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-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.

The Kardashians took up the ball that Paris Hilton dropped.

And with parasocialicer I mean the type of people who's main effect is to be someone who'se existence people can enjoy, without delivering anything actually skillfull outside of social interaction. Similar to cat- or dog-content.

How about these examples? Amiga had customers, and was profitable, yet Amiga is no longer a force in the computing, nor is Commodore.

Both had more (arguably) capable operating systems than Windows (until at least Windows 95), yet, no sustaining power.

Look at the sustaining power of iOS and Android, despite other more capable competitors that tried to win market share (Windows Phone, WebOS, and I really wanted WebOS to win, mind you)

Isnt that just survivorship bias?

Its understanding how they managed that that you can work your back to 0, I think. There is value in that

There are millions of beautiful people out there trying to get rich and famous. The Kardashians have managed to do that very successfully, and consistently, for years. I don't think that's luck. That doesn't look like luck. I think they knew exactly what they were doing, had a good plan, and executed it perfectly. And a major component of that was understanding their market perfectly.

IMHO the reality and social media aspects of it get all the attention and people focus on those and think it's something entirely new and unprecedented, but really they're just force multipliers. Soap + reality and social media. That's it. The things that actual make it engaging are exactly the same as those in any soap, but even soaps are powerful enough that they can bend some people's reality.

I once saw an interview with the star of a popular soap here in the UK. He played a despicable character that manipulated and betrayed the people about him, especially women. He said that at a certain point when his character was particularly nefarious he had to avoid going out in public. Quite frequently he would be walking down the street and a woman (it was always a woman) would start screaming and shouting at him, telling him how horrible he was, and he should be ashamed of himself. Some of them even threw things at him. An actor in a TV show, it wasn't even a reality show, this was long before they even started. (Dirty Den in East Enders).

A lot of people consuming this stuff, even the explicitly fictional dramas, have a lot of problems distinguishing between reality and fantasy. They will sometimes even acknowledge they know it's just a show, while also directing abuse at the actors. Deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and real life, as reality shows do, and the brew becomes even more viscerally engaging.

Given this, things like qAnon become a lot more understandable. There are a _lot_ of people who are just out and out fantasists. If there are enough to make actors hide at home, that means there are some on almost every street in every city or town in the world all the time.

Edit: https://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/eastenders/a27088763/soap-v...

But your conclusion about mass-market is too broad, this is not a single thing and can really depend on your definition and perspective.

Apple devices can be considered mass-market or niche.

I would like to add luck to the theatrical world too.

I look at movie stars, and it seems like a very exclusive club.

If you can read lines, have a bit of charisma, and get that ever so lucky break--it almost seems like you have to work at getting kicked out, and even if you gain a bunch of weight, and fry your liver, and kidneys with drugs; in many cases the actor just gets more opportunities.

It seems like a couple hundred actors get most of the jobs.

As to the Kardiasians I believe it was luck, and a good product. I can't believe I wrote that last sentence. I never thought I would put "good", and "Kardasians" in the same sentence.

I kinda get the success of the Kardasians though. The ladies look multiracial. They are of all ages. For so long the fair skinned starlet was the desirable one.

Now--it's changing, and I like the change.

I'm still baffled by the younger one's financial success in makeup, and what not. She is worth over a billion dollars. MBA programs should be studying her business moves.

Selling to women is an art. If you can crack the mystery you can be a billionaire too? I remember hearing someone say selling to men is easy. Give them a product they like, and they will come back. She said selling to women is more nuanced. I always have that advice in the back of my mind.

I have a very pretty sister who moved to Los Angeles. She skipped college. She felt it was a waste of time, and she was probally right? She used networking to get jobs. She then decided to make, and sell shoes. In a few years, she had multiple stores, and is very successful. (Sadly we are not close. I will always love her, but the greed got mixed in family stuff. I guess that happens a lot?)

I remember looking at her first prototypes, and didn't get it at all. I wished her well though. She got a tiny bit of financial help.

She didn't need any advice from me though. She knew what would sell. She literally started off making the shoes in her garage, with minimal materials, and tools. I was always encouraging. I knew fashion was way out of my wheel house though.

(I really don't have a point? I rambled all over the place? Looking at my writing I hope nothing is considered sexist.)

This is not what luck looks like. This is what a good plan being executed perfectly looks like.

Your sister sounds like someone who understood her market well, worked out a plan to tackle it, and executed it perfectly.

I wish I understood a market well enough to create that kind of plan. I don't feel like I understand myself well enough to market to me, let alone anyone else.

To some degree, problems of luck are also problems of volume: if you are president #45 and you have a 5% chance at creating a viral tweet, tweet 50 times and you will get one.

Yet the behavior of lang maintainers seems to have an outpaced influence over that luck: individual programmers actively chose Guido over Larry or Matz. In turn, Armin's framework looks about in line popularity-wise with DHH's at present, but the trend seems clear. We trust Node because Ryan rage quit. Oracle has cast a shadow over Java, and their TIOBE descent is finally manifesting. K&R may never be unseated, e.g. A Deepness in the Sky. Anyone who's seen Anders in person has witnessed his presence.

I wouldn't discount the effects of actual human characteristics and behavior, even if choices end up mostly based on fashion and a fascination with infamy. One can influence their own luck.

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).

You need lots of empathy for sociopaths if your aim is to understand the why and the how of their successes. The fact you don't understand them makes me think you're a good person. The world would be a much better place if people weren't trying to copy them.

I don't want to copy them, per se. I respect them for their business acumen, and I would like to be that good at marketing. But as you say, sociopaths. I would do different things with the power that that kind of money brings.

People literally throw money at girls talking to a camera, taking photos of themselves and their lives and/or playing games.

I still don't quite understand why :D

These shows tend to be about groups of characters engaging in what you might call social or political struggles. Tensions, drama, conflict, emotions, and so on. Reality shows like the Kardashians are a distillation of these aspects and create something that is sweet like sugar to people who are disposed to enjoy that flavor.

I think a lot of people judge reality TV shows without watching them and kind of look down on them. If you don't have the taste for something it's easy to look down on it. For example, lots of people look down on Star Trek, which I loved when I was younger and still do. If I had to answer why I liked Star Trek, it's because I like to imagine myself as Captain Picard and figure out what I would do if I were faced with the given moral dilemma of the week. If my fantasy preferences tended towards "How would I handle the handsome jerk my sister is dating while I myself am a beautiful billionaire?" then I would watch different shows.

Madonna knew it in the 1980s. Britney or Jessica Simpson knew it in the 1990s. Paris Hilton knew it in the 2000s. The Kardashians have known it the past 15 years. Hugh Hefner knew it 70 years ago. Every model of consequence knows it.

The Kardashians are extraordinarily talented at selling sexuality. They know how to package it. They know how to market it. They intentionally replicated the system that worked so well for Kim, on to Kylie Jenner as she came of age.

Once you gain an initial position via your sexuality, leverage it into further gains. Sex rarely fails to sell.

And the parent is also correct in that it mostly (not exclusively) works for women, regardless of the downvotes attempting to change human nature and reality. A few male celebrities have benefitted tremendously from the effect, including Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey (how many famous male models can you name from the past 20-30 years though?).

And the target market for the Kardashians (I think, as far as I understand it) is not the people who find them sexually attractive. This is different from Marilyn Monroe, who mostly appealed to straight men, and for whom "sex sells" would be a perfect description. The Kardashian's market don't want to have sex with the Kardashians. They want to be the Kardashians (I think).

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

> The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

> Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

It was pretty obviously apparent with wikis that letting anyone update the page, from the browser, was a cool technological achievement. I was well into my tech career at this point and don't remember anyone reacting to wikis this way.

> youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

I mean, these are getting ridiculous. When YouTube came out video sharing was a major PITA, a pain that hit most technical people, too.

I just don't buy GP's premise because all of the examples seem like something only "Tech Support Guy" from those old SNL skits would say.

> Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

I don't get why we're even talking about it. The original example is nonsense. The web literally does what that example says - pushes byte streams to computers that use a rendering tool to view them.

Arguably, what made the web popular wasn't HTTP per se. The two core ingredients were, in my opinion, DNS infrastructure and that "rendering tool", AKA. web browser. Together, they made it easy to publish files and let random people access them. Arguably, the third leg would be the <A> tag in early HTML, which kept everything glued together while it expanded exponentially.

Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense.

Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about!

EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Hosting videos back then required plugins on the part of the viewer, which was something we were all cautioned not to download because of security.... Youtube was the first site that broke through the ice and had enough content to start taking advantage of network effects, and didn't blow that lead.

That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.

I remember getting into a few people's web-based online diaries in the late '90s and definitely some folks used geocities to host their journals. I remember using it myself to post whatever nonsense I was doing to share with friends.

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 timing was right for it to appear.

Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.

My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.

You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.

Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.

Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.

I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.

We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.

Let the platforms compete on UX and data handling policies.

That way, the interesting people on one platform aren't gated away from the interesting people on others.

This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom.

I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

This. The antidote is to revisit examples of "couldn't you just X" where X indeed prevailed. There are even instances where superseding technology was actually better, but it was too late to replace X.

My favorite example is Iridium (and the whole satellite internet industry so far, let's see what will happen with Starlink). It's one thing to remove friction, but only if the new cost structure is still favorable.

Disruption doesn't happen because new tech is better/cooler, it happens when it introduces competitive advantage.

I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

When he wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

The criticisms he was raising turned out not to be problems in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post—singled out as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me re-read it as charitably as possible.

That said, I think you're still overlooking some of the reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that's separate from hindsight bias.

First was the "quite trivially" phrase in the comment. That type of verbiage automatically triggers the perception of haughtiness. Imagine if someone did a Show HN of a new webcam security doorbell and a commenter said, ", you can already build such a system yourself _quite trivially_ by getting some components from DigiKey and soldering them yourself". Can you see how that sounds really dismissive?

Second, it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users like BrandonM who can string together curlftpfs with CVS/SVN.

So for him to avoid that comment required stepping outside himself to see the perspective of non-techies. He could still dismiss Dropbox... but for different reasons related to not meeting needs of the end user mass market rather than purely base an opinion off his personal skillset.

> it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users

I don't think that's an accurate reading. His Linux point was only one of three, and the other two were about the mass market. Given that he had implemented the Linux solution himself, I think the fact that he led with that point was probably more out of geeky exuberance than overlooking non-technical users.

It seems to me that in the context of 2007 all three of those points could easily have popped up in Dropbox's YC interview. Don't forget that back then, YC would sometimes fund a startup even though they didn't much believe in the idea (Airbnb famously so), because of the personal impression made by the founders. That's still the case today, and it was the case back then as well :)

I meant to focus on the text's tone sounding haughty rather than accuse the person being haughty.

Let me try to explain another way to emphasize the text aspect: that particular sentence in isolation is what is quoted on the internet outside of HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+suc...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+such+...

The "quite trivially" may only be scoped to one bullet point and may be unfairly weighted when looking at his followup thoughtful conversation -- but it also elevated it legendary HN lore.

I take your point about lore, and on that level it's just good fun.

p.s. Also, nice use of the word 'haughty'. We need those good English words.

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 stated since[1], I was an undergrad when I made those comments. I know how much I’ve grown since then. It feels like someone else said them, and everyone is talking about “not me” when they remark about it today.

I definitely appreciate the love, though. Thanks!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661824

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...

I appreciate your theorizing on its staying power. It’s interesting to think about why a particular phrase sticks with people.

[1] http://shebang.mintern.net/tips-for-remote-unix-work-ssh-scr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364025

>I have a few qualms with this app:

>1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account...

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Few seem to consider that contextual difference. Poor word choice aside for a moment, "quite trivially" meant something very different in 2007 than it has come to mean today.

I agree there’s still a conundrum here, why is something obviously one way to some very smart people like BrandonM while the exact opposite seems just as obvious to other people. I suspect it’s more about what people value than what they know technically.

Well, not exactly. There's plenty of people who have been successful at, frankly horrible things.

I count this kind of "not your computer, ours" rent seeking change as "bad if successful".

Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.

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 instance, we can patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a lot faster for everyone.

What we offer today is a faster way to use applications that do own your data so you can be much more productive and hopefully enable a new set of applications never before possible.

We help improve decentralization of the web over duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more powerful, not less.

We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer computing OS as it underlies our tech.

In time, we might be open to people owning their own hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I don't view either world as mutually exclusive.

If there's an opportunity to research making things trustless, we'll work on that.

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 dressing to get the job done.

I think that's just called "switching to a subscription model". "Rent seeking" has a different meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

That's factually incorrect that, that always happens and I am not sure why you think we're grouped into that without any evidence or a basis of reasoning.

I wonder if the pitch deck had the same value proposition we are getting or if it said "lets own consumer virtual desktop starting with Chrome". Both are valid.

Feels like a bait and switch.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter.

Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise.

Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.

But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf.

We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309

This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196

This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.

dang detaching off-topic subthreads is the opposite of mods opaquely fucking around with rankings. He explicitly detached the thread, and posted that he had done so. That's a judgement call which you're welcome to disagree with and I'm not going to affirm or second-guess because I don't care much.

As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

Yeah, you don't care about it much, it wasn't you that it happened to. I don't care that much either. I do care about this easily abused behavior, though.

> As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

I know, as do anyone that has experienced it, that they are penalized. If you say sane but controversial things around here you get downvoted, hidden, silenced. This sounds melodramatic, but think about what you are saying - HN is looking for boring, safe, everyone agrees commentary.

> So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

> Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

With all due respect, I know. I can tell.

> But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

Yeah that's how abuse works, that's how loopholes work. Rules for me and not for you. Rules that are arbitrarily applied.

That's what I've never gotten about HN. You guys are so smart, but it's like you skipped politics 101.

Persecuted? No. Pretty damn aware of the many times that people immediately downvoted every comment of mine they could? Yes. I'm a bog boy, I don't care about Internet points, but I also don't enjoy spending my days with people so petty and small. Grown, professional adults no less. If I feel persecuted, maybe it's because I like a lot of HNers know what bullying feels like. Feels like bullying. This applies to myself as well, but just because people have bullied you doesn't mean you aren't also a bully. You might even be more likely to be that because of learned behavior. HN is full of psuedointellectual high brow bullies. Not to smear all you fine people. It's not everyone, just an uncomfortable percentage.

What proof would you accept? I mean in the second one, you can literally see where dang has detached it, without a reason as to why. In a topic discussing politics and tribalism. There will be no proof of it, there's nothing to prove, but if that isn't evidence of moderator intervention (without transparency, no less), what is?

This is why even for all that I've learned form HN over the years (would love to not read it at all), I hate the discussion. It's so toxic. I'm getting probably rightly moderated but HN is full of people being ugly to each other on an hourly basis. I'm part of the demographic that should most appreciate HN, I can't imagine how people that aren't feel.

The solution has to include each of us seeing how we too add ugliness, and for this there's a difficult precondition: we have to be willing to look at that regardless of how badly other people are behaving. It always feels like the other person started it and did worse. Putting attention primarily on that feeling, which is what most of us do, is a recipe for a downward spiral—one can justify literally anything that way.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

This is, actually, still true :)

Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.

1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.)

2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)

The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.

Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies

I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.

Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.

This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.

MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.

It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no?

We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit any rough patches?

Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now. Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and people when they talk a little too different from you. That's why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males of the same demographics.

You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations – before you edited and completely changed it, that is.

And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, far from it.

You call it rambling because you don't agree with it.

I'm not sure what to do. This is easily a bannable offence. You can't post things to HN like your original comment, which was horrible. Editing in so misleading and nasty a way is also egregious. Even the posts you left up, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 are egregious, and the latter is a shameful personal attack to boot.

On the other hand, I can give you the benefit of the doubt in a couple of ways: everyone goes on tilt sometimes, and most of us post things that we have reason to feel ashamed of later. Since we try to err on the side of giving people second chances, I'm not going to ban you for all of this. But please clean up your act if you want to keep posting to HN. We're trying against the odds to have an internet forum that hovers at least an inch or two above the bottom of the barrel, and behavior like you've contributed here just pushes it all the way down.

HN commenters need to at least try to follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Regardless of what you feel you owe pg or YC or HN mods or me personally, you owe this community much, much better if you're participating in it.