Kinda tired of the whole "I made a lot of money building the Torment Nexus but now I quit and am warning you about the Torment Nexus (buy my book)" redemption arch for tech people we seem to have settled on.
@tante I think the problem is it can be real hard to see which ones are gonna be the Torment Nexus before it's built.
Fire burns and cooks food.
@hatter @tante I don't think those metrics are either necessary nor sufficient, unfortunately. Gasoline is popular and people are willing to pay for it, and its common use might exterminate the biosphere. Search engines are popular and people are unwilling to pay for them, and they've become one of the most transformative tools of the information age; hardly a "Torment Nexus" kind of thing.
@mtomczak @tante Search engines are getting that way. The 'portal' ones already crashed and are a historical footnote. But the mess of paid, or scam, and of unpaid (but scamming the pagerank to get your eyeballs to irrelevant pages) results on a search these days is pretty grim.