Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowpencil | Hacker News Reader

VC got their IPO, thats all that ever mattered.

it was kind of funny to see the PR campaigns ramp up - placement in news articles, podcast interviews with the founder, partnerships with fast food chains.

after the smoke cleared there was never any real demand, just hype. a bunch of people made money, rinse repeat.

View on HN

Social media hype is cheap to purchase these days. That's why we see so many stupid fads and political outrage hypertrends.

But they actually got funding to implement these fads. It took a decade of near-zero interest loans.

That's what you get when you have over a decade of near zero interest rates and easy money. A lot of hyped products and companies that mysteriously don't make any money. We're paying the price now.

There was also a lot of cool and important shit that was made due to the same conditions. I hope things turn around asap. Cheap money is good for fake progress as much as it is for real progress.

Or we could just produce less crap to be wasted, and have healthier work-life balances to boot. It takes an especially foolish kind of monetary environment to manufacture perfectly good e-scooters just to dump them into rivers and onto sidewalks, hoping that enough people tripping over them will create a recurring revenue stream from the coins falling out of their pocket. Plus that whole disenfranchisement of individuals further into renters rather than distributed capital owners.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com