Stupid Apps and Changing the World

http://blog.samaltman.com/stupid-apps-and-changing-the-world

by dmnd • 12 years ago

73 86 12 years ago

blog.samaltman.com

quaunaut2• 12 years ago

Kinda exactly what I needed this week. Every time I go on HN, Reddit, really much of anywhere all I see are people bitching and moaning about the most inane things, criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced.

The last paragraph is important. As much as I've enjoyed being on HN the past few years, and Reddit the past 8, I'm fairly close to swearing myself off of them entirely so I can focus better without rampant discouragement for the sake of the commenter's ego.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

criticizing products for not being something they were never intended to be, or tearing into decisions for being idiotic when it's pretty obvious someone's hand was forced.

The inverse, where everything is positive and criticism is ignored, is just as bad, if not worse.

The fact that we may not be able to predict the next big thing does not give everything immunity from critique.

quaunaut2• 12 years ago

There's a pretty obvious difference though between criticism for the sake of stroking your own ego, and criticism as a means of trying to better a product or legitimately point out its flaws. One introduces better conversation, another one is crowding around something to be kicked.

eliben• 12 years ago

I'm having a hard time understanding what he means by "hyperexponential". If N grows exponentially and there's some function of N that's O(N^2), it's still exponential.

He can't mean the hyperexponential probability distribution, that's something different.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

Hyperexponential I would assume is an order of magnitude higher than exponential. Although if I remember my video game terminology correctly, the proper hierarchy is exponential, then superexponential, then hyperexponential.

idlewords2• 12 years ago

I think it means he can't math.

tdaltonc2• 12 years ago

I think he's pointing either to this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration

or this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function

gipp2• 12 years ago

Neither of these are applicable to the situation he described, though.

sama• 12 years ago

combo of a n^2 and 2^n function--i think non-US english speakers call it a double-exponential function.

pzxc• 12 years ago

I think he was using that word not as a technical term, but as a way of saying "even faster/sharper than exponential". I.e., hyper- (the prefix meaning above) + exponential.

Certainly O(N^2) is not at the top of the food chain -- for example, it is beaten by O(2^N) or O(N!) or O(N^N). All of these could, colloquially, be referred to as "hyper"exponential.

Imagine a hockey stick graph (exponential). Now imagine that hockey stick graphed on a logarithmic scale -- the logarithms more or less cancel out the exponentiation if done right, making the graph appear to be linear even though the data is exponential. Now, imagine data that, even when graphed on a logarithmic scale, still looks like a hockey stick. That is hyperexponential.

And I think I just proved Sam's point -- that it is hard to visualize/grok.

gipp2• 12 years ago

O(N^2) is not exponential at all, it is polynomial. O(2^N) is exponential.

And the grandparent was pointing out -- correctly -- that that description doesn't really apply here. (2^N)^2 = 2^(2N) = still just 'exponential'. Plotted on a log scale it would still be a straight line.

chimtim• 12 years ago

O(N^2) is not exponential but just polynomial. O(2^N) is still exponential. O(N!) and O(N^N) are faster than exponential but not that much; O(N^N) grows slower than O(N!)[1].

Hyper-exponential is most likely double exponential O(a^b^N). There is an exponential growth of apps on these platforms and another exponential growth of users on these apps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling's_approximation

colanderman• 12 years ago

Many laypeople just use "exponential" to mean "really fast" (or even worse, "much more than"). It's been used that way so much that it's been watered down to mean just "fast". So the author probably just said "hyperexponential" to get back the original lay-meaning of "really fast".

prajit• 12 years ago

"There’s the famous observation that the value of a network grows as a function of the square of the number of nodes"

The value of a network is measured as O(V^2), where V is the number of nodes (users) in the network.

"and also many of these services/products double their userbase every N months."

V = 2^N (the number of users doubles every N months), so the overall function for the value of a network is O(V^2) = O((2^N)^2) = O(2^(2N)) = O(4^n). O(4^n) > O(2^n), but it is not the same as O(2^(N^2)), which was what Sam was trying to convey.

adamzerner3• 12 years ago

Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.

With the exception of the internet itself, I think they still are. Are we really that much happier with our social media and iPhones than we are without them? I think that for the most part, the answer is no. Most use is superficial and procrastination rather than meaningful connection with people.

Check out The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook. He talks about how we've made all of this "progress" in our standard of living, but that it isn't actually making us happier.

However, I agree with the central idea that "toys" are often dismissed prematurely.

finishingmove2• 12 years ago

Spot on. Capitalism generally is all about the illusion of progress, rather than real progress.

cglace• 12 years ago

And what is real progress? Do you define it?

facepalm4• 12 years ago

If I am cured of some nasty illness it certainly makes me happier. I think Gregg Easterbrook is full of shit.

pinkyand5• 12 years ago

It's about the bigger picture since "progress" brings also negative stuff like living in cramped boxes instead of in nature.

Are in general western people happier than inedegenious people without access to said medicine ? Not sure , but it doesn't seem so.

adamzerner3• 12 years ago

He never said or implied that medical progress doesn't lead to happiness. In fact he said that it does lead to happiness. You're arguing against a straw man.

josu• 12 years ago

Twitter and Facebook have changed the world; I don't have a doubt about it. And not only in a micro scale, also in a macro level.

I have gone from writing letters to my distant friends, to writing them emails, to writing them facebook messages. And believe it's much easier to keep in touch with friends now that there is facebook. If I travel to LA I can go to FB and check out who moved to LA in the last few years and actually meet them. Had I been in the email era, I wouldn't have had any idea of who was in LA. This is just a minor example for how facebook has changed the world on a personal level.

When it comes to the big picture, look at the Arab uprising, it used the social networks heavily. We don't know what would have happened without Facebook or Twitter, but my guess is that not much. But you don't have to go to developing countries to see the effects of the social networks on politics and society in general. [1] This is a graph of the Spanish bipartisanship going down the drain after May 15th, 2011(15M/Spanish revolution)[2]. The movement started on Twitter, and slowly moved to Facebook.

So these "toys" are changing the world, both on a micro and macro level, and denying that is like denying that TV changed how people view wars.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BuWphzlCUAAdwqX.png:large

[2] http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movimiento_15-M

adamzerner3• 12 years ago

You've mentioned a few examples of how social media is having a positive impact on the world. And after thinking about it some, I think I underestimated how big an impact they have. I still think the proportion of the usage that is meaningful is low, but given the huge amount of usage, it has lead to a pretty decent amount of meaningful interaction.

But what about the downsides? I don't have too strong an opinion and can't argue it well, but I do suspect that social media has its downsides, and that has to play into the equation. Something along the lines of "kids in the neighborhood used to all play outside together and now they're inside gossiping on social media".

coldtea3• 12 years ago

I have gone from writing letters to my distant friends, to writing them emails, to writing them facebook messages.

After using email those are all diminishing returns. Nothing earth shattering.

When it comes to the big picture, look at the Arab uprising, it used the social networks heavily.

No, it really didn't. Western media just liked to advertise it as such, because it made for a nice story. Plus social media using arabs are easier to approach, and are more likely to be more affluent and west-friendly, so they make for nice material to inflate their role.

We don't know what would have happened without Facebook or Twitter, but my guess is that not much.

Well, from people actually following middle eastern and arab history in all the 20th century, tons of movements have happened without any social media. The Iranian revolution in the late seventies, for example, was much touted in the west, and they didn't even have phones for the most part.

The movement started on Twitter, and slowly moved to Facebook.

There's a huge grassroots, on the roads, picketing and protesting movement in Spain. And there have been similar in the sixties in the US and Britain, in the seventies in Italy, Germany, etc. Twitter and Facebook are just convenient modern methods of organizing such things. If anything, current movements are much more tamer and less populated than the ones at times without social media.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

The only thing these "social web apps" achieved was turning trust fund millionaire kids into billionaires.

Give me a break. Real science and engineering, pushing the state of the art, is what changes the world. Not building a FarmVille platform or an advertising portal.

I have a hard time associating with people who are so caught up in the "Valley culture" that they can't see how ridiculously trivial most of their endeavours really are.

If you're into the startups and making money off "social/mobile/etc", all the power to you. Just don't claim you're the next Nikola Tesla. You're Gordon Gekko at best, making a quick buck off people's stupidity. No one will write about you in the science and engineering textbooks of the future.

You got FU money. Congrats. Now donate some to Janelia Farm so something can come of your time on this earth other than stocks market transactions.

finishingmove2• 12 years ago

"Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out."

So, are Facebook and the iPhone bettering the world right now?

tannerc• 12 years ago

In many ways, yes.

In foreign countries (not first world), Facebook has persisted as a primary means of communication; including finding lost relatives or friends and connecting people who have lost someone or something during catastrophic events. There's a lot of additional ways other countries are using the technology that we, here in the US, haven't dreamed of: setting up stores and selling things via Instagram, forming action groups and protest events on Facebook, etc.

The iPhone helps in many of those same instances, by connecting people to resources and other individuals.

Can there be simpler ways to accomplish the same goals? Absolutely! But the argument isn't to say these technologies are the be-all end-all. Instead, the point is to make it clear that these technologies can absolutely do good for the world if used to do so.

Just because you and I use Facebook to stalk our exes doesn't mean it's a useless tool for good.

ChikkaChiChi• 12 years ago

Why would we blame Silicon Valley for this? Silicon Valley largely builds problems that solve issues for Silicon Valley.

This isn't a bad thing, it just means that we have to decentralize the concentration of developers and entrepreneurs from one concentrated physical location.

If only there were a way for people to communicate at large distances with each other in an interconnected way....like a network of devices or something.

gamesurgeon• 12 years ago

If you build something you love, chances are someone else will love it, too. If you use something you love, chances are someone else will love it to. Incremental things that we love can spread like wild fire (Facebook, Twitter, and reddit), and they have changed the world; further incremental products will likely do so, too.

...An interesting discussion is whether these things we love make the world a better place. Another interesting discussion is if engineers and entrepreneurs focus too much on the things we love instead of the things the world needs.

grossvogel• 12 years ago

Yes. It's easy to argue that Facebook has changed the world, but that's not inherently good or worthwhile.

We could stand to pay more attention to direction of the impact, not just the magnitude.

pinkyand5• 12 years ago

While there are many useless critics, i wonder - was it really that hard to imagine Facebook("the identity layer of the web"),Reddit("democratic news"),The internet("duh") or smartphones("The versatility of computing, everywhere") becoming valuable under the condition that everybody uses them ? Doesn't seem so.

But there are many apps, that even under that condition, that it would be hard to imagine any unique value over what we have today, And do warrant criticism .

scott_s3• 12 years ago

I think you're suffering from hindsight bias. Less than two years ago, I was still explaining to people that the emergence of online social networks is a Big Deal.

pinkyand5• 12 years ago

This is not hindsight. At the beginning of those products, at least some people described it that way.

rvn10452• 12 years ago

Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact.

Couldn't this just be explained with power laws? Some small percentage of companies will have a disproportionate share of the impact.

sayemm• 12 years ago

This reminds me of one of PG's old essays, "The Power of the Marginal" - http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

People never see disruption coming and by its very nature, the best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked, by insiders early on. And probably the same is true of the founders behind them.

WhatsApp and Jan Koum are perfect examples of this.

idlewords2• 12 years ago

"The best contrarian value investments will always be dismissed, and overlooked" is a tautology.

rvn10452• 12 years ago

I think the real issue is not that these companies might not be changing the world, but rather that a lot of these companies don't have sustainable business models.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

That't a feature, not a bug. It all makes sense when you realize that the "products" are all throwaway, their only reason to exist is to get many people onboard fast, so that the company can be sold for lots of money (the product usually gets killed at this point; users are only score, why would anyone care about them anway).

larrik2• 12 years ago

Am I the only who still see Twitter as useless and trivial? Facebook has some undeniable values inside it's veneer of nonsense, such as out-of-state-Grandma getting to see the grandkids grow rather than waiting for holidays/care packages that may never come. Twitter, though, has never struck me as serving any use than as a shitty RSS feed for celebrities (including 'celebrities' in your field).

gfodor• 12 years ago

Yes, you're probably one of the only ones. The ability for Twitter to allow people (and machines) to quickly share information and allow it to go viral has certainly changed the world. The fact that the instant anything happens in the world there is a record of it on Twitter speaks enough about the impact it has.

giarc• 12 years ago

OP has never heard of the Arab Spring.

tdaltonc2• 12 years ago

I think that a big reason that twitter seems like a big deal is because "big media" understands and loves twitter. News outlets find twitter useful because they're news people. And they talk about it as if everyone found it as awesome as they do, but we don't.

pachydermic• 12 years ago

I think its more about the magnitude of innovation.

Twitter barely does anything new. It's not really that fundamentally different than a mailing list... The reason it's a big deal comes from the fact that tons of people use it - not from what it actually does.

I think things like the internet are incremental improvements as well. The internet just made communication between computers faster than, say, a person walking between them and re-typing everything. In a bigger sense, it just quickened up and made more reliable the transfer of information - just like radio, the printing press, writing or even spoken language.

The difference (to me at least) is just the size of the innovation. Twitter? Small change. The internet? Pretty huge. As big as writing? Who knows.

Just my two cents. I think how you look at these kinds of things has a lot to do with your world-view. As you can probably guess, I'm a "top-down" kind of thinker.

And I do get quite annoyed by arrogant startups "changing the world" over and over again. At the end of the day most of these things are just businesses who make small, incremental improvements to existing ideas. Very rarely does something truly revolutionary come about. That's fine - it almost has to be that way by definition. On the other hand, please keep trying, people! Just maybe show some restraint when you talk about yourselves?

I love to think about what Twitter and Facebook will be in 50 years. I find it really hard to imagine them being around other than in "internet history 101" textbook-equivalents.

nightski• 12 years ago

For me it is the opposite. Many programmers in the Haskell and Machine Learning/Scientific Computing communities use twitter and post useful tidbits all the time.

Facebook is full of my older aunts/uncles/grandparents posting memes and inviting me to play useless games. While most of my friends are on Facebook none of them actually post to it.

Then again I am 30 years old, the Facebook of a younger person may be very different.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

I run an incredibly boring business (SSL certs for Heroku), for which:

1. The majority of my alpha and beta testers came from Twitter.

2. The second highest source of traffic to both my marketing site [1] and the actual add-ons page [2] is from Twitter.

3. All of the testimonials on my site (which have been incredibly helpful in convincing people my service is useful are actually Twitter embeds)

4. There was a Heroku presentation given in Tokyo where my add-on was brought up as an example, which someone in the audience then tweeted about in Japanese. This triggered an alert on my computer (from Tweetdeck) and I was then able to on the fly answer questions people there had about it.

To me, with the people I follow, Twitter seems more like a programmers / startups meetup or conference than anything else.

1 - https://www.expeditedssl.com 2 - https://addons.heroku.com/expeditedssl

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

Consider a newsworthy event: a plane crashes. Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces. There's an earthquake.

Twitter is absolutely the fastest way to get information in those situations. Tweeting is way faster than updating some website, most reporters use it heavily, and Twitter now has the scale to stand up to even extremely heavy volumes of traffic.

The news of Osama bin Laden's death broke via Twitter more than hour than the President's own announcement of it [1]. Tweets about the 2011 VA earthquake arrived in New York before the actual seismic waves did. [2]

[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/death-osama-bin-laden-...

[2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/earthquake-twitter-use...

As a means of publishing news to a lot of people in real time, I would say that Twitter is the best media service ever created.

StandardFuture2• 12 years ago

The value of a piece of tech is not determined by the number of users, but by a change in the quality-of-life a user of the technology receives. Meaning "value" varies from individual to individual. Companies should focus on the individuals that they bring the most value too.

Probably what pisses people off about the "arrogance" of companies like Facebook is in their claims of bringing value to everyone (who uses their product -- and sometimes beyond). Which is not true (and is arrogant/obnoxious). Also, Facebook is not the only company to have this attitude.

Companies building something for the long-term are certainly not claiming value for anyone in the present (SpaceX is not claiming to be significant in your life now). But once their inventions (rockets, cures, transportation, etc.) are actually bringing benefits to the mass majority of humanity, then they have the right to brag.

But, the climatic 'era of benefit' from an invention usually comes after the inventors/founders have died. Edison's and Tesla's ambitions bring far more value today then they did in their time. On the other hand, Facebook will very likely 'die as a fad' within 5-10 years. In other words, the greatest figures/companies (should) appear very humble in their day.

So did Facebook change humanity? Did Reddit change Humanity? Yes, they are a temporary perturbation on the 'average state of human condition' over the grand scale of time. But, other inventions bring much longer-lasting benefits/changes to a greater number of people. Those are the inventions that people classify as truly "changing the world". Those are the inventions that should be worked on more so than the 'perturbative' & temporary world changers.

We are not seeing that. It's a reflection on the abysmal failures of humanity (in its entirety) rather than on any sub-set (Silicon Valley) or individual.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter

Not really. And the counter-examples he gives either didn't look trivial at first (the iPhone: actually everyone gapsed upon its introduction), or aren't really "world changing" (Facebook, Twitter: just some social networks).

As for the "Arab Spring" thing. Revolutions happened all the time without them. There were huge movements and shakedowns throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, including in the Arab world (Iranian revolution anyone?). It's mostly Silicon Valley and western media bullshitting that made some believe Twitter et co role in Egypt etc was "crucial". Plus it's easy to make starts out of the few Egyptians who tweet etc, and are usually of the more affluent and easier to talk to the press classes).

Smudge3• 12 years ago

By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before. Things that seem truly revolutionary are, more often than not, incremental changes on previous ideas that were easier to miss. As such, many movements and uprisings may be largely inevitable, and probably aren't the result of individual products like Facebook and Twitter, because they could've happened without them.

But that line of thinking is COMPLETELY missing the forest for the trees.

The world changes exactly because of such products -- specifically, because of the confluence of every idea and product up until that point in history. The Arab Spring may have been largely inevitable, but it was spurred by everything leading up to it, including the advent of social networks as a new communication platform.

coldtea3• 12 years ago

By that argument, no individual product or platform is truly important because everything is just built on what came before.

Only I never made such an argument. Email and the internet (www) for example were truly important.

keerthiko• 12 years ago

I find it quite mindblowing that people on HN can dismiss Facebook/Twitter as "just some social networks" that aren't "world changing".

Maybe you are all high and mighty and don't use "just some social networks", but they have definitely changed the world, in HUGE ways. I would say facebook's global permeation (circa 2009) is probably the most world-changing thing since global consumer internet availability (approx 1998?).

Just the other day, we on HN watched as a hotel business most likely crumbled because of worldwide attention on such social media [1]. Similarly, entire businesses are livelihoods are being built upon being visible on facebook. News travels like wildfire, opinions can make CEOs step down, a viral video can turn a beginner musician into a contemporary sensation, the list is endless.

How does one deny that these things have changed the world compared to before? They may not be all good changes, or any of them good changes, but they have changed the world, in huge ways, and we had best learn to accept it and take it into account in our lives.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8131162

Edited to actually add link.

fred_durst2• 12 years ago

Because news already traveled like wildfire. Its just didn't make it out to the people who weren't actually involved as often as it does now.

d--b• 12 years ago

It's not about the amount of change one is bringing, it's about the arrogance. It's about giving oneself more importance than anyone else. It's about believing that what you shitcode is golden

TomSattel3• 12 years ago

Facebook, Twitter, reddit are still trivial.

I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I have those things and they didn't.

The internet isn't trivial but I wouldn't say that my life is SO MUCH BETTER because I have internet. My parents did great without internet.

candu3• 12 years ago

"Farming is still trivial. I'm not doing SO MUCH BETTER than my parents because I grow food instead of hunting for it. My parents did great as hunter-gatherers."

TomSattel3• 12 years ago

Hunter gatherers had violent lives, experienced starvation and died in their thirties. So it's not a fair comparison.

hagope• 12 years ago

build something that some people love but most people think is a toy

best quote...

general_failure• 12 years ago

dildo fits the description :)

beenpoor• 12 years ago

I just donno man..this is easily the funniest comment in a long time.

roymurdock• 12 years ago

I've got a few bones to pick with this post.

1. Its main message, "build things you love" and "let the haters hate" seems to be pretty well-worn at this point. There was no value added in the way it was conveyed (no personal story, no anecdotes, no real insights). In fact, there was value subtracted by the jarring, undeveloped thoughts and the use of profanity that was censored in the original story on Businessweek.

2. I don't think anyone dismissed the internet or the iPhone as "incremental" or "trivial" when they first came out. Especially not in the way we often wonder about services like Snapchat and Secret. This seems like quite a silly comparison to me.

3. I don't agree with the idea that the value of a service is solely defined by its user base. User acquisition is only one part of a complex equation. "Hyperexponential growth" is worthless in the long run without a system that can capture and monetize user interest over time. Plenty of fads come and go:

-Planking

-Swag, #YOLO

-Pet Rocks

-Livestrong Bracelets

-Pets.com (symptom of the .com investing fad)

My opinion is that these fads add very little value relative to advances in healthcare, infrastructure, education, and technology that have made quantifiable progress towards a better quality of life for billions of people all over the world. Fads are like tumors that grow off of cultural and psychological excess.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

It's actually quite simple - Silicon Valley nowdays is an engine of money making, not technological progress. Those two values are correlated with each other, albeit not perfecly, and I'd hazard a guess that they are becoming more and more disconnected. So SV is optimizing for profit, and it's easier to make money by doing stupid throwaway stuff than by doing something actually useful.

Also things seem to have changed in the last few years; profit and usefulness are becoming visibly more disconnected. Startups nowdays lie about their "products" - the goal of New App X is not to be useful for you (the user/customer). Any actual use is a lie used to get userbase growth. When the "product" has enough users, it gets slaughtered, the team lands dream jobs, money changes hands, and everyone except the users is happy.

FD3SA2• 12 years ago

Meant to upvote you but may have fudged it. You've hit the nail precisely on the head. SV is now a well oiled machine for taking ideas and turning them into money for investors via IPOs. Technology and "saving the world" have got nothing to do with it, other than being convenient tools and marketing to achieve the primary goal of money making.

6nne• 12 years ago

Why is it that intermediate companies do not end up having a big impact? And what are some examples of such companies?

oskarth• 12 years ago

The overly ambitious aren't expected to succeed, and the frivolous aren't seen as amounting to anything. What they both have in common is that - when they work - they come as surprises, and surprises means you've probably discovered something new.

Middle-of-the-ground companies are more predictable in a sense, less likely to stumble upon something new, and thus less likely to have a big impact.

fred_durst2• 12 years ago

There is this funny thing about progress that I think about sometimes. Most old people I've spoken too say that things were better when they were young. They also say that things are easier now. Sometimes I wonder if that is the disconnect technologists don't quite grasp.

Stupid Apps and Changing the World

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