Toshiba, Seagate shipping slower SMR drives without disclosure, too - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sneaky-marketing-toshiba-seagate-wd-smr-drives-without-disclosure <comment><AUTHOR> Trying to pass SMR as PMR is kind of pointless since HDD becomes more and more pro and enterprise territory and consumer are shifting away to SSD.

Their customers are increasingly likely to be the kind of people who care about this kind of thing.

<comment><USER2> > pro and enterprise territory

This doesn't change the fact that enterprise customers are equally screwed by DMSMR drives.

Adding insult to injury is that those disguised SMR (DMSMR) drives were made with very intention to sell "unsalable" SMR drives to Windows users.

<comment><USER3> I read parent as saying that trying to cut corners with SMR is even more stupid seeing that the HDD-market is becoming 'more enterprise' on average.

<comment><USER4> SMR drives have more of a place in the enterprise market than the consumer market, just like tape drives. Enterprise/datacenter customers tend to have a much better understanding of their workloads and are more able to determine when they have a use case for niche technologies. They also have a greater ability to deploy tiered storage with SSDs in front of hard drives to cover up the performance limitations.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but they need to be told the drives are SMR to be able to make that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Adding to this confusing debacle is how HDDs are now being marketed like running shoes: one type for running, one for squash, one for tennis, one for basketball...

<comment><USER7> There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about.

* CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it.

* SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data, so that your data is physically overlapping at the microscopic level. Any write must read the old data, rewrite the old data, and then finally write the new data you're planning to store.

* 5400 RPM vs 7200 RPM -- Higher RPM drives are obsolete, because SSDs are faster. 7200 RPM is kind of standard, but 5400 exists for those who want less noise, less electricity usage, and are willing to put up with the lower performance.

That's pretty much it. "NAS" drives tend to have anti-vibration sensors and other such things, but those sensors don't really cost much and I don't really see why it deserves its own category.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

There only needs to be maybe, 3 kinds of hard drives made today. 7200 PMR drives, 5400 PMR drives, and finally 5400 SMR drives.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I've read NAS drives also declare themselves "bad" much more readily through SMART, so you replace them sooner.

<comment><USER9> It should just be a setting for whether a drive does 0 retries, 1 retry, 5 seconds of retrying, or longer. Not entirely different models.

<comment><USER8> It probably is a setting. And manufacturers simply make us pay $20-50 more for flipping a bit. I'd be stunned if they have entirely different firmware versions for different products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a trusted hdd manufacturer left? I'd like to not spend several weeks on research when I again get the urge to rebuild the NAS.

<comment><USER11> HGST still has a good reputation, due to top backblaze stats.

<comment><USER12> They were bought by WD a few years back.

<comment><USER13> 2012 in fact. I thought it was much more recent, myself.

<comment><USER11> They lead the Backblaze charts since years, so having been bought doesn't seem to matter much?

<comment><USER13> They were osntensibly a fully independent subsidiary (for antitrust reasons) through 2015.

For the years after that: yes, it seems WD did not want to destroy the high- quality reputation and engineering excellence they paid $4B for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How to tell if a drive is a shingled SMR drive...

it has TRIM support

[https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25185](https://support- en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25185)

</comment><comment><USER15> The annoying part about all this is that I _want_ to buy some SMR disks (HM ideally, but HA will do) to experiment with storage tech. I know that there are lots of devices out there that are SMR internally, but because of vendors hiding the information, I can't actually buy what I want.

(On that note: if anybody has a disk that supports ZAC or ZBC and wants to get rid of it, I'll happily buy it off of them)

<comment><AUTHOR> Google the exact drive name and SMR. People have started to put together lists.

<comment><USER16> The parents point was that, by hiding disk type, they are intentionally device managed, not host aware (HA) nor host managed (HM), so do not fit the bill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If customers cared enough, wouldn't someone just market their drives as PMR and this would solve itself? It would make sense to have a lower cost alternative that would fulfil most consumer needs though.

<comment><USER18> I can't speak for the drives mentioned in this article, but the WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR since the Red line was marketed by WD as the best drives for NAS. It'd be a little like if you went down to the your local Ferrari dealership and bought a Ferrari only to find that they'd started selling a model that couldn't reach 60mph.

<comment><USER19> > WD Red drives were de facto marketed as PMR

Do you have a reference? Or any evidence of customers knowing or caring about the internals of the drive before this controversy arose?

Claiming that anything is the "best" at something is pure puffery, as we say in the legal trade. Ferrari publishes quantifiable specs on how their vehicles perform; WD does not do so in detail.

<comment><USER7> SMR is terrible for NAS setups, particularly RAID5. Absolutely terrible. Under no circumstances should you be putting an SMR drive into your NAS.

<comment><USER20> Isn't this a question of throughput? What is the bandwidth of SMR and what workloads can't it support that PMR can?

I primarily use my NAS for backups and don't care too much about how slow they are, they finish quickly enough.

<comment><USER21> Try to do a resilver with SMR drives.

I just got fucked by this change in models - I had an array full of 6TB WD Reds, had one fail, ordered a replacement. Rebuilding the RAID-Z3 took over 2 weeks. Previous replacements had taken under 2 days - usually under 1.

Passing SMR drives off without saying anything, especially when that exact model had been a PMR drive prior, is incredibly anti-customer.

<comment><USER19> The model number did change. The older drive was a WD60EFRX; the newer SMR drive is a WD60EFAX. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER7> What's going on, is that WD has for years, sold a PMR 3TB drive called "3TB WD Red".

Suddenly, without warning, the "3TB WD Red" is an SMR drive. Technically they changed the model number, but the marketing number (3 TB Red) remained the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They should just sell PMR drives, with an option to enable SMR mode for extra capacity.

<comment><USER23> Not possible. Modern drives require precision external equipment to write the servo markers, you can't "low level format" a modern drive and haven't been able to for about two decades. Changing from SMR to PMR would require rewriting the servo tracks for the different density.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So does this happened because the rising adaptation of SSD or it's bound to happen after all for HDD to cutting cost?

<comment><USER25> It's competition. Every cost cutting tech gets adoption except for boost the main muggle specs like capacity.

On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC.

The annoying thing is that unless the government forces disclosure, the honest manufacturers are the ones hurt, having to start advertising "no SMR!" to differentiate, like the organic/health food products in the grocery store that have to list all the poisons they don't have.

<comment><USER26> > _On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC._

I'm happy to buy a DRAMless + TLC SSD for my boot disk on my web browsing PC (not development), it is a reasonable compromise for a lower price. Same for SMR drives, I won't have problems with them as backup disks.

I think the problem here is SMR drives are sold _without disclosure_ , and it has already created some serious problems in practice.

> What's worse, they're shipping DM-SMR drives as "RAID" and "NAS" drives This > is causing MAJOR problems – such as the latest iteration of WD REDs > (WDx0EFAX replacing WDx0EFRX) being unable to be used for rebuilding > RAID[56] or ZFS RAIDZ sets: They rebuiild for a while (1-2 hours), then > throw errors and get kicked out of the set.

<comment><USER27> > They rebuiild (sic) for a while (1-2 hours), then throw errors and get > kicked out of the set.

I don't doubt it, but do you have the source for that? I read stories about people using the Seagate Archive disks in RAIDZ and it worked fine for them.

<comment><USER21> Mine completed the rebuild, but it took over 2 weeks vs. the usual 1-2 days my prior WD Red 6TBs had completed in.

This has accelerated my move to enterprise 16TB drives, because I really don't want to expose myself to data loss on rebuilds taking hugely extended times.

<comment><USER28> > Mine completed the rebuild, but it took over 2 weeks vs. the usual 1-2 days

This also means you'll need a lot more HD's per RAID set to guard against multiple failures during rebuild. Which means that even the supposed data density/space advantage of SMR is moot - you'd be better off with PMR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there any way small-scale ~4 drive NAS or file server systems can accommodate SMR drives in software? It looks like they're going to need to do so...

<comment><USER30> It would really be best if the drive properly identified itself, so the host os/filesystem could adapt to the drive parameters.

That said, you would want to use a log structured filesystem, with a compaction feature. You want to avoid read-modify-write on the shingled areas, it's time intesive and competes with other I/O.

<comment><USER13> You don't need a single Log structure -- the shingle stripes are on the order of 128 MB of or so. Any CoW filesystem can relatively easily adapt to this kind of system; in-place filesystems are basically boned on SMR. The CoW filesystem aren't going to be fast on SMR, mind you, just not quite as awful.

<comment><USER31> Except filesystems like ZFS are having issues on these SMR Reds during resilvers (rebuilds) because SMR slows down so much.

<comment><USER13> Toast0's great-grandparent comment (and my grandparent comment) are talking about Host-managed SMR, not "transparent" drive-managed SMR like these fraudulent WD Reds.

Yes, nothing except extremely low load or extremely linear (i.e., security video / tape-style backup) workflows works well with drive-managed SMR.

<comment><USER32> storage drive recycle after certain period and hence it is good for the first write but after that as those (and then as which support it) would need to assume low load environment. May be ok, just if we can tell we can test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not sure about how to moderate the reported DMSMR behaviors reported in this thread.

But I wonder if folks are better off buying host managed or host aware drives instead, and pairing it with either dm-zoned and their preferred file system; or a file system that supports ZBC and ZAC natively (Btrfs does, I'm not sure about others).

Note that dm-zoned has significant changes starting with kernel 5.5.

[https://zonedstorage.io/linux/dm/#](https://zonedstorage.io/linux/dm/#)

</comment><comment><USER19> Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by the use of SMR technology? Or is this just one of those cases of performance generally not being as good as it used to be, and customers becoming reliant on past behavior despite the lack of an explicit performance promise from the vendors?

<comment><USER7> > Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated > by the use of SMR technology?

Not really, no. SMR drives overlays data on top of each other, like "shingles" on a typical American roof.

As such, whenever an SMR drive writes data, it must read the data "underneath" the current spot, rewrite the "underneath" data, and then lay the new data on top of it.

SMR drives are great for archives (write once, read many). But they're pretty much useless to the typical consumer. SMR drives should be avoided if you're building your own computer.

<comment><USER19> I think the real answer here is to demand that disk manufacturers publish performance specifications. This leaves them free to change implementation details (which consumers usually don't know or care about) as long as the published specifications are accurate.

<comment><USER7> For literally years, people bought WD Red drives, DESPITE being more expensive, because they had higher performance.

WD Blue drives had SMR / Shingles in them. WD Green drives were shoddy, low quality, and had issues with RAID Rebuilds. WD Red commanded a high price, but came with higher quality.

What's happened here, is that WD has begun to sell low-performance drives under their high-priced "Red" brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can't say I particularly care frankly. I don't see myself buying another spinning plate of rust

<comment><USER26> How do you backup your motionless piles of sand, then? /joke

Perhaps all the data you care is on the cloud, but HDDs are still important for backups. Although it's the most acceptable scenario to use an inferior SMR disk. The real issue of SMR is RAID/servers, which, of course, is what the cloud is made of...

<comment><USER35> I do my backups in the cloud, which uses hard drives for slow storage but I couldn't care less about it. The terrible reliability and performances are not my problem anymore.

<comment><USER36> What if you lose your job and can't afford to keep paying the monthly fees, or there is corruption in your backup? You won't know until you perform a disaster recovery.

<comment><USER35> If I lose my job I get notified in advance and then I get unemployment benefits for years. It's more than enough time to find a new job before I don't have enough savings to justify cloud storage costs.

What if you connect your hard-drive and the data is corrupted or the drive isn't spinning? That did happen to me. I rather have people replacing the hard drives for me. Uploading corrupted backups to the cloud is the same than saving corrupted backups locally.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What SaaS Startups Need to Look for in an Online Payments Solution - <AUTHOR> https://blog.paymill.com/saas-startups-online-payments/

<comment><USER2> Cool input!</comment>


An Inside Look at how a VC Evaluates Startups Pt. II - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thomvest.com/vcevaluatingstartupsii/

<comment><USER2> The investment memo is critical for founders to understand. These are all the questions that you should be able to answer when seeking financing.

This memo will be the first thing the LPs ask for if the VCs investment goes south, meaning, your company fails.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for posting a download of the cap table, will be useful if we go out for funding.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thought I was going to read about how they "REALLY" evaluate startups.</comment>


Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia - <AUTHOR> https://kirkcenter.org/essays/would-you-recognize-a-dystopia-if-you-saw-one/ <comment><USER2> I don't strongly disagree on any particular point, per se, but the fact that the author's thoughts are rooted in a religious worldview felt like it was snuck in there at the end:

"Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed...The utopian visions that animate real places...seek to remake humanity and society in someone's image—and that is not the image of the Creator."

For further context, the website it's on is "The Russel Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal"; from its Wikipedia page: "The Center is known for promoting traditionalist conservatism and regularly publishing Studies in Burke and His Time and The University Bookman, the oldest conservative book review in the United States."

Not that these things invalidate it necessarily, but they're important context to place it in.

Overall I'd say the article is more an argument about semantic nuance than a grand social commentary. Probably a valid semantic critique, but nonetheless.

<comment><USER3> >this world is fallen

Makes the entire article essentially meaningless. How can I trust somebody with such a bizarre and unconnected worldview?

<comment><USER4> I'm not religious myself, but I think you're letting some weird biases get in the way here. The point is that the world and the work of human beings is flawed, fallible, and imperfect. Whether or not heaven exists in heaven, it certainly doesn't exist on earth and essentially never can.

<comment><USER5> That's a very religious view. At most you can say humans are not what you wish them to be.

Where a crystal may have 'defects' that's meaningless for a pile of sand. Further, defects can be more useful than a perfect crystalline structure.

So, to say perfection is unobtainable requires a strict definition of perfection and absolute proof it's impossible. Both, are very high hurdles.

<comment><USER6> > _That's a very religious view. Humans are not necessarily flawed_

Historically they have been. At least they're not up to our own standards.

We can kill, lie, cheat, brutalize, exploit, each other, and we do so daily in the billions.

We might not be total bastards, but we're no perfectly fine people either.

<comment><USER5> > We can kill, lie, cheat, brutalize, exploit, each other, and we do so daily > in the billions.

All of those can be very useful traits. Evolution, promotes using miliple strategies.

Now, you can talk about spherical humans in a vacuum, but reality is more complex than that.

<comment><USER6> Useful for either the survival of the species or the individual. Still, hell for those suffering them. That's the broken part.

<comment><USER5> Which logically would mean it's the universe that's flawed not humans.

Though, that gets into some very odd arguments. History would be rather boring in a static or cycling universe.

<comment><USER6> > _Which logically would mean it's the universe that's flawed not humans._

Logically you can argue either way. Logically one can say the universe doesn't give a fuck, so can't be flawed any more than a rock is.

Humans however both crave unity and love and compassion and so on (and know those things for good), and also do the cheating, lying, killing, bullying, racism, and so on. So, one can justifyably call them broken.

Heck, tons of our books, movies, and songs call us just that.

<comment><USER5> > and know those things for good

Path finding algorithms optimize for the least cost path. That does not mean such a path is good, nor a zero weight path from start to finish is perfection.

In that context just because humans seek something does not inherently make it good. Religions for example often prohibit some gratifying behavior.

Is an eternal state of pure bliss perfection, or little more than a drugged out meaningless existence? Individuals may prefer one state to another, but it's not clear that the state of maximized preference is thus perfection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More generally speaking, when you optimize on a particular set of metrics to the extreme (when it comes to social issues this is what utopias try to do), you will inevitably cause another set of metrics to be correspondingly de- optimized to the extreme (which can be qualified as dystopian).

There is no way to optimize everything simultaneously because many things are fundamentally inversely correlated with each other (e.g. security vs freedom). So you either have a state that is relatively balanced (everything is mediocre), or a state with more spread (some aspects are really good and some are really bad).

<comment><USER8> I agree. It's also worth noting the lifecycle of most optimizations, including the non-partisan variety:

1\. Early on many benefit and costs are minimized per capita.

2\. As the benefits diffuse across the population, smart/wily/greedy individuals push the optimization to squeeze more value for themselves.

3\. Benefits begin to centralize among the smart/wily/greedy. Awareness of costs starts to grow. The general population becomes ambivalent. Regulation can keep the system in this state for a while, but it too will eventually be optimized.

4\. The arms race of optimization ultimately excludes all but the smartest/wiliest/greediest from any benefit while the rest of the population eats the cost. The optimization is now Bad For Society™.

My gut says this pattern is true for any social construction, from marriage and markets to card games and communism. The only meaningful insight I take away from it is that ideological conflict (competition between optimizations) is literally the foundation of a functioning society.

The relative balance that tension provides doesn't strike me as mediocre. Without it, everything devolves into an oscillating heaven and hell, mirroring your ideology.

<comment><USER9> Using 'optimization' here makes it an odd construction where I don't think I've quite understood what you are trying to say.

Is it synonymous with social change? Most social changes aren't optimisations, they are complicated changes to how resources are distributed; leading to unpredictable outcomes.

Take social welfare. This can probably be considered a social optimisation and most reasonable people would agree that some level of welfare is appropriate. But there doesn't seem to be any particular agreement on the economic or social front about whether the optimum amount is more or less. Or what we are optimising for.

<comment><USER8> Optimization in the sense of optimizing for a specific (often ideological) outcome, rather than optimizing away an objective inefficiency.

Social welfare is a perfect example of "competing optimizations" precisely because there are so many different (and often mutually exclusive) organizational models and success metrics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Procedural arguments like this are silly. You have to judge things by what they are substantively. Feudalism and slavery were not utopian projects but they were clearly brutal. Nordic social democracy consciously set out to create a decent society for all and largely succeeded. I don't know what game the author is playing.

<comment><USER4> Nordic social democracy isn't a utopian idea, though. It's a progressive idea and an ambitious idea but it only really peeks out slightly from the normal range of market economies with welfare states, especially within Europe.

Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don't come close to the concentrated human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.

<comment><USER11> > Feudalism and slavery were awful, but don't come close to the concentrated > human misery inflicted by the utopian projects of the 20th century.

By that I assume you're largely referring to the Soviet Union and China during the cultural revolution? Yeah sure, those were bad, but it's hard for me to say whether they were particularly better or worse than slavery (at least from the perspective of a slave).

Moreover, I think that the assumption that those 20th century projects failed because they were utopian is unsourced. I think I could equally validly claim that they failed because of a fundamental failure to understand basic economics and/or a deep lack of empathy or realism on the part of national leadership.

<comment><USER12> I think you could argue that the horrors of this last century have been crueler than all the others simply because there were so many more humans to thrust them upon. I'm not convinced that it had a higher horror per capita, though.

<comment><USER4> Per unit time, certainly. Though this may also be because slavery persisted for centuries and the e.g. Khmer Rouge would have never been capable of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Back in my childhood, if you told me that one day, there would be more games of any imaginable genre, more than what you would know what to do with, of a higher visual and production quality than I'd ever imagined, I would have thought that to be a kind of utopia. Now in 2019, I find it to be somewhat dystopic. (See also, the "Paradox of Choice.")

A century before cars, if you told people that a commonplace device could quickly and inexpensively take you to the very store or house you wanted to go to at speeds up to a mile a minute, that would sound utopian. Now we know such systems have serious downsides.

Be careful what you ask for. You may get it. Or, as I put it, into any complex system whatsoever, some suckage must come. Solving one problem either exposes or creates another.

</comment><comment><USER14> We don't fully understand how society works. There is an emerging field known as Cliodynamics that has started to identity cycles and feedback loops societies go through.

For instance, people raised inside of a generation tend to have a similar cluster of personality traits to some degree. These traits propel certain innovations forward , leave other things lagging, and cause a reaction formation in the next generation who tend to value opposite traits. These new traits then alter which innovations are pushed forward, which are left behind, etc.

There are additional cycles I'm not covering here, but together they form a sort of "super cycle" with great periods of unrest as well as innovation occurring when the lines converge periodically.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliodynamics)

<comment><USER15> In fairness to the humanities, there has been a good deal of research and knowledge via sociology for a long while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." ― Oscar Wilde

"It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live." \- Lewis Mumford

The sentiment is true if Utopia is persued at a mass level, but what we need are more attempts and experiments at small utopias.

<comment><USER17> I try to run the makerspace I started as a mini utopia. Access to technology, tools, and a place to explore what is possible, is a big part of what a utopia is to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's because everybody forgets the only way to reliably create something good artificially is to engineer it carefully taking as much relevant real world phenomena as possible in account and keep applying well-engineered fixes as feedback arrives. Just building a set of facilities, proclaiming a set of rules and expecting everybody to play nicely treating those who don't as enemies rather than a rightful element of the puzzle is stupid. Politicians of whatever a kind tend to hate critique while failing to recognize it as a vital resource is a fatal mistake. Even biased critique and false accusations are important to analyze as these still highlight important issues indirectly (at least the fact there is a serious portion of people who are going to believe these for some reason that should be taken in account too).

</comment><comment><USER15> "The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess."

— Brave New World Revisited, Huxley, 1958

</comment><comment><USER19> This amounts to arguing about definitions and it doesn't seem like the article proposes anything of real substance.

In the introduction to _The Utopia Reader_ , a compendium of utopian and dystopian literature, the following definitions are given:

* Utopianism—social dreaming

* Utopia—a nonexistent society described in detail and normally located in time and space

* Eutopia or positive utopia—a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than the society in which the reader lived

* Dystopia or negative utopia—a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which the reader lived

* Utopian satire—a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of the existing society

* Anti-utopia—a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as a criticism of utopianism or of some particular eutopia

* Critical utopia—a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as better than contemporary society but with difficult problems that the described society may or may not be able to solve, and which takes a critical view of the utopian genre

Given that utopias are speculative explorations of possible futures and societies, it seems hard to reconcile that with questioning whether reality is a utopia or a dystopia, as the author does here. That just doesn't type check, and then the article is more about the author telling us about various things he considers dystopian.

For a more interesting take on the concept of utopia, I highly recommend the Fun Theory sequence on LessWrong: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun- th...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory- sequence)

<comment><USER20> You're the one arguing definitions. This author is trying to make an actual argument, and you've introduced a non-standard vocabulary, and are judging the argument _with your vocabulary instead of the definitions the author made quite clear_.

How do you pronounce "Utopia"? How does it differ from "Eutopia"? Your definitions are fine, internally consistent, and quite clear for serious in- depth discussion... But they align badly with the common set of definitions (In which Utopia is your Eutopia), and so reading vernacular writing is probably unclear or poorly argued when using such - But that doesn't mean that their argument is bad, only that you're misreading it.

<comment><USER21> What the article seems to miss out is any mention of Plato's invention of the term, and its original meaning of "no place". From the very beginning unachievability was associated with the concept.

<comment><USER12> Plato's republic has been called a utopia only in retrospect, the term was coined by Thomas Moore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Dystopia or utopia, both seem rooted in the idea we could ultimately shape and rule the world as we wish. I constantly see the reliance on some kind of system to somehow apply constraints to preserve order against chaos. And every time the perfect and all-powerful *topia fails in some unexpected way.

One's long life indeed benefits from a controlled environment able to consistently provide food, water, air or protection from potential dangers.

But why would society's survival works like my own? The dinosaurs didn't last but life itself did. Abilities to evolve and adapt to change or the multiplicity of methods to keep going proved themselves as some of the reliable skills to survive.

Anyway, I'm eagerly awaiting any future story of a society able to provide each one with a promising and somewhat reliable environment while managing as a whole to evolve and overcome any new challenges the universe constantly throws at us :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Dystopia is when you get frustrated with your societal model not producing appropriate outcome metrics and up the learning rate of the algorithm so it happens faster and remove a lot of democratic metrics like elections that are hard to tweak effectively and get a horrible overfit to your small training set.

</comment><comment><USER24> A Dystopia is only recognizable when juxtaposed against a state that is much different from it. That is, a Dystopia would develop over time, with many not even recognizing the gradual changes; it's not something that develops suddenly. For example, it's not hard to imagine that our world could be considered a Dystopia to some who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. Or, it could even be considered a Utopia to others. Utopias and Dystopias are only interesting as thought experiments to imagine what Humans could be possible about. There's never actually been one or nor will there ever be one.

<comment><USER25> _> Utopias and Dystopias are only interesting as thought experiments to imagine what Humans could be possible about_

They both have the property that progress has ended; that we have ceased learning about reality. An undesirable state to be in!

Yet _ideas_ of utopias and dystopias have been used to advance the careers/interests/ambitions of the power-hungry, e.g. when they reluctantly accept power. they don't want power (allegedly) and will cede it when the utopia is achieved (it will never be achieved).

<comment><USER26> I don't think there's anything inherent to a utopia that means you stop learning about reality. If anything, you should expect anything you learn about reality to have maximally broad impact according to its relevance to people's lives. There's nothing about a perfect organization of society that implies a steady, non-adaptive state.

<comment><USER25> How can anything have an impact if there are no problems? How can there be problems if the arrangements are perfect? How can anything which is perfect be improved? etc.

<comment><USER26> Why would there be no problems? What is perfect is the ability of society to solve problems, not the whole of existence. A utopia is a state of social order, not a state of reality.

<comment><USER25> The problem here is that problems are connected to problems in other fields, and that solving problems always creates _new_ problems. So a notionally perfect social and political order could only be achieved by halting progress in all other fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thomas Sowell's book _The Search for Cosmic Justice_ talks about this sort of thing in the context of social justice. However well intended, trying to do the impossible can produce atrocities.

</comment><comment><USER28> The article is right, but fails to explain why. Here is an abbreviated version of the argument within _Enlightenment Now_ for the same basic point.

We are prone to believe that the ends justify the means. When the ends are infinite good, we therefore become willing to inflict unlimited harm to achieve them. In practice the infinite good people aimed for has proven to be debatable, but the harms inflicted have not.

The more right you feel your cause is, the more that this should worry you.

</comment><comment><USER29> I took a philosophy course on Utopian and Dystopian literature last year. The takeaway I had from the course is even more stark than this headline: Utopia and Dystopia are two names for the same concept.

In all of the utopias we studied -- from Plato's Republic through Thomas More's Utopia and including Marx's Communist Manifesto -- the question that kept ringing in my ears was "utopia for whom?" Every utopia makes assumptions about people that naturally divide them into identifiable groups. Some of these groups end up happy, others not so much. A utopia which purports to make everyone happy (shouldn't they all?) is one that assumes all people are the same or it endeavours to make them so. Either way, we lose our humanity in the process.

<comment><USER30> > A utopia which purports to make everyone happy (shouldn't they all?) is one > that assumes all people are the same or it endeavours to make them so.

So the contrapositive is that because people differ all societies require some people to suffer? That's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation.

> In all of the utopias ... including Marx's Communist Manifesto

Ah, the Chicago school framing. What's primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian, because it is not a kind assessment of those conditions.

<comment><USER29> _That 's a great way to justify all sorts of exploitation._

Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as individuals. Humanity could have been a vast society of clones (like an ant colony) but it isn't. We take all of the good and all of the bad together when we accept our individuality.

 _primarily a positive work describing existing material conditions and relations is utopian_

It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with Capital. The Manifesto is distinctly and unabashedly utopian. It is not a critique of any extant society, it is a call to arms. It sets forth a sharply bifurcated worldview, proletariat versus bourgeoisie, and attempts to rally the former in revolution against the latter.

This fact is so obvious, to so many people, that terms like "Communist utopia" and "worker's paradise" have become clichés.

<comment><USER30> > Describing is not the same as justifying. Nature is what created us as > individuals.

We have little means of empirically separating what is natural versus social construct (or even qualifying what such a distinction means) when it comes to human behavior and society. Claiming that our nature makes inevitable that societies require some significant portion of their constituents to suffer is not simple description, it's a conceit that, like most naturalistic fallacies, is consistently used to excuse and justify existing social order. Viz evopsych, etc.

The premise I'm contesting is that minimizing suffering due to social constructs necessitates homogeny, which is a condition that narratively pits potential social orders against the individual.

> It sounds to me like you're conflating the Communist Manifesto with > Capital...It is not a critique of any extant society

The Manifesto contains the class struggle interpretation of history, the labor theory of value, excess value, the means of production, etc. Those are all models and critiques of extant society. It is not as descriptive or theoretical a work as Capital, but it primarily argues for a model of things as they are and have been. To my decades-old recollection only the third section is focused on ideal societies, and a large portion of that on contemporary political movements.

You can disagree with those models of extant society, or like me view them as historically significant but superseded theories, but you must admit the fundamental contrast to something like Moore's Utopia. They both have explicit normative perspective, but the Manifesto's are constructed out of an analysis of existing conditions, whereas Utopia is primarily concerned with describing the order of its hypothetical social ideal. Books like The Road to Serfdom are rarely framed as being utopian despite primarily being normative.

Politics is the art of the possible. Labeling perspectives on social order as "utopian" is a move designed to exclude them from the realm of possibility. I also first read the Manifesto in a political philosophy course as part of a unit on utopianism. It was only years later I realized the framing by the right-libertarian professor to demarcate it from _serious_ political philosophy, despite post-Marxism having at least as comparable a profile as an academic philosophical tradition to the just-market apologetics that made up the remainder of the course.

<comment><USER29> _Claiming that our nature makes inevitable that societies require some significant portion of their constituents to suffer is not simple description, it 's a conceit that, like most naturalistic fallacies, is consistently used to excuse and justify existing social order._

If you eradicate violence then those who love violence will suffer. You can't please everyone. This is not a normative claim, it's a fact of individuality. If your Utopian society is free of violence, then you must exclude people who love violence. How you accomplish this without committing violence is another matter.

 _you must admit the fundamental contrast to something like Moore 's Utopia_

I don't, actually. More was every bit a critic of his contemporary society as Marx was of his. The difference between More and Marx is that More was one of the most brilliant rhetoricians of all time. Taking the form of a Socratic dialogue, Utopia employs a pair of interlocutors, one of whom is the author himself, in order to present a critique of enclosure and the excesses of nobility that flew right over most nobles' heads. To call it "primarily concerned with describing the order of its hypothetical ideal" is to completely miss the author's point. I suggest you read it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Is Trump's America a dystopia?

I would look at America over the last 40-50 years, instead of asking about Trump specifically.

This is one question asked in the article, and I think that the author does a massive disservice here, while simultaneously writing an article that suggests that any Utopia is also a Dystopia, but never asks the question: is there a subset of Americans that would consider America today to be Utopic. I would argue that yes, that is the case: Those who hold massive quantities of capital. They collect massive amounts from the economy, and pay relatively little in taxes, all by design, since Reagan. More speak against them today, but it is relatively new to see the arguments against their economic value, or whether such concentrated power is dangerous, at least for me.

I could go one step further and look at oil production and usage in this country, and probably be able to formulate utopia/dystopia from it.

However, neither of these are specific to "Trump's" America, and instead discuss an America that has existed and been going in this direction for some time. I consider inability to see dystopia and utopia in this system to be lack of creativity.

</comment><comment><USER32> When I read this article, I thought of growing up in the suburbs. The suburbs I grew up in are ideal for the adult who wants to have a large house and minimal contact with strangers, but they are something very different for the adolescent child who is craving experience and contact with the outside world.

It would be hyperbole to call the suburbs an example of a dystopia for teenagers created in an attempt to create a kind of utopia intended for parents. But I have to admit that was the first thing that popped in my head as I read the article.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think a lot of dystopias arise from Rousseau-style or blank-slate naturalism - the idea that humans are naturally good (or that they can be easily socialised to be naturally good).

A dystopian ruler does not believe they are destroying humanity, they believe they are rescuing humanity from some exogenous menace, whereas a more Hobbes- inspired ruler believes themselves to be rescuing humanity from itself.

If humans are only evil because they are brainwashed by capitalism, or patriarchy, religion, or royalty, or lizardmen, or the government, or some other menace then any brutality used to purge this evil is both justified and a temporary state of affairs. On the other hand, if you assume that some people are just a little bit naturally anti-social then trying to fight this (through either soft measures like education, or hard measures like punishment) is only justified if the the tangible benefits (not the promise of some eventual Utopia) exceed the costs.

</comment><comment><USER34> So the majority of the examples proving the claim rely on fiction books and Netflix shows. Well I'm convinced now for sure

</comment><comment><USER35> An interesting read, but I also returned here to remark that the argument "Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed. ... and that is not the image of the Creator." is invalid and does make me wonder if there are other, more subtle misconceptions sprinkled throughout.

</comment><comment><USER36> There is no utopia. There are always winners and losers. Also, every system has cracks and loopholes which work against meritocracy.

</comment><comment><USER37> Trying to immanentize the eschaton is risky business. On the other hand, that there's pie in the sky is a vicious lie.

</comment><comment><USER38> Everything will be perfect when I am king. Trust me.

</comment><comment><USER39> Despite all the complaining, we're living in a utopia in the US right now. By any historical standard, life in the US is good beyond imagination.

For example, we're the fattest people on the planet, at all income levels, due to ridiculous overabundance of food. People throw away 40% of their food!

The only crisis in America is a crisis of whiners, which has reached epic proportions.

</comment><comment><USER40> Using that logic, does utopia result from attempting to create a dystopia?

</comment><comment><USER41> An article brought to you by an institute that believes in:

"There are certain permanent things in society: the health of the family, inherited political institutions that insure a measure of order and justice and freedom, a life of diversity and independence, a life marked by widespread possession of private property. These permanent things guarantee against arbitrary interference by the state. These are all aspects of conservative thought, which have developed gradually as the debate since the French Revolution has gone on."

<comment><USER42> Interestingly, utopian projects tend to try and eliminate those things. Perhaps because they guarantee against arbitrary interference by the state.

<comment><USER43> But you see, only arbitrary interference by the state can bring about Utopia, because in order to get there, we need something powerful enough to run over everything in the status quo.

(Or so proponents seem to believe.)

<comment><USER42> Fortunately with super social technology we can succeed where all past attempts have failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've heard the assertion that utopianism is bad, but what about it is bad? Certainly, we should be able to strive for improvement, in ourselves and society?

The problem with utopianism is the desire to create a new society out of whole cloth, with no regard for the lessons of the past, or the structure of existing society. Drastic changes, like those of the communist revolutions, rarely bring about positive change (not never), and frequently bring about huge disaster. Instead, changes on the margins tend to more reliably improve things. There are exceptions of course.

<comment><USER45> Utopianism is Perfectionism, as opposed to Progressivism. It's unsound to believe that's possible to elminiate _all_ problems, and someone having a belief that utopis is possible is s strong signal of either deceit or stupidity.

<comment><USER46> Surely you meant to say that it's a strong signal of not being completely candid, or of being disingenuous :)

I like the perfectionism vs progressivism thing. My analogy would have been that it's like "the truth": if you think you're in full possession of the full truth, or ever could be, that's silly. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to learn more, be more honest, and so on. "truth" with a small t is still a useful concept. But it's always subjective, and requires people figuring that out both alone, with nothing between themselves and their conscience, _and_ together (which will never change it to being objective, or completely agreed upon by all, or mean 100% the same thing even for two identical twins who "totally agree" on it).

Just like one could say we are the "result" of what our cells are doing all the time (I know you really couldn't simplify it like that at all, but for the sake of argument), society is the result of the daily decisions of the actual people in it - what they think others expect of them, and whether they listen to that or their inner voice, and so on.

It seems to me many want to change society "on" others rather than with them, you might say they would rather attempt to change society on a drawing board to change their neighbours, than get to know their neighbours and themselves in the first place. But societies aren't really that different from personal relations and families. People grow over time, societies grow, decay or heal over time, too -- not as the result of turning a switch or throwing out everything that was before on a dime, just because we really want to.

> Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have > proved only that everything can be destroyed.

\-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> this was a completely useless run of the mill red scare piece whose only real argument is "things can only get better slowly you squirmy discontents, I have tenure so don't rock the boat"

</comment><comment><USER48> The only argument seems to be some religious BS. What we live today(in the developed world) could be perceived as Utopia for the poor caveman for sure.

<comment><USER49> Maybe.

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case- again...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against- civilization)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Sounds like the author finally got around to reading Utopia and went, "hey, wait a minute, this society is actually... bad. A dystopia, if you will."

</comment><comment><USER51> Politics is a see-saw of right and left policey, swings one way, then over time the objection to that swing grows and you end up swinging the other way. But then, you can see this historically with the two party system, even though you have more than a choice of two. Those two are the majority and the way politics works, it's the majority (however small).

So yes, a push to one direction or another will increase and raise risistance, but then that's due to lack of engaging with the resistance and as we see play out time and time again in politics. Instead of engaging, it becomes one of posturing and what I call playground politics, with name calling and labeling to dismiss the opersition. Both sides are guilty of this, they both equaly hate it when they are the minority at the time and on the recieving end. Yet nothing changes. So you end up with a sing to one side for a few years or decade and then a swing the other way.

How do you solve it, well as with any negotiation, compromise, as they do in buisness. But I'm sure many who have been at board meeting trying to get thru a project would love to resort to the political approach of labeling and dismissing all objections and vilionising such objections in an internal marketing campaign. But we don't as we are adults. I just lament how politics today on both sides, often forget they are adults and left the playground behind years ago.

Sure there are politicians who are above such approaches, but alas they are drowned up by the masses and I often wonder - has politics today improved or gone downhill? Equally has it always been the case and is it more due to more faster communications of the news and media access that has allowed us to see it more clearly?

But then, physics has taught us that for every action there is a reaction. Which parallels in many walks of life outside physics.

<comment> munk-a Politics in America are a see-saw of right/left swings... and the see-saw swings back and forth every eight years almost like clockwork, this is because of the American political system though, it's not due to the nature of humanity. America needs to take a serious swing at removing money from politics and giving more voice to third party dissenting opinions, it'll help stabilize the country over the long run and allow for a less partisan/black and white approach.

In America there are socially conservative people that believe the in the right for women's choice in abortion, and there are otherwise socially liberal people who believe in removing that right, these people are left voiceless to the benefit of the two entrenched parties and end up see-sawing back and forth between who has been the least terrible recently.

<comment><USER51> You see exactly the same over here in the UK, and in many other countries. But then that's the case with many voting systems alas. Which needs to evolve beyond a token X in a limited choice every N years. It's like a carpenter going to do a job, and only allowing him to pick from either a hammer or a saw and he has to stick with using only that same tool for years and future jobs in that time. That's politics today alas.

Though when we keep failing to produce a simple electronic voting system, a problem shared around the World. You wonder if perhaps the World could come together and group design an open source solution that the people of the World could audit and help improve, until we all become happy. That would be a start.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: NASA Picture of the Day – a cool Mac menu bar app for science geeks - <AUTHOR> https://nasapicture.com <comment><USER2> Great job! Some remarks:

No dual monitor support.

The set as wallpaper feature set the wallpaper as the small-sized version of the photo. It's pixelated.

How can I quit the app ? The right click method to quit the app won't show a dialog... ?

The textarea doesn't support mouse wheel scroll. I can't scroll neither with the vertical bar ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback! Thank you!

\- "No dual monitor support"

awesome feature! I'll work on it.

\- "set the wallpaper as the small-sized version of the photo"

Should be the hd image. I'll investigate it and hopefully fix it soon!

\- "How can I quit the app ?"

cmd+q when the popup is opened. Right-click the menu icon is definitely a very good suggestion! I'll implement it.

\- "The textarea doesn't support mouse wheel scroll."

If you tap "Read more", it will allow you to scroll. There's a known bug that shows the scroll indicator when the textarea is minimized though. I'm working on it.

Again, thank you so much for your great feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea. Will it always be limited to Macbook users?

</comment><comment><USER4> fuck macbook. worst stuff ever.</comment>


Ask HN: How can one offer free services to work with VCs/startups - <AUTHOR> I really wish to work with some VC firms and Startups to offer my expertise for free and just getting more involved with them. I am not really sure how to approach them or do they even need such help.
I do not wish to charge any money but instead just want to be more involved with the community. (I currently work as a data scientist/engineer by profession.)
Has anyone here tried such thing before? <comment><USER2> Just reach out to us

<comment><AUTHOR> how?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to learn Node.js quickly if Im coming from Django? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I just looked up my favorite resource from when I first started JavaScript but it is either gone or has moved, so I can only give general advice.

My process for learning a new language has been to focus on the fundamentals. Think about how you would teach Python to a total newbie and do that with JavaScript. You already know how to create a working program and are probably comfortable with a number of patterns. Your brain will figure out the high- level stuff on its own so don't worry about writing fancy structures or algorithms. You need to know the basic building blocks of the language.

The only specific advice I would give is to separate learning ES6 features into its own lesson. Start by using good old JS inheritance, creating instances, constructors and all of the pillars of the language. Learn classes by rewriting the same code with new syntax, because JS classes really are just new syntax for the same old patterns.

Before long you will come up with an idea and want to build it. If you focus on being productive too soon you will only look like you know what you're doing... until you don't.</comment>


Ask HN: Popular Ruby magazine - <AUTHOR>

Is there an equivalent of Pycoder's Weekly for Ruby? <comment><USER2> <http://rubyweekly.com/> <http://rubyrogues.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes there is. Check out <http://www.rubyinside.com/></comment>


Make Your Mom a Mother's Day Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.scrollkit.com/s/2072/

<comment><USER2> I like these suggestions for single-use websites. I'd much rather make a web- site instead of sending a paper card that will become either trash or a burden to store and preserve. The recipient doesn't have to make any effort at all to save the "card" and look at it again later. It is just there for them if they want to look at it. Good Stuff!

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really simple to make mom a card and can be sent across the country without paying postage!</comment>


How to make your application viral - A guide to getting users - <AUTHOR> http://danieltenner.com/posts/0009-how-to-make-your-application-viral.html <comment><USER4> When I think about social software (which is the context in which "virality" lives, anyway) I think you have to build for three things - in this order:

1\. Utility - it must be high utility, even if nobody else is in the system.

2\. Network Effect - As people are drawn into the system, it needs to scale in value more than linearly

3\. Residual value - Value taken out of the system, sometimes as revenue. Typically ads.

I think that it's not good enough to do these alone, however. You must construct something that isn't just viral but that makes it such that the fact that some person is not on the system is PAINFULLY ANNOYING to the actual users of the system. Consider the growth of email, in general: "Please just go sign up for an email address somewhere so I can email you!"

If you construct it in this manner, you do not have to spam people. Delicious, which has a lot of users, never emailed anything other than password resets, for example.

<comment><USER5> How did delicious get momentum in terms of user base? Did you do anything in particular or did you just solve a problem and _voila_?

<comment><USER4> I used the predecessor to delicious, alone, from 2001-2003. Then delicious took another two years, 2003-2005 to get to tens of thousands of users. So it took a really long time.

Firefox extensions and RSS helped a huge amount. And it was close to one of the first user data sites that had an API (before Flickr, I think...)

<comment><USER5> fascinating - thanks.

I think in 5 years time delicious & flickr will probably be the two webapps i still use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think one thing you're missing is the idea of social validation, or social proof, of your product. Like TallGuyShort said, getting invitation emails is rather annoying, and quite insincere. Users can spot that insincerity in a heartbeat. Sure, you'll rake in some users, but what you want is to create a demand for the product. When I did that whole FluShirts thing, I used twitter to message people, and within seconds I would see them tweet "haha, check out these shirts [flushirts url]." I'm not sure as to what percentage of shirts I sold were because of twitter referrals, but what that did at the very least was introduce my product to others in a genuine manner to potential customers using their friends.

Of course, to gain social validation of your product, it needs to be useful and something people will enjoy. There are some counterexamples, like hi5, that are fairly popular and got to that point because of their random email invitations (I don't know who you are Aaron, Britney, and Alexa), and to that, I'm not quite sure what to say. I guess they found a market. But as far as virality goes, in the genuine sense, I think Facebook/Myspace/Twitter beat hi5.

<comment><USER7> Of course give Twitter another 18 months and people will be pretty jaded and cynical about that too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "How can I make my app viral" seems like asking yourself "How can I _make_ someone love me".

You don't want to _make_ users want to spread your app, you want them to _want_ to spread your app.

The "Invite people" forms are a really bad way of doing things IMHO. It's like asking your wife/hubby to fill in a form detailing how much she loves you.

I'd also say a good strategy is to give users something for free, that they think should cost money - they'll be sure to tell their friends off their own back.

Still good ideas in the original article though.

</comment><comment><USER9> I actually find the examples it cites extremely annoying. I don't like getting constant emails from services just to remind me they exist, I don't like constantly being asked to give referrals, etc...

If I like something, I go out of my way to recommend it. If not - <USER2> aren't going to convince me you have a good product - if people like it, it ought to spread itself.

<comment><USER10> One thing to remember is who your target is.

Lets look at an example that I had to deal with about a week ago: The company I work for is having a pretty large event coming up, something that our customers would most likely be very interested in. My boss's reaction was that we should grab the email addresses that we have harvested from our website (signups require an email address), and send those people an email telling them about the event.

I'm sure that the majority of you can predict what my reaction to this was...something along the lines of "No, that is spam, that is bad, part of my job is preventing exactly the type of email you want to send out from making it onto our network. By harvesting email addresses from our website you are violating our customers trust; spam spam spam, BAD!" Naturally, the PHBs did not understand this and, despite my best efforts to stop them, they ended up sending the spam (although I forced them to use a different mail server than we use for sending mails).

After much anger, and much thinking, I have come to a conclusion about this. I have changed my mind. Now...I, as a geek/admin, DESPISE the sorts of mass mailings that they sent out, but why? I hate them because I hear "mass mail" and immediately think "0mG G3t V14GRA N0W!", something that I hate. I know the sorts of slimey tactics that spammers use to evade spam filters, and actively fight against them.

The "problem" is that the majority of my dislike for "mass mailings" are technical. I hate them because they are not what the email system was intended for, and because they are a pain in my ass. You know what, though, they're things that most of our customers _want_ to hear. Looking through my email box, I see that there are some things (mailing lists, google's newsgroup summary emails that come every day telling me what happened in comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc that day, emails from a website called steapandcheap [like woot, but for outdoor gear], backup confirmation emails etc.) that are automated, and might seem evil at first (the commercial stuff like steapandcheap especially) but are actually things that I WANT to see.

Where am I going with all of this?

There is a good chance that your hatred for the sorts of tactics he describes here come from your nature as a geek. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of users just simply don't care. Look at things like myspace, look at success stories like that 15 year old girl that is making 7 figures with her website that does myspace layouts (err..I think she is like 19 now...she was talked about in the 30 woman web entrepreneurs making big $$ article the other day), look at facebook applications like honesty box, these things are HORRIFYINGLY bad from the perspective of a geek. But to a normal person, to the type of person that is keeping the "Click here for a FREE iPoD!" advertisers in business, and to the type of person you're probably trying to attract, these things that we might find "obnoxious", they find useful.

It is a sad reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> do you not have a checkbox on your sign up form that asks if your customers would like to receive updates? something like that would have skirted this argument altogether. this is an example of why marketing needs to be implemented into the development phase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A point to add to the discussion from the metrics perspective: the net promoter score.

Net promoter score is an easy tool you can use to determine trends in your users' experience. It can be used as a leading indicator of the 'N' part of your viral coefficient. eries goes in to detail in "Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction" ([http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/net- promot...](http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/net-promoter- score-operational-tool-to.html)).

Additional reading from HN members:

jfarmer's "Three myths of Viral Growth" (<http://20bits.com/articles/three- myths-of-viral-growth/>)

</comment><comment><USER13> A counter part to the viral loop is the concept of viral channels. It is important to realize that the more often a viral channel is exploited (see e-mail, app notifications), the less effective it becomes until it actually starts harming your application.

Social / Viral plays these days have a tough time because of how quickly these channels become saturated. IMO you can disregard a lot of the rules in the article as long as your app has network effects and a unique viral channel.

</comment><comment><USER14> proflower does a lot of "follow up" in the name of repeat business. I get emails daily like "Please accept your savings" and "please fill out our survey" and my favorite "Your $15 shipping rebate" - all scams and wasting my time.

I will never use proflowers again; They don't respect my time. So far I think Amazon does it best.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the software that will grow viraly, are soft that need other users interactions.

Let's take for example, a mafia game in Iphone, when you play, you play offline (you are the only player) and your enemy is the computer. Will the idea grow?

Yes, if it's good, but after 3 or 4 years, may be the device change, or another startup takes your part. So solution? Connected gaming, here's the same game but a little bit different

* You download the game and run it

* The game shows how to play and tell you the vitality of having other players with your to help you

* you tell 2 or 3 of your friends and play together

* game over, your friend now create their band and call another friends, and friends call friends.

you'll finish with millions user in few days, it's like a chain and it spread quickly.

Look at most of the successful games of those kind, they are very simple but succeed

</comment><comment><USER16> Recently the Facebook-equivalent in my country introduced an API for apps similar to Facebook's and a friend created an app that is doing quite well in terms of users. The trick was to ask the users "Do you think this app would interest your friends?" and if they answered "Yes" it mass-invites all the friends. I think it's against the rules of the site, but since it's good for the site too, the rule is not enforced.

I recall that FB also started out by mass-mailing the Harvard mailing lists.

I guess virality often is just spamming or tricking the user into spamming.

<comment><USER12> I just wanted to note that apps that do this on Facebook get banned very quickly. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away.

<comment><AUTHOR> As they should. That's highly unethical and, as I mention in my article, it's unnecessary. I certainly don't condone it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The whole 'viral' meme is rather arogant - the result is the annoying barrage of meaningless 'updates' or solicitations to contaminate your friends. I find the 'spreadable' metaphore promoted by Henry Jenkins ([http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it...](http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it_m.html)) much more socially productive.

<comment><USER18> IMO, that's a distinction without a difference. Viral is viral, whether there is agency involved or not. It's about people communicating and behavior spreading through a social network.

The downside of forcing virality is reflected in additional metrics like retention rates and engagement.

<comment><USER17> The difference is in acknowledging that the people spreading the message do that out of their own will - not because they have been contaminated by the meme. In other the 'spreadable' metaphor focuses the thinking on why people want to spread the message, what they get out of it, makes the message author to concentrate on cooperating with the spreaders - instead of trying to contaminate them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why don't we focus on building applications that add value whether your friends are using it or not. Hence no need to be viral. It can be useful if only 1 person uses it or if 2M people use it.

<comment><USER18> Because you're going to be making more money if 2M people are using it, all else being equal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is also concept of so-called viral-advertisements. For example - <USER3> some video on youtube with something "freaky", "sexy" or "funny" and put your product placement or "message" inside. Then promote that video in some loaded community on social network. Then your link will be spreaded like virus - people will send that "funny" thing to friends, post in blogs and so on.

There are uncounted examples of political statements packed into some music videos of marginal and pseudo-underground bands and the like.</comment>


London – OS Town Plan 1893-6 - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/gallery/details?id=zs2aHyi7W8Ek.kggHTef2F49I&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Interesting to see how little things have changed around me (Blackheath/Greenwich) and that the sunken areas were actually gravel pits back in the day.</comment>


Google demo slam - <AUTHOR> http://www.demoslam.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> It is hard to believe that it is officially linked to Google and still using 2011 copyright .</comment>