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Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

jolieodell.wordpress.com

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Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#2

Post by megamark16 »

And I was getting down on myself lately because I hardly ever hit Twitter anymore. How will all my tens of followers remember who I am and what projects I'm working on if I don't tweet about them twice a day? I guess I shouldn't feel to bad, Twitter really isn't doing me much good, at least not as much as just sitting down and focusing on knocking out new functionality for my customers. there'll be time to talk about what I'm doing later...

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#3

Post by abcxyz »

Those who has the ability to program has a moral obligation to drop everything to help the homeless? Classic slave morality, cliched moral self righteousness.

"Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me.

If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#5

Post by davidu »

So stop living in a world of bread and circuses. I don't use foursquare because I get no value. Nor do most people I know. I use Twitter for work, nothing else. I produce, I do not consume. I am not special. There are lots more like me.

There is an entire world of startups focused on societal betterment -- some with the stated goal of just being self-sustaining rather than profit centers.

  in finance: kiva, prosper, even greendot which is now worth $2b, banksimple, etc. etc.

  in energy: bloom, kitegen, blacklight energy, etc. etc.
And the list goes on... for a really really long time.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#6

Post by yummyfajitas »

I find it rather ironic that many of the problems she claims the rest of the world should address aren't even real problems at all.

Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck....

The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions.

Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#7

Post by tgriesser »

It really depends on whether you look at the startup as the means or the end. For example, while the creation of Microsoft did not directly fix the problem of healthcare or hunger, it allowed for Bill Gates to create his foundation, and thus indirectly created a ton of good for the world.

Same goes for Facebook, yes of course keeping up with your friends has no direct impact on real issues, but the fact that 110m went to public schools in an area that really needs it - that is a pretty big impact.

The same goes for any other person who creates wealth from web startups or any business in general - I don't think that web startups themselves are going to do much directly but when you take the knowledge and potential wealth that you acquire in the process and put it toward a good cause, that is one way that you can fix a social or human problem with your app as the author challenges.

Just my take on it.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#9

Post by toast76 »

How any one who writes a blog can consider themselves anything other than self-serving is beyond me. You can't get any more narcissistic than having your own blog and prompting people to subscribe to it whilst telling everyone what movie you're out seeing with the hip crew du jour.

People like entertainment. People like socializing. Whoop dee doo. How is that any more self-serving than telling the world you're seeing "Waiting for Superman with the Facebook crew".

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#10

Post by brownleej »

I have a serious problem with the logical connection between these two statements:

   They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems.
and:

   But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity.
In the first statement, she is saying that these technologies do not do what technology should do. In the second, she says that their intention is not to do what technology should do. I think that the latter is more the point of the article, but the former is the more interesting question. Great scientific discoveries can be produced by accident. If a process regularly produces good things, we should be hesitant to malign it just because it was not the intention of those producing the initial technologies. The classic example is that penicillin was discovered by accident, but there are more. One of the motivations for the initial development of Unix was the desire to play games. Computers themselves started out as tools to crack codes and calculate ballistic trajectories. Technology naturally grows beyond its initial limits, and given how fresh these technologies are, we should be hesitant to characterize them as being without meaningful value for society, which I saw as the author's intent with this article.
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