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Why does everything in tech need fresh ideas all the time? Why can’t something just be good as it is? I don’t see people trying to re-invent the spoon. Because spoons are fine. We don’t need an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features.
Also, don’t add new shit while you’re still developing what you already have.
The tech space is intrinsically tied to the capitalist infinite growth mindset, that’s why
an innovative new spoon with special new spoon features
Please do tell me more about that new spoon.
There is no spoon.
Spork!
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It also requires a proprietary charger and has a non-replaceable battery.
Lol, so accurate.
Short term profit mate. It’s all they care at this point in my opinion.
Preach brother!
Social media has been out of ideas since we got video chat. The fact is people want a free place on the internet to share interests with other people and communicate with them. Every company tries to figure out how to monetize it.
So of course they’re out of ideas, they never had them in the first place. Capitalism cannot drive progress
In theory it’s easy to monetise - allow some targeted ads to communities and/or occasional relevant boosted posts, or paid awards like Reddit, etc.
The issue is greed / growth. They always need more and more - so you end up with more irrelevant ads, political ads, more boosted posts than natural ones, etc. - most companies aren’t happy to just do one thing well with a skeleton crew maintaining it and keeping costs low - they need constant growth.
Just look at Reddit and Twitter for example.
That’s because most Social Media players aren’t interested in the social community aspect. They only care about the nigh infinite metadata they can harvest and then sell, and advertisements. It’s profit driven first and last. So everything ends up being rather samey because it’s the best method to achieve those goals.
Shh… nobody tell them about the Fediverse.
On a separate note, anyone else finding Wired to suddenly be like the Boomer of tech publications? Ars Technica and Techdirt are vastly superior sources these days. Seems like Wired does nothing but pump out stale conglomerated opinion pieces that smell vaguely like Larry Ellison’s sweat socks.
conde nast, the same company that is a major investor in reddit owns them. You may also be familiar with several of their other publications, Vogue, Golf Digest and The New Yorker, to name but a few.
They also own Ars Technica, which as @Arotrios mentioned, is still decent. You can’t just blame the owners, the editors still have some level of control over the content they put out.
I find it slightly sad that when our leaders talk of Technology and Innovation - they often mean these ‘tech’ companies that essentially work out how to better sell advertising and occasionally provide a useful service alongside this.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
We have incredible problems facing us such as Climate Change and decarbonisation seems like it will be a very difficult challenge. And yet we focus on banal “innovation” in frivolous things.
America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a corporation with nukes rather than a country with functional government.
I’m not sure when or how it happened, but Americans seem to have decided that everything has to be privately owned for profit, and making those private services into government services (health care for example) it’s “socialism” and people would rather pay 5x as much for less care than our European cousins get with their taxes by default.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
Yeah, those are examples of actually innovative private enterprise.
I don’t have a problem with it being the private sector. But the problem is making a Twitter clone or a slightly better version of MySpace is barely innovating and certainly isn’t going to significantly improve the world.
This may be better explained through the lens of different departments within mega corporations. Alphabet constantly changing their messaging platform is bullshit, but their aggregation and ui for viewing not just the entire world maps but creating timelapse views of the planet is quite innovative and just one of thousands of research projects going on under their umbrella. Meta creating yet-another messaging clone in Threads is bullshit, but the research and development in optics and other fields as part of their VR work is actually quite cutting edge. Outside of tech there are also massive research bodies working behind the scenes. The recent adoption of decades of work in mRNA is a huge leap forward in vaccine work, for example. Many large corporations have these internal groups pushing the bounds of physics, and the scale and specificity of research today is orders of magnitude beyond where we were in the early half of the previous century. As we look back at the turn of the next century, I expect there will be a laundry list of technological turning points which are credited to today’s companies which just aren’t apparent in the din of 24/7 news and information. OTOH, thanks to these mundane communications services, we no longer need just a couple of research centers and, instead, we benefit from a larger network of investigators scattered about the world.
Yeah, that is true. I haven’t tried VR yet but I remember the world before Google Maps and that was a dark time.
Yeah, printing directions off of mapquest was a lot of fun (or alternatively asking directions from someone who doesn’t understand cardinal directions)
Federation is a fresh idea in the social media realm. Not chronologically, obviously (sorry mastodon), but fresh in the sense that it has buzz and momentum now that it hasn’t really had before as a direct result of the “staleness” associated with data collection, advertising, and corporate greed by the big players. There are no fresh ideas from meta, Twitter, and tiktok because their goals are stale. Bluesky is very buzzworthy, and if they can build out and scale up fast enough they have a chance.
I know it’s the wrong focus but I couldn’t help imagining using the three buttons in the graphic. There should only be two buttons in the picture : “ctrl C” and “ctrl V”.
Meanwhile Apple: Introducing the revolutionary new iSpoon, complete with a 4K OLDED touch screen and a built-in Siri that tells you how to chow your cereal properly. Starting at the low price of
$1600$1099.99.But of course, don’t forget to buy the iBowl, iPlate, and iNapkin as well, because who needs an ordinary cutlery set when you can have everything in true Apple fashion.
(Disclaimer ⚠️: The iSpoon can only be used with the iBowl.)
Have they ever really had ideas in the first place? Content created by the users is the main reason why anybody goes to these sites, not because we’re wowed by their brilliant ideas. r/place is apparently the peak of Reddit’s fresh ideas and people are just using that to shit on Reddit’s CEO, but again, r/place is nothing without an army of people contributing (or writing up bots that contribute). For the most part, people tend to hate whatever ideas that Social Media companies come up with outside of the core functions (seeing other people’s content), look at how long old.reddit has hung around for because people absolutely could not stand Reddit’s ideas. Every “idea” that Social Media companies come up with are usually weirdly stupid and have some sort of ulterior motive behind it (almost always profit/cost-reductions).
tl;dr Social Media companies aren’t out of ideas, they just never had them in the first place.
Thank god. Maybe we can try to heal our society from the massive damage it’s done now.
So many of them are trying to copy other ones it seems.
No, big cooperate “social” Media did.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (written over 2 thousand years ago…)
