the entire organisational structure of openAI was literally designed for exactly that. Like Mozilla, the for-profit arm of the company is legally subject to the non-profit.
This hinges on Open ai being as forthcoming with new models as they previously were. I'm not sure that's going to happen. Certainly the new board will be more inherently against it. Not sure what outs they have though besides the obvious one.
Microsoft hasn't released all its investment into OpenAI, and I think this could trigger some special contingency in their agreement to stopping doing so.
I think one thing is for certain: OpenAI now, won't worth that much any more.
Maybe they can. Maybe they can't. We don't even know if "the talks" to return Sama were just investors writing angry emails to Ilya and him replying "nuh-ah".
If I had a nickel for every SO thread that came up in my Google searches that could have answered my question if only the SO moderators had allowed it to be answered, I'd be able to buy a few steak dinners.
Me: Goes to read the other ticket. It's from 8 years ago, and the answer was "This is solved in version X."
Me, on something many versions after X, and having the hindsight of knowing that no, it was not solved in X, shakes my head. I find the solution someplace else.
I do not go back to SO because I can't be bothered to fight an uphill battle.
Same experience here, except half the time I visit the "duplicate" question, only to find it isn't a duplicate at all! In the last I've had several of my own questions closed as "duplicates", where it's quite obvious the moderator didn't read either my question, or the one they point to.
I haven't asked a question on SO for over 2 years now, mainly because I just got sick of the hostile environment that the mods created.
A 'high' (just not a new one) reputation user (not necessarily a moderator) opens a review queue. He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong, but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you, so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
> Now, you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong
Right.
> but another user who already spent some time cleaning up the site
"Cleaning up" by mislabeling stuff. Sounds like they are making a mess. But go on...
> is supposed to thoroughly analyze both questions to begin with?
Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
> People on Stack Exchange tend to try to not be emotional like you
I hope they care about being accurate rather than being apathetic about it.
> , so they don't fight a battle with you. You just resign from a discussion, and then complain how a mistake has been made, that you didn't care to even point out.
There was no discussion. I didn't resign, I never engaged in any discussion in the first place. I just found a question and a closed question.
And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed. It's closed. That's it.
Your entire comment is about how SO fails, and rather than work to overcome it, it just blamed the people for "not holding it right."
> "Cleaning up" by mislabeling stuff. Sounds like they are making a mess. But go on...
Accidents are inevitable.
> Yes, they should completley read questions before closing them.
Do you know the concept of a triage?
> And I can't even comment on how it shouldn't have been closed.
Either you don't have some very minimal reputation in the network (I don't know, 100 points?), which limitation is there, I think, do protect from bots and similar abuse, or the question was *locked* for other reason than just being a duplicate. You could still open a question on meta to discuss that.
I don't even want to defend SO, I'm just frustrated by how terribly bad the arguments criticizing SO are.
> you couldn't be bothered writing a comment about how the the duplicate flag is wrong
this comments are ignored
people closed my questions in past for being duplicate - despite that I linked that question and described why it is not a duplicate
> He sees a new question. He searches the SO if a similar question has been asked. He finds a similar question, and without reading and testing it thoroughly, he marks yours as a duplicate of that.
that is wrongheaded and bad idea leading to predictably terrible results
she/he should not close it as duplicated without proper check (it is better to have some duplicates over bad closures)
Well it doesn't matter because the parent post completely disengaged from the site. Turning away potentially active users seems like a horrible move that the owners of SO didn't try to fix and possibly led them to where they are today.
Flashback to a very common question about relative imports in python that had mostly outdated answers, or very hacky non-solutions but that kept being referenced in newer threads. You actually had to scroll way down to get a reasonable answer. Even then, there was so much confusion and "works for me if I just set the path manually (lol)" or "add __init__.py in this folder" , "no actually don't remove __init__!". Which okay I guess sometimes questions have multiple answers (though the answer way down the page was objectively correct!) ... but then why close newer questions if past answers were messy and very non universal?
They pushed me out when I was a student in Uni struggling with Java 101. And my experience left me shocked that an industry could be so cruel to people trying to learn the ropes and be just another programmer.
Luckily, I persevered, and I give back to the programming community by always being kind to the folks that ask me for help; but I always help others offline and not in hostile web forums.
I've answered a lot of Java questions on SO. One of the themes is beginner questions, and a lot are essentially "do my homework for me," poorly researched, or poorly asked. What have you tried? What have you researched? Explain your understanding for why you think what you're doing should work.
Even if you're asking good beginner questions that don't already have an answer, you get tired of reading all the bad ones.
I just signed on and saw this one (#3 in my personalized "new questions"):
The person asking the question put in minimal effort and showed no concern for people answering. Why am I sifting through your merge sort code when you're asking "why can't it open the file?"
I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014. And it was an awful experience. I got over my Java block by not just reading my Uni's textbook but by also reading another much older textbook.
I got so good at Java that I became a Lab/Teaching Assistant my last two years in college. And I helped folks the best I could in person: always kind, always patient, never blaming the student even if they didn't want to learn and just wanted to pass the Lab; that is an obviously wrong student attitude to have, but whether they cheat or want the answers without learning is between the student and god. I can only try my best to help.
Who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project? Who cares if their question is not deep enough or poorly written? Just answer their question or don't. You don't need to impose your moral sense of fairness unto them: it's not that deep. And you especially don't need the snark and the putting down of others. Again, the simpler thing is to not engage at all which is obviously not what happened or happens under the sludge and grime of SO answers.
Being polite in answering questions is pro-social.
It's a more pleasant interaction when someone is polite. -- Whereas, if you get rude answers, you'll be discouraged from participating.
Asking good questions is pro-social. People are going to be more willing to help if the questions are well thought out. -- Whereas, asking in an anti-social way discourages people from helping out.
It's still possible to ask questions even if you get snarky responses back; and it's still possible to answer lazy questions... But in either case, it's easy to see why people might not like that.
You are interpreting ability as a social gesture, taking disability as an insult. Thusyou not participating in the part of society that is learning is a good thing.
There's a difference between "I haven't paid the full effort to figure the answer out myself" and "I haven't paid the effort that makes it easier for you to help me". -- There's no setting in which being rude is going to be more helpful than being polite.
Expectations vary; in some settings, it's going to be more acceptable for questions to be a more raw "I'm stuck and I need help" than in others.
There is an asymmetry: people giving answers are more able to help those who are asking questions. If the people learning don't like the teachers, they'll have to go elsewhere (& learning is harder). If the teachers don't like the students, they don't have to teach.
> I asked two or three questions in SO back in 2014.
Please link them! They should still be there, and we should be able to analyze them. The strength of Stack Exchange is that it is factual, like on Wikipedia, users are discouraged to be emotional and encouraged to to prove their theories.
> who cares if someone wants an answer to some test or project?
A visitor from Google, who doesn't want to search through dozens of "too localized" problems, that don't apply in his case. There are other places to ask such questions, and the strength of SO/SE lies in its ruleset.
I'd phrase this a bit differently, for the questioner's side of things.
I know from experience that when I'm frustrated, I need to keep trying something smaller (or otherwise get more information) until it becomes clear what's not working.
The kind of steps it takes to ask a good question goes hand in hand with the kind of steps you'd take to solve the problem yourself. (Similarly: with domain knowledge, you know what to look for; without domain knowledge, you don't know what to ask about).
If I put too high a value on other people's time, I'm never going to ask questions, and may be slower than if I'd asked a question at a suitable time. (Whereas, putting too little value on other people's time ... can cause friction).
If people had your level of insight and self-reflection, then SO would be less popular but much more helpful and probably not known for all the needless hostility.
It takes a lot of guts to ask for help. And being put down when you're vulnerable: exposing an ignorance or a lack of understanding, is not a good feeling at all. For me, it always sticks for a long time until I forget it.
Yes, that's beginners in nutshell. It's why it's so important to educate them rather than take the opposite stance which is to chastise them for being so inept. I wouldn't take their bad questions that personally myself, it's what it is, but also I am not a person to answer SO questions so there's that.
Those who answer questions want good questions but those who ask good questions probably solve them on their own. Leaving things as they are.
Who cares, people with homework need help too. They're beginners so asking them to formulate a perfect question or conduct research is basically a non-starter. If the barrier to entry is become a professional first, it's no wonder why the company and its user base are shrinking.
I think "professionals who can't figure this obscure things out" is the best use-case for SO, really. Perhaps being a professional is something to be required. I'm speaking only from my own experience. I have only ever asked a handful of questions on SO (going back to about 2011), and that's because I spend hours and hours trying to figure it out first. So yes, I think I do expect that of other questioners as well.
"Why won't my docker container build?" Well, because there's a typo in your instructions and it says so clearly in the error output. Of course we get tired of answering these types of questions.
Can you name those alternatives? I don't think SO/SE is being beaten by anything, it has no competition within the set of questions it allows. When it comes to other questions - of course other websites are better for answering the questions that are offtopic on SO/SE.
I'd you think the SO is bad, you should check out the EE board on StackExchange. I've never seen such aggressively unhelpful behavior by people performing excellence in my life.
ChatGPT may have killed it, but it was already severely weakened by them allowing a-holes to run the place.
while I agree about SO culture, it's probably the case that most of the laid-off staff took no part in that behavior.
The Great Reset 2.0 which might save SO:
Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero. And since "sentiment" is measurable nowadays, the same would be done for anyone whose hostile comments exceed some threshold. Probably other behavior would be similarly penalized.
Do you lose some valuable expertise? Undoubtedly, but making an example out of people is a warning to the rest.
> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.
Why it would help?
While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.
> While closing random questions as duplicates of similar but different question is obnoxious, downvoting "do my homework for me" questions is very useful.
In what way? Who really cares if it's homework or a newbie question? Are you such an expert in everything that you never ask newbie questions?
This arrogant attitude is toxic, spreads quickly, and poisons far too many communities. I'm grateful to dang et al that HN hasn't become like this.
Just ignoring the newbie questions is best, unless you want to answer honestly.
On the r/jazz and r/classicalmusic, almost every day there's some question like "I'm just getting into <genre>. What are some top albums/artists I should listen to?"
Someone does answer those questions. Props to those saintly people.
SO/SE might benefit from a "this question smells like homework" button that could shunt questions that are posted without any code or evidence of adequate clue off to a forum specifically for homework, rather than leaving them in the general queue.
> Everyone whose downvotes exceed a certain threshold has their reputation points reduced to zero.
This could be reasonable or not, depending on the "threshold". SO/SE already have mechanisms (which aren't perfect) to deal with emotional up/down-voting. It already 'punishes' with a 2 rep cost for downvoting an answer. It doesn't for downvoting a question.
Is it really that bad? I know I have asked some duplicate questions in the past but it’s not like I care. As long as they point me to the answer I’m happy.
I think as an isolated incident it wouldn’t be a big deal, but Jobs’ general behavior towards his employees and specifically Wozniak justifies some of the resentment people feel toward him.
This is one of the things that always got me. People always seem to act like Woz is just too nice to be outraged on his own behalf or something, and we need to do it for him.
Woz is a smart guy and a definite people person. He likely knew what kind of guy Steve Jobs was and probably just made peace with it. We compromise on people we know doing far shittier things to us than Jobs did to Woz, and yet we can't fathom how someone like Woz can accept that Jobs is Jobs and deal with it.
I used to work at Desktop Metal which was (at the time) a pretty small startup here in Boston.
When I left, I wrote a pretty negative review on Glassdoor about what I felt was a toxic work environment.
At the time I submitted my review, there were probably about 10 reviews for the company.
The very next day after my review was posted, about 7 positive reviews popped up. Obviously pretty suspicious behavior, but when I contacted Glassdoor they said there was no issue.
A week later my own review was removed for a generic content policy violation.
Goes without saying I don't trust Glassdoor for much.
I and other reviewers had left negative reviews for Cosuno Ventures GmbH as it's an incredibly toxic and horrible place to work in. I received a take-down notice from a German Google Maps review employee saying that Cosuno is claiming it's a false review and they don't know how who am I. Even though I worked at the company for 4 months with the CTO and had responded to the e-mail with documents signed by the CEO and CTO.
They're rocking a 5 star review now. I didn't receive a response from Google and my appeal has been ignored. I still have the company's t-shirt in the countryside.
I went to a pediatrician near where I lived. Long story short, she was very toxic, making ultimatums and giving what was revealed as dubious practice. I consulted other similar pediatricians, who all gave me radically different answers than hers.
As a result, I chose to write a detailed review explaining why I thought she was unprofessional, citing examples. Of course, my review got nuked.
Same happened with a photo shop that screw up a photo development for some films. I left a factual review, with a sample in pictures. I can see my review with my account, but no one else can.
Heh, one of my friends wrote a negative review about his landlord's Immobilien company. Got sued and had to pay him the amount of his deposit.
I bet I'd be at risk of getting sued in Germany even if I wrote a positive review about a company. The moment you post an opinion online you are opening yourself as a target.
Germany is not customer-review friendly. I got two legal threats over a non-descript 3-star google maps review of a deeply mediocre Restaurant for maliciously damaging their business reputation. Google made me provide receipts to prove I had been there.
I've experienced this almost verbatim - put up a factual (at least from my view) account of working with a previous employer, a "warts and all" review. Next week I see about ten 5-star reviews each with a single sentence something like "This is a great place to work!".
However, when searching out the low-down on a potential new employer, I only read the one and two star reviews - if they're pretty spurious then I feel more comfortable taking a role there. If however the poor reviews contain lots of pretty specific complaints, I find them more believable that the single sentence "everything is awesome here" style reviews.
No one trusts these review companies actually. They simply exist to extort entities that get reviewed either to remove negative reviews or promote or even auto-post fake positive reviews.
Yelp is a classic example that did this for years.
Actually you are right, sorry. I was exaggerating but it is true that it is mostly the naive/average users of internet that do place any significant credibility in online reviews
Can you foresee a scenario where a review site could legitimately exist without turning to synthetic reviews, dark UI patterns, or outright brand extortion?
Not a review site, but networks of people I trust directly is about the only thing that works. As soon as this grows beyond the trust I have in the network, the proxy trust tapers off quickly. That's the problem with something like glassdoor.
That’s why the most lucrative thing is to get people to ‘connect’ their networks digitally on social media and manipulate them. I hope we see a return to irl networks
https://www.productreview.com.au/ is the only site I've ever seen that does a good job at user reviews. Each review has to be accompanied by a verifiable receipt.
Interesting but not relevant here - they require a photo of a physical receipt, and they're hand reviewed. Anything is scammable given enough effort though, no doubt.
that’s exactly the amazon scam, executed with a verified receipt and “hand reviewed”. or did you mean, manually moderated? that’s no obstacle.
for amazon the receipt is guaranteed authentic as the product will have been verifiably purchased on amazon. for a 3p site receipts can be trivially fabricated
Consumer Reports has well known biases though, which colors their reviews. For example, they tend to rank American car companies unfairly low. Their vehicle issue score isn't weighted - trouble linking phone to infotainment is the same as engine exploding. Cars with more tech -> lower scores, even if they're mechanically flawless.
Honda has moved down their rankings due to reliability problems with their infotainment systems. Lumping transmission failure at 50,000 miles with some audio system breaking is too coarse.
Wouldn't that set up a conflict of interest for the review site? I'd trust such a site even less than normal (and normal is pretty close to not at all).
Sure, in kind of the same way that steam has a conflict of interest with reviews for games. But I tend to trust steam reviews at least generally, in fact more than I do most reviews on products I am looking at.
It is possible to exist in this space with a potential conflict, as long as you position yourself appropriately. If your interest is to serve "decent" companies by providing them with interested candidates, it can work.
It'll work fine until the site decides chasing profit is more important than integrity of the system, so probably right around the time they're looking for more funding.
At the same time, unfortunately we will have a hard time finding companies that will actually thrive on that website, since a staggering majority of them are just ridden with crooks in the management layer and above.
True, though this should increase the value of the listings that remain. Companies that can hold their own here gain the value of being respected in the community.
Yes. With a paid subscriber base and no advertising their interests would be aligned with the reader's. If you're not paying for the review they will ultimately build loyalty toward their funders.
It's not so much that I'd read the reviews, but ranking of results is fatally flawed thanks to these practices.
For many queries (restaurant in town X, book in genre Y) there are simply so many candidate results that ranking is the one and only thing to determine a (much, MUCH) smaller candidate set that the customer might actually engage with. How often do you click through to page 2 of your search results?
At a healthcare tech startup I worked at for every negative review we got management made us write three positive reviews. The owners daughter would get all of her friends from college to write more and more positive reviews.
It was so obvious, any fake review written by HR will always have "keep doing what you're doing!" in the "advice to management" section. Like, even a moderately happy employee will actually have something to say in the "advice to management" section. Only a shill will say, "Keep doing what you're doing!"
I swear the 'keep doing what you're doing' must either be the standard HR planted review (I wasn't invited to the HR conference where they learned that!), or it's GD's own spam for pay. I've seen that too frequently at toxic jobs for it to be coincidence.
Luckily, just like Amazon reviews, it's pretty easy to determine worthwhile info from how specific and balanced it is. The aggregate scores are obviously worthless, because either shills or spurned employees taint the mix.
I enjoy when there are responses from the business: that can often show egotistical management that thinks their poo doesn't stink.
Heard the same from a friend of a friend, they would game Trip Advisor reviews by giving discounts to customers and the daughter would make accounts and leave positive reviews all the time.
There seriously needs to be a watchdog group or AI service (startup idea!) that vets reviews with heuristics like anomaly detection for VPN ip address reviews in succession or browser fingerprinting.
Also ChatGPT is gonna make writing unique reviews a thing of the past. Expect fake reviews sounding indistinguishable from genuine human writing. We are screwed.
I definitely believe that. Years ago, I had an interview scheduled with a bank’s IT department. Checked their Glassdoor page and it was littered with negative reviews, with obviously fake positive reviews peppered in.
I took the interview anyway because I really needed work at the time. Got some 1-on-1 time with the IT guys and the first thing they said was,
“You read the reviews on Glassdoor, didn’t you?” “Yes..”
“Well, don’t worry, IT is pretty isolated from all that”
Cool, I guess?
Next, I got some time with a VP. He saw on my resume that I’d done some work for a Christian church. He said,
“Yeah, I love to debate religion at the water cooler!”
Had he taken some time to get to know me, he’d know I’m not religious and probably would have held his tongue.
I got offered the job. Naturally, I didn’t take it.
Like others have said, Glassdoor is good to see problem spots in negative reviews. Positive reviews are meaningless in my eyes.
For reference, the bank was called Bank of Internet at the time. They’ve since rebranded to Axos and I continue to recommend against them. I know nothing about their financial credibility, but I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
> I can’t in good faith recommend anyone support a company that allows people in positions of power to “debate religion at the water cooler.” That’s a hostile work environment.
This is likely some cultural issue (I'm not from the United States), but I don't get what some person of power who loves debating religion at the water cooler makes the company a hostile work environment. Quite the opposite: in my gut feeling the fact that religion (a topic that has a tendency to cause heated discussions) can be discussed at the water cooler is rather a point of evidence that the work environment is really healthy.
Yes, this is the issue I have with all the comments on this thread saying that glassdoor has too many good reviews for a company that the commenter knows is "toxic". I have no idea what "toxic" means to the commenters here. Then I finally see an issue concretely identified: toxic can mean manager expresses an interest in "debating religion at the water cooler"? So what?
I also wouldn't generalize from this poster's anecdote to conclude "This is likely some cultural issue" in the US. I guess religion is a touchy subject in the US compared to more homoegenous nations like in the EU, and a rule of thumb I'd always heard is to avoid it in the office. (They used to say the same thing about politics in the office but that definitely went out the window these last 10 years.)
Religion is a legally protected class in the US, and the fact that a boss would willingly want to discuss, much less debate it with a subordinate opening the business up to much unnecessary liability is a red flag at least for stupid leadership.
Worst case scenario, the boss is trying to discriminate based on religion, and trying to find out more about the subordinate’s personal beliefs. Best case scenario, boss is for whatever reason curious, but displays lack of knowledge of labor laws and best practices (in the context of asking to discuss with a newbie who they have no prior relationship with).
After a working relationship had been established, I could see religion as a as a casual topic being reasonable depending on how what their relationship is like, but as an introduction? Forget about it.
Really? How would European business culture approach this? I feel like talking about debating religion when it’s not relevant to a potential employee is extremely short sighted or some type of backhanded mind game; it just doesn’t seem normal to say that at a job interview. After a working relationship has been established if it comes up, that is different, but if the VP just says that based on seeing a potential employee’s work with a church, it’s quite suspect.
I'd happily talk religion, trans rights, racism etc with anyone at work.
But then I'm not paranoid , and Ive never worked anyplace in 20 years where I feel people are being dishonest or disingenuous or playing any sort of games. especially not mind games, that's fucking absurd to me that you would even think that at all.
What sort of people are you working for, that sounds like hell.
I've always been in offices, and worked for managers I've gone and got drunk with and talked about all sorts of shit. it's never been an issue.
If US office culture Is as you describe it, it sounds fucking awful.
All those topics sound like minefields I would be cautious discussion even with good friends, and then only if we have similar views. If I knew there would be a significant disagreement I would drop the topic probably, avoids more trouble.
I think it’s about minimizing liability. I wouldn’t want a work dynamic to turn toxic due to a coworker’s prejudice or some disagreement we had debating over the water cooler. At work you focus on work, sure you can have some chit chat but generally these topics are breached after being acquainted with someone.
I’d say Consumer Reports and NYT wire cutter are pretty objective…
Their bigger issue is that company quality doesn’t change much from year to year, so the pans that were good in 2019 are probably still good now, which is boring.
To be fair, most of the alternatives are garbage, but also most of Kryptonite’s own products are garbage. There are ~3 worthwhile bike locks on the market. 2 of them are made by Kryptonite. The rest provide the same value as the TSA. Mostly theatrical.
On youtube there are videos from an expert lockpicker, I can't remember the name, where he goes on lockpicking kryptonite locks. He explains in great detail what he expected more from the high end, but his recommendation by the end was still a kryptonite lock, not necessary the ultimate, and said that unless you are ready to lose the bike, unless it's in sight, there is very little you can do.
And with an angle grinder you are doomed either way
Glassdoor removed all of my reviews after submitting a negative view about 1 company. Previous reviews had been mostly positive or just neutral with provable facts.
Having seen their internal Blind, social Slack channels and culture vs. the Glassdoor reviews, and then submitting my review which really "went against the grain" of Glassdoor, it was clear there was something going on. I just didn't care enough to find out.
As these systems age, I think they're all missing one feature - "what are ratings or reviews from the past 6 months".
My favorite thing about glassdoor is that I've had employers use their pay scales for negotiations. Which of course are many years old at this point. Needless to say I rejected their offer.
A blockchain based solution can be developed for customer reviews. If your cryptographically signed and verifiable review went and sat on the disk of every computer on the planet, there will be no options to manipulate it.
Yeah except there would still be a mechanism for revoking or moderating bad reviews because people would use the platform to review bomb any company they took issue with. The review might still be on the chain's history, but the moderation tool would still be created with good intentions, with a new transaction on a later block that basically revokes the "validity" of the bad review. Similar mechanisms can be seen in NFTs, where you can update the NFTs metadata.
But those "seven positive" reviews will still show up! When I was calculating the NPS scores at a former job, IIRC you need seven or eight 100% scores to offset one low score. Interesting that's what happened to the Desktop Metal poster.
But (presumably) those seven posters would be motivated by big tech money and thus be identified by some algorithm or the other in that blockchain? And/or you being a genuine reviewer would have a more organic activity across the blockchain with other products too compared to theirs and that will add to the weight?
There's just very little organic activity on a site like Glassdoor. You changing jobs, and thus naturally having any kind of inclination to post something may be few and far between, and you might not even think of uploading a review unless you're disgruntled (read: motivated).
Agreed for some reason I had a really repulsive reaction to seeing that as well. Feels like this is the next step in people turning more inward. A screen strapped to our face at all times.
If they can get it into a pair of glasses, it might help a lot. Yes, the screen will be there all the time, but people won't be staring down at their phones all the time either.
Imagine you realise that you haven't taken off your vision for a few months. You lift them up and you're just all alone with sores on your face, in your piss-soaked chair in your isolated flat in your decaying suburb of your polluted city. think I'll just put them back on...
You probably also don't want to take them off if everyone around you is going to wear one, not sure if AR is the right bet though for our dystopia. We don't want to augment the tent we live in the billionaire city, we want to replace the cardboard box we live in with a mansion to ease our embarrassment at not yet being a billionaire.
Future consumer electronics needs to focus on easing the transition of hundreds of millions of people in the western world into poverty.
