Ask HN: How to spot the next thing before it hits the mainstream?

One fun heuristic I've used for thought-experiments in futurology is to ask "what will be to cheap to charge for eventually, and what comes of that?" For example, electricity. Or water. Or fuel/energy for vehicles? Or computation? What would you do if you had unlimited internet bandwidth? What will have scarcity value when we can harvest asteroids for unlimited diamonds (or just... not stockpile them)?

There's the missing Step #2 problem, but it's still interesting to think through. And in my personal experience, it can also lead to you creating the future but too early for it to be truly viable. And that can 'waste' a lot of time, if you don't enjoy or value the the exploration in and of itself.

Hanging around optimistic, inquisitive people definitely helps. If your friends or community act reactively in a negative or dismissive way without consideration they're not going to see the potential in these things before it's obvious.

The mainstream news is like the above, have been dismissive of almost every new invention for basically forever so definitely avoid that.

Everything starts out looking like a toy and this causes most people to think it'll never be big/serious.

For tech projects, think about what they would look like if they were 1000x faster/better. Many people dismissed computers, the internet, phones and now crypto because it was so slow and expensive, but technology improves and unlocks new possibilities people didn't consider before as it gets faster and cheaper.

Lastly look for areas that have super passionate fans, and talk to them about why they're passionate with an open mind. Because there are always people that "get it" before others and you want to be one of them.

My pick for the next big thing for this decade is Ethereum + Decentralized Finance. It's eating the financial system in the same way the internet ate newspapers and media, or cloud computing ate traditional servers/ops. It looks small and slow and expensive now but is rapidly growing and has a super passionate fanbase (of which I am one, and will happily talk all day about it).

It seems like kids and nerds are the first to discover new trends. See what kids are into now, and adults will catch on in a decade (e.g. Roblox in 2006, Minecraft in 2011) and just now adults are discovering the metaverse.

Also nerds...I was using Zoom other video calling apps (e.g. Kik and Fring) for years before the rest of the world caught on in 2020. Bitcoin is a dozen years old and we still haven't found that killer app for crypto. Maybe 5 or 10 years from now grandparents will be using it. I had voice controlled home automation in 1999 with Homeseer and X10, 16 years before Alexa. It's getting more mainstream now, maybe in 20 years it will be the rule, not the exception.

Paul Graham said it in one of his essays that you can imagine what the future will be like and then fill in the gaps with technology that will make it happen...picture most cars are electric and self driving 30 years from now. Most lights and appliances either think for themselves or have voice control. What will change between now and then to make that future possible? If most cars are going to be electric, most gas stations might convert to charging or hydrogen stations (can you build a business that facilitates that?). If cars drive themselves, what do they do when they are not driving people around? Maybe ownership isn't as important, and there will be more car (and other vehicle) sharing.

If every light switch and appliance is smart and needs to communicate, what infrastructure needs to exist in every house? (Can you start a company that installs mesh networks or smart hubs in houses?). If crypto is a major way to pay, will there be more banks? Fewer?

If more work becomes remote and some jobs disappear (e.g. drivers, cashiers, restaurant hosts/waiters), will people migrate away from cities? What will need to happen to support that?

>Also nerds...I was using Zoom other video calling apps (e.g. Kik and Fring) for years before the rest of the world caught on in 2020.

You are like 15 years late with MSN/Jabber, and far before, people even used Netmeeting/Ekiga-Gnome Netmeeting over SIP/VoIP.

Kik and Fring were Android apps I used in 2009. I doubt many were using video calling on smartphones before that.

Some of us were messing with QuickCams and CU-SeeMe in the mid-90s.

Maybe the lesson is "what cool thing is interesting but isn't quite working today because the technology hasn't caught up yet?"

Eh, I am sure most of the teens were making video calls just fine even over MSN with aMSN and Kopete.

Also, I did videocalls with Ekiga with my GF perfectly back in the day. Not the best quality, but it worked.

> adults are discovering the metaverse

wait, who has been in the metaverse already? Can they tell the rest of us what it is?

You made me think: 3d printing. At the moment it is very fiddly for hobbyists but eventually it will be way more easy and with better materials. The idea of 3d printing things you’d normally buy may not be so crazy. Or maybe an amazon warehouse will 3d print and deliver as if it were any other package.

My quick take is that you can’t really. At least beside following tech related news. If “the next big thing” was predictable it would be “the big thing right now”. All the examples you took were only clearly “the big thing” in retrospect.

For example right now who knows which one of: VR, crypto, biotech, etc will be the “big thing” of the decade? If one trust the power law one will still dwarf the others by its importance in retrospect.

If “the next big thing” was predictable it would be “the big thing right now”.

Sometimes you know the next big thing, but tech has to catch up. I knew in 2003 that smartphones would be huge. I was a big fan but I knew not everyone had unlimited data plans like I did. Also the UI was clunky. There was no question that with an improvement in tech there would be mass adoption. There is no question that self-driving cars or electric cars will be near universal at some point. Whether that is 10 years or 50 years is the only question. Cryptocurrency too is just waiting for some killer application or a major bank crash before people say yeah this is the way to go. I think we know many of the next big things now, we are just waiting for tech (or people) to catch up. My daughter, for example, is 9 and I don't think she has ever touched a physical light switch. She grew up in a house with 17 Alexa devices and 70 smart switches, outlets, and lights. You just tell Alexa what you want. At some point in the future the rest of the world will be living the way I do now.

Aren’t you afraid of privacy issues with so many objects connected to internet?

For every “next big thing” there were 1000 other things that looked like they would be it, but weren’t.

I bet many of those "failures" were before their time. Example the Apple Newton was a failure but the iPad was and is a success. Sega channel offered games via subscription in the 1990s. Nintendo power glove offered an immersive VR feel to games. VR goggles come back every 10 years and still haven't stuck. Eventually they might.

I think that trend prediction is a fascinating area. I’ve read several books on the topic.

Sorry for the long reply, but I believe based on what I have read (though I don’t have the math skills to show it) that “the next big thing” is emergent, i.e. they are the states that are possible to reach out of the current set of system states. In other words, where we will be can only result from where we are now. I believe this is conceptually related to chaos theory?

Since it is impossible (due to complexity) to model exactly where we are now in a broad sense (e.g. the whole current way of life), it is difficult to say where we will be next in a broad sense.

However, a lower order state model of where we are now may provide a rough estimate of possible future states in that model.

This is most likely why we can say that there will probably be a medical breakthrough for society in the near future; but, perhaps we can’t say exactly what that breakthrough will be.

Maybe if the system under observation is small enough, you can get close.

I played roguelikes and IF games before they came into mainstream... again. About 2003-2004, under Linux and some 8 bit micropc emulators.

Most game scripts (scripts as in literature) were previously in most IF games as a concept, even with time travel or twisted world mechanics. Nothing is truly new.

I was using Super+a as a lauching prompt since forever, now a lot of environments use it because it perfectly fits to the left hand.

CLI IM'img/IRC, with or without Bitlbee. Already done in mid 2000's. Fun as hell, no anoying spamming or notifications. Now everyone has a Weechat plugin.

There was a Gopher revival in ~2007, now Gemini came over as a companion for modern devices.

As a child, I always want to play my sega mega drive in my house with my friends playing their mega drives in their house. When I was later introduced to the internet it just made sense to me.

Think about what you think the future would be like or how you would like it to be. Then see who is working on that right now.

For me, here's some things I think will be big in the future:

* smart screens - windows, mirrors showing information like weather and having 'Alexa' built into them.

* VR / metaverse(s)

* Bitcoin - it being the best proof of _work_ network

Paul Graham talks about this some in Living in the future[0]

I think there are 2 stages. Learning new stuff that has potential and understanding how much potential it has.

For the learning part you want to be really open minded and talk to lots of people. Use hacker news, reddit, TikTok, Discord, meet people in virtual reality who have unusual custom haptics and ask them about what they think the future will be like. Talk to weird people outside your social circles and gudie your conversations using first principals. Ask people younger than you what's cool now and what they're interested in. Gradeschoolers are the real gurus.

For the understanding part thats trickier and more personal. I've got it right a few times but I've got it very wrong a few times too. I first learned about Bitcoin when it was maybe 3 cents a coin or something? I think I saw it on some obscure subreddit. I've never been too into money though so I didn't really look into it. Even now if I'm being honest I usually find crypto kind of boring. (The chains you can write code on I'm more interested in, though still skeptical). You mention the internet. Lots of people actually knew about the internet. I haven't been able to find it again lately but there is this hilarious newscast from the early 90s that open with the anchor quickly turning to look into the camera and say "but what is internet?"

Here we have the tricky part. Out on the frontier, the "edge of the fractal stain" as Graham would call it...there is a lot of stuff thats just never going to pan out. Some of it is outright bullshit, some of it is just a tree that never grows. Or a tree that won't grow for a couple hundred more years.

Here again you want to use first principals to try and sort that out. Personally, I also take the strategy of only working on stuff that I deeply love and am extremely interested in. This way the work itself is the reward in case it fizzles.

For me it was Linux in 2001 (arguably already mainstream), Cloud in 2011 or so, and now VR. VR could turn out to be a flop compared to cloud or whatever but even if that was the case it's so fun to work on I don't really mind.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

Kevin Kelly or Stuart Brand, can't remember which, says "look for places where people are having to invent new words to describe what they are doing."

A good guide

I would like to hijack the topic for a bit more specific question: how to spot what tech (languages, frameworks, tools) will be the next thing?