> Should we think 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers on a daily basis (I mean the software we write, not our comments, hehe) are good things?
In the world I want to live in, would 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers, software, comments, and everythign else be good things? Sure. So in that sense, yes, they should be. Are they? Definitely not.
Is Facebook good? It definitely meets a market need; but what's the social implication of confining discourse into the channels it does? What will the generation raised on the 'like' button be like? How has social media affected journalism -- would people use phones to share linkbait about 10 Things You'd Never Believe We Found in Justin Bieber's Trash?
Snapchat is definitely a good thing. It's single-purpose enough that it doesn't replace anything else, but it add something to the toolkit of how people can communicate. It also brought the concept of ephemerality back to digital communication, which I think is invaluable. You might disagree about that, but it's definitely significant in the way that Call Me Maybe isn't.
I disagree that the idea behind pop music is to make people happier. The idea behind pop music is to make money. Sometimes these values align, and other times they don't. I've never met someone deeply fulfilled on a personal or spiritual level from playing Candy Crush; I've never seen anyone moved to tears by an N*SYNC song.
Assuming that people who make pop music are trying to make people's lives a little more bearable, I definitely think they could do a lot better. This guy is probably incredibly musically gifted, and what is he doing? Writing crap that nobody will remember to make a few bucks, in exactly the same way the greatest minds of our generation are using fantastic computing power and computing over insane amounts of data, thinking faster and deeper than any human ever could, to get people to click ads.
I think he could do better. I wish we lived in a world where he could.
I agree with everything you said, and you said what you said far better than I said what I said, so my hat comes off to you (then goes back on or my ears will get cold, this is Montana).
I would point out that, in a capitalist system, nothing is produced to make people happy, everything is produced for profit (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/adamsmith136391.h...). And that is really what I was trying to get across, pop music may be crap, but it is what is profitable, to the extent that people want to buy it (presumably because it somehow makes them happy). People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and a bunch of people building social networks and ad-targeting systems live in very fragile glass houses...
In the world I want to live in, would 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers, software, comments, and everythign else be good things? Sure. So in that sense, yes, they should be. Are they? Definitely not.
Is Facebook good? It definitely meets a market need; but what's the social implication of confining discourse into the channels it does? What will the generation raised on the 'like' button be like? How has social media affected journalism -- would people use phones to share linkbait about 10 Things You'd Never Believe We Found in Justin Bieber's Trash?
Snapchat is definitely a good thing. It's single-purpose enough that it doesn't replace anything else, but it add something to the toolkit of how people can communicate. It also brought the concept of ephemerality back to digital communication, which I think is invaluable. You might disagree about that, but it's definitely significant in the way that Call Me Maybe isn't.
I disagree that the idea behind pop music is to make people happier. The idea behind pop music is to make money. Sometimes these values align, and other times they don't. I've never met someone deeply fulfilled on a personal or spiritual level from playing Candy Crush; I've never seen anyone moved to tears by an N*SYNC song.
Assuming that people who make pop music are trying to make people's lives a little more bearable, I definitely think they could do a lot better. This guy is probably incredibly musically gifted, and what is he doing? Writing crap that nobody will remember to make a few bucks, in exactly the same way the greatest minds of our generation are using fantastic computing power and computing over insane amounts of data, thinking faster and deeper than any human ever could, to get people to click ads.
I think he could do better. I wish we lived in a world where he could.