Destructive Tightening

Less weird, less new, repeat

I agree with this, I’m trying to figure out why it actually happened, and if it’s fixable.

The valley is currently filled with people who are not “here for the tech”. It’s a cause of growing frustration for me recently, probably because we’re expanding our team, and gaining more and more traction. Consistently looking for people who want to build cool shit for cool shits sake, not because we’ll be successful. That’s the only way the long hours are going to be worth it. And it just takes a fuckload of hours to get there.

When I was growing up I spent a lot of time on forums. Basically every waking minute I could. ThisGameSux, ModRetro, and a few more. I was locked into how to write aimbots, or slim down an N64 board. Somewhere between then and now everything got a bit more commoditized.

Which isn’t bad, like, at all. It’s good to make money. But when it starts becoming a repeatable process, that process gets repeated. And with each repetition, the “sharp edges” get just a bit smoothed off. In the olden days, half the PHPmyadmin endpoints were exposed and default credentials. You could slip through the crevices and end up somewhere cool.

There are no crevices in an iPad. It’s perfectly polished.

If I had to guess why, It’d like to suppose the following:

The hyper competitiveness has created an environment where it’s artificially non-permissible to do anything other than <fastest thing that will make you successful>. There is essentially zero margin of error, and no space to “be weird”

The system is much more polished, so people can’t jump into the cracks. Not only are there less cracks because things are more polished, there’s less time to fuck around when you have to get extracurriculars to get into Stanford to get into YC to make it big before 22 or you’re a failure.

Forums themselves are a dying breed, so this shit is locked behind a paywall somewhere, and kids don’t have credit cards.

And focus is getting totally rekt for everyone because of the ads economy/TikTok/etc.

It’s probably why SF just feels like a monocultural blob of 25 year olds shifting from crypto, to AI, and back again.

Being weird comes from being focused on the unusual, and both of those are a dying breed.

I don’t know how to fix that.