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    Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

    (www.nytimes.com)
    388 points pseudolus | 22 comments | 25 Mar 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.801s | source | bottom
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    Bukhmanizer ◴[26 Mar 25 19:14 UTC] No.43485838[source]▶
    I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
    replies(21): >>43486104 #>>43486264 #>>43486456 #>>43487649 #>>43487671 #>>43488414 #>>43488436 #>>43488988 #>>43489201 #>>43489228 #>>43489488 #>>43489997 #>>43490451 #>>43490843 #>>43491273 #>>43491336 #>>43491568 #>>43491660 #>>43492193 #>>43492499 #>>43493656 #
    prisenco ◴[26 Mar 25 21:37 UTC] No.43487649[source]▶
    The AI takeover of the startup space makes me feel a bit crazy because there are still thousands of world-changing app ideas that have zero to do with AI but nobody's funding or building them.

    We can't possibly have run out of consumer app ideas in a decade or two, right?

    replies(5): >>43487720 #>>43487813 #>>43488156 #>>43488730 #>>43488981 #
    1. morkalork ◴[26 Mar 25 21:43 UTC] No.43487720[source]▶
    It feels like we ran out in the first decade since the iPhone (2007-2017) and have been running on fumes since. Can you name some world changing consumer app or company outside of AI fluff that came to be in that post 2017 to end of 2022 period when chatgpt was released?
    replies(5): >>43487923 #>>43488038 #>>43488113 #>>43488422 #>>43488518 #
    2. AbstractH24 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:02 UTC] No.43487923[source]▶
    Slack, Zoom, TikTok

    And those are just off the top of my head

    replies(2): >>43487987 #>>43488035 #
    3. robenkleene ◴[26 Mar 25 22:07 UTC] No.43487987[source]▶
    Those all predate 2017:

    - Slack: 2013

    - Zoom: 2011

    - TikTok: 2016

    Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.

    4. singpolyma3 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:12 UTC] No.43488035[source]▶
    Neither slack nor zoom did anything new or interesting. Just a clone of stable tech that worked out in marketing
    replies(2): >>43488108 #>>43488268 #
    5. KoolKat23 ◴[26 Mar 25 22:12 UTC] No.43488038[source]▶
    Sad to say: Tiktok, Only Fans, Discord
    replies(2): >>43488134 #>>43488253 #
    6. baby_souffle ◴[26 Mar 25 22:19 UTC] No.43488108{3}[source]▶
    Maybe they didn't have innovative functionality initially but the user experience was certainly better.

    Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together convenient apis on top of IRC...

    replies(1): >>43488701 #
    7. quantified ◴[26 Mar 25 22:20 UTC] No.43488113[source]▶
    Tiktok was released in its current form in 2017, I believe. Is that before the period you're asking about?
    8. morkalork ◴[26 Mar 25 22:22 UTC] No.43488134[source]▶
    According to Wikipedia, Discord is 2015, Only Fans and TikTok are 2016.

    I'm as surprised as you are, I'd like to be proven wrong here!

    9. forgetfreeman ◴[26 Mar 25 22:35 UTC] No.43488253[source]▶
    But these are all marketing wins. The underlying technology (let people post shit and talk to one another) had been stable for like a decade before they came along.
    replies(2): >>43488462 #>>43488565 #
    10. zombiwoof ◴[26 Mar 25 22:36 UTC] No.43488268{3}[source]▶
    Slack was skype
    replies(1): >>43512883 #
    11. pedalpete ◴[26 Mar 25 22:55 UTC] No.43488422[source]▶
    I think this is the cycle. Take a look at the S curve, things move in jumps with leveling out/adaption periods in between.
    12. daedrdev ◴[26 Mar 25 23:00 UTC] No.43488462{3}[source]▶
    No, they are product development wins. Discord is far more popular than alternatives because they provide a far superior product that also has many normal features that their competition somehow fails on, like voice chat, video chat, steaming, images and videos in chat that don't disappear, spam protection and good moderator tools, etc.
    replies(1): >>43512903 #
    13. Spooky23 ◴[26 Mar 25 23:08 UTC] No.43488518[source]▶
    There’s a lot of B2B stuff.

    How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it.

    Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.

    14. prisenco ◴[26 Mar 25 23:13 UTC] No.43488565{3}[source]▶
    | The underlying technology ... had been stable

    That's my point. There are still creative ways we can use or improve stable technology to build new consumer applications.

    I'm not seeing much creativity lately.

    replies(1): >>43488944 #
    15. entropicdrifter ◴[26 Mar 25 23:28 UTC] No.43488701{4}[source]▶
    Right, so iterations that ate up the old-school competition, not revolutions
    replies(1): >>43490464 #
    16. forgetfreeman ◴[27 Mar 25 00:00 UTC] No.43488944{4}[source]▶
    No argument there. Compared to Xerox-Parc's heyday the Bay Area has felt like a case study in cargo cults since before the dotcom implosion.
    17. brookst ◴[27 Mar 25 04:45 UTC] No.43490464{5}[source]▶
    What was the last major tech company that was a revolution and not mere iteration?
    replies(1): >>43491567 #
    18. samrus ◴[27 Mar 25 08:53 UTC] No.43491567{6}[source]▶
    Maybe Netflix?
    replies(1): >>43493378 #
    19. brookst ◴[27 Mar 25 13:25 UTC] No.43493378{7}[source]▶
    That’s a good one. Which suggests Amazon as well; similar revolution in distribution and scale.

    But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.

    replies(1): >>43539300 #
    20. kulahan ◴[29 Mar 25 05:01 UTC] No.43512883{4}[source]▶
    Absolutely not.

    Skype figured out how to build an integrated login experience. Every morning using slack I keep having to remind myself it’s not early FOSS!

    21. kulahan ◴[29 Mar 25 05:04 UTC] No.43512903{4}[source]▶
    It’s an incredibly buggy experience with a user interface that fails many basic design cues (like not hiding things until you mouse over, not making the friends list icon inexplicably identical to a server icon and also the add server icon, etc.)

    It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.

    22. entropicdrifter ◴[31 Mar 25 20:07 UTC] No.43539300{8}[source]▶
    Netflix and Amazon were the first to effectively scale their revolutions up to mainstream accessibility that made them clearly superior to the competition. You could say they brought already-simmering revolutions to boil.

    Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings