"Everything is obvious once its successful. Big wins come when you can spot something before its obvious to everyone else." -ev williams.
What a stupid idea
41–50 of 231 posts
Re: What a stupid idea
#42I had a similar experience when I was 14 years old. At the time I was running a very popular trivia web site that had been featured on Yahoo and in a few magazines. A guy e-mailed me and said he liked my site. He asked if he could pay me a small fee to run a banner ad for his new business. I told him I appreciated the offer, but I didn't think it was allowed under the Geocities terms of service.
I was really into discovering new web sites at the time and had not heard of this company. I looked at the guy's site to see what it was about. I remember thinking it was ugly design and a stupid idea. Not much longer after that, the company began to take off. The guy that had e-mailed me was Pierre Omidyar and the site was EBay. I've tried to look at new businesses with an open mind since then.
Re: What a stupid idea
#43Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my…
lazy, vapid, narcissism Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."
Sure.
The main use of Pinterest is to show your friends and everyone else what good taste you have. "Look at this collection of bridal dresses I like!" "Check out all these vacation spots I want to go to!"
If you just wanted to collect photos of these things to give yourself ideas, you wouldn't need to share it with everyone. So you have an easy way to show everyone how cool all the stuff you like is, and by extension you are, with very little effort on your own part to actually create or realize (i.e. actually do work) those things into being. Sure there are elements of this across all social networks, but Pinterest has really distilled it down to the lowest common denominator point and click.
More of an indictment of society than of Pinterest itself I suppose. Pinterest or something like it was bound to show up sooner or later.
Re: What a stupid idea
#44I thought Twitter was stupid when it came out. "Why would any one choose to limit themselves to 140 characters? Also the name is dumb and childish. 'tweet'? Who wants to 'tweet'? I'm a grown man, I don't want to 'tweet...' etc." I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.
How could you not see how Instagram is a thing? You can take a picture then press few buttons and now everyone you know can see your picture. If you don't see how that is popular maybe the problem isn't with Instagram.
And people couldn't share photos online before?
I can see how it's popular. I just don't see why it's as popular as it seems to be.
And obviously i'm not arguing the problem is Instagram, since this is a thread about not being able to see why ideas take off. Clearly I just don't get it.
Re: What a stupid idea
#45I thought Twitter was stupid when it came out. "Why would any one choose to limit themselves to 140 characters? Also the name is dumb and childish. 'tweet'? Who wants to 'tweet'? I'm a grown man, I don't want to 'tweet...' etc." I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.
I could never take a good picture. I used Instagram for the first time and it was fast, so easy, and I was actually proud of the interesting pictures I could take (not necessarily to share widely, but at least for myself). Instagram got someone like me, who never carried a camera in his life except for when I was kid holding a camera for my parents on vacation, to actually use their phone as a camera.
Ok, that makes sense.
Re: What a stupid idea
#46A few points, some already cited here: * Survivor bias ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias ) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit. * Second, an i…
Not sure about your third point. It seems like he's genuinely echoing a point that's been made many times before: that good ideas can sound stupid at first. http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html I don't think he's trying to show any superiority by telling us the details of how his conversations went about.
But I'm not sure about the merit of the position that expressing a strong opinion early on is a form of arrogance. If 90% of the time stupid ideas (as well as good ideas) simply don't pan out, then perhaps one can say that an opinion that something is "stupid" is not only unarrogant, but accurate. Then again, my point is that calling something stupid or smart really is largely irrelevant because the odds of success / failure are the same for ideas that are equally stupid and great. I'd like to see a post on the arrogance of calling something Great when it truly is not. That sort of hubris exists in equal quantities in the VC world.
I agree that one should give all ideas the possibility of success. But it's just human nature to judge things as stupid or smart. And as the animals that we are, our opinions largely don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe. Arrogant or not.
Re: What a stupid idea
#47Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away.
Perhaps the largest example of this would be Wave. When I first heard about Google Wave, I was incredibly impressed and immediately signed up for the beta. I really did think it would replace email and IM--it was an elegant solution that did both, at the same time. I then played around with it, rather liked it and even got some friends to use it. I was still trying to use it well after almost everyone gave up on it.
I was rather disappointed in its ignominious decline and eventual death.
I also really liked webOS. All your apps would just be web apps! It would be great. It wasn't.
I really loved the Zune HD. It had one of the best interfaces I had ever seen and was incredibly capable for its price. I still have mine, and I still like it, mostly. I've had people on the subway ask me about it simply because they didn't know what it was :P.
I thought Gnome 3 was awesome and a gigantic step forward from Gnome 2. You could customize your entire environment, all in JavaScript. And yet almost nobody I know uses it. Unity may have gotten panned by internet critics, but at least plenty of people I know use it. Gnome 3? Maybe one person.
A disproportionate number of the things that I get really excited about--rather than just interested in--seem to fizzle out. Maybe it's just selection bias, of course. I imagine the contrast between my expectations and reality make things stand out more. But it does seem that the more enthusiastic I am about something the more likely it is to flop.
Right now, the technology that I'm really excited about in a very similar way is Rust. I hope it breaks this rather annoying trend! It's basically the only new programming language that I genuinely like and don't view as a waste of time and space. I honestly think it will take off, but that's what I thought about all the other examples too.
I guess this doesn't have much to do with the actual article. It's just a lament about my own misplaced enthusiasm. But it does feel better to have written about it :P.
Re: What a stupid idea
#48A few points, some already cited here: * Survivor bias ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias ) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit. * Second, an i…
It's a bit uncharitable to call "I thought Pinterest and Vine were dumb" arrogance.
Indeed, I am sure that it was (is?) a mainstream opinion. Perhaps less so in the majority, but not in the extreme.
Re: What a stupid idea
#49There are so many things that seemed like a stupid idea to me:
- Seinfeld: Who is this guy, really?
- Frasier: Come on, a spinoff? (So, I didn't realize spinoffs were a thing)
- Twitter: Haiku and vanity plates for the Internet.
- Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream: Salty Caramel, you've got to be kidding me. I don't want salty ice cream.
- Arrested Development: Wait, Jason Bateman. He was so bland on The Hogan Family.
- There's Something About Mary: Their promo seemed ripped off the Zelda commercials, or that's how I felt.
- Blogging (Well, Live Journal): Do I really care what other people are doing?
- Scrubs: I don't know, I just didn't like the idea.
- Freaks and Geeks: How dare they try to explain what it was like to be adolescent me?
- McGriddles: Sausage, syrup and pancakes?
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Slow animals doing karate makes no sense.
The only common thread I can find in these things is me. I have no idea why I had negative, visceral reactions to these things. It's gotten to the point where I try to pay special attention when an idea causes me to have this reaction.
Re: What a stupid idea
#50A well-written humblebrag.