
Kiko guys back as reality tv stars - gaz
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/19/kiko-guys-back-as-reality-tv-stars/
======
nostrademons
I watched the dinner and aftermath, including all the pizza prank calls and
various other abuse. I didn't see an easily-accessible feedback link (note to
other startup founders: include this), so I'll post my feedback here:

1\. Congratulations. In two days, you have managed to create a community more
fucked up than YouTube.

2\. I started watching _because_ of the outrageous stuff other viewers were
doing. When you go to curb the abuse, be aware of this. Many of your viewers
may be watching only because folks are doing stupid stuff like ordering pizza
and making yCombinator pay for it. Lose the hassles and you may lose the
audience.

3\. Reality TV shows succeed because they're _unreal_. TV execs hype up and
dramatize all sorts of conflict, because that's what gets viewers to tune in.
Nobody wants to see an ordinary person's life, because it's _boring_.

4\. Who do you want to be - Anna Nicole Smith or Paris Hilton. Your success in
attracting viewers is proportional to how trashy you are willing to become.
Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton remain media darlings because we can look
at them and think "Wow, look how pathetic they are." It makes us feel good
about ourselves. Unless you are similarly pathetic, people will not want to
look at you. Respectable people like Tim Berners Lee or Steve Wozniak seldom
end up on the news.

5\. If you _are_ respectable and still choose to go on reality TV, you're
setting yourself up to be torn down. The justin.tv tagline is accurate: "An
exercise in narcissism". Narcissism is going to prompt abuse. People think
that since you've set yourself up on a pedestal, you've given them an opening
to tear you down.

6\. I initially had logged in watch the yCombinator dinner. That proved
impractical because of the technology: the audio quality was shitty, the video
would randomly drop out, and you couldn't really see anything anyway. Part of
the problem for attracting a decent community is there's nothing for _decent_
people to do. That leaves it as a festival for troublemakers.

7\. Have you guys not read Shirky? Almost all the problems tonight could've
been predicted from his articles. <http://shirky.com/.>

8\. Lose the arrogance. Kyle was bragging about his 1337 MIT CS skillz in the
chatroom. Emmett was talking about their being only a finite number of attack
vectors, and he'd have them all patched in a week. In my experience, _never_
underestimate the clever things people will do to break your system. People
will still be finding ways to abuse it a year from now, assuming it still
exists. The arrogance is just an invitation for them to try harder.

9\. I won't be back, mostly because this is a complete waste of time. But I
thought I'd give you the courtesy of telling you why I won't be back.

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nickb
Superb idea! This is the future of broadcasting! They will be able to license
this platform and allow others to broadcast the same way. This will also allow
people, who lead boring lives, to live through others. Reality TV is a big hit
because of this and it looks like justin.tv is a huge step forward towards
even a more intimate experience. I have a feeling that in the near future,
some people will live someone else's lives. Scary!

~~~
sethjohn
Product placement will get them generating cash pretty quick. Could be
difficult to scale up though, presuming there's only one Justin. What's the
chance they've managed to file a patent for this as a 'business concept'?

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danw
I initially thought this was a silly idea but I'm now strangly addicted to
it.. Why live my own life when I can watch someone else!

~~~
danw
Whoah, as the viewer numbers climbed rapidly the quality of conversation in
the chat quickly dropped off.

I've seen this link posted far too many times in there: <http://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19>

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zach
The company that creates companies brings you the startup about being a
startup. Wow.

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pg
Their logo, incidentally, was done by Alexis Ohanian, who invented the Reddit
alien.

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brett
This could be a good way to watch startup school if you didn't get in or could
not make it.

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floozyspeak
Yawn! Hasn't this been done already? Hello Jennicam, livecam, youtube?! I mean
sure its neat, and its a polished website, but long term sustainability? Is it
sticky enough to have me glued in day in and day out? I give it 3 months
before it taps out. I mean its no trueman show here folks and ya don't even
empower folks along the way. Why not tell people how ya did it? Share some
real insight. How exactally am I living through their lives.. by watching them
sleep? I did that sleep study last month, it wasnt that fun really. This is
basically a short term startup biz idea, take 4 guys that do stuff, slap
cameras on them, watch them make more stuff. Now I'd give them a bit more huff
if they at least connected themselves to ambient like devices, nabaztag, or
ambient orb, or something else other than forcing me to go to a widget to see
if they ate a bagel or not today.. i dunno.

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danw
Quite a few news.YC users are in <http://justin.tv/#justin.tv.1>

~~~
python_kiss
Yeah, I love the site. I got to say "hi to Jessica and Paul" and Justin
mentioned my site, Shuzak.com, to them live! I am watching YC dinner atm
(Paul's riding Trevor's invention) :D

This site definitely has potential to generate revenue. They could embed video
advertisements or use sponsored food or cellphones, etc. Justin.tv might fail,
but its model could be successfully extended to other reality tv shows. I
believe that is the direction they plan on taking :)

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notabel
This is an interesting adaptation of the notion of glogging / moblogging; I
have to wonder to what extent these guys were inspired by the much more
theoretical work done with eyetaps (amazing technology, but not really
scalable). The interesting thing to see will be whether, since this is meant
to be outward-facing (as opposed glogging's introspective bent), it will
suffer from the lack of editorial control. Basically, does a person's life
have a high enough density of interesting content that it is worth watching?
If the answer is yes, then there is definite potential for radical
developments in social media.

\me wanders off to check Joi Ito's moblog.

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rms
Coincidentally, justin.tv succeeded in creating the only Web 2.0 chat room on
the internet.

~~~
joshwa
"chat powered by Lingr"

<http://www.lingr.com/>

~~~
papersmith
Looks like a public version of campfire. <http://www.campfirenow.com/>

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staunch
It sounds like they're going to shotgun together some EVDO cards so they have
enough bandwidth for a high quality stream? I wonder if they've created some
kind of proxy to split up the stream and reassemble it with some hacked up
cam-driver or something. Hopefully it's not too complicated a system.

Very interesting if it works out. Latency with EVDO isn't great, but mostly
good enough. WiFi is pretty useless for mobile broadcasting because it's not
very mobile.

~~~
zkinion
Yeah, that can expand alot in the future with wimax.

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jamongkad
Dunno if I'm willing to invest my time to watch these guys. Is the ordinary
joe willing to watch this as well??

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mauricecheeks
I missed it when they went to start-up school. That would have been awesome! I
am growing in my level of interest in justin.tv - mostly as a fascinating
experiment.

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Readmore
This is crazy, it's like that movie EdTV, only geekier.

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danielha
They mentioned "live polling" a few minutes ago. That would be way cool.
Interactive entertainment at its finest.

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joshwa
argh, I've just upvoted and now there's nothing I can do to undo it...

see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4971>

~~~
joshwa
whoa! where'd those 59 points come from?

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rms
Fun idea. I like it.

~~~
brett
Yeah. Surprisingly compelling. Especially in the context of YC News given that
right now it's a bunch of guys monitoring a recently released site that's
getting a bunch of traffic.

