We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today
christophmccann.com
christophmccann.com
More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_Califor...
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
There are people that care about the things that you care about, and there are people who make apps like Yo. The latter aren't listening, the former have already heard the message.
To many (most?) people, unfortunately, yes.
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
Bored, maybe. But bored with sanitation systems, transport and technology rather than entertained and dead of cholera by 25.
Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.
So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.
The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society.
It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit.
[0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
Yes, exactly. And even more importantly: we can fix it, but we choose not to. I know brilliant people with extremely specialized training in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and so on. People who should be developing new drugs, or high-speed trains, or improving solar energy, or creating new ways to generate hydrogen or ethanol from plants.
You know what? They can't get jobs in their field of training, and if/when they do, the jobs are crap. The sad truth is, it's not (currently) economically rational to devote your youth to these high-minded pursuits. In all likelihood, you will be rewarded with a lifetime of insecurity and low income, followed by an uncertain potential of a comfortable life in old age.
This is a societal problem. We're currently spending all of our resources on short-term wealth accumulation and neglecting longer-term technological development. We could stop it with the right set of financial incentives, but we don't.
1. Helping the poor: $0 (maybe $12k if you count a fellowship)
2. Trying to Cure Cancer: $25k/yr, bump to $40k after 6 years
3. Engineering Medical Devices, Airplanes, etc: $60k/yr
4. Trying to Build the Next Twitter: $100k/yr-$150k/yr
5. Helping Rich People Game the System to Get Richer: $150k/yr, $300k/yr after a few years if successful
I have placed these in decreasing order of social value per my own judgement. Note that salary has precisely the opposite trend. The probability of that particular relative order occurring by chance is 1 in 120. I could add other jobs to the list to drop the probability even further.
In some cases the market is conveying valuable information. If we have enough !Software Engineers, it makes sense to depress their wages as a way of discouraging people from entering those fields. Similarly, it makes sense to encourage smart people to pursue roles with a lot of leverage (in the value creation sense, not the bargaining sense), which is a plausible excuse for sending smart people into finance (not one that I buy, but it's plausible).
But in other cases we can identify the information that the market is conveying and pass judgement with the opposite conclusion. By design, the market rewards those who feed and clothe wealthy people and punishes those who feed and clothe the poor and penniless. In this instance the market's reasoning is transparent enough to judge and few would rule in its favor ("necessary evil" is the best I've heard, and then only in the context of the circular "it's the best system we've tried" argument).
Another negative example would be medical research. Next time someone you care about is sick or dying and has run out of options, reconsider the wisdom of our system in spending ~3% of all medical expenditures on research. Also remember that much of that is governmental -- if the market had its way, that figure would be even lower. The market's reasoning is transparent: a doctor, insurance company, or drug company can threaten to withhold the service or good they provide in order to capture a fraction of the value they create. A researcher can't do that, at least not effectively (their product only appreciates in value once they no longer control it). So they are systematically undervalued and the options that your loved one has are artificially reduced as a result of this.
Market-based incentives have huge problems. The million dollar question (many trillion dollar question) is how to fix them.
[1] http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2012/02/01/a-c...
Internet ads have transformed life as we know it, in a good way.
What you are describing is more like a concierge. Hint: The person who pays is the person who's interests are being served.
The 'psychological exploits' are a marginal component, but again, why is it inherently bad for someone to feel good about using product x over product y, even if they're exactly the same?
It's entirely an accident if an advertizing service facilitates that transaction. They're not consumer reports, they're boosters for whoever pays.
This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
Free markets don't work best, popularity is not best; free markets cater to what people want, not what they need and certainly not what's best. Absolute belief in the free market is a religion, not a fact supported by history.
Market driven economies are wonderful for producing loads of crap and me too-ware and woefully inadequate for solving really hard and necessary yet not immediately profitable problems. Quite simply, market driven economies optimize the making of money, not the solving of problems in the best way.
The OP isn't a jack-booted right-thinking enforcer. The OP isn't even a "moral crusader", as you put it. In a free society, it is perfectly reasonable to gently mock people you believe are engaging in stupid and/or pointless pursuits. As the OP did. Of course the people doing the dumb stuff are free to scoff and ignore them. As you are.
Anyway, I think the OP has a perfectly valid point. Just because there is some market demand for an app like Yo, doesn't mean that we are predestined to make building it our life's mission. Some of us, if we slow down and reflect, might opt to be remembered for doing something other than: "Invented an app that no consumer was willing to pay for, and which solved no meaningful problems for anyone, but which some investment bankers managed to persuade some big company had strategory value. RIP".
That's fine if all y'all want that on your tombstone (the other kind of tombstone), but it's also fine to at least reflect on whether that's really what you want.
Well, there's a subtlety there.
It's not that "free markets work best". It's that the efficient market hypothesis claims that a market with perfect information dissemination consisting of uniformly rational agents will deliver Pareto-optimal resource allocations.
There's a lot to disagree with in that sentence; market agents collude, people are demonstrably irrational/rely on cognitive heuristics and just because something is Pareto efficient doesn't mean it's fair or equitable.
All three are valid critiques, and the case in point in TFA - the market allocated money to Yo, but that doesn't mean a priori that funding Yo is a worthy and moral choice.
So, if we have markets that routinely deliver inequitable outcomes it's perfectly reasonable to ask - why is this happening?
EMH means that well informed markets make sound decisions on the pricing of assets. This means that based on the current information available, markets are excellent at understanding the probability-weighted value of an asset. It doesn't mean that the outcome ends up being right, it means that it's fairly priced based on the information at hand. Nothing guaranteeing Pareto-optimal outcomes from that.
Furthermore, an investor giving 1.2M to a company is not an efficient market under any circumstance.
Here is one well stated version of the EMH:
"The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) essentially says that all known information about investment securities, such as stocks, is already factored into the prices of those securities. Therefore no amount of analysis can give an investor an edge over other investors. EMH does not require that investors be rational; it says that individual investors will act randomly but, as a whole, the market is always "right." In simple terms, "efficient" implies "normal." For example, an unusual reaction to unusual information is normal."[1]
[1] http://mutualfunds.about.com/od/mutualfundglossary/a/Efficie...
Look, I agree it's a ridiculous app.. but if people use it and derive value from it, good! Utility created!
I think you could just stop at "people use it". What kind of value they derive from it (if any) is another inquiry, and can't be discerned from merely observing the fact that they use it. At least, not without some really strong assumptions to the effect that people always correctly make positive-utility choices. It's possible people use it, but derive negative utility from it, and mistakenly use it nonetheless.
There are some very popular things (tobacco, say) that in most reasonable analyses produce negative utility over the long run! The problem is that people are not very good at utility-maximization, especially when the analysis involves more than one factor, some uncertainty, different time scales, etc. People are generally not good at almost any vaguely arithmetically complex operation (e.g. correctly using conditional-probability information in their decision-making, even when known).
That's one reason neoclassical economics prefers to talk about simply "price", rather than the classical discussion of both "price" and "value". Modern economics is the empirical study of pricing and economic behavior, and is agnostic about value.
Furthermore I'll be a devil's advocate however and just make the point that one could rationally defend tobacco use as utility deriving. Just because a (in my view) sane person would see all the horrible effects of tobacco as trumping any positive attributes, someone else may disagree. Depending on one's own discount rate, tobacco use at any point in time in fact be net positive in enriching their life. Even if you argue that some of the positives are created by advertising cigarettes as cool (Joe Camel, etc.), so what? Someone spending $50,000 on a fancy watch is also making the same sort of determination. If the user derives the benefit, regardless of whether it's endogenous or exogenous to the product itself, that isn't obviously inherently bad.
Now, of course, smoking has it's own set of problems because it negatively affects others... but again, it's not so clear that one can't attribute rational decision making to even a smoker.
All that to say, your point is well taken.
But yes, if you ignore all the problems both theoretical and practical with free markets, free markets work best.
And while that's a common argument, the obvious problem with it is that free markets weight preferences by existing wealth. $ as a proxy for utils isn't really a valid assumption when people don't have the same quantity of $.
To sacrifice the role of morals and ethics in forming societies at the altar of capitalism denies us one of the things that makes us human. If capitalism gives us "Yo's", then we may want to question why, not defer the morality of "Yo's" to capitalism and shut our brains off.
(And no, I am not making a moral statement about economic systems. I'm capitalist as fuck, but even I think if the Yo story is what it seems to be on the surface, something seems wrong.)
Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.
Real people happen to like Facebook and Fox News and Snapchat and Yo. And that's fine. To say that those desires are somehow immoral because they aren't lofty enough is elitist, condescending, and anti-humanist.
I'm also unsure as to how arguing that such a distinction might exist could be construed as elitist, condescending, or anti-humanist. And I've no idea at all how you got the idea that it might imply that the desires, of people, for things which do not add value to their lives, are immoral.
(That is, that the desires are immoral, not the people. Crikey that last sentence is hard to parse. Sorry.)
Or socialist? WTF?
20th century was spent exploring the alternatives to such a decider. As the result we do know that "making money" is the most efficient and effective decider that humanity has so far been able to come up with. Basically the humanity is just too stupid to use anything else at the moment.
Attempting moral persuasion ("moral crusading" seems an extreme interpretation) is essential for society to progress. Not much of a future if value is only determined by some business-genius decision maker deciding that, "Hey, I can make a million bucks off this. Must be worthwhile!"
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.
- As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues. - If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues?
- What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad?
- Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.
The entire article (and this viewpoint in general) is predicated on the idea that if you are capable enough to learn what is necessary to build and launch a mobile app you are capable enough to solve similar technical problems that apply to what the author considers more worthwhile to society. I don't think this is far fetched.
As far as determining what is worthwhile, I think this is less about what others think and more about what you think about what you are working on and its worth. Just because you have built something doesn't mean you actually have reflected on if it was the best use of your time. It's easy to be drawn in (due to flow, endorphins, cash, etc) and then suddenly you realize you've spent half of your life working on something you're not exactly proud of. It's easy to throw out moral relativism as an excuse to never be able to say something is objectively stupid, but some things are dumber than others, and at the end of the day this is about what you decide to spend your limited time on Earth doing. These little reminders I think provide a good nudge for people to think about what they are working on and consciously decide they want to continue on that path, regardless of what others think.
How else would people build products by hiring more developers?
So, in so far that there are more socially useful problems that iOS developers can help resolve it remains a valid critique to say that those developers could have worked on something else.
The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo.
It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases). But most of the bioinformaticians are second rate programmers (there are a couple of geniuses thrown into the mix as well). Their work generally helps, but to say they are doing something smarter that a scalable web app is a bit naive. Most of the stuff is 100 line scripts that count some numbers, and do some basic stats. Their software doesn't scale, it doesn't even have to be reliable, as often it will only be run on a couple of datasets. At the end of the day its a different set of knowledge and problems, the only similarity being that there is some programming involved.
There have been a lot of brilliant efforts at curing cancer. You could spend a large portion of a brilliant career following up on one lead. Odds are, that lead won't yield a cure. Cancer is that hard.
It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.
It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?
A somewhat recent example that pops into mind is this PRI story about the Soccket...
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoverished-kids-love...
Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices.
At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model.
If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.
I'm sure it must just be the former.
From the article:
"We need to think big, see the real problems that are out there and go solve them. For my part, I hope to stick by this philosophy and play my part."
> it saddens me that some of the worlds most driven, focused, intelligent and inspiring individuals don't focus their time on solving the real problems our society faces. It may well be that Yo has the user engagement and growth that justifies such an investment on purely those terms, but, to me, that is a narrow outlook.
> I therefore find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving these problems, instead put their efforts into something like Yo.
I grant that this is not exactly boot-on-the-throat language. But it's hard to read these remarks about what "saddens" McCann as anything other than (passive-aggressively) prescriptive.
Mis-allocation of resources thanks to market forces. Though I am guessing the pro capitalist people on here won't like that and try to justify it.
Let's just not fund them.
I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are going to waste, and they could be changing the world.
I don't understand why the author chooses to single out Yo. Someone took the time to develop something, and others are using it. Congrats to them for providing something of value. The simplicity of the app is inspiring in itself. Who cares if they raised 1.2 million? This is investment money, this isn't 1.2 million sucked out of a charity, or off the tables of families in Africa, this is 1.2 million that someone wanted to invest in a business, and they believe Yo is that business that'll give them a return.
This entire article is complete nonsense. Trillions of dollars are pissed away in this world, and we're going to point fingers at a developer that did nothing but invest some of their free time to contribute a fun social app to the market?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Show+HN#!/story/past_month/0/Show%...
Take a look at what's coming out of the HN community. Do we criticize each other here for not solving 'real' problems?
People can build whatever they want.
Yo is a step towards bigger ideas, better skills, more resources to make bigger ideas happen, etc.
Let the market sort out what's a good effort and what's a piss-poor one.
...In releasing massive security flawed apps.
We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.
Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is
> inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic,
> flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all
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> please don't also comment that you did.
"I'm not terribly interested in following this advice" is a lot different from "this advice is not appropriate for the site." Rejecting something doesn't mean it wasn't relevant.
This is the least interesting conversation I've ever had.
Equivocation fallacy. Can't say you weren't warned.
> This is the least interesting conversation I've ever had.
It's difficult to have an interesting conversation with people in so much of a hurry to misunderstand what's being said.
At no point did I claim you were wrong simply -because- you used a fallacy. I had other, better, reasons for that. You are bad at this and I've become bored.
Worth reading the counterpoint: http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/
"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.
Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?
It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.
And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.
For a programmer this is only a win-win scenario. The founder gets experience, funds, exposure, and something whimsical to hack on for awhile. The people in return get this insane idea plastered all over the news only to hopefully inspire a couple hundred kids to get into programming with their chance to strike it rich.
If you hope for anything, why don't you hope that all investors in this idea take a huge loss and do their part in stabilizing tech valuations.
It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.
I am a little surprised that no one has trotted out this history lesson:
"In 1969, Ken Thompson wanted to play SpaceWar on a PDP-8 computer..."
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
For one thing, this is incredibly insulting. Do you think that nobody is working on solving these already? Do you think that the people conducting medical research are just so unbelievably stupid that they couldn't comprehend how to write an app that says "Yo"? Maybe these problems are a little harder than you think.
If you stop talking about it, it will just fade into obscurity like Doogie Howser - only to appear years later as a successful, charming actor that can --- wait, where was this going?
Right. Stop talking about it and it'll go away. Don't be bitter about Yo; there's no point in it. Just let it go. Keep calm and carry on.
"We have the potential to solve the big problems. Let's not fund apps like Yo."
I would agree with that sentiment. A million more chat apps, a million more web frameworks, a million more crappy-bird game clones, twatter, farcebook, none of those solve real-life hard problems.
The difficult part then, is how to make solving those problems attractive. Money? Fame? Something else? A good feeling in the stomach and soul, knowing you have contributed to helping? That is the harder part. People are complicated, their motivations often less so, but hidden away beneath complications and layers of deceit, so as to often obscure them.
Disclaimer: I thought the aftermath of Yo was absolutely stupid, as well.
I do not agree with his target audience, since the bigger problems are big because of their difficulty. If they were problems that could be solved with little effort/limited finances they would have been. (energy, food, water, health, education). Apps such as Yo exist because they can obtain funding to the tune of a million dollars. His pitch should be to investors to invest wisely keeping in mind their social responsibility and make a case for the importance of these other big ticket problems as opposed to apps like Yo. It does not make sense to berate engineers/start up founders etc. for their chosen path especially since they do not own the capital required to solve "smaller" (acc. to the author) problem let alone a "big" world changing one. They are almost entirely reliant on working up to their next round of funding.
Have any of you installed and tried to use it? It's an app designed to send pre-fabricated messages amongst its users. Instead of typing "are you up?" late at night while I'm driving home (hypothetically; texting while driving is bad, kids), all I have to do is hit the "Yo" button on my screen. One, MAYBE 2 clicks later, my existence and consciousness is broadcast to my friends, en masse, and I can continue focusing on the road instead of my phone keyboard.
It also looks like, soon, new phrases will be sendable. Stuff like an actual, "Are you up?", "Lunch?" etc. I know in my friend circle, a button like, "Wanna game?" would work immensely well.
What about a "Help!" button? Now we're suddenly into the, "saving lives" territory the submission tries to say Yo has nothing to do with. "I'm suicidal"? "I'm lost"? "I'm hurt"?
Can we solve this problem using a million other apps, in a million other ways? Yes. Did Twitter go under because text messaging was the "exact same thing"? No.
Why does the modern economy incentivize negative and/or zero sum endeavors (e.g. trivial startups, exploitative finance,etc) instead of positive sum endeavors (e.g. genetics research?)
Which leads to a very interesting discussion. In short, extant economic policies disincentivize research so strongly that it's a wonder any research occurs at all.
I think at some point, "free-market" radicals threw the baby out with the bathwater, and have forgotten that some activities, such as research, are extremely risky in the short term but produce unfathomable long term benefits (antibiotics, vaccines, etc.). At present, neither companies nor governments want to foot the short term costs of research.
As such, we are paid six figures to brainwash people to click ads, but must accept financial ruin to even attempt to contribute to research.
In fairness to the guys at Yo though, 1.2M is really not that much money. Enough to get a few guys going and keep the lights on to see where it goes. So let's see it play out.
The people with the biggest problems are the people with the least money. You can't save them with apps, but you could help them with money made by making apps. Not that most will though, if they ever make it big.
[0] Rich is a relative term. Got enough to eat and access to the internet? Compared to most humans, you're relatively rich.
If money is easy enough to come by that investors can drop $100k like you and I can drop $0.99, sell them what they're buying.
Since when is this stuff zero-sum? Yo allegedly took 8 hours to build. Sure, during those 8 hours, Moshe Hogeg wasn't out solving the "big" problems, but in that day alone, he had 16 other hours, to do things the OP might deem worthy of his time.
Oh, and they have your social graph based on cell numbers.
The real problem is that someone with money and influence deemed their project worthy of support. The motivation is not to make the world a better place, but to get rich.
And here i've been wasting my life on novel hipster apps, thinking it would solve the big problems, when in fact I was just wasting my life working on fun things. Thank Bob i've been set straight.
SnapChat and Facebook are fun. Google and Tesla are world changing. The failures may be nameless, but they outnumber the rest 5 to 1.
If you're a success story, it doesn't matter to me whether or not you are fun or world-changing. You succeeded. That's enough in itself.
Why ignore the possibility that writing apps, new web frameworks, and "pivoting" is in fact the best possible use of this talent?
I like apps like Yo. They do exactly what they say they will do. Yo requires fewer taps than texting "Yo" to somebody. It's refreshing!
I would venture a guess that the people who are solving for big problems can be inspired by how minimal Yo is, and the decisions that stem from that inspiration may be the tipping point they needed for their businesses. There may be applicable uses for the Yo type of simplicity for any of the problems mentioned in the blog post.
There's a good place for apps like Yo. They challenge the status quo. They disrupt. They prove that removing mundane steps to doing something as common as texting can be popular and worth testing as a business model.
Maybe Yo has already solved a big problem. Maybe we have yet to experience the ripple effect.
Hard to take this guy seriously when he can't even grammar right in his intro paragraph. I love yo.
Can't "grammar" right? Can "grammar" be a verb?
"Don't spend your money on things I don't think are important."
That is the great thing personal freedom and property rights. we all have the choice of how we want to spend our money. If you don't like what other people are spending their money on, spend your own money on something else.
Do you know anyone who writes about these sorts of things? I.e. innovative technologies that ultimately aspires to improve the world around it a little bit (and not just in the stereotypical SC sales-pitch way ;) ), and not just the bottom line? I would like to read about stuff like that, either people who are doing it or just ideas.