This ones easy, it's because the other ones provide a service people generally want, so the faustian bargain is always "Ill give you this thing I dont want to as long as you keep providing the thing I like."
Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.
Plenty of people support Flock or at least its mission. They're just not vocal because the opposition is vociferous. Like most things the country is fairly divided. This poll has it 46% opposed and 38% support:
I mean, this clearly a technology change. Would you have stopped the printing press because young people got worse at verbally telling the ancient stories? Or when kids stopped understanding what a card catologe was?
We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.
Your whole comment misses the point of the sport. It is not effective to look for the most accurate or rhetorically tested point, the goal is to rally as large a group around a point that dosent make them look like hypocrites, or materially clashes with how they present their identity in other parts of their lives.
Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.
It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.
For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
The older I get the more I think the internet is a massive net negative due to effects like this.
Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale. Now thanks to the internet we have "hustlers" who scour FB marketplace and craigslist and buy up all the deals to flip for profit.
Physical space e.g. hikes,lookouts etc get absolutely ruined now and sometimes even closed due to the low barrier of entry required to discover them and the type of people this attracts but the flip side is something uniquely good like a coffee shop can be a success from open day.
I think the blog era was the best. If you were into something and applied some effort researching you could have many amazing experiences without having to rely on the luck of befriending knowledgeable people. However in today's world if you find something good it's only a matter of time that someone else discovers it uses social media to ruin it.
> Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale.
Certainly in the UK there were plenty of established options pre 'internet' to make finding cars easier.
Physical weekly magazines like Autotrader existed prior to the internet which had a small photo of the car a brief description and key details and asking price. People also used magazines like Parkers Guide to estimate the valuation of their/prospective cars based on mileage/condition etc.(Kelly blue book I think is equivalent in the US?...based on sitcom knowledge)
There were local used car garages too of course, but many of those also had their cars listed for sale in autotrader listed as 'trade' sale rather than 'private'. Or they'd be in the local newspaper on a set day of the week (where I was - Wednesday had a special 10+ page pull out of 'house listings', can't remember what day cars were but same happened)>
I know people travelled very long distance to buy cars using autotrader because my dad made an amount of side-money in the 1980s and 1990s from it. typically he'd buy a used (often damaged, 'no MOT') car, repair it, run it for a few months, sell it for a profit and repeating the process. He went all over the country to buy cars and he sold his cars privately to people from all over.
Also larger used car retailers and approved-used car garages have long since moved stock around their locations to support sales and used to have similar in-house magazines/brochures that showed all their available stock.
You lament the 'hustlers' scouring FB but arguably that's a much less problem than the risks pre-internet whereby local car garages could rip off local consumers because those customers quite probably only a limited field of reference to understand the value / worth of a car and so could easily be sold something for way more than it's true worth due to lack of comparable data. One of the biggest benefits of the online world is you can quickly see what is a 'normal' price for an item and so it's a little harder for people to be completely ripped off (though of course it still happens, savviness as a consumer takes a bit of work/time and a willingness to shop-around/do research).
Except now the modern car flippers have so much data on prices thanks to the internet that they know exactly what cars to buy and how much profit they could make. So it becomes much easier to do, making it more prevalent, and causing prices to rise.
Because CRTs are no longer made they are becoming rare but at the same time the market for them is small so what ends up happening is that opportunists take advantage of this and hoard them to create artificial scarcity.
You could argue they are doing a service by saving them from ending up as e-waste but this isn't always the case. Sometimes sellers are just raising the floor price for their own benefit.
Do you think it's the internet that introduces the net negatives, or is it just that there are less obstacles and makes bad behaviour surface more easily?
There shouldn't really be a problem with online job postings, but when people on either sides either try to game the system or don't actually want to deal with their job (e.g. HR departsment that can't and won't manually process applications).
Same for you example with the cars. Seems perfectly reasonable to put your used car online and for someone 400km to be interested if it's the right car at the right price. It's only when the hustlers insert themselves problems arise, but that's due to frankly shitty behaviour. The internet just makes it simpler to be a bad or annoying person.
Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.
Interestingly, and maybe surprisingly, moving long-distance is less common than it was in the past. The total number of movers has decreased [1] while the percentage of those moves that are inter-state has stayed constant [2]. Another analysis from 2018 [3] looked specifically at people who move for jobs and found a huge drop since the 1980s.
In the really old days you would move somewhere (often because you heard that some industry was booming there) and then look for work. Today you can't do that without a lot of savings.
I wonder how it relates with housing. Today you couldn't move without a job at your destination, because buying a house is expensive and renting requires a stable job.
jobs back then also offered relocation bonuses or covered moving fees and similar
my old man used to work for Big Oil back in the day, both in the US and internationally, and in basically all cases it wasn't even really a discussion -- "here's the cash to cover the move, how soon can you be here?"
for international, esp. in places like Kenya or Australia, they had apartments or condos for short term workers that they'd put you in until you found something more permanent. after my folks had me + my siblings, they even had listings of nannies and maids pre-sourced so you could find reliable help once you landed.
More so than now, but one could still find work elsewhere. At least in the US, you would visit a local library and read newspapers to see job listings in other cities. Or, you could rely on "headhunters" who would work to collect available candidates for many companies; they would advertise their services as regional or national agencies. The market looked different but for someone who wanted to find a job somewhere else, there were ways to do it.
For context: my programming career started in Russia (while I didn't live there... it was a very unique situation at the time to have a remote job!), then for some twenty odd years in Israel (on-site), then another five in the Netherlands (work visa).
I have an extremely negative impression from jobs that grant visas. Here are some points to consider:
* Work visa is an extremely valuable asset to the worker. They will do a lot of bad things before they even consider endangering their status in the country they reside. This leads to a pathologically abusive workspace because no criticism ever goes up the administrative chain of command. This severely impacts product quality, creates a toxic working environment.
* There's no good selection process for the applicants. On the other hand, applicants have a huge incentive to stick with whatever potential employer might employ them. This results in the overall poor quality of the workforce hired in such a way, it's also a workforce that's difficult to replace or to improve.
In other words, after working in Israel as a programmer for some twenty years (Israel doesn't issue work visas to programmers) I've seen both good quality products and programmers as well as bad. When I came to the Netherlands I was in shock because of how poor was the quality of both the product and the workforce. At first, it didn't make sense to me: how on Earth if these people can pay more and have a bigger candidate pool do they end up with such bad outcomes? My bullet points above are the conclusions I came to while trying to understand the problem. Perhaps they are wrong, but the observation, definitely, isn't: the quality is so bad I want to cry.
That's interesting because it's way more complicated than that. Boston had the 128 loop and Digital. TI in dallas. Simi valley. I think it's more like the end of defense spending in the late 80s early 90s winnowed down the several "SV"s into only one.
I know, and the reason Digital and TI and Compaq weren't able to make as deep ecosystems as Xerox PARC or Fairchild did was because of the non-compete aspect back when companies were much more litigious than today.
IMO, the non-compete aspect is way overstated. People moved between the Route 128 computer companies all the time and even moved to California. If it was a slower pace than today, it probably had more to do with people not shifting jobs as often than litigation related to non-competes.
> and the Stanford and UC Berkeley innovation ecosystem
which is geographic...
and let's also not forget the vast, heavy investments from the Navy and government during WW2. the SV wasn't just a couple of fancy colleges, San Fran is a major city that got a ton of investment.
DC, Maryland, and Virginia, a term only used in the DC area because those not in DC proper take offense at being lumped in with it or something I guess.
That seems like a really niche term. Parent really should've specified what it meant instead of assuming everyone in the world would automatically know what it meant.
I don't if it was exactly better, it was less "liquid."
Given the reduced competition, you couldn't find primo jobs unless you moved to a hub (which is why most people are in NYC/SF/LA), but when you found a job it was more stable.
Infantino either has already paid out people or already accepted money. Its unbelievable that he didnt poll for enough votes before launching. Theres a now a greater than 50% he has to step down.
Flock provides nothing direct to the consumer which means this is going to get worse and Id stake a wager they rebrand after raising their next huge round.