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.

There's the key.

I think this is easier to understand when you work in Hollywood. KTLA did a stand-up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in 2003. They set up a camera and a reporter and stopped and asked random passers-by

"How's your screenplay coming?"

80% of the people asked had an answer.

That doesn't mean 80% of the people they talked to were screenwriters. That doesn't mean 80% of the people they talked to had finished a screenplay. That meant that 80% of the people they had talked to had considered the idea of writing a screenplay seriously enough that they "had a screenplay" in their own minds.

Of those who answered yes, there's a small percentage that would ever write FADE IN. There's a smaller percentage that would ever write FADE OUT. There's a still smaller percentage that would ever get anyone to seriously consider it. And the number of people who would actually sell their scripts, see them turned into movies and make money from them is vanishingly small - the apocryphal datapoint we all know so well is that there are fewer working screenwriters in the WGAw than there are players in the NBA.

So when you're surrounded by "screenwriters" and the effort necessary to turn that "screenplay" into a movie is insurmountable - when the money being spent is "oil rig money" and when the number of people necessary to get them off the ground is "startup-grade" you naturally get in a position of learning to say no, not to say yes. I know three people who brought The Walking Dead to production companies to turn it into a TV series. Slam Dunk, right? Well, not until Frank Darabont wanted to do it it wasn't. I know a guy who turned down Being John Malkovich for HBO - and if asked, he'd do it again. Finding Forrester was a spec screenplay that Sony turned down, that won the Nicholl Fellowship, that Sony bought. The screenwriter has the poster and the rejection letter framed side-by-side on his wall, behind his desk.

Finding Forrester still lost money.

So at the end of the day, the evaluation isn't "will this idea make money?" The evaluation is "do you have the connections, the drive, the skills, the passion, the bankroll, the persistence, the intelligence, the charisma and all the other intangibles necessary to make this malformed and larval idea into a killer app?" And the answer, statistically speaking, is far more likely to be "no" than it is to be "yes."

HERE'S THE THING

Ben Silberman didn't need Dustin Curtis' permission to make Pinterest. And Dom Hoffmann didn't need Dustin Curtis' permission to make Vine. They made them. And they caught on. And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Stupid ideas catch on - Facebook is a fucking terrible idea and always has been, yet it's on our culture like a rash. Recognize that, as William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything" and that your instincts are to assume it's a bad idea because bad ideas take less energy.

You don't have to believe in them.