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Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla and SpaceX are notorious for rejecting work-life balance in general but they aren't software companies).

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We already have super-apps. They're called "Android" and "iOS".

Exactly. Why would you want a single app that has other apps? You could easily go download a standalone app from the app store that delivers a superior experience. There would need to be some competitive advantage or economy of scale of the single app. But what that advantage is remains to be seen.

Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm sure others) have tried adding games to their platform. Both efforts have failed because you can get a better gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you want to play with a friend, you can message them and say "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)

One exception to this is any feature that requires exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at exposing people to content. Something like Facebook marketplace can be successful because sellers want their listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to places that have the most sellers.

This is true, today. But look at things like the Digital Markets Act in the EU; there is a significant chance those "super apps" iOS and Android are forced to submit to government regulation in the future, which will create new opportunities - if/once the App store monopoly is removed for example, the ability for any app to become the "super-app" is greatly enhanced, even if very hard. Twitter as brand and platform I could imagine playing in a post-mandatory App store landscape - but so too will a lot of others of course.

I have no desire for a super app and I don’t think anyone else does either tbh.

The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.

Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)

996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China, so why wouldn't it be made to work here, especially if all the rich companies use the economic headwinds to collude and reduce compensation/QoL/perks? Also a massive fraction of young US techies are Chinese immigrants -- are they as vulnerable to 996 in US or are they a select group who escaped it?

And can Musk and others staff up in China (if US and Chinese politics/government allows it)?

Apparently it's illegal and ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) stopped doing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system#ByteDa...

I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.

China has a vast vast oversupply of software engineers.

In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower standard of living) to make people desperate enough to give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately, I think we may be getting close to that about now or at least heading down that path.

What makes you think that there is an oversupply of (good) Software Engineers? All I see every day is that it's still pretty difficult to hire good people.

> you can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff

Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".

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