Facebook hype will fade - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/07/rushkoff.facebook.myspace/index.html?hpt=T2 <comment><USER2> facebook growth went something like this:

      college --> high school --> young adults --> everyone

Trendy stuff generally follows the same cascade, more or less, where you don't see college students emulating the dress habits of the elderly.

facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and facebook withers, slowly starting to resemble an '85 buick.

<comment><USER3> I got my Facebook account in 2005 when I was a college freshman. At first it was amazing, then they opened it up to high schoolers which was okay, but not really what _I_ wanted from Facebook. Then they added things like the Friend Feed which bombarded you with "Your friend [name you know] just added [someone you don't know or care about}." Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.

I think for me, the longer I've had my Facebook, the less useful it has gotten and the less time I've actually spent on it. It's like talking in a room with everyone you've ever met listening in. It's unnatural. I think Facebook's market will eventually fragment-- LinkedIn being the first chink in FB's armor, I imagine the next will be a college exclusive network like how Facebook got started.

<comment><USER4> I had the exact same experience as well, and then I discovered the "hide" button. I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those. Examples of my rules were:

1) If I don't remember who you are, hide. 2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc). 3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide. 4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.

There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.

<comment><USER5> The hide is useful, but the unnatural part is the "everyone you ever met listening". The great thing about Facebook when I started was it was like blogs or photo sharing, except that everyone was a trusted, real-life friend. Facebook was like sharing photos, jokes, and stories with your circle of friends.

Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't the illusion of anything but talking to the internet.

<comment><USER6> You can still do that now. You just need to make groups of your different friend groups (family, real life friends, high school friends, work friends, etc) and share what you want with those groups only, depending on what it is.

<comment><USER4> This takes way too much work. As someone who was using Facebook for several years before friend-groups, it was going to be an unreasonable time-sink to sort all those people after the fact.

Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008."

Well said.

Sounds like a bubble to me.

<comment><USER8> Except of course, GS aren't investing in Facebook. They're backing out their stake to other investors via this SPV they've set up. I doubt they care what happens to facebook stock: there's huge demand at this valuation and all they care about is answering that.

<comment><USER9> "Goldman will be creating a "special purpose vehicle" to sell the stock to its wealthy clients and then will charge them a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits."

Heads we win, tails you lose. I'm just waiting until they start dividing up the stock into tranches.

(from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2071267> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym."

I disagree with this, simply because grandma wasn't on any AOL chat rooms, but she _is_ on Facebook. The only reason I'm on FB is because Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob and grandma are also on there, and I can connect with them that way, and know what's happening in their lives in real time, instead of seeing them once a year at Christmas.

Grandma isn't going to sign up for IM or get a blog. She's on Facebook.

That's the difference between FB and everything else that came before it. The thing creates its own gravity field that attracts everyone, and as long as everyone I care about is on Facebook, so will I. Even though I really hate the thing.

That's the genius of FB, I think. Hate it or love it.

<comment><USER11> This isn't really unique to Facebook. It's called lock-in and it's the desire of every service provider and software maker; they want you to be held hostage to their network, so that even if you want to leave, you can't without potentially serious ramifications (like losing contact with your grandma, or losing access to your documents).

Facebook has reached a level that had never been reached by any social network before it. Did your grandma use MySpace or LiveJournal? Once something crosses the threshold of youth and tech-savvy and "regular people" or even old people start using it, you have a much less transient userbase. Look at Microsoft -- the young and tech-savvy are happy to use Apple products over MS, but MS is king and will remain king at least until anyone born before 1975 is well into retirement. Once these things reach a certain level, they become generational standards, and then only minimal effort is needed on the part of the vendor.

I know old people that still use AOL. Most old people never would have left AOL in the first place if they'd come up with something sensible for broadband. Perhaps Facebook will come upon a stumbling block that's similarly fatal, but I wouldn't necessarily _expect_ that, at least not within a reasonable timeframe.

<comment><USER12> It's not really 'lock-in' unless the potential switching costs are too great to overcome. If another social network could set up your friend network with minimal effort (and are better than Facebook), they will win. No one has long term contracts to use Facebook or pay a monetary penalty (like a cell phone). So if someone can re-create your social graph with you putting in less effort than you normally put into facebook, they will win.

<comment><USER13> Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true cost. Think of all the photos, and to a lesser extent, wall posts. I would imagine a lot of the time that's spent on Facebook is just browsing through photos (and again, to a lesser extent, people's wall posts). Much of it probably is just new photos, so obviously those don't need to be replicated since if you port the social graph over, people will start posting photos on the new site and people will just look at those, but a ton of the viewing is probably of legacy photos. That is, some of the viewing is seeing what's happening with your friends (the party last night) but a ton of it is just checking people out (facebook stalking). How can I stalk somebody without seeing all their past photos/videos/notes/posts/etc.?

<comment><USER14> Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care.

It's activity that matters, not membership. If facebook stops talking about activity, and only talks about membership, that's when you know there's a problem.

<comment><USER11> Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out.

Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A bubble created around a legitimate service does not itself kill the service; the service becoming obsolete _does._

The author seems to completely miss this. AOL didn't die because it was bought by TW, it died because broadband became commonplace and people realized there was much more to the internet than AOL's walled garden. Myspace died because it was the last vestige of the "personal homepage" style internet and never ran with its burgeoning use as a network for musicians.

Facebook will fade when the next major gap in social connections+communication is filled. Simply saying "something more popular than Facebook will happen" seems a horribly obvious and empty statement. Now talking about what we still need or might discover with connections would prove insightful, but of course no one's going to blog about that until it's launched.

</comment><comment><USER16> "...the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL's revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly."

So facebook will fail when people venture out and socialize in real life?

Seriously, though, I get the point generally, but I don't think it's quite the same. AOL and MySpace were assimilated and stifled by their parents' ways of doing things, whereas Facebook will likely continue to do things its own way. This is a company that is able to convince its investors that it knows best, and I don't think things will change with the Goldman investment.

I don't know if Facebook will be on top in 10 years, but I don't think this is the beginning of the end.

<comment><USER17> I agree.

The author's main points seem to be that: 1\. Facebook has similarities to AOL, and AOL's bubble burst 2\. There was a bubble in the late '90s therefore there must be a bubble now 3\. Goldman is investing in Facebook, Goldman invested in other bubbles, therefore the investment must be bad 4\. Social is a fad

Nothing on why Facebook specifically is doing a bad job and why someone else is positioned to upset them. Not much evidence at all if you ask me. You could write the article with 90% of the content the same and replace "Facebook" with "Google" or "Apple" or "Microsoft"

<comment><USER18> Authors main point:

 _"Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."_

All the other stuff in the article is an attempt to back this argument up (AOL/TW merger stuff, Goldman deal a symptom of cashing-out mentality, MySpace collapse as a precedent.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand the comparisons of FB to AOL, besides their seemingly common goal to sandbox the internet.

People who use AOL who discovered "the real" internet had no reason to go back. Everything they wanted was just as available + more. There's no friction to switching, beyond learning how to use a search engine.

Facebook has billions of photos, posts, comments, friend requests, updates, registrations through connect, all being added to the site every day. The longer someone uses it, the higher the cost to stop using it, or switch to another.

That's why FB has the staying power AOL did not.

</comment><comment><USER20> I agree that popularity of social networks is faddish, and that Facebook will follow that rise and fall pattern, however...

I think that an open, distributed social networking protocol is a game changer. If there exists the ability to move between social networks while maintaining your social graph, that makes the way that social networks rise and fall very different than when sites hold your social graph hostage if you try to leave.

<comment><USER21> It continues to be hard for me to envision what that would really _look like_ in practice. I don't mean from a network typology standpoint; I mean how would it look in my browser?

<comment><USER20> Here is my Appleseed friends list:

[http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisar...](http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisari/friends/)

Keep in mind, this is beta software in active development, so you'll notice a few bugs here and there (and the live server is missing a major update I'm running locally).

<comment><USER21> Thanks! I'm interested specifically in the day-to-day usage: the situations of signing up, finding/adding my friends, posting statuses, reading and commenting on other peoples', sharing media like photos, etc etc.

So to start with a simple one: how does one add somebody else? Can you just search by name? I'm just having a bit of difficulty imagining how that sort of thing would work well in a truly distributed, federated way. But I haven't done much thought on it so I'm interested to hear.

<comment><USER20> If you'd like, you can get an Appleseed invite. Send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll send you one back right away (this is open to anyone, by the way). You can sign up for the main beta test site (currently around 500 users).

Searching is being worked on, that's coming in the next update, but yes, you just search by name (or other attributes). Distributed search is difficult, but only on the backend, on the frontend, it's similar to what you're used to. Only caveat is that it is not exactly real-time, and is more like a P2P search than a google search.

Once you find someone you're looking for, you identify yourself to their site by remotely logging in. This is as simple as giving your ID, which looks like an email address ( _username@domain_ ). Then you click "Add as friend", and they're sent a friend request. When they approve it, you are mutual friends.

You can post stuff to your "page" (what appleseed calls your wall), and an update will be sent to your friends list. You upload a photo, and an update shows up in your friends lists newsfeeds. They click on the thumbnail and it takes them to your photo album on your home node, etc.

Some other distributed social networking sites are breaking from convention in a lot of ways, but Appleseed's goal is to try and make it work as much like the current systems people are used to as possible. Certain growing pains are inevitable, but so far it's pretty similar after the first couple minutes.

<comment><USER21> Perfect, thanks! I wish you guys luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't necessarily agree the article but I'd be interested in hearing opinions on the interesting point the author presents near the end of the article: That social networking sites are like physical social spaces that will rise and fall in popularity.

<comment><USER23> My personal experience is exactly that. My parents, a grandparent, nieces, nephews, coworkers, bosses, college friends, and everyone in between are now in my network. My status updates are now a megaphone to everyone I've ever had any relationship with and more frighteningly, anyone I ever will have a relationship with in the future.

This kind of assemblage is perfect for weddings and funerals, and that's it. For daily living, it's just too much. If my Facebook friends all went to a building every day to hang out, I wouldn't go there. And I don't find myself using FB nearly as much now as I once did for this very reason. There's too many things to consider when posting even the simplest thing (will I offend my second aunt, will some future boss not like this political view, what if I run for political office in my 50s and find out I friended someone who ended up doing x, etc., etc.)

<comment><USER24> +1 I stop sharing my opinion with my network because of this same problem (I have clients, close relatives, extended family, etc.). What if I post something that a client finds offensive and leads to business problems that otherwise wouldn't have existed? What if I post something serious for my clients and some jackass high-school friend leaves an embarrassing comment on my status?

Initially, I had to block the ability for people to tag me in photos because I was being used to spam other people's walls, then I had to block other people from posting on my wall, because they would post "funny" stuff that wasn't good for my business-contacts to see. Finally, I started using lists, but having different "personas" for each list was just too much. As a result, I'm slowly letting my profile fade away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Facebook needs to generate more revenue or if they go public, their stocks are going to tank like crazy after the speculation fades. Facebook's P/E ratio is out of proportion. Doesn't matter how many users Facebook have, if the company doesn't generate the proportional profits to match its valuation, then the company is going to go through some tough phases.

Many people are looking at the Facebook stocks like it's a Pablo Picasso painting, and with users twice as the population of United States, it's bound to be valuable. However, in the economy of supply and demand, the bubble will pop if it decides to go public. Unless Facebook can think new ways to earn more money.

But that's hard, because Facebook users hate changes. They aren't exactly Obama fans.

</comment><comment><USER26> Facebook is definitely waning among my friends, but strong areas remains:

1\. Social graph. Many are not active Facebook users but are keeping the accounts cos all their contacts are there. Facebook has actually helped people found their long loss friends and classmates.

2\. Sharing links, picture and video. Facebook is replacing email as a means to share interesting contents. One friend actually visits Facebook just to read those contents posted by friends instead of going to the source such as YouTube. "It is easier". Twitter is an obvious alternative.

3\. Facebook is the new Flickr.

4\. Games. Hopefully when people think of FarmVille or CityVille they think of Zynga and not Facebook. Zynga should seriously break loose of this eco, build its own currency/credit system and focus on iOS/Android platforms.

5\. All-in-one ness. Grandmas and aunties love this. Contacts, photos, video, links, cute apps are all-in-one. But this will mean less and less, as this group of not savvy web users will decrease with time.

</comment><comment><USER27> It will take more than something "cool" to knock off Facebook - 600m users isn't fad-ish. A competitor has to have a MUCH better product and be very cool. It could happen, but Facebook is much more in the driver's seat than MySpace or Friendster ever were.

</comment><comment><USER28> Best quote of the article, "Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."

They cost to run the site compared to how much they're making does not work. Their only hope is to run _really_ fast and create a better advertising story. Otherwise, they need to get acquired by MS, Google or Apple and become an augment to a business that actually generates profit. Problem is their market cap is so huge that's becoming nearly impossible.

</comment><comment><USER29> All social media sites these days are bound for backlash because of the sins of their fathers, Thats why its so hard to get a great idea to catch on, people are growing skeptical about social media's benefits in a sea of high priced commercial promotion.

People make sites like facebook popular, commercial entities buy in and then corner the initial value that these sites created. All of the marketing potential individual users had in the initial stages vanishes once commercial ads and user tracking appear, and once a value is placed on a site. Myspace still gets great hits, but mostly from spammers and bots, which makes it value worth less than the computers its hosted on. Its their own damn fault. Tom played the game right when he sold early I tell you.

These social media sites aren't doing anything substantial in order to help productivity nor promotion for individual users. They have features that encourage users to spam each other, which make their added peers end up blocking each other because of incessant tagging and messages to user inboxes that require tedious manual deletion, etc [all tactics to generate empty clicks]...

These social media sites all make the same mistakes in not emphasizing their talented users, and helping to build followings, while promoting businesses and services that are reliable and relevant to their own users. I'm a firm believer in a future of micro-social sites that focus on specific user communities rather than trying to warehouse everyone into a huge template. Facebook, as it is really doesn't provide much in terms of letting "like minds come together". There should be no reason why I can't communicate [through a social media buffer of course] with Jay Z about rapping, or Kanye about being a douchebag, or ask the real Ivanka Trump out on a date, and they all should be able to block me if they get pissed off in the process, thats what happens on Twitter, and thats why this year Twitter will capture a large percentage of Facebook's user shares, because its much more fulfilling than fake user profiles [for the moment]

American Idol has made a lot more people "famous" than Facebook, yet there are many more musicians and artists on Facebook, how is this possible? I see that as a problem. YouTube has been the only consistently unobtrusive and highly functional/useful social media tool that has survived. They do have user profiles, they host content, allow comments, sharing and communication, and do it all pretty much in an amazing and unobtrusive way. YouTube also allows its users to cross-share content on sites completely unrelated to itself, a major hosting expense, but really solid in terms of usefulness to site users, no idiotic "like" button required. Based on this, the concept of YouTube, perhaps, should be used as a key "roadmap" to social media success in the future.

Instead of working on promoting normal users you don't know, most social media sites are geared towards the "celebrity machine", for celebrities that are already popular. Promoting the same stuff that's on TV, and the radio, because someone paid for the ad space. Following this "celebrity machine" is a losing battle because it has to put on a new expensive outfit every time its launched, and it fails once people uncover its motives, or once innovation can't disguise it.

Facebook makes it appear to users that the only method to generate 5,000 followers requires landing a major record or movie deal, so much for being a talented musician. Programming and monetizing is only a tiny part of creating a successful social media site, this is why most get it wrong. If you want 4 years of profit, who cares, make the next big social media warehouse, if you want a lifetime of success, think carefully of the benefits your site can provide to the average joe, and make sure you keep that in your mantra for as long as your site lives. The motives have to be clear cut, highly functional, and it must offer fair and equal promotion for all of its users while limiting spamming and upholding privacy, otherwise it will stay the game of rise and downfall. There's a reason why YouTube has been a great site all of these years, it sticks to its user base and keeps them content.

</comment><comment><USER30> I see so many people compare facebook to (late '90s) AOL these days. But the two never had much in common with each other. I think if facebook continues to bring out innovative ways/products/features that connect people with each other it will continue to be successful. Will it one day fade away? Probably. As do most huge dotcoms. But some even stay relevant for well over a decade (ebay, match, expedia, google). Most of them get a bit smaller and cruise along.

<comment><USER3> Your profile and buddy list on AOL were probably pretty similar to your Facebook friends. I think they have a lot in common.

<comment><USER31> Originally, but AOL never expanded on it. A profile was like a text box and that's it. As for AIM, everyone I know that used to use it still do. I don't think that's changed very much other than that people now use web based clients to chat on AIM.

<comment><USER3> Really? I only know a fraction of people who still use AIM, most just use the Facebook chat. It guessing it must be a generational thing? I'm 23, how about you?

<comment><USER31> Same age. It's probably just the people I know. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley amongst 90% Asians and the non-tech savvy subset of those I know all use the same AIM screen names but through different interfaces. The tech-savvy subset use multi-clients like Pidgin, Digsby, etc. I personally use Gchat and no one I know uses FB as their main chat client, only for a quick message if two people are coincidentally on FB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have no real use for facebook anymore. Honestly, I think most people right now just go there for lack of something to procrastinate with. Twitter is much better for that anyway. Trying to get all my fb friends to jump ship with me. <http://blog.ruedaminute.com/2011/01/dear-facebook-friends/> Honestly, the more people on Twitter, the better for the internet IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER33> Facebook has the advantage of being built into way more mobile devices than anything before it ever was. Many phones now come with a facebook icon on the main page when you first turn it on.

Also the amount of free advertising it gets from companies using it's logo everywhere with add us on facebook and have your say on facebook, how many other companies get their logo and a call to action to use there service for free on TV every day around the world?

</comment><comment><USER34> There are at least a few important differences that the author ignored:

* Not many "trends" have had 500 million followers.

* The other companies mentioned actually ceded control in some fashion; Facebook is simply taking investment dollars.

* The other companies mentioned didn't have Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Only a crank wouldn't acknowledge that Zuckerberg's leadership has been masterful.

</comment><comment><USER35> When you have so much traffic, it's easy to find other avenues for product changes. You can move into new niches. You gain flexibility.

But when you also have a high valuation, and have been taking money off the table, those choices become limited to those that are perceived as the highest growth. You lose flexibility.

Frugality is good, at all levels.

</comment><comment><USER36> The thing which amazes me about Facebook is how perplexing the basic UI is and remains. My wife will tell me "hey someone has made a comment on your wall you HAVE to reply to it" and it will take me five minutes to figure out where this comment is buried. Oh it's not under "status" it's under "profile". WTF?

</comment><comment><USER37> related from 2007: "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook" [http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArti...](http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573)

It certainly hasn't, but can facebook be the first social network to somehow help people maintain their different personas and keep their social circles unentangled when appropriate? Over the summer I facebook updated something about hacking on my front porch, and my wife's aunt commented asking how I got sick. Stuff like that isn't creepy, it's just awkward, and keeps me coming back here and to friendfeed or to reddit or wherever the community feels right for having a discussion.

</comment><comment><USER38> Agree, Just wonder if all these people were incredibly good at cashing in at the top or the overwhelming tidal wave of news stories about them cashing in is what caused their decline

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't it safe to just say that every technology fades with time? The only constant in our industry is that we will all become less relevant in time.

</comment><comment><USER40> most of the complaints here could be solved by facebook implementing (better) disjoint friend networks. I would imagine they are working on this. I currently have draconian privacy in place to prevent most of my friends from seeing status updates. Once this becomes easier wont these issues go away?

</comment><comment><USER41> Read his books, _Exit Strategy_ and also _Ecstasy Club_ , good scifi.

</comment><comment><USER42> Stupid title. Doesn't hype always fade, by definition?

</comment><comment><USER43> Hypes will fade. By definition.

</comment><comment><USER44> TheFacebook hype died in Nov. 2007 when they introduced advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER45> Some people will get a lot of money in shares. The difficult question is when to buy and when to sell. The hype will fade and shares will fall down very quickly but to win in this game you have to determine when it will happen. I don't know when, but I think that the fall down will be the extraordinarily stiff, in one day or two a complete collapse. Wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER46> Comparing Google with Facebook. I was using google since it was pretty unknown, I think it is still, after all these years, a good tool for searching. I will never use facebook, I think local solutions for meeting people will emerge soon and they will be much more appealing and useful.

Facebook only can exists if it can find a way to be a local tool.

<comment><USER3> I've never _met_ anyone on Facebook, they're all people I knew somehow previous to our _friending_.

<comment><USER47> Interesting. I would like to know if the majority of people use Facebook like you (with people they knew previously) or they use it to get new connections. How can I get this information? Any poll published somewhere?

<comment><USER48> I think I can say pretty confidently and without providing any data that most people use Facebook to connect with people they know from real life.

I believe that adding a complete stranger is seen as a bit creepy. Maybe the new Groups feature (like the hacker news group) will change that, but that's only a recent addition.

<comment><USER49> Maybe for our generation it is, but I can confidently say that this has changed amongst high school students and other youngsters. For them (at least the ones I have contact with), facebook is a tool for meeting new people. Hell, even a few people I know professionally has met their SO on facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> in the future your time will fade

</comment><comment><USER51> Facebook sucks!

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't know how people can seriously believe facebook is a bunch of hype. Or even that it's at the top of its success, as this article claims.

The $50 billion valuation, yeah there's some hype there. But whether Facebook will one day surpass such an evaluation is I believe a strong reality.

I'm just amazed at how well-run a company Facebook is. I'm in awe of how it is in a constant state of evolution and constantly being tinkered with. Usually when companies get big you see them play the game more conservatively. Facebook is exciting because it doesn't do this. I see so much room for Facebook to grow and surpass my expectations for it, as it has time and time again.

</comment><comment><USER53> I really think he doesn't know what he's talking about. Let's look at his qualifications. He's a professor of "Media Studies" at the New School. I think he's going to be taking everything with a lot of lit crit palavering.

Myspace to Facebook is a shallow analogy. If we would like to make an analogy with that analogy it would be like comparing Yahoo and Google. Facebook has far exceeded the market penetration of MySpace. Facebook has one of the best engineering teams around while MySpace attempted to some sort of media company (failing miserably at that). Facebook has a fairly credible revenue stream while we are never sure if MySpace every developed that.

<comment><USER20> _we are never sure if MySpace every developed that._

Myspace revenues are estimated at $385 million. Facebook's are estimated at $1.6 billion.

That puts myspace revenues at 24% of Facebook's.

Myspace has 66m users. Facebook has 500m users.

That puts Myspace's userbase at 13% of Facebook's.

In actuality, that means Myspace has found a way to generate more revenue on a per-user basis than Facebook. I'd say that's pretty credible.</comment></comment>


Learn Javascript In Manga - <AUTHOR> http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/06/21/learn-javascript-in-manga/ <comment><USER3> Seriously, if it were in english, I would look forward to it. I remember - <USER2> think it's the magic bus? (that's a french translation) -, I thought it was awesome to understand how the body works. I mean, book like that can really help unmotivated students to focus and read whatever they have to read each days.

And while I'm here, I do think that actual games could inclure a bit more of educationnal purpose so that teenagers playing it would learn important stuff by osmosis.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have fond memories of "Japan, Inc." -- a manga introduction to 1980's economics. It was one of the few manga stocked by our local library in the time before English-language manga really became popular.

[http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Inc-Introduction-Japanese- Econom...](http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Inc-Introduction-Japanese- Economics/dp/0520062892)

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that is fantastic. Human brains are wired to learn and understand stories. The are incredibly compelling to us. I think this would me a much easier way to learn things. How many people can remember esoteric facts about starwars that they internalized just because they were associated with a resonant story

</comment><comment><USER6> I've run into those "The Manga Guide to..." books before and I instantly loved the idea. I would venture to say that quite a few nerdy types would enjoy learning certain subjects using these books as primers, especially if beginning at a young age.

</comment><comment><USER7> The first time I saw one of these titles I rolled my eyes; I still haven't stopped doing that...</comment>


Ask HN: Is Amazon/AWS still bad when it comes to work-life balance? - <AUTHOR> I'm an engineer looking to move to One of the Amazon and/or AWS in an engineering role. I've heard horror stories about the work culture there. Is it still bad, or have they improved. <comment><USER2> It's still bad - some groups are better than others, but it's like buying a lottery ticket. An acquaintance was just shattered by his experience there as a recent data point.

</comment><comment><USER3> You will be paid, you will work. Many people go to Amazon just to get it on their CV then they fly away. They rarely keep talent over 3 years. (Afaik) Ask for retention data for the department you are joining if you want a clear picture. My hiring manager was blunt with me so I knew what I was going into.. ymmv etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on the team is the popular answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> It all depends on the team you join.</comment>


Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gitbook.com/tech/post-mortems/06-20-gitbook-domains-blocked-by-registrar <comment><USER3> GitBook CTO here:

Our production domains (gitbook.com and gitbook.io) have been blocked and locked by our registrar (Google Domains).

None of our infrastructure is impacted, all user content and databases are safe; our domains simply blocked by a heavy handed policy.

As mentioned on Twitter, we are all hands working with Google to fix this issues ASAP. We'll then share an in-depth post-mortem

[https://twitter.com/GitBookStatus/status/1268554857411227648](https://twitter.com/GitBookStatus/status/1268554857411227648)

<comment><USER3> We've just published a postmortem: [https://blog.gitbook.com/tech/post- mortems/06-20-gitbook-dom...](https://blog.gitbook.com/tech/post- mortems/06-20-gitbook-domains-blocked-by-registrar)

let us know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER4> I'm curious how you feel about CloudFlare as a registrar not allowing GitBook to use an external root nameserver.

Being forcibly stuck on CloudFlare's own nameservers only sounds very nefarious, and isn't a limitation I've ever heard of with any other registrar. For instance, it would break my tooling that uses my host's APIs to control DNS records through their nameserver.

I'd be very appreciative if eastdakota or jgrahamc could elaborate on what possible reasoning there is for this restriction as well.

<comment><USER5> Cloudflare sells the domain at cost. I think the idea is that its an extra service meant for their customers, not a service for the general public. As they are a DNS provider, their customers will use cloudflare nameservers. If they didn't, they would no longer be customers.

<comment><USER4> That does make sense. If I were using Cloudflare I suppose it would be a no- brainer, and if I were Cloudflare and didn't want people not routing their traffic through me on my registrar, that would be an excellent way to discourage it. If they're forced to offer to everyone as part of being a registrar, then the combination of all of the above is my answer. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Aside from the Google domain issue (which is obviously a problem) -- why on earth would GitBook be hosting user-generated content under their corporate gitbook.com domain?

The registrar issue is one problem here -- but I don't see this addressed in their post-mortem. I thought this was a well-known issue. You don't host user- generated content on the same domain that handles your corporate email. Because things like this can and do happen, so you want to make sure that your company isn't also down while you're busy fixing a problem with your customers.

I know the exposure risks are different, but isn't this is one of the reasons why Github moved hosting Github Pages content to github.io from their primary github.com site? Or why raw data is hosted from githubusercontent.com (in addition to mitigating cookie security issues).

The registrar was an issue that was largely out of their hands. But this was something that they could control. And I think it's something that is missing from their post-mortem. If they had split their domains, then while _serving_ user-content was disrupted, _accepting_ users to gitbook.com and their email (!?!?) would have still been working. Also, depending on if they had a 3rd domain for hosting their CDN, users that had custom domains would also have been protected.This goes along with the idea that you don't use email from your primary domain (firstname.lastname@example.com) to register your domain (gitbook.com). Or host your status page on the same infrastructure as your site.

If I were them, after migrating registrars, this would be the next engineering change I'd make.

 _(Maybe they do this, I don 't know enough about GitBook to know. But based on the thread here, I don't think they do, or at least it isn't mentioned in their post-mortem that I saw.)_

<comment><USER7> Where do you draw the line? I mean github.com is the corporate email domain of the GitHub company, it also hosts repositories (user generated content)

<comment><USER6> But it isn't... directly.

Github.com is their corporate site, hosts their application, and is how we all interact with repositories (via https or git://). But, the only data you get from that site has been processed through their application and sanitized.

The only way to get access to the _raw_ user-generated data is through raw.githubusercontent.com _or_ Github Pages which hosted on github.io. And the data from raw.githubusercontent.com has the MIME types set so that you don't get HTML rendered -- only the raw plaintext (I think).

So, in this specific example, if there was someone hosting a phishing site in a github account, it would have been active only through github.io, _not_ the main github.com site. (You could have likely seen the source code from the main site, but it would not have actually generated an HTML form).

For historical views, here is the Github blog post that details the change (2013): [https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain- githu...](https://github.blog/2013-04-05-new-github-pages-domain-github-io/)

<comment><USER8> Nevertheless some countries blocked github.com, not (only?) githubusercontent.com or github.io

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

Probably they think that GitHub didn't sanitize the content on github.com well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could you imagine if "youtube.com" were blocked and locked by IANA/ICANN/? because of reports that somebody posted a video with misinformation and phishing content?

I don't expect google appreciates how devastating this, but that would change quite immediately if it happened to them.

<comment><USER10> It's almost as if, while the laws and policies and regulations are supposed to be the same for all, giant entities with huge amounts of money and power behind them are held to a different standard than everyone else. I can't say I'm surprised.

<comment><USER11> There's a parade of apologists who will quickly pop up to say that a private company platform should not be held to any free speech standard since they're not a government, never mind how much power they wield in practice.

<comment><USER12> What about when it is the government taking down a domain for hosting illegal or copyrighted content? What happens when you give the government enough power to take down a domain for political dissent? The problem you mention isn't with Google, it is with how TLDs and domain registrars work in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > sent to an e-mail address on a domain they had just suspended...

I've always assumed that:

1\. When creating your account at the registrar you should use an email address that is not at any domain you will be registering through or transferring to them,

2\. The contact information you give for your WHOIS records (or if using a WHOIS privacy guard service, the contact information you give them to forward to) should use an email address at a different domain,

3\. If you use a DNS provider other than your registrar the contact email address they have for you should not be a domain using them for DNS, and

4\. Same for whatever hosts your email.

The general principle is that the contact method that a service provider will use to contact you if there is a problem with your account or service with them should not depend on the account being in good standing and the service working.

</comment><comment><USER14> The biggest hoster of phishing sites is Google.[1] Here's a list of major sites which have live entries in PhishTank.[2] Hosting phishing sites on Google Drive is very popular.

Many of those are long gone, but PhishTank hasn't cleaned them out, so they're still listed.

[1] [http://www.sitetruth.com/reports/phishes.html](http://www.sitetruth.com/reports/phishes.html) [2] [http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/ratingdetails.fcgi?details=tru...](http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/ratingdetails.fcgi?details=true&url=google.com)

<comment><USER15> To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing and most of them don't deal with it very well: Google, Microsoft, smaller players like Codebox and countless others. Then there's phishing on Dropbox, phishing on Google Forms, OneDrive, etc. Then you have phishing at all the various hosters like DigitalOcean, CloudFlare, etc. Even there you'll sometimes have IPs which have hosting phishing pages for various brands for a long time. It's not an isolated problem. Some deal with it more aggressively, true, but the pace and ease with which phishing can be stood up and modified makes it a whac-a-mole. Plus, the expectation is that most phishing pages will only be active for a few hours before being taken down and/or detected, so phishers pump out new ones on a constant basis.

I run the service at [https://urlscan.io](https://urlscan.io) which tracks phishing and frequently run into these cases which render any kind of black/whitelisting impossible. Imagine Microsoft phishing hosted on Microsoft domains and infrastructure. Here's a fun search which will return lots of phishing on windows[.]net and googleapis[.]com: [https://urlscan.io/search/#page.domain%3A(googleapis.com%20O...](https://urlscan.io/search/#page.domain%3A\(googleapis.com%20OR%20windows.net\)%20AND%20filename%3A%2F\(jpg%7Cpng%7Cgif%7Csvg\)%2F)

<comment><USER16> > To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers > massively from phishing

The big difference here is that all the other platforms struggling (and failing too often) to prevent themselves being used as phishing hosting - aren't then turning around and hypocritically taking other platform's entire internet presence offline for doing so.

Google here are acting in the roles of judge and executioner, while being the biggest offender of the same crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google Domains locked my domains at renewal time and refused to renew them until I provided proof of identity in the form of a scanned government ID -AND- a scanned copy of the credit card.

Coupled with the horror stories of non-existent support, the first thing I did was move my domains out this month.

<comment><USER18> To where?

<comment><USER16> I've kinda given up, and use Route53 for everything, on the grounds that if I managed to piss AWS off enough for them too take my domain names down, all my infrastructure will probably vanish to, so having someone else manage to keep my zone files up will not be of any use anyway...

It's got all my eggs in one basket - but solving that problem is a much bigger task that just picking a different domain registrar... (And I sometimes wonder if my blue-sky cloud-agnostic dreams would all come crumbling down if I even managed to implement then anyway - if whatever went wrong that pissed AWS off enough for them to shut me down got shared with and/or triggered the same reaction at Azure/Google/DO/whoever...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This mirrors my experience with google support, even as a paying gsuite customer. I lost a YouTube channel and wasn't given any option to restore it. Their advice was to just re upload all the content and forget about view counts and old links that would no longer work.

<comment><USER20> I'm going through issues with G Suite as an admin. They randomly blocked my account falsely accusing me of sending spam. I can't even access the help support team sicne I can't login to the system.

<comment><USER21> This is completely insane - there's absolutely no legitimate reason for Google to _lock you out of your account_ , even if you _were_ sending spam emails. Disable your ability to send new emails, maybe. Lock you out of your email inbox, maybe. But completely prevent you from accessing your account, and therefore even appealing? Inexcusable.

<comment><USER22> Come on bear with them. They're not a very big or technically sophisticated company, so they only have one big on/off button per account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a simple rule when using Google services (including paid ones) - <USER2> ready to lose access without a moment's notice. Unless you are an enterprise customer or can reach out to Google employees when things go horribly wrong, you are at the mercy of their automated systems.

As other posters have pointed out, hope they have a plan to migrate their domains elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER24> For the record: if you don't want this to happen to your site, you should avoid Dynadot also.

Several years ago I ran into almost _exactly_ the same issue with them after someone sent them a frivolous abuse report - they'd locked down my domain unannounced to the point that I couldn't even transfer it out, and it took a call from a journalist(!) inquiring about the suspension before they were willing to unlock it for transfer.

I've been using internet.bs for most of my domains since and haven't had any issues with them - they let me know when an abuse report comes in, and give me the time to handle it. There are probably other registrars that are fine too, but I don't have personal experience with them.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Everything is back to normal! The domains have been unblocked by the registrar. We are monitoring everything."

[https://twitter.com/GitBookStatus/status/1268565887256330241](https://twitter.com/GitBookStatus/status/1268565887256330241)

</comment><comment><USER26> After hearing this I'll be transferring away from Google domains. Had to use them for the initial .dev sales

<comment><USER27> Same. I bought a few .app names when they came out, but I'm transferring the rest away. It's not even the threat of someone accidentally locking something that concerns me, but the fact that Google is now so big that, like a black hole, all information is pulled in and none can escape, including (effectively nonexistent or incompetent) support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Never use google as a registrar. Support someone else. The internet is bigger than google.

<comment><USER12> Support who? Government has power to take down any domain, especially TLDs and registrars in the US. People should be supporting decentralized DNS and name servers if they want to be safe from takedowns.

<comment><USER29> If the government is taking down a domain at least there's a human behind it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Makes me wonder if they don't understand user-generated content, if Google Domains is more meant for small personal sites maybe?

I used to use a hosting company that had in their terms, that profanity wasn't allowed... The company seemed to have decent hardware, user interfaces and US based support too but ran by Mormons based in the beautiful state of Utah. I don't have much of a opinion of Mormons but I think pushing religious views on your customers is bad business.

So after noticing that in their terms I was curious since I run a personal WordPress blog, if someone wrote a comment even if it wasn't approved just by being in the database if it broke their terms and was told yes... Now that I'm a bit older, I wonder if they really are scanning database table text fields for swearwords or that support rep misunderstood what I meant... But after that discussion, I switched my domain and hosting elsewhere, two separate companies actually instead of just one account with both domain and hosting. If some spam bot or troll writes the F word, they are going to take my entire site down even if no fault of my own? Yeah, no thanks.

They got acquired though by a lot larger company and doesn't seem to have those same terms now though, and heard they now outsource their support. There was someone I used to talk to who was a big fan of them though and referred me. So slightly over a decade later, they are probably not even remotely the same company anymore though since merged with a much larger company. Wouldn't surprise me if they ended up getting rid of a lot of support staff and just kept a handful of people to manage the datacenter, since marketing, accounting, support, etc would probably be centralized between all the hosting companies they own I'd imagine, which is probably a blow to the local areas when they merged unfortunately. I guess that's one of the sad things about getting bigger, they lose that small town friendly startup feel probably as seemed like a great company other than forcing religious views on people. Just did some more research about their company, sounds like they were also anti- lgbt too sadly. Makes me wonder how many other people working their share those views or just something management was pushing down since looks like the church changed their policy last year... I've been wanting to go somewhere with more opportunities, and actually Salt Lake City is one of the areas I've been considering since seems like a bit bigger city and on the list as a place for upcoming startups.

</comment><comment><USER31> The exact same has happened with CodeSandbox, Google Domains had blocked our csb.dev (internal domain) and csb.app (domain for projects) without any warnings. It took us two days (of downtime!) to get them to lift the block. But then after 3 weeks, they did the exact same thing! They blocked us again for reports without warning. Luckily we had a fallback domain so that there was not much service disruption, but it was extremely frustrating working with them on this.

After 3 sudden blocks from them, they now give us a warning before they're planning to block us, but it took many calls before we got to that stage.

</comment><comment><USER32> ... Which is again why I would never use Google for any business application. These stories happen all the time.

"I built my business on Google Cloud / Android / Google Apps / Youtube / etc. I was flagged by an automated system. There was no human to speak to (at least one competent or empowered to do anything), and my business is now gone."

Some of these go viral on social media, and Google then fixes them. Some don't.

Support channels built on only having an impact if things go viral aren't what I'll build my business on.

</comment><comment><USER33> Having just moved 3 personal domains -> into google domains you can imagine I find this quite concerning.

I wonder how the domain registry community at large feels about this? ICANN exists, domains are subject to a legal agreement with ICANN, and it has customer-protection concerns surely?

<comment><USER34> I can tell you about my experiences with Namecheap when I used fake WHOIS info for my privacy and someone reported me.

Their support staff said that due to ICANN policy, they must have accurate WHOIS info, so they have changed my WHOIS information but also added WhoisGuard to the domain so the details are not visible unless someone gets a Panama court order.

My trust in them increased substantially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Using Google products really becomes a big liability for businesses. Articles like this have become quite frequent over the last year.

</comment><comment><USER36> Are they conflating domain registrars and DNS hosting? Did Google Domains block their domain at the registry level, like removing the NS records from roots? Or did they block is at the domain DNS level, like not resolving queries to Google nameservers for the domain?

I don't expect many startups or big companies use Google Domains for _DNS hosting_. AWS Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, or dedicated DNS hosting would be used for that. But I expect it is fairly common for startups to use Google Domains for domain registration.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't think it should be registrar's duty to shut domains down.

Gitbook appears to use CloudFlare to host DNS, and likely to use their CDN/proxy, which makes them the actual "host" of the content. If there is any phishing, they should be the ones responsible.

The post says even their email was down. I'm deciding to not use Google Domains anymore.

</comment><comment><USER38> You know, this is interesting. Google is taking something close to an editorial stance here - it is clear that they take action against their customers based on content on their sites.

Some might consider that sites with controversial content who use Google as their registrar and not taken down are considered reviewed-and-OK by Google.

Others might start pressuring Google to expand the nature of content they find unacceptable.

And yet others might try pressuring them to expand their policing - who knows how many bad actors could be shut down with Gmail monitoring?

<comment><USER39> Phishing is not "controversial." It's illegal, and it undermines the principle of informed consent that meaningful freedom requires. Even if Google isn't legally obligated to take down phishing domains, I refuse to be so anal as to complain about it. It is everybody's job to make the internet safe and usable.

Too bad Google does a terrible job of it. No way am I signing up for a Google Domain in the future.

<comment><USER38> The point is not whether it is reasonable to do so or not; I agree that phishing sites should go.

The point is that there is a large lobby out there for knocking different types of content offline, and they don't show much concern for whether their demands also seem reasonable.

Most registrars feel they should not be in the content policing or law enforcement business. Google volunteering to do it in one area that makes sense opens the door for pressure to do it in other areas that make less sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A month or so ago, I was setting up a new system for writing internal-ish documentation and made the rather unpopular decision to not go with Gitbook because it was too reliant on their servers for my taste. Today, I got to send a very satisfying "told you so" the the team chat.

To be clear, I think the Gitbook team actually handled this very well and it wasn't their fault, but it does illustrate very clearly why we shouldn't be relying on cloud services when we really don't need to.

<comment><USER41> I'm surprised how few people in this space aren't packaging their apps up for on-prem customers.

* Fewer security and compliance hurdles when its on our own infra.

* Perfect uptime because it's our responsibility. (Not saying we're better but outages are our fault and don't make you look bad)

* Fewer hurdles when integrating LDAP and friends. There's no need for the weird "connectors" that companies come up with.

* We'll pay you more for the privilege of hosting it ourselves.

* Giving us access to the code in a shared source model buys you an extreme amount of lock-in since once we start tweaking our fork for our needs we're not leaving.

* The support burden is higher, sure but if it's your most expensive enterprise tier you'll almost always be working with a professional IT team.

* We're the easiest crowd to up sell and we'll even pay you to develop features you can sell to other people.

I don't want to make it seem like selling in enterprise isn't a slog but it's a good business to be in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > sent to an e-mail address on a domain they had just suspended...

I remember logging into an Ad Exchange account and discovering Google was sending emails to it. No one at the company was aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER43> When google said "Jump", you must say "How high?". But there is more. Google won't inform you the required height or doesn't define what jump is.

</comment><comment><USER44> The one surprising aspect about google domains - it is not integrated into Google cloud.. they are two separate products while AWS domain registration is part of aws cloud

<comment><USER45> Unlike Amazon, Google has more domain-related services than just Cloud - i.e. Analytics, Sites, Places, etc - which is probably why it's still independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wait until Google controls all of your traffic, with AMP, ads, Google Cloud and all their services. Flip the switch off for a business and kill.

</comment><comment><USER47> Try epik.com

</comment><comment><USER48> gitbook... who?

</comment><comment><USER49> Just out of curiosity- when Google is infamous for hard-to-reach human support, what in the Internet would make anyone interested to register their domain with them? Do they provide some sort of security or insurance that I am unaware of?

All the popular dedicated domain registrars I have used so far have excellent human support. Godaddy, namecheap, namesilo to name a few. I don't know if big companies or corporate use something more to secure their domain names and DNS, do they?

<comment><USER50> I moved/consolidated from GoDaddy and 101domain to Google Domains because of the support I've gotten from Google in the past (on Nexus/Pixel devices, Apps, Fiber, Fi, Stadia, etc).

I always assume the people complaining about nonexistent support from Google are trying to get support for something they aren't paying for. You pay for Domains, and the support reflects that. You probably can't get support for getting locked out of a consumer Gmail account or help uploading a YouTube video.

<comment><USER34> As a paying G Suite customer, all of my support experiences have been horrendous, including trying to unlock an employee's account that was locked for "spam".

The support agent couldn't do a single thing but tell me to wait for the possibly robotic appeals process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> A bit off topic but Google blocks me constantly from accessing my gmail account... is there anyway to disable the "suspicious activity" "protection"?

</comment><comment><USER52> Since no one else has gone there, does this qualify as "book burning"?

</comment><comment><USER53> I told you guys, don't use Google Cloud or any of their services, but GPC users thought they are smarter... keep shooting in your own foot.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you were hosting phishing sites then I'm glad they did this. You should have better controls.

<comment><USER55> There is spam on Facebook, there is spam on Reddit, there is spam on Twitter, there is spam on Hacker News.

Proactive spam control is not a solved problem anywhere. Banning a website over it is absurd.

<comment><USER56> Nuking a domain with no warning for any reason is nuts. They started to shut it down _before_ the email notification.

And any time support or PR is droning on about "muh policies" you know there are problems.</comment></comment></comment>


Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos calls Sundar Pichai a liar over China - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/11/09/google-ceo-pichai-called-a-liar-by-former-facebook-exec-for-defending-move-into-china/ <comment><USER3> Watching these guys argue is like watching mud-covered pigs argue about which one is dirtier.

</comment><comment><USER4> these guys (stamos and millen) are either being intentionally daft or are embarrassingly naive.

nobody needs a primer to decode pichai's statement. it's political positioning.

to think that these guys are shining a light is laughable. stamos is obviously using this to help wash his own hands of his complicity at fb. millen i don't know.

<comment><USER4> BTW the real horror here is not that google is lying to the public — that's expected. It's that they are lying to their employees. Just awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://outline.com/LgB7Bs](https://outline.com/LgB7Bs)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sensationalist much? And that too coming from a guy who worked for a company who is bending over backwards(Zuck on board for Tsinghua Univ, asking Chinese president to name his baby etc).

If not for China, there's no room for growth in traditional markets anymore. Yeah, there's Africa, South East Asia, but Google and FB already are putting on big efforts there. So whether you like it or not, if you want a billion users right away, you have to make a compromise. Apple did it, why not Google?

<comment><USER6> So...don't grow? I understand the pressures of Wall Street and being a publicly traded company, but Google (or Alphabet) is in an _incredibly_ unique situation that the founders can do whatever they want and not be ousted by shareholders. I don't know what it's like to be worth tens of billions of dollars, but maybe that should be enough?

<comment><USER7> I'm more and more becoming convinced that we should just put a hard cap on company size. It's radical, yes, but all attempts to regulate those large corporate behemoths either turn out to be toothless in practice, or so heavy- handed that they cause too much trouble to everybody else.

<comment><USER8> Just as radical, yes, but likely more effective would be to limit the size of political parties.

<comment><USER6> A much simpler and more effective method would be to create a minimum of 3 official political parties. That way it would not be entirely us-vs-them and so many other benefits, including a rank voting system which is _so_ much better.

I believe, with no hard evidence, that a 3 party system could solve most of the political problems facing the United States today. Because it would remove the incentives to be impossible to work with (although I feel this applies to one party more than the other, it definitely goes both ways).

<comment><USER7> If you create an electoral system that has ranked voting and, ideally, party- proportional representation (e.g. straight up party lists, or MMP), then you'll get more political parties pretty much automatically.

As it is, we already have more than 3 parties (not sure what "official" means in this context, since you don't really have to register a party in US for it to meaningfully exist). The problem is Duverger's Law, which confines mainstream politics to the top two, and presents a near-insurmountable barrier for everybody else.

<comment><USER6> You might find this interesting

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics- industry/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/politics-industry/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Kettle - <USER2>

<comment><USER10> The kettle sat upon the stove absorbing heat in order to control the state of the water contained within. Nearby a pot was perched over a burner, boiling away. The kettle thought to itself, "What a glorious tool am I. That I can heat water with such efficiency. When my contents have been coerced into the desired state, I force the water though my finely crafted spout to release a useful scream. My custom fit handle makes it an ease for my user to pour the liquid into the desired consumption vehicle. My construction is an economy of function--truly beautiful design. My creator must be proud. The ugly, black pot to my left is such a brutish tool in comparison. Boiling water with such a utensil would be utterly daft. I am the path to the future of water enhancing tools!"

After some time had passed, both the kettle and the pot rested above their heating elements, rigid in their stillness--charred, empty. No human had monitored the job these tools were designed to solve. The water was gradually vaporized until none could be found in its native form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > compared censorship there to the "right to be forgotten" law in the European > Union, which can force Google to delete data it holds on people who don't > want the information showing up in search results.

You see? Forcing us (google) to delete data is literally the same as surveillance capitalism that sends dissent to gulags. I literally can't tell the difference between the two.

/s

<comment><USER12> You're stretching his claim. He compared censored search to censored search. Nothing about reporting searches to private parties who requested to be forgotten (not happening) or to governments who requested some results be removed (speculated to be what Google would do). His comparison is still wrong for the reasons stated in the article but not as wrong as your comparison.</comment></comment>


Microsoft makes list of top 20 Linux kernel contributors - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2012/surprise-microsoft-list-top-linux-kernel-contributors/

<comment><USER2> This article is very light on details; the list of the top 20, and the contributions that got Microsoft on the list, are not presented. The included video is a shiny animation on how contributing to a FOSS project works.</comment>


Lies on the London Underground [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomscott.com/lies/ <comment><USER2> Another good reason for odd connections is that it's easier to guide people on common routes. For example, around Bank and Monument, it's often quicker to walk above ground - but only if you already know the route. If you're a tourist, you're herded underground with very clear signs.

It's like progressive disclosure in software. By requiring some level of expertise even to see the options, you help to ensure that novices can't accidentally break things (in theory, at least). Imagine what would happen if TfL did this explicitly with signs saying:

<\-- Quick route that way :: Easy route that way -->

They're making the decision for you, assuming that if you're not sure, then you need the easy route.

Other examples of this in the physical world:

* The 'Black diamond' lane in airports (especially when they weren't advertised)

* Special unadvertised rates in hotels

* Theme parks with tickets for bypassing queues, though when these are advertised, they're more like price discrimination than progressive disclosure.

<comment><USER3> The signs aren't always very clear. King's Cross being the worst culprit. Arriving on the Northern Line then changing to the Circle line, will take a few minutes or almost 10 depending on which end of the train you get off. This happened to me a few weeks ago when I blindly followed the signs right in front of me. The directions are different depending on which end of the train you get off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You often get these sorts of "lies" on the road network. Signs will attempt to send you on a lengthy jaunt around the outside of a town even if the road through town is major and quicker.

Google Maps and sat nav devices tend to send you the more direct route, however, so I wonder if this technique may prove useless in future and force significant redesigns or even laws to prevent navigational devices making these suggestions.

A memorable one for me is the A6/A7 through Lyon (France). The signs are adamant you should take a 10 mile detour to head south of Lyon despite the A6 (solely marked as "Lyon Centre") going in a straight line under the city without interruption. August is probably the only time it makes sense and even then the entire A6 is blocked as it is..

<comment><USER5> Users generally want the fastest route, which is congestion-dependent. If they directed everyone down the shortcut it would become congested, and wouldn't be the fastest route any more, and you'd be asking why they directed everyone down it :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> A good moment to plug the book 'Traffic' - <http://tomvanderbilt.com/traffic/the-book/>

A good (geeky) read about all kinds of traffic issues including routing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best thing about London underground, now that I no longer live in London, is that it's not me with the long, grey, miserable face any longer.

Next time you're on the tube, especially at commuter time, take a look up and down the carriage at all the miserable sods slumped there, and try to smile.

I find it hard to suppress outright laughter these days.

<comment><USER7> Possibly the most annoying thing in the entire world is standing on a tube to work and have some bastard breeze into the carriage, obviously on holiday, and loudly declaim how miserable everyone looks and how glad they are that _they_ don't have to do this every day.

<comment><USER8> You know what's worse than commuting by tube? Commuting by public transport anywhere in America. I mean sure you can always get a seat on the Caltrain, but if you miss it you have to wait _one whole hour_ for the next one. Oh and if someone voluntarily or involuntarily commits suicide at one of the many at- grade crossings (for bullet trains) you will be 3 hours late because _there is no alternate route_.

Granted, I cycle to work because commuting by tube is not the most pleasant experience, but I _love_ being able to get anywhere in the city at the drop of a hat without the burden of car ownership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I thought this was going to be about the hidden stations, defunct tunnels and some of the ghost stories surrounding the London Underground (not that I'm in any way trying to undermine the point of that video either).

The London Underground fascinates me. The number of older rail networks (there was once a stretch of tunnels that were little wider than a crouched person and used either for mail or money - i forget which). The tunnels used during WWII as Churchill's bunker. The closed stations that feel like eerie to walk around. The hidden tunnel that were dug at Tottenham Court Road purely as a way to displace the other dirt due to the logistics of the location of the station. The experiments with spiral escalators...and so on.

It's a great marvel to think what the Victorians gave us Londoners more than 100 years ago. They saw out the old century with a world pioneering transport network. Then 100 years on, a technologically superior country decides to celebrate it's century with a big, ugly dome. :(

<comment><USER10> Pardon my ignorance but what is this dome you speak of?

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Dome>

Now privately owned as the O2 Arena: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_O2_Arena>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are various "walking tube maps" that show you where it's quicker to walk between two stations:-

[http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/images/tube_walklines_fin...](http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/images/tube_walklines_final_lm.gif)

</comment><comment><USER13> When I was a fresh-faced student in London, I had to go from the Strand to Covent Garden. This is about 500 yards.

Or three changes on the tube. Guess which one I took?

Eventually one works this all out, you know which doors to stand at to be close to the exit on your next station, why going up down stairwells is a popular pasttime, that St Pauls and the City are warrens of short cuts, something that is not possible in boringly grid like cities such as Manhattan. Really guys. I have walked across half of Manhatten and just counted the streets and never gotten lost. I can get lost in ten minutes in central London. Stumbling across random streets you have never seen in twenty years of living in London - that's what I call a "proper" city.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks so much for posting this. I was wondering why since the redesign my movement at Kings Cross was taking so much longer than the route my parents would take with me as a kid going to London for day trips to the Science Museum or zoo.

If I lived in London I'd like to think I would make a project out of finding all the shortcuts and hacks like this applicable to my routine. I'm sure the video is only the tip of the iceberg (especially as Tom Scott generally really knows how to make his stuff short and sweet - anyone else feel the video was edited to pretty much perfection?).

<comment><USER15> > I would make a project out of finding all the shortcuts and hacks like this > applicable to my routine

I'm often amazed at how often people don't do this. The last place I worked was always a nightmare to get to because of traffic, so I worked out all the possible shortcuts I could take depending on where the congestion was. I thought everyone did, until I was discussing this with colleagues who then revealed they just set off for work earlier.

One of them even _lived_ right nearby and didn't know some of these shortcuts - all you needed was google maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the "lie". So, there are times you can walk faster between tube stations than you can travel on the tube. The map doesn't seem to claim otherwise.

<comment><USER17> The lie isn't that you can walk faster between two points on the map than by taking one or more trains... the lie is that by following the signs, you can get from one train to the next in the most efficient manner. People expect signs to take them on the most efficient route... they don't expect to be routed half way around London to get from one train to the next when a short escalator ride to the surface and through 2 doors you can achieve your same goal...

... though it is a low tech solution to an otherwise extremely costly redesign of the station.

<comment><USER18> I think they have sacrified efficiency for no crushes or stampedes.

I don't class it as a 'lie' to quietly favour crowds flowing in a safe manner over the quickest route. They are the experts in what is safe for peak crowds, not some bloggers.

Of course I regard it a 'lie' that the platform crowding at places like Bank is very safe at all.

<comment><USER19> Did you watch the video all the way through? Their closing conclusion is that London Underground are experts in what is safe for peak crowds.

Calling it a "lie" is effective headline writing.

<comment><USER18> Actually I had to piece it together from other commentators... My employer sensibly bans youtube videos.

I responded to the comment and the 'lie' title

<comment><USER20> But you're allowed to post on HN?

Besides, watch videos and stuff at work on a phone over your own data connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've often taken the Kings Cross exit towards the trains and wondered why the hell it was so long.. Now I know better >:)

</comment><comment><USER22> Thank the Lord that thus far I haven't had to get a tube as part of my commute! The overground every day is bad enough, and I almost always get a seat and can look out of the window there. Roll on the day where working from home as a developer is the default rather than a rare privilege!

</comment><comment><USER11> One thing they didn't mention about the last example - which way to go on the Victoria platform at KX, is that if you get off down the other end of the platform, exit signs do point the shorter way - they divide it up so 20-30% go the quick way, the rest get pointed the longer route.

</comment><comment><USER23> Relevant: 'Here's how central London would look if the Tube map was geographically correct' <http://www.mapfodder.com/london.html>

<comment><USER24> And Wikipedia has a geographically accurate tube map: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Underground_f...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:London_Underground_full_map.png) ;)

<comment><USER25> For some reason I find that map quite disturbing - like I'm very very drunk and looking at a "proper" Tube map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Kings Cross example is in part due to the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. The newer exit is much nearer to St Pancras so if the test had been the Eurostar entrance then I'm not sure who would have won.

Given the location of the new concourse this is not as bad as it used to be. I suspect it would however be better if they sign posted the old exit onto the Euston Road as being for the buses stops, otherwise you end up walking for 5 minutes in the wrong direction and have to double back when you get above ground.

</comment><comment><USER27> So, people are "on to" the lies. At my local station (Archway), at the bottom of the escalators, there are two paths to the platforms, and they are routed one way to correspond well with the direction of the escalators. Except, people will happily walk into the wrong direction in their quest to one-up the system, often causing other passengers to have to dodge oncoming traffic, even at off-peak times.

But I get it, I measured it out once. One of the tunnels is 12 steps longer than the other.

</comment><comment><USER28> While people are generally discussing their discomfort with using the tube I'd just like to chip in my main concern with it being around 50 Celcius constantly year round down there.... (yes, I exaggerate slightly, but not by much!)

</comment><comment><USER29> Tube map doesn't say it's scaled so therefore the argument 'look how close these two stations are on the map' isn't valid.

</comment><comment><USER30> Bank is the Hogwarts of tube stations.

<comment><USER31> It took me 2 years to learn the warren that is the Bank/Monument complex and figure out efficient shortcuts (by purposely ignoring the signs).

Then someone made this: <http://stations.aeracode.org/#bnk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is dumb, you're not meant to use it to go 5 minutes up the road.

</comment><comment><USER33> First, get this off of HN please. I don't see the direct relevance.

Second, if this does have some relevance to HN with regards to usability, then this is a usability success, not a failure. Are there more efficient ways for _one_ person to navigate the tube system. Absolutely. Does this means it will be efficient for all. No.

<comment><USER34> You seem unreasonably grumpy... take a breath, chill out. I enjoyed the video and upvoted it - as did many others, clearly. It's of interest to hackers. Tom Scott is also "one of us" - a geek comedian. Probably one of the reasons why others have been upvoting this.

You might enjoy this excellent video of his talk at Ignite a few years back: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMdOT8YJgY>

<comment><USER25> "You seem unreasonably grumpy"

Probably came into work via the Tube :-)

<comment><USER33> Hehe, fair enough. Sorry if you thought my tone was a bit off! I don't know who the author is or what he does, I'm just getting increasingly frustrated with the content that's upvoted on this site.

 _as did many others, clearly_

I, like many longstanding active members here, care about the community and I don't see the relevance. It has nothing to do with hacking, entrepreneurship, or is generally all that interesting. But the author got my click, my eyeballs and my response, so he wins.

ps - Didn't take the tube in, I work from home :) I think the tube is very well maintained actually.</comment></comment></comment></comment>