

Super Normal by Dave Morin (Path) - tosh
https://medium.com/product-love/c1d22838572a

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not_paul_graham
> _A good place to start when creating a new social app for the first time is
> to build upon these normal concepts, and then add your own twist. Much
> success has been seen on the Internet by doing this._

But you have to break out of this pattern to create ground breaking
innovation, no? What Dave Morin is saying is that you take a particular
product in a particular category and then improve it a little, and iterate
over the process.

This only works if someone else has created that product/category in the first
place. This article is perhaps about social networks, but someone must have
initially imagined social networks on the internet when there were none and
tried to create one. Of course it follows that innovation follows from many
false starts in the same space and I can see his argument making sense for
things like Myspace improving upon Friendster; and Facebook improving upon
Myspace, etc. But if I come up with a better facebook (Super Normal), there
isn't any interest or mindshare because facebook has a majority mindshare and
there is only a certain minority that might choose my _super normal app_ vs
what already works.

Also, this pretty much fails in a lot of real world applications. For example
you could argue that people were social to begin with and _TELEGRAM_ was an
improvement on that process. But then the _TELEPHONE_ came along. Was the
Telephone an improvement on the Telegram (it's super normal) or was it a new
product category all together. Were Personal Computers the _super normal_ to
mathematics/games/writing or an entirely new product category?

I'm not sure if Dave currently reads Hacker News, but if he does (and this
might be an unpopular opinion on HN) I'd like to ask him what his motivations
behind continuing with Path are? Surely he is financially secure enough (w/ FB
and now Path), and Path is mature enough that it could live on as a
functioning experience on its users phones, but is this really his life's
mission? I mean he is smart, financially secure, perhaps has awesome friends
and familial relations, but why make another social app at all? I mean how
much can you optimize the user experience? What happens after you can't
optimize further? It's not like users will jump on your platform because they
find their current social apps sub-optimal. Surely smart people have some end
game in mind, so in this case is it just more money?

