twitch.tv, Periscope, etc. or just about any form of live streaming application seems like a huge time-sink to me (and largely inferior products when compared to curated content).
Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#32facebook. Thought it was the dumbest idea in the world to replicate what livejournal and myspace did early on
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#33Facebook. I was convinced this was a terrible idea until about 2007 or so, despite being on it since 2004. Still think it's kinda a terrible idea, but a billion people disagree with me. (Or perhaps it's more like a billion people agree with me but use it anyway.)
I also thought it was going to be a fad. What is interesting is that everything people use Facebook for day-to-day existed back in 2005. We used email for sharing life updates, various tools for photo sharing, AOL Instant Messenger for chatting, mailing lists for groups, email and evite for organizing events, etc. The novelty of Facebook was profile browsing and poking each other. And if Facebook had just remained th…
It's better to think of and use Facebook as a placeholder for identity and not a platform for expression.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#34Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
I think the fact that it is a separate social network is actually a huge part of its draw. I use Instagram on the daily, but haven't used Facebook in a good four years.
Facebook is just too full of garbage that is irrelevant to my interests as well as stupid ads. Instagram, on the other hand, is still basically ad free, and has interesting content I care about, easily consumed without having to dig through tons of cruft that I don't care about.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#35Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
Similarly, Twitter. Status updates are great, but a separate social network just for that?
same here, it's like subscribing to everyone's facebook when i can barely tolerate my own facebook feed
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#36Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
I can't claim to have foreseen Instagram's success...but to me, it's one of the best and prominent examples of how removing friction can be a completely new product...well, when you think about it, even Facebook itself became hugely successful by reducing the friction of getting to know people and keeping tabs on old friends.
But Instagram's value proposition is subtler than Facebook's...I remember that Hipstamatic and its filters was all the rage among my amateur cameraphotographer friends...it was so dominant that Pulitzer Prize-winner Damon Winter of the New York Times used it in his war photography [1].
But IIRC, Hipstamatic did not at all care about the concept of social networking...although perhaps what made it lose to Instagram was the fact that it cost money. I was very slow to take up Instagram because I keep an active Flickr (pro/paid) account...but now I see that Instagram's main value is not attractive photos, but its minimalist, sleek social features. The appeal of phone photography in general is that it constrains the amount of thinking/editing you can do...Instagram's filters ease the tradeoff of quality/ease and its networking features reduce even further the friction of showing the world what you just saw. And you have few options to elaborate on the photo, other than a caption and some tagging...I still like using Facebook, but Instagram works very well on its own because it's not just a filtered visual view, but its constraints limit the kind of things that piss people off about Facebook...for example, it's considerably more difficult to get into political arguments on Instagram.
[1] http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/finding-the-right-t...
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is mostly made up of abandoned/inactive accounts, and it hasn't turned a profit. Despite popularity, I don't think it qualifies as a success.
As of this writing, Twitter's market capitalization is over $23 billion. That's a success by any sensible definition. If you know something the market doesn't, there's any easy way to put your money where your mouth is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
Do you own TWTR? I think eventually Twitter will be acquired and integrated into a different social network. As for the OP's original point, they've never turned a profit, and I'd estimate that half of their accounts are inactive/fake.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#38What about the opposite, something that seemed like genius but turned out to be a terrible, terrible idea? Secret, for example.
Perspectives. Facebook, for example, turned out to be a great success, financially speaking. But I find it severely uninteresting as a product.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#39Instagram. I still don't get it. Vanity filters sure, there were dozens and there must now be hundreds of such apps, but a separate social network just for that?
I thought that initially (Android, couldn't get it) - I can put filters on my photos in a proper editing package. Then I'd tried it and I was like "oh right, I get it now".
I suppose the way it makes sense to me now - my friends put 900 pictures of their holiday on Facebook. They put the one picture that defines their holiday(/day/event) on Instagram. It makes so much difference. Add into that the celebrity voyeurism, and there you have it.
Re: Ask HN: Whats the worst startup idea you've heard, which turned out to be genius?
#40Twitter. To this day, I find it idiotic. I thought society reached rock bottom when politics started using it to convey their message (is there anything sadder than a political agenda that can be expressed in 140 characters?)
Twitter is mostly made up of abandoned/inactive accounts, and it hasn't turned a profit. Despite popularity, I don't think it qualifies as a success.
Bizarrely I'm much happier signing in on web sites using my slightly anonymous twitter account than anything else. Maybe this is where twitter can expand?