"the value of a human eyeball" / attention is and always will be the limited resource. But I wish the way the economy worked wasn't that attention is sold for money, which makes money the moat, and sets a floor on how low-priced things can get for customers too. Is this really the best the economy can do? Or is it possible to have a fair LLM-based search engine that matches customer need description with stated product descriptions from providers (while weighing customer reviews, etc)?
The only moat left is money?
101–110 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#102Saturation of channels due to slop content - doesn't mean that created stuff is not scarce there's more problems then ever before that need empathetic humans to solve - are you up for the challenge - or you're doing a quick cash grab due to people using machine gun approaches - spray & pray - we haven't forgotten how scalable human touch is -- yeah at first - you've to do things the manual way - reach out have a conv…
Yeah 100% there's more legit stuff than ever, but there's also just more stuff than ever. So it becomes a discoverability problem.
To be honest this is what is discouraging me from writing more novels right now. The only reason I'm even considering it is because the love of the craft is hooked firmly in my gullet. Were it not for that I'd drop writing faster than a lava potato...
Re: The only moat left is money?
#103For the comment from "Is Show HN dead? No, but it's drowning", the article author editorializes
"One of the great benefits of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge.
One of the great drawbacks of AI tools, is they allow anyone to build stuff... even if they have no ideas or knowledge."
into
"One of the great benefits of AI tools is they allow anyone to build stuff, even if they have no ideas or knowledge. One of the great drawbacks is they allow anyone to build stuff."
which removes the rhetorical effectiveness of the comment (and also breaks the promise of a quotation). I recommend that OP represents the source exactly.
____
I now see that this article contains multiple GPT-isms
Re: The only moat left is money?
#104Money is not a moat since you can buy money (debt) or sell equity for money.
>The thing I launched last week is called Kith — a paid, invite-only social network
Social networks already is an existing competitive space and making it both paid and invite only obviously will hurt its adoption. I wouldn't have been surprised if this failed to get users even if it was free and even if this was preLLM. A brand new social network doesn't truly solve users problems.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#105I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.
You don't need a ton of creativity for a good restaurant if you have good staff, and upkeep. I'll take a boring well maintained and staffed restaurant over an overpriced "creative" restaurant where the waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse.
This assumes the market is not oversaturated. It does not work if there are only a couple of people trying to find a place to eat in a street with 30 similar well maintained and staffed restaurants.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, you may be thinking of restaurants where their defining factor is "having a very creative atmosphere", which will not suit all customers. However it is a differentiating factor which will serve a big audience that is under served in a location filled with "boring well maintained and staffed restaurant".
In my view the creativity comes in in finding solutions to a problem, in a oversaturated market the problem may be "how do I persuade customers to come to my restaurant instead of my competitor?". And following that question may be (in the restaurant example) "what can I offer that is under served in the current market?" The solution to that may be "a biker cafe" or "an overpriced "creative" restaurant where the waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse" (perhaps even rude on purpose).
Additionally I assume you want the restaurant to grow. If you want the restaurant to just survive the bar is lower and you may be able to do that by doing the same everyone else is doing as long as you meet the minimum.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#106This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn.
Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software.
Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money.
We still live in a world where most individuals own more compute power than most universities did in the '80s, yet the only sign of automation is useless push notifications.
Data behind one pane of glass can't easily be moved to data behind a second pane of glass. Simple stuff like "move my Instacart shopping cart to Costco.com same-day" is a manual affair. This is a subset of the general problem that more apps has resulted in more data silos that are generally isolated, without APIs, without automation.
There are zillions of problems out there for which people will pay money, but money chases the same 4-5 problems at a time. Just work on one of the other ones.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#107If you thought things were hard now just wait for the industrial-scale fully automatic fast-follow bots that will nearly-universally nuke the human-created original product to oblivion in a few years...
Re: The only moat left is money?
#108The way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." If the answer is yes, then the business has no moat. The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't remember the last time I ate anywhere because of an ad. I eat out a lot too, used to uber eats nearly every single day. I wont reorder at places that mess up my order, but consistent quality I reward. Chick Fil A gives me the best service out of any fast-food restaurant, so they earn my repeat business.
People almost never admit it when they respond to an ad. Even when they very clearly do. Don't underestimate the effectiveness of advertising, or its ability to influence you.
I distinctively remember when ads have worked on me to buy something. Sometimes I blacklist a brand if an ad is deceptive and makes me click on something, but I don't watch TV much if at all, and the streaming services I do use I pay to have ads removed.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#110> The value of human thinking is going down. Wrong. Creativity, innovation, intuition, taste - all forms of thought solely inherent to humans, all going up.
why? We have no real evidence to support this claim.