Facebook Use Has Been Dropping Since the 2016 Election, According to SimilarWeb - <AUTHOR> http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2018/05/facebook-use-dropped-sharply-after-the-us-election.html <comment><USER3> I don't know if it's algorithmic, or if most of my close friends just hardly use facebook anymore, but it seems like I just rarely see anything anymore in my feed anymore that I care about. It also seems weird that what does appear is generally from people I'm very faint acquaintances with -- if I am curious about one of my actual friends I pretty much have to go straight to their profile.

Besides that though, I think it just encourages behaviors I don't really enjoy seeing in my friends. I definitely know people who in real-life are totally cool, but their social media presence makes me question why I ever liked them in the first place. Mostly I see a lot of:

1) very overt attention seeking for pretty lame things (like, pretty girls posting selfies of themselves doing nothing interesting, or dudes with gym photos, that kind of thing) 2) Extremely broad and poorly thought out political rants 3) sharing really vapid motivational quotes 4) people being maybe a little too vulnerable to a very broad audience, to the point where it's awkward. 5) This one is the worst of all. People taking passive aggressive swipes at individuals by posting very vague status updates. I hate stuff like that.

I don't think of myself as a super judgmental person, but whenever I get on facebook I spend half my time just thinking "really?" and then feeling kind of gross.

<comment><USER4> Facebook was a lot more fun when there was a chronological timeline of non- rich-text status updates and comments from friends. These days it's all semi- spam from pages and random week-old friend's FB activities being surfaced in a poorly targeted fashion. I know there are interesting posts by people on my friend list but they're simply being hidden. Maybe some fb developer was happy with increased engagement metrics merely caused by confused users forever scrolling up and down in desperate attempts to find out where all their friends whose posts used to show up have gone.

And when actual friends' posts show up, 90% of the time it's a like or a share of some uninspiring web page's article with no comment.

It's like it's become digg.com curated by your non-techie acquaintances, with a bonus ORDER BY RANDOM() thrown in for good measure.

<comment><USER5> Also their stupid push to make each single-line shitpost bigger and flashier and more impactful has driven the information density way down.

It was bad enough when people started posting pictures of text instead of just posting the text. Now they're posting videos of static text. What's next, immersive VR full sensory presentation to convey "its weekend party yay lol :D :D:D:D:D" posts?

<comment><USER6> It's like flashy banner ads from the 90s back again that people jumped to for grabbing attention. At that time it was ads, now it's people posting their thoughts in this fashion. Since Facebook provides these backgrounds only up to a certain message character length limit, many people curate their messages just so it would fit with these flashy backgrounds.

And because these posts with the backgrounds get larger font sizes compared to normal posts, to get attention in a voluminous group one must play the same dirty game. They're literally dragging people into the dirt pit.

Hope they don't introduce animation in these gaudy backgrounds!!!

Why not just give some font controls instead and remove all this background nonsense?! (Though this could also be argued to be terrible)

One day everyone will look back at these stunts and see them for the ugliness and abomination they are, just like we look back at banner ads with derision and hate.

<comment><USER7> Wasn't the main selling point of Facebook originally that you couldn't do flashing animated geocities crap? I remember that being the reason I signed up, most of my HS friends had no business doing web design. Once they opened it up beyond ivy-league, it didn't seem to have any particular status, having a Gmail account was arguably harder (I had to get lucky getting an invite off /.).

<comment><USER8> MySpace was often an assault on the senses, and disorienting. Reddit can be like that these days, perhaps worse since the interface elements also love around and can disappear. In the early days of FB, users had even less ability to customize the visual presentation of their pages than they do now. It's about like the simplicity of HN vs a 10 highly customized subs on reddit - <USER2> one hand, users like to express their personalities. On the other, inconsistency can make for a terrible user experience.

<comment><USER8> (Sorry about the typos)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to wonder how many HN comment anecdotes are related to HNers just getting older.

Yeah, I'm meeting fewer people than I did in uni. I use Facebook less than I did in uni. As I get older, it takes more and more effort to meet people. Easy for me to see downward trends in Facebook when I don't plot them against downward trends in novelty in my own social life.

But then I moved abroad at 25, I'm almost 30 now, I'm meeting new people (immigrants and locals) every month, and Facebook has become useful again for growing acquaintances into friendships like it always was.

HNers like to grandstand about how they rediscovered how to call people instead of messaging them, but that's still something you do with your closer circle, not acquaintances in 2018. And that's a personal issue if you had to quit Facebook just to relearn how to call mom or your best friends. I certainly don't relate to that.

It's like people who condemn Facebook because they got addicted to scrolling the news feed. Seems like condemning Netflix because you can't stop binge- watching. At which point do you take responsibility for yourself?

Aside, SimilarWeb, like Alexa, seems pretty useless for metrics. I remember gaining 100k+ Alexa ranking by installing the Alexa toolbar on my own machine and visiting my own websites as usual. Never looked at Alexa ratings since.

I guess I'm getting anti-Facebook fatigue. Especially when the predictable HN comments are things like "I quit Facebook and now I go outside again. Everyone needs to try this!"

<comment><USER10> I would add that Americans are (possibly uniquely) politicised and can't seem to stop constant posting about news. My friends from other countries never do that and instead use Facebook to talk about their actual lives.

I also have anti-Facebook fatigue and HN threads about Facebook are tiresome and predictable. It is like a never-ending line of newly converted going on about veganism or Crossfit or whatever...but in HackerNews' case it is about anti-Facebook and how you'll be smarter, sexier, sleep better, lose weight, and your children and dog will love you more once you give up Facebook.

<comment><USER11> Facebook is actively incentivizing posting of news. I remember over the years they made multiple changes specifically to bring more news to the users. Which is strange, given that they had the bulk of their growth when people were posting banal stuff and game requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I do think it's silly to assume that #DeleteFacebook is responsible for any serious movement in numbers, I also don't necessarily agree with the interpretation that this is just a downturn from how active Facebook was during the election; it seems it probably would've already dropped off and stabilized if that were the only cause, since the election hasn't been hot news for quite a bit now.

Speaking from personal experience, the scandals Facebook has been involved in are only a small part of why I deleted Facebook; more than anything, I just felt like it was not providing any value to me, just a pure time sink that I became less and less interested in. Maybe I'm not alone.

<comment><USER13> Its also important to ask the "network effect" works both way; people sign up in en-masse hockey stick shape grow because of others. It is quite possible someone in your network is using Facebook less often today, knowing you are inactive/dont exist there anymore. Eventually once the real exhodus starts, it will be equally rapid and happy to watch, as inicial waves of signups.

<comment><USER14> After a while the dark-pattern growth hacks stop affecting the populace, I guess.

The "Jane is waiting for you to see her post on your timeline" stuff where FB impersonates your friend was when my wife started ignoring everything from FB (I had quit a long time ago).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This data is meaningless because:

1\. There is no benchmark and we need one because SimilarWeb is based on a panel. The less people in that panel, the less total traffic to _any_ website.

2\. Most likely cause is more app usage and less desktop usage.

Also can we please stop using SimilarWeb as some sort of authority reference? Their panel isnt humongous. Despite the fact they pay Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it.

<comment><USER16> Agreed.

By chance do you have references on SimilarWeb paying "Chrome extension owners and later hijack the code to track everyone who installs it"? Curious to learn more about exactly what they're doing here.

<comment><USER15> [https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser- extens...](https://www.howtogeek.com/180175/warning-your-browser-extensions- are-spying-on-you/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I see it myself. I used to see people's baby pictures and vacation pictures on Facebook. Now it's mostly people breathlessly writing about the Mueller investigation or other pointless political shit. My visits have probably dropped 1/3 or more.

<comment><USER8> How many friends do you have on there? Facebook shows you a tiny percentage of the content added to your network, including repeating items way before they have run out.

If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of me, they are doing a terrible job. I find that the items displayed do not give me an accurate view of what my connections are posting. Often when I check the pages of in-person friends, while Facebook has been showing inane political posts by people I barely know, I have not been presented with the actually relevant and interesting activity my (real) friends have posted during the same time, or more recently.

I have unfollowed, blocked, and hidden so many stories about guns and politics, yet Facebook manages to find new friends I've never heard of with similar stories for my newsfeed. Ever since 2016, at least, I feel like politics is shoved in my face every time I go to Facebook, provoking me to interact with strangers regarding my opinions in one of the worst venues that one can do that.

I think they may be chasing interaction, regardless whether it's positive our negative. Another wild theory is that they want to gather information about members' reaction to politics, as it is not as lucrative to record reactions to someone's cousin's baby photos. The other alternatives mean they are very bad at their jobs, so I'm not sure.

<comment><USER18> > If the News Feed team is trying to show me what I actually want to see, and > not what they think will get the most interaction, ad clicks or time out of > me, they are doing a terrible job.

The News Feed believed that interaction reveals a preference for seeing something. Even though they added more icons so that you weren't thumbs-upping your friends personal tragedies to indicate that they matter to you, interactions all mean "like" in the sense of "I like Facebook relaying this content to me".

<comment><USER8> Sure, that's what I mean by chasing interaction regardless of whether it's negative or positive. If you comment on something, they show you more items like that, assuming you like to comment on those things. My impression was that Facebook's user behaviors analysis is way more detailed than that, though.

There are the specific negative indicators you can give to them such as hiding stories, which even says it will make them show fewer stories like that one, and unfollowing people. When you unfollow someone, surely Facebook attempts to analyze why? Neither of these seem to have an impact on the type of items shown to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have been avoiding a lot of sites since the election, largely because they can't seem to let the 2016 election go. Reddit is the biggest, I used to use Reddit a lot, now I'll use it a bit but generally I avoid all but a few subreddits. The others are unbearable, /r/politics is a swamp itself. I am willing to bet a lot of people have dropped off because politics is virtually unavoidable on Facebook. Meanwhile on Instagram, there are very few political posts. Facebook also changed their algorithm and now I see all kinds of stuff I literally do not care about at all, I find myself muting people all the time.

I follow GQ on Facebook and even things they post are so political it's unnerving. Everything has been politicized, people are burned out. I can't even watch a late night talk show anymore without political news being shoved down my throat; so why would I log into Facebook and see what my old classmate or uncle thinks? I am a very active Twitter user, but the crowd I follow sees politics and the media obsession with it as it is, largely a joke.

<comment><USER20> >I used to use Reddit a lot, now I'll use it a bit but generally I avoid all but a few subreddits. The others are unbearable, /r/politics is a swamp itself

Is it "politics" that you want to avoid? or just views that differ from your own?

<comment><USER19> I follow everyone from DailyKos to Weekly Standard on Twitter...I don't think I want to "avoid politics" or ones that differ from my own, most people find it very difficult to nail down what my views even are.

I want to avoid circle jerks, nonsensical news items and conspiracies, etc. /r/politics and /r/The_Donald both offer no value to Reddit or society, they are all just echo chambers, and they don't value or encourage diversity in view points. They are the same thing but on opposite ends of the spectrum. /r/Politics will be full of "ShareBlue" links and /r/The_Donald will be full of Breitbart. Not sure where the diversity of thought comes into play, which seems to miss the point of a "forum."

Anyhow, on the Facebook front you have equally uninformed people telling you their opinion on something, usually based on a false premise from a biased source they read...except this time you actually -know- these people.

If you do try to find a middle ground, which is generally where most truth is, in the grey, you are attacked by both sides for not being on their team. Like it's some game.

<comment><USER21> > /r/Politics will be full of "ShareBlue" links and /r/The_Donald will be full > of Breitbart.

I know it feels good to just breezily generalize, but I just looked through the 2 subreddits you named, and of the 125 top-voted links of the past 24 hours on /t/The_Donald, a whopping 4 of them are from Breitbart (a simply Ctrl+F on each page shows it). That subreddit is most memes, tweets, and even simple photos with smart-ass original titles written by the poster. Just do a word-find on "i.redd.it" and then "imgur.com" on each of the first few pages and see.

As for Shareblue on /r/Politics, there are no links from the Shareblue.com domain in the top 125 links today, but I assume you were referring to the source of the narratives; well, you would more effective in just point to actual sites: of the top 125 links on there for the past 24 hours, 16 are from WashingtonPost.com and 15 are from TheHill.com.

Edit - here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/](https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/)

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure "ShareBlue" links include washingtopost.com and thehill.com. Those sites are pretty much in total agreement with ShareBlue's positions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think I'm just getting bored of information. I even find myself unexcited to check Reddit, or major news sites, or even this site. My routine used to be to check Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, CBC and CNN, GitHub "explore" and HackerNews. Now I just tend to get up in the morning, eat a muffin and stare off and think about stuff. I'm tempted to look at these sites but know I won't see anything that tickles me. So I find myself actually just deciding not to look at all.

<comment><USER24> I have a friend of a friend who has described the same feeling. They weren't sure what to make of it.

<comment><USER25> I have the same feelings too.

In my case it is because of information being overwhelming. I just check a couple of sites at maximum now, the digital wellbeing thing that Google presented at io this year really resonated with me

<comment><USER26> I have the same feeling but am still guided by the monkey in my head that has the habit of checking everything. Any good replacement ideas for that dopamine hit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see any strong correlation here. To me it looks like it was dropping from about Aug'16, and this blog has merely drawn a line for the US election and called it a story. Based on a quick google search, the US is only number 2 in terms of total Facebook users[0] - maybe it might have been worth considering other factors outside of US politics that might account for this trend?

0: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries- based-on-number-of-facebook-users/) (No idea how accurate it is, but.)

<comment><USER28> Exactly, you have to tease out seasonality and the impact of special events like elections on user behavior. For example, is the percentage drop any greater than after previous elections?

I think people underestimate the truly global scale of Facebook. Even then, the US is a fraction of FB's user-base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The author confuses mobile web for mobile app traffic which isn't accounted for. One is the traffic from users using facebook.com via a browser on their phone versus using the installed application. Maybe the drop is real or Facebook has successfully converted more users to the Facebook app, Messenger app, etc.

<comment><USER30> Holy crap. Now it makes sense. I couldn't understand how Facebook usage could have been steadily dropping for over a year. So the entire article is pointless and wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Facebook is two things for me right now: 1\. A lazy way of registering to sites 2\. New Urbanist Memes For Transit-Oriented Teens (my feed is exclusively this one right now)

The notifications going a bit mad about 18 months ago or so when they introduced the market stuff and "your friends are interested in going to X" was what ran me off. I'd unsubscribe and unfollow and new worthless ones would take up their place.

Now I don't even bother checking my notifications; I'll log in maybe twice a day to check if I received any messages, have a scroll through NUMTOTs, that's about it.

<comment><USER32> Heh, me too! It was only in the past year that I've discovered NUMTOT and other fun groups, and my enjoyment of FB has increased a lot since I've joined them.

<comment><USER33> NUMTOTS everywhere! (Is _this_ peak transit?) In all seriousness, it's definitely more fun than vanilla facebook, although I'd have a hard time calling it a shelter from politics or praising its level of overall discourse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't have "data" to back it up but my personal experience is the same. My feed feels "empty". most of my posts don't get any likes/comments and most of my friends that used to post few times a day are doing it once a week now.

</comment><comment><USER35> Interesting chart showing FB steady decline over last 5 yrs on Google Trends. May not be the strongest correlation but interesting nonetheless: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Instagram,facebook)

<comment><USER36> Larger time window with comparison to Google and Snapchat.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F02y1vz,%2Fm%2F045c7b,%2Fm%2F0mgkg,%2Fm%2F027lnzs)

Google is also dropping in Google Trends. Assuming there is a drop in usage of FB (not just a drop in searches for FB), I guess the 2016 election is only one contributing factor.

<comment><USER37> It seems odd to me that iPhone wouldn't spike, especially so around 2007. Am I reading this wrong?

<comment><USER38> It did spike, being compared with Facebook et al. normalizes the spikes away though: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F027lnzs)

<comment><USER37> I think I expected it to be much closer to the popularity of FB, I'm quite surprised.

Unrelated, I recognise your name from GitHub, thanks for your work on the psychonaut wiki, I've used that resource many times.

<comment><USER38> Great to hear, thanks! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Personal anecdote time: The line on that chart, the 2016 election, was exactly when I cut back on my Facebook use. I had former friends who posted stuff that night like "white people need to die" and "unfriend me if you voted for [insert candidate's name here]".

Notwithstanding all the privacy issues, I remember the days when Facebook used to be _fun_. Back before timeline, back when it was limited to colleges, back when "Random Play" was listed as a desired relationship option. Now it's meme and clickbait article land.

</comment><comment><USER40> I can see why people are desperate to "prove" that the supposed election meddling or the Cambridge Analytica scandal is causing Facebook to fail, but the data just doesn't show that at all.

People make a big deal about privacy, but the actual users of social media usually post stuff because they want _everyone_ to know about it. The people who really care about privacy are not on social media. There's already a general understanding that when using the internet, you're getting tracked by various actors and people (even begrudgingly) accept that.

That same graph shows that Facebook usage has been dropping virtually every month before the election and after, totaling almost 50% loss. There's no exceptional change visible due to any particular event. There are some strong upticks in there as well, but the longterm trend is down.

I believe the most reasonable explanation is simply that people are moving on, just like they moved on from MySpace and other previously popular platforms. Young people are leading the charge here, it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher can see you on Facebook. It's _uncool_.

<comment><USER41> > users of social media usually post stuff because they want everyone to know > about it

> it's just not as comfortable when your grandmother and high school teacher > can see you on Facebook

I think most posts on social media are targeted at people in the poster's peer group, and the only reason that everyone else can see them too is that broadcasting is the default way to contact multiple people without prior coordination (say, by joining a group chat).

<comment><USER40> I don't actually use Facebook, but I'm under the impression that you can post to just the people who are your friends or just a set of friends. There's certainly the possibility to at least not broadcast to the whole internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I sometimes wonder if truly my friends have started posting less on Facebook or is it their algorithm messing up again?

I see almost no original content posted by friends and only posts from pages with comments by my friends on them ("X and Y commented on Z page's photo")

<comment><USER43> Stuff like that is a surefire sign that your friends are indeed posting less and they are just filling up the space with second degree content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I actually love to browse Facebook, mainly because I've taken the time to curate groups / pages I enjoy getting updates from. In addition, all of my friends still actively use Facebook too (all college kids) for status updates, photo uploads, and a LOT of event postings (most college campus groups/clubs/activities have migrated to be exclusively on Facebook).

Maybe it's one of those things that drops off after highschool / college / when everyone goes their separate ways ?

</comment><comment><USER45> AFAICT, this is traffic for desktop web and mobile web. It doesn't include the mobile app. Who's to say people aren't just moving to mobile app?

<comment><USER46> The article claims it includes app visits: _" Since then, total monthly visits to Facebook in the US (both on the web and through the mobile app) have fallen [by 3 billion/month]."_

<comment><USER15> SimilarWeb has no fool-proof way of tracking app usage, nor even app downloads (don't trust anyone that says they can, unless they're Apple or Google).

What they _can_ track is the number of ratings - nothing else, but there's very little correlation between that and app usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I miss the blog and personal websites era. These "too easy to share" years created a lot of noise and we still do not have a good alghoritm to filter it, and even if we had, we would blame it for filtering content and shaping our thoughts.

Users like to be in control. I have seen the rss emerging again, specially here on HN discussions, and I believe that is the best solution to follow updates.

</comment><comment><USER48> I, for one, am actively trying to limit my FB usage. I started actively limiting my FB usage last summer, so way before the Cambridge Analytica news. I do use it still for some groups, and Messenger from time to time, but I try hard to stay away from the main FB service.

I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot.

<comment><USER49> >I am also slowly but surely deleting content from my account. Deleting old content, deleting likes and whatnot.

I would have likely stayed on the platform if there was an easy way to do this. One of my biggest concerns wasn't just Facebook analysing my data, but allowing others to access it indiscriminately and I wanted a way to delete it.

There's no API functionality to delete/untag/unlike anything. Timeline is a mess, there's no bulk delete option or option to even select multiple/all. No "delete after X days" feature. In the end I spent 3x12 hour shifts writing a python script using image processing to find delete buttons in timeline and go through the motions to delete everything. It took about 3 hours for me to write/debug/test 300 lines of spaghetti python and another 30 or so for it to go through everything and try to delete. All of which should have been doable in <30 lines, a single API call, or by just hitting ctrl+a and delete. I deleted my account afterwards mainly out of spite.

Considering how politicians are already getting stung by things they posted to FB/Twitter in their teens here in the UK it is absolutely incomprehensible to me how Facebook doesn't have half decent delete functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ironically propagations of articles like this is actually more or less the reason I stopped using Facebook.

No one reads primary sources anymore. All kinds of baiting conclusions and titles are drawn on absolutely minimal data with zero scientific rigor like this blog entry and my feed is just reshares of these McNews for shock value and social credits.

</comment><comment><USER51> Facebook has lost it when it stopped being a social network where people follow their friends' lives. Once it became a 'I share random links or "news" stories off the internet' feed it lost all its value. There is nothing social about a Fox News or MSNBC story link. At all.

</comment><comment><USER52> I didn't see any sort of methodology in how they get that data. While the article said it included both web and mobile app traffic, I'm skeptical unless they provide more data. Could be that usage is just moving more to the app than web and the counting is different.

</comment><comment><USER53> By "Facebook" do they mean "Facebook" or "Facebook + Instagram + ..."?

<comment><USER54> That's my question too. It seems more Facebook users are migrating to Instagram. They did announce 150 million people now use stories. My experiences could be biased, but it amazes me how many Instagram users don't know it's a product of Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Doesn't this go against the numbers that facebook put out in its most recent quarterly report?

</comment><comment><USER56> Facebook dependency can't really drop significantly as long as people keep _requiring_ it for things that don't technically need Facebook.

Don't link to articles only viewable on Facebook. If somebody plans an event on Facebook, push back and request to be sent the details and say "I can't log in to Facebook", etc. Check in with your friends in non-Messenger ways, e.g. phone messaging or (gasp!) actually seeing them in person. Make walled-off sites unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER57> Facebook is alive and well, at least for everyone who uses it on a daily basis. The mass users of Facebook are not the least worried about the negative effect of social networks and those who actually left after recent events are not enough to affect those statistics.

Probably what's hurting it the most is the new users count, as I think that nowadays new users pick other social networks to hang out with their friends, such as Snapchat or Instagram.

</comment><comment><USER58> I wonder how many were just bots during the election.

My experience from running Facebook ads is that Facebook is crawling with bots.

We might never know the actual numbers.

<comment><USER59> Facebook recently said they deleted 583 million fake accounts in just the first quarter of 2018. It's entirely plausible a lot of that supposed usage drop, is more aggressive bot elimination.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million- fake-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake- accounts-in-the-first-three-months-of-2018/)

<comment><USER58> Yup, good point.

We also have no idea how many more there are, certainly FB wasn't warning anyone that their numbers might have been incorrect because of bots any time before getting rid of them..?

<comment><USER59> From what I understand of the bot deletion in question, these were newer accounts and are not counted in the official monthly active user figures (the 2.2 billion number). That is, Facebook's monthly active count isn't going to suddenly show 1.7 billion now instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> So bored of Facebook hate.

</comment><comment><USER61> Correlation is not causation.

SimilarWeb buys data from ISP DNS resolvers. During the same time, Cloudflare DNS resolver was released to the public and marketed heavily.

Even my nontechy gf started using Cloudflare Resolver. She saw that on twitter was curious about the benefits and was not disappointed.

So, yeah usage did decline a bit but not that much.

</comment><comment><USER62> I can say the same thing about my observation of how my friends use Facebook. Most of my friends have started to comment and post stuff lot less in the last year or two.

</comment><comment><USER63> Waiting for school to end. I rely on Facebook for quick messages and group classroom posts. Once Summer break starts, I can #DeleteFacebook until next year.

<comment><USER64> Will you start over again with a new account in the Fall?

<comment><USER63> Sorry for the late reply. I most probably will. I'm working on making a middleman website to remove FB tracking. If it works out, I'll rely on that instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> just so you'll know, similar web gets it data, mainly by spying on users via browser extensions. this is far from being legal. or at least a dark gray area.

I have personally complained about that, once found private URLs I sent to clients, and were not published elsewhere ever, were listed in their stats under that specific sub domain, but never got a satisfying response, if at all.

</comment><comment><USER66> Good.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is just bad data journalism.

</comment><comment><USER68> I suspect Facebook is going to die "The Orkut Death"!

</comment><comment><USER69> Nice. that platform's just wasting primates' time.

</comment><comment><USER70> Ah yes, I remember The Great DeFriending of 2016.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is only web traffic and doesn't tell us much. Facebook usage overall might be up, as far as we know.

</comment><comment><USER72> I gave up on Facebook about 10 months ago because of my friends there, most people who kept posting something were Commies/Putinists - which is a Russian equivalent of Trump supporters - those with liberal views just stopped posting. For me, it became a conservative outlet. I no longer saw anything of value for me there, and just deleted my account.

</comment><comment><USER73> Bot DAU's are a fraudulent metric. FB ( and other social media sites) have been using this for quite some time to inflate their performance.

<comment><USER74> Really? You think Facebook has an army of bots trying to inflate their metrics?

<comment><USER43> It wouldn't be the least ethical thing that Zuck as ever done...</comment></comment></comment>


The Collapse of Old Media - the Rise of Wi-Fi Broadcasting (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://modernmarketingjapan.blogspot.com/2010/07/marketing-japan-collapse-of-old-media.html

<comment><USER2> aaaaaand it's gone. my horrible government has now decided to regulate Wi- Fi.com signals as they do radio, because of fears over some sort of revolution happening here with access to free and uncensored information.

it was championed by the telecom monopoly lobbyists, who are fearful with so much free data around they wouldn't be able to charge excessive fees anymore once the masses discover free and encrypted voip.</comment>


Reddit CEO Asks Users To Buy Revamped Membership - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/08/reddit-digg/ <comment><USER2> Deep within the 1000+ comments on the accompanying reddit thread is a really interesting fact: Reddit is not (currently) profitable. [1]

I was already a reddit gold subscriber, but the fact that at the moment they're literally running into the red to provide cool stuff like the Obama AMA makes me want to subscribe again. Anyone looking for a reddit gold account?

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time...](http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/12v8y3/now_is_the_time_to_invest_in_gold/c6yfbuh)

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know what Reddit's AWS monthly bill is these days? I suspect they would be closer to profitability if they ran their own hardware, but I haven't seen any numbers recently.

<comment><USER4> In previous talks they have never revealed the numbers, but have said that their bills have been fairly constant over time - Amazon's price decreases have balanced growth in AWS usage.

<comment><USER5> Sure we did. Jedberg used to talk about it all the time.

<comment><USER4> Closest I have found is this (two years old): [http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ctz7c/your_gold_dollar...](http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/ctz7c/your_gold_dollars_at_work/c0v8ug8?context=1)

<comment><USER5> Well, try updating it for the present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really, really hope Reddit and 4Chan succeed in this. It would be great for other new services to be able to point to services like Reddit and say, "Customers will pay for something that is valuable to them, even if it's just a web site."

I don't use Reddit enough to justify paying for it, but I would certainly pay to support HN.

<comment><USER7> Is 4chan doing something similar? Where did that come from?

<comment><USER6> I was just going off what was printed in the article. :)

<comment><USER7> Oh shoot, I missed the last paragraph. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > See, the problem is that if your site is funded primarily with advertising, > then you are beholden to your advertisers.

There is a lot of precedent for handling this, as newspapers have been doing for decades. Newspapers have the content producers and the business people in the same building employed by the same company.

You separate your business and editorial and put a wall between them in the company. Nobody from business has access to the admin panel and nobody from editorial has access to the business contacts.

I really couldn't imagine an advertiser asking reddit to remove a post for them. To advertise on reddit means that you have some understanding of how it works, and how it works doesn't involve admins censoring content.

There are more than enough advertisers in the world who both understand reddit and would pay good money to get their ads infront of that audience. The only problem is that the ad product is not sold or promoted well.

<comment><USER9> That didn't work out too well for the newspapers, did it?

Newspapers got away with it for so long because they held a monopoly on information distribution.

<comment><USER10> Unless I am mistake, newspapers have distribution costs that are orders of magnitude larger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really understand why they're so against doing _proper_ advertising, so much so that they're willing to operate at a loss. Digg didn't fail because of advertising and if reddit can approach advertising in a "mature" way -- not just going after every penny -- it could work out well.

        you come under editorial pressure from advertisers to
        remove or modify it…This eventually results in a
        watering down of the true, authentic content on the site

If you're in a situation where you have no advertising and you're losing money, why not be in a situation where you have some advertising and if an advertiser gets annoyed you tell them to leave and not work with you again? If reddit has value to advertisers a few annoyed advertisers aren't going to break the site, especially when it can exist as a money losing business.

Their current advertising is just... pointless, I rarely see adverts on reddit, almost every page load has the advertisement block filled with an internal reddit notice (eg: "check out the FAQ!", "Thanks for not using adblock", "check out reddit gifts") or an advert that someone has paid for via self serve for their subreddit.

Maybe I'm missing something but surely even just throwing up a simple adsense block in the advertising space would generate enough revenue to be worth whatever supposed good will these cutesy cat picture adverts exist to score. Adsense certainly wouldn't "destroy" the trust people have placed in the site... As someone that puts time into reddit I'd be more annoyed if they let the site become so unprofitable they have to shut it down vs. have a few adverts that I can opt out of with a tiny monthly fee.

Would anyone here (that uses reddit) leave if they had proper advertising (that could be opted out of with reddit gold and was not audio / video advertisements, just "standard" web adverts)? I've never met someone willing to leave a website over adverts, if the adverts are reasonable.

Also during the time I wrote this comment I was constantly refreshing reddit.com, so far I have not seen a single non-reddit related advert and I'm at 30 page loads.

(maybe raldi or jedberg or whoever that left reddit and lurks here can explain why this isn't being done, because it's confusing, is there an internal belief that reddit users are so touchy that they'll leave if reddit tries proper advertising?)

edit: oh and for the perfect example, imgur has advertising, what about 75% of popular reddit content uses, and I don't see people boycotting imgur? (of the 100 links in r/all right now 75 are to imgur, 25 of those are to imgur.com which has advertising, so that means 25% of the front page links go straight to imgur with adverts)

edit edit: in an attempt to explain my opinion succinctly, I think the real problem reddit has is the toxic idea that any attempt to make money will alienate the community, when in reality the majority of reddit users don't care and the vocal minority would not leave the site as long as the advertisements were _reasonable_. People want a stable website that they can be a part of, advertisements don't destroy that. Look at how many people love imgur, 9gag and funnyjunk. Having so little faith in reddit users ability to deal with adverts is to me more "insulting" than the adverts themselves.

<comment><USER12> If I were an advertiser, I'd much rather pay someone to astroturf Reddit than buy advertising space on Reddit itself. It seems like a much better investment.

<comment><USER5> You underestimate reddit's abuse defenses.

<comment><USER13> And you overestimate the crowd's intelligence if you think this doesn't happen on a regular basis (quite successfully, I might add).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe there's a third way.

On one end is their free and ad-supported access. The few ads that I see are very easy on the eyes, easy to ignore, and I don't feel compelled _by the ads_ to buy a gold account. In return you get user generated content.

On the other end is the gold account, where you don't see ads, and you get the same user generated content.

In addition to any of that, they might decide to generate content themselves. Be the paid New York Times of the Internet (whatever that means, to them); the Site of Record. They've almost got the credibility, and certainly have the name recognition; their drama gets covered by the mainstream media.

Of course they'd have to hire another body or two.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not buy the most popular mobile apps for the site and monetize them? Users seem to be much happier spending money on mobile apps than on web sites.

<comment><USER16> Not sure if Jason (the developer of Alien Blue... far and away the best mobile reddit client) would want to sell his app. It seems like a labour of love.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> \--- I typed this up just before getting a call, so apologies for the first- draftiness. I refreshed the page to see if anyone was saying anything similar but I didn't see anything, so I might as well post it. ---

I really think they should just skip over the whole maj/minority struggle and work on a more suitable approach. What makes Reddit so special? Each subreddit and its dedicated and often unique community. When reddit was relatively new I avoided it, because on the surface all I saw were fellow tech-hungry teenagers looking for the next big place to gather. Only a few years ago did I stumble on some of the smaller, more interesting subreddits and realize that I could spend my entire time among just a few without ever caring about the rest of 'Reddit' because within those _little_ communities, there was something really cool and fun. Expat living in Japan? There's an r/ for that. Love cartography? There's an r/ for that. Linguist/mathematician/physicist? Plenty of r/s for you, of varying quality and concentration but interesting nonetheless.

Sometimes when I'm motivated to learn more about a subject, one of the first things I'll do is check if there is a decent subreddit that's relevant. Lo and behold, r/spicy and r/bonsai now come to my frontpage to shower me with pruning advice, sauce exchanges, and more. Of course, anyone can create a new subreddit if the existing ones aren't interesting enough, moderated poorly, or the subject just doesn't have a home yet. My list of micro-wikis and webpages to set up now has marks for items that would work just as well being a subreddit. But we're talking about revenue here, so let me get to the point.

 _Don't just think about Reddit as one big thing, but rather as a world full of lively other things– some some tiny, others huge._ They can make money without looking heavy-handed or causing too much controversy, as long as they see the users (all of them) as collaborators in that effort. Subreddits already enjoy a certain amount of freedom (of moderation, styling), why not gamify it somehow? For example, most people wouldn't mind if r/pics had real ads, and r/pics is probably one of the most trafficked subreddits around. Those who still don't want the ads can get Reddit Gold. However say r/crypto thought the ads were silly, and wanted them removed. Then they could, for example, buy their way out directly (garnering a few extra features for the local mods) or encourage their own subscribers to get gold, with some percentage reducing the number/location of ads until reaching zero.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't quite understand why a site like reddit would have "editorial pressure" from advertisers. If anything it should be the other way around.

<comment><USER19> What? A post get promoted 'My experience with AT&T sucks, they're terrible and here's why'. AT&T's marketing department makes a call, and says 'we'll pull our advertising spend if you don't pull that item'. Suddenly reddit has to make a call between having the cash they require to stay afloat, and staying true to their users.

That being said, I think there's a better compromise for the ad block than what they're doing at the moment. I don't care whether the ad space shows a kitten or an ad for Maccas, so it may as well generate them money (and if a company pulls advertising, well, that sucks, but that's how it goes. Better than having no advertising at all.)

<comment><USER11>
        Suddenly reddit has to make a call between having the
        cash they require to stay afloat, and staying true to
        their users.

but if reddit doesn't have that money now what difference does it make? if reddit has reddit gold __and __has advertising, don't they end up in a position where they're able to choose and turn away advertisers if they need to? unless turning away advertisers causes some sort of industry problem where companies are unwilling to work with reddit?

<comment><USER20> You burn bridges pretty fast doing that sort of thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It might be helpful for them to put a link in the blog post to buy reddit gold.</comment>


Dell Streak: Mini 5 tablet docs leaked; reveal specs, colors - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=13087&tag=content;wrapper

<comment><USER2> What kid is going to want one of these over an iPad or iTouch (iTouch prices will surely plummet after the iPad gains traction) even if it comes in bright colors? And if the rumors have any truth to them, the price is way too high. Poor Dell.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/19/dell-mini-5-prototype- imp...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/19/dell-mini-5-prototype-impressions/)

a video of the product also

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "five-inch, Google Android device will sport a WVGA (800 by 480) capacitive touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, front-facing VGA camera.

and

streak will launch with an Amazon content partnership, meaning Kindle e-books and Amazon MP3s and video will stream to the device.

So, i wonder are they going to find a dedicated wireless provider, like Apple did?</comment>


California To Hit Startup Founders with Big Retroactive Tax Bills - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/01/15/california-to-hit-startup-founders-with-big-retroactive-tax-bills/ <comment><USER2> One-sided and confused article. Whether this is an attempt to mislead readers or a misunderstanding by the writer, I don't know. But this is not a case of California choosing to implement an unhelpful policy. This is a case of California's previous helpful policy being found illegal because it violates the commerce clause; the FTB had no other choice but to impose the tax.

[http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/214234/Income+Tax/FTB+I...](http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/214234/Income+Tax/FTB+Issues+Notice+To+Retroactively+Deny+Qualified+Small+Business+Stock+Tax+Benefits+Amended+Returns+Should+Be+Filed)

[https://www.ftb.ca.gov/law/Qualified_Small_Business_Stock_an...](https://www.ftb.ca.gov/law/Qualified_Small_Business_Stock_and_Cutler_Decision.shtml)

The FTB did not 'take its ball and go home.' The Court told the FTB that it was not allowed to favor [EDIT: investment in qualifying] California corporations that way to begin with. An alternative would have been to extend the tax break to all companies that do business in California and send them a refund check for every year the QSB rule had been in place, but the FTB most likely doesn't have that much money available.

<comment><USER3> Hi - as the author of the article, I don't think I was misleading, nor do I think I misunderstand the issues. The FTB has a number of options and tools at its disposal to craft an alternative to this "nuclear option". They could have changed the rule going-forward and allowed post 2008 QSB exclusions under revised terms. Yes, that may have cost them some $$$, but probably not as much as you think, and certainly not as much as they will now collect. Maybe this was the easiest remedy for them in the short term, but the remedy they've inacted will have significant long term negative implications. -Brian

<comment><USER4> > Yes, that may have cost them some $$$, but probably not as much as you > think,

Why didn't you report this number?

<comment><USER5> Don't assume that he knows this number.

In the original article, he didn't even mention the amount of tax breaks given by the code thus far.

I doubt the purpose of the article is to inform, as much as it is to tell you that you should be outraged about something anti-entrepreneurial done by California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a business owner this crap terrifies me. Washington State was looking at changing their tax code retroactively to get more money from Microsoft, luckily level heads (and I might presume, extensive lobbying) prevailed.

I can't plan today for what yesterday's laws will be tomorrow.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, I think you'll see more of these problems as states get crushed under their existing debt and new expenditures from pension obligations, etc.

See: [http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2013pZ0d)

<comment><USER8> Perhaps defined-benefit retirement plans should not be in the public sector since they haven't been in the vast majority of the private sector for quite some time.

<comment><USER9> This is the exact same argument the supporters of Ohio Senate Bill 5[1] used. One reason people in the public sector are willing to be paid less than their private counterparts is because their benefit plans are genuinely better. Saying they should eliminate one of the better benefits public sector employees get is stupid.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Senate_Bill_5_Voter_Refere...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Senate_Bill_5_Voter_Referendum,_Issue_2_%282011%29)

<comment><USER8> First of all, I don't know about you, but I don't come to HN and try to have a somewhat intelligent conversation just to be called stupid for expressing an opinion.

Secondly and to your point, I am only speaking of defined-benefit "If you work here for x years you get y% of your salary." This is to say nothing of the health care (which is generally better than the private sector), the hours (which if you don't work for a legislator are generally better than the private sector), the guaranteed pay raise every year, the access to jobs you can only apply to if you _already_ have a state job, and various small perks like free or cheap parking, food, etc. These are all benefits of the job and I had to take a serious look at the health care and hours for a state job when deciding between that and a corporate offer.

I'm not here to argue whether or not defined-benefit retirement plans are inherently good or bad. I'm saying it's irresponsible and dangerous for a state to _guarantee by law_ that they'll pay anyone a fixed amount of money for decades at some distant point in the future. This is why it's most dangerous. If the state gets bankrupted by some unforeseen catastrophe 30 years from now, it can't suspend, eliminate or trim pension payouts. Not even $0.01. By definition the fact that pensions offer better retirement income than defined-contribution plans like a 401k should be a giant red flag. The system implodes if you can't at least break even off of it, and if it was possible to _make_ money off of them the private sector would still be using them.

<comment><USER10> "First of all, I don't know about you, but I don't come to HN and try to have a somewhat intelligent conversation just to be called stupid for expressing an opinion."

He didn't call you stupid for expressing an opinion, he called that particular view stupid.

<comment><USER11> Saying that a particular view is stupid without offering any additional information or another viewpoint is... well...

This isn't 7th grade — come up with another word that really means what you want to say. There are a lot of ways to disagree with someone and/or an idea without the derogatory language.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it was intended to be persuasive, but I don't believe it was meant as a targeted insult either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can we just hurry up and address the real problem: California's constitution? We should just burn that flawed thing and start over. As I understand it, one of the major problems with California is that the reasonable-sounding idea that citizens should be allowed to amend the constitution through a ballot proposition has backfired and led to all sorts of special interests amending the constitution to protect their own interests by lobbying the public.

[http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_constitutio...](http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_constitutional_convention#Reasons_for_a_convention)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_California#Dif...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_California#Differences_from_other_constitutions)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_\(1978\))

<comment><USER13> I also think states and locales should be able to declare bankruptcy and restructure their obligations. Currently there is no clear way to get out from under prior bad governance. Here's a good article about how San Bernardino is trying: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/13/us-bernardino- bank...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/13/us-bernardino-bankrupt- idUSBRE8AC0HP20121113)

> a third of the city's 210,000 people live below the poverty line, making it > the poorest city of its size in California. But a police lieutenant can > retire in his 50s and take home $230,000 in one-time payouts on his last > day, before settling in with a guaranteed $128,000-a-year pension.

> In 2009, patrol lieutenant Richard Taack retired at the age of 59, after 37 > years of service. He took home $389,727 that year, including $194,820 in > unused sick time and $33,721 for unused vacation time, according to city > payroll records. Shortly after Taack retired - on an annual lifetime pension > of $128,000 - he was hired part-time by Penman's city attorney's office, at > $32 an hour.

<comment><USER14> Doesn't feel like residents of California are getting a value for the % of tax that we pay overall. If you are self-employed and make say 150K you are going to be paying around 35% fed + 6% SS employee + 6% SS employer side + 9% Califonia. total = 55%. ( Granted the taxes are applied on a graduated basis so the effective tax rate would be less.) In Europe, they pay on the order of 50% with free healthcare and a great transportation system. In the bay area, we get charged higher insurance rates based on the zip code with live and we get to drive on 101.

<comment><USER15> Just crunched the numbers to see what the effective rate actually is. Assuming self-employed and single in California for 2012, with standard deduction and 1 exemption, your taxable income on $150,000 total income is $131,416, and your federal income tax is: $30,257. Your self-employment tax is: $15,468. Your state income tax is: $10,373.

Total effective tax rate is: 37.4%

A bit higher than I thought it would be overall, but not quite close to 55%. Of course, if you're at that level of income you should probably set up an S-corp to save on SE tax and dump some money into a 401(k) to further reduce your taxable income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would not have thought that retroactive tax bills were legal. Are there any other common examples or is this a new precedent?

<comment><USER17> The SC ruled that the retroactive immunity given to telecom companies was legal.

I'm pretty sure "Ex Post Facto" is dead.

<comment><USER7> Ex post facto is not synonymous with "retroactive."

See the post by David Redden in this thread: <http://www.connorboyack.com/blog/ex-post-facto-law>.

"Secondly, while there's some evidence that some of the "framers" thought "ex post facto" included civil laws, it's well-established that the most influential federalists in the late 18th Century understood an "ex post facto law" to mean a law that was 1) criminal, 2) functioned retroactively, and 3) worked to the detriment of the accused. (See Crosskey, The True Meaning of the Constitutional Prohibition of Ex-Post Facto Laws, 14 U.Chi.L.Rev. 539 (1947))."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I did a quick google and found a discussion of retroactive tax laws (applying to gift taxes in 2010):

[http://www.assetprotectionsociety.org/the-likelihood-and- enf...](http://www.assetprotectionsociety.org/the-likelihood-and- enforceability-of-a-retroactive-tax-2/)

Potential arguments include due process, "wholly new tax", lack of notice, ex post facto (with the same caveat as mentioned here about applicability only to criminal cases), and the fifth amendment taking clause.

Conclusion: it's hard to fight.

<comment><USER19> > applicability only to criminal cases

Where do you get that? The Constitution says simply:

"No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."

Period, end of story. Just because someone on the Internet says this applies only to criminal law doesn't make it so.

<comment><USER20> How about the US Supreme Court:

See Carpenter v. Pennsylvania, 58 U.S. 456 (1854):

"The debates in the federal convention upon the Constitution show that the terms "ex post facto laws" were understood in a restricted sense, relating to criminal cases only, and that the description of Blackstone of such laws was referred to for their meaning. 3 Mad.Pap. 1399, 1450, 1579.

This signification was adopted in this Court shortly after its organization in opinions carefully prepared, and has been repeatedly announced since that time. Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386; Fletcher v. Peck, 6 Cranch 87; 33 U. S. 8 Pet. 88; 36 U. S. 11 Pet. 421."

<comment><USER19> The Court gets things wrong occasionally. They got this wrong. Legislative intent does not trump the clear unambiguous wording of the law. This is why, for example, minting the trillion dollar coin would be legal despite the fact that this was clearly not the intent of the legislation.

<comment><USER20> ex post facto isn't English, it's not even really Latin. It's a legalism. The go to source of meaning for Anglo legalism in the late 19th century was Blackstone's "Commentaries on the Laws of England" . It's the Blackstone definition that the Court adopted.

<comment><USER19> I stand corrected. Wow, this sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A lot of the comments are characterizing this as a money grab by the state.

To me, it sounds more like the unintended consequences of a clever lawsuit and/or a poorly-crafted piece of tax-break legislation. People should be advised that California has a lot of clever lawyers who work to find and exploit holes in legislation.

<comment><USER22> But to make the cancellation retroactive for 5 years makes it seem to be a money grab to me. Why not just cancel for now and in the future?

<comment><USER23> For the same reason people can appeal their conviction if the law they were convicted of was found unconstitutional: it's as if the law never existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Come to (western) Michigan. We have new corporate tax reforms that dramatically reduced liabilities (6% rate for C-Corps, flow-through taxation for LLCs and S-Corps, personal income tax rate of 4.3%), we have a 6% sales tax, low property taxes, very cheap housing (compared to much of the nation), well-educated workforce, and liberal gun laws (for the guy who wouldn't move to NY). Our 4.3% income tax rate is still lower than CA's QSB credit rate.

EDIT: Michigan's new corporate income tax also has an alternative rate of 1.8% for Qualified Small Businesses... those with net income under $1.3 million. If your corporation operates outside of Michigan and has no activity in Michigan itself, there is no corporate income tax.

<comment><USER25> Maybe you and the OP should come to Colorado instead... 4.63% flat-rate personal and corporate tax rate, and the 3rd best educated workforce in the country.

[http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal- finance/2012/10/15/ameri...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/personal- finance/2012/10/15/americas-best-and-worst-educated-states/)

<comment><USER26> Boulder in particular was named "America's best town for startups" [1]. And if you're coming from California, you'll be right at home with the high property costs. ;)

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2010-04-22/why- boulder-i...](http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2010-04-22/why-boulder-is- americas-best-town-for-startupsbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and- financial-advice)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Vote with your feet; it's the only vote that matters in California these days.

</comment><comment><USER28> We can't effectively manage a budget, give us more money!

<comment><USER29> Actually, California's budget is balanced and it expects a surplus in two years.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/california-balances- its...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/us/california-balances-its- budget.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER28> Only after doing things such as threatening to cut 300 million from education unless folks raised taxes (retroactively as well).

If your method of balancing the budget is always asking for more money, you haven't really balanced the budget.

What are you going to do in a few years when those tax hikes expire, and you suddenly lose the same amount of revenue? I look forward to a few years when we begin to hear the claim in that we need to make the temporary hikes permanent, because we are running out of money again.

(This is, btw, fairly similar as to how the federal income tax was created. It was originally temporary)

As for the surplus claims: Of course the guy who supported the ballot initiative is going to say it's going to run a surplus.

However, even the ballot initiative booklet mentioned the surplus claims are possibly false, as the kind of revenue they are depending on is _very_ transient and hard to predict.

<comment><USER29> _As for the surplus claims: Of course the guy who supported the ballot initiative is going to say it's going to run a surplus._

The independent Legislative Analyst's Office, which had previously said Brown's budget would have had a $1.9 billion shortfall in November, now says that it is roughly in balance due to changes in income tax:

[http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2013/bud/budget-overview/budget- ov...](http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2013/bud/budget-overview/budget- overview-011413.pdf)

 _If your method of balancing the budget is always asking for more money, you haven't really balanced the budget._

How is increasing revenues not a valid way of balancing a budget? And always asking for more money? _Reagan_ raised the top income tax bracket in California from 7% to 10%. It now stands at 10.3%.

 _What are you going to do in a few years when those tax hikes expire, and you suddenly lose the same amount of revenue? I look forward to a few years when we begin to hear the claim in that we need to make the temporary hikes permanent, because we are running out of money again._

Considering most of the budget deficit is mostly due to California's substantial social safety net being engaged by the Great Recession, as long as the economy continues to improve, California will probably get by fine with the increased revenues of more people working and lessened burden of people applying for medicaid and unemployment insurance.

<comment><USER30> > The independent Legislative Analyst's Office,

I have no knowledge of the LAO, but the federal CBO (which I believe has a similar function, and is supposedly similarly independent) continuously makes projections that are worthless.

One of the reasons for this is that their mandate requires them to assume the current taxation regime; which means that whenever you do tax cuts (e.g. Bush), you do them "temporarily", which means that CBO estimates will necessarily assume they expire. Then you extend them, and -- tada, CBO is never right regardless of how well they do their work.

Politicians hacking the rules they set themselves. If it wasn't sad, I'd say it was entertaining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess the way I see it is this. I imagine most startups don't have much profit, so therefore they won't pay much in taxes. If you are making a lot of profit and paying a bit more in taxes, it seems like the system is working. If these people are selling millions of dollars in stock options and complaining about having to pay more taxes on them, I have a hard time having sympathy. I'd love for my biggest problem to be figuring out how much more in taxes I owe on all the millions of dollars I made.

<comment><USER32> Capital gains taxes are going up by 50% in CA this year. That's a big hit to future angel rounds. I wrote about it here: [http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-fiscal- cliff-...](http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-fiscal-cliff- silicon-valleys.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Am I missing something or has California crossed over into absurdity?

I don't understand why the VC and tech community in California stand for this stuff [1]. There should either be more lobbying by the seemingly powerful tech and vc community or mass exodus out of the state. I don't see either happening and I wonder why. Perhaps these things just take time.

Is CA killing the golden goose here?

[1] I am guilty too by living here at the moment, but I am a relative new comer to the state. The situation is completely baffling to me after being here for almost two years and am exploring other states at the moment.

<comment><USER34> I think part of the problem is there isn't a single other place which is objectively better than SFBA on every metric which matters to startup people, and yet people would prefer to stay together/have a critical mass of people.

Seattle, Boulder, and Austin are probably the most viable options right now, if you want more libertarian/sustainable government combined with the same overall feel of the Bay Area. It would be better if there were one place which was head and shoulders better than all the others.

Nothing really touches SFBA for VC, though, and Stanford is probably the world's best university for applied CS with startup involvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does this apply to a Delaware corporation which happens to have offices ("do business") in California?

<comment><USER36> I doubt it - although you would still need to pay CA franchise tax ($800 minimum yearly). That's always been the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Come to New York! We're rolling in so much finance money we don't need to hit up small businesses.

<comment><USER37> Your state's gun laws prevent me from ever living there.

<comment><USER38> Don't come to New York, then. If your access to rifles is more important than the tax codes your startup may or may not face, stay where you are.

<comment><USER39> To other child post: FUD. What the heck does NY have to do with the federal constitution? It takes 3/4 of states to pass a new amendment, so it's not like NY can do it on it's own. The second amendment limits the _federal_ government from passing certain kinds of laws.

<comment><USER40> Completely false. Like much of the rest of Bill of Rights, the second amendment has been incorporated (see Chicago vs McDonald), and thus held to apply to the states.

It slightly irritates me when people say this, because usually those people have no problem accepting that other amendments that they hold to be more important (e.g, the 1st) apply to the states.

<comment><USER41> > It slightly irritates me when people say this, because usually those people > have no problem accepting that other amendments that they hold to be more > important (e.g, the 1st) apply to the states.

Heck, people try to apply the 1st amendment to private corporations & online forums set up by 14 year olds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Austin, TX would love to have you.

</comment><comment><USER43> To me this is a symptom of the twisted politics around taxation in the US. You have one very powerful group that is continually fighting to lower or eliminate taxes and another somewhat less powerful group that wants to bring in enough tax money to fund government services. One side cuts taxes or refuses to raise them and the other side finds new things to tax or other taxes to raise.

Normally such a tug of war is not an issue and is basically a natural consequence of a functioning democracy but in the US it has gone to the extreme.

Personally I blame the anti tax group. They seem to have no use for logic or evidence and only demand more cuts regardless of the previous ones or the consequences. They are refusing to provide the funds necessary to run a modern government.

<comment><USER32> In California, our money goes to retired union worker's pensions, not current public services. Our most powerful lobbying group by money spent is the state teacher's union, followed by the state and municipal employee worker union. We have the highest taxes in the nation, poor public services, and massive debt.

Pro-tax types should stop carrying water for bad governance. I am one of those anti-tax people you say "has no use for logic and evidence", and I am happy to pay taxes when I feel it is going to good use. But I am not willing to pay taxes so that politicians can turn around and give it to the unions that own them at the expense of the public good.

It's funny that most of the world's entrepreneurship is in my country, where people can keep most of their money earned to fund new ventures (for now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Taxes have zero impact on my decision to start a company in California.

<comment><USER45> How come?

<comment><USER46> Perhaps for other more compelling reasons he has decided to start a company elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Houston, we have a spending problem.

<comment><USER48> It's got nothing to do with increasing tax revenue - it's petty overreaction on behalf of the responsible state body - the FTB. I quote liberally from the article:

> It turns out that a few years ago, someone sued the Franchise Tax Board over > being denied the right to claim the QSB benefit [Cutler v. Franchise Tax > Bd., 208 Cal. App. 4th 1247 (2012)]. The company at issue in that lawsuit > did not meet one of the QSB requirements—that it maintain 80 percent of its > employees and assets in California. In August of 2012, the California Court > of Appeals sided with the plaintiff, ruling that denying him the QSB > exclusion based on the "80 percent requirement" was an unconstitutional > violation of the interstate commerce clause.

> Since the FTB lost the case, you might think that they would strike the > unconstitutional requirement and keep the rest of QSB statute intact. Not a > chance.

> What the FTB did instead was to take their ball and go home. They decided > that since they could not impose the "80 percent requirement," no one would > be entitled to the QSB exclusion. They put out an announcement terminating > the Qualified Small Business exclusion and retroactively disqualifying all > exclusions and deferrals going all the way back to 2008.

<comment><USER49> That's actually fairly common in decisions striking down agency interpretations. Sometimes a court will order a specific remedy, but other times they only rule that the existing regulation was illegal but leave open multiple ways of curing it. In the case where the problem was that a regulation impermissibly distinguished between groups that the law didn't allow distinguishing between, there are two ways to fix it: put everyone into bucket A, or put everyone into bucket B. And in fact in either case you _have_ to do it retroactively, to fix the ruled-invalid error of treating the two groups differently.

<comment><USER50> This is not a decision striking down an agency interpretation.

The decision explicitly found that the _statute_ supplying QSB benefits in California "is discriminatory on its face and cannot stand under the commerce clause". Had an agency interpretation been struck down, it would be fair to say that (within the bounds of the court decision and the governing statute) the FTB was free to come up with a new interpretation. But when a statute is struck down, it can only be fixed by the _legislature_. An administrative agency can't fix constitutional defects in statute: they have no authority to do so.

(The court could have severed the unconstitutional provision and preserved the rest of the statute, and there is some indication in the decision that they probably would have done so rather than ruling the statute facially invalid if they had been reasoning clearly and consistently. But they didn't, and the FTB isn't really free to apply what the court _should_ _have_ ruled instead of what the court _actually_ ruled.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The FTB had two choices: allow the deduction for every QSBS that didn't qualify due to the 80% rule, or retroactively impose the tax on all who claimed it. I'm sure somebody did the math, and found a huge liability for the state if all the previously non-qualified QSBS' were given the deduction. Keep in mind the FTB can't allow the status quo: if they allow the previous claimants keep the deduction, they must grant the same ability to the previously non-qualified. They chose then to disqualify the previous claimants and fight with them on a case-by-case basis, rather than pay.

</comment><comment><USER32> On a related note - California capital gains tax is going up by 50% this year[1] (24.3% to 37.1%). That's a big jump and I haven't heard many people talk about it. In the short term it doesn't have much effect but in the long run it will reduce the amount of capital in the Valley available for angel investment and bootstrapping.

[1][http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-fiscal- cliff-...](http://jacobexmachina.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-fiscal-cliff- silicon-valleys.html)

<comment><USER52> That's completely misleading. The capital gains tax paid by some Californians may be going from 24.3% to 37.1% but only 3% of that has anything to do with California. This is important because changes that affect other states as well do not affect the relative desirability of CA vs. other states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Serious question, can one "retroactively" move out of the state? Isn't it kind of bullshit I wasn't afforded the opportunity to move out of the state before I sold my stock?

</comment><comment><USER54> I thought this was the "taxes changed during 2012 for the whole 2012 tax year" issue, but this seems to extend back to previous years.

</comment><comment><USER55> I also found this section interesting...and I didn't know about it before:

"Per amendments in the new "fiscal cliff" law, if you started or invested in a QSB between September 28, 2010 and January 1, 2013 and ultimately sell stock under the federal QSB provisions, you'll pay no federal capital gains tax, and in some states, no state taxes."

</comment><comment><USER56> If we're all recommending states, then how about ND. Yeah it gets cold and hot, but we have a budget surplus, wicked fast fiber, and low taxes. Fargo(1) is an ok town (Microsoft has a place there).

1) Fargo in no way resembles anything from the movie of the same name. That would be MN home of high taxes and no off-sale after 8pm.

</comment><comment><USER57> A lot of the discussion arounds this makes me think that the joke "The Republic of California" is not just true of CA, but for Washington, too. Is the talk of high taxes just limited to those two Western states or is it a bigger trend in other parts of the West Coast?

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm not sure I would recommend Texas either. Use tax means you pay annual taxes on everything you own, plus sales tax on any affiliate deals; franchise tax will hit you hard even if your not making a dime because it's based on 'net worth' and not on profit.

It's a tough place to be.

<comment><USER59> No state income tax, much cheaper housing costs than the national average, and cheap gas make it a pretty good place to live and work. Plus, because of all that, you can pay your employees much less (than California) and still provide them an equally-good standard of living.

And Tex-Mex! I don't see how people in other parts of the country could live without Tex-Mex food.

<comment><USER58> That's great if you are making money. If you are loosing money and still paying taxes then it's not so great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I'd be curious to know how many California taxpayers this decision affects.

</comment><comment><USER60> Come to Mexico, beautiful beaches, good weather, what else do you want?

<comment><USER61> A lack of institutionalized corruption and organized crime?

<comment><USER62> The USA has plenty of institutionalized corruption (see: Washington D.C.) and organized crime too, so how much worse can Mexico be?

<comment><USER25> "so how much worse can Mexico be?"

That's sarcasm right?

Mexico: 3rd highest number of murders in the world (only India and Brazil are worse). Nearly 5x the murder rate in the US - nearly 2x the total number of murders.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

<comment><USER62> I was referring, specifically, to the issues of corruption and organized crime. But even considering the general murder rate, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your likelihood of being murdered in Mexico vary tremendously depending on where in Mexico you are. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing there are some areas that are pretty safe and some areas that you'd have to be brain-dead stupid to walk into.

<comment><USER25> 1\. Most of the murders in Mexico are from drug cartels. Are you saying that the cartels are NOT a form of organized crime??

2\. If you go to the URL I posted, Mexico and the US are broken down by states. The are only 3 states in Mexico with a murder rate below the US average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The repeal of the exclusion actually seems like okay policy (at least sans the 80% requirement).

The retroactivity, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER64> we unfortunately don't have enough votes to influence their thinking on this. this is sleazy but not out of character for california. you can try shaming them with some media exposure (which is what you are embarking on) and hope it kinda works. good luck.

</comment><comment><USER65> Come to New Mexico. Cost of living is cheap and we have great weather.

</comment><comment><USER66> even if the tax break was found unconstitutional and retroactively revoked, how is the "interest and penalties" bit in any way legal?

</comment><comment><USER67> Come to Toronto!

<comment><USER68> Even better, come to Vancouver. You get SRED and no snow. Just rain.

<comment><USER69> Except when it does snow, and the entire city shuts down because they don't know how to deal with the snow (same thing happens in Seattle and Portland)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Some people in this world are just plain ridiculous. Who runs the country like this?

I really want to know who really thinks so stupidly while making/amending laws.

<comment><USER71> unfortunately, those in charge choose to vilify success and growth. rather than lauding the greatness of america, they choose to tax, burden and encumber it. i'm not sure there are good alternatives on either side of the aisle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> a prime example of fiscal policy going array. i hope our revered leaders figure out the fact that innovation is the key to the greatness that is America.

</comment><comment><USER72> ex post facto, surely?

<comment><USER7> The prohibition against retroactive laws only applies to criminal laws. See Calder v. Bull (1798).

<comment><USER73> So, theoretically speaking, could California retroactively increase the state income tax and claim billions from most of the populace?

<comment><USER47> This is exactly what happened when Prop 30 passed last year:

[http://allthingsd.com/20121204/what-proposition-30-means- for...](http://allthingsd.com/20121204/what-proposition-30-means-for- californias-entrepreneurs/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ways Streaming Services Are Getting Worse - <AUTHOR> http://www.cracked.com/blog/12-ways-streaming-services-are-getting-worse/ <comment><USER2> It is shocking to me how few old movies are available on Netflix. Here is a complete list of English language movies from the 1960s on Netflix right now:

* Color Me Barbara

* My Name is Barbara

* Barbara Streisand: A Happening in Central Park

It does not seem that unusual to me to want to watch a movie starring Audrey Hepburn, Clint Eastwood or Elizabeth Taylor. The presence of even a dozen of the better movies from that decade would increase the value of Netflix to me and, I suspect, many others. What is going on?

<comment><USER3> > What is going on?

The copyright owners of movies with know stars from the 1960s have their own platforms and aren't licensing the movies to Netflix.

Hence, why Netflix has for years been making a huge original-contenr push; once it proved out streaming as a business model with other people's content, getting (or keeping) such content became more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep thinking why on earth the Hollywood system doesn't realise the shear tonnes of cash there is out there for the following; DRM free downloads of HD movies for $2, 4K for $3-4. No-one would bother pirating and I'd probably spend a fortune over the next few years to legally have copies of this stuff. My bet is that most people would pay and do it legally because it's far simpler this way.

<comment><USER5> Because this market doesn't exist to any statistically measurable amount.

Just because you want it to doesn't mean it does.

<comment><USER4> Well until it's tried I guess we'll never know... worth noting the DVD market is still pretty big. No reason it wouldn't be several times bigger with a simple online version.

Pirates going to pirate so it will literally make no difference providing people with a legal alternative that is easy and simple to use.

<comment><USER5> > Well until it's tried I guess we'll never know...

It has been. The BBC tried selling Doctor Who via Bittorrent for example, with signficant publicity.

The DVD market is big because it's cheap and no other reason.

People already have an abundant legal alternatives that are widely available and simple to use.

<comment><USER4> It's currently £20 to buy an arbitrary superhero movie on Amazon Prime in 4K. I mean, it's up to you if you want to believe selling Dr Who or selling all movies ever are the same thing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And let's not forget one of my "favorites": ads before the content. Sure, for now it's mostly just promos for their other shows, and it's generally skippable, but that's how it starts. They ease you into it, like boiling a frog.

HBO and AMC, I'm looking at you. You have, like, two or three shows worth watching at any given time of the year. I don't need to be reminded about them _every damn time_ I watch an episode.

And, FYI, when I'm binging some dark-ass drama series, nothing kills the feeling of immersion like a loud-ass promo for some upbeat sitcom between episodes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Glad I've never dealt with any of that. Plex is great and my family loves it.

<comment><USER8> That's great, where did your content for your Plex server originally come from?

<comment><USER9> The most likely place HE got the content for his Plex server Is fRom legAlly archived dvds. ThE process for this is not so BAd, You should try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> back to torrenting we go...

<comment><USER11> Totally. The situation is absolutely ridiculous.

It was all fun when Netflix, Hulu & HBO were the only names in town. Now that they're constantly removing good movies, and adding cookie-cutter "original content", I'm actually considering cancelling my subscriptions. Trying to keep up without subscribing to everyone starts to feel more like buying individual movies, and half of the things I want to watch is geo-locked anyway. Meanwhile, random shady free streaming services are becoming more usable, especially for caching up with shows older than 5 years. All it takes is updating uBlock and killing an occasional cryptominer.

I'm strongly convinced torrenting will experience a resurgence of interest now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh no, Filmstruck[0] shut down??

I guess we're going to find those old harddrives and swap them around.

[0] [https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/filmstruck-shutdown- wa...](https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/filmstruck-shutdown-warnermedia- turner-1202998364/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Online TV was so cool back around 2010. Balkanization:-(

</comment><comment><USER14> That 16TB hard drive announced a few days ago is gonna fix that for me. I hear there is a 100TB in the works too.

To old really relentless extremely nice technology!

</comment><comment><USER15> > There Are Way Too Many Platforms

What's the goldilocks number of platforms?

<comment><USER11> I'd say two, maybe three. Beyond that, one wishes for a meta-platform integrating this all together.

(The same applies to IMs and groupchats. Personally, I can't reliably follow more than 3-4 channels, e-mail included.)

<comment><USER6> Also, all the legacy content creators are clinging to their old production models and airing shows one episode at a time. Just sign up for one month a year, binge, and cancel. Or do it twice a year.</comment></comment></comment>


Computer Chess: Longest-Running Experiment in Computing Science - <AUTHOR> https://en.chessbase.com/post/computer-chess-longest-running-experiment-in-computing-science <comment><USER2> This was a great read, with some fascinating tidbits of both computing and chess history.

Unrelated, but this part caught my eye:

> The most interesting and perhaps least known report on the 1970 tournament > came from a relatively unknown author. The article, "The Program Was a > Fish," appeared in 1972.

> A fish, you see, is a chess player. A bad chess player. The title is awarded > by other players when one of their peers exhibits a singular skill in losing > chess games. Popular synonyms are "patzer" and "meatcake."

That the cited article was written by George R. R. Martin (of Game of Thrones fame) is interesting in and of itself, but I also thought maybe the "fish" slang had a connection somehow to the naming of the popular Stockfish chess engine; but apparently it does not.[0][1]

[0] - [https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/6123509798/stockfish-10](https://blog.stockfishchess.org/post/6123509798/stockfish-10)

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish)</comment>


NYC Tech and the Compounding Interest of Making a Hire - <AUTHOR> In 5 years working in NYC Tech, working with 30+ Startups, it's interesting to see all of the different approaches to Tech hiring. Specifically looking at companies so focused on hiring with velocity, yet struggling with something we like to call Recruiting Hygiene.
From what we've seen in the industry at HiveFive, the average Onsite to Hire ratio is about 1:12. That means for every 12 people you are bringing onsite, 1 will be hired. Now think about that for a second:
Let's say there are 4-5 steps to your onsite (5 hours): A Coding Problem, Systems Design, Lunch, CS Fundamentals and a Wrap Up. Each step is a different person (Sometimes companies even have 2-3 interviewers involved for each) If each portion takes an hour, that's a minimum of 55 hours of Engineering time that's being pulled away from doing their core competency to make 1 hire. What happens when your goal for the quarter is 6 or even 10 hires on your team? At 10 hires, you're looking at an astounding 605 hours that Engineering is not doing their core competency. What do you think your organization could get done with an extra 600 hours of Engineering time? Additionally, how can we expect to compete with the major players in a hyper competitive NYC landscape when you are not able to hire efficiently and, in most cases, can't compete on compensation?
If there's one thing I've learned over the past 6 months that has stuck with me, and just makes sense it's this:
You only need to evaluate for 4 things in your process: Do they have the relevant experience? Can they do the job on a daily? The Level of Engineer Culture Fit
From there, you should have a clear cut decision on hire/no hire and the level of Engineer you're bringing on.
Hiring should be thought of as a product (NOT a sales funnel) Hiring is NOT a Democracy and feedback needs to be gathered individually immediately to avoid bias and group think
Agree of Disagree? <comment><USER2> I think the best way to interview is still the old school way [0].

Just find people who are smart and get things done.

We've had phases after phases of interview "wisdom". At one point people were just hiring for "passion" and picked any girl who has a Github account and was active on it. But this led to lots of people setting up Github account, not to build things, but to make themselves look good on the interview.

Now we have this whole CTCI trend, because big companies do it. And so developers with 10 years of experience spend 3 months memorizing every algorithm in the book, 80% of which they'll never use throughout their career. Does it make for better programmers? Sure. But in past quarters I've had two major speedbumps - CSS animation and setting up mail adapters, and no amount of HackerRank will make me good at that.

The article [0] also mentions "pointer and recursion". I think this is about as far as you have to technically test people. If you needed to code prime numbers from scratch a smart enough person can learn to do sieve in half a day. But pointers and recursion take a little more effort than a day. You might say that nobody uses C anymore, but we still use pointers - there's plenty of variations of binary search, and that's about as deep as it needs to go IMO.

[0] : [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla- guid...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guide-to- interviewing-version-30/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A blogger (I forget who) said to reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads to a lot of unnecessary interviews. Some gentle pressure on your phone screeners to reject marginal candidates works very well. One way to do this is to bring the phone screener to the final hiring meeting, and if you reject the candidate, ask "what could we have done to catch this earlier in the process." More aggressively, you can gather stats and you will find that a few phone screeners are letting through most of the marginal candidates, and some quick conversations with these few will bring down the interview load substantially.

Sadly, too many people running companies ignore the cost of interviewing on productivity. It's very similar to how they view open offices as a "free lunch," pretending that there are no costs, and pushing employees to just work more to offset their management mistakes.

<comment><USER4> > reject more candidates during the phone screen stage, which I've found to > work great. When evaluating a phone screen, many interviewers will think > "they were on the fence. Let's see how they do in the on-site," which leads > to a lot of unnecessary interviews.

This is a good tip. My employer is in the process of tightening this up as well. One colleague noted a correlation between people who are able to solve a phone screen problem inefficiently as frequently performing poorly when they make it to on site interviews. So raise the bar for what solutions are deemed good enough to proceed to on sites. Some good candidates may be excluded but the ratio of good candidates making it to on sites should increase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > If each portion takes an hour, that's a minimum of 55 hours of Engineering > time that's being pulled away from doing their core competency to make 1 > hire.

Once you have a new hire on site, there's additional engineering time spent to on board the new hire, depending on: how organised the team & the company is, how simple or complex the work is, how standard or weirdly proprietary the company tech is, how much experience the new hire is working in such a setting.

Suppose you can drive down the cost of hiring a new engineer to zero, there are still going to be costs on the order of engineer-weeks or engineer-months to on board them after they join before their net impact to the business is positive.

What am I trying to argue? I don't disagree that hiring burns a lot of engineering time, but on boarding also burns a lot of engineering time, so there might not be too much value in hyper optimising one phase the process without looking at the whole system.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why not use machine learning in order to rank candidates and "waste" time only on the top 3?

<comment><USER6> This was already tried by Amazon and it failed. ML algo magnified human biases which were present in dataset.

[http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/amazon-ai-recruitment-bias- wom...](http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/amazon-ai-recruitment-bias-women- sexist/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Hiring should be thought of as a product (NOT a sales funnel)...

Are you hiring Engineers or Day Labor?

The interview process works both ways--

I'm also score-carding you and the organization.

Frankly, immediate job offers often signal desperation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree with you here, that's why you have to evaluate correctly in order to execute in a timely manner versus uncertainty and dragging out the process</comment></comment>


macOS and iOS is completely useless together - <AUTHOR> This is probably going to be an ongoing rant about the integration of MacOS, iOS, and modern communications.
I left a drinking establishment perhaps 3 hours ago and seem to have left my iPhone 6S there.
As of 1:19PST, I can track my device on the "Find My" app on Catalina but can't send messages to it.
My 5 year old iPhone is somewhere in the Tenderloin. Impressive that I can track it, but the tracking app offers no options to send messages to it. WHY?
In the process, I also discovered that I am completely without the ability to contact any friends or family without my now lost iPhone. I can't make any text messages or outbound calls from my shiny 16in macbook pro (with its ridiculously sized trackpad and marginal keyboard).
Whatsapp requires having your phone as the central device to even be able to use it, which is of course no fucking use when your phone is gone.
I don't have a landline in my house, as I suspect most people don't these days. In San Francisco. I can literally see minute by minute where my phone is in the Tenderloin but have no way send a message to the device, to my friends, or to my family.
How in the hell is this where we are at in the the 21st century? <comment><USER2> Go get it. That's what Find My is for - not to provide fodder for an entitled rant.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think "find my" let's you put it in "lost mode" with a message on the screen

</comment><comment><USER4> >>>How in the hell is this where we are at in the the 21st century?

in the Cloud</comment>