The logic of this split to makes sense to me - as long as people associate foursquare with checkins rather than discovery, it'll be hard for them to go head to head with Yelp.
But it's odd that they'd create a new app around checkins and continue trying to associate the foursquare brand with discovery. Wouldn't it be easier to keep foursquare as "the checkin app" (how people already see it) and create a new brand identity for "the discovery app"?
"2. Raising venture capital doesn’t make you a good person." Is there anyone out there trying to raise money because they think it'll make them a good person?
I agree that, long-term, high-skill work is at least as likely to be automated as low-skill work. There's no shortage of occupations that were once high-skill and now are largely mechanized. We might not be able to foresee how that can happen with software, but there's a long list of industries that weren't automated until they were, to the surprise of those employed within those industries.
In a small way, one can argue that increasingly easy-to-use frameworks are already having that effect. Right now, with the market for software and software developers growing so rapidly, the efficiency gained from using frameworks is a great thing for the individual programmer. The time she doesn't spend building animations or site looks or CMS's can easily be applied to other problems, and she benefits directly from the increased productivity. But it's risky to assume that the demand for software will always outpace the supply, as this has never been the case for any other labor market I can think of. Markets seek and tend to eventually find equilibrium in these areas.
But I'm less a fan of 'news' articles with sensational headlines that boil down to "The way it was was good, so new stuff must be bad." It's not hard to imagine (or find) similar articles about basically anything that's new and popular, especially when it happens to be popular with 'young' people.
It seems to me that this article plays on the fact that most people prefer established norms over change, and most people glorify "how things were" in relation to "how things are". There's very little meaningful here, only link-bait.
But it's odd that they'd create a new app around checkins and continue trying to associate the foursquare brand with discovery. Wouldn't it be easier to keep foursquare as "the checkin app" (how people already see it) and create a new brand identity for "the discovery app"?