Why not fund them? If you think you can make a profit investing in Yo, then go for it. Who cares if it's not a life changing app, that's 99.99% of the app market, and it is what it is. If people install it, and use it, then it's providing some benefit to their lives, even if it's just for entertainment purposes.
I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are going to waste, and they could be changing the world.
And because, sometimes, Game of Thrones (or whatever you do with your spare time) can be the inspiration/genesis for something world changing, or at the very least a recharge period.
If watching Game of Thrones can be inspiring, than surely Yo can be as well.
I don't understand why the author chooses to single out Yo. Someone took the time to develop something, and others are using it. Congrats to them for providing something of value. The simplicity of the app is inspiring in itself. Who cares if they raised 1.2 million? This is investment money, this isn't 1.2 million sucked out of a charity, or off the tables of families in Africa, this is 1.2 million that someone wanted to invest in a business, and they believe Yo is that business that'll give them a return.
This entire article is complete nonsense. Trillions of dollars are pissed away in this world, and we're going to point fingers at a developer that did nothing but invest some of their free time to contribute a fun social app to the market?
If you haven't ever released a product with massively flawed security, you've probably likely never released something, or you have released something massively flawed and don't know it yet.
We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.
Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.
Yo's popularity entirely rides two facts: (1) it's a silly app, (2) it got a million dollars. We currently know nothing about user engagement and retention. I'd be surprised if anyone uses it for more than a few weeks.
The hype and funding is based on the HOPE that something will come of it. However, retention is already a problem in Tel Aviv, where the app got its start. As fast as it has risen, it will fall (my prediction, anyway).
This signal says that people are still willing to pay for effective data collection. An app like Yo simply proves that quality/purpose do not really matter for making money. If it walks like a bubble, and talks like a bubble
"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."
Precisely. Who would have predicted that Twitter would have been used to organize people in a meaningful way during the Arab Spring?
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
Or Arbel, cofounder and CEO of Yo, told Mashable that the app has had 110,000 downloads since Wednesday morning and 160,000 total downloads since it launched quietly in April.
None of those fields beat the "change the world" drum as hard as tech startups do. This article seems to be an attempt to an attempt to reconcile action and rhetoric by asking "us" to live up to it.
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
There are people that care about the things that you care about, and there are people who make apps like Yo. The latter aren't listening, the former have already heard the message.
With the exception of games, the items you mention aren't distracting much engineering talent from solving the big stuff. With $1.2m, Yo can directly compete for talent that might otherwise go to graduate school or make progress in a more serious venture.
Right. It's just distracting chefs, artists, ecologists, photographers, etc. Clearly these people neither have engineering talent nor could contribute in any other way to McCann's chosen causes.
Ditto. While I'm never going to use this Yo here thing, I don't consider it to be something that never should have existed.
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
I don't believe that the article's criticism would be effective also against art (also, games can be art) -- striving to make something beautiful that illustrates the human condition or makes us feel something, is a non-trivial effort; art can galvanize us socially [0] [1] and can effect meaningful change.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
We have the potential to solve the big problems. But the big problems cost a lot more than $1 million to solve and aren't likely to get funded unless the founder is already a Silicon Valley billionaire with VC connections.
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
I agree. Though Yo should not have a 1.3 million funding. However, any sane person would quickly recognize that investors put in that 1.3 MM to fund the founders. They don't care about Yo. It may be a situation of "give some smart people who get the internets a bunch of money and hope it sticks". Which is a bit of a bubble IMO.
I have a plan to do this, have it kind of like a wiki with a breakdown of problems based on location (Becuase you can't solve world hunger all at once, each place has its own issues). Then have users submit possible solutions, and then open people to volunteer to implement solutions (maybe add a crowd-funding portion to it). Only issue is I'm too lazy to brush up my web development skills.
I'm a business analyst that also does some basic IT work. I know some basic HTML/CSS/JS, enough to tweak some web pages that I support, but nothing from scratch.
Your reasoning suggests that if the people who built Yo were not building Yo, that they might be out there curing the world's diseases. See the flaw there?
If the people who built Yo had been curing the world's diseases instead of building Yo, then everyone would still be stuck with giving each other Facebook pokes, and would therefore be too demoralized and disconnected to complete the task.
The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?
It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.
And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.
The triviality of Yo is obvious, it's not an amazing feat of engineering, but it is an important app. It shows that millions of people would much rather use an app that takes two "touches" to let someone know they would like to have their attention when they are available.
It's a data point on what people are looking for. Many tiny data points can lead to big conclusions and inform design decisions far down that road. Finding out that users still want things that reduce the friction of communication was worth having built Yo.
"The problems facing us - energy, food, water, health, education - require big solutions and we are just starting to see some of these solutions come out of a new wave of startup businesses."
You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.
Building a nuclear power plant solves a lot of energy problems. Getting a permit to build one is more challenging than assembling the engineers to do it.
Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
"some of the worlds most driven, focussed, intelligent and inspiring individuals"
It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.
Yes, "grammar" can be a verb. And even if it were in some sense incorrect, the meaning is clear. Confusing "there" and "their", OTOH, is outright misleading, and suggests a lack of understanding.
187 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadLet's just not fund them.
I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are going to waste, and they could be changing the world.
I don't understand why the author chooses to single out Yo. Someone took the time to develop something, and others are using it. Congrats to them for providing something of value. The simplicity of the app is inspiring in itself. Who cares if they raised 1.2 million? This is investment money, this isn't 1.2 million sucked out of a charity, or off the tables of families in Africa, this is 1.2 million that someone wanted to invest in a business, and they believe Yo is that business that'll give them a return.
This entire article is complete nonsense. Trillions of dollars are pissed away in this world, and we're going to point fingers at a developer that did nothing but invest some of their free time to contribute a fun social app to the market?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Show+HN#!/story/past_month/0/Show%...
Take a look at what's coming out of the HN community. Do we criticize each other here for not solving 'real' problems?
People can build whatever they want.
Yo is a step towards bigger ideas, better skills, more resources to make bigger ideas happen, etc.
Let the market sort out what's a good effort and what's a piss-poor one.
...In releasing massive security flawed apps.
We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.
Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.
"We have the potential to solve the big problems. Let's not fund apps like Yo."
Worth reading the counterpoint: http://avc.com/2013/04/return-and-ridicule/
"This notion also plays into Clayton Christensen's framework for disruptive innovation. Many of the most disruptive technologies started out as what Clay calls "toys". The PC is a great example of that. PCs came out of the homebrew computer movement. Geeks were building computers in their garages. And everyone thought they were nuts. But from that came the Apple Computer and the IBM PC and we were off to the races with personal computers."
The overthrow of tyrannical regimes is a noble cause that a startup would almost certainly never been able to focus on as a solution to a big picture problem.
Oh, and they have your social graph based on cell numbers.
More importantly, it also works against articles that gripe about effort wasted on apps the author doesn't care for.
To many (most?) people, unfortunately, yes.
So yes, you can poke the hole that you do. But that's just pretending to miss the point.
Personally, I think the reconciliation is rhetoric coming back to earth. It's self-perpetuating saccharine and delusion that should probably stop.
There are people that care about the things that you care about, and there are people who make apps like Yo. The latter aren't listening, the former have already heard the message.
Yo and the mere fact that it exists means that the per-unit cost, monetary or in terms of effort, of making something more useful has fallen, once again. The barrier of entry for something more innovative than Yo has dropped and people, at large, have become just that tiny bit more receptive to something even more interesting than Yo.
Ten years ago, just the concept of Yo actually working and having a user base in the millions would have been the biggest thing since sliced bread. If aspects of the present might be a little over the this-is-amazing hill, then that's not too much of a doomsday portent for the future as it's being made out to be.
While Yo may prove to have some value, the author's post more speaks to how so many smart people are incentivized (by money) towards trivial ends; our economy seems often to reward trifles over things that benefit human well-being.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Octopus:_A_Story_of_Califor...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin
Engineers maintain the world that we see. They build roads, bridges, the internet, and so forth.
Artist (writers, game designer, etc etc) create things that we can enjoy using the infrastructures that engineers built. Without these artistic creations, the world would be a very boring place.
Bored, maybe. But bored with sanitation systems, transport and technology rather than entertained and dead of cholera by 25.
So let's build apps like Yo because Silicon Valley deems them to be a prerequisite to being allowed to solve the big problems.
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
The article simply sounds like sour grapes. If something as simple and stupid as Yo can get funded for $X, then why hasn't my worthy and interesting project been funded for $Y ? Obviously, the developer of Yo is to blame for finding a big pile of money curated by fools and taking it?
It is pointless to question why Yo exists. It is far more useful to ask why nearly everyone capable of accomplishing great things has to go beg shrewd financiers and capricious morons (depending on whether or not they give you anything) for the money required to attempt one, or languish under the direction of someone else as an employee until finally saving enough to try.
And the answer is that life is not fair. A plutocracy is not a meritocracy. If you don't like it, be born rich or win big at business roulette, and then invest only in worthy things.
Disclaimer: I thought the aftermath of Yo was absolutely stupid, as well.
You can't engineer technological solutions to social problems. You will get so far, but then you'll run into politics and religion.
Innovating on the hospital is not even legal. You don't need to ask permission to develop an app (unless you count Apple's process as permission).
If money is easy enough to come by that investors can drop $100k like you and I can drop $0.99, sell them what they're buying.
It's quite possible that a company does not contain any people like this. This article seems to assume a lot about a large group of random programmers and business people. There are plenty of hacks out there and some of them will be founding a start up near you.
Hard to take this guy seriously when he can't even grammar right in his intro paragraph. I love yo.
Can't "grammar" right? Can "grammar" be a verb?