[thepuppet33r]

Putting aside the whole "I'm rich and aimless, what should I do" thing the author's got going on, I found the product they got rich for (Loom) to be fascinating as a statement on where we are right now.

It's essentially just a program that allows you to record a video of yourself while iterating through a presentation or screen share and then share it for feedback.

Powerpoint has this as a native feature with OneDrive. There are other screenshare programs that do the same thing.

The whole incentive for using it (according to the video) is to "avoid another all hands meeting." And AI is involved somehow?

I find it so fascinating how companies seem to be aware that the way many big companies work (usually in office, in meetings, sometimes on video calls) is flawed, but rather than revisit the model, we just try to map the existing structure onto new expensive shiny tools.

The only benefit I see to having someone send me a video of them reading their presentation or narrating their screen share is that I can watch it on 2x speed asynchronously. At that point, why not just send me a set of bullet points and the presentation or screenshots?

I look at these products and I get the same feeling I do when I watch a road worker paint a tiny bike lane on an existing 4 lane megaroad with no barrier. You're not fixing the problem - you're just causing new ones. The whole system has to shift somehow.

[tqi]

Loom is one of my least favorite products because it enables lazy creators to offload the work of organizing and editing their thoughts onto the viewers. So instead of one person spending 30 minutes distilling their thoughts into a coherent narrative once, each member of their audience is forced to do that work separately.

[boringg]

Its helpful in certain cases for sure but you hit the nail on the head. Totally enables a lazy approach where everyone now needs to waste time watching a video so collectively the cost is much higher in terms of time spent.

[RGamma]

Sounds like a proverbial multibillion dollar todo list SaaS.

Kinda wish big money would have left the CS-related space right about ~10 years ago, when things weren't quite as nonsensical (and culturally decrepit), so all the serial careerists would have chased something more viscerally useful, like maybe bracing us for the impacts of global warming.

Rational markets and all.

[purple_ferret]

Loom is not for teams who use Microsoft 365.

It's for teams that exclusively use Slack, Notion, Miro, Vercel, Mux etc

[thepuppet33r]

Fair point.

[Destiner]

> At that point, why not just send me a set of bullet points and the presentation or screenshots?

Because video works better for product demos.

Show, don't tell.

[jmuguy]

Our company is currently six people. We have a software-updates channel in Slack where I post our changelog for the team to read. I am very meticulous about these posts because I know very frequently we'll get asked "when did such and such change" and I can go back and reference these posts. And also its frequently the only way sales and our executive will know about changes, having not been directly involved. So yeah - I take a lot of time to make these posts concise, easy to understand etc.

I constantly get asked to make a Loom demonstrating the changes. Which makes sense... but is also frustrating. And I always make the point that these videos aren't searchable (sure they have AI summaries or whatever but those are in Loom, not Slack).

[abustamam]

I used to work for a company that used Loom. It was always used for internal demos, ie "I made a new feature" or "I encountered a bug." It was perfect for that. That being said, we probably weren't the target market because we didn't pay for it.

[herval]

Loom is pretty great. It does one thing and does it well. It’s obvious and easy to use. It’s fairly priced. It’s a great tool for remote work!

[downrightmike]

Its a screen recorder system. Rather than looking at a dedicated program that costs money, Loom comes up in Google first and works.

[4gotunameagain]

The shift would take a massive culture shift.

Everything and everyone seem to only be concerned about money. In music, in art, in popular culture, in the contemporary "thought leaders"..

It was the inevitable but hard to predict outcome of capitalism, the utter dissolution of everything that cannot be converted to capital, and the monetisation of everything else that could.

The zeitgeist is a thin, inconsistent and ever changing set of ethics (which of course are also swayed wildly by capital) and everything else is about money.

All the previous values are not only waining, they are also mocked.

A lack of greed is considered a lack of ambition, piety is disregarded as antiquated and evil, honour and shame are non existent.

We are living through tremendous sociopolitical changes, the most substantial and the most high paced humanity has ever faced.

I just hope it goes the right way eventually, although it is almost certain that none of us will be here to witness it. The only thing we can do is surf the wave and do our best to make things better.

[tdiff]

> It was the inevitable but hard to predict outcome of capitalism

I think it was not hard to predict, and in fact it was actually predicted in countless pieces, criticising capitalism.

[torginus]

Sound like a billion-dollar idea to me (and Atlassian)!

[mandmandam]

I'm guessing you don't actually mean what you just said? You gotta be careful with derogatory words you don't know the meaning of.