I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?
I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both?
imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
> The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to?
I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed countless possibilities for computers to make life better. Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type of thing.
I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes. Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given to the rich.
Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D
Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part.
Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline.
Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972.
Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying.
Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.
I'm not sure the others aspired to, to quite the same extent.
Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after.
Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.
You nailed it: success is a winner-take-all (or maybe most?) proposition. At least in a narrow domain, the dominant solution crowds out all other contenders.
15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think Facebook still sorted by recent back then.
The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.
I think "algorithms" disguises something bigger: a broad ethos to extract value from users, instead of delivering value to them. Modern consumer tech sees end-users as resources to exploit. Between privacy violations, vendor lock-in, worsening functionality and interoperability, and unilaterally changing terms and designs, these services demonstrate so much contempt for the people who've come to rely on them.
Instead of making things better, tech companies use their engineering prowess to impose control over people and reduce end-users' agency.
At one point, a company makes changes to just get users, and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all the efforts come from increasing profitability per user. That will rarely make the company's products better for their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins and minimal growth years ago.
Algorithms aren't inherently bad. An algorithm that keeps spam out of my email is pretty great if it works. An algorithm that presents a feed of things I actually want to see is also pretty great. I want to see life updates from my friends and family, especially media of their pets, but not sports, babies, or politics except from a couple people who write interesting things.
That's not a tall order for a recommendation algorithm with a huge supply of training data. It wouldn't even need a 50% hit rate to make something really useful that I would definitely check once or twice a day and post or comment several times a week if even a third of my real life social circle used it.
An algorithm that presents me a feed of things I sometimes can't look away from even though I don't really want to see them is harmful, like an addictive drug.
> the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero
The word/ genre is a protagonist as antihero. An antihero is nice in fiction, we sympathize with them to some degree over their flaws and challenges. The problem is that a billionaire very much has an outsized impact.
People with power tend to change. With being in power, their perspective on the world shifts, often for the worse.
Zuck originally wanted fully free speech, this is in fact what everyone wanted in that time. Then appeared the massive abuse in the unavoidable echo chambers. Zuck was hence forced to be the judge between good and bad speech/content, up to being in court. The filtering had to happen with advanced algorithms since fully manual was impossible to pull off. The funding happened by advertising, so the move to algorithms upping engagement was only logical.
Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground, via the acceleration of electrical transport, up to buying the world's biggest software playground and obtaining a large part of world's communication and transport hardware infrastructure. He's more convinced than ever of the power of capitalism, for the good and the bad.
We were not at the site when it happened. I only recall the various sources that I read and try to make a consistent/plausible model and narrative. I never met Elon nor Zuck in person.
The first time I saw a fellow student post something utterly irrelevant (to our local group's real lives) rage bait thing into the then-new FB feed I knew we were in trouble. Surely, FB and Zuck must have had an idea what was going on.
Then I deleted my account and successfully ignored all of the generic, commercial asocial media fads that happened afterwards (at least to the degree they're directly ignorable). Feels nice to have it all pass me by.
Mixing online and real life in this uncontrolled manner and scale was a huge mistake for our collective moral and mental health.
And for the record: I don't blame him for everything that happened, but he certainly helped open the doors to a much more unpleasant VC-powered internet and we're struggling to reboot the cultural forces that made the time before it so great.
I don't think Zuck's motives were ever pure or noble. We must remember that Facebook (original name: Mashbook) was originally created to rate the fuckability of the females residing in Harvard's co-ed dorms. Basically, it was Hot Or Not for a very targeted population.
The concept of a social graph was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from the Winklevoss twins.
Zuck's talent is unabashed brashness and chutzpah. He thinks the rules simply don't apply to him. He is not an original thinker, but rather very intellectually derivative. The fact that he grew up wealthy opened many doors for him, even despite the Winklevoss twins' sentiment that he comes from new money and is thus irremediably beneath them, and even worse in their WASPy blueblood minds, Jewish new money. ('How dare a Jew steal our idea!') Shady actors all around, with not an admirable figure amongst them.
Well, it's what everyone wanted apart from all the people warning them about it.
(I'm not taking credit. I was militantly pro free speech at the time, the anti-free-speech position was mostly held by Christian Conservatives and other fun-free types. Free speech was borderline _sexy_).
What I don't think Zuck or any of his peers realised was what they were connecting. Sure, connect all the bright young things on college campuses, and maybe their nice extended families, good things will happen.
I don't think he'd have done it if he knew just how much of the population was deplorable, deplorable-adjacent or highly susceptible to being turned that way.
And I don't recall ever seeing that discussed at the time. "But if we connect all the people... you realise we're connecting all the angry, ugly, bitter, nasty, broken ones too. And have you considered just how many of those there are?"
Things have definitely gotten worse. I view SaaS subscriptions as the primary culprit. Even here on HN, most "side-projects" are attempts at recurring revenue through paid subscriptions instead of contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly all software is built from in terms of languages and libraries).
"Even here on HN, most "side-projects" are attempts at recurring revenue through paid subscriptions instead of contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly all software is built from in terms of languages and libraries)."
Shared libraries generally don't make money. HN has always been about startups and making products/services.
I predicted this would happen decades ago. Piracy was accepted in the tech community and became so widespread, it made it nearly impossible to make a living selling the software anymore, so businesses made their move when Internet speeds got faster and now make everything into a service (that can't be pirated).
I remember the popular prediction of software going service-based, probably delivered via a web browser or something like one in the late 1990s and being disturbed at the prospect of being unable to pirate things. How else was I going to get software as a broke teenager?
I don't have your answers, but it has been a very long time that I lacked the enthusiasm you seem to have had.
I used to be hyped about the Internet in particular and technology as a whole in the early to mid 2000s, before I started to work professionally as a developer.
Ever since this illusion was shattered. I understood that everyone was just interested in making money, lots of it and as quickly as possible. There was no concern of how good something would be for the world as whole, only a vague shrug on that of something was successful it was inherently good.
I don't feel better or worse for it. I know it's a job but someone's gotta do it.
In my career, engineering went from lucrative, upper middle class to a potentially explosive wealth-building apparatus.
Once people became aware of that, they began to strive for it. Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful, upper middle class life.
Their hunger for more created a subculture of grinding and speculation. As the playing field grew feom office computers to everyone's phones, the old school capitalists dove in and catalyzed it all.
To the point where the wellbeing of our young, the environment, the jobs we created- none if it mattered anymore. The goal was to get perversely rich and dominate the subculture, dissolving the real culture with it.
> Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful, upper middle class life.
Ironically, this is was what I chased, and what I found. I never wanted to have a destructive amount of money, just enough to have a house and raise a family.
A lot of people in this industry just wanted to make money very quickly to retire early though. There is something unhealthy that comes with it, I think.
> Can we ever get back on track?
I am very pessimistic about it. Not without heavy government regulation, and it is a can of worms of its own.
We are never going back to the environment we had around the 90s and early 2000s. There was a naivety in the air back then, some healthy gleeful contrarianism. After the dot com bust, it was unclear for a while how many things could even be monetized. There was a pervasive desire to build things for the sake of it.
What we have now kinda sucks, and it is probably only gonna get worse.
There was a universal, naïve air of optimism on the eve of 9/11. To wit Francis Fukayama's blithe sentiment that history was over with the fall of the USSR and that a capitalist, secular paradise would be ushered in with the Millennium.
That's generally true. I remember that back then technological advancement was seen as a force for good and freedom. It was difficult to argue against this idea, in the context of the time, even if there were dissonant voices and even when you looked at things critically, you could see cracks on the surface.
People wanting to go back to a simpler, smaller internet -to this mythical prelapsarian era - are in my opinion just nostalgic about how things felt back then. But there is no going back, tragically.
I don't have any evidence for this assertion, but my intuition tells me a huge downturn ('correction' in economists' parlance) is about to hit us like a tsunami and get rid of much of this extractive, parasitic, unsustainable 'tech'. It's a storm that's been brewing at least since 2010 or so. Think dotcom crash, but at least an order of magnitude worse.
I am curious about what forces would bring about this unraveling of the extractive, parasitic, unsustainable tech industry.
Then again, it is difficult to see how an empire would fall when you are witnessing it at the height of its power, even if that height is on the eve of its downfall.
Well, in my case, I’ve been involved in them, for most of my life.
I won’t go into detail, as that is sort of the way we work. We don’t really talk about our work at the level of press, radio, and film.
Otherwise, finding volunteer opportunities is usually fairly straightforward. Find a cause that personally motivates you, and look for organizations in that context.
The whole thing about “volunteer,” though, is that it is synonymous with “unpaid,” and that’s a dirty word, with this crowd.
Also, working with these types of orgs can be maddening.
When there’s no money to be made, ego becomes the currency, so status games abound.
And, when people don’t pay for something, they often treat it like crap.
That means that we have to find our own motivation, and have a thick skin. If we are doing something that we truly believe in, then it makes it worthwhile. If we aren’t motivated by the cause, it can be rather demoralizing.
In my case, I stay focused on the people that my work helps.
A lot less, these days, than I used to be, but I get around (unless “traveling man” is shortcode for a specific organization, in which case, I probably am not).
When you write software is the thing you are writing something you would ever want to pay for out of pocket even with inside knowledge? The answer to that question determines the degree of bullshit you are peddling.
As a JavaScript developer the answer about 90% of the time is I would rather just write it myself. Exceptions include JellyFin, PiHole, Node.js, Mealie, Libre Office, and some other things. Those things are free, but I would buy I license if they weren't. These things are exceptions not because they are big, but because I am happy with the quality of product. They have not given me cause to find a replacement. There is so much software that I cannot say this for.
Computers have inundated life so thoroughly now that it feels less clean to be writing software. If people enjoy a 30 min TV show you made that feels great, but if they are watching 10 hours of tv a day then it feels more problematic.
My personal relationship with phones/computers/tv has degraded in the past 20 years as well, its hard to feel good about building software when I am trying to cut computer/phone usage out of my own life.
I think parts of our industry has gotten worse, but I also think there are a lot of opportunities to do some really great (and fun) work. I work in the green energy industry and I like working with software for solar plant equipment. I hope I can eventually pick up a little more on the electrical engineering side of things and get into farming robots.
Don't get me wrong, I also do work in the financial aspects of it and that'... Well, useless is too strong a word, but in the grand scheme of things it's frankly useless. There is so much ridiculous leglislation that can be digitized, some of it is stupid. Like how you can get various tax benefits if you split what you and I think of as a single solar farm into 100 smaller companies. How to game the various financial tariffs, how to figure out the optimal direction for solar cells based on market data. That sort of stuff. Then there is the reasonable parts, like how Italy has an agency which requires all money transactions to go through them as an anti-mafia thing (sorry I can't be more clear on that part I didn't make it). Over all though, it's fun to work with stuff that has a real world use.
In Denmark the electricity price is calculated per hour for consumers, allowing us to move tumble drying, dishwashing and laundry to times, when it's cheaper to use power (= more renewable energy in the grid). This obviously requires some digital solutions to work and I think it's a great example where digitalization drives value in other sectors (in this case the power sector).
I actually don't know too much about what power traders do in the various EU nations. The majority of our plants tend to shut down production once the grid is too full since that is what many countries require. Hopefully we'll see storage get to a point where we can keep the power for later, but that's not where we're at right now. A solar panel and it's inverter and datalogger don't work without software though, and it can be quite fun to work with that tech. At least in my opinion.
I don't think it's always been this way. Perhaps capitalism is destined to end up here eventually, but I think it's been functional enough for most of our lives. I wouldn't even say it got really bad until very recently, but that could change from one person's perception to another's. I'm happy I got to live most of my life in the era when it wasn't like this.
I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users.
But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord model but come up with something better.
I used to think I'd be part of the solution, but I honestly don't know where to apply pressure anymore. Go into policy? Go into reporting? Wait decades to build my influence at a company like Google? It all feels untenable.
You have a sphere of influence which is a function of your resources (your resources being the aggregate of fiat, assets, your ability, your network, etc). Do good for those who can fit within your sphere. Attempt to grow your sphere. When you pass, you will have done what you can with what you have for those you could. That is the most we can ask of ourselves in the brief period in which we exist.
I don't want to just be an influencer. I want to put in the work actually fixing things. We don't have a shortage of outrage and opinion, we have a lack of productive outlets for these feelings.
Apologies, by influence I meant action or what you can control, things you can do (not social influencer or simply words). Helpful feedback, appreciate it.
Build connections so you can do good. Be active in local government? Support your local library? The grandiose stuff seems to suffer from the 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' rule.
I see you did smart phone stuff and might feel bad because of the whole 'the road to hell thing'. Well, fun story how I killed people for money (yay). I once had a passion project that reduced waste in an industry, in some cases allowing places providing services to stay open that otherwise would close. When I went to one of the first sites to oversee implementation/learn improvements from the domain experts starting to use it and all proud I was making the world better, I found out that the 'waste' was actually collected and used in desperate communities to save the lives of people that could afford even less than the communities I had helped. I literally at the end of the day and distilled down had ended up killing people in order to save money. And I had spent nights/weekends/alienated my family to make sure it happened! I also saved lives in communities that would have had lost services without the savings, and positively impacted a lot of others. But still, there were people dead over my passion project to make the world better.
Or take my parents who were hippies. I grew up on a commune because they were doing the best thing, anti-capitalism, pro-organic, rah rah. All my parents accomplished living on it was they delayed their lives a decade scrapping bare bones subsistence survival out of the earth, and raised their child in poverty. Again, good intentions, bad results (voluntary child poverty for their own child).
Sometimes we are going to accidentally increase child poverty or kill people for money. And we just gotta say 'Well f*ck that didn't work' and move on and keep trying, keep smiling, keep being kind, and keep helping others.
I'm looking for a career fixing problems caused by tech as a techie.
How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI? How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
>I'm looking for a career fixing problems caused by tech as a techie.
Oh, I thought you were looking to do something for the good of humanity. I'm afraid all the paying jobs are antithetical to that goal to varying degrees.
>How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI?
Work on your own model, or at least a framework where other people can make their own models. The biggest issue with AI right now is it's expensive to run locally, thus entrenching cloud interests. I suspect that unless hardware gets insanely cheaper that we'll have domain specific models to serve that purpose.
>How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
Ghostery did a pretty good job with this. So much so that the advertising companies are struggling with ad blockers. For broken links, perhaps a wayback machine plugin that renders the latest historical version of said hyperlink.
>How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
The only models I know of that work is freeware / premiumware and/or support contracts.
>What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
You (we) aren't powerless, but perhaps overmatched. The nice thing is tech can really disrupt entrenched interests. Linux is a prime example. Most people don't remember how powerful Microsoft Windows was in the 90s. They still are but at least there are viable alternatives, particularly in the server sphere.
Engineers have lost almost all our leverage. Even if you are a top 20% engineer (which would make you very talented by 1990s standards) you have limited employment opportunities. The education system completely revamped itself and has been cranking out CS grads. Engineers are no longer calling the shots, big corps have the situation under their thumb again.
Isn't this is same lament as "Eternal September" when AOL joined Usenet?
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm not sure how to leverage this fact for an improvement. Hacker News is good because it's also a "self selecting group", and it won't be pretty if that ever changes.
I find it disgusting how "tech people" are blamed for this. It is like blaming plumbers in Pentagon for stuff in Iraq. Management takes billions, there are politicians, judges, all sorts of regulatory bodies...
Everyone is happy to ignore monopoly, get rich, grab more power, and push their agenda. But we have to blame tech people!
I'd say its more like blaming soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines,... for stuff in Iraq. If the plumbers in the Pentagon stopped working the war could simply roll merrily on, but if the cogs in the machine go on strike that's another story.
We were told it would be different and world changing because tech people with their high ideals were liberating us from all these captured institutions. We literally know and are friends with the people that were working at all of these places.
I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic employees - computers.
These electronic employees are very good at following very simple instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be handled in the way that the software engineers planned for.
The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber, DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning Chesterton's fences.
Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up days).
In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that they're cool.
(On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook, then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of market positioning.)
It's not management. It's lawmaking without any control. Typical management can't blatantly defy laws because the public will grow suspicions and law enforcement will eventually intervene(or the public will in form of a violent uprising). But law enforcement has little to no leverages against software, which makes code law.
Police and government have always worked in the same way: they don't enforce laws. They wait until people complain and convict the party at fault.
They have stopped doing that. Especially in cases where the government is at fault, but essentially in a lot of interactions. And where there is a conviction, it's either unenforceable, or just outright unenforced. You only see legal convictions and consequences in cases between companies anymore.
The result is a lawless society. Not just on the internet.
The people who design policies and processes and factory lines are not the managers anywhere except at tiny startups. Those are completely different skill sets.
This seems like it breaks down when you consider a lot of the regulations are ideological. Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers. The main lesson if anything seems to be that there's little benefit to preemptively handicapping yourself with that sort of thing because society will impose it anyway.
> ...Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers...
Maybe you're not totally wrong...but that statement almost sounds like when a young person ventures off on their own to get their very first apartment...and has a job that allows them to afford only up to a maximum of USD$100 rent per month (I'm using low figure for ease)...but then this same person did not think to budget additional monthly costs like electricity, water, heating, etc...and of course blows way past their hard limit of $100/month....and then this same person cries that they didn't know about facts of life like paying for electricity, water, etc...or how businesses cry because they didn't think that they might have to conform with typical/normal regulations/costs of doing business and such...and that *that unexpected cost** is what is ruining them. ;-)
Or maybe I actually worked the job and went into it with realistic expectations? I've been in the system long enough that the changes don't impact me as far as hiring but personally I thought it was more convenient as a worker when I didn't have scheduling windows and all the added hurdles keeping me from working when I want to. The added taxes and service fees similarly did me no favors as far as the actual number of orders available. But by all means belittle the people with actual experience in the field.
Great post! “The “digital revolution” is financially corrupt, morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating the world, all right.” Applies to a lot of AI develpments too imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium platform….
I think Anti-Trust actions or large scale technological revolutions is the only way we can reclaim some competition in the digital space. The digital monopolies are really a cancer of our modern age.
When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible using automation and technology.
Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.
The goal goes even further -- to privatize economic gains (e.g. advertising revenues, SaaS revenues) while socializing costs and risks (e.g. increasing social divisiveness by stoking outrage, increasing poor self-image by comparisons with carefully curated images by others, increasing obesity by always getting people to think about processed food, increasing depression rates by face-to-face social isolation, addiction to dopamine hits by hijacking the startle/novelty attention reflex, increasing financial distress by retail therapy, not paying a fair living wage to gig workers so they are essentially mining their cars and wardrobe and health and skills without replenishing them, loss of privacy by being tracked everywhere online, loss of security from identity theft from careless exposure of collected information, the potential for poorly-regulated hyper-competitive superhuman AI destroying human society as we know it, and so on).
> My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or emphatic they will be.
Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?
I searched to find out what restaurants he owned. It looks like the harsh realities of operating restaurants urged him to incorporate a company to make RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION SERVICES because of course.
It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption", and against the individuals who run them.)
Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand.
I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as.
If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so.
The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with.
Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.
The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular people, in conjunction with that software automation affects everyone.
I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option).
I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields as the field of software. That must be why and how software is eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of a modern society.
What I'm not sure about is whether the problems that author mentioned were intrinsic to the software systems, or they were fixable. Many of the problems were caused by incompetent product managers, per the author's speculation. I was wondering if such incompetence (or malice for the sake of argument) is rooted in human nature and therefore can't be fixed, or companies can still iteratively remove such pains. If such problems are part of the human nature, then wouldn't they manifest themselves in other systems even if we don't use software?
This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that) and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an hour.
But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes.
Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird, because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order is the only one waiting for pickup.
It might be due to this "feature", but there are a few additional quirks to how the modern food delivery system works for restaurants. First, it is not uncommon to restrict online ordering based on busyness in the kitchen, and that would include in person dining. They might still take orders by phone call because the additional friction slows still slows down the order velocity a lot. Second, a lot of restaurants operate _one tablet per food app_, and it's very cumbersome to do this (you'll see a wall with like 4-5 android tablets attached to it). This invites human error, ie an employee may easily forget to activate a service. This second part is slowly getting better, though.
The author totally lost me at:
1. examples of the Yelp reviews. Nothing wrong with complimenting someone using the word "sweet". If that's the worst example he came up with, then I am skeptical about the fairness of his overall analysis.
2. complaining about tipping. Your kind of greedy business owners who are not paying their workers living wages and are trying to put social pressure on innocent customers are displaying the exact same behavior that is eating the world, Jean-Jacques.
We need to start going into the real world by delivering products and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems like a good step forward.
Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to software companies. So author is right basically that’s extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would say. It sucks just like article describes.
I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.
The interesting thing here is that he gets exactly what was written in the article he argues with. The software will eat as much of your margin as it can. There should be a small font remark, "regardless of its quality".
The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews. Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use words like “clueless and absent” when talking about a twenty-year-old African-American women', it is the author of the article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know.
Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.
I regularly frequent fantastic small businesses there there are a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people. Pre-Covid, my favorite local banh mi place had a 1 star review that described the woman who ran the place as angry and hard to understand (because, I can only assume, her english was heavily accented). But in reality she was the nicest old lady and was so happy when I came back after a few months because our office moved. And I've been to 4.9 star places that could only generously be described as mid. Obviously this is all anecdotal, but it also seems to be a nearly universal experience among my peers. Rage baiting, Yelp's blatant extortion of establishments to get rid of bad reviews, and all the other little tricks described in the article are purely due to these awful companies optimizing their perverse KPIs, like a leech whose only KPI is quantity of blood sucked.
I was a true believer in a lot of this stuff 15 years ago, but from where I sit now I really agree with OP.
> a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people
My favourite category of 1-star reviews are those left at obviously fine dining establishments praising the food and service but one starring due to price. (Same category: excellent food truck food, unbelievable value, one star because there wasn’t enough seating or the water came in a plastic cup.)
This is a particular banh mi place in South Bay isn't it? I've been there dozens of times and seen the reviews you're referring to. For similar reasons I completely ignore all review scores because gamification ruins all signal. Same with the chaff driven by SEO. Synthetic information is way easier to produce than organic information, which means it's always going to be a losing battle over the long term.
What’s important though is that we can discuss the appropriateness, but it doesn’t matter at all. We can’t bend the rules either way, they’ve been arbitrarily set by someone else.
The recent resurgence of Bluesky would suggest that, on one of the article's main points about civility/toxicity/moderation, arbitrarily set rules can lead to an exodus and migration to greener pastures. Same is true of the author's own actions, e.g. with the payments provider. So while you cannot change a company, you can often just change companies.
If there's a better system for reviewing businesses than Google Maps, by all means, I'll try it out, but the information it gives me as a customer (often, even if not always, and with all other possible caveats) is too valuable for me to simply stop using. Otherwise, the information asymmetry is a nearly complete one, unless I rely on personal recommendations, which is very often not feasible. It has served me very well for what, 12-15 years now? I'll take the occasional sociopath review, those are more rare than insinuated in the article anyway.
The original article was focused on restaurants, this sub thread focuses on Google reviews in general, and the person you are talking about never mentioned restaurants at all
Without knowing the location, we don't know the regional context behind this. Just because in some places people freely use this superlative with total strangers in person doesn't mean it's appropriate to use online anywhere english is spoken.
So everyone should be made to like these reviews and to view them as a positive, just because supposed customers are speaking their minds? It's well known that there are a lot of fake customer reviews on these sites. These sites shouldn't be allowed to behind a toxic "The customer is always right" mentality.
The curse of growing up during good times is that when things slightly change for the worse, it's the worst you've ever seen in your life. Yes. Some things suck. But other things are amazing. Chill out. It's going to be fine. Personally, I think that the eshittification of the internet will lead to renaissance of offline life, just wait for it.
A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article was specific to software.
Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will.
The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs.
He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect armchair critic.
Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.
On a long enough timeline, probably. But we're talking about decades here. Are you content with things sucking horribly for most of the duration of these cycles ?
And this also assumes that we are not moving to a different kind of society (as posited by cyberpunk) : a much more stable system, where corporations are able to capture enough power that only whole society collapse events are able to get rid of most of them.
The author needs medicine for his soul. (The medicine is humility)
It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc.
"I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..."
That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before I reached it.
As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want. The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to have anything to do with these digital platforms.
Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant, you can pay your staff more if you want to.
The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the author puts it.
Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you borrow from relatives and spouses.
It is the bias that being good at computing automatically gives you an advantage with somebody else’s algorithms. Or that they see you better as one of their own.
After being successful in IT one thinks one can approach arbitrary areas of snail mail life better than the rest, but it’s more complicated than that.
Having have the rare opportunity to fail in a way the author write about I can relate the feeling, but no Marc can unwind where we are and it needs solid ideologies to change the status quo. This not a green field anymore in many areas and particularly with who gets peoples’ attention.
I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?
I've been reflecting over the past year or so about this. And I'm also stuck with the same thoughts. Was I just dumb 15 years ago, or did the industry actually shift? Or a little of both?
imo society also had a different view of these sorts of snake oil salesmen, so it was easier to fall into the collective hallucination. Remember when the movie "the social network" came out, the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero - there was a sort of righteousness, and people loved him. The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to? But now I think, in general, we've seen that most of these very special boys are actually quite shit.
> The "very special boy" who cheekily breaks a few rules in order to build something that is wildly popular and disruptive...and this was something to live up to?
I think examples like this (also see Bill Gates) were more inspiring because there was an idea that you could get at least some smaller scale of that kind of success with a modicum of talent, hard work, and luck. You would look around your high school class and there would be one or two "whiz kids" who everybody knew would go on to do great things. The role of computers was not widespread yet and there seemed countless possibilities for computers to make life better. Instead of writing numbers by hand into a ledger and adding on a mechanical calculator, you would use a spreadsheet type of thing.
I think what changed is the efficiency of the successes. Success means extraction at largest possible scale, such that there is no more room for one or two whiz kids from every single high school class. There is room for 1 whiz kid per generation; and chances are that guy will need to be a greedy asshole to make it to the top. And then the very nature of this extraction means, now that the productivity gains have plateaued, that resources are taken from the poor and given to the rich.
Sorry to be a downer, I'll see myself back to my bottle. :-D
Yes. The problem is scale and pervasiveness.
Ethics didn't matter on an Apple ][. Well, not much. You could screw around, break stuff, "should" didn't come into it, you couldn't really touch the parts of the world that matter. Even people hacking phone lines and banks were small-time for the most part.
Zuckerberg wasn't particularly original in his thought process, there'd been many like him before, but I think Facebook was the pivotal moment. One, because it was for everyone (even more so than AOL), two, because it was personal in a way that previous social platforms (ICQ, Usenet, Compuserve) hadn't been, and three because by rigidly enforcing real-life identities as the norm, it collapsed the context between online and offline.
Ten years earlier, lonely-bored-horny-smart dudes would have joked about building an app to be vaguely creepy around hot girls they were too shy to talk to. Heck, that's basically the plot of Weird Science - by 1985, Hollywood knew that's what geeks were like, so we can guess the first time that conversation happened was about 1972.
Smart little boys breaking the rules on an Apple ][ are interesting and funny. When they end up running the world but haven't grown psychologically, it's downright terrifying.
Same goes for 25-year-old stoner douchebags making edgy shitposts on 4chan, and those same people when they're 55 and worth $400Bn. With power, responsibility. Grow the fuck up.
I guess the blurring and eventual erasure of the online/offline erasure is where Zuck succeeded and Friendster, MySpace, et al., failed.
I'm not sure the others aspired to, to quite the same extent.
Partly a function of timing of course. Stable, universal broadband connections arrived a couple of years before Facebook, and the iPhone a couple of years after.
Even as late as 2002, people _went_ online. I think the last time I used a modem must have been summer 2003 or so. By 2007, people _were_ online.
> Grow the fuck up.
Or else what.
Or else you're a
<reaches for expletive>
<checks handle>
Sigh, never mind.
You nailed it: success is a winner-take-all (or maybe most?) proposition. At least in a narrow domain, the dominant solution crowds out all other contenders.
15 years ago we didn't have so many algorithms. I think Facebook still sorted by recent back then.
The pervasiveness of algorithms is a symptom of the change that has happened. It shows how companies started to compete more and more for our attention and engagement.
I think "algorithms" disguises something bigger: a broad ethos to extract value from users, instead of delivering value to them. Modern consumer tech sees end-users as resources to exploit. Between privacy violations, vendor lock-in, worsening functionality and interoperability, and unilaterally changing terms and designs, these services demonstrate so much contempt for the people who've come to rely on them.
Instead of making things better, tech companies use their engineering prowess to impose control over people and reduce end-users' agency.
And people have been warning about these issues back then already : this is what "protocols, not platforms" was about.
(Corporations seeking monopoly is not a new story.)
At one point, a company makes changes to just get users, and that makes it have to do things people want. Eventually the growth opportunity by utility gets very small, so all the efforts come from increasing profitability per user. That will rarely make the company's products better for their users. Every top company moved to increasing margins and minimal growth years ago.
And this is precisely Doctorow's definition of 'enshittification'.
Algorithms aren't inherently bad. An algorithm that keeps spam out of my email is pretty great if it works. An algorithm that presents a feed of things I actually want to see is also pretty great. I want to see life updates from my friends and family, especially media of their pets, but not sports, babies, or politics except from a couple people who write interesting things.
That's not a tall order for a recommendation algorithm with a huge supply of training data. It wouldn't even need a 50% hit rate to make something really useful that I would definitely check once or twice a day and post or comment several times a week if even a third of my real life social circle used it.
An algorithm that presents me a feed of things I sometimes can't look away from even though I don't really want to see them is harmful, like an addictive drug.
> the movie portrayed zucc as kind of an asshole, but also a hero
The word/ genre is a protagonist as antihero. An antihero is nice in fiction, we sympathize with them to some degree over their flaws and challenges. The problem is that a billionaire very much has an outsized impact.
Put another way, an anti-hero is tantalising in a work of fiction, but not necessarily the type of bloke with whom you'd want to grab a beer IRL.
In fact Zuck _was_ a hero back then, as was Elon.
People with power tend to change. With being in power, their perspective on the world shifts, often for the worse.
Zuck originally wanted fully free speech, this is in fact what everyone wanted in that time. Then appeared the massive abuse in the unavoidable echo chambers. Zuck was hence forced to be the judge between good and bad speech/content, up to being in court. The filtering had to happen with advanced algorithms since fully manual was impossible to pull off. The funding happened by advertising, so the move to algorithms upping engagement was only logical.
Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground, via the acceleration of electrical transport, up to buying the world's biggest software playground and obtaining a large part of world's communication and transport hardware infrastructure. He's more convinced than ever of the power of capitalism, for the good and the bad.
> Elon on the other hand went all the way from the nerd being bullied at the playground
Elon wasn't bullied. He was pushed down a flight of stairs by one kid after Elon made fun of that kid's father's suicide.
We were not at the site when it happened. I only recall the various sources that I read and try to make a consistent/plausible model and narrative. I never met Elon nor Zuck in person.
I wasn't there, but the source is elon's father.
Elon's father is/was a certifiable monster. I'm not sure he's the reliable narrator that you're setting him up to be.
Zuck, a hero?
The first time I saw a fellow student post something utterly irrelevant (to our local group's real lives) rage bait thing into the then-new FB feed I knew we were in trouble. Surely, FB and Zuck must have had an idea what was going on.
Then I deleted my account and successfully ignored all of the generic, commercial asocial media fads that happened afterwards (at least to the degree they're directly ignorable). Feels nice to have it all pass me by.
Mixing online and real life in this uncontrolled manner and scale was a huge mistake for our collective moral and mental health.
And for the record: I don't blame him for everything that happened, but he certainly helped open the doors to a much more unpleasant VC-powered internet and we're struggling to reboot the cultural forces that made the time before it so great.
Agreed on the mixing of worlds being detrimental to society. Boundaries exist for a reason.
I don't think Zuck's motives were ever pure or noble. We must remember that Facebook (original name: Mashbook) was originally created to rate the fuckability of the females residing in Harvard's co-ed dorms. Basically, it was Hot Or Not for a very targeted population.
The concept of a social graph was stolen lock, stock, and barrel from the Winklevoss twins.
Zuck's talent is unabashed brashness and chutzpah. He thinks the rules simply don't apply to him. He is not an original thinker, but rather very intellectually derivative. The fact that he grew up wealthy opened many doors for him, even despite the Winklevoss twins' sentiment that he comes from new money and is thus irremediably beneath them, and even worse in their WASPy blueblood minds, Jewish new money. ('How dare a Jew steal our idea!') Shady actors all around, with not an admirable figure amongst them.
Well, it's what everyone wanted apart from all the people warning them about it.
(I'm not taking credit. I was militantly pro free speech at the time, the anti-free-speech position was mostly held by Christian Conservatives and other fun-free types. Free speech was borderline _sexy_).
What I don't think Zuck or any of his peers realised was what they were connecting. Sure, connect all the bright young things on college campuses, and maybe their nice extended families, good things will happen.
I don't think he'd have done it if he knew just how much of the population was deplorable, deplorable-adjacent or highly susceptible to being turned that way.
And I don't recall ever seeing that discussed at the time. "But if we connect all the people... you realise we're connecting all the angry, ugly, bitter, nasty, broken ones too. And have you considered just how many of those there are?"
Things have definitely gotten worse. I view SaaS subscriptions as the primary culprit. Even here on HN, most "side-projects" are attempts at recurring revenue through paid subscriptions instead of contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly all software is built from in terms of languages and libraries).
"Even here on HN, most "side-projects" are attempts at recurring revenue through paid subscriptions instead of contributing to the sharing economy (which nearly all software is built from in terms of languages and libraries)."
Shared libraries generally don't make money. HN has always been about startups and making products/services.
I predicted this would happen decades ago. Piracy was accepted in the tech community and became so widespread, it made it nearly impossible to make a living selling the software anymore, so businesses made their move when Internet speeds got faster and now make everything into a service (that can't be pirated).
HN was briefly called "Startup News".
I remember the popular prediction of software going service-based, probably delivered via a web browser or something like one in the late 1990s and being disturbed at the prospect of being unable to pirate things. How else was I going to get software as a broke teenager?
I don't have your answers, but it has been a very long time that I lacked the enthusiasm you seem to have had.
I used to be hyped about the Internet in particular and technology as a whole in the early to mid 2000s, before I started to work professionally as a developer.
Ever since this illusion was shattered. I understood that everyone was just interested in making money, lots of it and as quickly as possible. There was no concern of how good something would be for the world as whole, only a vague shrug on that of something was successful it was inherently good.
I don't feel better or worse for it. I know it's a job but someone's gotta do it.
In my career, engineering went from lucrative, upper middle class to a potentially explosive wealth-building apparatus.
Once people became aware of that, they began to strive for it. Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful, upper middle class life.
Their hunger for more created a subculture of grinding and speculation. As the playing field grew feom office computers to everyone's phones, the old school capitalists dove in and catalyzed it all.
To the point where the wellbeing of our young, the environment, the jobs we created- none if it mattered anymore. The goal was to get perversely rich and dominate the subculture, dissolving the real culture with it.
Can we ever get back on track?
> Far fewer people became content to live out a peaceful, upper middle class life.
Ironically, this is was what I chased, and what I found. I never wanted to have a destructive amount of money, just enough to have a house and raise a family.
A lot of people in this industry just wanted to make money very quickly to retire early though. There is something unhealthy that comes with it, I think.
> Can we ever get back on track?
I am very pessimistic about it. Not without heavy government regulation, and it is a can of worms of its own.
We are never going back to the environment we had around the 90s and early 2000s. There was a naivety in the air back then, some healthy gleeful contrarianism. After the dot com bust, it was unclear for a while how many things could even be monetized. There was a pervasive desire to build things for the sake of it.
What we have now kinda sucks, and it is probably only gonna get worse.
There was a universal, naïve air of optimism on the eve of 9/11. To wit Francis Fukayama's blithe sentiment that history was over with the fall of the USSR and that a capitalist, secular paradise would be ushered in with the Millennium.
That's generally true. I remember that back then technological advancement was seen as a force for good and freedom. It was difficult to argue against this idea, in the context of the time, even if there were dissonant voices and even when you looked at things critically, you could see cracks on the surface.
People wanting to go back to a simpler, smaller internet -to this mythical prelapsarian era - are in my opinion just nostalgic about how things felt back then. But there is no going back, tragically.
I don't have any evidence for this assertion, but my intuition tells me a huge downturn ('correction' in economists' parlance) is about to hit us like a tsunami and get rid of much of this extractive, parasitic, unsustainable 'tech'. It's a storm that's been brewing at least since 2010 or so. Think dotcom crash, but at least an order of magnitude worse.
I am curious about what forces would bring about this unraveling of the extractive, parasitic, unsustainable tech industry.
Then again, it is difficult to see how an empire would fall when you are witnessing it at the height of its power, even if that height is on the eve of its downfall.
I don't know the hows or whys. It's just a general feeling of unease that I have. I'm waiting for additional shoes to drop.
The cure for that, for me, was easy (but sucked).
No one wanted to hire me, so I started writing software for organizations that help people, for free.
I feel that my software Makes A Difference. It doesn't make money, but it acts as a force multiplier, for people that help people.
How do you pay the bills?
I'm retired.
Fortunately, I had invested wisely, and live humbly, so I can handle it.
The reason no one wants to hire me, is because I "aged out" of the tech industry.
At 55, I was "radioactive."
I would have been happy to put in at least ten more years, but c'est la vie...
Another option, if you can stand the bureaucracy: Go work for a university. Or possibly some level of government.
How did you find such organizations? Can you give some examples, please?
Well, in my case, I’ve been involved in them, for most of my life.
I won’t go into detail, as that is sort of the way we work. We don’t really talk about our work at the level of press, radio, and film.
Otherwise, finding volunteer opportunities is usually fairly straightforward. Find a cause that personally motivates you, and look for organizations in that context.
The whole thing about “volunteer,” though, is that it is synonymous with “unpaid,” and that’s a dirty word, with this crowd.
Also, working with these types of orgs can be maddening.
When there’s no money to be made, ego becomes the currency, so status games abound.
And, when people don’t pay for something, they often treat it like crap.
That means that we have to find our own motivation, and have a thick skin. If we are doing something that we truly believe in, then it makes it worthwhile. If we aren’t motivated by the cause, it can be rather demoralizing.
In my case, I stay focused on the people that my work helps.
Are you a traveling man?
A lot less, these days, than I used to be, but I get around (unless “traveling man” is shortcode for a specific organization, in which case, I probably am not).
Ah. Get it, now.
Nope. Not that way, but cheers.
When you write software is the thing you are writing something you would ever want to pay for out of pocket even with inside knowledge? The answer to that question determines the degree of bullshit you are peddling.
As a JavaScript developer the answer about 90% of the time is I would rather just write it myself. Exceptions include JellyFin, PiHole, Node.js, Mealie, Libre Office, and some other things. Those things are free, but I would buy I license if they weren't. These things are exceptions not because they are big, but because I am happy with the quality of product. They have not given me cause to find a replacement. There is so much software that I cannot say this for.
Computers have inundated life so thoroughly now that it feels less clean to be writing software. If people enjoy a 30 min TV show you made that feels great, but if they are watching 10 hours of tv a day then it feels more problematic.
My personal relationship with phones/computers/tv has degraded in the past 20 years as well, its hard to feel good about building software when I am trying to cut computer/phone usage out of my own life.
I think parts of our industry has gotten worse, but I also think there are a lot of opportunities to do some really great (and fun) work. I work in the green energy industry and I like working with software for solar plant equipment. I hope I can eventually pick up a little more on the electrical engineering side of things and get into farming robots.
Don't get me wrong, I also do work in the financial aspects of it and that'... Well, useless is too strong a word, but in the grand scheme of things it's frankly useless. There is so much ridiculous leglislation that can be digitized, some of it is stupid. Like how you can get various tax benefits if you split what you and I think of as a single solar farm into 100 smaller companies. How to game the various financial tariffs, how to figure out the optimal direction for solar cells based on market data. That sort of stuff. Then there is the reasonable parts, like how Italy has an agency which requires all money transactions to go through them as an anti-mafia thing (sorry I can't be more clear on that part I didn't make it). Over all though, it's fun to work with stuff that has a real world use.
In Denmark the electricity price is calculated per hour for consumers, allowing us to move tumble drying, dishwashing and laundry to times, when it's cheaper to use power (= more renewable energy in the grid). This obviously requires some digital solutions to work and I think it's a great example where digitalization drives value in other sectors (in this case the power sector).
I actually don't know too much about what power traders do in the various EU nations. The majority of our plants tend to shut down production once the grid is too full since that is what many countries require. Hopefully we'll see storage get to a point where we can keep the power for later, but that's not where we're at right now. A solar panel and it's inverter and datalogger don't work without software though, and it can be quite fun to work with that tech. At least in my opinion.
I don't think it's always been this way. Perhaps capitalism is destined to end up here eventually, but I think it's been functional enough for most of our lives. I wouldn't even say it got really bad until very recently, but that could change from one person's perception to another's. I'm happy I got to live most of my life in the era when it wasn't like this.
I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users.
But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord model but come up with something better.
I used to think I'd be part of the solution, but I honestly don't know where to apply pressure anymore. Go into policy? Go into reporting? Wait decades to build my influence at a company like Google? It all feels untenable.
You have a sphere of influence which is a function of your resources (your resources being the aggregate of fiat, assets, your ability, your network, etc). Do good for those who can fit within your sphere. Attempt to grow your sphere. When you pass, you will have done what you can with what you have for those you could. That is the most we can ask of ourselves in the brief period in which we exist.
I don't want to just be an influencer. I want to put in the work actually fixing things. We don't have a shortage of outrage and opinion, we have a lack of productive outlets for these feelings.
Apologies, by influence I meant action or what you can control, things you can do (not social influencer or simply words). Helpful feedback, appreciate it.
"Take action people around you need."
I get that, but I'm looking for more tangible advice. No offense; what you're saying is generally good advice.
You could make a large dinner for your friends.
Build connections so you can do good. Be active in local government? Support your local library? The grandiose stuff seems to suffer from the 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions' rule.
I see you did smart phone stuff and might feel bad because of the whole 'the road to hell thing'. Well, fun story how I killed people for money (yay). I once had a passion project that reduced waste in an industry, in some cases allowing places providing services to stay open that otherwise would close. When I went to one of the first sites to oversee implementation/learn improvements from the domain experts starting to use it and all proud I was making the world better, I found out that the 'waste' was actually collected and used in desperate communities to save the lives of people that could afford even less than the communities I had helped. I literally at the end of the day and distilled down had ended up killing people in order to save money. And I had spent nights/weekends/alienated my family to make sure it happened! I also saved lives in communities that would have had lost services without the savings, and positively impacted a lot of others. But still, there were people dead over my passion project to make the world better.
Or take my parents who were hippies. I grew up on a commune because they were doing the best thing, anti-capitalism, pro-organic, rah rah. All my parents accomplished living on it was they delayed their lives a decade scrapping bare bones subsistence survival out of the earth, and raised their child in poverty. Again, good intentions, bad results (voluntary child poverty for their own child).
Sometimes we are going to accidentally increase child poverty or kill people for money. And we just gotta say 'Well f*ck that didn't work' and move on and keep trying, keep smiling, keep being kind, and keep helping others.
I would suggest writing a FOSS solution to a proprietary software system. FOSS is the great equalizer. It's hard to compete with free.
EDIT: For concrete examples, see what the author complained about, there are some good pain points to attack.
I'm looking for a career fixing problems caused by tech as a techie.
How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI? How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
>I'm looking for a career fixing problems caused by tech as a techie.
Oh, I thought you were looking to do something for the good of humanity. I'm afraid all the paying jobs are antithetical to that goal to varying degrees.
>How do I make some FOSS which addresses being lied to by Google AI?
Work on your own model, or at least a framework where other people can make their own models. The biggest issue with AI right now is it's expensive to run locally, thus entrenching cloud interests. I suspect that unless hardware gets insanely cheaper that we'll have domain specific models to serve that purpose.
>How do I make FOSS that makes the web a more pleasant place to browser without popups and broken back buttons?
Ghostery did a pretty good job with this. So much so that the advertising companies are struggling with ad blockers. For broken links, perhaps a wayback machine plugin that renders the latest historical version of said hyperlink.
>How do I turn FOSS into a career? I've worked at companies who use FOSS and contributed both on the clock and off, but it was never primary way I made money.
The only models I know of that work is freeware / premiumware and/or support contracts.
>What makes me so frustrated is that these things are getting worse, and I feel powerless to stop it.
You (we) aren't powerless, but perhaps overmatched. The nice thing is tech can really disrupt entrenched interests. Linux is a prime example. Most people don't remember how powerful Microsoft Windows was in the 90s. They still are but at least there are viable alternatives, particularly in the server sphere.
Reminds me of hippie boomers who tried to "change the system from within," only to become part of the system.
Too bad people can't seem to learn from others.
Engineers have lost almost all our leverage. Even if you are a top 20% engineer (which would make you very talented by 1990s standards) you have limited employment opportunities. The education system completely revamped itself and has been cranking out CS grads. Engineers are no longer calling the shots, big corps have the situation under their thumb again.
Isn't this is same lament as "Eternal September" when AOL joined Usenet?
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm not sure how to leverage this fact for an improvement. Hacker News is good because it's also a "self selecting group", and it won't be pretty if that ever changes.
> how willing tech people
I find it disgusting how "tech people" are blamed for this. It is like blaming plumbers in Pentagon for stuff in Iraq. Management takes billions, there are politicians, judges, all sorts of regulatory bodies...
Everyone is happy to ignore monopoly, get rich, grab more power, and push their agenda. But we have to blame tech people!
I'd say its more like blaming soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines,... for stuff in Iraq. If the plumbers in the Pentagon stopped working the war could simply roll merrily on, but if the cogs in the machine go on strike that's another story.
We were told it would be different and world changing because tech people with their high ideals were liberating us from all these captured institutions. We literally know and are friends with the people that were working at all of these places.
So yes, 'tech people'.
I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic employees - computers.
These electronic employees are very good at following very simple instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be handled in the way that the software engineers planned for.
The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber, DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning Chesterton's fences.
Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up days).
In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that they're cool.
(On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook, then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of market positioning.)
It's not management. It's lawmaking without any control. Typical management can't blatantly defy laws because the public will grow suspicions and law enforcement will eventually intervene(or the public will in form of a violent uprising). But law enforcement has little to no leverages against software, which makes code law.
Police and government have always worked in the same way: they don't enforce laws. They wait until people complain and convict the party at fault.
They have stopped doing that. Especially in cases where the government is at fault, but essentially in a lot of interactions. And where there is a conviction, it's either unenforceable, or just outright unenforced. You only see legal convictions and consequences in cases between companies anymore.
The result is a lawless society. Not just on the internet.
The people who design policies and processes and factory lines are not the managers anywhere except at tiny startups. Those are completely different skill sets.
This seems like it breaks down when you consider a lot of the regulations are ideological. Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers. The main lesson if anything seems to be that there's little benefit to preemptively handicapping yourself with that sort of thing because society will impose it anyway.
> ...Doordash was a better service before regulation, and in it's most heavily regulated areas has become both less accessible to aspiring workers and more expensive for customers...
Maybe you're not totally wrong...but that statement almost sounds like when a young person ventures off on their own to get their very first apartment...and has a job that allows them to afford only up to a maximum of USD$100 rent per month (I'm using low figure for ease)...but then this same person did not think to budget additional monthly costs like electricity, water, heating, etc...and of course blows way past their hard limit of $100/month....and then this same person cries that they didn't know about facts of life like paying for electricity, water, etc...or how businesses cry because they didn't think that they might have to conform with typical/normal regulations/costs of doing business and such...and that *that unexpected cost** is what is ruining them. ;-)
Or maybe I actually worked the job and went into it with realistic expectations? I've been in the system long enough that the changes don't impact me as far as hiring but personally I thought it was more convenient as a worker when I didn't have scheduling windows and all the added hurdles keeping me from working when I want to. The added taxes and service fees similarly did me no favors as far as the actual number of orders available. But by all means belittle the people with actual experience in the field.
My apologies if you felt I was belittling you or people in the field. That was not my intent. I was simply disagreeing with you, that's all.
Great post! “The “digital revolution” is financially corrupt, morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating the world, all right.” Applies to a lot of AI develpments too imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium platform….
I think Anti-Trust actions or large scale technological revolutions is the only way we can reclaim some competition in the digital space. The digital monopolies are really a cancer of our modern age.
How do we make this actually happen though? I've been saying this for nearly a decade, but I lack a proper outlet.
Yeah but they have regulatory captured our government so I don't see that changing soon.
When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible using automation and technology.
Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.
Not economic gains. Wealth extraction. Provide just as much value as needed to squeeze out the super majority of the new value, maybe less.
Edit: We violently agree!
The goal goes even further -- to privatize economic gains (e.g. advertising revenues, SaaS revenues) while socializing costs and risks (e.g. increasing social divisiveness by stoking outrage, increasing poor self-image by comparisons with carefully curated images by others, increasing obesity by always getting people to think about processed food, increasing depression rates by face-to-face social isolation, addiction to dopamine hits by hijacking the startle/novelty attention reflex, increasing financial distress by retail therapy, not paying a fair living wage to gig workers so they are essentially mining their cars and wardrobe and health and skills without replenishing them, loss of privacy by being tracked everywhere online, loss of security from identity theft from careless exposure of collected information, the potential for poorly-regulated hyper-competitive superhuman AI destroying human society as we know it, and so on).
Marshall Brain's Manna shows two options for how all this may end: https://marshallbrain.com/manna
> My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or emphatic they will be.
Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?
> Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?
Yes. One of our juniors found a candidate's Yelp page. The level of awfulness on display there almost had me wondering if it was caricature.
(If you're a founder, this works for VCs, too.)
I will not be surprised if there is call for startup to build this exact thing :P
Author is Jean-Jacques Dubray, creator of State Action Model (SAM) [1], since retired as of this post.
[1] http://sam.js.org/
I searched to find out what restaurants he owned. It looks like the harsh realities of operating restaurants urged him to incorporate a company to make RESTAURANT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION SERVICES because of course.
https://www.bizofwa.com/co/cognitive-fab-llc
It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption", and against the individuals who run them.)
Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand.
I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as.
If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so.
The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with.
Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.
The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular people, in conjunction with that software automation affects everyone.
I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option).
I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields as the field of software. That must be why and how software is eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of a modern society.
What I'm not sure about is whether the problems that author mentioned were intrinsic to the software systems, or they were fixable. Many of the problems were caused by incompetent product managers, per the author's speculation. I was wondering if such incompetence (or malice for the sake of argument) is rooted in human nature and therefore can't be fixed, or companies can still iteratively remove such pains. If such problems are part of the human nature, then wouldn't they manifest themselves in other systems even if we don't use software?
> sure enough, they had closed us
This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that) and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an hour.
But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes.
Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird, because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order is the only one waiting for pickup.
It might be due to this "feature", but there are a few additional quirks to how the modern food delivery system works for restaurants. First, it is not uncommon to restrict online ordering based on busyness in the kitchen, and that would include in person dining. They might still take orders by phone call because the additional friction slows still slows down the order velocity a lot. Second, a lot of restaurants operate _one tablet per food app_, and it's very cumbersome to do this (you'll see a wall with like 4-5 android tablets attached to it). This invites human error, ie an employee may easily forget to activate a service. This second part is slowly getting better, though.
The author totally lost me at: 1. examples of the Yelp reviews. Nothing wrong with complimenting someone using the word "sweet". If that's the worst example he came up with, then I am skeptical about the fairness of his overall analysis. 2. complaining about tipping. Your kind of greedy business owners who are not paying their workers living wages and are trying to put social pressure on innocent customers are displaying the exact same behavior that is eating the world, Jean-Jacques.
We need to start going into the real world by delivering products and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems like a good step forward.
Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to software companies. So author is right basically that’s extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would say. It sucks just like article describes.
I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.
> He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.
?! He's the longest-serving member on Meta's board, and is a named partner at a prominent and prolific VC fund[1].
Maybe he's not the emperor, but he's at minimum, a duke and/or king-maker in software industry nobility.
1. https://a16z.com/portfolio/
He’s an effective accelerationist which makes him a pretty good figurehead to aim the rhetoric of this article at.
Venture capital demanding YoY growth in revenue is a major (if not the major) driving force behind this person's complaints.
The interesting thing here is that he gets exactly what was written in the article he argues with. The software will eat as much of your margin as it can. There should be a small font remark, "regardless of its quality".
The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews. Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use words like “clueless and absent” when talking about a twenty-year-old African-American women', it is the author of the article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know.
Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.
I regularly frequent fantastic small businesses there there are a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people. Pre-Covid, my favorite local banh mi place had a 1 star review that described the woman who ran the place as angry and hard to understand (because, I can only assume, her english was heavily accented). But in reality she was the nicest old lady and was so happy when I came back after a few months because our office moved. And I've been to 4.9 star places that could only generously be described as mid. Obviously this is all anecdotal, but it also seems to be a nearly universal experience among my peers. Rage baiting, Yelp's blatant extortion of establishments to get rid of bad reviews, and all the other little tricks described in the article are purely due to these awful companies optimizing their perverse KPIs, like a leech whose only KPI is quantity of blood sucked.
I was a true believer in a lot of this stuff 15 years ago, but from where I sit now I really agree with OP.
> a handful of 1 star reviews from angry internet people
My favourite category of 1-star reviews are those left at obviously fine dining establishments praising the food and service but one starring due to price. (Same category: excellent food truck food, unbelievable value, one star because there wasn’t enough seating or the water came in a plastic cup.)
This is a particular banh mi place in South Bay isn't it? I've been there dozens of times and seen the reviews you're referring to. For similar reasons I completely ignore all review scores because gamification ruins all signal. Same with the chaff driven by SEO. Synthetic information is way easier to produce than organic information, which means it's always going to be a losing battle over the long term.
No this was a place in the international district of downtown Seattle. It's not there anymore unfortunately.
But yea I'm right there with you. I ignore reviews now.
>Yelp's blatant extortion of establishments to get rid of bad reviews
Yelp has never done this. I have no idea how this myth has persisted this long.
What’s important though is that we can discuss the appropriateness, but it doesn’t matter at all. We can’t bend the rules either way, they’ve been arbitrarily set by someone else.
The recent resurgence of Bluesky would suggest that, on one of the article's main points about civility/toxicity/moderation, arbitrarily set rules can lead to an exodus and migration to greener pastures. Same is true of the author's own actions, e.g. with the payments provider. So while you cannot change a company, you can often just change companies.
If there's a better system for reviewing businesses than Google Maps, by all means, I'll try it out, but the information it gives me as a customer (often, even if not always, and with all other possible caveats) is too valuable for me to simply stop using. Otherwise, the information asymmetry is a nearly complete one, unless I rely on personal recommendations, which is very often not feasible. It has served me very well for what, 12-15 years now? I'll take the occasional sociopath review, those are more rare than insinuated in the article anyway.
The Bluesky migration shows that people will keep trying anything but a decentralized platform as long as there are centralized ones that claim to be different. https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get...
Google reviews have been absolute miss for me.
A lot of car dealerships have high reviews in my area and were absolute garbage. There is no way they are not gaming it.
I've had similar experience with doctors. So much that I started using word of mouth again and asking physicians I trust for referrals.
The person you're responding to is talking about restaurants. You're talking about doctors and car dealerships.
The original article was focused on restaurants, this sub thread focuses on Google reviews in general, and the person you are talking about never mentioned restaurants at all
Without knowing the location, we don't know the regional context behind this. Just because in some places people freely use this superlative with total strangers in person doesn't mean it's appropriate to use online anywhere english is spoken.
Yes it is. There is nothing wrong complimenting people by calling them sweet. Neither is criticizing the workers. That's exactly what reviews are for.
So everyone should be made to like these reviews and to view them as a positive, just because supposed customers are speaking their minds? It's well known that there are a lot of fake customer reviews on these sites. These sites shouldn't be allowed to behind a toxic "The customer is always right" mentality.
What you just wrote has absolutely nothing to do with the:
1. original article
2. critique of Yelp
3. your incredible "doesn't mean it's appropriate to use online anywhere english is spoken" take
4. my rebuttal
Why are you writing incoherently like a low-quality bot?
Just the tiniest tip of a megalithic iceberg.
The curse of growing up during good times is that when things slightly change for the worse, it's the worst you've ever seen in your life. Yes. Some things suck. But other things are amazing. Chill out. It's going to be fine. Personally, I think that the eshittification of the internet will lead to renaissance of offline life, just wait for it.
A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article was specific to software.
Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will.
The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs.
He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect armchair critic.
Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.
You are incredibly naive to think so. The companies behind those services optimize only to make money, not to provide better value to the users.
They only have to provide the minimum amount of value to keep users hooked. Small competitors can be either bought or smothered by your weight.
POS systems and credit card terminals were a nightmare for restaurants before cloud based challengers appeared.
On a long enough timeline, probably. But we're talking about decades here. Are you content with things sucking horribly for most of the duration of these cycles ?
And this also assumes that we are not moving to a different kind of society (as posited by cyberpunk) : a much more stable system, where corporations are able to capture enough power that only whole society collapse events are able to get rid of most of them.
The author needs medicine for his soul. (The medicine is humility)
It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc.
"I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..."
That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before I reached it.
As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want. The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to have anything to do with these digital platforms.
Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant, you can pay your staff more if you want to.
The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the author puts it.
Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you borrow from relatives and spouses.
It is the bias that being good at computing automatically gives you an advantage with somebody else’s algorithms. Or that they see you better as one of their own.
After being successful in IT one thinks one can approach arbitrary areas of snail mail life better than the rest, but it’s more complicated than that.
Having have the rare opportunity to fail in a way the author write about I can relate the feeling, but no Marc can unwind where we are and it needs solid ideologies to change the status quo. This not a green field anymore in many areas and particularly with who gets peoples’ attention.
Don't run a restaurant. Especially don't run a kitchen which exists to fill orders controlled by someone else.
Nobody seems to want to start a dry cleaning shop. That's a business with good margins, not too much capital investment, and a low failure rate.
Wait, really? Dry cleaning? How do I get started?
1. Find people who need to launder money. 2. Profit.