I have to agree with the top comment. I don't follow HN closely or have anything to say about "hacker culture", whatever that is, but I can't help but completely agree with its conviction of most social startups as unproductive and stupid.

As Paul Miller admitted yesterday here and kleinbl00 asserted way back on this post of mine, people are to blame for wasting their time; the medium by which they waste it is inconsequential. I believe this.

But I also believe, as kleinbl00 also asserted in that discussion, that the internet and social applications are handicapping people's social lives. These social media startups pretty much all contribute directly to this problem, encouraging people to have shorter, less sincere, and more mediated social interactions. They're a net loss for the people who use them and for everyone else in the world, making it more difficult for people like me to find friends interaction with whom doesn't mandate investment in this artificial social world.

Snapchat and Vine may have been made by people going against all odds to bring ideas to reality, but they are lucrative, successful, unproductive, and stupid ideas, adding fragmentation and indirection to people's relationships, and my life would be better if those people hadn't bothered.