Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

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I was in the web/dotcom 1.0 biz from early 1995 through late 2001.

I am reading the news these days with a strong sense of deja vu for late 1999.

Kickstarter and crowdsourced funding is great news for artists, but I don't see it scaling much bigger than AFP and "Iron Sky" without attracting fraudsters. Again: hacker/maker culture is great, it has brought us great things in the past, and I expect great things to come of it in future, but it's not delivering huge new industries on the scale of a Google or Facebook or Apple. (Making stuff with atoms instead of bits is intrinsically slow, energy and matter intensive, and hard to scale up exponentially.)

But this isn't about artists making a living. If this guy was talking about crowdsourcing to fund his next book of poetry I'd be all in favour. But instead, he's talking about building some kind of bullshit hosting/purchasing storefront with the idea of raking off a percentage of gross from a market that died of natural causes three quarters of a century ago.

Thinking you can set yourself up to rake off a chunk of the value in each exchange in a particular field is the sort of wishful thinking that gave us the Feb 2000 bust.

I appreciate how your experience in the late 90s has given you a heuristic for picking up on the signals and leading indicators of a bubble, but I question how relevant it is in this case.

The poetry blog post is just one bad idea that a couple guys had in an attempt to gain a small amount of funding from a notable startup indicator. That's not to say that there aren't more small teams with laughable ideas out there, but I think it's important to note that nobody gave them money. I suspect they went home empty handed because the folks who manage VC funds did learn from the mistakes of the 90s, even if a new generation of wantrepeneurs have no clue.

Which brings me to my point. The niche based thinking expressed by the poetry disruptors and many others is an expression of the realization that individual programmers have the ability to work alone to create products and businesses that are capable of supporting them financially in much the same way that a sole proprietorship would in the physical world.

I'm fairly certain that this wasn't possible in the 90s without outside help, but I think that it explains a lot of the misguided enthusiasm from people who want to build lifestyle businesses, but don't realize that venture capital is not the way to go about it.

Not only is poetry dead as a market, it's arguably even deader as a form. The profession of poetry is all about making the connections you need to get a book published, at which point you can work (for pennies) at a community college teaching poetry, and have as good a right as anyone to introduce yourself to chicks as "a poet." You can't be utterly illiterate, though, unless you're a protected minority.

But "Poetry," capital P, is an entirely different and quite solid business. I wouldn't at all count this startup out. It's called a vanity press, honey! The profession of fleecing people who want to be Poets may not be the oldest, but it's got to be at least fourth or fifth.

(It's also worth noting that before, I don't know, 1850 or so, the distinction between a vanity press and a real one was by no means clear. Plenty of reputable authors invested in the production costs of their early works. It was almost embarrassingly easy for a good writer to acquire a reputation based on one work - Dr. Johnson went from nobody to lion after one 300-line poem, his imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire. Of course, the tennis court had a net then.)

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