I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups.

It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a small percentage of the real total.

From what I could tell after a couple of exhausting weeks reading these emails at least 99% of these startups are almost completely unnecessary. I'm not using "99%" and "completely unnecessary" as rhetorical bludgeons; I mean quite literally that less than 1% of these startups have anything more than the tiniest smidgen of utility or innovation to justify their existence.

I stopped reading those "startup news" emails because it was depressing to see so much talent and effort being squandered. I don't know exactly what else all these people could/should be working on, but if they can't find some genuinely useful ideas for startups then they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends.