The Stupidest Answer In The World | Hacker News Reader

The Stupidest Answer In The World

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27 pointsksvs19 comments

Tangentially, I find myself in the mainstream about Twitter. I tried it for a few weeks and couldn't figure out what it was for, what was actionable (my favourite word from my go-go thirties) about it. It felt like Facebook status updates with wimpy group chat on a quad short espresso.

Which made me feel old. Whenever throngs of people love something and I can't figure out what it's for, I immediately think of mainframe programmers sking what on Earth anyone would ever want to do with an 8 bit microprocessor, a couple of K of memory, and a paper tape reader.

Which made me feel old.

This is the funny thing though: the majority of people out there are all older than us!

I'm the last of the gen xers, (75) and I can still say that. With something like twitter that needs to be popular to stay alive; if my initial reaction is "I feel old because I don't get it", that's not a good sign.

> This is the funny thing though: the majority of people out there are all older than us!

But less so with each passing moment...

It's not a bad sign either though, because time spent online is almost inversely proportional to age. If you appeal to the younger half of the online population, you're still only losing maybe 1/4 of the audience.

Except that retirees are the largest growing segment of internet users... and the boomers haven't really retired yet, and are more familiar with computers than those who barely used them at work.

It doesn't matter. There were enough people on the internet 3 years ago for a product to be wildly successful. Even if 0 of the older people use Twitter, their potential audience is more than large enough.

A product doesn't have to appeal to 100% of the population to be successful. It does to be Coke or McDonald's or Google successful, but you can still make a shit ton of money by only appealing to 50%.

Get your damn tweets off my lawn!

I was disdainful of Twitter for some time, then decide to make an effort to try it out in earnest. It seemed useful for a while, but then the signal to noise ratio is was so dismal I started dropping people from my "follow" list.

What may be of real value are the assorted tools and sites that have spring up around it, where I can get more targeted datage.

I'm a fan of serendipity and the use of noise to disturb mental stasis but there's a limit to how much self-absorbed minutia I can wade past.

My experience was pretty similar. I found that you either have to spend hours a day on it, or it's just no fun at all, and who has that kind of time?

But Britney's on twitter!

It is not the stupidest question in the world. It's a terribly important question. But I don't think it's the most important question facing Twitter right now. Twitter has yet to cross the chasm to mainstream usage. It's not immediately obvious to anyone why they should use Twitter

See this is why I have a problem with the "get big and everything else will happen" philosophy that so many in the valley share: It's twisted logic.

If a startup can't make money now, then yes, it's possible that they might make money later. That's sounds more like trying to win the lottery twice though. Odds are it won't happen. In fact, Google is the only time it's happened that I can think of off hand.

Now, if a startup can turn a profit from the start (or soon enough) then it is pretty much guaranteed to continue making that profit no matter how big it is. In fact, it doesn't even need to get bigger. It can if it chooses, but it doesn't have to.

Why do people continue to focus on the bubble mentality of trying to profit from popularity alone? Even when it works, it isn't sustainable.

Although I agree with you, I actually just got kinda owned in a similar argument/conversation:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=334545

Wow - cheers to Fred for admitting his mistake. It takes balls to do this, let alone blog about it to thousands of people.

I'm dead-blazé about the Twitter "controversies". It's like an endless stream of always the same praises and complaints, questions and answers, positive and negative outlooks. Can we please move on?

It's interesting that anecdotes about Obama have entered into the popular consciousness as parables in the same way that was once reserved for stories of Jesus or Buddha.

Uh oh - I hope he doesn't make it 2 out of 3 for false prophets. Or is it 3 out of 3 or 0 out of 3.

Can someone explain what was so stupid about his answer? I don't understand.

It implies that he's not even looking for a way to make money, as well as sounding rather arrogant ("Well, we're obviously going to be the next google whether we try or not")

A lot of people took it as coming off very arrogant.

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