The Times has two pieces today that are interesting in and of themselves but more interesting when considered together.

The first is about how irritating rich techies have become in San Francisco, and how they’re making the city unlivable.

Resentment simmers, at the fleets of Google buses that ferry workers to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View and back; the code jockeys who crowd elite coffeehouses, heads buried in their laptops; and the sleek black Uber cars that whisk hipsters from bar to bar. Late last month, two tech millionaires opened the Battery, an invitation-only, $2,400-a-year club in an old factory in the financial district, cars lining up for valet parking.

My anecdotal supporting evidence: I was in Austin, Texas, last weekend, and met a young guy who had tried his hand at San Francisco. The people there just weren’t nice, he said. Everyone had an attitude. So he moved to Austin, and loves it.

The second interesting Times piece is Nick Bilton writing on the possibility of a tech bubble.

Money-losing technology companies are going public at you’ve-got-to-be-joking prices. The founders of Snapchat are getting multibillion-dollar offers — and turning them down. And the Nasdaq composite index, a visible symbol of the ’90s dot-com boom and bust, is a sneeze away from 4,000, a level it last reached just before, well, you know.

(Blogger: Nasdaq passed 4k about 9:30 this morning.)
The Snapchat thing is particularly interesting. Last week Business Insider’s Henry Blodget had a piece arguing that the Snapchat founders were right to turn down the $3 billion offer from Facebook, that they were going to make more on…advertising…and…selling virtual goods.

(Can you hear the skepticism in my ellipses?)

Blodget argues:

The average active Snapchat user, of which there are likely already 10s of millions, receives ~150 an estimated 20-50 “snaps” per day*. Snapchat has already experimented with mixing in one video or photo advertisement in every 20-30 snaps. Advertisers are jazzed about this, because Snapchat allows them to reach a coveted demographic (teenagers) that they have trouble reaching anywhere else…

Note all the suppositions (and one corrected mistake) in that one paragraph: there are “likely” tens of millions of Snapchat users, they won’t mind getting ads every 20 or so messages, the ads will be influential, teenagers won’t get as bored with Snapchat as they do with every other social media platform…

This LinkedIn post by a guy named Shane Snow devastatingly rebuts Blodget.

Snow points out that, unlike Facebook, Snapchat is easy to abandon; it doesn’t store any user data (friends, e.g.) that users want to preserve. Also, Snapchat’s technology is easy to replicate. But perhaps most important, advertising is no panacea. (I often wonder: Will we ever reach a point of advertising saturation? At the moment, advertising is expected to fund virtually everything.)

Face it: kids don’t like ads. As soon as Snapchat users start getting Snaps from Ford Focus and Citibank, they’re going to start thinking Snapchat’s about as cool as junk mail. The word they’re going to use is Spam.

Sure, some advertisers will come up with really funny ads that won’t bother users; they’ll try to fit the medium. But it’s going to ruin the user experience, and the users don’t have a good reason to deal with bad UX.

I’d argue there’s a bubble because of all the pitches that I get for new tech companies—dozens every week. And none of them seem to be offering a service that I actually need. I might try them, even use them for a while, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss them for a minute.

And here’s a key difference about this tech bubble versus the last one: I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who’d actually be kind of happy if this bubble popped. Tech people are having a disproportionate influence on our culture now, and for a lot of reasons (Google glass!) it’s not a healthy one. (Longer post, if I can find the time.) I mean, is Mark Zuckerberg really the guy you want to be one of the world’s most powerful people? Has he ever read a book that wasn’t intended to help get him into Harvard?

Plus, on a more tangible note, the riches generated by this tech bubble haven’t really translated to average stock market investors; they’re limited to founders, employees and investors. So if this bubble burst, the extent of financial damage would be limited, and frankly, some of the people who are now getting rich off tech would be improved by having to endure a little financial pain.

So I say, yes, it’s a bubble. Bring it on.