I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work.
Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.
The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use.
Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)
The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.
Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.
All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.
Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)
Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever.
I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance.
In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes.
Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.
My fear is that this will make the gap between newcomers and veterans so much bigger that the junior market will suffer more than ever before.
However, according to a few job openings in my area, "junior AI powered engineer" is actually a thing that some companies ask. Is it a good idea? I'd say no it's not. Do the managers who do the hiring while reading all the hype care? Definitely not the ones who ask for AI powered juniors.
Excel is the worlds most popular declarative programming language.
2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.
I call this ‘mass produced software’. I walk into a software shop, ask for software and get more or less what I need at barely acceptable quality just like at Walmart.
There’s no accountability in software, and in the tech industry people move jobs so fast they can simply blame the previous person and say they need to refactor the code to remove tech debt for a few years. Basically the three envelope situation.
I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.
Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.
The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P
Building a particular type of company - a tech startup.
I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
"Tech startups" that make enough money to be interesting [1], but do not have the property of being a winner-take-all market, are the truly magical unicorns of software. If you have one, you should covet it and guard it viciously, because otherwise someone with more money is coming to eat your lunch [2][3].
OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.
[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.
[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.
[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.
> I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity,"
Only if you ignore the costs of risk.
Let's say you hear that 90% of businesses are financial failures. What is the profit hurdle you need to exceed before you could declare success?
Zombie businesses (one person just earning a living) are common and often the income doesn't cover the risk premium (e.g. of one year of opportunity cost wages/ladder working as an employee). If you're doing a business, then in theory only the financial returns matter. There are non-financial returns (pride, control, yadda yadda) but those apply more to hobbies than businesses (not that I think anything is wrong with starting a hobby business if you're honest with yourself about motivations).
I think the VC rule of thumb is that one investment needs to do better than 30x return over 10 years to cover the losses on the rest of the portfolio. Therefore as an individual unless you get over 30x the return (versus lost wages) then you are under water? i.e. if you quit a $50k/yr job for a year, then only when you're earning $50k/yr AND have gained $1.5 million more then have you broke even.
Is the vet clinic thing a lasting phenomenon? Are independent vet clinics not economically viable or is there just a VC/PE market imbalance where capital is overbidding for a business that doesn't really have a great moat. I would be perfectly willing to believe that if you knock on the door of a perfectly viable business and offer them more than it's worth as well as a salaried position at the new business, (almost) no one says no.
I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business. If my vet leaves and opens a new practice, I will follow the person. Vet services don't really scale either, you can hit efficiencies with admin, but I'm sure a software company is willing to eat the PE firm's lunch there. With software, costs are heavily weighted to the fixed side. With vets, seeing twice the number of dogs takes twice the number of vet hours, vet tech hours, etc.
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a limit to how much you'll pay in order to follow your favorite vet, because veterinary services are a commodity, and your pet doesn't know the difference. So there's price pressure as well.
You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
As you’ve pointed out, people are price sensitive. One of the substantiated gripes of PE owned vets (and many other things) is that they are more expensive, not cheaper. Price pressure is working against your argument here, not for it.
That is what happens in the later stages of monopoly. In any case, my point wasn't about vet clinics, it was about the business financial properties that lead to monopoly. Even a business model as mundane as the local veterinary practice is undergoing industry-wide consolidation.
Any profitable software business is vastly more interesting for consolidation than a vet practice.
Right, but the nature of veterinary practice don’t lend themselves to monopoly, nor is the excess cash even close to artificially achieving that. This is just what you see in an irrational market as well. All this stops when PE won’t overbid on practices, or when the vet pay is low enough that it makes sense to open your own practice. Many forms of software do favor monopoly. Rolling up all of the gov tech startups has network effects in addition to being an industry that operates on large fixed costs and low variable costs.
Vets aren’t like that, one vet has a limit to the number of dogs they can see in a day. I think it is mostly PE trying to mimic their success with doctors offices (which have massive network effects via insurance), and assuming that it will work the same.
It is very hard to have any monopoly power in an industry where there is no barrier to entry for your most valuable employees, and where, as you pointed out, customers are sensitive to price.
Also increasingly discoverability. New customers must be able to find you. And how online advertising and SEO is going established player which has resources to waste will beat you.
Anecdotally, all of my friends across multiple friend groups found their vets via word of mouth. The only vet that I’ve visited that wasn’t word of mouth was an emergency vet (googled), although I later discovered that office was the one my vet recommended for after hours anyway.
In my area, the non corporate vets are turning new customers away and recommending other offices.
There's probably a middle ground here. Making a profit ASAP is only really possible if you're selling expertise, such as consulting. I really like the emerging term, "seed strapping" which aims to address this conundrum in the startup world: raise just enough to build the first iteration, then act like a bootstrapped business.
I didn't mention it in my original comment, but I enjoyed your article -- and agree that small, personal, purpose-built tools are having a moment in the age of LLM's. I like that application of AI.
In a way (as I understood it), what you're getting at is that not everything has to be a business. Businesses definitely do have to scale, but personal software doesn't.
It's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games.
There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.
But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.
And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."
Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.
It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.
I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.
I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.
I agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting.
On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
Anyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?
It would be one thing if the post was arguing for or against the substance of that essay, but it's really not -- it's about a different thing you can do, in a different context.
Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language
In a way this is how AI can help us return to doing things for interest, pleasure or creativity.
Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $.
I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.
I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.
> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
We have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand.
I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.
That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better.
>
> Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
>Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.
Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.
Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -
…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.
It depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Unless your family members are card carrying members of the Nazi party, "Nazi" is just a codeword for "disagree with them" just as "no respect for the rights and freedoms of others" is the same.
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.
By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
If someone votes for and cheers on the sending of specific ethnic groups to concentration camps, the removal of rights and freedoms for political opponents, and the advancement of authoritarianism, they are Nazis.
We are way beyond Godwin’s Law at this point and it’s time to recognize and acknowledge that fact.
I've never cut off a relative for their politics, but I've cut off relatives because they wouldn't shut up about their politics.
Talk to me about all the gardening you're doing after retirement, about your new motorcycle, about the fishing this year, hell talk to me about your favorite sports team. I'll listen and interact, even if I'm not particularly interested in those things. Tell me for the 500th time about how Biden was a commie and I'll just eat Thanksgiving with my in-laws.
Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).
That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."
Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.
Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.
I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.
That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.
I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
It's how people talk to groups of dozens of people at a time: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, the parents of your kid's school mates to discuss school stuff or to setup a birthday party… coworkers if you include more work oriented chat apps.
I have dozens of such groups, some with photos of kids around a birthday cake that I'd never have put up of Facebook (if I still used it).
If that's not social networking, I'm not sure what is.
Another reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.
And that's why the real name policies helped kill Facebook. The best way to section off your friends from family from work is a separate somewhat anonymous account for each.
You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.
The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)
I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.
So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”
True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.
I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.
I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.
My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")
The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.
Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.
Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."
> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.
N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.
I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.
(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)
Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.
As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.
And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.
(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)
---
Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!
Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
This is absolutely true and the reason I left a job in software consulting.
The future is asking an LLM to write anything for you. It will figure out the tech stack, hosting, integrations etc.
“I am looking for an alternative to Discord” is now “make me a Discord clone for my friends and I”.
Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc.
People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project
I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
Interesting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly).
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
Had a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.
Those are called jigs and they really separate the good from great woodworkers. Tamar from 3x3Custom is probably one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers because she's all about making and using jigs. Typically they are trying to eliminate manual measurements for repeatable parts.
I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
The cost-benefit analysis has changed. It's now easier to build something indulgently complex -- something of larger scale than a "side project" -- for just a few people.
> It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
Vibe coding isn’t going to net you horizontal scalability out of the box if you know nothing about scalable system architecture. These models have more examples of single node wonder codebases than they do for real world application of algorithms like Paxos or RAFT. That being said I let Claude Sonnet 4 eat my GHC premium creds a few weeks back to see if it could figure out multiraft in Go. The short answer is just no, without doing an entire refresher on where it went wrong.
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
This is a chord, this is another chord, this is a third chord.
Now start a band.
I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.
Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
I have a bunch of little projects that benefit me personally and professionally in a number of ways.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.
Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
Money maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
Aider (cli) and continue.dev (VS Code plugin) can both run with a local(net) Ollama. The qwen-coder models are pretty good and getting better; qwen3-coder is in the ballpark of Sonnet 3.5 for code-synthesis, albeit slower on my hardware.
For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try stuff like the DeepSeek models, which are known for being ultra-efficient and runnable with "normal" computers, if you don't mind the politics of using that (and there are many models now that are similar!) but I haven't tried too many more to be able to comment.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
I had pretty mixed experiences with the 20B version of GPT-OSS, sometimes that thing would just start looping in the thinking block and no sampler parameters would seem to do anything for specific questions.
That said Qwen3 and Qwen3 Coder are both pretty nice. Also ERNIE 4.5 if the benchmarks are to be trusted but I mostly run Ollama instead of vLLM now so can’t test it out atm (apparently llama.cpp added support for them recently though).
The models by Mistral might also be worth a look and personally I thought the EuroLLM project was also nice, but MoE models feel way more palatable on limited hardware.
Neither seem to be able to directly compete with Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, would need way better hardware to come close.
Hmm, well. So I need a 64GB MBP to run the AI tools, and another machine (likely running Linux) to run the system under development, since we're going all local. Well, doable.
Not sure why parent is being downvoted here. Even without getting into whether it's possible for technology to be apolitical, many AI companies have explicitly political goals.
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
Most businesses make enough money but not necessarily a lot of money. Slightly fewer make decent money. It's not that common for a business to make its founders "a lot" of money.
95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.
I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work.
Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.
The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use.
Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)
The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.
Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.
All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.
Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)
Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever.
I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance.
In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes.
Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.
My fear is that this will make the gap between newcomers and veterans so much bigger that the junior market will suffer more than ever before.
However, according to a few job openings in my area, "junior AI powered engineer" is actually a thing that some companies ask. Is it a good idea? I'd say no it's not. Do the managers who do the hiring while reading all the hype care? Definitely not the ones who ask for AI powered juniors.
Excel is the worlds most popular declarative programming language.
2 things I'd fix about it, remove default assuming certain things are dates, and adding a way to mark an area of a spreadsheet as a database table, so you can't sort only some of the columns.
Excel has tables (Insert > Table), which take care of your second point.
> Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code
I call this ‘mass produced software’. I walk into a software shop, ask for software and get more or less what I need at barely acceptable quality just like at Walmart.
Vibe coding? Perhaps it’s just shopping.
> Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial.
Not if you have to stake your career on them. AI takes no liability, it is all yours
There’s no accountability in software, and in the tech industry people move jobs so fast they can simply blame the previous person and say they need to refactor the code to remove tech debt for a few years. Basically the three envelope situation.
>Basically the three envelope situation.
https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
To be fair, some of that is the python:
https://xkcd.com/353/
I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.
Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.
The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P
I don't think they were trying to gatekeep. They were just saying that it shouldn't not be concluded to be because of llms
Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.
Building a particular type of company - a tech startup.
I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
"Tech startups" that make enough money to be interesting [1], but do not have the property of being a winner-take-all market, are the truly magical unicorns of software. If you have one, you should covet it and guard it viciously, because otherwise someone with more money is coming to eat your lunch [2][3].
OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.
[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.
[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.
[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.
> I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity,"
Only if you ignore the costs of risk.
Let's say you hear that 90% of businesses are financial failures. What is the profit hurdle you need to exceed before you could declare success?
Zombie businesses (one person just earning a living) are common and often the income doesn't cover the risk premium (e.g. of one year of opportunity cost wages/ladder working as an employee). If you're doing a business, then in theory only the financial returns matter. There are non-financial returns (pride, control, yadda yadda) but those apply more to hobbies than businesses (not that I think anything is wrong with starting a hobby business if you're honest with yourself about motivations).
I think the VC rule of thumb is that one investment needs to do better than 30x return over 10 years to cover the losses on the rest of the portfolio. Therefore as an individual unless you get over 30x the return (versus lost wages) then you are under water? i.e. if you quit a $50k/yr job for a year, then only when you're earning $50k/yr AND have gained $1.5 million more then have you broke even.
Is the vet clinic thing a lasting phenomenon? Are independent vet clinics not economically viable or is there just a VC/PE market imbalance where capital is overbidding for a business that doesn't really have a great moat. I would be perfectly willing to believe that if you knock on the door of a perfectly viable business and offer them more than it's worth as well as a salaried position at the new business, (almost) no one says no.
I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business. If my vet leaves and opens a new practice, I will follow the person. Vet services don't really scale either, you can hit efficiencies with admin, but I'm sure a software company is willing to eat the PE firm's lunch there. With software, costs are heavily weighted to the fixed side. With vets, seeing twice the number of dogs takes twice the number of vet hours, vet tech hours, etc.
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a limit to how much you'll pay in order to follow your favorite vet, because veterinary services are a commodity, and your pet doesn't know the difference. So there's price pressure as well.
You're right that vet clinics aren't like software in the variable cost structure, but that just makes the software business more attractive for consolidation, not less. Bigger players will have the customer relationship, lower fixed costs, and high margins, with little threat of competition.
As you’ve pointed out, people are price sensitive. One of the substantiated gripes of PE owned vets (and many other things) is that they are more expensive, not cheaper. Price pressure is working against your argument here, not for it.
That is what happens in the later stages of monopoly. In any case, my point wasn't about vet clinics, it was about the business financial properties that lead to monopoly. Even a business model as mundane as the local veterinary practice is undergoing industry-wide consolidation.
Any profitable software business is vastly more interesting for consolidation than a vet practice.
Right, but the nature of veterinary practice don’t lend themselves to monopoly, nor is the excess cash even close to artificially achieving that. This is just what you see in an irrational market as well. All this stops when PE won’t overbid on practices, or when the vet pay is low enough that it makes sense to open your own practice. Many forms of software do favor monopoly. Rolling up all of the gov tech startups has network effects in addition to being an industry that operates on large fixed costs and low variable costs.
Vets aren’t like that, one vet has a limit to the number of dogs they can see in a day. I think it is mostly PE trying to mimic their success with doctors offices (which have massive network effects via insurance), and assuming that it will work the same.
It is very hard to have any monopoly power in an industry where there is no barrier to entry for your most valuable employees, and where, as you pointed out, customers are sensitive to price.
Also increasingly discoverability. New customers must be able to find you. And how online advertising and SEO is going established player which has resources to waste will beat you.
Anecdotally, all of my friends across multiple friend groups found their vets via word of mouth. The only vet that I’ve visited that wasn’t word of mouth was an emergency vet (googled), although I later discovered that office was the one my vet recommended for after hours anyway.
In my area, the non corporate vets are turning new customers away and recommending other offices.
> I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business.
The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.
The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.
I’ve watched multiple vets do exactly that. I’ve seen vets in strip malls, converted houses, purpose built buildings, etc.
Why not?
It’s loosely regulated and people will follow their vet just as they’d follow their hairdresser, no?
There's probably a middle ground here. Making a profit ASAP is only really possible if you're selling expertise, such as consulting. I really like the emerging term, "seed strapping" which aims to address this conundrum in the startup world: raise just enough to build the first iteration, then act like a bootstrapped business.
Yep, totally — the OG advice was founder-focused. I just couldn’t resist twisting it a bit, because the line itself is too good not to repurpose.
I didn't mention it in my original comment, but I enjoyed your article -- and agree that small, personal, purpose-built tools are having a moment in the age of LLM's. I like that application of AI.
In a way (as I understood it), what you're getting at is that not everything has to be a business. Businesses definitely do have to scale, but personal software doesn't.
Yeah... i think that's pretty clear right from your title.
It's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on.
They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
"Startup" is often defined as "small company designed to grow quickly".
I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games.
There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.
But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.
And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."
Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.
It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
Is it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?
It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.
I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.
I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.
[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...
I agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.
It's like we have a 3D printer where before there was only injection molding.
This was my first thought as well -- even some of the examples in the post are pre-llm.
Than you probably never used ChatGPT for coding.
> There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.”
Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359
Haha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week
I agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting.
On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
The postcard app is gated by a verification queue. FWIW, so far no one has tried to sign up. Also there’s an address book so it’s not just for mom :-)
It's definitely the first result on Google and sort of ruins any credibility of the article.
Anyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?
Because when you quote someone, you should credit them. It's not believable that they don't know the source of the quote because it's trivial to find.
It would be one thing if the post was arguing for or against the substance of that essay, but it's really not -- it's about a different thing you can do, in a different context.
An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Reminds me of Maciej Ceglowski’s seminal “Barely Succeed: It’s Easier”
https://youtu.be/5Vt8zqhHe_c?si=Etv3Gz5f0bfAw6gM
I feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.
It'll last until you lose interest or die. Shrug emoji.
Also making it easy to host and maintain. The more custom or esoteric libraries, the better.
If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.
In a way this is how AI can help us return to doing things for interest, pleasure or creativity.
Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $.
I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.
I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.
Check out the book "Small Giants, companies that choose to be great not big"
It's crazy that medium.com has an SSR hydration issue that just goes unfixed for years.
We can vibe code crazy stuff and this still a problem? I guess our job is safe :)
> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups
I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.
Why does this happen? How is it economical?
Automated attacks, running on botnets or other breached servers.
Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.
Put a challenge in. A shitty hidden field honeytrap challenge can massively reduce this without needing to present people with a puzzle.
It's economical because the compute and bandwidth come from devices infected with malware.
They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.
Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
We have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand.
I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.
That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small.
I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.
When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
> I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins
I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.
Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.
This goes both ways (old to young and reverse), but family goes before politics. You don't cut out, or disown, or stop visiting, or badmouth family because you disagree with their politics...
If you do so, you were a shitty relative to begin with.
AFAIK, you cut off shitty relatives…
…and you usually find out they’re shitty because of how they handle (or don’t) “political” conversations.
Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
>Pro tip: You don’t get to decide for someone else what’s “just” politics. If someone else says it’s important, while you’re interacting with them, it’s important.
It's rarely, if ever, important to any concerned party's day to day life. It's bullshit partisanship instilled into idiotic brains by the media and social media.
Just because they say it's important, doesn't make it so.
Eh. While that might be true in the course of say, governance - where IMO it’s important and worthwhile to use scientific methodology (statistics, etc) to establish “importance” -
…your family around the notional holiday dinner table? The personal is what’s important, kinda by definition. The point is the subjective and emotional.
It depends, if the political take is sufficiently shitty it’s a betrayal of your morals, friends etc to continue to associate with your family spouting it.
Typically that has to be some extreme form of bigotry people won’t let go of after repeated coaching. Extreme bigotry or conspiracy thinking is arguably a form of abuse directed at other family members and it’s 100% ok to cut people off for being abusive.
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Unless your family members are card carrying members of the Nazi party, "Nazi" is just a codeword for "disagree with them" just as "no respect for the rights and freedoms of others" is the same.
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.
By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
Sorry, but absolutely the fuck not.
If someone votes for and cheers on the sending of specific ethnic groups to concentration camps, the removal of rights and freedoms for political opponents, and the advancement of authoritarianism, they are Nazis.
We are way beyond Godwin’s Law at this point and it’s time to recognize and acknowledge that fact.
I've never cut off a relative for their politics, but I've cut off relatives because they wouldn't shut up about their politics.
Talk to me about all the gardening you're doing after retirement, about your new motorcycle, about the fishing this year, hell talk to me about your favorite sports team. I'll listen and interact, even if I'm not particularly interested in those things. Tell me for the 500th time about how Biden was a commie and I'll just eat Thanksgiving with my in-laws.
Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?
What if you’re dating a person of another race, and your relatives support keeps making racist comments to you, even after you try to explain why that’s not okay?
>Where does it stop? What if your relatives support, eg, racist policies? What if they support genocide? How personal does it have to be?
Unless they act on them, they can support anything they like, it means less than them supporting some team or MCU fandom
What? Your relative Being a racist is less important to you than them supporting the opposing team?
What a stupid reason to cut off your child - so late in life too.
That’s how bad things have gotten, and a lot of it is because it’s profitable to fan the flames of rancor.
I don’t see it improving. I think there was a post, a couple of days ago, where some folks concluded that social media is unfixable.
“Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
https://youtu.be/aCbfMkh940Q
TIL Kendrick Lamar has a HN (/s)
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."
Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..
Excellent point. Plus and Wave were ahead of their time.
It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.
IG and others have similar functionality nowadays at least.
Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.
> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.
Then it wasn't a good feature.
The point is that we weren't looking for social media, so killer SNS features didn't matter. It was a better mousetrap for a market that's deep down motivated by mashed potatoes.
This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.
Wonderware has an automatic I/O assignment feature that - if you follow some basic rules on naming things - sets up all your data sources for you automatically. It cuts out maybe a quarter of your development time.
I don't use it because I mostly automate fuel farms, and I do that by taking a blank fuel farm config we created and customize it for a particular site. We have scripting in place to assign data sources that work with a standardized set of PLC data structures that we've written. Most Wonderware installs are one-offs that start with a blank slate, so our use case is unusual.
That doesn't make auto-assignment a bad feature. It just means it's not the best fit for me. Likewise, Google Circles was a good feature that I never used because I only ever knew one other person who used Google Plus.
I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.
Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.
And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.
I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.
Google's Circles is a classical example of something that seems like a great idea on paper but doesn't work in practice. It had too much friction: categorizing people by circles and then also deciding which circle should receive what. Apparently nobody liked it and it's one of the reasons Plus failed so spectacularly.
No, it didn't fail.
Circles is group chats (WhatsApp, or whatever's popular in your neck of the woods), which I'd argue is how (most?) people in 2025 actually do “social networking.”
Instagram/TikTok/Xitter is… something else entirely.
Chat programs are not social networking.
They absolutely are. Maybe less so in the USA, but they have replaced Facebook for many (most?) people in the subcontinent, Africa, and south america
Exactly. Europe too.
It's how people talk to groups of dozens of people at a time: friends, neighbors, acquaintances, the parents of your kid's school mates to discuss school stuff or to setup a birthday party… coworkers if you include more work oriented chat apps.
I have dozens of such groups, some with photos of kids around a birthday cake that I'd never have put up of Facebook (if I still used it).
If that's not social networking, I'm not sure what is.
The main reason I didn't use is because the UI sucked so much.
Another reason was asymmetric friendships. Meaning Alice could add Bob to a circle without Bob adding Alice back. Made it so much harder for the network effect to kick in.
FWIW IG now has a similar feature. I don't use it but alas...
And yet for certain communities - like TTRPGs - it not only worked incredibly well but were still unlocking the effects of its loss.
You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.
I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.
People hated it because Google for some reason decided to force it into YouTube by forcing you to link your YouTube account to your G+ account. Remember that stick figure tank guy that was plastered over every comment section?
I believe that’s mostly what killed Google Plus. People were introduced to it in the worst way possible, so nobody actually cared to try it out, even if it was technically a good product.
This was also introduced in the same moment as a bunch of real name initiatives from multiple companies. People were rejecting it based on what it demanded compared to what was offered. It also killed or force reworked other Google products that were working fine to end users (e.g. Google Talk).
In my eyes it was one of the key moments that put them on a downward trajectory in public opinion. So while it might have had the right features the rest of the deal sucked, and people were already tiring of social media overall.
I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...
Reminder for everyone to donate to your favorite station (eg SomaFM).
Google Plus correctly identified a major problem.
Unfortunately the solution that works for most people is to have multiple identities on multiple social media sites. So FB with one circle, work relationships on Slack, several channels on Discord, a group of friends on Instagram, a couple of groups on What's App, some mobile game friends on Line...
That's a really good point that I haven't seen made before. Even with apps/networks that are ostensibly pretty similar, like Slack and Discord both offering channel-based text chat, real-time audio calls with screen sharing, and the ability to join multiple servers/organizations, the people I hang out with and the type of things I talk about with them on Slack versus Discord are very different. I've never worked at a place that used Discord for their work communications, and I've never had a group of people I gamed with who use Slack to coordinate and talk while playing. While there's potentially a bit of friction if I happen to want to start gaming with a friend from work or something like that, I'd honestly still want to use separate accounts for my personal life and work stuff even if the same app was used everywhere, so having everything in a single place just doesn't feel like it matters.
And that's why the real name policies helped kill Facebook. The best way to section off your friends from family from work is a separate somewhat anonymous account for each.
I wish Google didn’t give up up everything they try. Google plus was cool.
You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.
The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)
I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").
15 years later, we've reinvented Path: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)
> Path was a social networking-enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices that was launched on 14 November 2010. The service allowed users to share up to a total of 50 contacts with their close friends and family.
1,000 is way too many. Low hundreds max.
At some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete.
Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.
Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.
Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.
This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.
Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.
There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.
https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php
comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters
This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.
You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).
Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale
Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.
Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p
At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)
SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.
I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.
The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.
Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.
The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)
Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.
In real-world terms:
• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.
• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.
• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.
• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.
Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)
• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)
• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.
Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)
It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.
So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”
True, but – at least for the networks born in the "organic era" — I don't think the shift to algorithmic curation is a causal factor for the disappearance of organic traffic on these networks.
I think, for these older networks that had an "organic era", it's the reverse: the falloff was due to the space becoming a dark forest for organic interactions; and then a curated global engagement sphere was implemented to fill the void / decrease user churn.
I know this was true at least for Facebook. I recall a clear 5+-year gap, after a lot of the original FB core demographic had already left, but before FB adjusted its recommendation engine, where FB was just... a ghost town.
My impression of this gap time, was that back in the "organic era", FB had implemented some sort of damping, ensuring that posts by commercial posters got "promoted" to only a small fraction of that poster's subscribers, and preventing multiple posts from the same commercial poster from making it to the same user's feed at once. (Presumably to prevent something they saw as "advertising" from overwhelming the organic posts they considered the user to be "there to see.")
The gap ended once they shut off this now-vestigial damping, and opened the floodgates to commercial posts showing up in feeds, being shared to non-subscribers the same way organic posts could be, etc.
Other social networks seemed to "follow the trend" on both counts — previously having tuning parameters in their algorithm to protect users from commercial posters flooding their feeds; and then later suddenly "opening the floodgates" in response to organic engagement decline. But (IIRC, correct me if I'm wrong) they didn't all do it at once; each network changed only at the point that that network needed to change to retain metrics in the face of declining organic participation.
Networks like Tiktok, meanwhile, that were born entirely after this sea-change among networks, just let brands into users' FYPs from the start. That was half the point.
You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:
“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”
> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."
> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.
N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.
I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.
(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)
Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.
As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.
And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.
(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)
---
Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!
It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").
Not the response I expected. You've misunderstood a well known hypothesis and are spreading misinformation.
And then doubling down.
Well, what else can one expect from HN. :)
No, the one who misunderstood a well known hypothesis and is spreading misinformation is none other than you.
And then you accuse others of exactly that... To quote someone: Well, what else can one expect from HN. :)
(Well, TBH, I'd have expected better. But I'm obviously getting old and falling behind the times.)
The best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.
Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.
For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.
The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.
I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.
There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.
This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too."
—xkcd 1320
Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.
Ha ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.
This is absolutely true and the reason I left a job in software consulting. The future is asking an LLM to write anything for you. It will figure out the tech stack, hosting, integrations etc. “I am looking for an alternative to Discord” is now “make me a Discord clone for my friends and I”.
Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc.
People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project
I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.
Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
Interesting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly).
I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.
I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.
I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
Had a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.
Interesting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling.
Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.
The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
Making tools to make the tools is the real devops.
CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
Those are called jigs and they really separate the good from great woodworkers. Tamar from 3x3Custom is probably one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers because she's all about making and using jigs. Typically they are trying to eliminate manual measurements for repeatable parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng
I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.
In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.
Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
Nitpick, but having side projects you don’t plan to scale isn’t anything unique to the AI era
The cost-benefit analysis has changed. It's now easier to build something indulgently complex -- something of larger scale than a "side project" -- for just a few people.
> It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom.
Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
There are a few but I use directmailers.com!
If you search “physical mail API”, I see several options. The first one that I saw charged $1 per letter.
But what if everything scales but what if no matter how complicated how obscure how mundane how niche what if everything I mean everything scales
Everything I mean everything doesn't scale.
Open source your apps so other people can use it and host it on their own if they want.
Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
Lol I agree. But I was thinking by "dont scale" to scratch my itch and never release it. That is more worthwhile now.
I find running a company over 50 people not nice. We had a few 1000 and it just really sucks imho.
I think this is precisely right. Like 100% correct. No notes. Exactly nails it.
This reads like a LinkedIn post
Vibe coding isn’t going to net you horizontal scalability out of the box if you know nothing about scalable system architecture. These models have more examples of single node wonder codebases than they do for real world application of algorithms like Paxos or RAFT. That being said I let Claude Sonnet 4 eat my GHC premium creds a few weeks back to see if it could figure out multiraft in Go. The short answer is just no, without doing an entire refresher on where it went wrong.
It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
This is a chord, this is another chord, this is a third chord.
Now start a band.
I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.
Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
You realize that as the amount of people vibe-coding goes up, the “quality” of the data llms are trained on are going to drop.
>"A few strangers from the Orange Site signed up"
Is that us?
Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
Guess it better scale then :-)
If I was a successful billionaire, and I didn’t want any competition, I would tell all the young smart people to go play in a different field
I have a bunch of little projects that benefit me personally and professionally in a number of ways.
I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.
Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.
To each their own I guess.
> Growth would make it worse, not better.
Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
Only in theory. Most times none of those stakeholders get anything but wages and recognition.
What do you mean by anything?
Money maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.
Was scaling ever the point?
Hi
> The cost to build is so low now.
The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
Yes – but when people say "AI", most often they are talking about the latest OpenAI/Claude development.
Todays open models are the latest OpenAI/Claude X months ago.
Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?
Aider (cli) and continue.dev (VS Code plugin) can both run with a local(net) Ollama. The qwen-coder models are pretty good and getting better; qwen3-coder is in the ballpark of Sonnet 3.5 for code-synthesis, albeit slower on my hardware.
For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try stuff like the DeepSeek models, which are known for being ultra-efficient and runnable with "normal" computers, if you don't mind the politics of using that (and there are many models now that are similar!) but I haven't tried too many more to be able to comment.
On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.
I had pretty mixed experiences with the 20B version of GPT-OSS, sometimes that thing would just start looping in the thinking block and no sampler parameters would seem to do anything for specific questions.
That said Qwen3 and Qwen3 Coder are both pretty nice. Also ERNIE 4.5 if the benchmarks are to be trusted but I mostly run Ollama instead of vLLM now so can’t test it out atm (apparently llama.cpp added support for them recently though).
The models by Mistral might also be worth a look and personally I thought the EuroLLM project was also nice, but MoE models feel way more palatable on limited hardware.
Neither seem to be able to directly compete with Sonnet 4 or Gemini 2.5 Pro, would need way better hardware to come close.
Hmm, well. So I need a 64GB MBP to run the AI tools, and another machine (likely running Linux) to run the system under development, since we're going all local. Well, doable.
>if you don't mind the politics of using that
what exactly are the "politics" of using DeepSeek? Feels weird to single out DeepSeek like that
Using anything Chinese is political while using anything American or European is obviously totally apolitical?
Of course!
Not sure why parent is being downvoted here. Even without getting into whether it's possible for technology to be apolitical, many AI companies have explicitly political goals.
For example, OpenAI's charter is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity". They go on to list more specific political goals downstream from that: https://openai.com/charter/
And you believe them?
That's neither here nor there. The point is that it's expressly political, so using ChatGPT is every bit as political as using DeepSeek.
Aider!
+1 Aider, first time I used it I knew I was looking into the future
I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.
6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.
It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.
Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.
A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
Most businesses make enough money but not necessarily a lot of money. Slightly fewer make decent money. It's not that common for a business to make its founders "a lot" of money.
95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.