Stupid Apps and Changing the World | Hacker News Reader

Stupid Apps and Changing the World

blog.samaltman.com

73 pointsdmnd86 comments

> Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.

With the exception of the internet itself, I think they still are. Are we really that much happier with our social media and iPhones than we are without them? I think that for the most part, the answer is no. Most use is superficial and procrastination rather than meaningful connection with people.

Check out The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. He talks about how we've made all of this "progress" in our standard of living, but that it isn't actually making us happier.

However, I agree with the central idea that "toys" are often dismissed prematurely.

Spot on. Capitalism generally is all about the illusion of progress, rather than real progress.

And what is real progress? Do you define it?

More importantly: can you measure it?

It's harder, though it is correlated with profit, so that's why we could be using it as a proxy and get away with it for so long.

There's a long debate whether profit correlate with value. The simple example the rise in GDP due to car accidents.

It correlates in a way; that's the basic assumption of capitalism and the reason why companies work. But it does not correlate perfectly; many would say it doesn't do it very well, and I'd hazard a guess that profit and value are becoming more and more disconnected from each other.

If I am cured of some nasty illness it certainly makes me happier. I think Gregg Easterbrook is full of shit.

It's about the bigger picture since "progress" brings also negative stuff like living in cramped boxes instead of in nature.

Are in general western people happier than inedegenious people without access to said medicine ? Not sure , but it doesn't seem so.

If you look at the happy faces of indigenous people, you experience survivor bias: you only see the smiles of the people who survived. Perhaps you could argue that it's better to live short and happy than long and miserable, but I think a lot more research would be necessary.

As for cramped boxes: is the population explosion due to progress? Maybe better health care and food? On the other hand, also better contraceptives, and the biggest population growth seems to happen in places with less progress. And with modern transport, at least you can get to nature at times.

Also, people flock to the cities because they have no good opportunities in the countryside (look at China). If they wouldn't go to the cities, perhaps they would just starve, or start wars with their neighbors.

Living in nature undisturbed Thoreau style is actually a great luxury.

> If you look at the happy faces of indigenous people, you experience survivor bias: you only see the smiles of the people who survived. Perhaps you could argue that it's better to live short and happy than long and miserable, but I think a lot more research would be necessary.

Two things.

1. You say "short and happy" life, but you can argue for "long and happy" - people before civilization didn't live much shorter lives than we do.

2. It might not be survivor bias, there are lots of records and arguments suggesting that living hunter-gatherer lifestyle is much, much happier than what we have today.

There's a nice article elaborating on that in case of Comanches [0]. An excerpt:

So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant:

All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

Note the second paragraph.

[0] - http://squid314.livejournal.com/340809.html

"people before civilization didn't live much shorter lives than we do."

Not at all true. According to "The World Until Yesterday" life expectancy in traditional societies is more like 40 years. I know there is always the issue with child mortality distorting the numbers, but still.

As to 2), while some aspects of living in traditional societies sound great, in "The World Until Yesterday" Jared mentions that most people chose to live in civilization once given the choice. The main advantage apparently being to not live in permanent fear of being murdered.

There were countless different ways to live in traditional societies, though. Maybe some where better than others. Still, I am more inclined to believe Jared Diamond than your source.

Another thought on the Comanche example: how civilized was the world of North America at the time? People were coming to the Americas to escape extreme poverty and starvation. And there still seemed to be wars raging on. Maybe not at all comparable to our modern comfy civilization?

I don't remember all aspects, but I think hunter gatherer actually have to work less than farmers. There are certainly advantages to that lifestyle. But then they don't have much surplus to invest into medical research, and they can't support a high number of people - surplus people have to die, either by being murdered as children, being sent away into the wild, or in wars.

My favorite insight on Thoreau's undisturbed nature living is that he had his mother do his laundry. I am not trying to be mean or cynical about his philosophy---just saying that one has to be clear-eyed about the tradeoffs. Personally, I think that an intelligent person should look at both the conventional modern lifestyle and the happy nature lifestyle, and try to understand and extract the best features of both. You know, thesis and anti-thesis leading to synthesis.

He never said or implied that medical progress doesn't lead to happiness. In fact he said that it does lead to happiness. You're arguing against a straw man.

And you are using the "no true scottsman" fallacy :-) Medical progress is also progress, but suddenly it is magically excluded from the "does progress bring happiness" equation? And presmuably it is not only medicine, it's also clean water and food, fast transport to hospitals, fast alerts of the medics (via iPhone), and so on.

Twitter and Facebook have changed the world; I don't have a doubt about it. And not only in a micro scale, also in a macro level.

I have gone from writing letters to my distant friends, to writing them emails, to writing them facebook messages. And believe it's much easier to keep in touch with friends now that there is facebook. If I travel to LA I can go to FB and check out who moved to LA in the last few years and actually meet them. Had I been in the email era, I wouldn't have had any idea of who was in LA. This is just a minor example for how facebook has changed the world on a personal level.

When it comes to the big picture, look at the Arab uprising, it used the social networks heavily. We don't know what would have happened without Facebook or Twitter, but my guess is that not much. But you don't have to go to developing countries to see the effects of the social networks on politics and society in general. [1] This is a graph of the Spanish bipartisanship going down the drain after May 15th, 2011(15M/Spanish revolution)[2]. The movement started on Twitter, and slowly moved to Facebook.

So these "toys" are changing the world, both on a micro and macro level, and denying that is like denying that TV changed how people view wars.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWphzlCUAAdwqX.png:large

[2] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimiento_15-M

You've mentioned a few examples of how social media is having a positive impact on the world. And after thinking about it some, I think I underestimated how big an impact they have. I still think the proportion of the usage that is meaningful is low, but given the huge amount of usage, it has lead to a pretty decent amount of meaningful interaction.

But what about the downsides? I don't have too strong an opinion and can't argue it well, but I do suspect that social media has its downsides, and that has to play into the equation. Something along the lines of "kids in the neighborhood used to all play outside together and now they're inside gossiping on social media".

I bet there are downsides. But there were also downsides when every home got a telephone. And when everyone started carrying cellphones.

My point is that new technology which changes the way humans communicate with each other is a phenomenon that has played out many times in the past few centuries.

>And when everyone started carrying cellphones.

in 1984 George Orwell talks about TeleScreens,

Here's a little excerpt from wikipedia:

>"Telescreens are fictional devices which operate as both televisions and security cameras....telescreens are used by the ruling Party in Oceania to keep its subjects under constant surveillance, thus eliminating the chance of secret conspiracies against Oceania. All members of the Inner Party (upper-class) and Outer Party (middle-class) have telescreens in their homes, but the proles (lower-class) are not typically monitored as they are unimportant to the Party."

now consider recent NSA revelations (dragnet surveillance) including: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/nsa-targets-users-of-privacy-se...

Cellphones are Telescreens... they are a source of entertainment for most (like TV) and function as security cameras -- with your location and data connectivity being constantly logged, complete with backdoors which allow full remote access.

The middle class is being destroyed (http://time.com/money/2917709/wealth-inequality-doubled-over...) and anyone who opposes the party will be subject to indefinite detention (NDAA) or wiped out.

Apps are primarily a distraction mechanism and social networks are services which profile every aspect of an individuals life, data which can and will be mined and used against you if you commit a thought-crime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html

http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/7/5878069/why-facebook-is-bea...

Try and stop them: www.cnbc.com/id/101669271

> anyone who opposes the party will be subject to indefinite detention (NDAA) or wiped out.

Then why are you and countless other people like you allowed to post your alarmist b.s all over every day? Try moving to north korea and posting against the government, if you want to know what being in a totalitarian state is really like.

Erosion of privacy, ease of government surveillance, and monetization of personal identity could all be viewed as either upsides or downsides. It depends on who you ask.

Technology doesn't have to have a net positive impact to have an impact. The moral/ethical debates on atomic fission, cars, and industrialized agriculture are all still very much open.

>I have gone from writing letters to my distant friends, to writing them emails, to writing them facebook messages.

After using email those are all diminishing returns. Nothing earth shattering.

>When it comes to the big picture, look at the Arab uprising, it used the social networks heavily.

No, it really didn't. Western media just liked to advertise it as such, because it made for a nice story. Plus social media using arabs are easier to approach, and are more likely to be more affluent and west-friendly, so they make for nice material to inflate their role.

>We don't know what would have happened without Facebook or Twitter, but my guess is that not much.

Well, from people actually following middle eastern and arab history in all the 20th century, tons of movements have happened without any social media. The Iranian revolution in the late seventies, for example, was much touted in the west, and they didn't even have phones for the most part.

>The movement started on Twitter, and slowly moved to Facebook.

There's a huge grassroots, on the roads, picketing and protesting movement in Spain. And there have been similar in the sixties in the US and Britain, in the seventies in Italy, Germany, etc. Twitter and Facebook are just convenient modern methods of organizing such things. If anything, current movements are much more tamer and less populated than the ones at times without social media.

In order to be world-changing, Facebook and Twitter don't have to fundamentally change the way humans communicate and organize into movements. Because they don't -- as you pointed out, humans have followed these patterns time and time again, all throughout history, and nothing about social networks has fundamentally changed this. But that doesn't mean they're not world-changing. Simply amplifying our capacity to communicate and organize around ideas is a huge leap forward. What used to take months or years to reach a critical mass could, on today's technology, take days or even hours.

I think you're really onto something when you say that "current movements are much more tamer and less populated" than seen historically. I'd theorize that current movements are happening sooner and in smaller spurts largely because social networks lower the required breaking point. It's easier than ever to organize around a perceived injustice, so what once would have grown and festered until it reached a huge breaking point now only requires a single viral video to draw crowds.

The only thing these "social web apps" achieved was turning trust fund millionaire kids into billionaires.

Give me a break. Real science and engineering, pushing the state of the art, is what changes the world. Not building a FarmVille platform or an advertising portal.

I have a hard time associating with people who are so caught up in the "Valley culture" that they can't see how ridiculously trivial most of their endeavours really are.

If you're into the startups and making money off "social/mobile/etc", all the power to you. Just don't claim you're the next Nikola Tesla. You're Gordon Gekko at best, making a quick buck off people's stupidity. No one will write about you in the science and engineering textbooks of the future.

You got FU money. Congrats. Now donate some to Janelia Farm so something can come of your time on this earth other than stocks market transactions.

It's actually quite simple - Silicon Valley nowdays is an engine of money making, not technological progress. Those two values are correlated with each other, albeit not perfecly, and I'd hazard a guess that they are becoming more and more disconnected. So SV is optimizing for profit, and it's easier to make money by doing stupid throwaway stuff than by doing something actually useful.

Also things seem to have changed in the last few years; profit and usefulness are becoming visibly more disconnected. Startups nowdays lie about their "products" - the goal of New App X is not to be useful for you (the user/customer). Any actual use is a lie used to get userbase growth. When the "product" has enough users, it gets slaughtered, the team lands dream jobs, money changes hands, and everyone except the users is happy.

Meant to upvote you but may have fudged it. You've hit the nail precisely on the head. SV is now a well oiled machine for taking ideas and turning them into money for investors via IPOs. Technology and "saving the world" have got nothing to do with it, other than being convenient tools and marketing to achieve the primary goal of money making.

Why would we blame Silicon Valley for this? Silicon Valley largely builds problems that solve issues for Silicon Valley.

This isn't a bad thing, it just means that we have to decentralize the concentration of developers and entrepreneurs from one concentrated physical location.

If only there were a way for people to communicate at large distances with each other in an interconnected way....like a network of devices or something.

Kinda exactly what I needed this week. Every time I go on HN, Reddit, really much of anywhere all I see are people bitching and moaning about the most inane things, criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced.

The last paragraph is important. As much as I've enjoyed being on HN the past few years, and Reddit the past 8, I'm fairly close to swearing myself off of them entirely so I can focus better without rampant discouragement for the sake of the commenter's ego.

> criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced.

The inverse, where everything is positive and criticism is ignored, is just as bad, if not worse.

The fact that we may not be able to predict the next big thing does not give everything immunity from critique.

There's a pretty obvious difference though between criticism for the sake of stroking your own ego, and criticism as a means of trying to better a product or legitimately point out its flaws. One introduces better conversation, another one is crowding around something to be kicked.

I believe it's called: Constructive Criticism.

Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).

Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.

OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.

I remember it, but I also remember Twitter's contribution to it be largely overblown PR.

I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.

I think its more about the magnitude of innovation.

Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does.

I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language.

The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows.

Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker.

And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves?

I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.

For me it is the opposite. Many programmers in the Haskell and Machine Learning/Scientific Computing communities use twitter and post useful tidbits all the time.

Facebook is full of my older aunts/uncles/grandparents posting memes and inviting me to play useless games. While most of my friends are on Facebook none of them actually post to it.

Then again I am 30 years old, the Facebook of a younger person may be very different.

I run an incredibly boring business (SSL certs for Heroku), for which:

1. The majority of my alpha and beta testers came from Twitter.

2. The second highest source of traffic to both my marketing site [1] and the actual add-ons page [2] is from Twitter.

3. All of the testimonials on my site (which have been incredibly helpful in convincing people my service is useful are actually Twitter embeds)

4. There was a Heroku presentation given in Tokyo where my add-on was brought up as an example, which someone in the audience then tweeted about in Japanese. This triggered an alert on my computer (from Tweetdeck) and I was then able to on the fly answer questions people there had about it.

To me, with the people I follow, Twitter seems more like a programmers / startups meetup or conference than anything else.

1 - https://www.expeditedssl.com 2 - https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl

Consider a newsworthy event: a plane crashes. Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces. There's an earthquake.

Twitter is absolutely the fastest way to get information in those situations. Tweeting is way faster than updating some website, most reporters use it heavily, and Twitter now has the scale to stand up to even extremely heavy volumes of traffic.

The news of Osama bin Laden's death broke via Twitter more than hour than the President's own announcement of it [1]. Tweets about the 2011 VA earthquake arrived in New York before the actual seismic waves did. [2]

[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-...

[2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-use...

As a means of publishing news to a lot of people in real time, I would say that Twitter is the best media service ever created.

>People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter

Not really. And the counter-examples he gives either didn't look trivial at first (the iPhone: actually everyone gapsed upon its introduction), or aren't really "world changing" (Facebook, Twitter: just some social networks).

As for the "Arab Spring" thing. Revolutions happened all the time without them. There were huge movements and shakedowns throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, including in the Arab world (Iranian revolution anyone?). It's mostly Silicon Valley and western media bullshitting that made some believe Twitter et co role in Egypt etc was "crucial". Plus it's easy to make starts out of the few Egyptians who tweet etc, and are usually of the more affluent and easier to talk to the press classes).

By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Things that seem truly revolutionary are, more often than not, incremental changes on previous ideas that were easier to miss. As such, many movements and uprisings may be largely inevitable, and probably aren't the result of individual products like Facebook and Twitter, because they could've happened without them.

But that line of thinking is COMPLETELY missing the forest for the trees.

The world changes exactly because of such products -- specifically, because of the confluence of every idea and product up until that point in history. The Arab Spring may have been largely inevitable, but it was spurred by everything leading up to it, including the advent of social networks as a new communication platform.

>By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before.

Only I never made such an argument. Email and the internet (www) for example were truly important.

Pshaw, those were just some protocols built on top of a network.

I find it quite mindblowing that people on HN can dismiss Facebook/Twitter as "just some social networks" that aren't "world changing".

Maybe you are all high and mighty and don't use "just some social networks", but they have definitely changed the world, in HUGE ways. I would say facebook's global permeation (circa 2009) is probably the most world-changing thing since global consumer internet availability (approx 1998?).

Just the other day, we on HN watched as a hotel business most likely crumbled because of worldwide attention on such social media [1]. Similarly, entire businesses are livelihoods are being built upon being visible on facebook. News travels like wildfire, opinions can make CEOs step down, a viral video can turn a beginner musician into a contemporary sensation, the list is endless.

How does one deny that these things have changed the world compared to before? They may not be all good changes, or any of them good changes, but they have changed the world, in huge ways, and we had best learn to accept it and take it into account in our lives.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131162

Edited to actually add link.

Because news already traveled like wildfire. Its just didn't make it out to the people who weren't actually involved as often as it does now.

I'm having a hard time understanding what he means by "hyperexponential". If N grows exponentially and there's some function of N that's O(N^2), it's still exponential.

He can't mean the hyperexponential probability distribution, that's something different.

Hyperexponential I would assume is an order of magnitude higher than exponential. Although if I remember my video game terminology correctly, the proper hierarchy is exponential, then superexponential, then hyperexponential.

I think it means he can't math.

I think he's pointing either to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration

or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function

Neither of these are applicable to the situation he described, though.

combo of a n^2 and 2^n function--i think non-US english speakers call it a double-exponential function.

I think he was using that word not as a technical term, but as a way of saying "even faster/sharper than exponential". I.e., hyper- (the prefix meaning above) + exponential.

Certainly O(N^2) is not at the top of the food chain -- for example, it is beaten by O(2^N) or O(N!) or O(N^N). All of these could, colloquially, be referred to as "hyper"exponential.

Imagine a hockey stick graph (exponential). Now imagine that hockey stick graphed on a logarithmic scale -- the logarithms more or less cancel out the exponentiation if done right, making the graph appear to be linear even though the data is exponential. Now, imagine data that, even when graphed on a logarithmic scale, still looks like a hockey stick. That is hyperexponential.

And I think I just proved Sam's point -- that it is hard to visualize/grok.

O(N^2) is not exponential at all, it is polynomial. O(2^N) is exponential.

And the grandparent was pointing out -- correctly -- that that description doesn't really apply here. (2^N)^2 = 2^(2N) = still just 'exponential'. Plotted on a log scale it would still be a straight line.

O(N^2) is not exponential but just polynomial. O(2^N) is still exponential. O(N!) and O(N^N) are faster than exponential but not that much; O(N^N) grows slower than O(N!)[1].

Hyper-exponential is most likely double exponential O(a^b^N). There is an exponential growth of apps on these platforms and another exponential growth of users on these apps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling's_approximation

Many laypeople just use "exponential" to mean "really fast" (or even worse, "much more than"). It's been used that way so much that it's been watered down to mean just "fast". So the author probably just said "hyperexponential" to get back the original lay-meaning of "really fast".

"There’s the famous observation that the value of a network grows as a function of the square of the number of nodes"

The value of a network is measured as O(V^2), where V is the number of nodes (users) in the network.

"and also many of these services/products double their userbase every N months."

V = 2^N (the number of users doubles every N months), so the overall function for the value of a network is O(V^2) = O((2^N)^2) = O(2^(2N)) = O(4^n). O(4^n) > O(2^n), but it is not the same as O(2^(N^2)), which was what Sam was trying to convey.

"Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out."

So, are Facebook and the iPhone bettering the world right now?

In many ways, yes.

In foreign countries (not first world), Facebook has persisted as a primary means of communication; including finding lost relatives or friends and connecting people who have lost someone or something during catastrophic events. There's a lot of additional ways other countries are using the technology that we, here in the US, haven't dreamed of: setting up stores and selling things via Instagram, forming action groups and protest events on Facebook, etc.

The iPhone helps in many of those same instances, by connecting people to resources and other individuals.

Can there be simpler ways to accomplish the same goals? Absolutely! But the argument isn't to say these technologies are the be-all end-all. Instead, the point is to make it clear that these technologies can absolutely do good for the world if used to do so.

Just because you and I use Facebook to stalk our exes doesn't mean it's a useless tool for good.

While there are many useless critics, i wonder - was it really that hard to imagine Facebook("the identity layer of the web"),Reddit("democratic news"),The internet("duh") or smartphones("The versatility of computing, everywhere") becoming valuable under the condition that everybody uses them ? Doesn't seem so.

But there are many apps, that even under that condition, that it would be hard to imagine any unique value over what we have today, And do warrant criticism .

I think you're suffering from hindsight bias. Less than two years ago, I was still explaining to people that the emergence of online social networks is a Big Deal.

This is not hindsight. At the beginning of those products, at least some people described it that way.

Based on the content of the article, and you language you used, I assumed you were wondering if it really was hard for most people to imagine the impact of things like Facebook, Reddit, smartphones and the internet. Not that there was a small number of people who did, but most people. And for all of those technologies, I think the answer is, yes, it was hard for most people.

When reading the article , i was thinking more about the criticisms we hear at hacker news. People here are not "most people" and can have vision, but still there's a lot of criticisms about useless apps.

But maybe i read the article wrong.

This reminds me of one of PG's old essays, "The Power of the Marginal" - http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

People never see disruption coming and by its very nature, the best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked, by insiders early on. And probably the same is true of the founders behind them.

WhatsApp and Jan Koum are perfect examples of this.

"The best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked" is a tautology.

The value of a piece of tech is not determined by the number of users, but by a change in the quality-of-life a user of the technology receives. Meaning "value" varies from individual to individual. Companies should focus on the individuals that they bring the most value too.

Probably what pisses people off about the "arrogance" of companies like Facebook is in their claims of bringing value to everyone (who uses their product -- and sometimes beyond). Which is not true (and is arrogant/obnoxious). Also, Facebook is not the only company to have this attitude.

Companies building something for the long-term are certainly not claiming value for anyone in the present (SpaceX is not claiming to be significant in your life now). But once their inventions (rockets, cures, transportation, etc.) are actually bringing benefits to the mass majority of humanity, then they have the right to brag.

But, the climatic 'era of benefit' from an invention usually comes after the inventors/founders have died. Edison's and Tesla's ambitions bring far more value today then they did in their time. On the other hand, Facebook will very likely 'die as a fad' within 5-10 years. In other words, the greatest figures/companies (should) appear very humble in their day.

So did Facebook change humanity? Did Reddit change Humanity? Yes, they are a temporary perturbation on the 'average state of human condition' over the grand scale of time. But, other inventions bring much longer-lasting benefits/changes to a greater number of people. Those are the inventions that people classify as truly "changing the world". Those are the inventions that should be worked on more so than the 'perturbative' & temporary world changers.

We are not seeing that. It's a reflection on the abysmal failures of humanity (in its entirety) rather than on any sub-set (Silicon Valley) or individual.

If you build something you love, chances are someone else will love it, too. If you use something you love, chances are someone else will love it to. Incremental things that we love can spread like wild fire (Facebook, Twitter, and reddit), and they have changed the world; further incremental products will likely do so, too.

...An interesting discussion is whether these things we love make the world a better place. Another interesting discussion is if engineers and entrepreneurs focus too much on the things we love instead of the things the world needs.

Yes. It's easy to argue that Facebook has changed the world, but that's not inherently good or worthwhile.

We could stand to pay more attention to direction of the impact, not just the magnitude.

I've got a few bones to pick with this post.

1. Its main message, "build things you love" and "let the haters hate" seems to be pretty well-worn at this point. There was no value added in the way it was conveyed (no personal story, no anecdotes, no real insights). In fact, there was value subtracted by the jarring, undeveloped thoughts and the use of profanity that was censored in the original story on Businessweek.

2. I don't think anyone dismissed the internet or the iPhone as "incremental" or "trivial" when they first came out. Especially not in the way we often wonder about services like Snapchat and Secret. This seems like quite a silly comparison to me.

3. I don't agree with the idea that the value of a service is solely defined by its user base. User acquisition is only one part of a complex equation. "Hyperexponential growth" is worthless in the long run without a system that can capture and monetize user interest over time. Plenty of fads come and go:

-Planking

-Swag, #YOLO

-Pet Rocks

-Livestrong Bracelets

-Pets.com (symptom of the .com investing fad)

My opinion is that these fads add very little value relative to advances in healthcare, infrastructure, education, and technology that have made quantifiable progress towards a better quality of life for billions of people all over the world. Fads are like tumors that grow off of cultural and psychological excess.

There is this funny thing about progress that I think about sometimes. Most old people I've spoken too say that things were better when they were young. They also say that things are easier now. Sometimes I wonder if that is the disconnect technologists don't quite grasp.

Facebook, Twitter, reddit are still trivial.

I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I have those things and they didn't.

The internet isn't trivial but I wouldn't say that my life is SO MUCH BETTER because I have internet. My parents did great without internet.

"Farming is still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I grow food instead of hunting for it. My parents did great as hunter-gatherers."

Hunter gatherers had violent lives, experienced starvation and died in their thirties. So it's not a fair comparison.

They also had happy lives, didn't have to slave themselves for 2/3 of their lives to get food and shelter, and no, they didn't die in their thirties, they lived as long as we do. Oh, and also they didn't have so many diseases - it's another thing we got from settling down and becoming agrarian.

The point is, just because we have reddit and facebook now doesn't mean we're all just so much better off. The contribution of those products to our lives is rather trivial. Even the internet, while it's very impressive and useful and interesting, has not made everyone in our generation better off. It's cool to have but like I said, my parents and grandparents were fine without it. In fact they were probably more fine than many of technologically most advanced people on this forum.

> The point is, just because we have reddit and facebook now doesn't mean we're all just so much better off.

That I agree with.

> The contribution of those products to our lives is rather trivial. Even the internet, while it's very impressive and useful and interesting, has not made everyone in our generation better off.

And that I disagree with. The Internet, and services like Facebook and Reddit are turning humanity into a giant hive mind - millions of people constantly connected in amost-instant form of communication and exchange of ideas. This is something unprecedenced.

> It's cool to have but like I said, my parents and grandparents were fine without it.

Your parents and grandparents were probably fine without it, but this is the standard case of Blub paradox - people always work with what they know and every improvement feels like useless nonsense until you actually try it; then you start asking, how people could live without said improvement.

My previous comment was picking on the notion of old hunter-gatherers being in significantly worse situation than societies nowdays. My current belief is that our technology makes world for the current generation better than the generation of our fathers and grandfathers, but we might not be necessarily better off than people in pre-agrarian times.

> Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact.

Couldn't this just be explained with power laws? Some small percentage of companies will have a disproportionate share of the impact.

It's not about the amount of change one is bringing, it's about the arrogance. It's about giving oneself more importance than anyone else. It's about believing that what you shitcode is golden

I think the real issue is not that these companies might not be changing the world, but rather that a lot of these companies don't have sustainable business models.

That't a feature, not a bug. It all makes sense when you realize that the "products" are all throwaway, their only reason to exist is to get many people onboard fast, so that the company can be sold for lots of money (the product usually gets killed at this point; users are only score, why would anyone care about them anway).

Why is it that intermediate companies do not end up having a big impact? And what are some examples of such companies?

The overly ambitious aren't expected to succeed, and the frivolous aren't seen as amounting to anything. What they both have in common is that - when they work - they come as surprises, and surprises means you've probably discovered something new.

Middle-of-the-ground companies are more predictable in a sense, less likely to stumble upon something new, and thus less likely to have a big impact.