661–670 of 808 posts
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Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market
The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been effectively thrown off from their perch.
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I think your problem is treating the success of the Kardashians as deterministic
Their initial success may not have been, but their sustaining success absolutely must be, or else it would have fizzled out, one way or another. Many celebrities tried to latch on to this style of success as their careers waned more generally, (Jessica Simpson comes to mind, she had a similar enough reality TV show and was a big star for her time), but there was no sustaining power there. Not saying she isn't in her…
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Fwiw, unlike the examples above, we have permission to your data (if you give it to us) but we don't own or control any of it. We don't store it elsewhere. We don't sell it to the highest bidder. We don't mine it for some other purpose. Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model. I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instanc…
I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions. Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work. It is a slippery slope and claiming virtue doesnt decrease the gradient. Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple. The rest feels like classic SV/startup window…
I think that's just called "switching to a subscription model". "Rent seeking" has a different meaning.
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I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary. Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the ti…
I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising. We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the inter…
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Ok, but if you read the text as a whole, it's not true that it's haughty. That it sounds haughty when quoted selectively is the internet's fault, not the commenter's. At most he can be accused of (a) not pre-emptively bulletproofing his text against selective quotation, and (b) not knowing the future. And (a) reduces to (b). I take your point about lore, and on that level it's just good fun. p.s. Also, nice use of th…
Hello. I’m honestly loving this conversation. Thanks for engaging seriously about it. It also means a lot, dang, that you took the time to both understand my points and also to counter the narrative, all these years after I commented. As much as I appreciate your thoughtfulness, I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway. As I’ve…
Thanks for adding to the discussion. While dang was trying to defend your character, I was emphasizing the peculiar wordsmithing of your text being an enduring magnet for memes. Are you aware of snowclones[1]? Here's a recent snowclone example[2] from HN: For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by installing an x11vnc server on your host, setting up a SSH tunnel to a remote server which forwards the host's VNC port, [...]
Here's my theory on the phenomenon and why your old comment keeps getting cited...
Your 1st bullet point's text about ftp was so poetic that it hijaacks the mind and it overshadows the rest of your comment(s). It's like people think Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the USA" is a celebration of patriotism when actually, the total lyrics are about disposable veterans from the Vietnam War. It's the "born in the USA" chorus that more people remember and not the nuanced verses of sadness.
If you had written about ftp in a more hesitating way with more qualifiers...e.g. "Maybe I'm reading the Dropbox application incorrectly but it seems like it duplicates what ftp already does [...] blah blah blah" -- your skepticism would have been forgotten because the text would have been boring and safe.
But your text of, "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account," -- combined with obscure tools unknown to the masses like "curlftpfs/SVN/CVS" -- was irresistibly quotable. That unintentionally became your "born in the USA" chorus.
Even before your 2007 comment, there was already a "too many techies are out-of-touch about the needs of non-techies" criticism in the air and the internet punching bag to express it was the famous 2001 Slashdot comment[3] about the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
So the HN collective found a new example of "out of touch techies" in the "famous Dropbox comment". But only the 1st bullet point and it doesn't care about the rest of your thoughtful nuanced conversation and replies. It's unfair but I'm glad to hear you've made peace with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230416
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
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“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I love how what ended up happening was "Or you can pay Dropbox to not have to do any of this".
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Their initial success may not have been, but their sustaining success absolutely must be, or else it would have fizzled out, one way or another. Many celebrities tried to latch on to this style of success as their careers waned more generally, (Jessica Simpson comes to mind, she had a similar enough reality TV show and was a big star for her time), but there was no sustaining power there. Not saying she isn't in her…
I find going from 0 to 1 much more interesting than 1 to n though, since 0 to 1 seems far less understood.
Its understanding how they managed that that you can work your back to 0, I think. There is value in that
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I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
> This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works Just because they understand how to play the game in their current situation, it does not mean they could replicate the process of getting to their current situation.
The same is also true in business (this is one root cause for the "hard-to-place smell" that surrounds the HBS case study approach).
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The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography for Vogue. T…
> there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos That's inaccurate. No doubt some responses were like that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration. The internet hivemind (which is all of us) leaps from a few data points to anyone , always , everytime , etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous sentence without too much loss of fidelity…