Is “Yo” Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid? Let’s explore, shall we | Hacker News Reader

Is “Yo” Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid? Let’s explore, shall we

amandapeyton.com

18 pointsinmygarage24 comments

I feel like I'm losing my mind having to justify that Yo is anything but Stupid Stupid. The technology is easy to copy, not defensible, and not novel. It does not move the needle in terms of bringing us closer to a technological utopia. It is in my mind, a glorified Hello World app with some modern colors / UI treatment. There is no revenue model and no form of scalability (unless you consider adding a word after "yo" to be scale).

This is a dud for all intents and purposes, and yet I can imagine being down voted to hell, all along the way being barraged with a point-by-point breakdown on how I'm wrong on all points with some pseudo-intellectual handwaving. This app is nothing more than popularity-through-absurdity, that it even glazed the eyes of millions is a testament to our culture's obsession with irony, which only further feeds the fuel to the fire. And yet I further this irony by commenting on it as making it something to talk about. It's a vicious cycle.

/rant

I agree. It's stupid stupid, hands down.

You hit the nail on the head with your assessment of Yo as a "Hello World" app. There's literally nothing else to it. Yo is another example of the tech/startup industry drinking Kool-Aid. Nobody would even take this noob app seriously if it wasn't for the fact that it has already gotten funding. I guess the question is whether or not investors are really nothing more than poker players.

I think you have your answer.

I'll risk being downvoted with you, because I agree that Yo, and all the hype that has cropped up around it, is just stupid stupid.

FWIW, I've found use for Yo when making recipes with IFTTT. It replaced email as a trigger.

That doesn't make it "stupid genius", but for any given tool, someone will find a use for it.

I'm only recently coming to realize the huge purchasing power of the irony-demographic.

> Can there be a platform where counter-action is not only discouraged but impossible? Where consumption is truly meant to be passive?

You mean like television?

I really dont get whats supposed to be the benefit of this... saves you the seconds it would take to actually send a text of the word 'yo'?

You get it. That's what it is.

Wait... I thought it was some kind of alias (for example, sending "yo" to contact_1 would expand to "hi", on contact_2 "I'm coming home" etc.).

An "app" that sends just "yo" gathered 1.5m????

Remember poking on Facebook? It got a silly/meaningless semantic attached to it, likely because it was created before people could do it from their phone, and so it never went anywhere. You just poked people and then got poked back, ad infinitum.

Yo has exactly the same data model as Facebook pokes (a graph where the vertices are people and the edges are binary signal flags), but is different-looking enough that people are willing to grant it a different semantic interpretation. The semantic people seem to have adopted for a Yo is “hey, do the thing you know I want you to do, now’s the time” — which is, admittedly, a pretty useful semantic that was surprisingly missing from online interaction.

This semantic didn’t have to missing—someone could communicate the same semantic inherent in a Yo over Twitter, or SMS, or really any push-enabled app. But people will only understand services through the lens of one semantic at a time: you can't get someone to use Facebook as Twitter, or Wordpress as Tumblr, or Youtube as Coursera. Because nothing was just for this--nothing had this "rut" of suggested usage burned into its UX--users didn't bother doing this interaction at all. And now they do.

There's probably a market for quite a few other services that have effectively the same data models as apps we already have (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Snapchat, Reddit, etc.) but which use different UX to push users into a new semantic interpretation of those data models. (To get different information from the same data.) HN seems completely color-blind to this idea, interestingly.

"Yo" is the pet rock of our generation.

Pet rocks could hypothetically teach someone responsibility. Yo is closer to the eye ball used on that pet rock, useless by itself.

> Pet rocks could hypothetically teach someone responsibility

???

> There isn’t any social contract to reply, or even any way to jump to the site. It simply is.

That's neither Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid. That's just handicapping yourself for no reason other than faux-superiority.

One might describe this as "Stupid Hipster"

Yo isn't any stupider or less innovative than 99% of other tech startups. It just doesn't pretend like it's making a difference in the world or other such nonsense. The fact that people are offended by it is actually pretty amusing IMO.

This seems identical to Facebook's "poke" functionality.

I feel that Yo's criticisms are frankly kind of... weird.

> "It's stupid!"

No, it's pretty fun :)

> It's useless! You can't communicate with 0 characters!

There are actually tremendous sources of information with Yos, if you know where to look. Timestamp and username alone are usually enough to convey some message ("Hey it's 8 oclock, log in to Steam dawg", "Hey, it's 2am, why not come over to my place?" etc.). Implicit information like number of Yos exchanged in the last 10 minutes, health of friendship, etc. also contribute. The key thing to keep in mind is that all Yos are ambiguous and depend on context: the detractors should stick to texts, if they don't want to decrypt messages. Either way, there will always be people saying that low entropy signals are useless, but, as they say, 1 if by land, 2 if by sea...

> "Doesn't scale / tech is too basic / I could write it in day / society is crumbling / etc."

C'mon.. The app is a concept piece. What's wrong with the app (barring whatever security issues there once were or that might resurface)? Yo accomplishes it's goal, end of story. These types of critiques all seem rooted in the idea that Yo fails to reach some critical threshold of complexity that would give it intellectual merit or some shit like that. Strawman: "A sham argument set up to be defeated."

There's nothing wrong with the app per se. However, there is something clearly wrong with it being as popular and valued as high as it is. A concept piece should not be worth millions of dollars and be surrounded with as much hype as Yo appears to be.

And while you're right about metacontextual information being a thing - that problem is not one that Yo actually solves. I don't see anyone saying yos are completely useless, but people have already been exchanging these kinds of messages for decades (they're known as emoticons and emoji.) In that regard the only thing Yo has going for it is it's UI.

Which, granted, may be a draw - but it's still not worth the coverage it's getting.

Also it's worth pointing out that "stupid" and "fun" can be overlapping sets. Case in point: Angry Birds. Clearly fun, also clearly kind of stupid.

I understand what you mean. But one thing I'd like to mention is, if you think about it, there are already several concept pieces worth several billions of dollars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films, and others, in terms of hundreds of millions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_arti..., etc.

I'd also like for readers unfamiliar with 4'33 to read up about it, and what was said about it at the time.

I don't know that those make a compelling argument for Yo, though. How many were worth that much money in their day, or would have become worth what they are without the cachet of the artist?

While it pains me to say it, there is case to be made for Yo as a work of art, if art can be accidental (I guess all real memes are accidental art in a way, and Yo's popularity seems memetic to me.) And perhaps the ephemeral nature of the medium works against it, but I seriously doubt anyone is going to care about Yo fifty years from now.

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