I don't believe that the article's criticism would be effective also against art (also, games can be art) -- striving to make something beautiful that illustrates the human condition or makes us feel something, is a non-trivial effort; art can galvanize us socially [0] [1] and can effect meaningful change.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
None of those fields beat the "change the world" drum as hard as tech startups do. This article seems to be an attempt to an attempt to reconcile action and rhetoric by asking "us" to live up to it.
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
Ditto. While I'm never going to use this Yo here thing, I don't consider it to be something that never should have existed.
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A person could argue that the post has more value than Yo (though I'm not sure this is self-evident), but it still isn't in the same ballpark as "energy, food, water, health, education." I mean, c'mon Christoph McCann, get your priorities straight!
Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.
So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0]
The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society.
It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit.
>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world?
This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best:
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo.
It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
I think the issue buckles down to someone saying "I'm working on this important thing and I can't raise $1MM, while this trivial, non-important app just raised $1MM, WTF?!"
It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.
Also temporarily assuming his premise, I disagree with your conclusion that this article itself becomes a waste of time: if he convinces a couple people to work on those things he finds important by way of having written and published this article then it may be more beneficial by the stated metric of doing good for the world than directly working on those important problems. I'd instead try to question the value of the post (again, assuming the premise, so in the eyes of the author) by asking this question: "if someone actually finds Yo worthwhile enough of their time to work on, maybe they aren't the kind of person who would actually come up with useful solutions to actually important problems anyway". Then again, the cost of writing this article is so low that even if the potential reward has very low probability, it has sufficient value (the productive output of another individual working on important problems) that it is probably still worthwhile (again, if you agree with the basic premise).
But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
Besides the argument of the potential that an app like Yo could have, it's also a business decision.
Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices.
At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model.
If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.
Sometimes people need to be reminded that there is a lot happening in the world outside of the sphere of influence that they exist in. As a global society we are leaving segments of our population behind and it is unnecessary and cruel. Do we really need more distractions and toys if we can't fulfill basic needs like food and water? Put yourself in the shoes of someone that experiences real needs (not wants) for a while before you judge the author's criticisms of our self indulgent society.
Why not fund them? If you think you can make a profit investing in Yo, then go for it. Who cares if it's not a life changing app, that's 99.99% of the app market, and it is what it is. If people install it, and use it, then it's providing some benefit to their lives, even if it's just for entertainment purposes.
I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are going to waste, and they could be changing the world.
We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.
Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.
Unless my mom or dad recently signed up for HN, I'm not terribly interested in any of this paternalistic (and patronizing) advice on how I should spend my life and time.
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"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."
Precisely. Who would have predicted that Twitter would have been used to organize people in a meaningful way during the Arab Spring?
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
"The problems facing us - energy, food, water, health, education - require big solutions and we are just starting to see some of these solutions come out of a new wave of startup businesses."
You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.
Building a nuclear power plant solves a lot of energy problems. Getting a permit to build one is more challenging than assembling the engineers to do it.
Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
Your reasoning suggests that if the people who built Yo were not building Yo, that they might be out there curing the world's diseases. See the flaw there?
If the people who built Yo had been curing the world's diseases instead of building Yo, then everyone would still be stuck with giving each other Facebook pokes, and would therefore be too demoralized and disconnected to complete the task.
The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?
It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.
And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.
Programming skills do not translate into solutions to big problems. The amount of education required to tackle something serious weeds out nearly all coders. Most programmers spend their careers writing code to someone else's spec, and a Yo app is a fantastic — and lucky — way to escape that fate. My hat is off to the creator for doing it, getting attention, and raising money.
The title should be "Let's not 'invest' in apps like Yo"
For a programmer this is only a win-win scenario. The founder gets experience, funds, exposure, and something whimsical to hack on for awhile. The people in return get this insane idea plastered all over the news only to hopefully inspire a couple hundred kids to get into programming with their chance to strike it rich.
If you hope for anything, why don't you hope that all investors in this idea take a huge loss and do their part in stabilizing tech valuations.
"some of the worlds most driven, focussed, intelligent and inspiring individuals"
It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.
Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
I agree. Though Yo should not have a 1.3 million funding. However, any sane person would quickly recognize that investors put in that 1.3 MM to fund the founders. They don't care about Yo. It may be a situation of "give some smart people who get the internets a bunch of money and hope it sticks". Which is a bit of a bubble IMO.
We have the potential to solve the big problems. But the big problems cost a lot more than $1 million to solve and aren't likely to get funded unless the founder is already a Silicon Valley billionaire with VC connections.
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
I disagree with the premise that being able to create an app that sends "yo" to somebody implies that you should be able to solve any of the various health crises around the world.
For one thing, this is incredibly insulting. Do you think that nobody is working on solving these already? Do you think that the people conducting medical research are just so unbelievably stupid that they couldn't comprehend how to write an app that says "Yo"? Maybe these problems are a little harder than you think.
Every time you talk about "Yo" an angel loses its wings or a kitten dies or... whatever.
If you stop talking about it, it will just fade into obscurity like Doogie Howser - only to appear years later as a successful, charming actor that can --- wait, where was this going?
Right. Stop talking about it and it'll go away. Don't be bitter about Yo; there's no point in it. Just let it go. Keep calm and carry on.
I have a plan to do this, have it kind of like a wiki with a breakdown of problems based on location (Becuase you can't solve world hunger all at once, each place has its own issues). Then have users submit possible solutions, and then open people to volunteer to implement solutions (maybe add a crowd-funding portion to it). Only issue is I'm too lazy to brush up my web development skills.
Maybe, Chris, me old mucker, you meant well in this article. You wanted to point out that there are some real, hard, difficult, real-life problems, things that affect people in large numbers, and that it would be great if people worked on those.
I would agree with that sentiment. A million more chat apps, a million more web frameworks, a million more crappy-bird game clones, twatter, farcebook, none of those solve real-life hard problems.
The difficult part then, is how to make solving those problems attractive. Money? Fame? Something else? A good feeling in the stomach and soul, knowing you have contributed to helping? That is the harder part.
People are complicated, their motivations often less so, but hidden away beneath complications and layers of deceit, so as to often obscure them.
This signal says that people are still willing to pay for effective data collection. An app like Yo simply proves that quality/purpose do not really matter for making money. If it walks like a bubble, and talks like a bubble
[+] [-] skywhopper|11 years ago|reply
More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.
[+] [-] jal278|11 years ago|reply
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_Califor...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin
[+] [-] forgottenpass|11 years ago|reply
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
[+] [-] angersock|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quink|11 years ago|reply
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
[+] [-] adamgravitis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwnna|11 years ago|reply
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
[+] [-] pdabbadabba|11 years ago|reply
Of course, I don't actually make that argument, because I reject its premise. As the above argument hopefully illustrates, it is not reasonable to insist that everyone spend all their time in the most socially beneficial way possible. Should we all strive to make the world a better place? Of course. But I don't know many people who think that we need to spend all our time tackling the world's biggest problems.
And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? Maybe an app like Yo will bring us together in a new (albeit marginal) way. That's valuable, even if it is also silly. (See, e.g., the first few paragraphs of this article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2014/06/23/goo...) Or maybe it provide a cautionary tale to remind us (as, perhaps, it already has) what is really important. Value exists in subtle forms that are not so easy to glibly list, and can be advanced in subtle and unexpected ways. While I wish we lived in a world where more people focused on problems like energy, food, water, health, education, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where EVERYONE works on those problems. I want people to be free to do the unexpected, even if the results sometimes seem frivolous.
So, if McCann's only point is that we should take a moment and reconsider our priorities, point taken. But this looks suspiciously like something a bit more (with respect, and apologies) totalitarian.
[+] [-] jal278|11 years ago|reply
The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society.
It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit.
[0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
[+] [-] digz|11 years ago|reply
This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.
[+] [-] gfodor|11 years ago|reply
"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.
[+] [-] mtdewcmu|11 years ago|reply
The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo.
It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.
[+] [-] acconrad|11 years ago|reply
It just doesn't seem fair that a pointless app could raise 7 figures while others are struggling, but it does point back to the idea that fairness and judgment are human-made, and not absolute.
[+] [-] saurik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|11 years ago|reply
It's hard to see what the point of such a thing would even be. Isn't the whole point of solving the world's problems that we'll have more time to waste on frivolous pursuits like the Yo app?
[+] [-] atmosx|11 years ago|reply
I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?
[+] [-] LunaSea|11 years ago|reply
Developers have a limited amount of time they can spare to write code so they have to be wise with their venture choices.
At the end of the day, when you read that Yo was funded for $1M, bubble or not, it's a smarter decision after calculating the risk / benefit ratio to emulate Yo's model.
If their would be more funding in the areas described in the blog post, I'm sure more developers would launch start-ups around them.
[+] [-] canvia|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheald|11 years ago|reply
Let's just not fund them.
[+] [-] soccerdave|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Throwaway0812|11 years ago|reply
I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are going to waste, and they could be changing the world.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|11 years ago|reply
...In releasing massive security flawed apps.
[+] [-] ricardolopes|11 years ago|reply
We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.
Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.
[+] [-] lbrandy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steveklabnik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grogenaut|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew_null|11 years ago|reply
Worth reading the counterpoint: http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/
"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."
[+] [-] rajbala|11 years ago|reply
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
[+] [-] Delmania|11 years ago|reply
You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.
[+] [-] hagbardgroup|11 years ago|reply
Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
[+] [-] crassus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aashishkoirala|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|11 years ago|reply
The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?
It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.
And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.
[+] [-] gcv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ryel|11 years ago|reply
For a programmer this is only a win-win scenario. The founder gets experience, funds, exposure, and something whimsical to hack on for awhile. The people in return get this insane idea plastered all over the news only to hopefully inspire a couple hundred kids to get into programming with their chance to strike it rich.
If you hope for anything, why don't you hope that all investors in this idea take a huge loss and do their part in stabilizing tech valuations.
[+] [-] bloat|11 years ago|reply
It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.
[+] [-] mbubb|11 years ago|reply
I am a little surprised that no one has trotted out this history lesson:
"In 1969, Ken Thompson wanted to play SpaceWar on a PDP-8 computer..."
[+] [-] jasontsui|11 years ago|reply
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
[+] [-] Justsignedup|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exelius|11 years ago|reply
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
[+] [-] imgabe|11 years ago|reply
For one thing, this is incredibly insulting. Do you think that nobody is working on solving these already? Do you think that the people conducting medical research are just so unbelievably stupid that they couldn't comprehend how to write an app that says "Yo"? Maybe these problems are a little harder than you think.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] VolatileVoid|11 years ago|reply
If you stop talking about it, it will just fade into obscurity like Doogie Howser - only to appear years later as a successful, charming actor that can --- wait, where was this going?
Right. Stop talking about it and it'll go away. Don't be bitter about Yo; there's no point in it. Just let it go. Keep calm and carry on.
[+] [-] angersock|11 years ago|reply
"We have the potential to solve the big problems. Let's not fund apps like Yo."
[+] [-] odonnellryan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekalon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cacainmycafe|11 years ago|reply
I would agree with that sentiment. A million more chat apps, a million more web frameworks, a million more crappy-bird game clones, twatter, farcebook, none of those solve real-life hard problems.
The difficult part then, is how to make solving those problems attractive. Money? Fame? Something else? A good feeling in the stomach and soul, knowing you have contributed to helping? That is the harder part. People are complicated, their motivations often less so, but hidden away beneath complications and layers of deceit, so as to often obscure them.
[+] [-] alttab|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vezzy-fnord|11 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I thought the aftermath of Yo was absolutely stupid, as well.