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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> My 15-year old nephew who isn't part of the game development scene almost certainly noticed this game before I did. Just think of all the other trends you and I are likely missing no matter how close we think we're paying attention.

People like to make fun of me when I talk tech with teens (TM?). This is exactly why. Because as much as we think we're on top of all the latest trends, sometimes we're just too not hip.

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Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it? Looking at Google Trends, it's already peaked, and peaked at far less interest than say Among Us or Fall Guys. It does appear have more longevity than Fall Guys did. But right now I just don't see either the cultural or commercial significance.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=roblox,among%20us...

(But I hadn't heard of the game before now, so maybe dismissing it is just a bias on my part.)

> Is FNF really so significant that it was important not to miss it?

Probably not, but I also learned about Roblox, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok from teens long before any of those got popular in my usual bubbles. In part because when I would tell my usual bubble about them, they were dismissed as fads.

vsco.co is the next bubble.

Funny you mention that. I have in fact heard about that one from some teens as well. Don't use it much though, since I don't really know anyone on the platform. I still haven't figured out how it differs from Instagram, other than the ownership of the site.

Maybe it is because I was a teen then, but I heard about vsco a long long time ago (unless ~6/7 years is not long). I thought it was already on its death throes though, barely anyone I know uses it.

I think it's not so much that you're not "hip," but you aren't concerned about the minutia most kids are nowadays. My 2nd cousin told me recently he hated reading in school because "there was no sound." It was incredibly eye opening to me to see how starkly different growing up between us was. Not that I'm some enlightened millennial, but often in the earlier days of the internet, reading and images were all we had. Now as a more tech inclined individual, I see what the current generation appreciates as annoying and excessive.

Perhaps market research should interview 10-16 year olds more often?

Yup. I feel like a bunch of stuff is absolutely invisible to my industry bubble until it has a standout hit that makes a ton of money or starts getting talked about by someone everyone knows and trusts and then becomes impossible to ignore. And the lesson then should not be that "wow this is a perfectly replicatable formula" but, "maybe some of our assumptions are wrong."

Which makes me further think -- how many OTHER transformative trends are we missing, because they AREN'T money or media based and thus destined to eventually pierce our industry bubble?

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