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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

#131

Post by maxawaytoolong »

timr wrote: post #130
maxawaytoolong wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressi…

"This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism....All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do." Ah, yes...the world is so much simpler when it's in black and white, isn't i…

I'm just stating my opinion. I disagree with your original premise that all these people making Facebook games would (or even could) be solving the world's problems in completely unrelated sectors if market forces were aligned differently. This is the long standing hubris of the programmer, and you see it all the time on blogs and online forums, dating way back to the USENET era. If only I didn't have to do my boring job, I'd be a brain surgeon and a rock star, invent organic gasoline, do angelina jolie and natalie portman at the same time, and maybe even reconcile quantum physics with newtonian mechanics as a side hobby.

This mindset has recently expanded into the popular consciousness, with opinion pieces by every jowly conservatively liberal political columnist, and even stated by the president of the united states, who publicly lamented the fact that all these engineers are engineering themselves more money in the stock market instead of engineering up some new fuel sources. (The messed up part about that, is all those talking heads have degrees in journalism and law. Fuck you and get back to me after you pass freshman physics...) I just don't believe the notion that any somewhat smart person can be successful at anything to be true. People tend to self-select into careers they think they'll be sort of good at. I've worked in both science and e-commerce, and most of the e-commerce people would be bad at science, and most of the scientists would be bad at e-commerce. I just happened to be able to work in both fields because they both need big databases. I honestly don't believe we've lost any great scientists or nobel peace prize winners to Zygna.

The notion that skills are fungible at such a high level is like saying that if only Americans cared about soccer, the members of the Yankees would be winning the world cup instead of wasting their time playing baseball. It's ridiculous.

I don't really get your example, though. A decade ago, the people who are coding social networks today were 12. I don't think they had a lot of financial angst driving them away from their 6th grade research careers.

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

#132

Post by wmeredith »

This is utter bullshit. It's the same reasoning that leads people to say that video games or guns cause violence. Web apps are just tools, you can't out-code human nature, just like you can't legislate morality. It doesn't work.

For example: Twitter is a powerful platform for sharing information. This could be leveraged for dissent or education, and it is in some ways. However, most people just follow Justin Bieber and Lada Gaga. "Bieber Fever" allegedly consumes about 3% of Twitter's entire infrastructure. (Source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/) Take that stat with salt, but it's certainly not improbable.

The argument put forth in this post is older than dirt and completely false. I'll wager a bet that this argument is just slightly older than it's cliché response, "You can lead a horse to water, bu you can't make it drink."

There are plenty of web apps that are truly kick-ass implementations of "doing good" (http://mycharitywater.org comes to mind), but they aren't going to ever be as popular as something like Farmville, because of human nature. Making your "do good" web app kick more ass won't make people want to do more good.

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

#133

Post by preichen »

you missed the point completely.your focus is too narrow. there are vast quantities of people on this planet who are working to solve the "real" problems that you mention. your argument does not hold because you are only talking about the base of the maslow hierarchy of needs. OF COURSE there are people whose most basic needs are not solved yet on this planet. You are only argumenting for the lowest levels of the pyramid! Once someone has covered his basic needs and moves up the pyramid "other" types of problems emerge like "how do i watch my favorite tv show on my mobile phone" etc. you have to segment your argument and make it very clear that you are addressing the lower levels of the pyramid.

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

#134

Post by aamar »

replicatorblog wrote: post #110
timr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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,…

I work in medical/pharma, an area that some consider "Socially Beneficial". The reality isn't much different than the consumer web. For instance, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on making small improvements to diabetes monitoring tools. We are talking about chasing minor improvements e.g. reducing test times by 1s. All those resources could be spent researching a cure. Pharma's actions are dictated by the s…

Great comment. There are probably many, great, socially beneficial things for technical-entrepreneurial people to do in healthcare (a field I worked in for a long time), education, and poverty. But "industry" is the wrong level of analysis for social benefit -- the analysis has to go to specific problems and impact.

Ten years ago, one would very frequently come across essays decrying the alienating nature of the internet, how it dehumanized us and isolated us. They would argue that online relationships are inveterately shallow but displace our fraying real-word relationships with friends and family. But: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. alongside broadband, wireless, cell-phone cameras, etc. seem to be doing something very meaningful to reverse the (real, though possibly exaggerated) problems those essays described. And by correcting these problems and strengthening the social fabric, we may be indirectly reducing problems in healthcare, education, and poverty.

Again, the problem with the article is not really misprision of social networks, the problem is analyzing social impact at a level where Twitter = Zynga = LinkedIn.

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

#136

Post by peterbessman »

edw519 wrote: post #118

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. I doubt that you'd get many of the 7 million small and mid-sized businesses in the United States to agree with this. Many of them have an unquenchable thirst for information: more, better, faster, in order to survive. Th…

Really, the OP is complaining that she thinks people want the wrong things. There's nothing here particular to web apps.

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

#138

Post by rubinelli »

In my experience, people who ask "why aren't you working on a cure for cancer?" never had to build a HIPAA-compliant system, much less get something as harmless as a nutritional supplement approved by the FDA. You can't disrupt a "serious" field with two college buddies and a few AWS instances.

Anyway, this "bread and circus" discussion reminds me of all the authors -- Tolkien in particular -- who were accused of wasting their talent in escapist works.

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

#139

Post by bendmorris »

So, if a person has a great idea for a web app that might be useful to some niche group of businesses, they should throw it out and keep thinking about how to feed the hungry or cure diseases - problems they have no expertise in and that they are unlikely to ever solve?

Smart people should figure out what they're good at and what they're interested in, and do that. If you have a good idea that has worth to some group, you should try to implement it. A good idea is a good idea.

And while we're at it, things like Google and Facebook, in addition to facilitating wasting time for those with no motivation, can also be used by, oh I don't know, medical research companies or nonprofits trying to feed the hungry to get the word out.

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

#140

Post by yayitswei »

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…

My girlfriend and I work quite a bit with the homeless and I've noticed that even the most brilliant social work has its limitations. Most homeless people benefit from those social workers, educators, volunteers, etc., but it takes an inordinate amount of energy to reach out to the fringe that seem to lack the motivation to better their own lives.

I think non-profit and for-profit ventures have this in common: they help those that wish to help themselves, help themselves even more.

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