Any going against that trend?
Ask Gen-Xers, specifically those who are not over-consuming news media and the harmful generalist social media (Reddit's default subs, Twitter's political echo chambers). My life is way, way better now than it was prior to the internet, Google and half a dozen other services.
Even HN's favourite boogieman Facebook provided me with insane value. For example:
- While I lived abroad, it provided an easy, passive way for me to keep in touch with my family. Compare that to my parents' desperate 10 dollars per minute phone calls in the 1980s
- I met friends through Facebook advertising for a boardgaming group (that I also ran on Facebook.) I met people from way, way more backgrounds than otherwise possible
- I can passively keep in touch with friends and easily get in touch if I'm in the same area.
People "struggle" to find "long term value" because that's ironically the meta for upvotes on the contrarian SV Internet right now and we internalize those values far too easily. Rest assured, value exists for most, if not all.
But what you don't see (or perhaps didn't pay attention to) is the way that Facebook monopolizes that value. They gained that control through ruthless manipulation, advertisement, buying of competitors and more. Then once you have buy-in, you're stuck with the enshittification they force on you because all of the alternatives have died.
For Bandcamp, they existed in the bought competitors space. And we're seeing the cycle I mentioned above occur faster and faster. The goal of companies like Facebook, Epic, Uber etc isn't to actually make a good thing. It's to dominate a market. The value is incidental, occasionally coming with the aquisitions.
Small towns are no longer truly isolating. If you're an outsider, for whatever reason, in a small town it's no longer a sentence for loneliness, harassment and abuse. You will likely still experience harassment and abuse, but there is bound to be a community online that you can connect to in order to overcome loneliness.
That's a pretty bad selection bias. You shouldn't exclude the perspectives of those who've been harmed by social media. That would be like asking people if alcohol has been a positive influence in their life, but excluding alcoholics.
You can also say what you want about FB/Instragram doing many bad things but you can still be "friends" with people you know and stay up-to-date with them in a pub/sub style (which didn't really exist outside of christmas cards before social media was thing).
Google/Apple Maps are a great resource still.
Apple produced and still produces smartphones which have massively changed society. Those aren't going anywhere
Smartphones enabled app-based services for banks and other institutions and such with a ubiquity that did not exist in the desktop and dialup era.
Like it's so easy to look at how the world has changed in the last 15 years that I have trouble taking your claims that nothing lasts seriously.
1) Obviously, first and foremost, this is a tautology. 2) There is little proof that companies that last long term, do so for good reasons 3) What does it matter... at all? Wide and short, Long and narrow, short and sweet, all these forms of impact have nothing to do with their inherent value
Classic HN comment.
> Classic HN comment.
Try to be more constructive in the future.
0. "Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" McGonigal, Jane
Even though it didn’t end as the dreamers had hoped, revolution in a broad region of the world isn’t exactly an opiate.
And the thing is, Epic are following industry norms for this. All digital storefronts are trying to enforce the same sorts of policies. Get as much "stuff" in front of as many people as possible and have them fork over money to rent that "stuff" with tenuous if any protections for their purchase. Valve really are the outliers in this, and the only others I can think of that do what they do are Itch.io and Bandcamp, one a tiny player catering to a lower market and the other essentially the only survivor in their particular niche. Gamejolt and Soundcloud aren't even really competitors for each of them respectively.
You appear to be arguing in unequivocal favor of a short-termist, purely profit-driven way of doing business, which is a viewpoint that, to me, needs a whole lot more cogent support than the word salad posted above.
As a user I care about stability, which requires things to work out on longer time scales than a few years. And since I cannot know or verify if a company also cares about this (and will still care in a few years), I have to trust them. But such trust is hard to come by...
However, I think that falls pretty squarely in the "internet" era rather than the "VC" era of your point. I'm not sure if that gets at the spirit of your argument (which I generally agree with).
I interpreted the word "institutions" pretty broadly here though, since the original comment was talking about a whole "era". Not trying to disagree with the gist of the original comment, just making discussion about an edge case I thought of.
"Revenue is way up for our Web3 SaaS this qua- aaaand it's gone."
The problem is that the technology enables illicit activity on a large scale because of its core premises.
The problem is NOT that people write it off because of the risks built-in to the technology, at least for most people. I'm sure scammers and crypto zealots do consider that a problem.
- Facebook (Groups, Messenger)
- Amazon (Store, Audible)
- eBay
- Spotify