Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (2008)(old.ycombinator.com) |
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (2008)(old.ycombinator.com) |
Music became irrelevant.
2. Simplified browsing.
The web became irrelevant. Replaced by Wikipedia, Amazon, and Facebook (none of which YC funded).
3. New news.
Journalism never covered itself in glory, but approximately half of the separation between the NY Times and Weekly World News has been erased since PG wrote this. Reddit probably didn't have anything to do with it.
4. Outsourced IT. 5. Enterprise software 2.0.
These two items seem to be the same. It's one area where I would say startups have been tremendously successful. If you can call thought-terminating technologies like Slack successful.
6. More variants of CRM.
Interacting with customers hasn't got much better.
7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist.
I'd say this has been a success. Everything from corporate formation to payroll to office space is now plug-and-play.
8. Dating. 9. Photo/video sharing services.
The iPhone existed when this was written, but that the smartphone represented a shift at least as large as the original PC revolution is nowhere on the radar.
10. Auctions.
Everybody hates them. The last 5 times / 5 years I've used Ebay, it's been with the "buy it now" feature. I can remember at least two smartphone apps that promised to get rid of unwanted stuff through auctions, which no longer exist, but I can't remember their names.
11. Web Office apps.
The Windows desktop world was already looking dire in 2008, and its slide continued. Web apps, mostly from Google and Microsoft, picked up some of the business. Rich text documents (Word) are also a lot less important today.
12. Fix advertising.
I've been blocking them since this was written, so I'm not sure. In general, I'm skeptical that "paid human discourse" is something that can be fixed.
14. Tools for measurement.
I think he means SEO, aka "machine learning".
15. Off the shelf security.
Doesn't exist, but a lot of it is sold. Did YC get any of that action?
16. A form of search that depends on design.
?
17. New payment methods.
Apple Pay has potential but has so far been disappointing. Same with cryptocurrencies.
18. The WebOS.
Nope.
19. Application and/or data hosting.
Sure.
20. Shopping guides.
Stores are so 2008.
21. Finance software for individuals and small business.
Mint was acquired I guess, but nobody uses it.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid.
There was a good try at this, which existed when this was written: Dabble DB. It went under in 2011. Silk shut down in November,[1] leaving Airtable and Fieldbook...
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
Doesn't exist, and at this point we're lucky to have Wikipedia. It's clear to me that our society could not presently create it from scratch.
24. A buffer against bad customer service.
While good customer service is not more common than in 2008 (see #6 above), really really bad service is much more rare. Not sure who gets credit for this. Twitter and other platforms that let word about bad service spread easily may deserve some credit.
25. A Craigslist competitor.
Pretty much every startup ever. Still no overall competitor for the general case (online classifieds) though.
26. Better video chat.
Video chat is too intrusive for many applications. Apple Facetime, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Skype own the market.
27. Hardware/software hybrids.
?
28. Fixing email overload.
It wasn't fixed but email has become less relevant.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets.
Again, websites are less important now. Squarespace isn't more specific than Weebly.
30. Startups for startups.
See #7 above.
[1] http://blog.silk.co/post/167155630197/its-time-to-say-goodby...
Stripe has probably been important for a certain class of businesses. You could also argue that paying through apps more generally (e.g. Lyft) are, in a sense, new payment methods.
Airtable founders: "Hold my beer."
Midori is the simple browser I have ever used.
>17. New payment methods
This one has certainly come true! Cryptocurrencies have absolutely exploded.
>28. Fixing email overload. A
Astro tries to solve this problem. https://www.helloastro.com/product/ Know what to focus on and what to clean up
Astrobot’s AI-powered Insights remind you to follow up on important emails, questions, time-specific requests, and @mentions.
Plus, Astrobot makes suggestions about lists to unsubscribe from, emails to archive, and emails to move to folders.
1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.
Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)
2. Simplified browsing...Grandparents and small children don't want the full web...
Apps. Remember this list is from just one year after the iPhone launched, so everything was still "the web". It was almost unthinkable that native, installed apps would have such a resurgence. But the iPad is exactly this, a simplified computer that young kids and grandparents love to use.
3. New news.
Still in flux. Nobody has figured out a business model. Over the past century consumers were trained to expect free, ad-supported news. Surprisingly, online ads have not worked out well for publishers.
4. Outsourced IT. & 5. Enterprise software 2.0.
AWS. There's a lot of higher-level SaaS packaged services too and it sounds like that's what pg was envisioning. But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.
NY Times topped $1 billion in subscription revenue last year. Quite a feat and definitely an indication that money is to be made in digital news.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/new-york-times-c...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-...
If you search and don't find it on Wikipedia, you can look elsewhere. That's a better experience than finding unmaintained crap.
(Of course, the incarnation of Napster referenced here is very different from the original Napster concept.)
EDIT: Windows pre-Zune DRM was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure (PlaysForSure) -- it was "anything but". So many synchronization problems with devices, it was painful.
Yeah but neither of those had a billion+ smart phones to deliver their subscription service to. Not really their fault, but clearly mobile streaming was what really made this type of product skyrocket in popularity.
They supplement record label's core business more than they disrupt.
Lately seems to be going into an opposite direction. I.e. I have TV subscription, Netflix subscription, Amazon Prime subscription... but what I have to do to see Start Trek Discovery? Get yet another monthly subscription. Not exactly "one umbrella $10 subscription covers all" but rather "everybody has its own $10 subscription in which you probably are only interested in one thing ever, but you have to get the whole thing anyway". That, or just download it from torrents...
> to expect free, ad-supported news
Same problem here, btw. I wouldn't mind another $10 subscription, but I am surely not going to subscribe to 50 different news sources of which I read 2 articles a month from each, and I am surely not going to buy subscription to only one and trust it to actually give me full, deep, unbiased and untainted picture of the world, not sure if such unicorns ever existed but for sure they are extinct now. So again, 50 subscriptions or... other ways.
But, as with news, i would much rather have an à la carte model. I don't watch enough movies for a subscription to be worthwhile, but i'd pay 2 or 3 pounds to watch an old Bob Hope movie every now and then.
For this one, I would definitely say Twitter. As an example, my first info about the recent school shooting in Florida was a tweet by a scared student. Anything that happens anywhere in the world will spread on Twitter literally in an instant, and the same goes for non-realtime content published elsewhere.
I'm not sure 'hero' is the right word. AWS has created culture of lock-in and closed source products being acceptable in many otherwise open source pipelines. Additionally, people funnel significantly more of their money into AWS than they would with dedicated hardware.
AWS is a plague on infrastructure and a black spot in open computing history on the level of Microsoft. Kubernetes is showing promise to fix some of this.
this has made software services much easier to sell. in a world without AWS, only monied interests can hope to bring a service in any scale. even in the face of vendor login, AWS has increased the democracy of starting a new business.
> Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)
The disease that the RIAA is a symptom of is not piracy. Piracy doesn't have a negative impact on music sales. The disease is an industry that makes success (i.e. financial sustainability) inaccessible to most, and excessive (lucrative beyond need) to few. Spotify/Apple Music do precisely nothing to change this.
Beats and Google Play Music are closer to the mark, but still a good bit off.
Did artists make more money as a result?
I think this is where blockchain tech will prosper. Integrated wallet in you browser and nano payments to purchase access to articles. I don't want to subscribe to FT or New York Times, because I only read one or two articles per week. But I would happily pay 50c per article to get a few days access
I don’t disagree it would be nice. $100 per year subscriptions are a pretty high bar for me. But the evidence that people will consume digital news and other articles transactionally just isn’t there.
These sorts of decision are currently in the hands of editors who, despite all the growling, are still inclined to allow vast, expensive, investigative goose-chases.
If you introduce per-article payments, it becomes just too easy for the business department to explicitly see which articles bring in more than they cost. But you want the cross-subsidies that are necessary for a well-rounded publication.
The sad thing is that this is what Ted Nelson has been advocating for since the late 1960s (amongst with many other things that made his vision of a worldwide web much more compelling than the one we have now, but technologically unfeasible until very recently). If it ever materializes, it'll just be half a century+ late :)
Yeah, we now recognize that as propaganda. Maybe the web is finally helping people wake up to the fact that news was never really working.
For example, #1 about RIAA, I'd argue that it was never solved but with streaming stations in particular, it's just not such a pressing issue today.
Some certainly haven't happened (e.g. fixing news).
The list also seems to assume a lot more replacement of incumbents (Craigslist, Ebay, Wikipedia) than has been the case.
Video content is moving in another direction with more walled gardens supported by original content. Maybe it's because of the costs required to produce quality content, or the size of the total library. Maybe it has something to do with how we watch video vs. listen to music (i.e. I may listen to a song or album 100x, but rarely watch any movie even twice).
Of course, the dollar amounts involved are a matter of ongoing debate. But, for the most part, if you want to setup a music streaming service or store, you could probably get access to at least a very large library at rates comparable to your competition.
The basic problem with video seems to be that the content owners by and large aren't jumping to broadly license content, even much of their back catalog, at rates that would support an all-you-can-eat subscription service. So all the services are basically doing original content that they pad out with the mostly mediocre stuff that they can license for a reasonable rate.
Also, it looks like you republish recipes from other websites. Do you have their permission to do so?
- #5 explosion of upstream SaaS
- #6 tons of higher-res components of CRM software
- #9 instagram
- #11 google drive
- #22 smartsheet
wonder if the few on here that haven't been solved (wrapper for customer service) are simply unsolvable, or something has to shift for the economics to make way for them.
This probably is more meant to challenge bad customer service like ATT/Comcast but the (non legacy) software world is doing better with this I think.
link: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/1/#...
I built FormAPI [1] because I used to work at a company that needed to fill out a lot of forms. (Gusto [2])
Turns out there's not a huge number of programmers that need to fill out PDFs. But there's a big market for things like online forms and electronic signatures, so I'm looking into some different directions. But I think 7. is a great place to start.
This is what we're trying :-)
Especially the paragraph:
All have fallen very short IMO. Coursera's courses are generally pretty watered down compared to the real undergraduate versions with a few exceptions here and there. Udemy focuses more on skill-based courses and they also have a huge issue with enforcing copyright. A lot of people are uploading pirated materials to the site and masking it as their own creation. The courses aren't that high quality compared to a traditional university setting. As with coursera, there are a few exceptions but overall most courses are low quality.
Khan academy is more for short tutorials where you need help here and there. It does play a role though but I don't think it is anywhere near possible to replacing traditional university education.
I think most people would agree that they want to see some sort of online learning system that can actually compete with a traditional university. As in, if I want to take physics 101 I can take it either at a traditional university or this online university. The online university would offer cheap/free and high quality courses such that you would basically be learning the same thing as the traditional course. It would also be possible to have a better overall learning experience thanks to internet/computer enhanced features (simulations, interactive videos etc.). Ultimately it would have some sort of certification, verification system that employers would place value upon, similar to the value currently being placed on BA degrees.
Here are typical problems which nearly all dating sites run into:
1. Women got way more attention than men. Such environment stimulates aggressive strategies on both sides. Men must spend a lot of effort to reach as many women as possible. Women must filter out males as hard as possible. Men are discouraged to carefully read profile of women because probability of particular woman responding a message quite small. By the same reason, men are discouraged to write personalized first message. Such economics create hostile environment for both genders. Men got upset that women don't respond them or respond lazily (i.e. on your long sentence or question, she may just say - "nice"). Women got upset that they have inbox full of messages from men but nobody seems have deep interest in them. And I didn't even mention the case when lots of sexually unsatisfied men may harass women because it's cheap (i.e. no consequences). And just banning those men isn't viable long term solution. An apps like Tinder, where you can't write a message till you get mutual likes don't change dating economics at all.
2. Both genders are encouraged to participate in aggressive photos contest. I've had countless personal disappointments on the first date when I've seen completely different woman in real life than on pictures. They can use Photoshop, they can take selfies under specific angle. It's very often that pictures does not show real person at all.
3. Similarly, I've had countless personal disappointments because she turned to have completely different character in real life. The problem is that you used text messages in order to know each other. Dating is very subtle area and you cut off a lot of information if you rely only on text messages and 2D photos. There are much more information in non-verbal communication about your possible compatibility.
I've never seen a single serious attempt to solve this problem. Tinder doesn't even try to solve these problems, they just used mobile apps hype in order to get traction. I've seen the same model (mutual match before you can write message) in 2006.
Dating is area full of stereotypes and political correctness. It's easy to take side. Either feminist side and blame men for being sexual predators or you can blame women as being harsh filtering out men without giving any second thought.
Instead we should think for game theoretic data driven approach.
Now, we have advanced ML algorithms and big data. We can use ML, we can use game theory. Why not create online dating startup which encourages people to know each other well. And discourages aggressive behaviour on both sides. In other words, we should create totally different economics of online dating.
An online dating site which promotes quality over quantity and personalized behaviour.
P.S. I have no idea why I gather downvotes as problems with dating sites are very obvious. They are pretty hard to solve but it doesn't mean these problems do not exist.
1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom - Streaming, both paid and ad-supported seems to be the answer here. It's prone to monopolies and music streaming doesn't seem to pay artists very well, but Netflix is producing quite a bit of original content.
2. Simplified browsing - mobile ate this.
3. New news - appears largely unsolved. A few big national newspapers are are doing serious reporting, some newcomers (blogs) are doing the same without a print version and local newspapers are still mostly bad. Social sharing of news mostly hasn't made things better.
4. Outsourced IT - "the cloud" hasn't replaced everything, but increasingly, companies do seem to like software that stores data on someone else's server and gets delivered by a browser.
5. Enterprise software 2.0 - not a field I have enough contact with to comment on.
6. More variants of CRM - as above, I'm not very qualified to comment. I know there are startups doing things in this space.
7. Something your company needs that doesn't exist - kind of too vague to respond to. AirBnB was an example of this.
8. Dating - Tinder is the main winner I'm aware of. I'm not quite sure how they solved the chicken and egg issue, though it appears they were helped by Facebook-based login and doing their initial release to students at a small set of universities.
9. Photo/video sharing services. Instagram seems to be the biggest winner here. Imgur, started as image-hosting for reddit is trying to offer reddit-like features and keep the users on its own site.
10. Auctions - I think this one missed the mark a little. People don't want to auction things for the most part, they just want to sell things. As an online marketplace accessible to individuals, nothing has really displaced Ebay. Facebook is doing a bit for some niches with sale-oriented groups and built-in payments, and there's Etsy. It's possible to sell on Amazon as an individual, and a few people do, but Ebay still dominates.
11. Web Office apps - Google ate this, and Microsoft has entries in this space too.
12. Fix advertising - Facebook and other social platforms have at least made the problem different by having businesses interact with customers directly and paying for reach. This is not a solved problem by any means.
13. Online learning - massive open online courses are improving access to education, but the fact that a lot of situations still demand credentials from more traditional educational institutions is keeping this approach from being too dominant. I expect more development here long-term.
14. Tools for measurement - this seems like a feature more than a product. A lot of productivity tools have metrics built in, e.g. github.
15. Off the shelf security - there seem to be some things available here, but nothing really dominating the market.
16. A form of search that depends on design. I'm not certain, but I don't think there's anything here. What people seem to be more interested in is something that's not big, scary and delivering tailored results. That's not a huge market, and DuckDuckGo seems to have most of it.
17. New payment methods - Paypal is still big, Facebook handles payments now, mobile OS makers and device manufacturers are doing things. Stripe and Square helped with credit card processing, but that's not really a new payment method. Cryptocurrency is a thing, but nobody's been very successful actually using it as a payment method.
18. The WebOS - stuff like Zapier and ITTT are providing some plumbing, but nothing very OS-like.
19. Application and/or data hosting - "the cloud" is obviously huge and dominated by AWS and Google.
20. Shopping guides - I'm calling this a miss, with most of the exceptions being niches too small to be more than supplemental income for one person (http://flashlights.parametrek.com is a neat example, and the creator has an account on HN by the same name). Most people just shop on Amazon. There's low-quality content/affiliate marketing in this space, but that's arguably just SEO spam.
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses - I'm not sure what's going on in this space. I haven't heard about anything making big waves.
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid - Unless Google Sheets counts, I don't think this has panned out yet.
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia - Deletionists still seem to rule Wikipedia, and nothing has displaced it.
24. A buffer against bad customer service - I'm not sure there's been much movement here. I suppose you could use something like Taskrabbit to hire someone to talk to Comcast for you.
25. A Craigslist competitor - Facebook groups have displaced Craigslist a bit and Ebay has experimented with some local marketplace stuff, but I think that's mostly it.
26. Better video chat - Google and Apple built better Skypes. There's appear.in, Discord offers video, etc.... There's a lot happening here, but it seems essentially evolutionary, not revolutionary.
27. Hardware/software hybrids - smartphones ate a lot of the applications for this, but Arduino and various single-board computers enabling DIY projects are cool.
28. Fixing email overload - I'm not seeing a single overarching solution here, but things like Gmail priority inbox, in-browser notifications and such seem to be chipping away at it.
29. Easy site builders for specific markets - I'm sure there are a few of these that are more niche. Shopify is kind of Viaweb 2.0. People in some niches seem to prefer to just have accounts on social media and have little interest in standalone websites.
30. Startups for startups - I probably haven't been paying attention to the right things to list these. A lot of stuff that's not very startup-specific like CRM, "cloud" services and finance software can, and probably does make inroads by being startup-friendly.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1ToS1gYD3wQ/TlxUHSp-uKI/AAAAAAAAFw...
So, the solution to this very political problem might be one of the following:
1. Creating non-profit organizations that collect dues to lobby on behalf of voters against corporate interests. They'll need to have focused legislation and marketing to reach a lot of people. They'll need a lot of money to outspend the plutocrats who have piles of money. The competition will at least be happening where the root problem is to eliminate some things like bans on reverse engineering, the severity of punishment for filesharing, or changes to copyright itself that limits labels control over business models. The rest will follow after root causes are solved at level of corrupt politicians introducing them.
2. They eliminate all politicians doing that in ways that cause consumers harm. This might take a combo of political campaigns for replacements plus media campaigns about harms predecessors were/are doing. Copyright/patent system would be but one. Might also try to get the new politicians to pass laws limiting donations by private parties with corporate ones eliminated entirely. Taxpayers themselves will pay whoever wins a fortune plus subsidize various stages of the election process so they work for us. Bribes will be felonies leading to life in prison.
This is all kind of like how we say certain things like governments banning encryption are political rather than technical problems. The people's action in legal system and media are needed to solve them. Lawmakers that will constantly do what's in incumbents' interests, even imprisoning innovators making alternatives, have to be fought at their level for best results. I mean, do combine as many methods of resistance as possible. Just startups or tech alone aren't the solution if problem starts with laws paid for with bribes.
tl;dr was that people don't like buying stuff via auctions.
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/live-event-ticket-market-scr...
Say, like, a site for old video games. Anyone who wants to sell Street Fighter II for the SNES submits it to the Street Fighter II auction, and anyone who wants to buy it bids on it there. There aren't 500 Street Fighter II auctions, there's just one, creating a more efficient commodity market for Street Fighter II.
Maybe the answer here is a service where people can build their own auction sites around product categories they care about. The service, the auctioneer/curator, and the seller split up the proceeds of each sale.
I think the problem here is that Ebay doesn't give any metrics on how frequent an item comes to market, nor does it give any pricing history for how much an object typically sells for. Instead of tackling those problems, they just opted for the "buy it now" button.
I search for camera gear a lot. When it comes to camera bodies, there's a lot of variation. With lens or without, with battery grip or without, what's the shutter count? What's the cosmetic condition? etc. etc.
But generally I just end up with a range by manually looking for the highs and lows, and then try to nab one at a price I think would be a "good deal"
I'm pretty sure you used to be able to search on completed auctions. I seem to remember doing that. But you seem to be correct that there's no way to do it now that I can see.
To the broader point, I do wonder to what degree participating in eBay auctions was something of a fad. eBay was a bit of a hobby of mine for a while. In part, my buying habits have changed but I'm not sure you can separate out the "thrill of the hunt" from the more utilitarian aspects of using eBay to buy and sell.
Oh and not forgetting their 10% + Paypal fees, which makes them damn expensive.
Think there is a lot of scope for someone to do it better.
There should be a way to discourage quantitative behaviour (i.e. when you play statistics game) and encourage qualitative behaviour (i.e. when you are more focused on speaking with less people).
In other words, in real life, you don't try to talk with 100 women in one evening. However, it's cheap in online dating to spam many people.
So online dating should be closer to real life.
It should be more expensive to reach and even like more people in short timeframe. On the other hand, somehow we should guarantee that pictures (and probably video) should give maximum of information about appearance. It should be encouraged to provide as many high quality pictures as possible.
Maybe something in a chatbot for text-based interfaces? Make it speak/listen with text->speech and voice recognition? Since most of the human interactions on the other side of bad customer service are scripted, should be possible to build counter-scripts.
But after all that I don't think I'd pay anything just for this on an ongoing basis. So who is the market? Impatient wealthy people? We're back to assistants!
It is further hampered by planned obsolescence and the increasingly fast pace that new products are released at. It is very difficult and expensive to maintain actual experience with everything in a product space.
It can't be crowd sourced either because most people are overly attached to their purchases and can't give objective comparisons between something they don't own.
Biggest problem I find is the local news space. There’s nowhere for funded investigative reporting at the local level - I feel like some type of local club or community organization needs to start growing to get it back.
Perhaps we'll see a collapse of local news (which really has already happened) and the resurgence of quality national news on a smaller, less competitive, but sustainable basis?
I wonder if there are common cross-industry causes, or more specific contextual reasons this occurs. I suspect the latter.
Let's be honest, the "long-term fan" strategy is generally just a profit maximizing strategy due to repeat sells.
I bet so
I don't know what it means to be closer to real life. The reason your have social less momentum in your day-to-day is because you just don't meet that many people.
Also, I'm not sure what increased qualitative behavior would mean in online dating. Sure, there are bozos who just say "hey" to everyone, but those are trivial to filter out. Online dating is a vessel for quickly escalating to a meet-up. I think you should put less importance on the quick-fire internet game because most people don't want to languish there either. People want to meet, fuck, make connections just like you.
Color Dating (http://www.colordatingapp.com/) lets you match by race/ethnicity.
Muzmatch (https://muzmatch.com/) has features needed by Muslims.
[All 3 are YC-funded]
It's not perfect. I'd have liked to see a recommendation for something more powerful with an 18650 battery and USB charging and perhaps something more pocket-friendly. They only mention color temperature briefly, while I consider it important (most people prefer neutral white after trying it outdoors). 2xAA is not a battery configuration I'm fond of. All that aside, these aren't bad recommendations. Maybe the Maglite is a little questionable, but you could do worse.
https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-flashlight/
Outdoor Gear Lab on the other hand did a terrible job - so bad that they pulled their article after it got an extremely negative reaction on /r/flashlight.
Review sites mostly have various conflicts of interest but the best ones seem to manage them reasonably.
Wait. I thought long-term relationships were due to love/care, sacrifice, hard work, a common goal.
You can see this in action on google search: type in something like "Chili soup", then it'll return the image, description, some parts of the recipe, etc.
Lists of ingredients aren't protected by copyright. Hell, neither are basic instructions and he doesn't even have those.
Photos are but this looks like it would fall under fair use. If you have a fashion blog you're allowed to use a photo of a dress from the makers website when you're writing about it. It's hard to comment on a product if you can't share a photo of the product. This guy is commenting on various foods by showing their nutritional value.
is there any reason to think any site wouldn't want their recipe showing up in a search result?
the 2 sites I talked to were overjoyed to have their recipes shown in my search results.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/twitter-q4-2017-earnings-rev...
The issue is that we also complain about the dumbing down of online info, and decry the lack of quality content.
The advertising model does not work for valuable content creation. Period. Until someone figures out what its replacement is, news (and all non mass-produced content) will continue to slowly die online.
https://www.atlanticmedia.com/brands/quartz/
Atlantic Media is owned by David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs invested in The Atlantic recently (but I think all of the subsidiaries are still owned solely by Bradley).
Before he was in media, he founded and sold a few advisory companies that went public, where he made a few hundred million dollars. So I guess Quartz's business model is live off the largesse of very wealthy benefactors?
"Twitter is profitable with revenues of $732M".
Ah, sounds like you’re into eugenics. Do you believe humans are wise enough to determine what traits are favorable?
Increased longevity, for instance, seems short-sighted. We already have extreme population growth. While natural survival instincts strive to fight death, what’s the net benefit to society of helping more people make it through their 90s?
Phases like childhood and parenthood would become smaller fractions of life, does extending old age make your overall life experience better? Would society progress as quickly with more old people around?
This inequality between lifespans is going to become a much greater concern for humans in the future, you will see. Perhaps it will become most noticeable as the baby boomers begin to die.
Also, I think society could progress even faster if the wisdom and experience of old people can be harnessed and not just tossed aside as “antiquated”. We need to rethink the way we think about the elderly, because one day those elderly will be us.
> We need to rethink the way we think about the elderly, because one day those elderly will be us.
I find this Western fear of death to be toxic. One day we'll grow old and die - and that's ok, that's how life works.
Actually, many Western countries have the opposite and need large-scale immigration (along with all the societal problems this brings) to maintain their population numbers.
If I recall correctly, the described humans were living spans greater than 400 years, among other traits, after a handful of generations.
If something as ambitious as Deep Space is your goal, you're probably better off engineering people to make the trip rather than waiting for technology that may never materialize.
People with excellent genetic traits need some sort of advantage to meet each other. The movie Idiocracy may have been a satirical comedy, but its message is actually not far from the truth of where we’re heading if someone doesn’t do something about improving the gene pool. To me, that is way more terrifying than genetically conscious dating.
There's nothing that stops any people from "breeding promiscuously", provided they find suitable and willing partner. It is when you start talking about who is worth access to reproduction and who is too genetically inferior to be allowed that is where trouble starts. The humanity has terrible track record with this. Surely, you say, this time it would be different - we have The Science on our side which won't lead us astray! Which would be very reassuring, if only that wasn't the same thing, word for word, that was said in all previous attempts.
> People with excellent genetic traits need some sort of advantage to meet each other.
Why? If they're so excellent, they may find each other using their own excellent facilities. While it still sounds terrifying and offputting, I have no problem with people trying things that are terrifying and offputting to me in their own bedrooms. It's when this is proposed as some kind of societal norm where the really terrifying part begins, because we've been on that road, and not once, and we know it leads to hell.
Maybe the time is not quite yet. Maybe genetic mapping services have to improve a bit more, and public opinion has to shift somewhat, but if the conditions ever align, I’ll probably take a shot at it. Biotech is the next great frontier after all, and that’s where I’d like to be.
I personally don’t believe either of those things should be limited, I simply believe people with good genes should have an easy way to match with each other and form a relationship. That’s it. Society will take care of the rest.
That's status quo bias [1]. If you want to die, nobody will stop you – but don't force your decision onto others.
I can't help but think people are reading some form of government mandate argument from their preference when they haven't mentioned one.
I like swimming. I don't think anyone should be forced to swim nor that its the governments business to increase swimming.
That guy wants to filter partners by their long term health potential. I don't see any reason to believe he thinks people should be forced to do the same nor that he thinks it's the governments business.
To me an appropriate analogy would be if burkas were the norm for everyone, some guy was all "I wish we could easily see peoples faces when trying to date. I have a really attractive face and I'd like a partner with the same", then someone was all "the government will get involved!"
How and why? Prevent uglies from dating hotties? The market already does a decent job of that.
There's no department for "dating profile height fraud".
No one cries "eugenics!" at being able to see how attractive your partner is.