One time I almost got involved with a person who truly wanted to improve the world, but didn't get the job.
Outside of that one person I almost met 15 years ago, literally every founder in tech I've interacted with is just trying to run the ponzi scheme and get to that exit event, consequences be damned, employees be damned, profit be damned.
Maybe there are some good people in tech, but I still haven't met them after a whole career in this industry. Just a lot of people who make number go up like they're told to.
*edit I think this comment will be very poorly received and downvoted to -100000 karma, but honestly typing it out has made me realize I just fucking hate this industry with every fiber of my being. Every new platform and channel and tool gets completely subverted by ever more intrusive and personalized advertising, and the total data surveillance ecosystem of the big tech giants ensures that they will be able to kill or consume any truly good business idea before it gets off the ground. I think I'm done. Fuck tech. Fuck computers. What a waste of a career.
I'm coming around to a the-medium-is-the-message / technological-determinism perspective on the Internet, that it cannot exist as anything like the way it is now and mostly be a force for good. Just can't.
Always on ubiquitous wireless Internet. Decent battery tech so you don't need a power cable to everything. Low-powered cheap computers and sensors (cameras, microphones, those creepy human-body radars Google's about to start putting in phones). Storage so cheap you can collect everything. Algorithms to sift through it.
I don't see any possible way for all those things to exist and for the results not to be, overall, disastrous.
I also see exactly no way to stop it.
Stallman, Snowden, the EFF, and the rest of us are Cassandras. People just don't give a shit. Let alone the future, people are still trying to roll back protections we got in the 18th Century. There just isn't going to be a public consciousness of how we need to limit power from using tech that was invented a decade ago, no matter how many articles or blog posts those weird nerds write about their tinfoil paranoia.
I think we're just doomed to suffer the consequences again and learn from the suffering. It will be hell on earth for a lot of people but the light at the end of the tunnel is that tyranny is an objectively inferior mode of organization, and it always has to collapse eventually.
Whereas the successful founders were the ones who chased the bottom line, improve the world is a benefit.
I fall into the first camp, though I got lucky with an acquisition. However it tainted me on startups and business in general actually having the ability to be ideological. At the end of the day people need to get paid, otherwise it's a volunteer organization, and volunteer organizations don't scale.
Second for business there is a question of "where is the money from with the business model"? Skipping that step leads to a VC acquisition which will subvert it once it gets big enough to "harvest" it at best.
Data-gaming SEO style seems like it would be the logical consequence of the surveillance but that may fall into the legally dodgy on its own.
GIGO spam may be what eventually bursts an ad-tech market. Phone systems are already notorious for being overwhelmed with scam and spam callers. Now imagine click and view farming being similarly leveraged as noise overwhelms signal.
I don't know where you live or work, but wow this is the complete opposite to my experience.
If you hate this industry, HN is an odd place to hang out.
Also don't complain about downvotes.
I guess this is surveillance capitalism at it's best.
Surprisingly (at the time), war and sex tend to drive the vast majority of it. GPS, microwaves, the internet, and many medical treatments had roots in national defense. VHS over Betamax and high speed internet adoption came from porn. We identified hundreds of big and little things in many industries.
If so, I’d love to read it.
In my highly unscientific observation those use cases are minuscule in comparison to entertainment (Netflix/Hulu/YouTube shows, funny cat videos, arguing with idiots on Reddit, reading the news, reading blogs, pornography, reading HN, etc, etc).
YouTube for example: Making a large scale video platform is a challenge, but then using that to generate revenue is probably the bigger challenge.
A lot of the research efforts that discovered these things were funded by governments for the purpose of conducting war more effectively and efficiently. The internet was created to maintain command and control in the advent of a nuclear war. A lot of operations research was about improving factory production of war materiel. The desire to simulate nuclear explosions drove a lot of super computing research (look at all the Department of Energy contracts for supercomputers).
Throughout human history, the desire to efficiently kill other humans without being killed yourself has driven a lot of technology development, and this is unlikely to change in the future.
These technologies are funded by defence industries in the first place.
We see the largest strides in innovation when we're pitted against each other and the stakes are high and clear.
We discovered and innovated heavily on amazing pieces of technology (Computers, Web, Phones, Efficient Algorithms). And seemingly, the two foremost use cases have become to captivate people’s attention to sell them ads, and to threaten the lives of people we disagree with ideologically. (War, mass surveillance) Just look at what China has done to the Uighurs.
I often worry about the direction we’re heading. While it is undeniable that fewer people are dying due to war, maybe we’re just moving the agony elsewhere.
For every startup that begins with the ambition to make money, there lack in startups that actually aim to address a problem. Yet, somehow we manage to convince ourselves that food delivery, ride sharing, or scooters are somehow going to fix our most primal issues.