Why does everything in tech need fresh ideas all the time? Why can’t something just be good as it is? I don’t see people trying to re-invent the spoon. Because spoons are fine. We don’t need an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features.
Also, don’t add new shit while you’re still developing what you already have.
an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features
Please do tell me more about that new spoon.
What kind of get-off-my-lawn take is that?
Of course because that’s where a lot of the fun is in tech, inventing, learning about, using and talking about new stuff. Newness can make mundane things interesting and entertaining for a while, just look at a child figuring out new things for the first time.
So the point is to be fun for the developers? Because that doesn’t sound like a good thing for the users necessarily.
Why are you creating narrow strawman arguments from what I’m saying? Being fun is one upside of new things in tech, and for everyone who enjoys that sort of thing.
Trying new things is also the major way to create progress and improve lives over time. Everything you are used to right now was new at some point, and we wouldn’t have any of it if people were just content with what they had. And I think we can all agree that social media needs some real improvements right now.
It’s a lot like a new smaller band, which is trying to make a difference in the world. They might sound terrible, but they have to start somewhere.
Social media has been out of ideas since we got video chat. The fact is people want a free place on the internet to share interests with other people and communicate with them. Every company tries to figure out how to monetize it.
So of course they’re out of ideas, they never had them in the first place. Capitalism cannot drive progress
In theory it’s easy to monetise - allow some targeted ads to communities and/or occasional relevant boosted posts, or paid awards like Reddit, etc.
The issue is greed / growth. They always need more and more - so you end up with more irrelevant ads, political ads, more boosted posts than natural ones, etc. - most companies aren’t happy to just do one thing well with a skeleton crew maintaining it and keeping costs low - they need constant growth.
Just look at Reddit and Twitter for example.
I agree with your main point but have either Reddit or Twitter ever been profitable?
That’s because most Social Media players aren’t interested in the social community aspect. They only care about the nigh infinite metadata they can harvest and then sell, and advertisements. It’s profit driven first and last. So everything ends up being rather samey because it’s the best method to achieve those goals.
Shh… nobody tell them about the Fediverse.
On a separate note, anyone else finding Wired to suddenly be like the Boomer of tech publications? Ars Technica and Techdirt are vastly superior sources these days. Seems like Wired does nothing but pump out stale conglomerated opinion pieces that smell vaguely like Larry Ellison’s sweat socks.
conde nast, the same company that is a major investor in reddit owns them. You may also be familiar with several of their other publications, Vogue, Golf Digest and The New Yorker, to name but a few.
I find it slightly sad that when our leaders talk of Technology and Innovation - they often mean these ‘tech’ companies that essentially work out how to better sell advertising and occasionally provide a useful service alongside this.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
We have incredible problems facing us such as Climate Change and decarbonisation seems like it will be a very difficult challenge. And yet we focus on banal “innovation” in frivolous things.
America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a corporation with nukes rather than a country with functional government.
I’m not sure when or how it happened, but Americans seem to have decided that everything has to be privately owned for profit, and making those private services into government services (health care for example) it’s “socialism” and people would rather pay 5x as much for less care than our European cousins get with their taxes by default.
Yeah, those are examples of actually innovative private enterprise.
I don’t have a problem with it being the private sector. But the problem is making a Twitter clone or a slightly better version of MySpace is barely innovating and certainly isn’t going to significantly improve the world.
This may be better explained through the lens of different departments within mega corporations. Alphabet constantly changing their messaging platform is bullshit, but their aggregation and ui for viewing not just the entire world maps but creating timelapse views of the planet is quite innovative and just one of thousands of research projects going on under their umbrella. Meta creating yet-another messaging clone in Threads is bullshit, but the research and development in optics and other fields as part of their VR work is actually quite cutting edge. Outside of tech there are also massive research bodies working behind the scenes. The recent adoption of decades of work in mRNA is a huge leap forward in vaccine work, for example. Many large corporations have these internal groups pushing the bounds of physics, and the scale and specificity of research today is orders of magnitude beyond where we were in the early half of the previous century. As we look back at the turn of the next century, I expect there will be a laundry list of technological turning points which are credited to today’s companies which just aren’t apparent in the din of 24/7 news and information. OTOH, thanks to these mundane communications services, we no longer need just a couple of research centers and, instead, we benefit from a larger network of investigators scattered about the world.
