> 700,000 installs amount to less than 1% of TikTok’s user base.
700k in how much time? RN tops the (Play Store) charts here (EU/Croatia) as well, and anecdotally there's a lot of word of mouth growth. Even though TikTok will not get banned over here.
> It’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
Possibly, but it does have a foot in the door. It doesn't look like they were ready for western audience so remains to be seen if they can seize on the opportunity.
I am pulling these numbers out of my a* but comparing to the situation in Twitter. People can be enthusiastic to move but if a significant portion doesn't do it in a certain window of time, they'll just drop out of it.
Let's say this portion is around 60% of Tiktok users. So something like 60-70million and window span is 10 days. They need to sustain 6-7 million new US users per day in order to make a successful transition.
The book has some interesting ideas (which you'll mostly be familiar with if you're following the microisv/indiehacker/solopreneur communities), but stretches the "company of one" concept to breaking point, at some point invoking teams in facebook, etc. The term basically gets redefined as "individuals, teams or orgs that the author likes".
A more descriptive title would be something like "the minimalist entrepreneur", which is actually a title of another book on the same theme by Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad.
The book is full of interesting stories and presents a counterpoint to the "default" VC-backed growth-at-all-cost startup. If you haven't been exposed to the indiehacker/soloprenur ideas, a useful read even if you don't take that route (same for Sahil's book I mentioned).
This presumes that MrBeast intended to create "videos with meaning" in the first place.
In his defense (!?), most of what's churned out by the streaming platforms, hollywood, and the music industry, is also not very bothered by lack of meaning.
This seems an insufficient analysis. The meaning expressed by contemporary music, film media, or streaming television isn't very profound, but they at least still make a passing effort to "signify" something. The highest grossing movie of 2024 - Inside Out 2 - is not a deep text, but it does have a thesis.
The "Pixar apparatus" is definitely increasingly consumed by audience demand, but they're at a minimum in a transitional phase: something like Seeing Red would never get workshopped out of committees.
Youtube and other social media (emphasis on media) is ground zero for the decay of meaning into intensity; the ultimate incestuous product of auto-simulacra.
That's exactly an n-th example of why this non-commercial clause is bogus since the very beginning of CC, and particularly unadapted for software code: no one is able to define clearly what commercial means, and what perimeter it applies to.
Selling the code? (you're a software editor) You could say it's covered/forbidden by the license.
Selling the service the code gives when it is running? (you're a PaaS) You could say too.
Selling anything unrelated to the code and the running app (say, oranges), but using the app to organise privately within a corporation? (you could be a shop owner installing the software for yourself and your team within your own building) 1/ the license says nothing about it, 2/ if it were covered and forbidden, how would it be even enforceable?
> That's exactly an n-th example of why this non-commercial clause is bogus since the very beginning of CC, and particularly unadapted for software code: no one is able to define clearly what commercial means, and what perimeter it applies to.
Agree with you on this one and I'd go step further: CC licences in general are poor fit for software.
> Selling anything unrelated to the code and the running app (say, oranges), but using the app to organise privately within a corporation? (you could be a shop owner installing the software for yourself and your team within your own building)
Excerpt (that I think is most relevant, but it's definitely a nuanced issue):
> uses by for-profit companies are typically considered more commercial [...] one exception to this pattern is in relation to uses by individuals that are personal or private in nature
Based on this, I think the common agreement would be that this is commercial use.
> how would it be even enforceable?
That's not a point for ignoring the license. If you download pirated movies, games, or other software, it's very unlikely you'll get caught, but you're still committing a crime.
However in this case, it actually can be enforcable. If the organization is eg. a startup that raises venture funding or is getting acquired, legal due dilligence will involve examination of all licences for software used.
That's not what I understand from these pages (that only reinforces that even to CC, NonCommercial is not a clear criteria).
They also note NonCommercial as “not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” which perfectly matches my 3rd case above.
For instance, you perfectly can print and display an NC image as a poster in your professional office, it's not "commercial".
> That's not a point for ignoring the license.
It's definitely an argument to ignore this part of the license: an unenforceable item is effectively void.
> If you download pirated movies, games, or other software, it's very unlikely you'll get caught, but you're still committing a crime.
Beware, that's different here. Downloading/uploading pirated items is illegal. Here, the NonCommercial clause is so ambiguous that even CC doesn't know how to put it. So its enforcement is even further delicate and open to interpretation.
Planning work is not the work, it's something around the work, similar to a poster (that could very well present information valuable to the work, but still not be the work you're selling in the end).
I read all the negative/neutral GoodReads comments of the book (and author's other books if I'm not familiar with the author, and maybe Wikipedia if I want to dig deeper).
99% of books I learn about from recommendations (HN, blogs, other books), and the pattern I see is that the source/recommender are usually at the similar "popsci" level.
I sometimes get it wrong. In most cases I just waste a few hours. The worst mistake was taking Why We Sleep to heart before I read the rebuttal. I still think it's fine, but more on a Gladwell level.
Im Suleyman's case, I recognize the name from Inflection shenanigans, so already have a bias against the book to start with.
It's par for the course for Charlemagne (the column in The Economist). It's not meant to be an actual realistic analysis and reporting (the way their non-columnist articles are, even if they all have an editorial streak). Mostly it comments on the topic of the week/month in some irreverent way[0], or entertains a modest proposal[1] like this one, in a "ha ha wait a minute" sort of way.
There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad.
You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:
* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.
* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).
(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).
Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.
So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:
* pick a template you like
* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text
* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)
* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience
Yeah, that's torture.
But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.
A lot of the criticism from OP is assuming that the slides exists in a vacuum and that the slides are the presentation. Short bullets? Yeah? It's just a reminder of what was presented in the main talk. They are not supposed to contain the complete content. Now unfortunately, a lot of presenters do the same mistake, get nervous, forget what they were supposed to say and let the nerfed bullets do the talking. Worst style is when they know beforehand that this will happen and add more and longer bullets to compensate for it. Death by powerpoint, guaranteed.
That's not to say bullets are great, the 6 level columbia slide is absolutely horrendous and bullets should not be the first tool one reaches for, contrary to what powerpoint easily invites for. Prefer a good graphical visualization of the raw data and annotate it with insights to back up your main argument, then let your slides back up your talk instead of being driven by them.
There is also the argument that slide decks tend to outlive their verbal presentations, because we are too lazy to create both a slidedeck and a properly written paper. Resulting in confusing low density bullet-lists being shared around. Here, a information dense presentation help, but it's usually not enough and often forces compromises to the main presentation.
Yep. A "powerpoint" can be single Edward Tufte graph presented to a room for 30 seconds. Or it could be War and Peace pasted across 10,000 slides. There is no one thing to complain about. Reading this lowered my opinion of tufte, who I have always found great, but also very overrated.
Works pretty well for my personal/hobbyist use (quality also depends on genre and instruments used - synth stuff tends to bleed into voice a bit).
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