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).<p>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.<p>/rant
> Can there be a platform where counter-action is not only discouraged but impossible? Where consumption is truly meant to be passive?<p>You mean like television?
> <i>There isn’t any social contract to reply, or even any way to jump to the site. It simply is.</i><p>That's neither Stupid Brilliant or Stupid Stupid. That's just handicapping yourself for no reason other than faux-superiority.
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.
I feel that Yo's criticisms are frankly kind of... weird.<p>> <i>"It's stupid!"</i><p>No, it's pretty fun :)<p>> <i>It's useless! You can't communicate with 0 characters!</i><p>There are actually tremendous sources of information with Yos, if you know where to look. Timestamp and username alone are usually enough to convey <i>some</i> 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...<p>> <i>"Doesn't scale / tech is too basic / I could write it in day / society is crumbling / etc."</i><p>C'mon.. The app is a concept piece. What's <i>wrong</i> 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."