This feels like an archetypal bad product idea I would have worked on in my contractor days.
It's always some dude. Usually they made money doing something else, and they had a (really dumb) idea one day, involving gamifying something, or putting ads somewhere, or both.
If by some miracle they get the right people around them, and don't just waste all their money, they can actually put something on the market. 99% of the time, it goes nowhere, once in a great while it does.
I'm not totally convinced this product will be a success — they are probably just burning runway.
But your overall point is valid, because there will always be some dude who will keep trying this kind of thing until eventually, by statistical oddity, it sticks. Then, it will stay around, and we'll be on to the next fresh hell.
You talk about a Moore's law for privacy. My mental model is more like a ratchet: it takes a some force to advance the mechanism, but once it clicks into place it is locked there forever. There's no going back, only forwards, so you should be extremely careful about anything that pushes you ahead.
> Then, it will stay around, and we'll be on to the next fresh hell.
Yes exactly, and your ratchet analogy works here too. Because in our society, the guy who does end up making a billion dollars on a genital surveillance network is lauded as a genius hero meant to be emulated. His business model will be remixed and rerun by countless others, and will spread to other countries. Once something is shown to work, it will be tried and tried again.
It's always some dude. Usually they made money doing something else, and they had a (really dumb) idea one day, involving gamifying something, or putting ads somewhere, or both.
If by some miracle they get the right people around them, and don't just waste all their money, they can actually put something on the market. 99% of the time, it goes nowhere, once in a great while it does.
I'm not totally convinced this product will be a success — they are probably just burning runway.
But your overall point is valid, because there will always be some dude who will keep trying this kind of thing until eventually, by statistical oddity, it sticks. Then, it will stay around, and we'll be on to the next fresh hell.
You talk about a Moore's law for privacy. My mental model is more like a ratchet: it takes a some force to advance the mechanism, but once it clicks into place it is locked there forever. There's no going back, only forwards, so you should be extremely careful about anything that pushes you ahead.