Ask HN: Will good tech times come again?

12 points by buboard 5 years ago | 2 comments

It seems like 2005 is 1000 years away. There 's no way today you can launch a silly idea like twitter or groupon and expect it to go anywhere. It won't , there is no money to make through advertising, acquiring users means paying levies to google, users' attention is oversaturated and impossible to attract, the tech press is too busy cancelling people small or big, users can't handle an interface that requires more than scrolling, techies care more about the language you use rather than if your product works etc etc. Walls, walls, paywalls, concentration, iron grips is all that's in the horizon. It seems like, out of a million different ideas, well-funded tech has decided to reinvent computers as televisions. Will computer tech become fun again, or one is better seeking greener paths elsewhere?

sneeuwpopsneeuw 5 years ago |

Your post reminds me of my experience with webdevelopment. In the beginning it was all fun for me I helped many different clients with there websites and I enjoyed it a lot nevertheless it where simple Wordpress websites with custum themes. But the joy of learning wile doing helpt me to keep motivated. When I knew most things and could type more and more css and html without Googling (ducking) I lost my motivation more and more. After 2.5 year I had made about 15k next to studying IT at university and that was nice but all I did was moving pixels around on screens. So I desided that i was done with the dirty hacks the working with multiple developers over 1 ftp server and the moving around of pixels. So I made the design to stop using Wordpress and to quit for 1 full year to focus on game development.

So yes there is some truth in your message. Yes it is more difficult to start something but it is not impossible. I still have many connections with people who have very small website and are still earning there living from it from websites like torrentfreak to small local dutch news papers. The way they earn money has just changed.

The advice I got out of the past years is do something you enjoy. As long as you enjoy it the money and the project/website ideas will come to you.

sock 5 years ago |

I sort of think the opposite; the tools available now are much better and you can often design something to fit within the free tiers of various cloud operators and still scale to 100k users, and in personal experience small projects can get a good amount of use(rs) compared to the time to make them. Most projects don't though, and projects I've put a lot of time can just be ignored, so I tend to stick to just what I enjoy, and everything else is a plus. The centralization to towards facebook/twitter/youtube for discovered is a shame though.