Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43250000

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Every scaled up platforms then gets trapped into collecting/selling personal data and flooding the field with Ads (and obviously in these ad auctions the 10% can outbid the majority so Ad prices keep rising).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239249

Points: 354

# Comments: 585

Big salaries thrown at young people are bait. They don't need wild animals, but circus animals that are obedient, dependent and consistently perform tricks without too much thinking about why. Over time this involves such animals to loose all sense of self. Naturally this won't work on everyone and causes all kinds issues for both sides.

The first time I was shown a case study of Amul (cooperative model of food production), it was a really eye opening moment, cause they had reached massive scale, profitable, invested in quality/innovation, really super creative (on the marketing side without any great budget) and most importantly Sustainable.

Like me if you have studied Dominoes, KFC and McDonalds this is not supposed to be possible. It shows how constraints in the local environment lead to innovation and totally different models that work.

Anyone getting thrown into the deep end of the Indian market, equipped with Western models are quickly confronted by assumptions that don't hold, and then they come up with stuff we don't see in the west.

Just look at their Dabbawalas (decentralized supply-chains/logistics), UPI (disintermediating Mastercard and Visa), IPL (no one thought cricket could compete when literally less than 10 countries playing the sport) etc

Western companies built their scalable models by optimizing for capital-heavy, consumption-driven economiess, but that doesn’t mean those models are the only viable ones. India (and other low-consumption economies) often find more sustainable ways to solve the same problems because there’s no safety net of endless VC funding, mass credit, or impulse spending to prop things up. Most Western companies operate in winner-takes-all mode (Amazon crushes small retailers, Uber kills taxis). But Indian models like UPI, Amul, Kirana networks show models of growth in a more cooperative manner.

Imho the world needs more Amuls than McDonalds.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43169230

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

In the Attention Economy, that social media platforms create, he knows how to capture Attention. The question is not Elon but about why we tolerate these platforms that prop up people like Elon or what the alternatives are.

Michael Goldharber pointed out at the dawn of the Internet => info explodes but Attention does not + ppl have a limited capacity to pay attention but unlimited capacity to receive attention.

The truth is Everyone needs a bit of Attention (it is a source of self esteem), that's why sites like HN work because people feel they are seen or heard even if its one upvote.

But then there are Elon and Trump types who are born with a need to be loved and respected by everyone. Plant them in the social media environment, where attention capture is rewarded, and is the main source of profit for the platforms, and we get the abnormal fruits we sow.

This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/

But either way Govt is not magic. It has to react to a very complex uncontrollable ever changing reality. There will be oscillations between periods of calm and chaos.

Limits that in the past 2 decades (of scaling) the people who built these Platforms didn't have to think about. Now they do. And they are coming under serious pressure because they have built out more Supply than there is Demand.

For example, we got the explosive growth of Netflix. Everyone sees that and piles into streaming. When growth slows in one country they immediately move into another and they keep growing until they run out of countries to expand into. So Netflix has been in India (a country advertised as having zillions of consumers) for nearly 10 years now but they haven't found more than 25 million paying subscribers. Learning takes time. And everyone is learning there are limits to growth based purely on the online model.

There is no magic obvious path for countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea or Taiwan as the influence of US, over everything they did in the last 70 years recedes. It will take time to work out. In the meantime thousands of articles will be written about how they don't know what they are doing and that what they should do is obvious. All worth throwing in a dustbin.