At least this gives kids the chance to be kids and know a life without it before they encounter it.
Many of us grew up in the offline-is-default time, but our cohort will age out. Then we’ll only be left with people who grew up with these technologies shaping their lives and perspectives, who have little sense for the alternative.
The window of time is closing for us in this cohort to use our understanding of what life was like without these technologies to advocate for a healthier environment for kids.
Please. At best HN has a very small subset of the problems in social media, and its positives easily outweigh its negatives. This is a well moderated forum with a lot of bright people and industry experts that a young person could learn from by observing conversation and debate. It bears a great deal of resemblance to historic methods of learning by watching experts interact and debate. Tons of pedagogical value is here for a young person to latch onto.
A most obvious difference besides that is HN isn’t a nonstop feed of short form video appealing to the insecurities of teenagers, using notifications and social feedback loops and the suggestion that you’d be missing out on what your friends are up to if you left.
HN doesn’t even let you follow people and barely lets you know who they are. It’s centered on ideas, not people. HN and social media are almost nothing alike.
Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.
Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
Agree about psychological impact outpacing likely actual impact, but that’s a relatively temporary phenomena as we are all adapting to the new way things work.
Productivity wise employment is far more than code production productivity in a vacuum, and productivity gains are rarely captured by employees (see famous chart on worker productivity where that correlation changed around 1970). I wouldn’t expect to see much in the next 1-2 years besides noticing effective teams increasing velocity of features.
I think people in forums like complaining about things and aren’t representative of the broader set of people who are just using the tools, so no real paradox. For vast majority of tech jobs, $200/mo is still an absolute steal in terms of what these tools offer. Only the dullest of companies would not realize this.
Fwiw in the 80s-90s computers also didn’t really register in productivity metrics. Qualitative changes occur long before accurate measurement catches up.
No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.
The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.
The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The dabbler/serious user distinction isn't the only framing here.
Assuming this limitation applies to team seats in the same way, at $20/mo, businesses could afford to have everybody on the plan. Plenty of folks write only a few hours of code per day—or even per week in their job. These are still professionals, not dabblers.
Especially when ads win out over UX. Just a month ago I searched for UPS locations in Google Maps and filtered by open, and one place nearby popped up. I put the package in my car and drove over and lo and behold they were closed. When faced with a choice, Google chose to be greedy and make money on an ad unit over providing the correct user experience.
I've used Google Maps for two decades and have 1000s of saved pins. I could have been a customer for life. Haven't used it since.
You want to be careful about who your customers are, and what they will do to you as an organization. Enterprise customers create enterprise teams create enterprise culture creates enterprise rot. Apple is wise to play to their strategic position as a consumer product company that lives or dies on great product, because when the buyer is the user thats what they demand.
The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.
Oh.. uh hold on a second... removes anesthesia mask from patient
Wake up sheeple!
reply