Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 491 posts

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#101

Post by austenallred »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #75
austenallred wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.

> If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. "If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!" > Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc... "Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions hav…

I hate to be the person saying “correlation != causation,” so instead let’s just agree that “the people who liked more things on Facebook self-reported to be less happy” is not a very rigorous way to analyze how Facebook affects human happiness levels.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#102

Post by jmull »

gotthemwmds wrote: post #17
carbocation wrote: post #8

As someone outside of SV (Nevadan living in Boston and practicing medicine), I think this article largely misses the mark. I think it is true that there is a diversity problem in SV, just like there is a diversity problem in medicine. It’s a problem, because there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields. But that’s probably the only point that resonates. Th…

" there is no a priori reason for women and ethnic minorities to be less prevalent in our high-paying fields." Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions. And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.

> And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.

How so? Suppose everyone accepts this... then what? What do we do with this information to change things?

I don't think racist and sexist white men are the problem. They exist, of course, and are a problem but that's not what's driving Silicon Valley's diversity issue. It's (1) the bias people have for entrusting people they understand and feel understand them and (2) the compounding opportunity gap various groups have.

Further, casting the issue this way nearly precludes a solution since it attacks and alienates the people whose help you probably need to change things -- those very white men running so much of SV and so much of everything else.

I guess it feels good to rage against the system, but in doing so you end up perpetuating and strengthening it.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#103

Post by icebraining »

ernst_klim wrote: post #54
austenallred wrote: post #24

People generally do love Silicon Valley and what it creates. It’s the media that doesn’t. Ask the average person what brands and products they like and use the most (or just look at the data on where and how they spend their time and money) and you’ll see that Silicon Valley is doing just fine in the eyes of the populace. In fact, Silicon Valley has never been more influential. Ask people to go to a world without iPh…

>a world without iPhones, Facebook, Google, Uber/Lyft World without insane eulas, itunes, exploitation of drivers? Such an utopia.

Hate to break to you, but non-SV companies are quite fond of insane EULAs too. And drivers were exploited before Uber/Lyft, as taxi companies already classified them as contractors.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#104

Post by mixedbit »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #13

this article is so nonsensical, it's almost comical, I don't even know where to start. Ok, how about calling it a problem that 19 out of 20 investments will fail. Willing to invest like that is a great thing about SV, not a bad thing!

19 of 20 investments fail because VCs equate success with > 1B$ valuation. Among the failed companies there are plenty that produce great and useful products but need to shut down because the VC deals forced them to grow to unsustainable size.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#105

Post by nsxwolf »

Middle America is not too keen on your "basic income" solution to all the problems you are creating. It brings to mind a future of living in a 300 square foot government apartment in some hideous Brutalist concrete block of a building, eating our daily Amazon rations, knowing that's just how life is going to be, forever, no need to have dreams anymore.

There will be torches and pitchforks coming for you.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#106

Post by GhostVII »

jes5199 wrote: post #100
jrs95 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of the people that do have a problem with SV or tech in general also just have a problem with people they perceive as having lower social status succeeding. It's not anti-intellectualism exactly, but it sort of parallels it in my opinion.

people in SV aren’t “suceeding” - they’re making twice as much money as everyone else in exchange for creating systems of surveillance. I’m not surprised people are salty about it.

> they’re making twice as much money as everyone else

Sounds like succeeding to me. And not everyone creates "systems of surveillance" anyways, lots of other types of tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#107

Post by nadam »

"So, what can you do about it?" As much as I love the Sillicon Valley, disproportional concentration of venture capital and brain drain to a geographical location is not the healthiest thing in the world. I am a big proponent of democratization of early-stage investment for years. Now it started to happen in the cryptocurrency world. It is wild west now, but who knows how it turns out?

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#108

Post by [deleted] »

austenallred wrote: post #71
aaron-lebo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's false loyalty. People put up with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc with their fake "we care about you" marketing (could apps stop literally telling me this? it's weird), overpriced, and walled garden megalomania because they are addicted and their other options are mediocre walled gardens (look around). People aren't stupid, they can sense when they are being used and those companies have treated their customers lik…

It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#109

Post by [deleted] »

KekDemaga wrote: post #97
toomuchtodo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. "If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!" > Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc... "Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions hav…

>For example, a 1-standard-deviation increase in “likes clicked” (clicking “like” on someone else's content), “links clicked” (clicking a link to another site or article), or “status updates” (updating one's own Facebook status) was associated with a decrease of 5%–8% of a standard deviation in self-reported mental health. >Facebook is toxic. Or alternatively mentally ill people like Facebook.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Silicon Valley: America’s fallen out of love with you

#110

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #75
austenallred wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not loyalty at all, it’s just people using the best product available to them. If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. Until that happens, people will continue to use Facebook, because despite what Hacker News thinks, Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives.

> If someone creates something better than Facebook people will use that thing and won’t feel any remorse in switching. "If you don't want someone doing cocaine, make a better cocaine!" > Facebook adds a huge amount of value to peoples’ lives. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/185/3/203/2915143/Assoc... "Face-to-face social interactions enhance well-being. With the ubiquity of social media, important questions hav…

You've got your correlation v causation mixed up there in interpreting those results. It's just as likely that negative well being means people take more shelter in digital interaction as opposed to the opposite (which is why the paper is careful to avoid actually suggesting causality).

Given that loneliness and isolation actually is toxic [0], for many it's not that online interactions are replacing offline interactions; they're the only interactions these people can get.

[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/174569161456835...

Post reply on HN