

Is “Yo” Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid? Let’s explore, shall we - inmygarage
http://amandapeyton.com/blog/2014/08/is-yo-stupid-brilliant-or-stupid-stupid-lets-explore-shall-we/

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acconrad
I feel like I'm losing my mind having to justify that Yo is anything but
Stupid Stupid. The technology is easy to copy, not defensible, and not novel.
It does not move the needle in terms of bringing us closer to a technological
utopia. It is in my mind, a glorified Hello World app with some modern colors
/ UI treatment. There is no revenue model and no form of scalability (unless
you consider adding a word after "yo" to be scale).

This is a dud for all intents and purposes, and yet I can imagine being down
voted to hell, all along the way being barraged with a point-by-point
breakdown on how I'm wrong on all points with some pseudo-intellectual
handwaving. This app is nothing more than popularity-through-absurdity, that
it even glazed the eyes of millions is a testament to our culture's obsession
with irony, which only further feeds the fuel to the fire. And yet I further
this irony by commenting on it as making it something to talk about. It's a
vicious cycle.

/rant

~~~
dennisnedry
You hit the nail on the head with your assessment of Yo as a "Hello World"
app. There's literally nothing else to it. Yo is another example of the
tech/startup industry drinking Kool-Aid. Nobody would even take this noob app
seriously if it wasn't for the fact that it has already gotten funding. I
guess the question is whether or not investors are really nothing more than
poker players.

~~~
ddp
I think you have your answer.

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mcphage
> Can there be a platform where counter-action is not only discouraged but
> impossible? Where consumption is truly meant to be passive?

You mean like television?

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apalmer
I really dont get whats supposed to be the benefit of this... saves you the
seconds it would take to actually send a text of the word 'yo'?

~~~
krapp
You get it. That's what it is.

~~~
_cipher_
Wait... I thought it was some kind of alias (for example, sending "yo" to
contact_1 would expand to "hi", on contact_2 "I'm coming home" etc.).

An "app" that sends just "yo" gathered 1.5m????

~~~
derefr
Remember poking on Facebook? It got a silly/meaningless semantic attached to
it, likely because it was created before people could do it from their phone,
and so it never went anywhere. You just poked people and then got poked back,
ad infinitum.

Yo has exactly the same data model as Facebook pokes (a graph where the
vertices are people and the edges are binary signal flags), but is different-
looking enough that people are willing to grant it a different semantic
interpretation. The semantic people seem to have adopted for a Yo is “hey, do
the thing you know I want you to do, now’s the time” — which is, admittedly, a
pretty useful semantic that was surprisingly missing from online interaction.

This semantic didn’t _have_ to missing—someone could communicate the same
semantic inherent in a Yo over Twitter, or SMS, or really any push-enabled
app. But people will only understand services through the lens of one semantic
at a time: you can't get someone to use Facebook as Twitter, or Wordpress as
Tumblr, or Youtube as Coursera. Because nothing was _just_ for this--nothing
had this "rut" of suggested usage burned into its UX--users didn't bother
doing this interaction at all. And now they do.

There's probably a market for quite a few other services that have effectively
the same data models as apps we already have (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare,
Snapchat, Reddit, etc.) but which use different UX to push users into a new
semantic interpretation of those data models. (To get different _information_
from the same _data_.) HN seems completely color-blind to this idea,
interestingly.

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shawnhermans
"Yo" is the pet rock of our generation.

~~~
xvolter
Pet rocks could hypothetically teach someone responsibility. Yo is closer to
the eye ball used on that pet rock, useless by itself.

~~~
pizza
> Pet rocks could hypothetically teach someone responsibility

???

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minimaxir
> _There isn’t any social contract to reply, or even any way to jump to the
> site. It simply is._

That's neither Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid. That's just handicapping
yourself for no reason other than faux-superiority.

~~~
asuffield
One might describe this as "Stupid Hipster"

~~~
_cipher_
Yo

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zaccus
Yo isn't any stupider or less innovative than 99% of other tech startups. It
just doesn't pretend like it's making a difference in the world or other such
nonsense. The fact that people are offended by it is actually pretty amusing
IMO.

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spilk
This seems identical to Facebook's "poke" functionality.

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pizza
I feel that Yo's criticisms are frankly kind of... weird.

> _" It's stupid!"_

No, it's pretty fun :)

> _It 's useless! You can't communicate with 0 characters!_

There are actually tremendous sources of information with Yos, if you know
where to look. Timestamp and username alone are usually enough to convey
_some_ message ("Hey it's 8 oclock, log in to Steam dawg", "Hey, it's 2am, why
not come over to my place?" etc.). Implicit information like number of Yos
exchanged in the last 10 minutes, health of friendship, etc. also contribute.
The key thing to keep in mind is that all Yos are ambiguous and depend on
context: the detractors should stick to texts, if they don't want to decrypt
messages. Either way, there will always be people saying that low entropy
signals are useless, but, as they say, 1 if by land, 2 if by sea...

> _" Doesn't scale / tech is too basic / I could write it in day / society is
> crumbling / etc."_

C'mon.. The app is a concept piece. What's _wrong_ with the app (barring
whatever security issues there once were or that might resurface)? Yo
accomplishes it's goal, end of story. These types of critiques all seem rooted
in the idea that Yo fails to reach some critical threshold of complexity that
would give it intellectual merit or some shit like that. Strawman: "A sham
argument set up to be defeated."

~~~
krapp
There's nothing wrong with the app per se. However, there is something clearly
wrong with it being as popular and valued as high as it is. A concept piece
should not be worth millions of dollars and be surrounded with as much hype as
Yo appears to be.

And while you're right about metacontextual information being a thing - that
problem is not one that Yo actually solves. I don't see anyone saying yos are
completely useless, but people have already been exchanging these kinds of
messages for decades (they're known as emoticons and emoji.) In that regard
the only thing Yo has going for it is it's UI.

Which, granted, may be a draw - but it's still not worth the coverage it's
getting.

Also it's worth pointing out that "stupid" and "fun" can be overlapping sets.
Case in point: Angry Birds. Clearly fun, also clearly kind of stupid.

~~~
pizza
I understand what you mean. But one thing I'd like to mention is, if you think
about it, there are already several concept pieces worth _several billions of
dollars_ : [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-
grossing_films](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films),
and others, in terms of hundreds of millions
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_music_arti...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_music_artists), etc.

I'd also like for readers unfamiliar with _4 '33_ to read up about it, and
what was said about it at the time.

~~~
krapp
I don't know that those make a compelling argument for Yo, though. How many
were worth that much money in their day, or would have become worth what they
are without the cachet of the artist?

While it pains me to say it, there is case to be made for Yo as a work of art,
if art can be accidental (I guess all real memes are accidental art in a way,
and Yo's popularity seems memetic to me.) And perhaps the ephemeral nature of
the medium works against it, but I seriously doubt anyone is going to care
about Yo fifty years from now.

