When there is a talk about Apple going into self-driving car, there are hundreds of comments. When Musk mentions that Tesla will have self-driving car almost everyone here has an orgasm, but when a company that's well established in automotive industry drives their car from SF to NYC, we can't get even 30 comments in 12 hours?
Thats the problem with voting-based sites. The sexy stories get play and everything else, outside of rare oddities, is marginalized. This is fine I suppose if we want to get a certain superficial benefit from this site, but if you want something deeper, often from what I imagine people think of as "boring" companies or "boring" spaces, it just won't work on a site that has this kind of voting mechanism in place.
Geeks like to think of ourselves immune from things like celebrity, hype, PR, etc, but we actually are very vulnerable to it. We play up this "man of logic" persona, but its just a self-compliment. Not too long ago we were telling each other that $FOSS_project would destroy Windows/exchange/office, or Xioami will kill Android as we know it, or $billionare will fix $unsolvable_problem, or Diaspora will destroy Facebook, or that Ouya would destroy mainstream consoles, but it turns out that "boring" often wins as MS, Google, and Sony keep making profits and maintaining marketshare. We believe these things because they are pleasing to believe. If you got your news and tech opinions from slashdot 10 years ago you'd be shocked to even see Microsoft in business. How are we different today than the usually wrong slashdot narrative of yesterday?
The larger issue is that dissenting voices are too easily marginalized. I'm pretty skeptical of the success of Tesla and Oculus for reasons I feel I present in a mostly productive way, but when I mention them its just a ticket to being downvoted, which on here and reddit just limits the visibility of the comment. Fanboy comments get upvoted to mass visibility and become the defining narrative. Those narratives become the norm and, well, here we are.
They didn't do the drive yet, this is just a piece of fluff to fill the time between their initial announcement and the drive (which will start next week).
