I Hope This Bubble Kills The App

Comic Sans is a Good Thing.

That capitalization isn't accidental. It, and every other easy to [mis]use cute, fun, and simple thing we've seen in the last couple decades have been incredibly beneficial to the tech industry and humanity as a whole.

When the Mac and Windows came around, a lot of "computer people" hated them. They were slow and inefficient, and hurt productivity. RMS still rarely uses a mouse. That's fine for people like us, but it isn't fine for people who use a computer to keep in touch with friends or make lost cat posters. And the simple fact is that there aren't that many people like us. Casual users are by far the largest demographic, and that expanded market has been a huge boon for us.

The proliferation of "toy" apps is no different. By sending the message that "you too can make an app", we expand the market hugely. That helps everyone. So what if most apps are garbage? Most websites were garbage in the 90s, but without them we would never have had the Internet that we have today. We needed that huge variety of sites for people to think the marketplace was worthwhile. Now, the Internet is mature, and we almost accept as an inevitability that it should be that way. It wasn't. Without geocities, porn, and even AOL it would just be a graphical Usenet with 2% of its current users.

We're in a Geocities phase right now. There's a proliferation of garbage filling up the mobile sphere. Without that garbage, however, the sphere would be much smaller. Eventually, professional companies will step in and improve overall quality, but we need size at the moment. It grows the market, and it's good for everyone.

Please come correct next time.

(I did appreciate "Incompetent MBA Popped Collar")

[edit] he really doesn't deserve negative karma for that, chill out people.

If you feel that you need a disclaimer, why not improve the post to the point where you don't need a disclaimer, before inflicting it on HN?

It's one thing to rant to friends over a beer, but at least try to go through a few drafts or reviewers before inflicting such nonsense on the internet, permanently. Maybe try to address the first level of obvious criticism?

Re: me ... I have 0 dollars in outside funding, and some number of users who like my work. Unless you're saying that games are ipso facto useless, I'm not sure how this is relevant.

1) "Change the world" is a red-herring. There's a lot of very valuable and helpful work that people with a "change the world" focus will miss out on. A lot of people writing craplications believe they will change the world. It's a content-free sound-bite at this point. It doesn't translate into any world-changing behaviour.

2) The value of a thing has very little to do with how hard it is to make. This is a common trap that techies fall into: I worked really hard and didn't get rewarded while someone else spent a few hours and did get rewarded.

2b) If you're going to argue that we're incentivizing the wrong behaviours, well, that's an interesting argument that you didn't explore.

3) Unintentionally, your rant is analogous to the very apps you're criticizing. I.e. it seems you just kind of pooped it out. You apologize for pooping it out, but you don't do the things that could turn it into an insightful or useful article.

Just as various app stores are saturated with crap, news sites are saturated with random half-assed comments that would be funny over beer, but just clog the internets.

I also notice you program in C# and Ruby, which (tongue in cheek) aren't real langauges. I mean, they're interpreted! You know, like BASIC. Meant for toy programs and people that don't know how computers really work. I still remember the time when applications (shrink wrapped applications) were written in Assembly language because even a compiled language like C produced "toy" applications (one reason why Lotus ate Microsoft's lunch in the early 80s---Lotus 1-2-3 was written in Assembly when Microsoft's Excel wasn't and it showed).

The whole point of things like assemblers, compilers and interpreters are to make programming easier so people can ignore gritty details and get on with their job. And as much as I hate PHP, it has allowed people who otherwise could not express their ideas, a way of expressing their ideas (personally, I wouldn't want to maintain their code or even look at it, but that's a separate issue).

As I read it, you seem upset that apps you deem stupid are getting funding and you aren't.

That's what the word "bubble" refers to, though. If the OP didn't mean a stock market bubble, he should explain what he does mean. A "bubble" of investing? Why would it warrant the analogy of a bubble? What horrible things happen if and when VC investments don't pan out?

What people are trying to call a bubble is actually just an increase in investment by VCs, sometimes good investments, sometimes bad, and sometimes there are overvaluations.

But if you think we're in a bubble, you either don't remember the real bubble of 1999 or you misunderstood what the problem was.

I suggest you to check few graphs on Google/Yahoo Finance

Considering the deep trough we just came out of, it makes sense that we see a stock market uptick. Moving up != inherently bad.