Facebook User Growth, Time Spent Fall on News Feed Changes - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-31/facebook-falls-after-user-growth-fails-to-meet-expectation <comment><USER3> I didn't see anyone else mention this, but to me it is a problem of facebook's own making. They drove personal content off the site when they pushed videos and pictures by "viral marketing" firms onto it. They replaced groups (inherently personal) with pages, then scrambled to try and bring groups back years later. They turned the wall to spam from various garbage apps that were given permission to crap all over it by default interspersed with ads and machine-generated content ("a picture of you from three years ago").

In their zeal to gain IM users, they replaced messages with chat, removing the inhibition that kept people from using messages for one liners. Then they made you always online, supplanting Facebook itself entirely with something that could be replaced by any other real-time communication app. Once phones became nicer to use and there were alternatives to the lag and limitations of SMS, people had no reason to log into Facebook to chat with their friends because Facebook has trained non-IMers to IM and they no longer needed Facebook to do it.

Users would have killed for high-resolution photos (Facebook would make pictures so tiny and so low resolution that they'd become unrecognizable and all talent that went into composing them or editing them would be lost, and they couldn't contain text or captions because that would be compressed away) or the ability to create albums. A dozen apps existed to shoehorn that functionality in via the Flickr api. Then they had to go buy Instagram to win those users back.

Now people just post major life events to share with people they didn't bother communicating them to via another, more personal means of communication once a year or so.

<comment><USER4> Worse yet, do you know how frustrating it is to be told that there are no more updates available while you know that you a missing life events from friends that actually posted them.

After a while you realize that there is no point in posting your own because they will similarly not show up for friends.

Cutting back on FB has become ever easier over time.

<comment><USER5> My wife and were 'in a relationship' on Facebook within a few months of meeting each other. Then we were 'married'. Even still, for the first four or so years that we had each other on FB, it wouldn't show me her posts. They just weren't in my feed, I'd scroll down so far I was seeing content from months ago, but I'd never see anything she'd posted that week.

Eventually it took me telling FB I didn't want to see posts from 90% of my 'friends', and then going to her feed and 'engaging' with her posts, for it to start showing them to me.

I've never actually _used_ Facebook in any serious way; I'll log in and scroll through my feed once every few months, but I've always hated it. The other day I put my finger on why: it's the mobile equivalent of turning on the TV and flipping through channels looking for something to watch, something you do as an alternative to doing something with your time.

<comment><USER6> They've probably done testing and found that for some significant percentage of married couples, seeing their spouse's posts caused them to reduce their Facebook usage. So unhappy marriages are ruining it for everyone.

I feel like the general trend of UI simplification and a/b testing everything has companies chasing after anything that will push their general metrics up in the short term, at the expense of slowly disenfranchising a large portion of their users.

I interviewed at Netflix recently for a position on their UI team, and I questioned the interviewer about a lot of annoying aspects of the Netflix interface. He was aware of every complaint, and his explanation for every one of them was he wishes he could change it but the a/b testing shows they get higher engagement with it the way it is. So, for example, they show you movies you have already said you don't like, because enough people give a thumbs down and then later watch the movie. In the short term very few people are going to cancel Netflix because of this, but enough of these decisions in succession is erosive to customer goodwill.

Personally, these kind of decisions wouldn't bother me that much if apps and websites made it easy to customize your experience. Facebook makes it difficult by opaquely shaping your newsfeed and giving you what seems like hundreds of options across a half dozen settings pages. Netflix makes it difficult by just giving you practically no options, but there's enough demand that's there a tiny industry in just making websites and plugins to make Netflix usable.

<comment><USER7> I guess A/B testing will tell you if the horse will become faster if you change from iron shoes to carbon fiber ones.

A/B testing won't ever get you a Tesla from a horse.

<comment><USER8> If you do enough binary switching, you eventually _will_ get a Tesla. Assuming a Tesla is optimal. Let's test to find out.

How do you think the eyeball arose from unicellular eukaryotes?

<comment><USER9> I don't think so. A/B testing is like gradient descent which is a greedy algorithm. You move in the direction that locally looks best. Evolution on the other hand allows for suboptimal species to persist for enough time to let them develop their advantage. (In the language of optimization evolution allows you to go past the local optimal and reach global optima by allowing you to move in non-optimal direction -- as long as the move is not catastrophic.)

<comment><USER8> Nope. A/B testing depends on what you choose to mutate. The problem is that we humans intentionally change the things. Nature randomly changes the things.

You're not going to get to a global optimum driven by human choice of what to test (only local optima at best) unless the human setting up the tests is some sort of sage.

<comment><USER4> Do you Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum? If so, that belief is opposed by what biologists know about developmental and evolutionary pathways.

For a trivial and well-known example, there is now no developmental or evolutionary pathway that will lead to a vertebrate eye where the nerves run behind the retina. As a result every last vertebrate has a blind spot where all of the nerves dive through the retina. This makes our eyes less efficient because the nerves block out light.

We're therefore stuck with the first design of the vertebrate eye and can't change it. There is no pathway to the more sensible design of the mollusk eye.

This is but one of many examples. For another one, relative developmental timing of growth is fixed across vertebrates. For example the "hand" grows before the "arm". The result is that pterodactyls, whose wings are entirely hands, could fly from birth. But birds (whose wings are arms) and bats (a mix of the two) can't fly from birth. No matter how desirable an evolutionary trait that may be.

<comment><USER8> > Do you think Nature will eventually hit on a global optimum?

No. At least not in the way described. Optimal as considered by whom? Us? We look at something and say this would function better than that, but is something that is optimal perfect? Basic microeconomics shows that perfection is sub-optimal due to the law of diminishing marginal return. Perfection is wasteful and unsustainable. What do we know to be optimal? From what I know, "adequate enough to reproduce" may not be perfect, but it might be brushing up against optimal in its "good enough and no more" / lagom nature. Mollusks have mollusk eyes. Can we know that humans would be better off with mollusk eyes without rewriting our evolutionary lineage for us to be more like mollusks in other imperfect ways?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From my readings, something Facebook has been struggling with for a couple years is getting people to post more personal updates.

Thus their Newsfeed changes de-prioritizing articles, and thus (I figure) their experiments such as showing short posts in large font sizes, and enabling MySpace-like gradient backgrounds on text posts...

This dynamic makes me recall something: Anyone remember how back in the day (like 2006) Facebook had a feature called 'Wall-to-Wall' conversations? You would go to a friend's profile and just write a message, they would go to your 'wall' and reply, and mutual friends could see the conversation.

These days between the Newsfeed, comments on posts, and Messenger, the only reason I would post on another friend's profile is to wish them a happy birthday. That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

<comment><USER11> >That whole ethos of just having informal personal conversations with college friends on Facebook is gone.

The wall was never a good way to do this. It's neither as powerful nor as flexible as pretty much any competing way for a small group of people to communicate, including chat programs, email, txt, snapchat, etc.

Facebook's deprioritization of the wall and buy-in on messenger/whatsapp, instagram, and the newsfeed was very smart. I suspect they are ok with people moving off posting on facebook to posting on instagram and chatting privately.

<comment><USER12> The engaging part of the wall to wall wasn't how good it was for communication, it was the semi-permissioned town hall style chat for semi- related groups of friends you'd see as it whizzed by on your feed. People did all sorts of humblebragging, cries for attention, or on the nicer side of the spectrum, open discussion that chat like whatsapp and messenger do not have.

The similarity between snooping around facebook and seeing all the open chats going on with people you'd never usually talk to and watching reality TV were striking to me.

Thought admittedly, I do not know if it was one of the driving factors to FB success or not, so it may well have been past its use by date rather than the news feeds killing it.

Personally I enjoyed those days more as my feed was more of a chronological account of people chatting rather than reshares articles, videos and memes.

<comment><USER13> On the other hand, your description bears a strong resemblance to Twitter. If you have a conversation with someone through replies, anyone who follows both of you will see it in their timeline, and by default, _anyone_ can read it by going to either of your profiles. So it's not uncommon to have someone you've never heard of jump into a conversation. And it's easy enough to "snoop around" yourself; sometimes that can be a source of genuine new acquaintances, and with time, friendships. (There's an etiquette to it, though. If you don't know someone, you should only butt in to their conversations if you have something to add - not because, say, you disagree with a political statement they're making, or at the very least, certainly not if you're planning to hurl insults!)

Unfortunately, some people and some topics tend to attract a lot of those sorts of uninvited rebuttals - in other words, harassment - driving some to make their accounts private. In that case, only approved followers can see your tweets, ever. There's no "friends of friends"-like middle ground, or any other more flexible filtering options.

On the other hand, for most people, Twitter's system seems to work pretty well. It works for me, and I really enjoy the spontaneity of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Posting on Facebook, right now, is like updating your resume (like LinkedIn) for personal life. It just feels too "public". Sure, you can tweak your social network into different privacy levels. But, that just doesn't feel intuitive or effortless. The exclusivity factor which initially propelled the network is simply not there. At the peak of the facebook madness, you had a need to post whenever anything happened. Now, its just the big ticket items.

I think people login more due to habit than to post personal updates. I doubt the current college going kids even login at all. Today, you update facebook only on special occasions like marriage, birth of a child, graduation or when people go out to visit places etc. Previously, like 7 to 8 years back, people used to post very personal things, knowing that only their friends are on the network. It definitely, felt safe. It Again, maybe my gen aged a bit during the last 8 years, I don't know. If anyone posts anything too personal right now, it feels like a violation of social norms. Like crying in public with everyone watching.

No matter how many tweaks Facebook makes to their Newsfeed, I doubt quality engagement from what I saw 7 to 8 years back will return.

People just shifted to mobile apps like Whatsapp and have different social groups there. This feels very natural and organic. You have a few small groups of maybe 10 to 15 people max per group who all know you intimately and maybe a couple of larger groups with 50 plus members. This usually an alumni group of some kind. Even the larger groups get tiring if there are too updates and many frequently opt out after a tiff.

I just feel the era of publicly sharing personal information on web based social networks is over. If there is somekind of a decentralized privacy oriented mobile app that has the same functionality as whatsapp and it gets widely adopted, then it might be game over for the big companies in the social networking space. Even though Whatsapp is owned by facebook. It feels very safe and personal to share updates.

<comment><USER15> Personal opinion that this is all again unintentionally there own doing.

They drove people to stop posting personal content by making personal content so rare to come by (with ads, news,pages,sponsored posts..) that it was percieved that people don't post those kind of things anymore.

Going to be very tough to get people back into that mindset.

<comment><USER16> There is no need to go back to that mindset. The goal is to transition everyone to a new, different mindset. This is how a business evolves.

<comment><USER17> You mean imitates progress?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Some notes from the results they just released:

Revenues: \- 4Q revenue $12.97 billion, estimate $12.55 billion (range $12.15 billion to $12.91 billion) (Bloomberg data)

\- 4Q EPS $1.44

\- 4Q daily active users 1.40 billion, estimate 1.41 billion (Bloomberg News) (3 estimates)

\- 4Q monthly active users 2.13 billion, estimate 2.13 billion (BN) (3 estimates)

\- 4Q mobile ad revenue as percentage of ad revenue 89%

\- 4Q advertising rev. $12.78 billion

General:

\- increased headcount: it was 25,105 as of December 31, 2017, an increase of 47% year-over-year.

\- This is the first-ever decline Facebook has had in North American users. Daily active users growth in US & Canada fell to 184 million, compared to 185 million in Q3.

Related to new US Tax Plan

\- There's a one-time mandatory transition tax on accumulated foreign earnings and a reduction of the corporate income tax rate to 21 percent, effective Jan. 1, 2018. Facebook's provision for income taxes increased by $2.27 billion and its diluted EPS decreased by $0.77 for both the fourth quarter and full year 2017.

<comment><USER19> In another thread here we are learning how much of this "daily active users" is actually bots run by corporations. I for myself have shown myself out of Facebook and enjoy real live interactions with human beings like it's the '90s.

<comment><USER20> But in the 90s we were all watching 4-6 hrs of TV a day.

<comment><USER21> It was good family TV though! Like Family Matters and Full House!

<comment><USER22> ...and no need to be stressed if your comment will receive "likes"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For people using uBlock Origin who want to hide all of the noise on their Facebook and truly see what their friends are posting, here are some useful filters:

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ replied to a /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ liked this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ commented on a post from /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ reacted to this./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/'s cover photo./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ likes /)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ are now friends./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ is interested in an event./)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Sponsored/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/Suggested Post/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/A video you may like/)

facebook.com##div._3ccb:has-text(/ shared /)

!facebook.com##u_fetchstream

!facebook.com##._4-u2[id*="u_fetchstream"]

I got tired of seeing seemingly hundreds of, "Your friends reacted to this ad page 5 months ago" or "Here's another advertisement disguised as a page you might be interested in." I realized after I implemented these that I see maybe 2 or 3 new posts a day from my 500 friends, and of these posts the majority of them are political in nature and don't interest me. The only reason I still continue to use FB is for the messenger app as I still think it's the most convenient compared to other platforms.

Here's what my feed looks like with the rules implemented (they aren't FULLY currently up to date either because FB continually updates the phrases, but good enough for me). I also hid a lot of the junk on the sidebar with the element picker. I have no interest in using FB as a platform for buying and selling and the "News Ticker" (if you can call it "News") is just tabloid garbage. I have 4 posts in the past day before I get the "There are no more posts to show right now" message.

[https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png](https://i.imgur.com/AbBnPo3.png)

<comment><USER24> Thanks, I might use some of those to tweak my newsfeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent? They don't make it easy, and I don't think you can default to it, but I just point all my bookmarks to [https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr](https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr)

Still though, Facebook could be so much better. The problem is that a profit- driven social media site is always going to have different goals than its users. Free ones seem to never gain traction. Currently, most of my friend groups are switching to Discord, but that's basically just going back to IRC without having to understand NickServ and such.

As many others have pointed out though, Facebook got bland when everyone's parents joined. Private groups somewhat help, but it really does need to be more directly baked in to the design. It's far too late for that now, but I dream one day someone will finally make the Facebook killer. Until then, I use Facebook, because it benefits me more than not using it. Shallow interaction, peoples kids, etc? That can easily be fixed. For me, the boost in mood I get from reconnecting to old friends makes it worth all the pain. I was a hold out too, and didn't join until ~5 years ago?

I think the problem is it's almost a utility at this point. Most everyone I know (non-techy crowd) is on it. If you aren't, you truly do miss out, which sucks. But do you know anyone who doesn't work, or want to work at Facebook who would say "I love Facebook!" Tweak all you want, but it's too much a behemoth to love.

<comment><USER26> _Am I the only one who views Facebook by Most Recent?_

Do you think most recent really is everything in reverse chronological order, or just a slightly different algorithm?

<comment><USER25> Naively, yes, yes I did. Dammit Facebook. There's a reason why I changed the settings. I figured it was like browsing the new queue here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter usage are all down.

People are just spending less time on social media apps for some reasons these days.

[https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media- usage](https://www.similarweb.com/blog/social-media-usage)

<comment><USER28> That is interesting. Too much noise , too much distraction?

<comment><USER29> It's a cesspool, imo. My Facebook is overwhelmed by extremely ugly political obnoxiousness these days, which makes it almost worthless (I'd have to hide 3/4 of the conversations/posts by friends). Between that and the junk content and general corporate spam, maybe 3-5% of what I've seen on FB in the last year has been legitimately valuable social content. The majority of people I know _hate_ Facebook as a product now. They don't just not want to use it, they hate it. Facebook knows what their product has become, it's so bad now they stopped trying to pretend otherwise. They're basically facing their Microsoft Internet tsunami moment, they either quickly adapt or fade from here. If they fade, what will happen is a dozen new social competitors will spring up and begin stripping fringe corners off the core FB network, amounting to tens of millions of users in eg North America. It'll simply break up at the edges, and retain a large foundational user base that will be a lot less engaged.

<comment><USER30> I've been thinking about how much I hate Facebook as a product. I think the idea might not be wrong and centralization of trust might not be a horrible idea. Implementation is important. There just needs a GNU or Wikipedia of Facebook to exist. A place that has a great code of conduct and not-for-profit agenda.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Main problem is that Facebook is too public in that most friends are actually acquaintances. People are less likely to share intimate updates with acquaintances and instead will only post generic neutral, non-controversial things which dont't drive deep engagement.

<comment><USER32> basically. guess thats what the whole g+ circles thing was, and im sure fb can do too now, but if i have to spend basically any effort thinking about who's going to see it I'm just not gonna post. (or worry about who won't see it because of the black-box algorithm)

I'm prob not the target market anyway, as im paranoid and social media and human interaction in general is strange and frightening to me, but that's a major part of the reason i never post anything.

<comment><USER33> IMO Google+ circles were a step in the right direction, but Google shot themselves in the foot with their "one real-name account to rule them all" bullshit.

People don't just want to separate their "lists of other people", people also _act a different role_ in different contexts.

In other words, humans want to maintain _different identities_ too. That doesn't always mean pseudonyms, but the single human behind "Bob from the Accounting Department" probably wants to use a completely different set of contact-information and profile-pictures when he's in the role of "Bob, Death Metal Biker" or "Bob, Single Parent Looking For Love."

<comment><USER30> When Google forced the real name bullshit on Youtube and Places reviews, I knew I had it enough. I just wanted to leave a stupid, lighthearted comment on a video talking about a socially taboo topic, and I can't. I just wanted to leave an honest negative review on a business that fucked me over, and I can't.

biker139 is different than John M Businessman. I don't want people reading that review to know I'm John.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Surely this has something to do with the sheer number of users they have, right? There's only like 8 billion people on Earth and Facebook has 2 billion monthly active users. If you take away 1.5 billion people in China who can't/don't use Facebook, this means that it has 2 billion out of like ~6.5 billion possible users. And many of those people are either children (<13 years old), don't have reliable access to internet, and/or have no use for social media. So it really doesn't seem _that_ bad to me (unless I'm missing something important).

<comment><USER22> I have a company page/account where I daily automatically post updates. I guess that counts into this number.

<comment><USER35> Pages are not counted as a user in their DAU counts.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but there is a user who is the admin for the page. This "admin" is entirely a bot.

<comment><USER35> You have a bot that logs in as a regular user? I'd be surprised if that is common, there are APIs for automation that wouldn't count against DAU. And you would run the risk of getting your admin account blocked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Who and why uses Facebook today anyway? All my friends use messenger apps like WhatsApp or Telegram to communicate to people they know in real life, sites like Reddit and HN to communicate to random crowd sharing their interests and Instagram to share pictures they take. I personally feel like Facebook is a concept fading into the past.

UPDATE: The only thing I used to use Facebook for a couple of years ago when I had more spare time was finding events to attend for fun. Does anybody know a good alternative? There probably is a special app just for this. Another useful feature of Facebook seems to be the groups directory: there are groups in WhatsApp and Telegram but they are harder to find - isn't there a project building a directory of them already?

<comment><USER9> I wonder what will happen to the Facebook the company as this progresses. It would be quite funny if the main product of Facebook becomes Instagram -- and the original product fades.

One thing we might be discounting though is other nations. (I assume you live in N.A.) I don't know how widespread Facebook is elsewhere. It could be that Facebook gives up on N.A. market and let Insta handles their interest there and focus itself on emerging markets.

<comment><USER36> A probable role Facebook may take in future is providing digital "passport" kind of identity. The Chinese Facebook clone is doing it already and the Russian Facebook clone does too though in much smaller degree.

I live in Europe, not N.A. We use messengers a lot here and many people still use Facebook. I've heard that people use SMS and MMS much more actively in the USA (I have never used MMS and have stopped using SMS years ago).

<comment><USER37> That's what we call "texting", but very often texting isn't done using SMS. With the iOS market share hovering slightly below 50% in the US, it's iMessage that is the main messenger, at least where I live. The iOS Messages app seamlessly switches over to SMS when the receiver doesn't have iMessage - <USER2> shows a visual distinction - but in my case, that's a minority of the people I text with.

I don't use Whatsapp nor was I ever invited by someone to use it, but I heard it's basically the iMessage equivalent in the EU and in other places where the iOS market share is lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My preference would be to never see anything, ever, that was shared more than say 50 times. As soon as something is "viral" It's usually just a timekill. It's not relevant to me.

So a simple tweak to the news feed would be to just stop showing me what my friends "like" or "re-share". Just show me what they say, or post or show directly. That's it.

For a really dramatic change: remove the ability to pass on content alltogether.

<comment><USER39> This is what I want from a service like facebook - posts my friends, groups, and pages explicitly post, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, and nothing else. No "John commented on this" or "Melanie liked that". No algorithms. No out-of-order, unless I ask for it.

(If 10 friends all reshare the same post, sure, collapse it into one.)

But, of course, if they do that, they make it too easy for people to see posts they want without pages they follow paying for ads. So they put in an "algorithm" and say they're "making the news feed more personal".

<comment><USER40> If your content stream includes every post your friends make, every comment they add, every post they like, every event they're interested in or join in on and it was sorted chronologically then you would never be able to scroll past the immediate present. It would just constantly generate new content as quickly as you can scroll.

I'm glad they sort by relevance and time is just one small factor in relevance.

<comment><USER41> True, but what are the other relevance factors? It's a black box, and basically ends up being "whatever Facebook deems to be the most profitable content to show you".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I am effectively banned from facebook.

I was on the platform a few years ago, but deleted my account and didn't miss it at all. Then, a couple months ago, I became interested in a new Chinese amateur radio transceiver, and the best source of English information was through a Facebook group of a couple hundred owners. So naturally, I joined facebook, joined the group, and had several weeks of a _really_ enjoyable experience. I didn't add any friends or pictures or anything like that; I had no interest in _really using_ Facebook with people I knew in real life, and as a result my newsfeed was an endless list of really great discussions about amateur satellites, straight key century club, Xiegu transceivers, etc. I think what set it apart from something like Reddit is the civility that comes when you make hams post with their real name.

Then, all of a sudden, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I was actually forced to _upload an image of my face_ to get back into the site. This was a sort of funny thing to ask, because I didn't have any images of myself on the site up to that point-- so how are they supposed to know what I look like, anyway? (I'm being sarcastic here, I'm sure that Facebook has my face profiled in their databases somewhere.) So I uploaded my photo, a handful of days went by, and then I was allowed back in, and again started using Facebook as an awesome discussion platform full of meaningful interactions with people that shared a common interest with me.

A couple weeks go by, and yet again, "You Can't Log In Right Now". I upload my face again, but this time I've never been unbanned. I think it's been this way for over a month now. I still get email notifications with subject lines like, "See what people are talking about in your group AMSAT North America", but when I click "Read Post", I'm not able to view the content. (I also can't unsubscribe from the emails, as editing email settings is hidden behind a login prompt, which I am obviously not able to get through. I also can't file a bug report about the lack of ability to unsubscribe... because that, too, is hidden behind a login prompt.)

It's just so incredibly ironic that as soon as I started using facebook for content I was interested in, instead of seeing political posts from people I went to middle school with, I get permabanned on suspicion of being a fake account.

<comment><USER43> Geeze. For some reason I never bothered to make a Facebook account, and as time went by I bothered even less so this might be less shocking to the seasoned, but to me that sounds absolutely horrendous.

What legitimate reason (in my interest) would Facebook have in me uploading a picture? It's not a transaction where I need to prove identity. They aren't a government issuing ID's (yet). So no fucking way! And why would anyone? I don't get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a chance before the U.S mid-terms for them to prove to the public they've learned from their mistakes..

1). prevent the spread of fake news.. they need a better solution than the user-tagging bs if an article is valid or not. there was a scientologist that had an account that wasn't active for 5+ years, that started posting how puerto rico wasn't that bad when the storm first hit. why is this account not being banned or suspended when people are reporting it and they're reposting pictures from texas claiming it to be all good.

2). prevent outside interference with elections. the first baby step is if they're accepting rubles for political ads targetted at americans, ban it. simple as that. then it'll get more complex and interesting handling proxies doing the dirty deed. the hearing w/ congress was pathetic and makes fb even more untrustworthy.

3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.

even though pretty much everyone i know is on facebook, i'm itching for another platform with better integrity to jump ship to.

<comment><USER45> > 3). ban fake accounts / tie in a real human behind the account. 100000 fake > users means a lot less to me if i'm an advertiser than 10 real people.

so i posted this in another thread in response to twitter, and it got kind of drowned out but with regards to authoritative/oppressive governments subpoenaing facebook to get a user's identity for voicing an opinion that isn't in line with the regime's. how do you solve this while giving every account an identity? anonymity on facebook/twitter seems to be one way to practice freedom of speech in countries where there isn't really any

<comment><USER46> In German there's a term called Eierlegende wollmilchsau. A wool pig that gives milk and lays eggs.

A reason that term exists is because there's a tendency for Germans to wait to commit to, or outright dismiss choices because they do not meet ALL of a list of requirements.

I bring it up because I do not believe that it is possible to have an identity and anonymity concurrently while the service achieves all of its goals.

Either the service caters to anonymity, or it caters to identity. Trying to sit on the fence too long results in more specialized services dividing the customer base.

<comment><USER45> i don't disagree. but what's more important? personally i'd vote on people being able to be heard. however, those messages are diluted or hidden if massive amounts of bots are spamming something else

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I don't think anyone really cares about societal impact. IMO, Facebook is a faddish activity that many people have turned into a defacto obligation.

People are getting Facebook fatigue. In my social circle, Facebook use seems to have switched to Instagram.

Personally, I check on it once a week now to keep up with a few friends who I don't see anymore. It's an effort, because Facebook refuses to show me what I want to see, and I need to specifically search for people.

<comment><USER48> I'm seeing some of that Instagram move as well. Having a service that's more about what's happening in people's lives is better than the mess that's facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> From the analyst covering "They've warned about a decline in one of the basic fundamental financial drivers." which was "changes in the fourth quarter that cut the number of viral videos in people's news feeds. Those tweaks, and others, have already reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day, he noted."

I am going to assume that FB is smart enough to have figured out how to trim the 50m hour engagement # from an ad cohort that is likely not that profitable or important.

Because guess what - the brand advertisers that elevate overall CPM already don't want to be in your shitty viral cat video, or your stupid publishers- gaming-FB with autogenerated content.

I would go a step further and predict that within this quarter we see an internal FB study for advertisers suggesting that their algorithm that trimmed that 50m in hours has actually IMPROVED the value of the advertising by a commiserate level.

<comment><USER50> Well the average price per Facebook ad rose 43% in Q4 2017 (and only 3% in Q4 2016): [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock- to...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-earnings-stock-touches- record-after-massive-ad-price-increase-2018-01-31)

That increase more than offsets the decline in the amount of time users spent on Facebook. So it looks like the value of advertising has improved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Respect for journalism is as much about avoiding headlines like this that sneakily imply some sort of baseless causation via - in this case - the word "After" as it is about bad science in Fox News coverage of global warming.

When we let poor journalism like this headline go uncontested we erode public trust.

<comment><USER52> Headlines are why I rarely read online news articles anymore, and typically just view the comment sections, either here on HN, or Slashdot, etc. It never used to be this bad. One would think that with public trust in the media at an all time low, they would make an effort to be less sneaky and clickbaity, at the very least with their headlines, but....... nope.

<comment><USER53> > public trust in the media at an all time low

Is that a fact or opinion? Likely they're seeing ad-revenue increasing with the clickbait titles, giving them a data-driven reason to pursue this (short- sighted) strategy. Long-term, they may lose their readership once they catch on.

<comment><USER52> Looks like it hit the absolute bottom in 2016 [0], with a slight uptick in 2017 according to some [1][2], but still, overall, according to various studies it's been at an all-time low during these last couple of years.

[0] [http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass- medi...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks- new-low.aspx)

[1] [https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study- exam...](https://www.poynter.org/news/poynter-releases-new-study-examining- trust-media)

[2] [https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more- trus...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40503393/americans-are-more-trusting-of- the-media-in-2017-but-theres-a-catch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The only people I know that still use Facebook are people over 50 years old, and to them it is crack cocaine that consumes their whole life. I think not growing up with things like this their whole life, they have been ill prepared for it when it breaches their world.

<comment><USER55> That pretty much sums it up for me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It seems like nobody at Facebook is allowed to play the long game.

In the long game, quality wins. In the long game, an organization that puts quality of information at top priority persists and becomes a long-lived resource for civilization.

Like Google has become a persistent Web search resource, setting aside its short-lived ancillary forays into more clickable, trivial services.

So long as Facebook prioritizes viral clickbait, so long will it be in danger of collapse, irrelevance, and extinction. That's ok with me.

<comment><USER57> Identifying "quality" content algorithmically seems like a hard problem to me. If Facebook wanted to play the long game by promoting high quality content in the feed, how would you propose they identify it in order to promote it?

<comment><USER56> Your question is excellent and gets to the heart of the matter.

How could Facebook, in a neutral way, cull crap and promote quality?

I wish I had robust answers. All I have at the moment is opinions.

• Algorithmic methods can't deliver near term solutions. Algorithms embody the biases of their human coders. I doubt we currently know how to algorithmically evaluate inputs for quality in the Facebook or "fake news" context. We need more time and effort to learn how to do this.

• Promoting quality currently requires humans, who are expensive. If Facebook really prioritizes feed quality, we'll see serious hiring. If we don't, then evidence of commitment is lacking.

• I believe (no proof to offer, mainly intuition) quality can eventually be algorithmically determined, but it's a hard problem. It will take years, lots of smart people and $ to figure out how to make it work at scale.

• I don't think Facebook's announced path, which is to solicit those who are arguably more susceptible to "fake news" to be arbitrators of quality, will succeed.

Facebook, like others, is caught between maximizing 90 day quarterly profits and becoming a persistent human resource. I don't envy Zuckerberg at all. I hope he can do the right thing.

We'll see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I feel they have crossed several lines in their constant push for engagement, to the point where, previously, a notification from Facebook was generally worth my time (and directly related to an action a friend has taken), whereas now, most of the notifications are irrelevant, effectively short term boosting engagement at the cost of mid/long term engagement drop. I have flat out disabled notifications from Facebook at this point.

<comment><USER59> I deleted the Facebook app on my phone a few months ago and only use it for messenger. My life has been improved so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I think with all the high profile hyperpoliticization of who and what gets into the Facebook feed of the average person, the idea that Facebook is a private space where friends create their own private worlds together has been destroyed. Now it's just another public space like Twitter and that essentially makes people not want to post personal stuff on it. This has also led to the opening in the market that Snapchat filled and a bit of a revival of twitter.

<comment><USER55> Yes, like Twitter, but the late night infomercials version of Twitter where some guy is trying to sell you miracle tanning cream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if the cause really is the news feed. What if it was the first decline ever and then they made some quick algorithm changes.

Then they went public with it, before releasing the numbers

<comment><USER62> This is the most likely explanation.

<comment><USER63> Based on what?

<comment><USER62> Engagement numbers are averaged across Q4 2017, I assume. Zuck announced the news feed algorithm changes in mid-January 2018. Now, they were likely A/B testing it for part of the past quarter, but it seems quite likely that these changes were not 100% live for all of North America for the entirety of the past quarter.

Therefore, speculatively, engagement in Q4 was likely flat or declining across NA already. What is more uncertain is the order of operations here. Did they publicly announce these changes in advance of the earnings report to get ahead of bad numbers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The title makes it seem like the growth slowed after the questions on societal impact were raised. I think the growth stalled years ago and has been declining even before the questions were raised.

<comment><USER65> If that was the case, FB has been lying on every single earnings release since they went public, which seems unlikely.

<comment><USER66> > seems unlikely

I can't imagine why anyone would lie when they stand to make billions of dollars from it. What an odd idea.

That aside, there is a gray area between lies and not really digging into truths that you don't want to know the answer to, like how many of your accounts are actually fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe it's slowing because they hit over 1.4B people? I doubt people are concerned about societal impact, regardless of what the media would love you to believe.

</comment><comment><USER67> As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing.

The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.

That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

</comment><comment><USER68> Since the newsfeed changes I noticed that I spent a bit more time on my FB feed. Normally I would see one of those idiotic posts, and wonder WTF was I doing on the site. Now I actually see stuff from friends (pics and stories), and I linger a bit more to see what's going on. Clearly I'm not the real FB demographic though.

<comment><USER69> I'm with you. I _love_ the changes they did to the newsfeed, because now I'm seeing way less viral shit, and way more actual interesting posts and updates by my friends. And since everyone gets the same interesting content promoted to them, there's also more comments on that content, making it better.

Love it, love it, love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Hope Google shares latest YouTube hours tomorrow and we can compare. Last quarter Google shared

"As I mentioned in the last earnings call, YouTube now has over 1.5 billion users. On average, these users spend 60 minutes a day on mobile. "

Which I guess means 1.5 billion hours a day of YT use daily. Be interesting to compare to FB.

</comment><comment><USER71> I would shorten this to 'Facebook User Growth Slows'

</comment><comment><USER72> Instead of Facebook flailing about trying to come up with the best news feed algorithm to please everyone they should just give the consumer a choice. Imagine an "algorithm store" that lets developers build and publish ranking algorithms that users can buy and use.

<comment><USER73> That's won't happen. The mistake you're making is assuming that Facebook wants to "please everyone." It doesn't. It only cares about pleasing itself, and it does that through manipulating the algorithm to attempt to get its users to do what it wants.

Giving up control of the algorithm means giving up control of its user- products, and it's not going to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I wonder if we as humans at some future point would evolve to understand and consume only sane and specialized content based on lessons of Facebook? History and behavioral psychology tells us people don't learn from the past just because they simply can't recall it.

BUT perhaps what might work, and only hope, is a spectacular fall of this kind of interaction model(and the business) so that no one touches it with a 10 ft pole for some time. Like the terrible Nazi stuff of WWII.

Hopes of healthy competition in the industry and the democratization of quality content in a way that precludes brand loyalty, will probably never happen as long as Facebook lives. It will just acquire and buy its way to monopolize everything.

</comment><comment><USER50> From the article: "Yes, the time spent on Facebook in the quarter declined by 5 percent, but it was by Facebook's design, executives said, in order to promote a higher quality experience. Yes, there was a dip in North American user numbers for the first time ever, but only because Facebook is already so dominant in the region."

Can someone explain why a 'higher quality experience' didn't lead to more active monthly users in North America? I would have thought there were people who hadn't checked out Facebook for a few months, but now start using it more regularly.

</comment><comment><USER75> Good.

The less people use Facebook, the better and healthier society becomes.

</comment><comment><USER76> I think both time on site and engagement are narrow metrics to judge a site's usefulness and effectiveness.

Reduced engagement on Facebook is probably a good thing for society, but it could arguably mean it's also achieving it's goals as a social platform more succinctly.

As an advert stream of course, that's bad. But I suspect an amount of truth in Zuckerberg's somewhat altruistic new vision.

</comment><comment><USER77> > " _We made changes to show fewer viral videos to make sure people 's time is > well spent. In total, we made changes that reduced time spent on Facebook by > roughly 50 million hours every day._"

Weren't the changes to the news feed just announced? This sounds like spin. They planned all along for people to stop using our service. Right.

</comment><comment><USER78> 1- charge advertisers more, for less. Pay to get back what you had.

2- sink the fb fangs deeper into users by promoting 'engagement' content i.e. stuff with better hooks.

3- market the increase in time spend on site, Q418 to the very advertisers.

Brand cryptonite. He holds the poison and the medicine. Depending on public sentiment they dish out the doses of each accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER79> It feels like Facebook started out as Geocities and has ended up as your cranky aunts forwarded chain e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER80> Okay, that ship is sinking. Time to burn it; Facebook has long outlived the usual online social network lifetime. What's the next one we jump to this time?

[http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240](http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=3240)

</comment><comment><USER81> > Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that those changes have already reduced time > spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours a day.

Or, to put this another way, people have saved 50 million hours that they formerly spent scrolling past stupid videos and memes they'd already seen on Reddit.

</comment><comment><USER82> It feels like they want to move towards being more "useful", a la WeChat:

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from- wechat/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/)

</comment><comment><USER83> There are like 3 of my friends who I like and want to hear things from, but they post about 10x per day. Facebook has decided that because of this volume ALL I WANT TO SEE IS THESE 3 FRIENDS' POSTS. It's irritating. I wish I could fall back on Twitter to show me everything, but now between "tweets you may have missed" and randomly showing me posts (4 or 5 times) that other people have liked, it's feeling more and more like Facebook, just with different people.

</comment><comment><USER84> Encourage more personal photos. And ban links from Newsfeed. It's really that simple.

</comment><comment><USER85> The stock has already recovered and is above $190 now (up 3.6% vs. close).

<comment><USER16> Will probably hit $200 tomorrow

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why is this article so certain this related to fake news correction?

</comment><comment><USER86> when you already have a large percentage of the online user base you are going to have to 1) wait for that underlying user base to grow 2) offer something new to capture people you dont have with your current product

They have reached the point where its a lot easier to lose someone then gain someone. I dont think its societal impact ... its people getting older and dropping off while at the same time its really hard to replenish that use base when already have so many of the young people already on your site.

So maybe they need to understand user rentention vs aging , I think that would be a place to look, societal impact ... no one uses or drops a product becuase of societal impact.

How many diamonds and how many electronics or clothes do we use that have a dubious labor practices. Its the product quality that speaks loudest.

</comment><comment><USER87> What could they possibly be doing with 25,000 staff? That is insane.

<comment><USER88> Building the thing called Facebook, to be sure, but also building Oculus VR, Onavo (data collection company), WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, as well as their open source stuff like React, Flux, Relay, and myriad other JS/Haskell/OCaml/C++ projects, and don't forget the people building out Internet.org and content for Facebook Watch.</comment></comment>


Facebook could kill Google by 2012 says Analyst - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-facebook-could-kill-google-analyst-2009-3

<comment><USER2> "Ross Sandler of RBC has done what every good analyst should do, which is say something interesting." What he has not done well, however, is analyze his data contextually. Just because Google and Facebook are both popular web sites does not mean that they're in a competitive relationship.

</comment><comment><USER3> I do not go facebook to look for coding samples or help with code errors.

Likewise I do not make friends on Google, but I do google for long lost friends.

And for facebook to kill Google? How do you kill one that have no life?

</comment><comment><USER4> I never met anyone who said "I want to be an analyst when I go up". Let's face it: forecasting one quarter ahead is already hard. Predicting where we will be in 3 years is _voodoo_ magic. This article looks like linkbait to me. Just my 0.02 USD.</comment>


Ruby vs Python  - <AUTHOR> http://www.senktec.com/2013/06/ruby-vs-python/ <comment><USER2> A quote: "Often one the most debated, but I think largely irrelevant issues, is the significance of whitespace."

I think it's pretty relevant. I use Python and prefer it to Ruby, but I think the presence of syntactic whitespace is a mistake. For one thing, it prevents a scanner from performing a consistency check against a source file that may have been corrupted or edited by someone unaware of the whitespace issue.

For another, a source file that mixes spaces and tabs can be a nightmare to sort out, once a person evolves to the point that they realize tabs are evil and resolves to do something about it.

Finally, there is the readability/editability issue caused by syntactic whitespace. In a complex code block, the indentation of various parts of the block ends up defining the algorithm, not always in ways the programmer intended, and an inadvertent whitespace insertion or deletion changes the program's meaning.

The whitespace idea was originally well-intentioned -- it was meant to reduce a programmer's effort level when Python was a tiny fraction of its present size and importance, when no one expected to be writing large, complex programs in Python. Now, in my opinion, it's the elephant in the room.

<comment><USER3> I hate syntax arguments when semantics is so much more important, but your arguments are interesting. I'm both a Python and Ruby developer, and I generally do not prefer one over another. Much like web frameworks, I use the language most appropriate for the task at hand.

What syntax boils down to is the programmer. For example, how can you check for consistency in this code -

def thisfunction(foo, bar): { foo.boing()} { for i in bar.fizzle(foo): { { baz = i __2 } foo.wibble(baz) return foo, baz } }

How would a scanner determine the bracket issue?

Honestly, I am not a fan of invisible syntax, but for a seasoned programmer it saves me time coding because I don't have to enter whitespace and a closing bracket or a end space, etc.

<comment><USER2> > ... for a seasoned programmer it saves me time coding because I don't have > to enter whitespace and a closing bracket or a end space, etc.

Yep, I agree. When I'm coding something new, intent on getting something working as soon as possible, I appreciate the fact that it saves typing. Later on, when I'm trying to maintain, debug or expand old code, different story.</comment></comment></comment>


Simon Ramo Dies at 103; Helped Develop ICBMs in the Cold War - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/business/simon-ramo-dies-at-103-helped-develop-icbms-in-the-cold-war.html <comment><USER2> Only the good die young.</comment>


Redundant Array of Flaky Connections - <AUTHOR> http://www.sumologic.com/blog/technology/rafc-internet-connectivity-for-the-cloud-age <comment><USER2> I could use a RAFC right now for cell-based internet here in Russia. There are 4 providers for wireless internet (3 UMTS and one CDMA450) and none of the three UMTS work reliably. Haven't tested the last one yet.

<comment><USER3> Looks like the peplink guys (cited in the article) have just the thing for you:

<http://www.peplink.com/max-mobile-router/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _we have connection outages almost daily_

Seriously? Is this considered acceptable for residential ISPs in California? Here I'd find one outage every month to be unacceptable, much less daily ones!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, for consumer level ISPs in California, sadly, this is a reality. I've used Comcast, AT&T U-Verse, sonic.net, Speakeasy, etc over the years, and they all had outages.

Amongst the better ones were Speakeasy and sonic.net. Comcast is amongst the worst. Especially here on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, which is basically littered with tech startups, things are pretty bad.

<comment><USER6> Huh, that's odd. I live in Sunnyvale and have had very little trouble with Comcast connectivity for most of the last several years. There was one period of time when I was seeing frequent (> daily) connection loss, but that was cured by a cable modem upgrade.

<comment><USER5> Let me add some nuance here: We have the "business" offering from Comcast. It was the only offering that had 100MBit/s when we signed up. With the "business" offering, you are forced to use the "business" modem.

The modem is made by SMC. It is a full firewall/gateway. Unfortunately, the software on it is not very stable. For about 4-5 months, we worked with Comcast customer support to resolve this. They tried many different things to fix the issue, without success. My conclusion was that the software on the SMC modem just crashes once a day or so, and then hangs.

Eventually, I convinced them to let us use the "simple" residential Motorola modem. That has worked much better. It still crashes every 1-2 weeks, but that's almost acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One advantage not mentioned here is when you need to perform maintenance. Being able to take any single device offline without affecting the service means that you can perform software upgrades or hardware replacements with more flexibility (and often within working hours)

</comment><comment><USER8> The biggest problem with this is the difference in ToS between consumer grade and business grade connections. If you try to use a consumer comcast cable connection for business you may run into things like bandwidth caps, filtered ports, etc.

<comment><USER9> You should definitely get business service if you're going to do this; it's not that much more expensive.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and that's actually what they did here, even though they label them "consumer grade" connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks great for client-side connections!

I wonder to what degree this is a solution for office-based servers. How would DNS failover be handled?

<comment><USER5> Even though we don't run any office-based servers at Sumo Logic, the recommended way is to make the Peplink a DNS server. It will then serve the IP of the currently active link...

They also just sent me this in an email:

"Our revolutionary SpeedFusion technology is now available. Adding a wealth of innovations that take Peplink/Pepwave gear to the next level, SpeedFusion provides Balance users a cost-effective, high-bandwidth, and reliable alternative to using expensive MPLS connections in their branch VPNs, while SpeedFusion 4G/3G Bonding gives MAX users the ultimate in speedy and dependable networking on the road. Blazing fast, secure, and easy to manage, SpeedFusion is part of Firmware 5.4, so download this new release and become part of the SpeedFusion revolution today."

<http://www.peplink.com/speedfusion>

<comment><USER10> Looks great and thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We do basically the same thing at our office, though with IOS Event Manager foo sprinkled in. It works great.

</comment><comment> excuse-me 1, "Set up multiple consumer grade internet connections."

2, Discover that all of them are just reselling the same service provider's product and they all go to the same cable in the same junction box under the street.

Even with totally independent enterprise grade 'N'-9s uptime guarantees we discovered they are in the same trench under the road outside our site. A lot of major data centers have discovered that it only takes a single idiot with a backhoe.

<comment><USER12> I assume that's why they got both cable and DSL, although depending on how things work out they might still run in the same trench.

<comment><USER5> Trench? Wishful thinking in California. :) There's a big telephone pole behind our building, and both the cable and phone lines run from the building to the pole...

This setup is by no means good enough to run any mission critical services off of. It is, however, a big improvement over a single business line to keep a group of 30-40 people reliably connected to the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We helped a client of ours setup something akin to this, to work around their (essentially unfixable) Internet situation.

We rolled our solution using OpenBSD/pf/carp/pfsync due to client expertise and comfort with BSD. It works well enough that outages on their lines have shown up only as nagios alerts, not actual outages, even through many years of service.</comment>


Hackers gonna hate - <AUTHOR> http://nickchaves.com/post/hackers-gonna-hate <comment><USER3> Either the author does not know the meaning of the word "Luddite", or is making presumptions on what people value in technology.

Kyle Wiens was clear: Apple was experimenting with two divergent strategies - small, portable and inflexible vs larger, modifiable and upgradeable. Neither is _anti-_ technology or _anti-_ progress, they're just different paths.

Instead, Nick first _assumes_ that the first option represents progress and draws his inference from there. This allows him to look down his nose at Kyle's clearly superior knowledge of Apple's product history and strategy.

Of course, this is ass-backward.

EDIT: --

Well there you go. John Gruber, who snarkily wrote off Kyles well written analysis as a whine, has linked back to Nicks _categorical imperative_.

I'm sorry, but that is the worst sort of circle jerk.

<comment><USER4> When he says "Do we imagine that such progress is achieved through the kind of Luddite thinking that leads people to value "hackability" over never-before- achieved levels of precision and portability?" he pretty much proves that he does not understand either the word Luddite or it's origins. Essentially Ned Ludd was rebelling over looms that had been 'hacked' with the technology of the day. A complete contradiction to what the author said.

<comment><USER3> And let's be honest, referencing _Avatar_ , _Minority Report_ and _moral philosophy_ (!) raise a few red flags about the quality of the argument too :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This conversation is ludicrous. All I want is ram that isn't soldered in so I can upgrade it at a later date. If this takes me out of the Apple's target demographic (which I most certainly believe it does) then so be it.

<comment><USER6> This.

There are two components in modern computers that are experiencing Moore's Law-style rapid improvement: RAM and SSD. Whatever you buy now is going to be obsolete (or half the price) in two years.

This means that I either have to overspend for bleeding-edge RAM capacity now, or replace the whole machine later. Neither are attractive options - especially with Apple's large built-in margin on upgrades.

<comment><USER7> > Moore's Law: RAM and SSD

Not true with RAM, at least for capacity!

My late-2008 MacBook Pro has been upgraded to 8GB of RAM, which is the maximum available for all current MacBook Pros except the new Retina edition (16GB). Just barely doubling in 4 years ≠ doubling every ~2 years.

Likewise, SSDs are not doubling in meaningful specs every two years, either.

<comment><USER6> Apple seems a bit behind here; you have been able to get 16GB notebooks from other vendors for quite a while now.

Still, the _price_ of that 8G has dropped pretty dramatically over the last 2 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think iFixit provided a useful commentary on how the new Apple products are made. If people still buy them after knowing they're not as expandable, serviceable and recyclable as they used to be then at least they knew what they were getting.

My biggest issues were the lack of a socket for RAM and the use of glue to bond the glass and aluminum.

As a side note, I have. PowerBook Wallstreet G3, a five year-old Compaq and a nine year-old Dell that are all still functional and in good shape. The Powerbook and the Compaq both have over 100k miles of travel on them and I'm convinced the biggest factor determining longevity of a laptop is the owner.

It's true that your batteries are somewhat beyond your control and there are some models with known issues (e.g. hinge problems), but how can I only person that's never had a laptop just up and die on them. I've also have had five or six other laptops assigned to me by the companies I've worked for over the last 15 years and I've generally turned them in to be upgraded (processor and RAM limitations).

<comment><USER9> Did your laptop make a daily commute to work in a bag? Did you walk or drive?

<comment><USER8> Yes, it made a daily commute in a well-padded backpack. I drove in the winter and rode my bicycle when the weather was suitable. It also flew across the country at least once per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two years _is_ a short life span. My 2001 ThinkPad is under-powered, but now used by a four-year-old who otherwise wouldn't have access to a computer.

Two year product life cycles are incredibly brief for people who aren't circuit-heads like us.

<comment><USER11> define "life span"? a laptop only "used by four-year-old" is pretty dead laptop. can it fully replace your every-day development/whatever machine?

<comment><USER12> The laptop he's talking about is from 2001. It's 11 years old. Of course it can't replace a modern dev machine! However, it still works as a machine and a 4 year old child is using it as an introductory machine. That doesn't sound like dead laptop; it sounds like one that has exceeded expectations and continues to work in a limited capacity (like a Mars rover!).

<comment><USER11> technology progresses fast, more than that - it progresses faster than it progressed 2, 5, 10 years ago. getting newer laptop is not a linear jump in benefits you could get with upgrades so from consumer point of view getting shorter life span is logical.

also less repairable/upgradable device is often more solid and reliable.

dropped repairability is just a tradeoff between delivering more "awesome" device and delivering longer-lasting device - no wonder apple has taken the path it did.

p.s. no-one forces you to throw away laptop you own just because new version was released. in fact most macbook owners will just sell current devices and in 10 years time it might still end up in hands of 4 year old

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Absolutely disingenuous and/or dickish to call the preference for maintainability/extensibility/hackability/repairability "Luddite." Not to mention, throwaway culture is short-term anti-environment thinking.

</comment><comment><USER13> >> Do we imagine that such progress is achieved through the kind of Luddite thinking that leads people to value "hackability" over never-before-achieved levels of precision and portability?

I don't think that's precisely fair. I'm not exactly a fan of King Ludd - <USER2> like machines a lot, I like taking them apart and putting them back together and doing cool things with them. For this reason, though I think they're really neat, and I've even thought about it just because they're so cool, I don't think I'll ever buy a Macbook.

Even so, I am not foolish enough to believe everyone is just like me on this count. I've even recommended Macbooks to at least three friends, helping them purchase and set them up, not that anybody needs much help with such intuitive machines. They're just not for me, and I know why - because I'd like to be able to disassemble them, and at the very least I'd like to be able to add or replace my own RAM.

Does that really make me a Luddite?

<comment><USER14> No, it makes the author a moron that wants to jump on a bandwagon to get a few pageviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the dichotomy here between PCs and Macs is harmful to the discussion. I don't think of Apple as a bad guy here any more than Microsoft, whose UEFI secure boot is just as hack-unfriendly. The point remains that there is value in being able to fix your own devices.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love that inserting a sim correctly is somehow a "hack". I've literally talked my then 75 year old grandmother through reseating memory over the phone.

If anything, the closed nature of the hardware is going to make actually fixing things a lot more valuable.

<comment><USER17> This too, if we've degraded the options for "Hackability" to upgrading the components, then we may as well just say that the machine isn't hackable. (If the capability was designed to be there and is used for it's intended purpose then it doesn't qualify as a hack; period.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _"When we look at futuristic computing devices in movies such as Minority Report or Avatar, do we think 'Neat, but those definitely don't look upgradeable. No thanks.'"_

When did "movie coolness" become a legitimate metric (let alone an important metric) to gauge the value of technology?

 _"devices that are more about the human interface and less about the components is a form of a categorical imperative"_

If you are going to toss around weighty philosophical terms like "categorical imperative" I think it is important that you do not beg the question in the process. The author assumes that "hackability" is not a component of the human interface? In my opinion the human interface includes a discussion of user serviceable/upgradeable hardware. It is certainly not the most important aspect but of the human interface but it is on the list.

I also think it is a little curious that the author does not mention what brand of PCs he bought. If I had to guess I would say that the omission was because it was hardly an apples to apples comparison. All of my thinkpads have lasted a lot longer than two years...

PS

If we are going to talk about human interfaces lets drop the CSS floating vignette/border/frame thingy...

</comment><comment><USER19> I think laptops are becoming like smartphones in their design. After two or three years of use and when they break, you go out and buy a new one. It is much cheaper (opportunity cost speaking) for the user to get a new faster computer and the company to sell out new model than having companies pour a significant amount of time and money to have repairable components.

</comment><comment><USER20> _Do we imagine that such progress is achieved through the kind of Luddite thinking that leads people to value "hackability" over never-before-achieved levels of precision and portability?_

OK, that makes no sense whatsoever. I don't think the OP really knows what he's talking about on this bit. "Luddite thinking" is what leads to a desire for upgradability and hackability? Really? WTF?

If anything, it's _exactly_ the opposite. Hackers are the ones who like to take things apart, explore them, explore their boundaries and find ways to push them beyond their boundaries and do things they weren't meant to do. If you can somehow make that into an analogy for Luddite thinking... well... your analogy is flat wrong.

<comment><USER21> Being brief in the quote you've replied to meant that I poorly communicated what I actually meant.

The analogy was meant to communicate the harm of hanging on to methods of the past longer than necessary. Consumer hacking in terms of computer hardware is in decline.

I absolutely value hacking in any new technologies, I believe it to be essential to progress (totally agree with your comment on pushing the boundaries). But when it's time for things to progress again, I don't want to be caught arguing against _those_ methods for the sake of my own need to tinker.

My chief complaint with Wiens is that he argues for consumers as a mass market to "draw a line" in support of user-repairability. I don't see that as forward-thinking at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My main concern with this entire 'non-upgradeable' situation is having to eventually recycle a laptop due to one or two components that could have been replaced or upgraded.

My Dell XPS1640 isn't the best by any stretch, but I know that I can repair the hinges and upgrade the ram when I need to.

I'd rather spend more money upgrading and refurbishing a system than just buying another because it won't run the eventual CS8.

"Shame to let a good toaster go to waste over a frayed cord" \- Proposition Joe, The Wire

</comment><comment><USER23> We, as hackers, are not the target.

Apple is targeting everyone else; they are selling to the rest of the world, the people who want something that works and don't care a whit about upgradability.

The only people that care about upgrading hardware are an extreme minority and Wintel salespeople.

After all, when was the last time your uncle Bob, that guy who does some computer stuff but is not a power user, told you he needed to upgrade his ram?

</comment><comment><USER17> >"Do we imagine that such progress is achieved through the kind of Luddite thinking that leads people to value "hackability" over never-before-achieved levels of precision and portability?"

There's a lot of irony in linking people to the word Luddite when the author himself uses it incorrectly.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm at peace with the upgradablity issue. It is personal taste so whatever. I agree with others that it is a silly debate and that the author is overly butt-hurt.

However, his "rebuttal" completely ignores the 2nd half of the original article's point: the new macbooks, and all ipad, are _not_ recyclable despite what Apple says.

Not that Apple has a monopoly on callously diluting terms like "all natural", "recyclable", "free range", etc to increase profits and mislead consumers, thereby, eh, destroying the...EARTH. But still, even as the norm, it's pretty f-ing evil.</comment>


Ask HN: How much do I cost to Facebook? - <AUTHOR>

I've been reading online that each user is worth around 4.75$ a year to Facebook. But how much does each user cost Facebook? Also are there ways that users of Facebook cause Facebook to suffer a loss for hosting their content? <comment><USER2> You can't put a price tag on individual users, thus it might be hard to determine when a user causes Facebook to suffer a loss just for hosting their content. See it like this: If a user blocks all advertisement, he still interacts with his friends - which is hard to value.

On the other hand - if you create an account, upload a few photo albums and don't add any friends to your account, you will probably cause a loss ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> quarter results show that revenue is $1.058 billion, net profit (revenue-cost) is $205, = 19.38 %

revenue/user/quarter = $1.21, then cost is ~80 % = $0.97/quarter, about $3.9/year

of course, define cost per user. Total costs include marketing, pr, investments in new software and operational costs like coloc rent, power, hardware, network bandwidth, system engineering, etc.</comment>


Developers: One simple tip to make your designs rock - <AUTHOR> http://gradientsmotherfucker.com/

<comment><USER2> ha - I admit, it did make me laugh.</comment>


A type-based solution to the "strings problem" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a-type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem <comment><USER2> Reading this (a year or so ago) was one of the things that convinced me that Haskell was worth looking at.

Another was a blog post about Haskell error handling strategies _(update - decided to submit it as a separate link and discuss it there instead)_ :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986592></comment>


I write python, I could care less about pythonic - <AUTHOR> http://joerussbowman.tumblr.com/post/711850290/i-write-python-i-could-care-less-about-pythonic

<comment><USER2> OK, playing devil's advocate, and without believing everything I write ...

Although the article might be saying something interesting, I, for one, kept tripping over the grammar.

To start with, although it's gaining ground, this doesn't make sense:

        I write python, I could care less about pythonic
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The original, meaningful idiom is "I couldn't care less." He wants to say that he cares so little that it is not possible to care less. He wants to say that he could not possibly care less. He couldn't care less.

Instead he says that he _can_ care less, and therefore he does care, even if it's only a little. which is not what he wanted to say.

And yes, I know about linguistics. I know the arguments about language use, idioms, etc. I'm just saying that what he said, when interpreted carefully and in some cultures (including in British English) what he said isn't what he meant.

Secondly:

       Recently I saw a post in the Tornado group,
       saying it's use of libcurl is not pythonic.

He means "its" use. "It's", when correctly used can be substituted with "it is". In this case it can't, so it shouldn't be used. He means the possessive.

My point here isn't to diss the writing, but to tell you, the reader of my comment, that some of your audience will, on occasion, fail to listen to you properly if you get grammar wrong. It's not fair, and you may think it's unreasonable, but life isn't fair. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

However, to deal with the technical content:

        If being pythonic means reinventing the wheel,
        in python, I'm pretty confident I'm going to
        stick with the opinion I'm not going to worry
        about being pythonic.

This is a false dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to be Pythonic without re- inventing the wheel. All (and I agree that this is a big "all") it takes is to learn the language properly, in its own context, rather than writing Perl, C, Bash or Javascript "in Python." The dedicated "Real Programmer" can write ForTran programs in any language. Not learning the language "properly" means not taking the opportunity to expand your mind, but instead, to stick with Blub, and write Blub in whatever syntax you happen to be using.

        I'll worry about commenting and documenting what I do
        in order for other developers to follow behind me.

This is the important bit, but style comes into it as well. If someone is writing in Javascript style, but Python syntax, it's harder to understand. Sometimes sufficiently harder to make a real difference.

        I think I now have one of those first questions
        for when I interview developers for my business,
        when I get to that point. "How much focus do you
        put on making your python, pythonic?"

It's the wrong question. The question is - can you write Python as Python. That will actually tell you something about the programmer's range of skill.

By why ask them anything as all? Why not just see if they can program?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not that long ago my initial response to this comment would be to be annoyed about being judged on grammar. However, maybe because I'm a bit more mature, or I've just been working so much on writing documentation the past couple years, I see your point 100%. It also helps that you've stated so eloquently. I'll be sure to make edits later this weekend, I wrote that article quickly on my lunch break.

The point I may didn't expound on enough was when I spoke of reinventing the wheel. What I mean is the reluctance within the Python community to use existing tools, and instead turning to rewrite them in Python. The libcurl reference is a perfect example. Curl provides a wealth of functionality, but some would prefer calling it's use not pythonic.

As for interviewing, there's more to a developer than just the programs they write.

<comment><USER2> Re grammar, thank you for an excellent response. People often say that language isn't nailed to the floor with one right way of saying things, but that misses the point. Communication is important, and if a writer doesn't get things right, some of the audience will be lost.

I'm intrigued by the emergence of the "I could care less" expression. Here in the UK people look at it, stunned, and are confused as to what the author meant. It's like "The proof is in the pudding," an expression that clearly derives from something that makes sense in a stand-alone context, but which now can only be understood as an idiomatic, atomic phrase, and which doesn't mean what it actually says.

But that's language, which is weird.

With regards using existing tools, I largely, but not entirely, agree with you. It would be useful if languages had clean containment methods/techniques for wrapping existing tools rather than (re-)implementing facilities, but that's a general discussion.

And I agree that there's more to a developer than just the programs they write. That, however, partly makes my point and not yours. Whether they expend effort writing "Pythonically" is, to my mind, a much smaller point than whether they document well, communicate clearly, design effectively, and have a sense of balance.

But that's a minor issue. I suspect we are, in truth, more in agreement than not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> David Mitchell does an excellent job of explaining "I couldn't care less" -<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=0m56s>

<comment><USER2> Thank you - I really, _really_ enjoyed that. Given my bizarre linguistic background, that hit several sweet spots.

Cute how the CGI background is deliberately out-of-focus too. Very effective use of the technology.</comment></comment>