A few days ago I read a Product Hunt blurb about an Airbnb for X application called Airpnp. It’s a site where you can rent your toilet out to strangers so that they can pay you to take a dump in your bathroom.
A total stranger comes over, rings my doorbell and says
“Hi, I’m Larry, I reserved your bathroom for 2:45pm on Airpnp. I really would like to use your bathroom now. I really gotta go.”
Me:
“Hi. Yea man, the bathroom is over there, first door on the left. There’s some air freshener in the vanity above the sink. Make sure you use it afterward. If you need it, the wifi password is listed on a sticky note on the mirror and the plunger is just to the right of the reading materials next to the bowl. Oh, and by the way, there’s another guy scheduled to use the bathroom in about 15 minutes, so don’t be too long and make sure you leave the fan on and courtesy flush at least once.”
Larry:
“…awesome about the wifi! I’ll make sure to give your bathroom a 5-star rating and tell all my friends about it.”
The above scenario illustrates just how fucking stupid some of the apps are that smart people are building today. Why is that? Why are so many smart technical people with amazing talents focusing so much time, energy, and money doing this sort of nonsense? Is there really that much stupid money out there now to build dumb shit? Why aren’t these smart folks tackling bigger problems that are actually worth solving? Like the whole online passwords problem. I mean, why are we still using passwords anyway? The world wide web as we know it has been around for over 22 years, and we are still using passwords. Why aren’t we able to wave at the computer and say “hi, it’s me” and log into a website just.like.that?Or building foolproof systems that would make it easier to know if the calamari you are eating is actually calamari and not a pig’s bunghole. Yup, in a blind taste test, no one could tell if the food they were chewing on and swallowing was hog rectum or real calamari. Note: there’s a company that I know about called TRUfish that is actually tackling this very real problem.Here’s another real-world problem worth solving: making publicly-available court records easy to access and understand, so that stats on our judges and cops are as accessible and open as stats on baseball players and umpires. Even today, in 2015, we know more about people playing a dumb game than we do about the people that can change your life.
If you are reading this and are one of the folks building silly apps like airpnp, please consider abandoning your dumb-ass app and focusing on things that matter instead. Don’t waste your talents on really stupid shit.Maybe you are just trying to build a portfolio of your tech chops. Or maybe it started as something silly and fun and then grew from there. That’s fine, but you will still be better off spending less energy on that stupid app and instead focusing your amazing talents that I wish I had on things that have more meaning in life. Things that solve real world problems. So go ahead: take your silly app, dump it down that toilet, and start on something useful instead. And don’t forget to use the air freshener after you flush.
