Gwern's Law: Ads cost you a tenth of your users - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1103855323100708866 <comment><USER2> I believe it. There are a lot of games that I downloaded from the app store and really liked initially. However, I noticed a pattern. At first, ads seemed to be optional (i.e double your gems by watching an ad!) However, after about 10 minutes of playing, I'd see an ad. No big deal. But then it got more and more aggressive. Pretty soon there was an ad after every single level, (plus the bonus ad if you want to double gems). It got to the point I was spending about 50% of the time actually playing games, 50% of the time watching ads (the levels could be beaten in 30 seconds or so).

At that point I uninstall even though the game is fun. It's not like I can just pay a 1 time fee to get rid of all ads with the type of game I am talking about. I have paid to get rid of ads for a few bucks in the past, but these games will _still_ pester you with in game pop-ups for "diamond memberships" (outrageous recurring subscription fee for nominal and significant bonuses) and "best value" gem packs (also sold at outrageous prices going up to $100 for the biggest pack).

<comment><USER3> One of my favorite mobile games (an old Popcap title) used to have a version which cost ~$10 and was just a no-frills port of the original.

No ads, no permissions beyond file storage, no issues working offline.

But you can't buy that anymore; now the only option is a 'free' version which has ads that you cannot pay away.

Fortunately I can still download the old version from the app store; now it is called 'zzSUNSET <game>' in the list of purchased apps. But I'm amazed at how consumer-hostile game companies have gotten; I guess the ads must pay out the wazoo. It makes me really hesitant to try any new mobile game, especially since I don't really have much time for them these days. I'm not going to spend 30 seconds out of every 1-5 minute diversion watching an ad, that's ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> I think my conscience would be more satisfied working in porn than mobile gaming.

<comment><USER5> I worked in mobile gaming and would never work in porn (unless it was like filtering or prosecuting creators). A coworker hard a good point to say what the people who are addicted to mobile games would be addicted/spend money on if they didn't play. It's possible they would be buying meth/booze with it.

<comment><USER6> We don't hand children meth so that they behave, but we do with mobile games.

<comment><USER4> In fact this is almost exactly what happens with many children being prescribed Adderall.

<comment><USER7> To counteract your bullshit...

If someone has ADHD, adderall slows them down so they can concentrate. It reduces mind-fog from too much stimulus.

If you don't have ADHD, its like a super cup of coffee, but in pill form.

My doctor was trying to figure out my cognitive issue. And for a time, I was on adderall. It was pretty easy to tell that I didn't have ADHD, since I started getting upper'd. Felt nice, don't get me wrong. But I'll stick with coffee.

<comment><USER8> More interesting question: How do we know regular drug users are not self medicating.

<comment><USER9> They in fact frequently are. There are huge communities dedicated to that on the Internet. BTW a lot of the previously illegal and unthinkable treatments these people used have just been legalised in the EU, using MDMA etc.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. And although I wouldn't recommend the self-medicating route, it's hard to deny that there are some people who get much better results doing that than getting "official" medical help.

<comment><USER9> Professionals can be found even though its illegal. I wouldn't recommend self- medication either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More detailed discussion of the 4 other datapoints: [https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication](https://www.gwern.net/Ads#replication) (I added McCoy et al 2007 just last night, so now it's 5 total: me, Pandora, Mozilla, LinkedIn, and McCoy et al 2007.)

<comment><USER12> It's often said that less than 10% of users click ads. If there would be way to identify those users with reasonably low false positive rate, you could annoy only small fraction of users and keep more of them (if you want to have them).

<comment><USER13> Yeah, that's the thing. I will never (except possibly accidentally) click on an ad. Every single time I see an add in my Instagram feed, I mark it as "not relevant". And yet these days I see ads every 5-7 photos in my feed. I use Instagram _much_ less now because of the quantity of ads, and Instagram should clearly be able to tell that I don't interact with ads at all except to get rid of them. I've probably reduced my use of the app by 75% or so (both viewing and posting), solely because of ads.

<comment><USER14> What are you trying to accomplish by clicking "not relevant"?

<comment><USER13> My (naive) hope was that after a while they'd give up.

Is there a better response, you think, that would possibly decrease the number of ads I see?

<comment><USER15> The "not relevant" button certainly means "please, show me other kinds of ads".

<comment><USER13> I've tried "I see this too often" for a period of time without any better results.

And in the end, I don't really see much variety in the ads I see. Decent variety in account/company, but very little variety in product/market type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If a game doesn't offer any way to pay to remove ads, it's an instant uninstall for me.

If a game does offer it, but doesn't let me play for long enough to decide whether I like the game before it starts serving up unskippable ads, I uninstall it.

Most games simply don't give enough time to decide if you even like it before they start throwing ads at you. That seems like a terrible policy in general, regardless of whether you have a "skip ads" IAP or not. You want to wait until the player has made up their mind about your game before you start degrading the experience. This seems like such an obvious thing I don't know why so many games are so bad about it.

<comment><USER17> I'm about to release a fun little ambient physics based puzzle game on iOS and have been debating this. To me ads are a stain on what I consider my art. But at the same time I want to monetize and wonder if people will skip over a $1.99 download. What do you think? Ads with the option to unlock? Seems gross though... maybe free with paid version that includes level editor or additional level packs?

<comment><USER18> I think the classic "shareware demo" model is a good one, have some free stuff to introduce the user and make sure they like the game, then give them a wall and tell them to pay if they want more. It's fair to them and fair to you. It doesn't violate their privacy, it makes sure your customers actually want to be your customers (reducing chargebacks because the game has an issue for someone) and you get paid without polluting your art.

<comment><USER19> I actually like a "skill shareware" (my made up name) model in puzzle games. When you have lots of levels, you split them into groups. You can only advance to the next one if you solve all previous ones perfectly, (3 stars / 100% / some other metric) or pay for full unlock.

I've never been on the other side, so I don't know how well that converts. But as a customer, I love the idea. "Euclidea" does this for example: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hil_hk.euc...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hil_hk.euclidea) They also have IAP for dark mode.

<comment><USER18> As a customer it may be great, but this isn't great for the developer in my opinion. Perhaps it's just the way I play, but I will already refuse to advance until I've got a level fully beaten, so I'll basically keep at that until I get bored of your game or beat it fully and you'll never see a penny from me.

<comment><USER18> To add to this a bit, it also provides a motivation for developers to make games that are too hard and will force users to pay if they want to enjoy them, but people who play like I do will get bored quickly.

This is why I loved the old Peggle games from PopCap but hate the new mobile one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like advertisements ruin everything. I remember driving onto the my air force base and being thankful that all the visual pollution was gone. It was like stepping into another world. Now the internet has ads everywhere. I find the attention economy awful and dystopian. I'd gladly pay to never see another ad.

<comment><USER21> I remember reading about someone that built a system where you put $X in to a pot every month, and every page you visit gets $X/pages_visited. This allows you to directly monetize creators without ads.

I cannot for the life of me find it - does it ring any bells with anyone?

<comment><USER22> Ironically(?), Google Contributor is a thing:

[https://contributor.google.com/](https://contributor.google.com/)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it ads, or slowly-loading ad-sized content?

One thing I've noticed is that ads seem like an afterthought in most apps. The New York Times iPhone app displays ads, even if you pay for it, and occasionally the entire app will freeze while it's waiting for ads to download. (The app works offline, but if it gets a hint of network availability, it will stop the world to try and download them. Usually as your train is leaving the subway station with a 4G signal entering the tunnel without.) The Wall Street Journal app is similar, except instead of freezing completely, scrolling starts to run at about 5Hz instead of the expected 60Hz. Obviously, the developers of the apps develop it with ads turned off (or with sample images loaded from servers they control with no DNS lookup latency, etc.), so probably aren't even aware of these issues. That is going to reduce subscriptions, even if the images weren't ads.

</comment><comment><USER24> I tried to get my young son into original Angry Birds, thinking it would be a nice simple physics lesson for him, but it has become absolutely unnavigateable for his age level. So many pop up special offers for magic birds to solve the level, cut scene product placement, and other in game purchases, that I can't trust those games to not get him lost in a maze of advertising bullcrap.

I paid for this game, a kids game I thought, why can't I just enjoy it with my son?

<comment><USER25> Basically, everyone that makes games now knows how insanely lucrative it can be. I am not sure if this is caused by sales/marketing/executives but games now can generate massive cash.

Many games now offer micro-transactions, casino style loot crates where you can open them by buying keys to have a chance of wining something. Even I bought a few things in games. However, many others young or old drop massive amount of cash on some games. My uncle drops thousands of dollar in world of tanks(or whatever it is called) to have the best tank. Plus, those game can create gambling addiction in kids, I think it is quite sad.

<comment><USER24> Oh man, sorry for your uncle blowing that amount!

Speaking of training kids to gamble, I'm gonna thread jack with a public service announcement, please avoid letting your kids see any "Surprise Egg" videos all costs. I downloaded "you-tube kids", their supposedly safe curated experience, and almost half of the recommended videos on a completely clean user install was this moronic kiddy click bait that turns youngsters into drooling dopamine rinsed zombies, primed for our loot-box overlords.

Un-install, go play outside.

[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern- minds/201703/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/modern- minds/201703/welcome-the-madness-and-mystery-surprise-egg-videos)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I believe it. I've stopped playing games with ads altogether. I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have time for ads. Apparently 90% of users do though, so they'll continue to fill up the "top games" lists and make it impossible for us to find good ad-free games in the app stores. Even worse now that google removed the "contains ads" tag from the play store top game lists. _sigh_

<comment><USER27> > I'd rather pay $40-60 for a game that keeps me in the story. I don't have > time for ads.

Old-fashioned console and PC gaming is still a thing, though mobile inspired microtransactions are starting to creep into the market.

<comment><USER26> Yes and I am very appreciative of companies like Nintendo who keep the art alive. I feel the phone market has untapped potential still.

<comment><USER28> The Nintendo Switch's start screen has ads on it. When you turn the console on from sleep mode, it shows flashy images entitled "Featured News" on the left third of the lock screen. [1] I tried to disable it, but apparently you cannot unsubscribe from the preloaded "news" channels.

When I play Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the in-game experience is mostly ad-free, but there is a side quest on my quest log that appears to be a cross-promotion with some non-Nintendo game.

It's really frustrating that Nintendo is also doing this bullshit now, even if in moderation.

[1] Representative example: [http://www.bearingnews.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_49...](http://www.bearingnews.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/03/IMG_4920.jpg)

<comment><USER26> I think an ad outside of a game is fine if it's not too excessive, but I too was disappointed to see cross-game "ad" content being baked into The Legend of Zelda DLC.

<comment><USER10> > I think an ad outside of a game is fine if it's not too excessive

I don't, if the ad is on a device or program that I've paid cash money for.

<comment><USER28> Exactly. I didn't pay 300€ for an ad delivery mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is interesting and valuable analysis. Despite a lot of people in this thread saying "See! I told you ads are user toxic!" I'd easily make this tradeoff if I had no/limited other sources of revenue.

Two additional questions I have are: 1) Which 10% of users churn because of ads? Are these just average p50% actives or are they power users who evangalize your product? 2) What's the effect on annual growth rate?

<comment><USER30> I think the real key takeaway is the graph he has about what type of ads are served. I'll deal with inline ads, but I'm closing the window if you think a popup is okay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I assumed this would be the case and removed ads from my web game about a year ago. But didn't see a difference with traffic or retention (granted, I didn't A/B test it! I removed them 100%). Which was disappointing. The only difference I noticed is that I lost that revenue (5 figures).

But probably depends on volume and/or type of ads?

[EDIT] Clarified re: traffic

<comment><USER11> 'Revenue'!='users'. EDIT: and 10% is, while important, a pretty subtle difference compared to the enormous variability of traffic. Traffic is a time- series which drifts and has many potentially large jumps. If you removed ads only once, how would you ever notice? The effect is very noticeable if you look at samples with _n_ in the millions, or if you remove/add scores of times and model it statistically, though.

<comment><USER13> A very good point -- if you don't have other sources of revenue aside from ads, and can't run the site/game/whatever without that, 10% of your users gone might be a perfectly reasonable trade off for the ad revenue that keeps the site running.

I think you mention later in the Twitter thread that Patreon has given you much more recurring revenue than ads? I wish operators would spend the time to look at the effectiveness of ad alternatives as you've done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really do think the way ads are presented and how they are embedded matters. E.g., a static banner, embedded statically server-side without tracking and targeting, respectfully sitting besides the content may be not offensive to anyone. We may even appreciate that the advertiser is supporting the content we like, a positive image transfer besides the needs of last week's shopping list (of which we're kept reminded just too often by common advertising practice). On the other hand, what we mostly see, is advertising going off- the-rails, competing with the content (reading a news site is often some of a glimpse of war of its own today, at least visually), aggressive tracking and targeting, in combination fostering the feeling that the ad-networks and by this also the hosting site are actively working against you, providing the content just as a pretext for exploitation. Something has gone terribly wrong. (I've actually not bought products, I would have bought else, because of advertising practices.)

Edit: As an ethical workaround, I find myself increasingly opening a site in broser A without blocker and then copying the URL to another browser B with blocking, because I can't concentrate on the content anymore, or maybe switching to reader mode to consume the content. But, does presenting the ads to me make any sense at all? Most interestingly, this would result in inflated user statitistics. Maybe, we're seeing a combination of both?

</comment><comment><USER33> That would make sense. Ads are designed to be visible and clicked on, but on the other hand you can't go too far without annoying the users. It's a fine line to walk so it's not surprising you'd lose some users as a result. The unblockable ads they had on Facebook at some point is what finally pushed me to close my account.

<comment><USER34> _but on the other hand you can 't go too far without annoying the users_

Back in the ancient history before Google and search engines, a web site I built was submitted for inclusion in DMOZ. At the time, all web sites were hand-approved by an editor who also wrote a description of the site.

The site was included, but the description noted that it was "covered with too many ads" or something similar.

The site had one 468x60 static image banner ad, and one 236x60 static image ad.

My how our standards have changed.

<comment><USER35> Maybe your standards have changed, but that's still too much for me. I don't mind guest posts or (mentioned) sponsored content, however I will always use ublock to remove ads.

It would be different if the _typical_ ad experience were a related, useful product. But it's always unrelated hot garbage - distracting and annoying at any pixel size.

<comment><USER34> _that 's still too much for me_

Reasonable ads don't bother me.

I don't long for the day when I can install an ad blocker in my car's windshield so I don't see billboards or the names of car dealerships on the backs of the other cars.

Then again, when I drive someplace where there's too many billboards I find it annoying.

<comment><USER13> I would absolutely love an ad blocker for my car's windshield (or, since I don't drive much, some sort of AR glasses that block ads). I find advertising unbearable. People's tolerance levels are different.

I wouldn't say that your old site, with its two image ads, was "covered with too many ads", but I would still expect an ad blocker to remove them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't have the data anymore, but based on my memory of the time, I don't think reddit saw any difference in traffic when we launched ads (which was more than 10 years ago).

That's not to say that it wouldn't change now, but just throwing out there that it didn't make a difference then.

<comment><USER37> Reddit lost me with the redesign to track and monetize. maybe 2-3 years ago? I had 250k karma all from mindful comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > So now there are 4 independent quasi-/experimental datapoints (me, Pandora, > LinkedIn, & Mozilla resp) showing that a standard load of ads vs no ads > decreases total consumption/activity by 10–15%.

From the tweet itself, this is 10% of activity, not users. Kind of suspect that someone misinterpreted their own data so significantly.

<comment><USER11> I disagree about it being a misinterpretation. They are measuring different things because they have to, but if you read the papers, you see that that's the net effect and most reasonable way to summarize them: an 11% reduction in intention to visit, a 9% reduction in total traffic, a similar reduction in total web browsing per individual, and in the case of LinkedIn, you can see both a decrease in users _and_ activity per user, which net to the >10% reduction in total activity. This is as it must be (what is a web browser user going to do - stop using web browsers completely and quit the Internet entirely...? Not likely! Reduction in web usage is their only possible response.) How else could one reasonably summarize that in a few words?

<comment><USER38> In analytics there are ways to discuss activity like: visits per month, pages per session, time on site, conversion rate, etc.

It's possible for any of those activity metrics to go down 10% without losing any active users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is pretty interesting. I'd love to see the analysis broken down by some measure of the ads' "annoyingness." For example, what is the harm from an animated gif ad vs. a text ad?

</comment><comment><USER40> A site with ads is guaranteed to not care about how you use it. A site that takes your money is one that will care about the experience. Seeing an ad is an instant "if I can't use reading mode I just block the site". Life is too short to waste your attention on people selling you crap.

</comment><comment><USER41> While ads may cost you 10% of your users, it may also be responsible for up to 100% of your revenue.

<comment><USER42> That's your own fault if that's the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> > @Piccirello: What viable alternatives exist that don't directly charge the > user and therefore disadvantage the less privileged? Is JavaScript-based > crypto mining feasible?

That leads to an interesting thought. Ads are definitely one of the more egalitarian ways of getting payment from people, as they sap time and attention somewhat equally (or randomized along a fairly predictable spectrum not affected by most differentiators, I would think), and in proportion to how much you use something.

Also, the ones problematic form a privacy perspective likely screw people over equally as well.

</comment><comment><USER44> I might be one of the 10% mentioned here. It was sefinitly true for instagram since facebook took over. If every 5th image in my stream is a sponsered ad by nike or some startup it _doesn't feel like my stream anymore_. There is weird content coming out of nowhere that I didn't ask for. Effectively I just ended up using it less and less, till I sropped using it entirely.

<comment><USER45> This is exactly why I quit pinterest. A good 10% of the content are ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Could just be an effect of page load time?

Any attempt to rule out confounding parameters - on the web ads increase pageload a heap.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was a long time mobile Chrome user (until my recent switch to Firefox which allows me to block ads). My rule then was to move onto another source if I couldn't find one place on the page unimpeded by ads or spammy shite from Taboola et al. News sites are definitely the biggest offender here.

<comment><USER48> You can block ads in chrome too. Ublock is on both ff and chrome or you could install a chromium based browser with native ad blocking like brave or opera.

<comment><USER49> He meant mobile Chrome, which doesn't have extensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I have been seeing Squarespace ads on YouTube nearly for every video. I hate it and I just gives thumbs down hoping it will go away. Nope.

Although the echo effect is real, I have to say I do not and will not use Squarespace simply because of the ads. It's insane. Same music, same video over and over.

/rant

<comment><USER51> Why don't you use an adblocker or pay for YouTube premium to support your content creators.

<comment><USER50> My conscious choice NOT to pay premium. Content creators already get $$ for views.

<comment><USER52> Aren't youtube ads pay per click? In which case adblock doesn't cost the creator money (if you weren't going to click an ad), and their viewer/subscriber count is still normal (important for non-youtube sponsors)

<comment><USER53> Pretty sure they aren't -- on my PS4 for example, YouTube shows ads just like on PC/mobile, but they're totally unclickable. There's no button for "see more on this ad" or anything.

I know this because it has shown an ad for something that I was interested in buying, and I tried everything to get to the ad and couldn't. Ended up having to Google it on my phone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> > I feel like I'm on crazy-pills with this topic. No one links to my page, > hardly any orgs run these experiments, no one upvotes them on Reddit or HN

Gwern is on crazy pills because this is a feature not a bug. Your users are there to generate ad revenue - not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER55> Are the 10%-15% who bail free users, or paying users? Number of free users is only a good metric if you have ads. Without ads, a better metric is needed, like revenue.

The other thing we need is a real alternative. Ads are more or less unanimously not beloved, but bootstrapping revenue and funding are real problems. Worse than losing 10% of your customers is losing 100% of your customers because you can't afford to stay in business. No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren't going away until there's a way to fund your site/org/business.

<comment><USER10> > No matter how much everyone dislikes ads, they aren't going away until > there's a way to fund your site/org/business.

The problem isn't that there aren't other ways of generating revenue. There are lots of them. The problem is that carrying ads is the easiest way -- it requires almost no development effort.

<comment><USER55> That doesn't answer my question. The question isn't what ways there are to generate revenue, it's what is the right metric. Number of users dropping doesn't mean that revenue is dropping, so it's not a great metric to demonstrate that ads are bad. If we want to show that adding ads to a site is damaging, we have to show that it's actually damaging, rather than you lose a fraction of the people who were mooching anyway.

I'm not sure I agree there are lots of ways to generate revenue, and more importantly that there are _reliable_ ways to generate revenue when bootstrapping a small company. If there were reliable ways to do it, ads wouldn't be such a big problem. The scourge of ads is evidence that finding revenue sources isn't reliable.

The main sources of funding for small companies are: loans, grants, personal savings, friends & family, angels, VCs, sales, and ads. Sales and ads are the only sustainable long term strategies unless you're going for government funding of research or a public service. Sales requires a product with market fit, i.e., a bootstrapped company. For most early stage companies that leaves only ads as a potential positive long-term revenue stream. What other options are there?

Making money with ads requires an audience, which requires having something of value. In that sense, it does require development effort. Maybe installing the ad into an iframe is easy, but getting enough people to your site isn't trivial.

<comment><USER10> > The main sources of funding for small companies are: loans, grants, personal > savings, friends & family, angels, VCs, sales, and ads.

Funding a startup is an entirely different, and more complicated, topic than what I was addressing. However, I would mention that what you list there are not the only options.

For instance, I've started a number of successful companies without requiring more than a small amount (four figures) of seed money from my own savings, and bootstrapping from there, growing the companies from the revenues streams they create.

Admittedly, this isn't an approach that appeals to everyone or is feasible for all sorts of business. It requires a lot more work and causes initial growth to be very slow (but the payoff is no debt), but it works for me and demonstrates that in the real world there are numerous workable approaches.

> In that sense, it does require development effort.

Yes, but that's precisely the same amount of development effort required no matter what your revenue model is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> If any app or service offers me the ability to pay them money in exchange for removing ads, I do

I do this even if the price is rather large. I think the most I've ever paid is $25 but I'd go higher.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm curious about the numbers for websites automatically playing videos. I find these even more annoying than 80% of ads and they often don't get blocked. And I personally run a domain blocker plugin just for these sites. Playing a video I didn't ask for? Bye forever. Most sites with this problem have 10 competitors just on that page of search results.

</comment><comment><USER58> The guys who built RealClearPolitics built a sort of "pay to eliminate ads" feature.[1] I wonder if they saw Gwern's Law in action.

[1] [http://subscriptions.publir.com/](http://subscriptions.publir.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Ads strike me as a laughable local maximum on our ability to monetize spare brain cycles of the human mind. Critical thinking cycles, arguably the most precious resource, is subverted for single digit clickthrough rates. Ad tech makes me cry, and after reading science fiction, depressed. Let's please please gtfo out of this paradigm and figure out how to bootstrap these things between our ears for creation, than consumption, of something.

And to go a bit deeper for a moment, it seems likely to me that what we now call critical thinking is the same thing as what Chomsky and Berwick mean when they use the word "language": an ability to hierarchically represent the world using symbols. Our "external representation" or ability to communicate ideas to one another, according to them is a byproduct of that effect. This was from their recent book, Why Only Us, and go on to point to the specific gene, FOXP2, that they believe caused this ability for the mind, and then assert that this emergence caused us to leave Africa (Out of Africa Theory). And if that's even remotely true, then the human mind is inherently more able and creative than we will ever know. Or said another way, the cross product of Dunning & Kruger with Berwick & Chomsky suggests an almost infinite unawareness of our own potential. \- How do we know that the 10% drop off in traffic isn't "just" due to the increase of latency by the nature of adding additional the additional ad package that dispatches and draws on the main thread, slowing everything down (Linden, 2006)?

[http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk- at-s...](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/12/slides-from-my-talk-at- stanford.html)

</comment><comment><USER60> Ads cost a tenth of my users, but I gain 100% of my income. No regrets.

</comment><comment><USER61> In a similar vein. Anti-adblock measures will pretty much guarantee I never come back. I'd love to be able to filter them from my search results. Plenty of domains I would blacklist.

</comment><comment><USER62> Only if they are done intrusively. Nobody cares about the ads on CrossMe, for example...but Jewels Jungle, the interstitials may aggravate a small number.

<comment><USER63> I have troubles with the concept of a "non-intrusive" ad - If you don't notice it to any degree, it's not doing its job, and if you DO notice it to any degree, it's intrusive and disruptive (to a matching degree)

I think you mean "Nobody cares ENOUGH" rather than "Nobody cares", and that's a big distinction.

<comment><USER64> You may have a point. Maybe we need to draw a distinction between "non- intrusive" and "non-distracting".

Ads should not move, period. No animated gif's, no video. And for $DIETY's sake, no audio. NONE. No audio. EVER.

Slicing up the reading in the middle. Covering with spashes, etc. I just close the tab.

But a non-distracting static ad? It is easy to ignore if I don't care, but if, in fact, it is something I care about I will see it. Ads that relate to my needs at work or to my hobbies will likely get clicked on. Non-distracting will keep me from closing the website, relevant and timely will get me to click on the ad.

The human mind is funny that way. A non-intrusive, non-distracting ad for, say, carpet, I likely won't even notice. But display a non-intrusive, non- distracting ad of exactly the same size for a piece of shiny, new, ham radio gear... it will get noticed. It might even get me to think about my credit card limit. Basic psycho-perception at work.

<comment><USER65> Some ads are intrusive in the way that they highjack my thought processes. I'm reading about hard-drives, I don't want to think about science fiction right now, and vice versa. So unobtrusive also means matching the content in spirit. (I might be fine with related tech, for example.)

At that point there shouldn't even be any point in user preference tracking any more. I even click these ads on occasion if they seem trustworthy (another important point - there is still too many 'You won a car!'/'Lose weight with one simple trick!'/'Doctors hate him!' kind of ads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Additionally, 26 percent of desktop and 15 percent of mobile users block ads, so those studies already exclude the most ad-averse part of the user base.

</comment><comment><USER67> but can you rephrase that in terms of revenue? and tbh 10% is right about the amount of pain you 'd expect to inflict to monetize your traffic.

<comment><USER11> No, because that will depend on the purpose of a site, what alternative revenue streams there, the site owners' utility preferences between traffic and revenue, what sort of ads there are, what sort of clickthrough rate they have, what the advertising rate is, and so on. At best, you can make a directional generalization: given that people systematically appear to underestimate the effects of ads (they just don't know), there is probably a large but unknown number of people who have overshot the optimal number of ads by an unknown amount, which will be different for each person.

In contrast, the binary variable ads/no-ads appears to have a (surprisingly) consistent effect on general metrics of users/usage, as measured by 5 very different large-scale studies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Life hack for stopping ads on mobile games: Turn off internet connection.

So far this has worked for me with solo games.

</comment><comment><USER69> Surely any user that's going to bail because of advertising is already blocking the ads anyway?

<comment><USER70> I don't object to advertising - it is how free news sights should pay for themselves. I understand and accept the deal. However this is a two way deal, they give me "free" content in exchange for me seeing the ads. If the ads are too intrusive they have violated their end of the contract and I leave.

<comment><USER65> I actually don't really block ads, I block tracking and by-default scripting (I whitelist pages), plus enforced https. That gets rid of almost all of the ads. If they can't give me ads without these things, their problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> (sardonic) True, but did you want those users if they aren't even willing to spend money?

<comment><USER72> Sometimes. Those users are potential advertisers for your site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I mean, sure, but they also often fund 100% of your users.

</comment><comment><USER74> Not having ads costs you 100% of your members if it's the only way to monetize your content (not all content is suited to be supported by paywalls or Patreon).

<comment><USER40> Is the content worth anything then? Why not just distribute it through torrents or ipfs or something?

<comment><USER74> I guarantee you that you read tons of content that you wouldn't pay for. Hacker news itself is a big ad for Ycombinator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This may help explain why many companies focus so much ad budget on brand awareness and generally inserting their brand into the zeitgeist or popular memes and conversation.

Corporations rarely prize loyalty of any type: loyalty from employees, loyalty from customers... they don't care.

Creating loyalty requires sublimating your own short term desires for the sake of promoting someone else's interests instead. Corporations, as sociopathic legal constructs meant to encode ruthless pursuit of short term financial gain, are essentially incapable of acting this way.

This is why you have to pay so much to get new employees to join your team, or pay so much to acquire new customers. The corporation never cares to proactively reward existing employees or proactively improve products or reduce prices for customers.

So all short term attention is paid to seeding the necessary details required to acquire new supply of employees / customers / whatever.

Holding on to / valuing what you already have is just not a concept modern corporations have the ability to understand or articulate, despite lots of lip service about it.</comment>


Foxconn Planning To Hire 1 Million Robots - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/01/foxconn-planning-to-hire-1-million-robots/

<comment><USER2> Previous submissions of this story:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2830614>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827882> <\- This has over 100 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2827861>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm always torn when I read things like this. I tend to be pro-innovation and take the approach that if you don't take advantage of technology, someone else will. But when I read stories like this I can't help but wonder where all those people will go. What will their next job be? As technologists, what is our responsibility to them (if any)?

<comment><USER3> The problem is not that it's happening at all, it's that it's happening in a relatively short period of time for _a lot_ of people, and that time period will keep shrinking in the future. I think Governments could help here by spurring entrepreneurship in the country, and also by having nation-wide free training problems for jobs are "are the future" and are in high-demand. It should alleviate the transition.</comment></comment>


Many Swiss farmers use honor system to sell their products - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessfondue.com/2018/09/15/which-country-is-famous-for-using-honor-system-yes-its-switzerland <comment><USER2> As others have noted, this is common in rural America, which tend toward being very high-trust communities such that many people don't even bother to lock their doors. Bartering local goods and services is such an integral part of the rural social fabric that everyone has an interest in making it work well with minimal transaction costs.

Part of what makes it work in rural areas is that no one is really anonymous. The local social networks tend to be very quick to identify bad actors.

<comment><USER3> > As others have noted, this is common in rural America, which tend toward > being very high-trust communities such that many people don't even bother to > lock their doors

There's a practical reason for that, too. If you're being burglarized in a rural community, a locked door will be an obstacle for ~10 seconds, and you'll come home to just as much of your stuff stolen, plus a broken door to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The book "Freakonomics" details a similar bagel-selling system, where they would put bagels in the break room of workplaces, and you would pay on the honor system. After years of collecting data, the owner realized he had been doing a real-time, real-life experiment on how honest people are. You don't know WHO took without paying, but you can tell HOW MANY of your bagels were paid for. There's analysis of how it varies by time of year, type of workplace, etc. Fascinating.

<comment><USER5> Mind telling tthe findings? :-)

<comment><USER6> From memory, one thing that surprised me was holidays. Thefts decrease in the days before a holiday that's basically just a day off for most people, but thefts increase in the days before a holiday that has a strong tradition for getting together with the extended family.

<comment><USER7> "I just spent 400 bucks on Christmas presents. I can't afford to pay for this bagel." ... ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here in Sweden I've noted that some sellers have started adding a Swish-number for payments. Swish is a Swedish payment service where you basically send money to a phone number. This is great since the only risk for the seller now is the produce. The cash can not be stolen.

<comment><USER9> That sounds very Swedish! The nearest I've seen to that in Switzerland was a farm with a book where you can write your name, address, and how much you owe them. That was on a slightly larger farm (~100 cows and pigs) that sold expensive things like cold-cut meat too.

I live in a tourist region of Switzerland and here the local supermarkets carry local produce e.g. cheeses and sausages bearing the name and address of the farmer who produced them.

In our village we can buy cheese, eggs, honey, and some preserves by letting ourselves into the cellar of the local farmer and leaving money in a jar.

<comment><USER10> How bucolic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a Swiss guy, I must say I only see this in rural areas. It wouldn't work in big cities like Geneva I think (too many people living in urban areas who don't respect our wonderful country and that's a shame).

<comment><USER12> This is actually fairly common in rural areas in America too. Maybe someone sets up a bunch of pumpkins, apples, etc at the end of their driveway (which in rural America can be measured in KM) and a box to put money in.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, this sounds like an article written by someone who lives in a big city and has never been to rural America. This isn't even uncommon; its pretty darn standard. Another common, similar thing you see all over (climatically appropriate) America are fruit orchards where you pay for a bag upfront and you can fill it as full as you want (or take more than the bag, or not even pay for the bag if you're dishonest).

<comment><USER14> Oh this fruit orchard tradition is so wonderful! I remember going on an outing like this with my friends (We aren't American citizens) and we went absolutely nuts, going on a binge carrying and eating fruits. (We were really hungry after a long road trip). We all felt appropriately guilty afterwards and apologised.

<comment><USER13> Oh, trust me; those orchards are a cash cow. There's practically no amount of fruit you could have taken which would have caused them material damage. Most of them don't even make most of their money from the fruit; they'll usually have little shops, or processed fruit goods (jams, syrups), or food, or hay rides as well. There's one near me that does the fruit-stuff during the summer, then converts into a haunted farm-type attraction in the fall, and the owner says they make a ton more money in the fall season. The "pick your own fruit" is just to get people in the door, and they usually overcharge like crazy for the bags under the assumption that their customers (A) are gonna take a ton, and (B) will end up buying some other stuff on-site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even retail establishments with staff and security systems balance the extra costs of these "loss prevention" measures against customer convenience. The goal is never _perfect_ security but _sufficient_ security. Large retailers typically set targets on loss and try to minimize them, within reason. Farm stands that operate like this have simply found a reasonable cost/benefit trade off. (There's an apple orchard near Boston that leaves their store unattended for the slow winter months... My wife pops in a few times to buy some more apples.)

<comment><USER16> Loss from stealing was called 'shrinkage' by retail industry people, in Sam Walton's autobiography 'Made in America'. As you say, they expected to have some. I wonder why it can't be prevented 100%.

<comment><USER17> Because stopping retail theft 100% requires an inconvenience to normal customers that is off-putting and will cause them to go somewhere else.

<comment><USER18> I certainly wouldn't shop somewhere that required my bags and pockets to be searched every time I left the store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Honesty boxes are common here in UK countryside too. Same as any country tho', it probably wouldn't work in the towns and cities.

I guess the number of people in a city make it more likely that there'd be enough 'cheaters' to ruin the whole enterprise and not make it worthwhile.

<comment><USER18> You also have enough customers that having someone manage the store doesn't cost very much per sale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I ran into this in California at a small farm along Highway 1 a few miles north of Santa Cruz. It's a scenic ocean side rural locale but near all the big Bay Area cities and frequented by day visitors from there. There was a shack with a good variety of their produce laid out, with price labels. Up front there was a cash box, with about $40 already in it, and a sign that said pay here. This was late '90s. I really hope that it continued to work for them for a long time after that. I haven't seen that elsewhere before or since. I overpaid as a tip. I hope that happens enough to offset cheats.

<comment><USER21> In rural south west England, on holiday last year, the well-stocked local farm shop operated not only an honesty box, but an honesty credit card machine, with detailed instructions how to put a transaction through. The merchant receipt went in the honesty box, of course. I was astonished but pretty pleased, because I was low on cash and far from any ATM.

<comment><USER22> PayM would be the easy implementation of this, it's the generic mobile phone based bank transfer system for the UK.

In Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland the same shop would have a phone number. You type the phone number into the app (which shows the name as confirmation), the amount, and press send. It's not tied to any particular bank.

Unfortunately, the UK system isn't really catching on. Instead, my friends seem to be using proprietary apps which only work for friends at the same bank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My first exposure to the honor system was at Caltech. It worked very well there, and it was really nice to not have to obsessively lock your dorm room door every time you walk out.

I've since used the honor system in my business dealings, and it works well enough to allow me to continue with it.

<comment><USER24> One of the reasons this worked so well at Caltech was that every freshman's first night included an introduction to lock picking.

If you locked your door, you might expect a polite note like "I noticed your door was locked. Thanks, it gave me a chance to test my lock picking skills."

<comment><USER23> When I attended in the 70's, lock picking was there but wasn't much of a big deal. The protocol was: door is open, come on in. Door is closed, don't come in. As simple as that.

My favorite was the bathroom, which had a sign on it with a rotating pointer, and 4 quadrants labelled:

1\. men

2\. women

3\. don't know

4\. don't care

where you selected one on entry. For the 70s, it was way ahead of its time :-)

<comment><USER25> > door is open, come on in. Door is closed, don't come in

Same protocol at Cambridge (UK), at least in the rooms with two doors (outer door open: come in, outer door closed: do not disturb/I'm out). Lock picking wasn't really a thing, but one of the tutors did point out to us that the locks in a specific corridor could be opened by sliding a knife down the edge of the mechanism (it was "fixed" by screwing a steel plate to the _outside_ of the door, which felt like missing the point somewhat).

I'm possibly missing something obvious, but could you explain why you'd need to pick a quadrant? I'm not seeing why that is necessary.

<comment><USER23> The purpose was to temporarily, while you were in the bathroom, say what kind of bathroom it was.

If you don't care who else uses it while you're in there, dial "don't care". If a man dialed "women" and went in, he'd likely face some angry students. To my knowledge that never happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Like several other commenters noted, these types of roadside stands are prevalent throughout rural areas of the US. You usually only see them on side roads though, if you're just passing through on the highways you'll miss them.

</comment><comment><USER27> I was recently in Zurich and entered a small shop that was honor system. Scan and pay for your own items, no staff. Small food items, drinks, wine available.

Might be different since there could be cameras or some other form of accountability, but I found it interesting.

<comment><USER28> Would police every bother investigating simple theft from such a store..

Even if there is excellent video and identification?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've seen this in the US in rural parts of Georgia.

<comment><USER30> Yep...I agree it works well here and let's you farm while holding down another job. You can get "vine ripened" and the flavor it much better. It also is more efficient for spoilage. Hogs or chickens get it right after it is too ripe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Last year we found a place on the Oregon coast that had a little freezer with Salmon and Halibut. Also a table with Cherries, Peaches, and a few vegetables with an honor box and, interestingly we thought, QR codes to accept BTC and ETH.

Halibut was killer, but I paid in USD because my phone was dead.

<comment><USER32> Haha can I get a +/\- 10 mi general area to not kill the goose?

<comment><USER31> On the 101, South of Garibaldi, North of Lincoln City. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In Paris pavements are routinely lined with stacks of books, magazines, comics, etc. The idea being 'you take some, you leave some. Or just take, at least the books will find some use.' I've seen it abroad so it's probably widespread.

Slightly more tangential, but people also often leave furniture (or clothes) they don't need outside for the taking, often because they're moving places. You notify the municipality, put up a post-it with a number on it so that they can eventually identify and carry the stuff away if it finds to takers, but in the meantime other people are free to help themselves. I have friends who would completely furnished their apartment with furniture found on the street.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a sign of a deeply trust based society.

I don't think articles like these are good for the system's health :)

<comment><USER35> You really think a significant number of people are going to get on a plane to Switzerland and then drive to Vaud to steal pumpkins?

<comment><USER34> I there are always marginal effects, as an economist would put it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Growing up in Switzerland, when we lived on the outskirts of Bern, we would get our milk from such a dispenser at a farm. It was a 5min walk to the farm, and we'd bring our own bottle and fill it up from a spout. The milk was fresh and unpasteurized, so we'd have to leet it sit in the fridge for a few hours to separate it from its cream.

<comment><USER37> Wow. How does it compare to the store bought milk of today?

<comment><USER36> It's not even in the same universe in terms of quality. Although it went bad way quicker, so you had to drink it in a day or so max.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is more common than you might think in rural areas in California

<comment><USER39> Once upon a time I cycled through vast fields of strawberries and other yummy looking produce in California.

I did see honour system stalls but they were pretty rare considering the size of the area. They were more like curious exceptions rather than the norm. They were also geared up to sell at volumes that didn't suit the bike, so too much to carry.

I got the impression from the article on Switzerland that this was more of a way to do your shopping, so sensible quantities not vast bulk purchases.

Incidentally I did not stop to freeload a single strawberry. On a bike with nobody around this should have been simple, there weren't even any barbed wire fences. However, my riding buddy - also a non-American tourist - was not so keen. The reason why was a simple one - 'don't they have guns in America?'.

Actually they have guns in Switzerland too and there is a lot of national service practice going on at the weekends. In fact weekends are quite wonderful in Switzerland as the shops are closed and people go out and do things including going to honour system stalls. The guns though are quite terrifying if you are cycling as you can turn a corner on a descent and feel like you are suddenly in a firing range (rather than right next to one).

I have to say that the Californian produce looked good but was not that good when I bought it in the shops. The land of plenty turned out to be quite expensive and bland to European tastes. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, the roadside appearance of plenty was not so good but the food bought in shops was as expensive as everything is in Switzerland (so no surprise) but delightful to taste.

The relative abundance of Swiss roadside honour stalls doesn't just say things about how honest people are in squeaky clean Switzerland, it also says something about the produce being of value rather than bland.

<comment><USER40> So this! The lovely clicky sound of rifle bullets passing by above your head as you stroll on well signposted paths. I understand they do have concrete blocks preventing beginners from shooting too low. Still...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Once I broke the signal in Switzerland and outran the cops sent back the car to the countryside and took bus to the hotel just to find the traffic ticket waiting for me in the room I booked.

I am still not sure how they knew where I am going and which hotel I'll be staying at.

</comment><comment><USER42> Mapping where such systems actually work well would produce the best "quality of life" guide for me. It just takes a few bad apples to break these forever and communities in their naivety often don't notice until it's too late.

</comment><comment><USER43> Here in southern germany ots of farmers sell Apples and other fruit (and sometimes vegetables) this way. Some also have fields of flowers where you can cut some and pay at a honor box. Though generally you put your money in a heavily bolted down box through a narrow slit.

In Scotland, especially on the Hebrides I saw various types of honor stalls. One sold all kinds of food, prepared and unprepared even warm pies, another one was just a Box with cakes, brownies and muffins and some thermos with tea and coffee and some dishes placed at a POI. In both cases you put your money just into a carboard box, so you could even get change.

</comment><comment><USER35> Also found in rural Japan.

[https://en.japantravel.com/saitama/honesty- shops/59159](https://en.japantravel.com/saitama/honesty-shops/59159)

</comment><comment><USER44> You have to understand that Switzerland is a very rich and very expensive country. Stealing some fruits would be a really dumb crime to commit, when you can steal much more expensive things easily.

</comment><comment><USER45> > Unmanned stalls with vegetables can be found all over the world. Germany, > Norway, the U.S., Australia, Canada, the UK are among the countries where > the honor system isn't any novelty.

This seems to be a property of the rural community rather than the country/people. The same happens in Tunisia in some very rural/remote places. The farmer will put their produce on the road, and then the buyers will collect from the road.

This was a surprise to me as Tunisia cities are plagued with vandalism and property theft.

</comment><comment><USER46> Any place with a high trust society tends to do this. I see farm stands and camp wood stands with honor boxes all over rural New England.

</comment><comment><USER47> Seems to me that the farmers will need to charge a premium to make up for theft, assuming that the total amount stolen is greater than the cost of someone sitting there.

For rural areas where turnover is low and where there's more trust, this system sounds pretty effective.

On a side note, this isn't exactly an honor system, as the cash is still locked away I'm guessing.

</comment><comment><USER48> Very similar situation in Ikaria (Greece) - [https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island- where...](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people- forget-to-die.html)

</comment><comment><USER49> Very common here in Western Washington (Microsoft country). We get honey, flowers, and produce that way

</comment><comment><USER50> Very common in rural New England as well. This may be common in many other rural areas, I'd guess.

</comment><comment><USER51> I saw one of these in Washington State in October 2016, and I thought it was super cool. I bought some sweet corn and BBQ sauce :)

[https://imgur.com/a/wmka5yA](https://imgur.com/a/wmka5yA)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A video of how those look inside: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwyPEFC4Tsk&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwyPEFC4Tsk&feature=youtu.be&t=4)

</comment><comment><USER52> This phenomenon isn't unique to Switzerland, or even Europe. Farmstands throughout Western NY and PA have similar setups: Grab some fresh fruits, veggies, eggs, etc... and leave your cash in the box.

</comment><comment><USER53> I've seen some in Germany (e.g. Pick flowers, put coins into the box), but I like the ones I found in Switzerland more - larger selection including fruit, vegetables and eggs. Maybe I just got lucky.

</comment><comment><USER54> There's a farm stall in Bolinas, California that sells produce with the honor system. It's the first one I've encountered in my life.

I had no idea this was much more widespread.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's also like that in the Massachusetts countryside.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've seen this with firewood in California. It probably costs the producer more to have someone there then it does losing a portion of stock to theft.

<comment><USER57> It's very common with firewood bundles in areas of New England where, in the summer, a lot of tourists are buying firewood to burn at a campground. Quite a few houses have some bundles of firewood out that they probably cut themselves from dead trees/branches on the property along with an honor box. Very small- time supplemental income operations that aren't nearly worth someone hanging out all day for maybe only $20 or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> How does that actually work ? It takes only one thief to steal the entire box of payments.

Do they have hidden camera to dissuade people of stealing the box ?

</comment><comment><USER59> This isn't that unusual at roadside stands I see in some rural places in the US.

If someone isn't there they just leave a box or bucket with a sign.

</comment><comment><USER60> Some of them provide free tasting as well: small glasses and many open bottles so that the customer can try all flavors before buying one.

</comment><comment><USER61> Not sure what's so extraordinary about this — I've used such rural systems in France, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the USA.

</comment><comment><USER62> They used to have this in Finland too, but it seems to be dying out. Such a shame, but I guess it is inevitable.

<comment><USER63> Why are they dying out?

<comment><USER64> Very likely different forms of "lower social cohesion."

<comment><USER65> What, if anything, do the quotation marks mean here?

<comment><USER66> never relax

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I've driven extensively in California, Hawaii, and other western states, and this is extremely common.

</comment><comment> rv-de in many German offices you may find the Snackbox ([http://www.snackbox.de/](http://www.snackbox.de/)). it's based on trust based payment and they'll cover the difference. i genuinely love those concepts.

</comment><comment><USER68> This happens all over rural southwestern ontario as well.

I never thought it was strange or newsworthy as a result.

<comment><USER69> Yeah, I really miss the road side corn from back home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I just came across and patronized an honor system farm stand in Bolinas Ca yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER71> There a a few places off of summit rd. In NorCal that do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER72> Very common in Denmark too.

</comment><comment><USER73> They have this in Ontario.

</comment><comment><USER74> This is what high trust society looks like.

</comment><comment><USER75> > the U.S...[is] among the countries where the honor system isn't any novelty.

I've seen plenty of roadside stands, but I've never seen one of these in my life

</comment><comment><USER76> I saw these in rural New Zealand in 1982.

<comment><USER77> They're still there in 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> The honor system was also used in World of Warcraft: [https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Honor_system_(pre-2.0)](https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Honor_system_\(pre-2.0\))</comment>


Sex Scandal Simmered for Years Before Silicon Valley C.E.O.'s Swift Fall - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/technology/sofi-chief-executive-toxic-workplace.html <comment><USER2> I'm surprised this is not getting as much traction... sexual harassment, possibly lying to investors, making custreps underwriters...</comment>


MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/10/mongodb_and_data_durability.html <comment><USER2> I agree largely with this post. I'm tired of hearing the same arguments the author has. This technology we use is hardly infallible and as programmers and system administrators of these systems the defects should be obvious! Yet somehow people still think that the "clueless users" are to blame for these "defects."

Sure, we all know the saying about assumptions. But why are we at a point where it's cool to use a data persistance layer that assumes it doesn't have to live up to any of those assumptions? It's why we have things like ACID, the LSB, etc. Contracts about how these systems should work for the end user.

It's hard to get all that stuff right off the bat, sure. But losing the entire database when a few bytes land in the wrong place? Yikes. Hardly something I'd trust real data to.

This stuff can always get better. Of course the solution as pointed out is tried and true. Glad to see that the developers aren't covering their ears...

</comment><comment><USER3> I read once that every developer ought to use 'kill -9' as their method of stopping services they are writing, then ensure that doing so never causes a problem. Even if you can keep people from executing 'kill -9' (hint: you can't), there are always cases that you can't control that can stop a box in its tracks. By developing explicitly for this, you save you and your customer a lot of pain.

Honestly, I would never use a database that doesn't make safeguarding my data as its number one priority. Even if I'm just dumping logs in it, the time I really need to know what's going on is likely the time those safeguards are put to the test.

<comment><USER4> It was briefly mentioned in the article, but this is exactly how couchdb shuts down:

 _On-disk, CouchDB never overwrites committed data or associated structures, ensuring the database file is always in a consistent state. This is a "crash- only" design where the CouchDB server does not go through a shut down process, it's simply terminated._

<http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/overview.html>

(Please, no mongodb vs. couchdb wars here)

<comment><USER3> I think that is actually where I read it. It must have resonated internally and became the topic (in my mind).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is exciting. MongoDB (and the suite of libraries building up around it) has made prototyping web applications an order of magnitude easier than using SQL. Lack of single-server durability, however, is a showstopper in production, before you've grown enough to justify scaling the database beyond one machine.

In my case, that meant going back to MySQL once our schema was finalized (sadly). Looks like that won't be necessary in the not-so-near future, which means MongoDB is usable in new projects without worrying about replication before otherwise necessary.

<comment><USER6> What's with the aversion to replicas?

I have an app I'm working on launching right now, it's in what you might call 'private beta': real people accessing the app is <10\. It's been in this state for a little less than 2 months and there's been a replica-set and backups happening since even before that.

What I'm saying is that you don't need to grow before adding a second box. My project currently runs on ec2 micro instances and the second box will probably cost you less than your GitHub code hosting costs! Just seems to me that (in ec2 terms, as an example) going from $9/month burn to $18/month is hardly a show stopper.

<comment><USER5> Aren't micro instances $15/month? (Plus EBS backing, unless you want to lose your DB on reboot.)

Regardless, it's added complexity that you can avoid with MySQL early in your application's lifecycle. Even if it's not much more expensive, you have more hardware to administer. Compare that to a Rails+MySQL stack, which you can run on a single box. (There are added benefits of replicas, sure, but they aren't _easier_ to set up, per se, then just installing your stack on one machine when you're getting going.)

<comment><USER6> Yea sorry $15/month (EBS is practically free, as is Elastic IP), but anyway my point still stands at $30/month. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a developer who doesn't spend that much on coffee per month (not to mention merchant accounts and support and code hosting and bug tracking and blah blah blah) :)

As to the rest, sure, it's sys-admin-wise easier to setup. But then you have to consider stuff like database dumps/backups. Where are you storing them? Have you tested your recovery plan? Then there's hassle when you decide you need a dedicated db box and move it there (friday fat-finger, anyone?). True enough that none of these are deal-breaker level issues (evidenced by the ubiquity of MySQL/etc).

With mongo you spend a tiny bit of extra money and a tiny bit of extra time setting up a replica set which handles your backup for you. And then when you need more db horsepower you just start sharding or just adding more replicas and sending reads there. Need to upgrade the db box? Cool just add a huge instance, add it to the replica set and promote it when it's done syncing.

I certainly agree that it's a trade-off... it's just one that I think is _not_ driven by data durability. Either way I need to handle my disaster recovery with some kind of automated system and I'm just suggesting that whether this is some kind of cron-job, restore recipe, etc backup of a db-dump or a replica on a cheap extra box is a wash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pleased Mongo is getting single server durability. I have never understood why it got so popular without this feature. I'd love to know why people choose Mongo over say, Riak, or CouchDB, as the majority of projects don't need more than one server.

<comment><USER8> Because single server durability is a myth when hardware can fail at any time.

<comment><USER9> We're talking about data durability. When my SQL server crashes due to hardware failure I know that when I eventually get it back up and running the data will be consistent with at worst the last couple of transactions being rolled back.

<comment><USER8> This is most certainly not true. Disks fail in ways where the whole volume becomes unreadable all the time.

<comment><USER9> What I'm saying is that I can go up to my SQL server and disconnect the power cord and my database will not be corrupt when I start it back up. Sure if your HDD gets taken out by a meteor then nothing will save you but that's why you have backups.

<comment><USER10> Not guaranteed. I have had more than one customer experience hardware failure, resulting in a corrupt or suspect SQL Server database, that was unrecoverable via normal means.

In each of the cases where the customer had a true standby system, implemented via replication, log shipping, or mirroring, they were able to failover with little (log shipping) or no data loss.

In the cases where they had a single, standalone server, the option was to restore the last known good backup, or sent the database files had to Microsoft for analysis and repair.

ANY system (RDBMS, NoSQL, or otherwise), should have a standby replica to prevent data loss. If you data is stored on a single machine, you are doing it wrong.

<comment><USER9> I'm not disagreeing with you, all I'm saying is that SQL Server databases are built from the ground up to resist data corruption and does exceedingly well at it. Not so with NoSQL data stores.

<comment><USER11> Not so with _MongoDB_. Let's please not blame all of NoSQL for MongoDB's bad design decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am never sure what niche MongoDB is supposed to fill.

If I want a large cluster to handle "big data" Riak or Cassandra seem to fit the bill better.

If I want speed Redis is great.

If I want a schema-less SQL-like (but not SQL) database, MongoDB?

<comment><USER13> In my admittedly limited experience with mongo, it felt like they were designing the ultimate database for the web. Not in a "web-scale" sort of way, more in a swiss army database for the web dev way. This came to me when I wanted to do location queries on a db. Most people using standard DBs do this with PostGIS for postgres, which is incredibly powerful and accurate. But mongoDB supports the "find shit near me with good enough accuracy" query that 90% of people want to run right now.

I was able to make a simple test page that told you the IP of the previous visitor who was closest to you. It took me thirty minutes from "hey mongo has some sort of geo support" to that (and I'm not a web dev and was using ATT 3G to read doc). PostGIS took me longer to figure out how to set a lat,long pair in the DB.

I'm not saying raw speed of development is the best measure of a database, but if your #1 priority is the ability to rapidly prototype, I'd imagine mongo is a good fit in your toolbelt.

<comment><USER9> I assure you that that anyone who has used any kind of SQL database can do the same stuff you did on Mongo in the same time or less. Development speed is much faster on the SQL database once you have some more data and you can start using joins and searches and all the other nice RDBMS features.

<comment><USER14> I've built a lot of stuff on RDBMSen, and often, those 'nice features' are actually what I call 'a giant pain in the ass.'

Sometimes, data doesn't fit a relational model well. In those cases, something like Mongo is a godsend. And yeah, you could de-normalize your data and get halfway to Mongo, but I'd rather use each tool for what it's good at.

<comment><USER9> "Sometimes, data doesn't fit a relational model well."

I keep hearing this but I've yet to see any good examples.

<comment><USER14> Here's what I posed last time someone asked me this, I got no answer: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637903>

<comment><USER9> We have exactly the same kind of data relationships in our database. Sure it's complicated and in your example sure you'll end up with a bunch of tables if you normalize it all the way to 3NF. But there's a lot of GOOD STUFF you get when you do, for example if you decide to rename a FooType or a FooSize then you only have to update one record rather than searching every document in your document DB for instances of those names so you can rename them. Hell if you have many documents and 24/7 clients this may become IMPOSSIBLE to do while still guaranteeing consistency in your data.

Your example is not that unusual or even that complicated. What is about it that doesn't work on a RDBMS? You can't just say the solution sucks because it uses more tables that you feel it should.

<comment><USER14> It's good to know that I'm not totally spewing bullshit, and that's the way it should be done.

In this case, I would have less than 200 types, and probably under 1000 Foo records total. Updates wouldn't have been a problem. The pain was much bigger than the upside. Especially designing the forms that would end up creating those rows...

It's not that it doesn't work. It's that it's not a 'this always fits' solution.

<comment><USER12> This is what views are for. If it is easier to work with the data denormalized, create a view with a few joins. Some views can even have updates directly applied to them.

<comment><USER14> You're not exactly helping with the "Mongo is significantly less complicated to model my data with" argument. ;)

But still, good to know. I'm bad with views. :[

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I had a nickel for every time a coworker used "-9" for no other reason than being in a rush and not grok'ing what a bad idea it is.

<comment><USER16> I don't know if this is what happened to the reluctant hero of this story, but if the database really had hung, and wasn't responding to "sensible" methods of shutting down, what are you supposed to do besides kill -9? (By "sensible" I mean something the DB could trap in order to finish saving a consistent state to disk - shutdown command, -INT, -QUIT, etc.)

(I'm not excusing trying -9 as a first resort, but if a process is deadlocked (or pegging the CPU in a tight loop) and won't respond to -QUIT, there's not much else you can do.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can also use fsync to guarantee that a transaction was written to disk at a _severe_ hit to performance.

<comment><USER18> Actually that doesn't add any additional durability guarantees in the general case. The only way to use MongoDB durably with a single server is to use the new --dur flag coming in 1.8. I assure you there is no other way.

<comment><USER19> And how far out is 1.8?</comment></comment></comment>