Ask HN: When did tech stop being cool?

As you gain more experience and become familliar with any system(digital, political, social), you start to recognize the frameworks behind the hype, the recurring patterns repeating ad nauseum and the hidden hands that manipulate spaces. Just accept the fact that life will wear you down and make a bitter old person out of you, eventually.

J/K, sorta. Life is an accumulation of experiences & learning, that changes you & the way you see the world around you. The 'new' things become old and the newest often resembles a rehash of the old. Find your zen wherever you can, there's lots of options.

As always, YMMV.

I used to think that if only everyone had access to all the information, they would make better decisions. It turns out that given access to all the information, lots of people just want to do social things that reinforce their tribal membership. And some people make better decisions, some of the time.

In short, structural social problems are hard.

Good indie games like Super meat boy & Hollow Knight take more human resources than AAA-gamechanger Doom did, back in the day. Your 'kind of useful but fun/dirty' hacker project either becomes ad-infested to survive or is too-useful and gets copied by a big-company. If your problem is cool enough and you can solve it, investors will throw millions at you in hopes of making a global success. Hard to say no to that.

There is no moderate success anymore. Economies of scale end up being all-or-nothing style situation. Just as local mom-n-pops places have gotten replaced by much cheaper national chains and building your own house is now a thing of the past because the costs for getting past regulation only make sense at scale.