Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

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SEO, growth hacking, Bangladeshi click farms, social media clones, the "idea guy" archetype, "Silicon [insert distressed region]" boosterism. Tech's economic success has always attracted desperate, pathetic wannabes. Feeding technical due diligence to the competition, diluting a cofounder into irrelevance, patent trolling. It also attracts sharks.

Android flashlight apps, Facebook personality quizzes, Amazon affiliate spam, drop shipping, pay-to-win games. The shining, prestigious "platforms" are necessarily in symbiosis with their ecosystems of (mostly) slimy, bottom-feeding tenants.

Rails discourse, NodeJS discourse, MongoDB discourse, AWS discourse, Docker discourse, Agile discourse, TDD discourse, etc. Tech has always had cycles of hype, counter-hype, disillusionment, and eventually sorting tools and approaches into their proper niches in view of tradeoffs.

This comment needs to be recast to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire.

I asked chatgpt to do that:

SEO, growth hacking, Bangladeshi click farms,

Silicon Valley boosterism, idea guys with no charm,

Patent trolling, due diligence leaks,

Sharks lurking, waiting for the opportunity to sneak.

Android flashlights, Facebook quizzes galore,

Pay-to-win games, Amazon affiliates who always want more,

But these slimy tenants sustain the prestigious platforms we see,

It's a cycle of hype, disillusionment, and finding niches uniquely.

Rails discourse and NodeJS chatter,

AWS and MongoDB, Agile and TDD, they all matter,

Tech's economic success always attracts the wannabes,

But eventually everything falls into their proper niche and degree.

So next time you're scrolling through the latest tech news,

Remember the hype can be misleading, and always consider your dues,

Take a moment to reflect on the balance of tradeoffs and gain,

Tech is a dynamic industry that always evolves again and again.

Now I got reminded of this gem https://youtu.be/I6IQ_FOCE6I

> and eventually sorting tools and approaches into their proper niches in view of tradeoffs.

This is probably too optimistic. I think there's a lot of success, failure, and even assignment of particular technologies to particular niches that is not about inherent tradeoffs as much as the incidental history of various power struggles in institutions, governments, and marketplaces.

There's not really any guarantee that the sorting we get 'in the end' reflects the fundamental tradeoffs of the technologies.

(Love the comment overall, though, and mostly agree!)

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