find more scope for other business models to thrive. For example, there is a cottage industry of subscription based matchmaking services that offer a more personal touch than typical online dating.

Social networking is becoming the dominant form of media. Media controls what people think, including their politics, and what products they buy.

You need to stop and see the big picture here. facebook is basically as powerful as the entire TV industry combined, with all the power concentrated in a single company. The NYT recently reported that the average US facebook user spends 50 minutes/day on facebook. And people are watching less and less TV all the time.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, quite the opposite, but I think it seems dishonest not to acknowledge what a huge effect these companies have had on every level of our society, from how people talk to friends, how politicians communicate with the electorate, how people decide what to buy, etc.

I never said social media was not powerful. The question is what percentage of the "economy" it makes up. This source[1] puts the share of the "internet economy" at 5.6% of US GDP. I'm not sure how those terms are defined in this study. But the point remains that no matter how powerful you think the internet and social media have become, the economy is large and diverse.

Here is one breakdown of GDP by category[2]. Even if you are generous and include all retail (6%), information (4%), and entertainment (4%), that is still only 14% of the economy. I think people forget just how much economic activity is tied to things like government, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. The poster I replied to seem to imply that social media was making up most of the economy, and I think that's demonstrably false.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250703/forecast-of-inter...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States#G...

You're probably right.

My fiancee is an architect and I invest in real estate so I probably have a broader view of this than most (if only due to the luck of my draw/circumstances). Plus my father worked his entire career in factory operations.

Part of the problem is that HN is so software/Bay Area-centric, it's an industry cluster that pushes out a lot of traditional S&P 500 companies. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, living here, you are definitely "in a bubble" thought and perspective-wise. On the other hand, living in the bubble means you get to see what's coming next, and let's face it, the S&P 500 is backward. It's hard to appreciate how backward so much of it is, it's practically incomprehensible to the average Bay Area tech person. People overall are paid just way less, 40-hour weeks are the norm, people don't read books or retrain much, everything is done via emailed word documents and playing "did you get the latest changes" vs. VCS), etc.

Arrogant? Maybe, but you tell me how companies here can post such exceptional operational performance relative to their more "average" peers.

Healthcare is enormous. Holy crap, what, 24% of GDP?

How does he sell the advertising? Product placement in the photos?

(I'm not interested in advertising. I'm just curious.) I'm surprised by Target: Why not rotate their product lines and improve selection rather than just advertise to teens? Most of them would probably go to Walmart where it's cheaper.

I'm not sure, I didn't get his username, and even if I did, I'm not on instagram.

I did ask how he does it though, and he said target sends him pictures to use. I was confused by that response because, I thought instagram was more about product placement (him hanging out with his friends, with target logo in the background).

TL;DR; - Not sure how it works.

> How does he sell the advertising? Product placement in the photos?

Yes, that's probably it. It's the "influencer" model. If 700,000 people who are following you on social media see you wearing a cool jacket from Target, and you say something nice about it in the comments, then those people are more likely to buy that jacket than say, seeing some random person wearing it in a TV ad or a catalog.

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