It's the issue most trending tech has, where the majority of people trying to make use of it are grifters desperate for a quick buck rather than those who have problems that actually need solving.

And that's not even getting into the content part, where the stuff you want is probably on like 15 different services and you're either gonna pay through the nose for something you barely need or you'll have to miss a whole bunch of things because it's less of a hassle that way.

Yeah, it's a lot easier when almost everything can be found on a couple of sites for free, where you don't need an account to view most videos and where everything is about as predictable as it can be.

The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.

So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.

Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.

Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.

The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.

And even without the whole social media thing, we see an alarming trend where 'issues' seen as controversial in the US end up becoming controversies in other countries too, even if they're basically irrelevant on a cultural level/were perfectly fine for years or decades beforehand.

Add this to political figures from these parties being seen with their US counterparts on a fairly regular basis, and it generally feels like world politics is quickly becoming Americanised.

Unless your product or service is aimed at other founders, or a techie focused audience in general, that's not where your customers are. Advertising there is like a game developer marketing their game to other devs or a writer marketing their book towards other writers.

What you really want to do is figure out who your audience actually is, figure out where they hang out online, and promote it there. Niche specific forums, subreddits, Discord servers, social media communities, etc.

That said, there's no real harm in advertising in these places, and other founders can give you useful feedback.

What it's like seeing some random seemingly unlisted/unedited clip you posted suddenly get thousands or millions of views from random people online?

And that can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ideas put forward by successful companies and business people (like many from Apple or Google or Nintendo or whatever else) would never get off the ground if put forward by a random individual or company, and that risk taking gets us results that make the world better off.

At the same time though, there are a lot of successful people and companies that get hung up on 'bad' ideas that should have been shot down earlier. Like ex Nobel Prize winners that get into psudeoscience or grand overarching theories of everything, popular artists and creators that get away with shaky writing and uninteresting story concepts (George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels, JK Rowling after Harry Potter, etc) or any number of celebrities and politicians completely detached from reality.

So, there is a flipside to the article. Yeah, success can make you less likely to try stupid things because of your ego, but it can equally make you more likely to try them since your status gives you extra credibility and there's often no one there to tell you no.

For example, someone with a very entrepreneurial mindset is probably going to want to be born in the US, and ideally close to a city like New York or San Francisco. You can certainly make it as a founder in Europe or Asia or Australia or what not, but it's a lot easier to get the funding needed to become a household name in the former, since (at least for a while) there were companies and investors willing to throw a ton of cash at crazy ideas rather than a moderate amount at proven businesses.

Similarly, if you're particularly interested in a certain industry, you'll ideally want to be born in a country where said industry has a decent foothold. Video game developers are all over the world, but it's hard to deny your odds are probably better in that industry if you're American or Japanese.

I see all these example emails and such and my first thought is "oh, so how many of my relatives write emails and text messages then".

It reminds me of the whole "scammers use bad English to find easy marks" concept. Yeah, maybe some do. But again, it feels like people giving them way too much credit for what could easily have been an accidental situation.

Like, you suck at writing English because it's not your first language and you've got no professional reason to do so, and try scamming someone on the other side of the world with those skills. If the recipent is smart or internet savvy, they'll ignore your message. If they're not smart/are overly greedy/aren't internet savvy in general they'll fall for it.

So, why would you try and improve your English skills in that situation? As far as you know, they're good enough to get you money from gullible folks elsewhere. You're succeeding at what you want to suceed at, so you don't really think twice about it.

You can certainly try and find some psychology related reason behind every random disrepetency and questionable decision, or assume that people are often pretty dumb and do pretty dumb things, and that they won't stop doing those things unless they've given a reason to.

The challenge is that in most of these cases, success is based on trust and long-term reputation building rather than pure technical skill. And doing a good job in either industry requires a lot more time, resources and effort than a single person may be able to provide.

So, while I could definitely spin up some very similar sites, creating the actual content at a level of quality that people would even bother to read would be a chore, as would finding an audience in general.

Even if you manage to ignore the ethics issues and controversy, AI generated assets have the issue that they can be difficult to work with for a game developer, since these tools don't really make it easy to keep everything consistent across a game with thousands of resources. For example, if you made a 2D platformer with a pixel art aesthetic, AI generated graphics probably wouldn't work that well there. They'd look generic, show various signs of bad pixel art practices that would make them stand out as unnatural, likely not match the style for other assets in the game, be difficult to modify while keeping the same look and feel, etc.

Creating one piece of artwork with generative AI (as ethically dubious/controversial as it is) is 'manageable', since you don't need to care much about stylistic consistency, edits, etc. Creating all the assets needed for a game with such a tool sounds like a nightmare.

1. There's a lot of competition in many elite fields, and a decent percentage in both groups aren't going to make it anyway.

2. Being good at something as a child doesn't mean that's your passion or the thing you want to devote your life to. Plenty of these prodigies may want to get into different fields they're not naturally gifted at instead.

3. Being really good at something as a kid can make it hard to learn the discipline needed to stay on top when things get tougher. I'm not a prodigy, but many of the things I did well at in school/college are things I did worse than expected at in unversity, since I wasn't motivated/disciplined enough to get everything done on time.

4. Some fields require physical capabilities that a child prodigy may not grow up to have, like certain sports.

But even when a company gave me a 'free' computer to do work on, they never really locked it down that much. We could still install programs and browser extensions and visit just about any site we wanted, and network security was basically non-existent. We didn't usually need a VPN to access our email or workspace, and much of the time they let us access work email on our phones or personal devices like it was any other account.

This was when I was working for two large organisations, one media company and one fintech one.

Because over here in the UK, every shop I've seen that sells soft drinks sells both brands at the same time. Probably alongside a bunch of others.

Then again, the branded coolers seem to be more of a thing in restaurants and takeaways rather than shops.

Unfortunately, a lot of niche communities have decided to stick to developing for Windows machines no matter what (especially game development and modding ones), so using Linux isn't that practical about now.

The system needs to be way more even when it comes to dealing with individuals and companies of every size possible.

So many times I've needed simplify the data provided by an embed code or share link for some reason (usually a third party integration or API development), only to have found the site forcefully making me select way more than I ever needed to. It doesn't really change anything in the long run (since you can just copy it into any other text editor and get what you need there), but it's still an annoying extra step that shouldn't be needed nonetheless.

On the one hand, it's pretty clear that whatever moderation is being done on app stores like the App Store or Play Store is clearly not enough to handle the scams and frauds and fake apps found there. That apps that encourage illegal actions or blatantly infringe on others' IP rights are being waved right through by an apathetic and broken moderation process that seems more like an ineffectual box ticking exercise.

In that sense, "we're too big to care about the law" seems to be the order of the day for these companies, especially where app stores and advertisers are concerned.

At the same time though, I can't help but worry about the implications, since a fair amount of what they 'allow' is really just being allowed because it's best for the users and their freedom to use these systems. Yes there are dodgy search results, but that's because Google isn't manually approving every site that wants to be listed there. Yes things like malware exist, but that's a cost associated with the user being able to run whatever programs they want on their machine.

My worry is that their apathy towards issues that make them money (scam ads, scam apps on app stores, unmoderated marketplaces, etc) is also going to lead to them being required to turn all their services into walled gardens that kill user choice for 'safety'.

The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.

Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.

But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.