The counterpoint to this argument is that Yang tried to solve the problem of automated job losses as an entrepreneur when he ran the nonprofit Venture for America, which ran in states not commonly known to be tech hubs.
He's not someone that was distantly removed from the issue as he was highly aware and swimming deep in it. He realized after a while, that because he was only bringing in a few thousand jobs from starting new companies compared to the hundreds of thousands lost each year due to automation, that the only good avenue of making real change was driving national dialogue to accelerate meaningful solutions via running for president.
So as a user of the Beme Panel app (the 2nd app, created after the CNN acquisition), I thought its core idea was fascinating. The ability to quickly panel and poll people on news topics directly via a phone app instead of invasive text or phone calls seems something worthwhile to invest in. Using it felt more like joining a group for a conversation rather than being prodded by pollsters.
What didn't make sense to me is why they didn't "step on the gas" and accelerate the speed of their app development and content. I overall enjoyed the Beme youtube vids and it seemed they were finally honing in on the right track, and as mentioned earlier the Beme Panels app showed promise.
However, the videos were a bit infrequent, not pumping out as much video content as competitors VICE or Vox, or even CNN's own previous acquisition "Great Big Story". The Panels app was still in closed beta and only brought in a trickle of users instead of trying to bring in even more to provide more data points and diversity of content/conversation.
Being a subscriber to Casey's YouTube channel, it seems to me that Casey is the kind of person that's a self-starter that likes to change things up a lot (which works for YouTube vids), but when it comes to consistently working on something that's more finite for long periods of time he doesn't have the knack for it.
It's funny that the photo-sharing part of the "Game Neverending" MMO became Flickr, and the chat tool they created to communicate while working on Glitch became Slack. It's a double coincidence of side-project success.
A good case where this happened was with the Flash 2D "Crafting" MMO named "Glitch" created by the former Flickr founders. After the game terminated, they released all the art and source code to the public domain: https://www.glitchthegame.com/public-domain-game-art/
I only played this game briefly when it was around and it didn't hold my interest for long, but it was a really unusual and quirky game. I'm sure the devs go into more detail somewhere why it failed, but it was likely because of bad timing-- it was a post-Farmville Flash game during the time when mobile gaming and HTML5 were really starting to kick off.
You can find a lot of retro-style PC indie games on http://itch.io/, regarding mobile it's probably best to check out the forums or categories on mobile game review sites like http://toucharcade.com/ .
He's not someone that was distantly removed from the issue as he was highly aware and swimming deep in it. He realized after a while, that because he was only bringing in a few thousand jobs from starting new companies compared to the hundreds of thousands lost each year due to automation, that the only good avenue of making real change was driving national dialogue to accelerate meaningful solutions via running for president.