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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in.

I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?

Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS?

youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??

Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode.

Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.

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I think of this as my "Kardashian problem".

I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works.

This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works.

This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.

Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market

The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been effectively thrown off from their perch.

Exactly and the pandemic basically disrupted the traditional celebrity info market.. you can't go to a party or restaurant etc... no photo ops.

Luck also seems to plays a big role in the programming lang market.

Yet the behavior of lang maintainers seems to have an outpaced influence over that luck: individual programmers actively chose Guido over Larry or Matz. In turn, Armin's framework looks about in line popularity-wise with DHH's at present, but the trend seems clear. We trust Node because Ryan rage quit. Oracle has cast a shadow over Java, and their TIOBE descent is finally manifesting. K&R may never be unseated, e.g. A Deepness in the Sky. Anyone who's seen Anders in person has witnessed his presence.

I wouldn't discount the effects of actual human characteristics and behavior, even if choices end up mostly based on fashion and a fascination with infamy. One can influence their own luck.

I agree.

I would like to add luck to the theatrical world too.

I look at movie stars, and it seems like a very exclusive club.

If you can read lines, have a bit of charisma, and get that ever so lucky break--it almost seems like you have to work at getting kicked out, and even if you gain a bunch of weight, and fry your liver, and kidneys with drugs; in many cases the actor just gets more opportunities.

It seems like a couple hundred actors get most of the jobs.

As to the Kardiasians I believe it was luck, and a good product. I can't believe I wrote that last sentence. I never thought I would put "good", and "Kardasians" in the same sentence.

I kinda get the success of the Kardasians though. The ladies look multiracial. They are of all ages. For so long the fair skinned starlet was the desirable one.

Now--it's changing, and I like the change.

I'm still baffled by the younger one's financial success in makeup, and what not. She is worth over a billion dollars. MBA programs should be studying her business moves.

Selling to women is an art. If you can crack the mystery you can be a billionaire too? I remember hearing someone say selling to men is easy. Give them a product they like, and they will come back. She said selling to women is more nuanced. I always have that advice in the back of my mind.

I have a very pretty sister who moved to Los Angeles. She skipped college. She felt it was a waste of time, and she was probally right? She used networking to get jobs. She then decided to make, and sell shoes. In a few years, she had multiple stores, and is very successful. (Sadly we are not close. I will always love her, but the greed got mixed in family stuff. I guess that happens a lot?)

I remember looking at her first prototypes, and didn't get it at all. I wished her well though. She got a tiny bit of financial help.

She didn't need any advice from me though. She knew what would sell. She literally started off making the shoes in her garage, with minimal materials, and tools. I was always encouraging. I knew fashion was way out of my wheel house though.

(I really don't have a point? I rambled all over the place? Looking at my writing I hope nothing is considered sexist.)

> I'm still baffled by the younger one's financial success in makeup, and what not. She is worth over a billion dollars. MBA programs should be studying her business moves.

This is not what luck looks like. This is what a good plan being executed perfectly looks like.

Your sister sounds like someone who understood her market well, worked out a plan to tackle it, and executed it perfectly.

I wish I understood a market well enough to create that kind of plan. I don't feel like I understand myself well enough to market to me, let alone anyone else.

It’s surfing. The wave is luck, but the successful ones know how to get up on the board and ride it.

The problem with luck is that people who are extremely skilled at something seem to usually get inordinately lucky. Part of skill involves setting yourself up to get lucky.

To some degree, problems of luck are also problems of volume: if you are president #45 and you have a 5% chance at creating a viral tweet, tweet 50 times and you will get one.

I think your problem is treating the success of the Kardashians as deterministic

Their initial success may not have been, but their sustaining success absolutely must be, or else it would have fizzled out, one way or another. Many celebrities tried to latch on to this style of success as their careers waned more generally, (Jessica Simpson comes to mind, she had a similar enough reality TV show and was a big star for her time), but there was no sustaining power there. Not saying she isn't in her own right successful (she is), but by all given metrics I can think of, the Kardashians are outliers here

How about these examples? Amiga had customers, and was profitable, yet Amiga is no longer a force in the computing, nor is Commodore.

Both had more (arguably) capable operating systems than Windows (until at least Windows 95), yet, no sustaining power.

Look at the sustaining power of iOS and Android, despite other more capable competitors that tried to win market share (Windows Phone, WebOS, and I really wanted WebOS to win, mind you)

I find going from 0 to 1 much more interesting than 1 to n though, since 0 to 1 seems far less understood.

As do I, what I'm addressing here is a question of "do they have some kind of special staying power" which is in my mind, an absolute yes.

Its understanding how they managed that that you can work your back to 0, I think. There is value in that

> their sustaining success absolutely must be

Isnt that just survivorship bias?

If it's non deterministic, if these people are just extraordinarily lucky, then OK. But that means it's all just luck, just being in the right place and knowing the right people at the right time. And I don't have that kind of luck so I should stay away from mass-market ideas. Or probably, any ideas at all because there's nothing special about the mass-market, and it's all "just luck".

There are millions of beautiful people out there trying to get rich and famous. The Kardashians have managed to do that very successfully, and consistently, for years. I don't think that's luck. That doesn't look like luck. I think they knew exactly what they were doing, had a good plan, and executed it perfectly. And a major component of that was understanding their market perfectly.

Considering there are now many many more of those type of people on youtube and instagram, I would not call it undeterministic. Sure, there is many luck and several variables involved; not many can do the same, especially not on that scale. But the general process of how it works is today known enough for other people succedding too.

Pornography for women works completely differently than pornography for men.

Can you expand on the idea that the Kardashians produce pornography for women? Sounds like it could explain why I don't get it!

I don't know if I would call it "pornography for women" but in my experience women tend to be more interested in social dynamics. e.g. Who said what to whom and why, X is fighting with Y because of Z and J is siding X instead of K, and so on.

These shows tend to be about groups of characters engaging in what you might call social or political struggles. Tensions, drama, conflict, emotions, and so on. Reality shows like the Kardashians are a distillation of these aspects and create something that is sweet like sugar to people who are disposed to enjoy that flavor.

I think a lot of people judge reality TV shows without watching them and kind of look down on them. If you don't have the taste for something it's easy to look down on it. For example, lots of people look down on Star Trek, which I loved when I was younger and still do. If I had to answer why I liked Star Trek, it's because I like to imagine myself as Captain Picard and figure out what I would do if I were faced with the given moral dilemma of the week. If my fantasy preferences tended towards "How would I handle the handsome jerk my sister is dating while I myself am a beautiful billionaire?" then I would watch different shows.

I think your comment is more sophisticated and useful than my “pornography for women”. What I was getting at in particular was that fantasies of luxury, arbitrary amounts of money, clothes, homes, vacations, and being listened to, resonate with many women on a fundamental level, and this may be entwined with their sexuality. Whether this is a form of pornography or not is complex. The points about politics above are well made. I have always thought that these endless “social dynamic” controversies represents a real time estimation, by the women involved, of their mating attractiveness, which partially governs all the chrome junk they’re enveloped in, but I am certainly a very amateur analyst. Two more thoughts, one from my late mother and one from me. 1. There are no books in these houses and no abstract concepts. 2. It is useful to contrast the details here with men’s obsession with sports.

The parent is actually talking about a far larger category that existed commercially in a studied way long before the Kardashians, it's simply: sex sells.

Madonna knew it in the 1980s. Britney or Jessica Simpson knew it in the 1990s. Paris Hilton knew it in the 2000s. The Kardashians have known it the past 15 years. Hugh Hefner knew it 70 years ago. Every model of consequence knows it.

The Kardashians are extraordinarily talented at selling sexuality. They know how to package it. They know how to market it. They intentionally replicated the system that worked so well for Kim, on to Kylie Jenner as she came of age.

Once you gain an initial position via your sexuality, leverage it into further gains. Sex rarely fails to sell.

And the parent is also correct in that it mostly (not exclusively) works for women, regardless of the downvotes attempting to change human nature and reality. A few male celebrities have benefitted tremendously from the effect, including Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey (how many famous male models can you name from the past 20-30 years though?).

There are literally millions of beautiful people trying to make a living out of being beautiful. I don't believe that "being beautiful" or "sex sells" adequately explains the success of any of the people you mention.

And the target market for the Kardashians (I think, as far as I understand it) is not the people who find them sexually attractive. This is different from Marilyn Monroe, who mostly appealed to straight men, and for whom "sex sells" would be a perfect description. The Kardashian's market don't want to have sex with the Kardashians. They want to be the Kardashians (I think).

Yes, I had that thought too. My wife is an artistic, leftist resister type with a background in ballet, dance, and education. She watches the Kardashians, all the Housewives, the Shahs, all that crap. She doesn’t aspire to this either. She buys all her clothes in thrift shops! So it is extremely complex.

Millions of woman try to get famous based on looks and sexuality alone. They (almost) all fail. So I think it is more complicated than that.

This is rather insulting and dismissive. There's a lot of empty media content aimed primarily at men that's no more ultimately meaningful than celeb gossip that's hardly "pornography." Sports are the most obvious. A lot of empty action/comedy shows would also fit the bill, I think.

The other replies to your comment don't seem to address your fundamental point that the Kardashians and their kind are in a different category than other celebrities. Their skills are not acting or singing or sports, but rather generating news to keep themselves in the headlines. I don't really recall this being a category until the start of reality TV, and even then it was short-lived after the shows ended. It wasn't until Paris Hilton that I was really aware of how powerful this category can be, and others have figured out the formula as well, leading to the Kardashians and other influencers. The successful ones have the social intelligence to know how and what kind of outrageous or salacious news to generate to attract people who like to feel envy, indignation, and a sense of superiority to famous people to watch their antics, and thus feed the hype machine that keeps them in the spotlight and allows them to reap the rewards of that spotlight.

Yes, this is something the 45th US president did quite well

Trump is arguably one of the first successful reality TV stars. He basically laid the groundwork.

The Kardashians took up the ball that Paris Hilton dropped.

This is a solid point about Donald Trump. I owned the Trump board game as a kid. (Released in 1989! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump:_The_Game) We thought he was such a goof, but he was definitely a social media star before social media networks.

Kim Kardashian was Paris Hilton's intern and appeared on Paris Hilton's show. I don't think that was accidental.

It comes down to two things: consistency of brand, and constantly creating content. Media does the rest. If you think about 45, he almost always wore the same thing, put his name on everything, applied the same style of opinions to everything (either loved or hated something, with limited nuance). Offered a simple opinion on everything.

He was always slightly outrageous which the left wing media had a job dealing with in a way that did not benefit him. He'd say something a bit bad which was then on the cover of all the newspapers when it would have been politically better to ignore him.

I think you're giving them a lot more credit than is due. they are merely puppets poorly acting out situations scripted by people who do understand how to market their products

That's no different than actors and singers, who act out situations scripted by their publicists and managers who understand how to market their products. Regardless, we are talking about the kind of product that's being sold, which is fundamentally different than those sold by actors and singers.

actors and singers are contributing to the arts, plus they require at least an iota of talent, which is more than can be attributed to those vapid degenerates

Yes, and this is exactly Marcus Holmes's point.

But they are billionaires and we are not

I don't think this category is entirely new. Drama and gossip always was a prominent topic among people, even before global media was a think. But what shifted over time was the quality of content that was allowed to surface in media. In the 80s and 90s cheap trash-content became a think, to feed the growing demand for content, and to lower the costs of production, but also because people learned more about the culture of modern media. And with this movement, many types of content which were former just local stuff that people did privatly, became professionalised for TV and pushed to the whole world. So it really was just a matter of time till even parasocialicer made their appearence.

And with parasocialicer I mean the type of people who's main effect is to be someone who'se existence people can enjoy, without delivering anything actually skillfull outside of social interaction. Similar to cat- or dog-content.

Certainly there's nothing new under the sun. The difference is the degree in which these people are prominent in media and the zeitgeist, to the point where they make a comfortable living from this work.

You should clearly not enter a market you do not understand, because you'll probably lead you to bring a knife to a gunfight.

But your conclusion about mass-market is too broad, this is not a single thing and can really depend on your definition and perspective.

Apple devices can be considered mass-market or niche.

the phrase "famous for being famous" sums it up nicely. it's a feedback loop.

With respect, I believe anyone who uses the term "famous for being famous" isn’t working very hard to understand the subject. It is roughly like saying a programming language is successful because it uses semicolons.

I think it makes sense, a lot of celebrities that I know, I only happen to know them because someone else talked about them, not because they have some kind of talent that I was looking for.

I sort of see where you're going with this, but a large part of the equation missing (at least in your outline; not to suggest you're ignorant of it) is 1) startup capital (they were already wealthy) and 2) a powerful and influential network. Their skill was leveraging these things, of course, so I'm not saying their success was inevitable, but even having those opportunities in place for Kris, Kim etc. to build on puts them far ahead of most people trying to enter the market. Maybe before trying to figure out how to appeal to the mass-market like a Kardashian, try figuring out how to appeal to a small but dynastically wealthy and famous market like a Kardashian ;)

> This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works

Just because they understand how to play the game in their current situation, it does not mean they could replicate the process of getting to their current situation.

The same is true in science.

The same is also true in business (this is one root cause for the "hard-to-place smell" that surrounds the HBS case study approach).

There's actually a lot of "Kardashian-like" people out there these days.

People literally throw money at girls talking to a camera, taking photos of themselves and their lives and/or playing games.

I still don't quite understand why :D

People, not girls. There are actually more men than woman with that livestyle. Unless you are also consider Instragram-Influencers who are selling beauty-products. But those usally don't play games.

>> my "Kardashian problem"

You need lots of empathy for sociopaths if your aim is to understand the why and the how of their successes. The fact you don't understand them makes me think you're a good person. The world would be a much better place if people weren't trying to copy them.

Thanks :)

I don't want to copy them, per se. I respect them for their business acumen, and I would like to be that good at marketing. But as you say, sociopaths. I would do different things with the power that that kind of money brings.

It's a soap opera played out as though it's real life and on social media, and soap operas have been popular since the 1930s.

IMHO the reality and social media aspects of it get all the attention and people focus on those and think it's something entirely new and unprecedented, but really they're just force multipliers. Soap + reality and social media. That's it. The things that actual make it engaging are exactly the same as those in any soap, but even soaps are powerful enough that they can bend some people's reality.

I once saw an interview with the star of a popular soap here in the UK. He played a despicable character that manipulated and betrayed the people about him, especially women. He said that at a certain point when his character was particularly nefarious he had to avoid going out in public. Quite frequently he would be walking down the street and a woman (it was always a woman) would start screaming and shouting at him, telling him how horrible he was, and he should be ashamed of himself. Some of them even threw things at him. An actor in a TV show, it wasn't even a reality show, this was long before they even started. (Dirty Den in East Enders).

A lot of people consuming this stuff, even the explicitly fictional dramas, have a lot of problems distinguishing between reality and fantasy. They will sometimes even acknowledge they know it's just a show, while also directing abuse at the actors. Deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and real life, as reality shows do, and the brew becomes even more viscerally engaging.

Given this, things like qAnon become a lot more understandable. There are a _lot_ of people who are just out and out fantasists. If there are enough to make actors hide at home, that means there are some on almost every street in every city or town in the world all the time.

Edit: https://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/eastenders/a27088763/soap-v...

The Kardashians have just perfected the Seinfeldian idea that people want to watch people doing whatever.

I met the owner of the garage on Oak Tree road in Edison, NJ several years back. Hia garage was part of Paris Hilton episode where she works with customers visiting for car repair. What he said shocked me. He said we are fools thinking that Paris Hilton is stupid. The joke is on us. He said she was paid a ten figure amount to be part of the show and she very well knew how the market worked.

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect.

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed, in part because I thought didn’t see how they addressed the minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an unusually limited interface).

Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense.

Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about!

EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...

For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites with relative ease and to write a post history that other folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that software to easily throw together a stream of articles had common value.

That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.

I think you're right about the timeline. I do remember livejournal being around before Blogger, which is around when "blogging" became a term.

I remember getting into a few people's web-based online diaries in the late '90s and definitely some folks used geocities to host their journals. I remember using it myself to post whatever nonsense I was doing to share with friends.

You could use the finger command on users and read their .plan files even earlier than that. Quake developers were famous for those. https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_19...

Thanks, I was looking for this comment. Most of the examples he gave just seem like absolute straw men to me:

> The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

> Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

It was pretty obviously apparent with wikis that letting anyone update the page, from the browser, was a cool technological achievement. I was well into my tech career at this point and don't remember anyone reacting to wikis this way.

> youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

I mean, these are getting ridiculous. When YouTube came out video sharing was a major PITA, a pain that hit most technical people, too.

I just don't buy GP's premise because all of the examples seem like something only "Tech Support Guy" from those old SNL skits would say.

> > The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

> Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

I don't get why we're even talking about it. The original example is nonsense. The web literally does what that example says - pushes byte streams to computers that use a rendering tool to view them.

Arguably, what made the web popular wasn't HTTP per se. The two core ingredients were, in my opinion, DNS infrastructure and that "rendering tool", AKA. web browser. Together, they made it easy to publish files and let random people access them. Arguably, the third leg would be the <A> tag in early HTML, which kept everything glued together while it expanded exponentially.

>youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Hosting videos back then required plugins on the part of the viewer, which was something we were all cautioned not to download because of security.... Youtube was the first site that broke through the ice and had enough content to start taking advantage of network effects, and didn't blow that lead.

A somewhat HN-famous example of the "couldn't you..." sentiment would be this from the debut of Dropbox ("couldn't you just use ftp"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary.

Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.

Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.

My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.

You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.

Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.

Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.

I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.

I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising.

We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.

I just wish social media platforms had adviasarial integration like telephone companies were forced to do.

Let the platforms compete on UX and data handling policies.

That way, the interesting people on one platform aren't gated away from the interesting people on others.

I mean I want a social media product with only my friends on it that filters out all the crap.

To summarize: one can't predict user adoption. If they can, I'd encourage them to start the required companies in order to capture it.

In many cases what people failed to anticipate was simply how successful online advertising would prove to be. Many of these ideas were just ways to lose money when they were first implemented.

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom.

I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since then, including between the two themselves.

>I have a few qualms with this app:

>1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account...

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Sorry, I can't resist... I just noticed from the URL that my comment was the 9,224th item ever on Hacker News. Hacker News was a very different place back then. YC wasn't well known at all. Hell, the iPhone hadn't been released yet. We still had to walk uphill both ways to get to school and back.

Few seem to consider that contextual difference. Poor word choice aside for a moment, "quite trivially" meant something very different in 2007 than it has come to mean today.

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

Edit: oops I mixed up the dates- Joel's blog post was from 2008. But the point that file sync was widely derided as a consumer product still stands.

>, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me re-read it as charitably as possible.

That said, I think you're still overlooking some of the reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that's separate from hindsight bias.

First was the "quite trivially" phrase in the comment. That type of verbiage automatically triggers the perception of haughtiness. Imagine if someone did a Show HN of a new webcam security doorbell and a commenter said, ", you can already build such a system yourself _quite trivially_ by getting some components from DigiKey and soldering them yourself". Can you see how that sounds really dismissive?

Second, it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users like BrandonM who can string together curlftpfs with CVS/SVN.

So for him to avoid that comment required stepping outside himself to see the perspective of non-techies. He could still dismiss Dropbox... but for different reasons related to not meeting needs of the end user mass market rather than purely base an opinion off his personal skillset.

Even with all of that, it's not a great example of what pg used to call a middlebrow dismissal, especially when there are so many millions of worse examples. "Quite trivially" sounds terrible out of context, but (a) he scoped it to Linux users, (b) it's clear from the downstream reply that he was speaking from experience, and (c) he immediately agreed with Drew that even that solution had drawbacks and thanked him for the technical correction. That's the behavior of someone making good conversation, not someone being haughty. A haughty dismisser would have seized the opportunity to up the snark.

> it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users

I don't think that's an accurate reading. His Linux point was only one of three, and the other two were about the mass market. Given that he had implemented the Linux solution himself, I think the fact that he led with that point was probably more out of geeky exuberance than overlooking non-technical users.

It seems to me that in the context of 2007 all three of those points could easily have popped up in Dropbox's YC interview. Don't forget that back then, YC would sometimes fund a startup even though they didn't much believe in the idea (Airbnb famously so), because of the personal impression made by the founders. That's still the case today, and it was the case back then as well :)

> That's the behavior of _someone_ making good conversation, not someone being haughty.

I meant to focus on the text's tone sounding haughty rather than accuse the person being haughty.

Let me try to explain another way to emphasize the text aspect: that particular sentence in isolation is what is quoted on the internet outside of HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+suc...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+such+...

The "quite trivially" may only be scoped to one bullet point and may be unfairly weighted when looking at his followup thoughtful conversation -- but it also elevated it legendary HN lore.

Ok, but if you read the text as a whole, it's not true that it's haughty. That it sounds haughty when quoted selectively is the internet's fault, not the commenter's. At most he can be accused of (a) not pre-emptively bulletproofing his text against selective quotation, and (b) not knowing the future. And (a) reduces to (b).

I take your point about lore, and on that level it's just good fun.

p.s. Also, nice use of the word 'haughty'. We need those good English words.

Hello. I’m honestly loving this conversation. Thanks for engaging seriously about it. It also means a lot, dang, that you took the time to both understand my points and also to counter the narrative, all these years after I commented.

As much as I appreciate your thoughtfulness, I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway.

As I’ve stated since[1], I was an undergrad when I made those comments. I know how much I’ve grown since then. It feels like someone else said them, and everyone is talking about “not me” when they remark about it today.

I definitely appreciate the love, though. Thanks!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661824

I don't know about everyone else, but I always read your comment with the mindset of "this could definitely have been me", not "hah, look at this idiot". I hope most other people read it the same way, because I don't think anyone is 100% correct in their predictions of which product will do well.

>I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted,

Thanks for adding to the discussion. While dang was trying to defend your character, I was emphasizing the peculiar wordsmithing of your text being an enduring magnet for memes. Are you aware of snowclones[1]? Here's a recent snowclone example[2] from HN: For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by installing an x11vnc server on your host, setting up a SSH tunnel to a remote server which forwards the host's VNC port, [...]

Here's my theory on the phenomenon and why your old comment keeps getting cited...

Your 1st bullet point's text about ftp was so poetic that it hijaacks the mind and it overshadows the rest of your comment(s). It's like people think Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the USA" is a celebration of patriotism when actually, the total lyrics are about disposable veterans from the Vietnam War. It's the "born in the USA" chorus that more people remember and not the nuanced verses of sadness.

If you had written about ftp in a more hesitating way with more qualifiers...e.g. "Maybe I'm reading the Dropbox application incorrectly but it seems like it duplicates what ftp already does [...] blah blah blah" -- your skepticism would have been forgotten because the text would have been boring and safe.

But your text of, "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account," -- combined with obscure tools unknown to the masses like "curlftpfs/SVN/CVS" -- was irresistibly quotable. That unintentionally became your "born in the USA" chorus.

Even before your 2007 comment, there was already a "too many techies are out-of-touch about the needs of non-techies" criticism in the air and the internet punching bag to express it was the famous 2001 Slashdot comment[3] about the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

So the HN collective found a new example of "out of touch techies" in the "famous Dropbox comment". But only the 1st bullet point and it doesn't care about the rest of your thoughtful nuanced conversation and replies. It's unfair but I'm glad to hear you've made peace with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230416

[3] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Haha, thanks for pointing me to that comment. It’s especially hilarious to me because I wrote a blog post nearly 10 years ago about exactly how to configure SSH+VNC like that[1][2]. It was even featured in the now-defunct Hacker Monthly.

I appreciate your theorizing on its staying power. It’s interesting to think about why a particular phrase sticks with people.

[1] http://shebang.mintern.net/tips-for-remote-unix-work-ssh-scr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364025

> pretty much the definition of hindsight bias

This. The antidote is to revisit examples of "couldn't you just X" where X indeed prevailed. There are even instances where superseding technology was actually better, but it was too late to replace X.

My favorite example is Iridium (and the whole satellite internet industry so far, let's see what will happen with Starlink). It's one thing to remove friction, but only if the new cost structure is still favorable.

Disruption doesn't happen because new tech is better/cooler, it happens when it introduces competitive advantage.

It’s not hindsight bias if you think it’s face smackingly obvious at the time.

I agree there’s still a conundrum here, why is something obviously one way to some very smart people like BrandonM while the exact opposite seems just as obvious to other people. I suspect it’s more about what people value than what they know technically.

> but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

Well, not exactly. There's plenty of people who have been successful at, frankly horrible things.

I count this kind of "not your computer, ours" rent seeking change as "bad if successful".

I don't really buy this. A lot of complaints are about the privacy of the whole ordeal. That's kind of moot considering Google has access to all of my banking emails, Dropbox has access to all of my invoices, Apple has access to all of my photos, and Equifax already leaked my SSN years ago.

Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.

Fwiw, unlike the examples above, we have permission to your data (if you give it to us) but we don't own or control any of it. We don't store it elsewhere. We don't sell it to the highest bidder. We don't mine it for some other purpose.

Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model.

I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instance, we can patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a lot faster for everyone.

What we offer today is a faster way to use applications that do own your data so you can be much more productive and hopefully enable a new set of applications never before possible.

We help improve decentralization of the web over duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more powerful, not less.

We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer computing OS as it underlies our tech.

In time, we might be open to people owning their own hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I don't view either world as mutually exclusive.

If there's an opportunity to research making things trustless, we'll work on that.

I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions. Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work. It is a slippery slope and claiming virtue doesnt decrease the gradient.

Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple.

The rest feels like classic SV/startup window dressing to get the job done.

>I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions. Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work.

I think that's just called "switching to a subscription model". "Rent seeking" has a different meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

> "Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple."

That's factually incorrect that, that always happens and I am not sure why you think we're grouped into that without any evidence or a basis of reasoning.

i have a hard time classifying mighty as 'rent seeking' - they are providing you computational resources in return for money, not seeking some sort of gatekeeping money by virtue of owning a scarce or critical-path resource.

Agreed, my concern is about the trajectory of the product offerings more broadly. Embrace-extend-rent seems a common theme. I hope the case of Mighty has better intentions. Perhaps I am too cynical.

I wonder if the pitch deck had the same value proposition we are getting or if it said "lets own consumer virtual desktop starting with Chrome". Both are valid.

Feels like a bait and switch.

This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

That is a great list. I also felt the same about many of those technologies, but I never thought to put it so succinctly -- as you have!

For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter.

Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise.

Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I knew this would show up again. It's a comment that will live in infamy.

I love how what ended up happening was "Or you can pay Dropbox to not have to do any of this".

I don't want to manage my backups or I guess file syncs between machines.

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc

This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.

Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has.

But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf.

We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309

This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196

This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.

How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?

They're his posts?

Oh, of course. Thanks.

This is not proof of what you think it is. It may be evidence but it isn't proof.

dang detaching off-topic subthreads is the opposite of mods opaquely fucking around with rankings. He explicitly detached the thread, and posted that he had done so. That's a judgement call which you're welcome to disagree with and I'm not going to affirm or second-guess because I don't care much.

As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

> dang detaching off-topic subthreads is the opposite of mods opaquely fucking around with rankings. He explicitly detached the thread, and posted that he had done so. That's a judgement call which you're welcome to disagree with and I'm not going to affirm or second-guess because I don't care much.

Yeah, you don't care about it much, it wasn't you that it happened to. I don't care that much either. I do care about this easily abused behavior, though.

> As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

I know, as do anyone that has experienced it, that they are penalized. If you say sane but controversial things around here you get downvoted, hidden, silenced. This sounds melodramatic, but think about what you are saying - HN is looking for boring, safe, everyone agrees commentary.

> So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

> Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

With all due respect, I know. I can tell.

> But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

Yeah that's how abuse works, that's how loopholes work. Rules for me and not for you. Rules that are arbitrarily applied.

That's what I've never gotten about HN. You guys are so smart, but it's like you skipped politics 101.

The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much money you can make from a product and not about how the product improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather then fixing the real issues.

The problem I see with this heuristic is that it is going to give false positives for, well, the vast majority of cases where there's a supposedly new idea that actually is just an unnecessary rehash or combination of things that already exist but with a new coat of paint. I don't see how the heuristic can possibly have any predictive power. Look at pretty much every tech startup, every get-rich-quick scheme, every cryptocurrency project, etc. and they'll be making grand claims that their idea is groundbreaking, and technical people are going to say "couldn't you just x?" or "isn't this worse than the existing x?" and those dismissals are actually going to be reasonable and proven valid in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, your heuristic will also catch the tiny number of cases that do turn out to be groundbreaking (or at least extremely successful or popular).

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

That's just the realization that opinions of technical people don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.

> twitter: couldn't you just not?

This is, actually, still true :)

Great observation! It feels to me kind of like the 'blub' problem [0], in that these are both cases where technical folks misjudge the utility of something new (to them) because it merely makes it easy to do something, instead of making it possible to do something. And maybe that 'something' they either don't know they want, or don't realize how often they would use it if it were available, or don't appreciate that others want.

Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Another perspective; blogs and wikis are two use-cases of essentially the same interaction. The different designs guide and inspire people how to use them. Then, they discover that the use-cases are beneficial.

In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.

There are two types ideas:

1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.)

2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)

The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

Except for twitter, all the alternatives you wrote doesn't even fit the criteria of "couldn't you.." because it is not replacing the given product MVPs. What do you mean by update a page. Blog and wiki just "update the page" more than most other form of sites.

In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.

I think there is an analog here to the great man theory vs zeitgeist. Maybe this tech was underwhelming and its massive impact was due to fortuitous timing. So you weren’t wrong about the tech just how it would mix with the spirit of the moment.

This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP" comment.

I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.

No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

This argument have been attempted already, you can also take Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea" , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this product. Just because some successful companies had bad feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder comment fiesta...).

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____"

Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies

Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.

Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.

u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive. This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can bend light.

I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!

Canva - couldn't you just use photoshop? This isn't a dig at Canva, but praise.

Good heuristic.

It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.

Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days.

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

There are incremental/larger/easier improvements and then there are populism "improvements." The one tends to amplify the other. Facebook was incrementally better than Myspace at first, and then became more popular and much better. Myspace was much better than Friendster. It's an evolutionary model where some improvements are made, some features are lost, and specialization meanders.

I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.

All of those examples boil down to making technology more accessible for the millions or billions of less technologically savvy people.

Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.

"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??"

This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic weeks before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter.

There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.

Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull" that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to make it happen.

MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.

I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's platform.

Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it never dies

Twitter deserves a full time CEO

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