A critique of trends in tech

Eh, I don't think Dollar Shave Club fits in with the article's examples. The value created is that many people want to spend more money and less of their time with consistent results. The company doesn't try to ratchet up margin with unnecessary tech, it just satisfies a legitimate customer demand. That might be a customer demand you don't identify with, or which you believe shouldn't exist; it's still a legitimate demand.

The article is mainly talking about companies that augment existing products with shallow improvements for the sake of large margin increases. Dollar Shave Club is novel in that it adds a service to abstract away the thinking portion of buying a razor. It makes no attempt to increase profits with shitty tech.

I like DSC. I know I could get razors cheaper in bulk but I prefer the convenience and it's still much cheaper than buying $15+ packs at the store.

Nitpick: DSC is headquartered in Los Angeles, not Silicon Valley.

While I agree DSC seems insane, you are looking at it from the wrong end: most customers were used to paying crazy prices at the grocery store. DSC is cheap by comparison, even if you can get the same blades for less elsewhere. Dorco could have run the same business, but DSC figured out how to market it.

I started using DSC early on because their marketing video was hilarious, and I was always forgetting to buy razors when I needed them. Now they've expanded out into a whole range of bathroom products, most of which are about the same price as they would be in a store, which makes it an easy choice.

When I put my account on hold, they don't spam me, begging me to come back. When I switched to every other month on razors, there was no dramatic emails or price changes. When I switched versions of the razor, they just shipped me a new handle. They've been doing this razor thing for ~7 years, and in that they haven't given me a single reason to complain. Its nice to have a transaction with a "startup" that does exactly what it says it's going to do.

I don't use DSC but the value they provide is that you always have a razor. A lot of people have to shave for work and forgetting to buy razors at the store sucks. It means you have to shave with an old, dull razor. They charge you to avoid that situation.

I bought a medium sized package of Schick Injector razor blades about five years ago. At this rate, that might be a lifetime supply - they don't really get dull, and you can use them almost forever.

Granted, I like my beard and don't shave daily, but even when I was keeping up the same routine and using Gilette-style cartridge razor blades, I was burning through them much faster.

Dollar Shave Club is a marketing engine, Dorco is not. Few people order from Dorco because few people know they exist.

My life is much better when I optimize for convenience instead of saving money when the money is in the "handful of dollars" range. And yes, never again having to think about having to buy a routine item is convenient. It seems patently obvious that a subscription is more convenient than having to remember to buy something on a regular basis; I can't believe there's even debate about that. You can certainly debate whether the additional cost is worth the convenience, but I don't see how you can claim that there is no difference in convenience.

Groundbreaking innovations do not happen every day. Small, slow incremental change (repackaging old stuff) moves us forward as well.

so what % of the margins on "subscription box" services comes from people forgetting / being too lazy to cancel? all of it? perishables and other time sensitive stuff notwithstanding, there is no reason getting something shipped monthly is going to be a better deal than buying in bulk. these people are obviously just trying to make a buck. they are full of shit if they say they are trying to create value, but they aren't really hurting anyone i guess. its mostly on the consumers for buying it.

To refute his point, You can subscribe to receive razors every 1-6 months on Amazon.

The only value I see him creating is value for his company haha.

A service like DSC that I thought was brilliant is that one that does air conditioning filters. I forgot its name, but I always forget to change my filter, and you're only supposed to do it every 6 months. Then because it's been so long, I invariably forget what size I need, buy the wrong one, have to go back... Ship me a filter every 6 months? Awesome! THAT'S a company I see as "adding value".

No affiliation, not even a subscriber -- just had a "duh" moment when I saw their ad.

Why convenience? So people can go 'do what they love'? Or in reality, so people can spend more time on vapid social apps and feel like they're on top of trends?

Well in response to someone saying they worry about him he says, "Don’t. My life has never been better. Remember it’s a persona."

So take that salt into consideration. Besides he never said every bit of tech is bad.

My interpretation was that he didn't think that improving posting text to the Internet was inherently bad, just that the Silicon Valley hype around what are just improvements to an old model is strange. I think you can say the hype around a thing is ridiculous without saying that it is worthless

It's not hypocrisy, it's offloading traffic to a company who hasn't quite figured out how to make money, but is willing to provide the author with analytics and hosting in exchange (... for what exactly???)

In other words, it's milking the freebies.

Also, this is mostly true for rent in big cities; big corporations are essentially forcing people to move to big cities where the quality of life is lower by promising them a better future. This increases house prices and makes everyone miserable (except wealthy shareholders and landlords).

Never have to look far in a thread like this to find the kid who thinks economies work like Econ 101. Here's a piece of advice: anytime you find yourself concluding with "it's that simple" you're probably not thinking critically about the issue.

But wealth distribution does affect who is willing to pay how much, and is going to have an impact on the outcome of supply & demand.

> Rents are high because of supply and demand. That's literally all there is to it.

Except that's literally not all there is to it, that's just one component of the problem. It turns out housing is just a tiny bit more complicated than your first day of Econ 101. The half dozen empty skyscrapers lots of us pass by each day seem to indicate that.

"High Rent is just supply and demand" is the new "I could rebuild that whole app in one weekend".

Do you remember the mass foreclosures? Do you see the sea of For Sale signs everywhere? Do you know who bought the lion's share of the defaults? It isn't the privates who fueled the housing/rental costs. You don't need to click ZeroHedge or formulate conspiracy theories, just visit the county assessor's site and try to unravel all the LLCs and "trusts" to determine who controls the market.

Rent is high because supply has been restricted by low-density zoning regulations, especially in San Francisco and Seattle.

Policy-market mismatch is partially due to low participation in local politics, and partially due to high-income neighborhoods influencing local politics to keep their area low-density (raising their property value and the surrounding area's rent).

I am aware, but even if silicon valley was how it used to be described it was never an option. Maybe its because I am younger, but in my age group everyone went to college and got massive student loans because that's what every adult in your life told you to do.

How were you supposed to travel to the valley and work on something that didn't make you a lot of money when you had large, non dis chargeable loans tied to you for decades? The only people who had that option were rich kids, or the few who took the "bad" choice of not going to college and ended up lucking out.

Seeing people reminisce about how silicon valley used to be always reminds me of older people complaining that the youth are no longer treating college as a place to learn. Well no shit. We are, on average, much poorer than we used to be and everyone has to eat. All those old ideals are nice, but they matter much less when you end up having to work yourself to death or decide between medicine or making rent that month

> "add a touch screen manufactured by Chinese tweens, call it “Smart,” and sell it to schlubby dads too indebted to buy a midlife crisis car and too unattractive to have an affair."

As someone who spends hours pondering the same NYC subway ads, this captures what I'm seeing better than I could ever put it.

Some alternative writings (for all HN readers) with the same sentiment but in different tones than snark:

Melancholic wistfulness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370776

Kafka by way of Mike Judge https://www.metafilter.com/122529/Welcome-to-San-Francisco-N...

Yeah, his writing style reminds me of Ted Dziuba's past posts.

More people should read Arrington's post which has a classic Teddy Roosevelt snippet: https://techcrunch.com/2007/10/12/the-man-in-the-arena/

My memory may be hazy, but I vaguely remember him during saying something similar onstage during a past YC Startup School.

Wow, I stopped reading to check this thread at exactly that point.

Yea, I loathe those fiverr ads. When I end up in a subway car filled with them it really sours my mood. I used to have no feelings about fiverr but now I absolutely would never use it.

Which model did you get?

Yeah brushing form is important, and for some like myself, difficult to get right consistently. I really need an electric toothbrush.

Are you saying that because both parties benefit then neither party can be to blame? Confirming, not sure based on your wording.

If so, that assumes that both parties are going into the trade negotiations on equal footing. I don't think I'm the only one who would argue that's not the case in a great many rentseeker:rentee or owner:employee relationships. Even discarding any social or economic pressures in the current climate, the power of the rentseeker and owner allows them to shape the environment into one that benefits them more (see: lobbying and politics in the USA).

When it comes to free-trade it doesn't need to benefit both parties, it just needs to benefit the party with the most leverage. The other side will then have to adapt.

Are you suggesting that, if we feel we are not benefiting from the current rent market, we can simply stop participating?

Price gouging. It's not really free trade when options are limited. It's not really free trade when "free will" has been subverted.

The notion of free trade sounds good at an individual level but does it really exist at a societal level? I think it's like libertarianism. It's sounds plausible at the micro level but doesn't scale well.

I think the starting point you seek is itself worthy of criticism.

Tragedy of the Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Tragedy of the Anticommons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

Unscrupulous diner's dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unscrupulous_diner%27s_dilemma

The usual solution to these problems is regulation by government.

This is a very simple statement you've made but introduced the exact issue while also glossing over it.

Trade is voluntary. Free trade is an agreement between two parties. But free trade does not benefit 'both parties' unless you vivisect -for example- the American people into those that actually benefit from free trade and those that do not, largely.

This is borne out by the reality we live in: that income and wealth inequality is increasing and doing so at an increasing rate and capital is accumulating due to public policies both domestic and international in nature that disproportionately favor the rentiers.

The US has a lower rate of individual participation in the economy now than before NAFTA. That's a major failure in my opinion.

In a perfect market? Sure. But, this is real life, not an Econ-101 textbook.

In the housing market, there are regulations put in place by NIMBYs to protect their own investments. These limit the supply of housing in popular areas, driving up prices. Nothing a rentee can do but pay up or move elsewhere.

In most job markets, the employer has more knowledge (about compensation plackages) and the job-seeker needs a job ASAP to avoid starving.

In the case of Juicero, the toothbrush subscription, etc? Closer to a textbook-pure market, for sure.

I'm not an economist, but I'll give it a shot: the vast influx of VC money allows for the creation of unsustainable businesses designed to "disrupt" (read: eliminate) traditional players. Buyers are happy to participate because they are getting a "deal" in the short term. Those who have been "disrupted" out of a job are often left to work for those same companies.

Meanwhile, the startup is trying to capture enough market share so that it can then raise rates and lower wages with less competition down the road. In other words, the traditional free trade model can be distorted by the effects of VCs who can operate with extraordinary scale of time and geography.

How about this?:

Free trade used to be between roughly equal parties. You wanted juicer, someone sold you a juicer.

Today, free trade has evolved into a transaction between you and the rest of humanity where you are expected to yield your information to an entity so that they can use it to better serve you and the rest of the world.

For many scenarios, this symbiosis was a net benefit. Recall Nest and the promise to reduce your electricty bills by 10-15% by harnessing big data.

Over time, Silicon Valley got addicted to the promise and possibility of making you yield data to it so that they could "somehow" help you live a better life.

They tried to extend the idea into areas where it had no business being - a juicer or a coffee maker. And since the average human knows a bad bargain when they see one, they had to sex up the juicer or coffee maker with beautiful design, empty slogans, and beautiful models.

..which is pretty much the author's entire point if you read between the lines.

> Free trade is voluntary,

Except all the times when it isn't.

Housing isn't really voluntary. Water isn't voluntary. Internet access isn't really voluntary. Electricity isn't voluntary.

Free trade requires the option to walk away without catastrophic problems occurring in your life. Increasingly, that option doesn't exist.

When the alternative is homelessness, or joblessness, or starvation, you can't honestly claim a choice was voluntary.

That's an idealized version of trade. The problem is that benefits can be asymmetric and pushed by irrational means, when they aren't spurious.

This may be done out of fradulent desires, but more commonly it's done because we as a society are too efficient. We have too many goods produced, so the only way to differentiate many products is through "intangibles" which obscure the actual benefits provided, and instead sell things based on irrational factors like sexiness, virility, image associations, and identity.

The customer often is forced into asymmetrical deals due to this, because of the relative quality of actual benefits provided. You don't sell cheese any more, you sell artisanal cheese. This is because if we were honest, artisanal cheese is close enough to regular cheese to be hard to differentiate, so they sell the intangibles of artisanal qualities, and people pay more for pretty much the same benefit.

I think the article shows that if you take that kind of intangible differentiation too far, you get things that end up harming the benefit to customers and society.

The idea is that we're entering the late stage capitalism phase of our civilization. Like, we went though antiquity and modernity and post modernity. There was a colonial period and a reconstruction. Pre and post ww2.

They're all hard to define and poorly scoped, but there is something to each of the ideas, or people wouldn't talk about them.

Anything I could say to define 'late capitalism' would detract from the point though, because any tech person can find a million nits to pick on any point made about even relatively precise subjects, and late capitalism refers to trends in something as diverse as global society.

Just try and think for yourself, "If we are living through such a thing as late era capitalism, what characteristics of our world are relevant to that label?"

In what world do you think academics like standardized testing? Every teacher or professor I've ever met loathes the idea of having to "teach to the test". They didn't set the standards, but they're forced to follow them.

Sounds like a non sequitur, though. Standardized testing in academia isn't necessarily a sign of lack of creativity or innovation.

He is a critic of most standardized testing. He wants to figure out how we can do better.

Sounds kind of like ad hominem bro

Android makes almost no profit for google and isn't a 'win'. All it does is protect the search monopoly from competition from Microsoft and Apple.

I'm reasonably certain that advertising has a pretty big reputation as a stress-driven hellscape, at least in the classic Madison avenue format. Lots of deadlines and all-nighters

The morality of the consumer vs. the morality of the supplier an interesting problem. On one extreme, we have the drug dealer relationship. The supplier is obviously more morally duplicitous, and the consumer is often pitied (at least in liberal, anti-drug war circles). At the opposite side of the spectrum, you have suppliers making entirely ok or even ok things selling them to bad people. Are fertilizer providers to blame for consumers turning their products into bombs? Obviously not (actually, I'm not sure legally, but common sense says no).

In the middle, you have a wide array of relationships. Is Coca-Cola to blame for the obesity epidemic? Are gun companies to blame for suicides or mass shootings? Is Juicero to blame for customers being dumb shits?

I think when you answer different examples, you get a pattern: when a supplier is selling a negative/zero value product but induces demand by playing off human weakness, then they're doing something wrong.

Juicero is playing off human weakness (the wealthy tech nerds' desire to be "hip" and "fit") just like a a fashion company plays off human weakness (by creating unrealistic representations that it goads its customers into trying to reach).

Oh no, what a pity.

It's harder to make pointless, bullshit companies that add literally nothing and instead contribute to degrading conditions and pay.

I have zero sympathy for someone not being able to spin up a useless, zero-effort company. Put some effort in and come up with something worthwhile that contributes instead.

I would say my least favorite part is seeing that empty car and not realizing the reason why it's empty is because of the smell inside until the train's already left the stop.

The least pleasant part of the NYC subway is how over-congested, chronically delayed, and unreliable it is. But yes, the ads are annoying too.

I sure hope not.

Auctioning the loser's organs.

Pivot idea: pay for admittance to a unit or building, and if you can throw the existing tenants out the window, the place is yours.

Then you pay the landlord each month for the right to keep your door locked. If a prospective tenant can outbid your month's rent, man the battle stations.

Thanks for this. You've articulated how I've felt subconsciously about HN for a while now.

HN used to be a place where I could be stimulated intellectually. Today it no longer seems to give me that.

Where can I go now to get better content? Or should I give up on aggregation altogether?

To provide some additional background: The title was initially "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People".

It's certainly sensationalist from the point of view that it's something a lot of HN readers who work around SV probably don't want to think that much about, but I thought that's why it maybe deserves some attention. It's also consistent with the conclusion in the content of TFA:

"That’s it. That’s all they are. That’s all they do. They are the final logic of late capitalism, the engine of human creativity applied to the essential work of making life worse for regular people."

Agree - I saw it with the title that conveyed actual semantic content, which is why I read it.

So perhaps we'll need to acknowledge this sort of editorial control a kind of signaling - a meaningless, anodyne headline means "article YC doesn't like".

I'll be honest: I don't really like how you're approaching this. It feels like a higher class of conspiracy theorizing I often see on the web in its construction, so I'll run through my issues point by point.

1 - The original title was sensationalist (and so is the article, really), and changing titles to be more useful to the average HN reader/removing clickbait is something that happens fairly often here. I don't expect this process to be perfect, and I regularly see posts with somewhat useless or one-word titles. It happens. I have yet to see a post from Dang I'd consider unreasonable (in several years of reading HN) so I'm inclined to have some faith in the mod team here.

Further, I also think you have a lack of faith in the readership here - title quality is less important on HN than on any other similar site I've used (though I favor accuracy and find the current policies regarding them reasonable).

2 - Generally this means some users are flagging the article. I've flagged articles on occasion before, and it can cause an instant drop of several places on the front page. This regularly happens for sensational or political articles - even things verging on political I find of interest and would like to see discussed more. I chalk it up to the nature of the community.

As for this going against YC interests or business model - I don't really see it. This isn't even a good attack on YC, it's an attack on rent-seeking and/or the work culture of startups. YC is an effort to make startup funding more accessible, equitable, useful, and wide-ranging (or at least, that's how it looks to me from the outside). Heck, they have RFSs that go in direct opposition to the kind of startups talked about in the article (and their interest in funding these kinds of things + moonshots are increasing, not decreasing).

In short - I think you're pretty far off here, but you're free to read into it what you want.

Now that I realize the original title was "Silicon Valley: Making Life Worse for Regular People", this is a clear cut case of censorship.

I would hope that we're not at 1984 level yet, so something like a title change won't make people start engaging in SV doublethink, but you never know.

I can't find much to disagree with here, so have updated the title to add "A critique", removed the moderation penalty from it, and rolled back the clock on the story so it has more time on the front page.

If I have time, I'll come back and add a fuller explanation of what happened, but the bottom line is: HN moderation is driven by trying to keep the community happy while staying within the mandate of the site (which is intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive discussion). That's the problem we're trying to solve, not anything directly to do with YC's business. A happy HN is worth more to YC than any other kind of HN, so it would be dumb to optimize for anything else.

I'm marking this subthread offtopic now, which makes it fall to the bottom of the thread, because otherwise the meta conversation will dominate the discussion rather than the points raised by the article.

Yes, all these people know nothing about economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Libertarian_economist...

Personal swipes are not welcome in comments here. We've warned you before, so if you want to continue commenting here, it's time to fix this.

That includes avoiding snark tropes like "you do realize, right?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14213226)

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.

> Clearly you don't care or haven't thought

That's unduly personal. Users here aren't allowed to address each other that way, first because it's uncivil, and second because arguments get stronger when such bits are edited out.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14212866 and marked it off-topic.

You forgot the big guns: Google and Facebook, who literally exploit small publishers and individual content creators. They are killing journalism and content creation, and all for the ever escalating profit.

(I run a med tech website that reports on medical technologies for doctors and med professionals. I am an MD. We are publishing every day since 2004. News, interviews and exclusive reports. We have a half a million page views a month from professional readership, and Google pays us pennies for Adsense. $60/day? WTF!)

I have no idea what this comment is supposed to mean. The contentless crap posted isn't for people who are mildly depressed, it's for people who are morbidly depressed?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14214782 and marked it off-topic.

in my book, people like you are very dangerous. I fear people of your ideals far more than I fear terrorism or anything of that sort.

Let that sink in for a while!

Lets call it a cultural revolution or something like that.

Edit: Or the rise of the glorious proletariat.

I must admit, I liked _jal's colosseum idea better.

The problem is that capitalism has shown every ounce as much capacity to funnel wealth from the impoverished to the elite as a command economy, while enjoying a better public image due to the greater difficulty of pinning any level of culpability on systemic flaws. We need a system that actually prevents exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few, regardless of what such an economy actually looks like.

I don't think that's what the author is saying. If anything, I think the point is that the "revolutionary" nature of most hip companies (not necessarily from SV) is really not revolutionary at all. Cutting edge progress in tech doesn't happen nearly as much as the general public perceives, but they believe it is because the slick marketing, subscription service for mundane products, adding an LCD touch screen to an existing product feels like technological progress, but really isn't. The few real leaps in technology that actually are unique and applicable outside of selling some product or service aren't visible to the end user.

When Netflix caught on everyone thought "wow, technology!" Only some of us in the tech world realize that the idea of streaming movies and TV to your house isn't the amazing breakthrough they made -- it's the infrastructure behind making it work, and the layperson doesn't give a shit about that.