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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

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Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#111

Post by topaz0 »

loumf wrote: post #74
mekoka wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?

Because when you quote someone, you should credit them. It's not believable that they don't know the source of the quote because it's trivial to find.

It would be one thing if the post was arguing for or against the substance of that essay, but it's really not -- it's about a different thing you can do, in a different context.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#115

Post by trenchpilgrim »

midhir wrote: post #7

> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts. Why does this happen? How is it economical?

It's economical because the compute and bandwidth come from devices infected with malware.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#116

Post by [deleted] »

derefr wrote: post #64
godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks. The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by tryi…

[deleted]

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#117

Post by shooker435 »

salomonk_mur wrote: post #70
kylecazar wrote: post #3

Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.

Building a particular type of company - a tech startup. I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).

There's probably a middle ground here. Making a profit ASAP is only really possible if you're selling expertise, such as consulting. I really like the emerging term, "seed strapping" which aims to address this conundrum in the startup world: raise just enough to build the first iteration, then act like a bootstrapped business.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#118

Post by kevml »

saubeidl wrote: post #100
brentjanderson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#119

Post by coldtea »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #95
wincy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with. Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.

This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...

If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#120

Post by ajsnigrutin »

godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.

For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.

The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)

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