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Comment by pshin45 | Hacker News Reader

I've always felt that companies like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Zynga do way more harm than good.

Early on I was impressed by how well these startups were able to capture mainstream attention and change the way so many people live and behave.

But at the end of the day, what value does Groupon and Zynga actually add to society? I'm of the opinion that most daily deals and social gaming companies bring out our most primitive and animalistic tendencies (addiction and impulsiveness), and are antithetical to human progress.

If this is the beginning of the end of LivingSocial and daily deals then good riddance I say.

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Please define "good" and "human progress." In my experience these terms are often so nebulous as to be meaningless when applied to companies.

EDIT: How can you conclude that I'm wrong if even you haven't defined "good" and "human progress" in your argument?

Point taken, and I'd rather not even attempt to define the two because I think that is outside the scope of HN altogether.

I'm pretty new around here and the last thing I want to do is be starting political/moral/religious flame wars in a post about LivingSocial.

I disagree, it is will within the scope of HN especially if we're to prevent this sort of thing happening again from a founder/person on the ground level.

The other guy is wrong, good and human progress can be paired well with technology and business solutions. It's called social venture, and it's possible. It's just not what the valley focuses on.

Like I said, I'm a bit of a lot of newb, but I appreciate the correction :)

you can take the view that Good means profitable. thus if your business generate a profit you have done good.

of course this is only true if the market is free.

Drug dealers? Pirates? Hell, the somali pirates even have an investment system now.

lets talk about drug dealers. The drug market isn't really a free market. THere isn't really easy competition, the means of production is difficult for people to get into. The participants don't really want to do it sometimes, but is forced to.

In fact, if the gov't legalized drugs, and let big pharmaceuticals produce these drugs, i reckon it'd drive the scarcity of the drugs down, leading to their devaluation, and the market would correspondingly collapse (as its no longer seen as the forbidden fruit).

On driving prices down, yes, on the market collapsing, you have clearly never interacted with an addict.

Selling drugs to an addict is in no way creating value for society. None. You're taking money that was hustled/stolen in order to leave someone worse off than if they got clean. It might be that legalization is better than the black market but what I'm contending here is that "just because you made money, does not mean you were serving society".

Did you read my comment? Please define what you mean by "value, "worse off," and "serving society." Don't just throw those terms around expecting everyone else to share the exact same values as you.

Some examples: life, truth, and/or pleasure. If it's a combination, how do you prioritize?

Discussing "X has no value" is absolute garbage if you don't discuss "value."

Of course by that definition LivingSocial didn't do a lot of good.

Uhh... starting philosophical tangents is common and encouraged on Hacker News.

>are antithetical to human progress.

This can be said of many startups, and this fact is causing a reactionary feeling toward the Valley in many tech/neckbeard circles.

Agree, technology for the sake of technology and growth for the sake of growth does not a business (or social good) make.

I love so much of what YC does but I wish their motto was not "Make something people want" but rather "Make something people need" because the two can often be diametrically opposed. Kinda like how a parent should not always give their child everything he/she wants (candy at every meal, constant attention, making a mess/scene everywhere you go, etc).

If we as startups only tried to make stuff people "want" then the world might end up looking like the dystopian society in the 2006 film "Idiocracy".

If tech were really like that, maybe Tent and Spideroak would be more popular. If only.

If Zynga actually made games, I'd say that entertainment is one of the most valuable services that a company can provide. Too bad they don't.

Isn't all entertainment just about Dopamine release (catchall for all other known and unknown 'pleasure' neurotransmitters. Zynga's games were decent enough at first. The problem is that for a business that is in the business of purveying entertainment, to be successful, it has to figure out a way of continually squirting out Dopamine in a subject without harming them (harming is more from business point of view than moral). Zynga's current game plays simply can't achieve that. Now if they can get the gambling license... (it is approaching midnight, so please pardon my incoherence)

Small business marketing and entertainment are fine endeavors. I'd cut Groupon and Zynga some slack here.

I've got nothing against either endeavor, I just don't like the way Groupon and Zynga in particular go about it. (Thus my "more harm than good" accusation)

Otherwise, there are plenty of small business marketing and entertainment companies I really like.

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