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Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

Same age as author.

Through procrastinating with digg, reddit, and HN over the years, and just being a tech enthusiast before that (reading Industry Standard, Business 2.0 magazines, Web Magazine etc) -

I've been on the leading edge of seeing all the new services come and go.

- started using Google in early 1999 (few months after they launched)

- first 30K users on LinkedIn

- first day user of YouTube

- first 100K users of Twitter

- first 100K users of Instagram

- first 30K subscriber of Casey Niestat Vlog

- knew about bitcoin at 10 cents (didn't buy thanks to HN saying it was a scam/bubble)

The most confusing and frustrating thing for me has been SnapChat by far. That's when I realized I'm getting old.

View on HN

I feel the same way about Musical.ly/TikTok, but I look at it more as a time/value proposition.

I think the hallmark of being “old” on the internet is embracing the technologies that actually enhance the use of your time and talent and forego or ignore the ones that do not.

I’m sure my 11 year-old daughter disagrees that TikTok is a waste of time and I respect that. But it doesn’t mean I have to understand it. My parents probably felt the same way about BBSes.

I just have to make sure she’s safe and that’s all. She’ll figure out the rest.

I have to say, TikTok really impressed me which was really surprising. It wasn't until I created a Tiktok video that I "got it". The mobile video editing tools they created are really top notch.

As I get older I find myself more and more looking for utility. When I was younger, I’d early-adopt everything without regard to whether it added anything important to my life or whether it was fundamentally useful. As I get older and notice time catching up, I am more ruthless about cutting things that “everyone does” but don’t add any value. Pop culture, sports, social media, gossip, dozens of chat apps. They don’t really add more than they take away in terms of time.

My kid is bored and has all the time in the world. She’ll do the early adopting for now.

same! i was thinking about tiktok the whole time.

i suppose i should, but i... just don't get it. too fast, too furious. you only get a second or two for a breather between videos that are too short. you are constantly bombarded with new ones.

it's like playing a rhythm video game. it's build for fast reaction. no deep analysis or thinking. but it obviously seems to work for many people.

i have to say, i still don't have an account. maybe things are different and you get more choices when you actually sign up.

I’ve talked to other parents that tell me their kids use TikTok as a messaging platform.

Why TikTok and not the other 1,000 choices? Who knows. Maybe the fact that the olds won’t use it / don’t know about it is hugely appealing. Grown ups wreck everything, right?

But the “olds” are using it.

sssh they don’t know that yet

I’m 48 with childhood story similar to the author. I do like TikTok for some reason.

2 years younger than you and the author, and I too have had a front row seat to many of these developments : home computers in the 80s, the Internet from 1994, Linux from 1996, Google in 1999, blogging in the early 2000s, podcasts in 2005, Bitcoin in 2011...

On the positive side, my BS radar is well tuned, I'm pretty good at putting tech trends in perspective and identifying the ones that have a good chance to be game changers. This is useful wisdom in my career as an engineer.

But I haven't really managed so far to switch from being a spectator into acting decisively & quickly to convert those insights into something valuable : the ROHMO (regret of having missed out) gets heavier the more of these trains I've seen come and go !

Bitcoin is the obvious (and trivial) one : I read the Satoshi paper a few weeks after its release, spent a few evenings understanding blockchain, downloaded a miner.. but never bothered leaving it running for a few days, for fear my computers would run hot for something intellectually interesting but of questionable monetary value :)

Any of you old timers want to share how they have turned "having seen things" into a valuable career or entrepreunarial edge ?

Don't let SnapChat make you feel like you're old.

It's a crap UI.

> didn't buy thanks to HN saying it was a scam/bubble

Didn't buy because, like most people, you didn't bother. When bitcoin was @ 10 cents it was not that expensive to mine.

>knew about bitcoin at 10 cents (didn't buy thanks to HN saying it was a scam/bubble)

they still say its a scam/bubble

I am a believer now:

It solves inflation problem, so government will soon be smaller.

It doesn't solve the problems that led to the embrace of inflationary currencies at all. These are among others price inelasticity and the very powerful psychological "number going up is good" factor.

Try explaining to an employee that their paycheck is smaller because currency has appreciated in value, or to a bank that the principal of a loan should be written down for the same reason. "But number go down bad!"

Inflation hides these things. It's a hack around these problems.

Am employee would have her paycheck in bitcoins. Same quantity every paycheck.

Inflation is an emission problem and Bitcoin solves it.

> Same quantity every paycheck

Not with deflation. As the value of Bitcoin rises (in terms of food, cars and vacations), the number on your paycheck will go down.

It's already happening these days. Besides housing and healthcare, inflation is practically zero. Wages are staying flat as well and people are low-key freaking out, even though they can buy more food, cars and vacations than ever.

> didn't buy thanks to HN saying it was a scam/bubble

This is a good lesson about the oft-repeated wisdom of crowds. It's just not there. (Please don't link me to the thing about how crowds converge on the number of jellybeans in the jar and suchlike due to the law of large numbers.)

"If "everybody knows" such-and-such, then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one." —Heinlein

I think it's important to understand that SnapChat is intentionally confusing.

The UI is designed to be opaque so that some amount of effort, or asking your friends, is required to figure it out.

Then, once you have, you feel invested in it, and are less likely to abandon it.

What's yer slashdot ID?

haha, I forgot about that one. I went to that site here and there, but I wasn't a developer, so I felt lost. I actually finally learned to program last year.

Also same age. I was big into Quantum Link in the 80s. Remember Mosaic and Gopher. Very late to Facebook and ended up deleting. Never joined Instagram or Twitter. Or MySpace. Who is Casey Niestat?

Oh yeah, Facebook I knew about super early, couldn't join because it was only allowing Harvard students. I thought Mark Zuckerberg was super arrogant because he was known to meet with investors wearing sandals and he had a business card that said "I'm CEO, bitch"

Casey Niestat is the father of modern daily vlogging. Many of today's vloggers copy his style. He's got over 10 million subscribers now, he's not a HUGE youtuber, but like I said, very influential.

What's the next big thing?

Looks like Kevin James' youtube channel will blow up to at least 1 million subscribers soon. Get in before it hits 100K subscribers now:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9k23HZ1xMiqxf4gFfmxr5w

I also think there's a vacuum that needs to be filled when it comes to Youtube and the creator community. There is way too much frustration from creators about demonetizing, and having to walk on eggshells so they don't trigger warnings and red flags. I don't know what it will be, but I wouldn't be surprised if something blows up in this space.

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