Is there a poison and antidote? Reddit [yc backed] and to raise the bar. The symptom is partially caused by YC.
Requests for Startups Refreshed
101–110 of 132 posts
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#102I have worked on two of loosely related projects. Both of them are very close to my heart. Since I am heading another (3rd) project that has become a funded startup, I would like to share those ideas and see if anyone is interested in pursuing them. Would love critical feedback on these as these are my life goals as of now.
1) Food and Farming - iPlantTrees. The idea is to set up a platform where two kinds of people meet. One without the resources or knowledge but have a place to plant. Other side of people or organizations who have knowledge/resources to plant. I came up with the idea because when I moved to CA, we bought a house with an Orange tree. It gives amazing oranges so we no longer have to buy from the store. It would have been great if I could also get some Apple or other trees too but I have scant knowledge of finding -> planting -> maintaining plants. I could spend years doing so or someone could plant them for me. You could make money by partnering with Nurseries etc. In the end everyone would know a lot more about food plantation and have fresh home grown food to eat.
2) Path to middle class - FillSkills. My understanding of the problem is the barrier to entry to jobs. Which is being brought down tremendously by the internet. Even now though I meet people all the time who would like to become a Software Engineer or a Data Scientist or a Business Analyst etc but have no idea where to start. FillSkills would take a look at all job postings, show which jobs are in in demand or expected to be in demand. Think of a stock trading app but for Job data. So you can really see what is going on in the job market and make life choices accordingly. In addition it will be able to tell you specifically what you need to learn to get the job profile you like. Companies should also be able to post jobs directly with a string of challenges (courses, exams, interviews, projects etc using whatever tools) that if passed by a candidate, guarantees a job or at least an in person interview.
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#103I think funding mass media is less interesting than finding a way to have sustainable investigative journalism, both at the local and national levels. Investigative journalism, especially at the local level, has been hit hard by local newspapers getting shut down and the media forced to either pull out of unprofitable areas or focus on money-making ventures. Most media outlets are not the New York Times or Washington…
State run media is actually very good at solving the problems you find aggravating. 99% of useful news has nothing to do with the things you imagine state run news will be bad at informing you about. It is a world without sensational click bait. The 1% of the time some journalist goes missing, well thats what WeChat is for.
The Voice of America RSS feeds [1] are mostly clickbait-free. It's officially the position of the US Government, but has a long tradition of being neutral to the point of blandness. To try to drum up more interest, there are now some more tabloid-like feeds, such as "VOA Fast Five".
The VOA's judgment on what's important is a lot better than most of the US media, where click-through rates seem to determine placement.
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#104We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is. Th…
I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good f…
Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising.
So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.
If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.
If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#105I've constantly racked my brain on the Underserved Communities and Social Services: my dad is a Vietnam vet and my mom (while we were growing up) fit that single mother middle-class type...how does technology help them? Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (…
> Part of the problem is they aren't tech savvy the way the HN community is - so what works for our community doesn't exactly work for theirs, or that they even use technology to the extent that we do (i.e. does technology even solve this problem?).
> The other problem is revenue/profitability...this population is inherently cash-strapped, so trying to create a technology solution that likely lies in the Tech-meets-Consumer Discretionary industry, well, who among these people can (and will) afford such services?
Maybe we should be looking at a different "group" as the users of the services we could provide.
For example, the government. Governments spend billions on social services, so perhaps we could be creating technology that could improve their efficiency and reduce their costs, which in theory would lead to more/better support for undeserved communities. Not saying that's much easier, but it's another way we can try help.
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good f…
Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising. So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue. If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional. If you thin…
This is why I put the "problem" in quotes - I'm not sure if it can be called a problem. If we believe in people's freedom to choose what they want to read, then it isn't.
When people talk about bringing back the good old days of journalism, they dream of the time when cigarettes were unfiltered and you could make a living researching a single story for three months. Or this Request for Startups talks about making mass media write stories that are good for the society (as opposed to people's immediate reading preferences).
I don't see any good technical solutions for achieving these goals, because these goals require changing people's preferences, and require funding that goes against people's preferences.
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#107We need the spotify of media, where journalists are paid directly from their readers maybe an aportioned rev share model. People who want articles about the kardashians still get them and people who want to read about conflict in the middle east get theirs. No more editorializing based on the current trendy group think, no more editorializing based on what their rich billionaire owner thinks their next crusade is. Th…
I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media. A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism. The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good f…
[deleted]
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising. So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue. If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional. If you thin…
This is why I put the "problem" in quotes - I'm not sure if it can be called a problem. If we believe in people's freedom to choose what they want to read, then it isn't. When people talk about bringing back the good old days of journalism, they dream of the time when cigarettes were unfiltered and you could make a living researching a single story for three months. Or this Request for Startups talks about making mas…
Agreed on all counts.
I also wish YC gave more details about what they mean when they talk about improving society. What's the metric?
I'm not really sure about the relevance of the concept of "mass media" today when people get their news from more and more fragmented sources.
And the idea that the polarization of media is bad also seems highly questionable. In fact, one of the leading researchers on the question of media bias showed that competition between media (which leads to polarization) could reduce bias (http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/BiasReputation.pd...).
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#109RE: Programming Tools
"What comes after programming languages?"
I think that this is the wrong question. How about these other questions instead:
How can we encourage the spread of existing best practices? How can we lower the barriers to entry for people wanting to make safe and reliable software at scale? Can this be done in a way that is commercially sustainable?
Re: Requests for Startups Refreshed
#110Farming is an interesting one, particularly with regards to the quoted statistic of 40%. From a technological perspective this has already been largely solved. Developed countries typically have 1-3% of the population working in agriculture. This is only possible because of large scale efficiencies, that allow 1-3% of the population to feed the rest. So am genuinely curious: what are you envisaging? How to market thi…
I agree. In underdeveloped countries however, the number of people working in agriculture is much closer to 90%. The tech clearly exists to improve productivity in these countries, but the problems are (mostly) political and economic. In particular, dumping from the US distorts local commodity prices. This makes investment in new technology impossible for local producers. This is an area where lots of technologically advanced people have been working for a long, long time. If the advantage that YC/SV can add to ag is software and sensors, things are actually pretty advanced in that field (self-driving tractors have been around for 10+ years), just the perception is that farming is still low-tech. If YC believes a startup can provide new ways of thinking about some of these non-tech problems in the space, then there might be an opportunity to make significant improvements, especially in developing countries.