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Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

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

#61

Post by gaius »

timr wrote: post #22
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker…

"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars,…

100% agree. I look around my office sometimes and wonder, what are we doing?! The skill of juggling terabytes of data then slicing and dicing it to order is massively transferrable to almost any problem domain. As is the skill of getting thousands of processors to work together. And we are using for something that is ultimately frivolous.

Like you I am a hypocrite in that I know this and I do what I do anyway. But it's only partly for the money; the other part is there just aren't the jobs to do this out there. A lab or whatever would rather have a grad student hack something up on the side than hire professional developers (and fair play to them, they've discovered a way to get smart people to work for peanuts, but with the best will in the world, someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional).

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

#63

Post by robryan »

marshallp wrote: post #57
jasonkester wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but hopefully it'll stop the thing from turning into rentacoder, where everybody competes on price to the point where it's essentially free. A site where people who normally make less than $1/hr can sell their services online for less than $1/hr doesn't really help anybody . On the other hand, requiring people to charge the fair market value for their service forces them to compete on quality rather than pr…

The one dollar foik wouldn't go for the sub dollar work so it's a nonissue. There's nothing wrong with rentacoder, it's a great site creating efficiencies (it only worries you if you were one of the inefficiencies in the system before - american/european programmers/writers)

That depends really, does rentacoder exist on a never ending churn of cheap labour that competes at unsustainable prices or does it actually provide people with a decent wage over the long term.

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

#64

Post by smokeyj »

dasil003 wrote: post #23

Reading this resonated with me. I knew that the responses here would pretty much rip it apart, but I'm surprised that as of right now only one of 15 comments is positive. It's pretty easy to find ways to criticize this post. It's not particularly well written, it's not inspirational, and of course you can poke holes in any kind of argument this vague. But if you don't agree, I think it's worth it to stop and be hones…

Another blog heard from. Group A thinks group B doesn't do enough for society. Instead of describing a system to overcome of the selfish tendencies inherent in all humans, she chose to belittle an entire industry and the aspirations of entrepreneurs trying to learn to be productive.

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

#66

Post by jayliew »

apsurd wrote: post #59
callmeed wrote: post #45

"Many Americans can’t afford a decent education" Baloney. I worked in the CA community college system. It's $26 per unit. TWENTY SIX dollars. Oh, and if you're poor, it's nothing. A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it .

We have this problem that Universities are GREAT at marketing. Jane doesn't want to go to some stooooopid lowly community college, she wants to go to USC because ahem, it's better!

You take as many classes as you can at community college then you transfer to a real university and technically graduate from there. Massive $avings.

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

#67

Post by marshallp »

robryan wrote: post #60
marshallp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high schools generate students that aren't even capable of doing community college, or have enough sense to "want" to do community college.

It's hard to help people if they don't want to help themselves first.

There aren't people who don't want to help themselves - it's a basic instinct in every life form. There are people who "don't know how" to help themselves though.

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

#68

Post by sovande »

sovande wrote: post #8

A classic mistake; The parish pump generalizing.

I see I get down-voted on this. I agree. It was presumptuous of me to suggest that the blog post author maybe should look beyond her henhouse. Of course her generalization of web-app's and observation of lack of world changing startups is correct.

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

#69

Post by marshallp »

robryan wrote: post #63
marshallp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one dollar foik wouldn't go for the sub dollar work so it's a nonissue. There's nothing wrong with rentacoder, it's a great site creating efficiencies (it only worries you if you were one of the inefficiencies in the system before - american/european programmers/writers)

That depends really, does rentacoder exist on a never ending churn of cheap labour that competes at unsustainable prices or does it actually provide people with a decent wage over the long term.

What is a decent wage? 2 dollars a day is pretty good to someone previously making 1 dollar a day.

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

#70

Post by iamwil »

acgourley wrote: post #44
waterlesscloud wrote: post #29

This is shallow thinking. Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs. There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move…

From the article, "Those relatively comfortable “problems” of modern life have already been solved to death, beginning with Alexander Bell and ending (sort of, for now) with Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Many of the apps we have nowadays — the successful ones, at least — revolve around game mechanics, addiction, self-reference, and narcissism. Even apps I use and actually like quite a lot fall into thi…

Well. Sometimes, you can only best solve problems you understand. And those that you understand best are usually the ones you experience yourself. Many of us have the luxury of being healthy and well-fed, so that's not the problems we focus on.

And were this written in 2004, would you have said social connection is adequately addressed by Friendster and MySpace?

Just as Alta Vista was not the last word on search (nor is Google for that matter), Facebook is not the last word on Social Networks.

I think there's something to be said, however, about digging by following your own sense of curiosity and intuition about good problems to solve, instead of seeing where everyone else is digging and just digging there.

Use your noggin and explore. If it happens that no one else is digging there, so be it. And if that's what the OP is encouraging, then I'm all for that. But I don't feel there's a need to discount the current range of problems being solved.

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