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Comment by slingnow | Hacker News Reader

Using total number of mentions as a way to predict future tech trends seems dubious at best. I understand coming up with a better metric would be difficult, but this one seems useless.

For example, with this metric, how can we tell the difference between people constantly dismissing Bitcoin or people constantly praising it? Just because you mention it doesn't mean you're mentioning it in a positive light.

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HN commenters famously dismissed Dropbox when it was first posted. I would love to see a variant of this based on sentiment analysis and whether the conclusion would turn into "yes, but not the way you think".

A lot of people fall into the trap of negativity = IQ. Your brain can spit out a reason that DropBox will succeed or fail, but the failure case sounds smarter.

Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions. It was more polished and financially successful but that doesn’t mean it was good for tech. It’s corporate software, yes it became valuable but it definitely represents an anti-user trend that actually would best have been resisted. You should never give closed source software root!

> Alternative take, people didn’t like Dropbox because it was the repackaging and close sourcing of existing solutions

It wasn't. Even the famous comment just pointed it was possible to replicate with existing tools. And apart from one person the thread was actually pretty welcoming.

That comment was just a grandfather of the very popular "Why should I use this instead of [completely different solution]?", that is also so very often also used against open source projects themselves.

Underappreciating simplicity and mass appeal is easy for an elite group.

(I do this consistently myself.)

Elitism doesn't make a group an elite.

That's rather spectacularly missing the point.

I think the point is noticing the trends, not agreeing with them. If people were criticizing bitcoin in hn in 2013, it means the community was aware of its importance. And they were before the rest of the world did.

That does not mean this is the perfect (or even a good) metric, but I do not think that predicting tech trends is the same thing as embracing them.

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