smugglerFlynn

I propose this short ‘Google test’ when ranting about LLM advertising: replace ‘LLM’ with ‘Google’ and see what happens.

‘Will Google decide on which ads to place? Will it be part of search results or a summary’ - we all know the answers

At this point why forcing people to use the service, if you can forcefully extract these eyeballs and then sell them directly to advertisers in large enough jars?

Modern version needs to be community focused, not platform focused. This could look like "old instagram" or "old reddit": people sharing findings with friends / small groups of like minded people.

We are seemingly unable to create something like that from scratch; these communities get born when good enough platform quality + hype/fashion + network effect all 'click' together once in a few decades. The problem is: every single time such community-based platform ever appeared, we've started tweaking the _platform_ and have (unintentionally?) destroyed the community in the process.

Today we are so advanced in managing technology, but so backwards in helping communities grow. People really need to stop treating communities as "user bases". Instagram or Reddit are not bringing any value on their own. Their value is driven by communities. Paradoxically, every other platform feature they introduce chips away at the community.

(Side rant: It is almost like platforms intentionally try to convert social side of user experience into something akin to 'television'. 10 years back I was mostly reading Instagram posts of my friends and looking at the photos they made, today I mostly see 'content creators' in the feed, and all the meaningful interaction with friends was reduced to seeing their 'likes' floating around the screen, plus forwarding more content to them.)

Same thing happened with remote work. Things that were simple by-products of a face to face communication now need to be dissected and studied, and then carefully added back in, in order for remote environments not to suck. All the small talk, emotional check-ins, etc.

  > I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this, and invariably find 90% of my listening happening on algo-generated playlists of songs that sound exactly like a song I like. I never learn the names of the songs or the names of the bands as the songs go by, and I fall in love with none of it… It just vaguely sounds like stuff I like. It sucks.

It's that the word "discovery" internet platforms have started using for this kind of experience is very misleading.

What real discovery means:

  - Spending more time and attention when selecting next artist
  - Reflecting on what you like about the song/album, and why
  - Taking time to curate your collection
  - Exchanging thoughts with other people, and reflecting on their opinions

This is not unique to music platforms by the way. Instagram spoon feeds you reels so you never actually reflect on anything - you don't have time for reflection, because content is coming. Instagram will say they've solved "content discovery" for you, which is good, right?

LLMs spoon feed you tons of data, leaving no room for reflection.

It is logical if you think about it: these platforms do solve accessibility, but they don't solve discovery, deep reflection or retrospection of the user. Why bother marketing things they _don't_ solve? So they oversell accessibility solution like they've solved everything else, while in reality their product teams spend literal zero time addressing the important things.

Unless you consciously prompt yourself to reflect and think (which takes x10 more time than just browsing content) you are missing out.

I've spent good 20 minutes reflecting while writing this comment. Could have been written by LLM based on a short prompt, right? But I write on HN not because I want for everyone to see my thoughts published out there - I write precisely because I want to _reflect on my own thoughts_.

I need help reflecting, not writing or discovering.

  > My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows:

  > Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else.

HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics.

Please OP, close HN, reach out to people, get help, and (importantly) learn to navigate your mind, not fight with it.

Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.

The culture you are creating is actually the opposite: no ownership, and no autonomy

You are delegating decisions that are in your responsibility to another person (=no ownership), and you are not able to progress unless someone else [even if silently] green lights your approach (=no autonomy).

Another similar management anti-pattern is “please copy me on all your communications” [for a chance to override your decisions]. This one feels more obviously off for many people, but works exactly the same way.

This is a valid team collaboration approach, but a major smell if people run their decision making like this with higher-ups. People often mix up these two.

If only things in life worked as well as things on paper

Once ‘them’ disappears brain loses the control, leading to unbearable stress, and we are back to where we’ve started with this article.

It is ironic that original comment proposes to face the problem head on while applying typical ‘feel good’ and ‘stay in control’ mechanisms that have nothing to do with facing reality.

The grounded way is to acknowledge that you have limited or no control about the situation. And that oftentimes we are all part of the very same problem. Only from there you can work through the resulting pain and fear and other hard to bear feelings to actual meaningful strategies. This, however, requires years of emotional tolerance training and oftentimes therapy which (again, ironically) very few people have time or motivation for nowadays.

You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this.

But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.

  > Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.

  > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea

  > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy

People go to nature to interact with nature, not with traces of other human beings. You don't want to ride 4 hours to countryside only to find very same things you've been running away from.

In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.

  > Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant

  > Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth

I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.

Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.

To expand on this: certain people have learned how to capitalize on “nerdiness” - i.e. how to virtue signal in a way so that investors and general public treat you like an engineering genius.

Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.

I wish we would start paying proportional attention to business news, instead of treating AI (or any other "cutting edge") companies as economy-defining and giving these 50+% of the attention.

It is especially telling if we try to list out all the psychological biases at play:

  - Availability & salience bias - vivid, memorable things feel more important than they are
  - Narrative bias - humans tend to think in stories, and AI tells plenty
  - Recency and novelty bias — new things feel more consequential than established ones (this one already drives like 80% of all HN content btw)
  - Proportionality neglect - people are bad at intuitively grasping what percentages mean, even if they see the stats
  - Social proof and reflexivity - coverage signals importance, and drives more coverage
  - Status quo invisibility - things that work reliably become invisible (surprisingly, HN is really good in terms of working against this bias, I feel like at least 5% of all posts are some niche "inner daily workings" topics)
  - Speculation premium in attention - uncertainty generates more discussion than certainty
  - In-group signaling - cutting-edge things are status markers among influencers

“Biggest innovation in tech” at times feels like 2000 era Nokia smartphones. You got phone with circle keyboard! You got foldable phone that turns into a neat camcorder! You got mp3 player phone!

All with marginal value add and having more to do with fashion than with actual innovation.

Real innovation is synonymous with problem solving. The only problem tech industry is solving nowadays is keeping its bloated valuation afloat.

It is the same with forums, trackers and private libraries. They are instantly more useful for information seeking purposes. And none of this really fits into attention-monetizing economy of Internet.

I’ve recently counted movies available on my HBO account and it is in low hundreds. There is absolutely no way to find a specific movie across existing services - information discovery is broken, and their subscription models force me to pay in weird ways (subscribe, watch, unsubscribe.. rental is scarce) for a relatively simple outcome.

Another weird example are books that are widely available on the web in pdf and other formats with absolutely no way to legally purchase them in electronic form. There is a vast untapped shadow network of people doing [often volunteer] work of publishers: scanning, uploading and categorizing content in a searchable way. At the same time most publishers who actually own rights to this content are prioritizing entertainment and attention focused platforms, where 20% of invested work already gives them 80% of business results.

One can argue that this is (a) the only economically viable model we could come up with and (b) most people that are looking for entertainment don’t really have this problem.

You are proposing to fix something that is not broken by adding things to it. My point is, the Internet has already evolved in this specific way for a reason.

Few old school sites like Wikipedia aside, modern Internet is serving a very different purpose: being an entertainment platform, being a backbone for building applications and monetizing them.

Yes, technically there are still underlying networks with instant delivery of content to any place on Earth, but maintaining something like Wikipedia on top of modern Internet is like trying to maintain a quiet library inside of a Casino. Monetization means don’t fit. You need a quiet space to read and study, not dingling sounds and bright lights, not free vodka and 50 security guys.

We need a new paradigm of information sharing and new ecosystem if we want to do things differently.

I think original web standards were solving a completely different problem: sharing information.

Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead.

Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will never really know what information-focused version of Internet would have looked like because evolution took it elsewhere. Unless we try building another one with different principles and limitations at the core.

You are probably talking about people who just crunch out some half baked solutions for the sake of getting somewhere.

But there are other nerds who care, just not about the code quality, but about conversion, testing out business ideas quickly, getting to know their customers better.

There are nerds who care about business strategy.

There are nerds who care about accounting principles and clean financial reporting.

There are nerds who care about sales targets and partnerships.

There are many types of nerds out there. Don’t limit nerds to engineers, because “tech” world is not just an engineering world anymore. All these nerds you can team up with to build meaningful things, because they do care.

I think you are mixing cause and effect in real life dynamics.

In real organizations people tend to raise their performance to the [often unreasonable] level of expectations, even when situation stops being sustainable long-term for the whole group.

Suggesting that people should simply avoid overperforming assumes a level of control they don’t really have.

What do you think will actually happen at Coinbase now? Is it more likely that people will start saying hard “no,” or that they would stretch to meet the new expectations despite the personal cost?

It is not a problem if you are an assembly line robot making motions. People, however, are not robots. They get held accountable by their higher-ups for delivering on these (often nonsensical) priorities, they risk getting fired when expectations are not met, and high uncertainty of faulty planning systems like that is extremely stressful in itself.

“Welcome to layoffemailreviews.com - your daily source of best and most honest layoff email reviews in the industry.

Is there a flood of talent leaving after this one? Major breaches? Only time will tell.

Buckle up, and don’t forget your pudding!”

They're not going to get to spend enough time meeting each report's needs, not a chance.

What needs? If you squeeze people hard enough there are no needs anymore, only responsibilities and urgent+important backlogs that have no bottom.

Welcome to 2026.

Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.

I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.

There is no cookie-cutter approach to all software products at once.

"I want classic sound / look / feel" of entertainment products like WoW is very different from, say, "I want old spreadsheet shortcuts / simpler UI" of office products where you have to actually balance many functional features that are in demand with simplicity and past product behaviour some of your users got used to.

Edit: I think I just rubber ducked myself with this comment into understanding that it is user segmentation which is key regardless of your product; real challenge is to try embedding and balancing all product features as a single package, instead of splitting core product into multiple different parts that fit different segments (like Blizzard did)

I would argue the only thing that does stop current situation from snowballing into something much worse are pre-existing institutions and regulations.

That's also why dismantling and challenging these is often the very first priority for authoritarian actors.

Nobody stops spammers from creating websites, but we still have search engines and web. Nobody stops spammers from sending emails, but we still use SMTP.

It is just a matter of tools we build to rank and filter content. With open protocols platforms can actually compete on antispam tools, among other features.

as long as there are relatively good options of apps that do have privacy (and I think there are)

Once you have enormous network effect like TikTok has, you don't really have any free selection of alternative apps. You are free to use one, but you will be the only sad user over there.

Regulations are needed that would force large platforms like TikTok and Instagram to enable federation, opening them up to actual competition. This way platforms would be able to compete on monetisation and usability, instead of competing on locking in their precious users more strictly.

Because building complex product that is also useful is not quick and is not easy. Contrary to the idea that many people are floating around these days.