Tag Archives: economics

Start up: Gov.uk vetoes apps, Buzzfeed nixes Trump ads, Twitter’s growth trouble, and more

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve got some bad news about the BlackBerry Priv. Photo by liewcf on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 11 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Why Britain banned mobile apps • GovInsider

Joshua Chambers spoke to Ben Terrett, former design chief at the UK’s Government Digital Service, which often acted as a sort of “tiger team” to fix big or little projects that had got bogged down in spec-land:

»Key to the GDS’ approach is designing for user needs, not organizational requirements, Terrett says. “That is how good digital services designed and built these days. That is how everyone does it, whether that’s google or facebook or British Airways or whoever.”

The problem is that public sector agencies tend not to design with citizens in mind. “Things are just designed to suit the very silos that the project sits in, and the user gets lost in there,” Terrett adds.

For example, opening a restaurant might require multiple permits from different agencies. A good digital service should combine them all in one place.

Focusing on user needs also needs officials to cut bad ideas out. Most Ministers might want there to be sharing options on websites so that citizens can easily promote government on Facebook and Twitter. But the GDS tested this, and found that only 0.1% of citizens ever clicked on them. These stats allowed officials to remove them from the design, making the site simpler, cleaner and quicker to load.

«

The mobile apps stuff? Because then you have to update them for each version of each platform. Responsive websites are better.
link to this extract

 

BlackBerry Priv is faring worse than expected • CNET

Roger Cheng:

»”The BlackBerry Priv is really struggling,” the high-level executive [at AT&T], who asked not to be named, said last week. “We’ve seen more returns than we would like.”

Wireless carriers are seldom publicly critical of their handset partners, and the sobering comments offer a rare glimpse into the troubles BlackBerry faces with the Priv, which is the first of its phones to run on Google’s Android software. BlackBerry, once a global leader in smartphones, hoped the Priv, which features a slide-out physical keyboard, would at least get the company back on its feet in the mobile devices business…

…BlackBerry and the carrier expected to see demand for an Android phone with a physical keyboard. Instead, most of the buyers were BlackBerry loyalists, the executive said. Those faithful, however, struggled with the transition from the BlackBerry operating system to the Android operating system, leading to a higher-than-expected rate of return.

BlackBerry’s decision to market the phone as a high-end device also hurt its prospects, the executive said. The Priv initially sold unlocked for $699, above the starting price of the iPhone 6S, which sells for $650. Few premium phones have fared well beyond devices from Apple and Samsung.

“There isn’t much volume growth in the premium segment, where Apple and Samsung dominate,” the executive said.

«

The Priv camera app on the Google Play store still has fewer than 500,000 downloads globally, having launched in November. That’s seven months on sale. BlackBerry’s hardware division is a money pit. (BlackBerry’s fiscal first quarter ran to the end of May. Results later this month.)
link to this extract

 

Why the economic payoff from technology is so elusive • The New York Times

Steve Lohr:

»for several years, economists have asked why all that technical wizardry seems to be having so little impact on the economy. The issue surfaced again recently, when the government reported disappointingly slow growth and continuing stagnation in productivity. The rate of productivity growth from 2011 to 2015 was the slowest since the five-year period ending in 1982.

One place to look at this disconnect is in the doctor’s office. Dr. Peter Sutherland, a family physician in Tennessee, made the shift to computerized patient records from paper in the last few years. There are benefits to using electronic health records, Dr. Sutherland says, but grappling with the software and new reporting requirements has slowed him down. He sees fewer patients, and his income has slipped.

“I’m working harder and getting a little less,” he said.

The productivity puzzle has given rise to a number of explanations in recent years — and divided economists into technology pessimists and optimists…

…Some economists insist the problem is largely a measurement gap, because many digital goods and services are not accurately captured in official statistics. But a recent study by two economists from the Federal Reserve and one from the International Monetary Fund casts doubt on that theory.

«

So much doubt, so little clarity. The most likely explanation? Technology actually hasn’t gotten that far into the economy.

link to this extract

 

BuzzFeed pulls out of $1.3M advertising deal with RNC over Donald Trump • POLITICO

Hadas Gold, Mike Allen and Alex Spence:

»In an email to staff on Monday, BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti explained that in April, the RNC and BuzzFeed signed an agreement to “spend a significant amount on political advertisements slated to run during the Fall election cycle.” But since Trump became the nominee his campaign has proven themselves to be “directly opposed to the freedoms of our employees in the United States,” because of proposed bans on Muslim immigration and comments about descendants of immigrants, among other policies.

“We don’t need to and do not expect to agree with the positions or values of all our advertisers. And as you know, there is a wall between our business and editorial operations. This decision to cancel this ad buy will have no influence on our continuing coverage of the campaign,” Peretti said in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO.

“We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company,” Peretti wrote. “However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.”

«

Peretti knows Buzzfeed’s audience, though, and knows accepting the ads would be bad for the site’s long-term health.
link to this extract

 

How to vote in the EU referendum • Martin Lewis’ Blog…

Lewis is an ex-Financial Times journalist who set up the Moneysavingexpert.com website, which has brought him great respect from the wider public as someone who understands money, understands the economy, and isn’t in anyone’s pockets. So his post on this was greatly anticipated:

»My mailbag’s been drowning with questions and concerns. The biggest being: “Please just tell us the facts, what’ll happen if we leave?” I’m sorry, but the most important thing to understand is: there are no facts about what happens next.

Anyone who tells you they KNOW what’ll happen if we leave the EU is a liar. Predicting exact numbers for economic, immigration or house price change is nonsense. What’s proposed is unprecedented. All the studies, models and hypotheses are based on assumptions – that’s guesstimate and hope.

So accept the need to wrestle with uncertainty. The EU referendum is far from a black and white issue; there are more shades of grey than E L James’s bookshelf.

Frustratingly though, most politicians try to come across as doubt-free. Those pro-EU pout that all elements are good, while those against frown at them. Yet like life, it’s a mix, and the debate would be better if both sides admitted that.

«

link to this extract

 

A statement on my position • Jacob Appelbaum

Writing in Berlin, Appelbaum, who left the Tor project last week, says:

»Vague rumors and smear campaigns against me are nothing new. As a longtime public advocate for free speech and a secure internet, there have been plenty of attempts to undermine my work over the years.

Now, however, these unsubstantiated and unfounded attacks have become so aggressive that I feel it’s necessary to set the record straight. Not only have I been the target of a fake website in my name that has falsely accused me of serious crimes, but I have also received death threats (including a Twitter handle entitled ‘TimeToDieJake’).

I think it’s extremely damaging to the community that these character-assassination tactics are being deployed, especially given their ugly history of being used against fellow members of the LGBT community. It pains me to watch the community to which I’ve dedicated so much of my life engage in such self-destructive behavior. Nonetheless, I am prepared to use legal channels, if necessary, to defend my reputation from these libelous accusations.

I want to be clear: the accusations of criminal sexual misconduct against me are entirely false.

«

link to this extract

 

New York Times ‘exploring’ ad-free digital subscription • AdAge

Jeremy Barr:

»The New York Times is “exploring the possibility” of selling an ad-free digital subscription package, chief executive Mark Thompson said at the IAB Ad Blocking & User Experience Summit Monday.

“We do want to offer all of our users as much choice as we can, and we recognize that there are some users — both subscribers and non-subscribers — who would prefer to have an ad-free experience,” he said, according to a copy of his remarks provided in advance to Ad Age. (The all-day summit, which is intended for publishers, is not open to the press.)

«

Love the irony in that last sentence. The article’s conclusion:

»Generally speaking, Mr. Thompson said marketers “need to think like programmers rather than as traditional advertisers,” by “offering consumers content which actually has value to them.”

Advertising will always be a vital revenue source for the Times, he said, pointing out that some 107 million of the 110 million people who access the Times are not paid subscribers.

«

Hm.
link to this extract

 

Twitter’s anti-Semitism problem is exactly why Twitter has a growth problem — Quartz

Paul Smalera:

»[New York Times reporter Jonathan] Weisman, in his story about being attacked [by anti-Semites], writes that, “An official at Twitter encouraged me to block the anti-Semites and report them to Twitter.” In other words, Twitter’s advice to users is that they police the hate themselves. It’s not an awful idea to ask users to report abuse, but the problem is that Twitter trolls can open up new accounts just as fast as Twitter closes down old ones. And with the power of search, newly opened accounts can quickly regain the followers and reach that shuttered ones had.

I haven’t signed up for Twitter or Facebook accounts for years, so I quickly opened up a browser in anonymous mode and went through the signup processes for each. Facebook stopped me several times, prompting me to use my real name. I had put in “Bad Guy” as my name, and eventually had to change it to “Badrick Guyowski” to get the service to let me in. Even when I was able to create an account, Facebook access was limited until I confirmed my email address–which was impossible for me to do, since I had entered a fake one. In essence, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network is inaccessible to someone who is not willing to part with at least some pieces of information that can be tied back to a real world identity.

Meanwhile, Twitter accepted these credentials to allow me to create an account, without protest, and without a phone number.

«

Because Twitter has a growth problem, though, it can’t tackle its anti-Semitism problem. Wall Street is worried about its growth, so anything it does that might slow that “growth” looks bad, even if it improves the quality of the network, and so its attractiveness to the users who are already there, or aren’t there.
link to this extract

 

A May 2016 look at Big Five ebook pricing Author Earnings

“Data Guy”:

»One of the key points we made in our recent DBW presentation was that higher ebook prices end up hurting newer debut authors far more than they hurt long-established authors, who already have existing fanbases and sustainable writing careers — especially those perennial bestsellers who have managed to become household names. We could see in our data clear indications that, between 2014 and 2016, higher prices had progressively damaged the earnings of new Big Five debuts, and even more crucially, crippled their *discoverability* — that all-important key to establishing the brand-new readership and fanbase necessary to establishing a long-term writing career. The triptych of slides below make that case with glaring starkness: in them, we can see Big Five debut authors dropping from 22% of ebook sales by debut authors in early 2014, down to barely 9% of those vital, career-launching initial sales in early 2016.

«

I wonder if ebooks have some lessons for app stores – as ebooks have been around for slightly longer, though with less volume, and so might have worked out the trends that app stores are revealing. Discoverability matter, but people won’t spend on things they’re not familiar with already.
link to this extract

 

Google misfires as it aims to turn Star Trek fiction into reality • Stat

Charles Piller:

»Google employees, squeezed onto metal risers and standing in the back of a meeting room, erupted in cheers as newly arrived executive Andrew Conrad announced they would try to turn science fiction into reality: The tech giant had formed a biotech venture to create a futuristic device like Star Trek’s iconic “Tricorder” diagnostic wizard — and use it to cure cancer.

Conrad, recalled an employee who was present, displayed images on the room’s big screens showing nanoparticles tracking down cancer cells in the bloodstream and flashing signals to a Fitbit-style wristband. He promised a working prototype of the cancer early-detection device within six months.

That was three years ago. Recently departed employees said the prototype didn’t work as hoped, and the Tricorder project is floundering.

Tricorder is not the only misfire for Google’s ambitious and extravagantly funded biotech venture, now named Verily Life Sciences. It has announced three signature projects meant to transform medicine, and a STAT examination found that all of them are plagued by serious, if not fatal, scientific shortcomings, even as Verily has vigorously promoted their promise.

The Tricorder, as Conrad and others at Verily call the device, is “in the realm of not only science fiction, but beyond that — science fantasy,” said David Walt, a Tufts University chemistry professor and nanoscience expert who met with Verily scientists and engineers last year to share his concerns. “And I’m not sure it will ever be science reality.”

The company has also touted a glucose-sensing contact lens as a substitute for frequent blood tests on diabetics, but independent experts said it is scientifically dubious at best.

It claims a billion-dollar “Baseline” study of human health will define what it means to be healthy and help identify early signs of disease. But researchers said design weaknesses make these lofty goals far-fetched.

Largely through Verily, Google has positioned itself to be a giant in life sciences by marrying technology and big data with science to cure diseases that have, so far, defied the best minds. But its setbacks and prominent scientists’ skepticism call into question this vision of the future of medicine.

«

Piller has gone into this thoroughly. Verily starts to look like a clunker. (They’ve featured here before, also through Piller, who noted that Conrad was “divisive”. Sounds familiar somehow.)
link to this extract

 

Nest’s time at Alphabet: A “virtually unlimited budget” with no results • Ars Technica

Ron Amadeo peers over the smoking ruins:

»It’s hard to argue with the decision to “transition” [founder and chief executive Tony] Fadell away from Nest. When Google bought Nest in January 2014, the expectation was that a big infusion of Google’s resources and money would supercharge Nest. Nest grew from 280 employees around the time of the Google acquisition to 1200 employees today. In Nest’s first year as “a Google company,” it used Google’s resources to acquire webcam maker Dropcam for $555m, and it paid an unknown amount for the smart home hub company Revolv. Duffy said Nest was given a “virtually unlimited budget” inside Alphabet. Nest eventually transitioned to an Alphabet company, just like Google.

In return for all this investment, Nest delivered very little. The Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke detector both existed before the Google acquisition, and both received minor upgrades under Google’s (and later Alphabet’s) wing. A year after buying Dropcam, Nest released the Nest Cam, which was basically a rebranded Dropcam. Two-and-a-half years under Google/Alphabet, a quadrupling of the employee headcount, and half-a-billion dollars in acquisitions yielded minor yearly updates and a rebranded device. That’s all.

«

Didn’t make an “audio device”, didn’t come up with a home hub language or door sensor or window sensor. Too much money can be bad for a startup.
link to this extract

 

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: mobile phones still safe, Clinton’s email screwup, Apple Store life, Facebook everywhere, and more

Posted on by
Reply


You can study first dates using economics. Ask about their STDs! Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 13 links for you. There you are. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Cellphone radiation is still safer than viral science stories • Mashable

Jason Abbruzzese:

»Here’s the study’s title: “Report of Partial findings from the National Toxicology Program Carcinogenesis Studies of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Radiation in Hsd: Sprague Dawley® SD rats (Whole Body Exposure)”

And here’s a summary from Mashable science editor Andrew Freedman: “The partial results show that exposing large doses of radiation over about two years to male rats can cause unusually high rates of two specific kinds of tumors. But the comparison to humans is a question mark and comparison even to the control group of rats is problematic because of abnormalities in that group. There are a lot of statistical oddities in the study.”

And now, a selection of headlines from various outlets that covered the study.

«

They’re all terrible misrepresentations. Survival in the control group of males was lower than in the exposed group of males. So.. mobile phones make you live longer?
link to this extract

Why Google and Boston Dynamics are parting ways • Tech Insider

Danielle Muoio:

»In 2015, Google attempted to take control of the robotics groups to learn what they were working on and how it could be translated into a consumer product, the former employees said.

“That’s when we first started seeing Google…actually trying to have leadership structure over all those robotic groups,” one former employee said. “Where they’re saying, ‘Okay, what do you do? Are you mobility, are you vision?’ …. and grouping them and directing them toward a commercial product space.”

It’s still unclear what exactly Google wanted in terms of a consumer product. One former employee said Google wanted an easy-to-use robot that could help with basic tasks around the house. One idea pitched was that it would roam around on wheels, which could arguably be seen as more consumer friendly than a complex, legged robot.

Boston Dynamics, given that it was born out of the MIT Leg Lab, was rubbed that wrong way by that concept.

«

Word is that Boston Dynamics is being sold to Toyota.
link to this extract

Clinton’s email shenanigans sure don’t look like an honest mistake • Bloomberg View

Megan McArdle:

»Today is the day that so many of us have been waiting for: The State Department’s Office of Inspector General has released its report about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state. The report does not uncover any smoking guns – no records of Clinton saying “Heh, heh, heh, they’ll never FOIA my e-mails NOW!!!!” – what it does lay out is deeply troubling. Even though her supporters have already begun the proclamations of “nothing to see here, move along.”

It lays to rest the longtime Clinton defense that this use of a private server was somehow normal and allowed by government rules: It was not normal, and was not allowed by the government rules in place at the time “The Department’s current policy, implemented in 2005, is that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System (AIS), which “has the proper level of security control to … ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.”

It also shreds the defense that “Well, Colin Powell did it too” into very fine dust, and then neatly disposes of the dust…

… it isn’t minor. Setting up an e-mail server in a home several states away from the security and IT folks, in disregard of the rules designed to protect state secrets and ensure good government records, and then hiring your server administrator to a political slot while he keeps managing your system on government time … this is not acceptable behavior in a government official. If Clinton weren’t the nominee, or if she had an R after her name rather than a D, her defenders would have no difficulty recognizing just how troubling it is.

«

Clinton really, really screwed this up.
link to this extract

Q&A with an Apple Store worker: ‘yes, it’s like a cult’ • Business Insider

Jim Edwards had a long chat with an ex-Apple Store employee, who has tons of fascinating detail, including this:

»BI: You were at Apple for four years. Why couldn’t you become a store manager?

A: It’s very difficult at Apple. We had between five and eight store managers during my time at the store, of varying kinds. Only one of them had started at Apple the rest had been recruited from elsewhere. From, say, Dixons or HMV.

BI: Why don’t they promote from within? Surely the regular sales staff are the most knowledgeable?

A: That was a hugely contentious issue. They did try to fix that with a “Lead and Learn” programme, where you train on the shop floor by acting as a manager without being a manager. We had some great people on the shop floor, people who had been there for five years, who were selling more than anyone else. But they were still just specialists or experts [two of the lowest ranked positions at Apple].

BI: So why is Apple not promoting these people?

A: I don’t know. It was controversial, hence the “Lead and Learn” programme. But as far as I’m aware — and I’m still in contact with these people — no-one on this programme has been promoted to manager. There are other jobs in-store that can earn you more money, but they’re technical jobs, like working at the Genius Bar, which a lot of people absolutely hated because you’re dealing with really angry customers.

«

Tons more in there. Worth the time.
link to this extract

Facebook wants to help sell every ad on the web • WSJ

Jack Marshall:

»Facebook has set out to power all advertising across the Internet.

To that end, the social network and online advertising company said Thursday it will now help marketers show ads to all users who visit websites and applications in its Audience Network ad network. Previously Facebook only showed ads to members of its social network when they visited those third-party properties.

The change is a subtle one, but it could mean Facebook will soon help to sell and place a much larger portion of the video and display ads that appear across the Internet. The change will also intensify competition with Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google, which dominates the global digital-advertising market, and a wide range of other online ad specialists.

“Publishers and app developers have some users who aren’t Facebook users. We think we can do a better job powering those ads,” said Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform.

«

1.6bn people on Facebook; 3.2bn people using the internet worldwide. Room to grow.
link to this extract

How many stories do newspapers publish per day? • The Atlantic

Robinson Meyer:

»The [New York] Times says it publishes several hundred stories from the Associated Press or other wire services online every day, but almost all of them expire and go offline after a few weeks. The number of wire stories that make it to the print paper—about 13 per day—hasn’t changed significantly since 2010.

At The Wall Street Journal, the set-up is different. Because the Journal’s online content more closely mirrors what makes it into the paper, it publishes only about 240 stories per day. That’s both online and in print. About seven wire stories per day make it into the paper.

At the Journal, the number of stories per day has fallen more significantly than at other venues. Five years ago, the paper published about 325 stories per day. A spokeswoman told me that the recent drop in Wall Street Journal stories per day can be explained by the fact that the paper integrated its own newsroom with the Dow Jones wire service in 2013.

«

Wolfgang Blau, formerly at the Guardian and now at Conde Nast, has a comment on this, including this dangerous observation:

»journalism – just like search, social or e-commerce, but with a delay – is now globalizing and will be dominated by publishers whose home base is already large enough to make it there, i. e. the US or China. The British model of having to expand into the US just to finance their domestic operation (Daily Mail, Guardian) is doomed…

«

link to this extract

Does online media have a political agenda? • Parsely

Conrad Lee:

»A couple of months ago, Journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote a controversial op-ed column in The New York Times about how “The Media Helped Make Trump.” In the piece, he argued that the $1.9 billion in free publicity that the media has given Donald Trump so far during this election cycle has provided him with a platform from which to spew “outrageous statements that [draw] ever more cameras — without facing enough skeptical follow-up questions.” In the aftermath of Kristof’s piece, readers and journalists fervently debated the veracity of his claims.

Because we work with media sites around the world to help answer questions about how readers are responding to content, Parse.ly is in a unique position to provide insight into this particular debate. We analyzed more than one billion page views across more than 100,000 articles to figure out which of the last five remaining major U.S. Presidential candidates were getting the most attention both from reporters and readers.

PLAY WITH OUR DATA

The results surprised us, suggesting that while journalists seem to be preoccupied with covering Trump, the public is not especially interested in reading about him.

«

link to this extract

The celebrity privacy case that exposes hypocrisy of Silicon Valley power brokers • The Guardian

Evgeny Morozov:

»Silicon Valley’s elites hate such intrusion into their personal lives. Had they worked for any other industry, their concerns would be justified. But they work for an industry that tries to convince us that privacy does not matter and that transparency and deregulation are the way to go. Since they do not lead by example, why shouldn’t their hypocrisy be exposed?

If tech elites are so concerned about privacy, they can start backing initiatives such as the right to be forgotten. Why can’t Thiel – a backer of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of the world’s dissidents where the Human Rights Foundation awards the Václav Havel international prize for creative dissent – help us to make sure that embarrassing content, taken out of context and now enjoying worldwide circulation thanks to social networks and search engines, is easier to manage?

This won’t happen, as the right to be forgotten undermines the very business model – grab whatever data is available – on which the untaxed riches of Silicon Valley are built. In Thiel’s ideal world, our data flows freely and the tech companies can hoover it up as they see fit. Should someone else pry into our lives, disclosing intimate details and making money out of it, then it suddenly becomes a crime against humanity.

A world where the tech elites have all the privacy that they want while the rest of us have to either accept living in public or invest in market solutions like online reputation systems is a world that rests on foundations that are so hypocritical and so ridiculous that they must be exposed.

«

link to this extract

Google steps up pressure on partners tardy in updating Android • Bloomberg

Jack Clark and Scott Moritz:

»Smaller Android phone makers didn’t even attempt the monthly goal [for security updates to Android]. HTC Corp. executive Jason Mackenzie called it “unrealistic” last year. Motorola previously tried to get handsets three years old or newer patched twice a year. It’s now aiming for quarterly updates, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Google is trying to persuade carriers to exclude its security patches from the full series of tests, which can cost several hundred thousand dollars for each model, according to an executive at a leading Android handset maker.

“Google has come a long way since Stagefright,” said Joshua Drake, a senior researcher at mobile security firm Zimperium. But it’s still a struggle because some carriers don’t treat security as a priority, while phone makers have other incentives, such as selling new devices, he added.

Google is using more forceful tactics. It has drawn up lists that rank top phone makers by how up-to-date their handsets are, based on security patches and operating system versions, according to people familiar with the matter. Google shared this list with Android partners earlier this year. It has discussed making it public to highlight proactive manufacturers and shame tardy vendors through omission from the list, two of the people said. The people didn’t want to be identified to maintain their relationships with Google.

“Google is putting pressure on,” said Sprint’s [vp of product development Ryan] Sullivan, who has seen data that Google uses to track who is falling behind. “Since we are the final approval, we are applying pressure because our customers are expecting it.”

«

link to this extract

On Peter Thiel and Gawker • Elizabeth Spiers

Spiers was the founding editor of Gawker (2002-3) which “was mostly interested in insider media stuff, and even then, it just wasn’t that scandalous”; now she’s a venture capitalist. She has never met Thiel, but thinks his acts in going after Gawker might worry future co-investors or entrepreneurs working with him:

»he would have been someone I’d have been curious to meet, in part because I am convinced that he’s smart, provocative, and thinks in a very long term way about big thorny problems.

But there’s interesting-fun-mercurial and there’s the kind of mercurial where you start to worry about being anywhere near the blast radius when the person blows up, for of being completely incinerated — maybe even unintentionally. And that’s where I wonder what he’s like as an investor in situations where he’s actively involved. If you have a disagreement with him, is the result a reasonable adjudication of the conflict, or is there always a possibility that even small things could result in total annihilation?

And because I know there’s someone somewhere reading this and thinking “well, what the fuck is wrong with total annihilation when someone screws you over?”, here’s what I’d say: there’s a reason why proportionality is an important concept in the ethics of warfare and I think there’s a parallel here. I don’t want to go into Just War Theory/jus en bello rules of engagement or whether it’s a morally correct military doctrine, but if we didn’t largely hew to it, we could easily end up in a “because we can” cycle of foreign policy that allows wealthy powerful nations to catastrophically and relentlessly attack weaker ones for minor offenses. Disproportionate response facilitates tyranny.

«

link to this extract

When journalism gets confused with cyberbullying • Medium

Kristi Culpepper:

»What I do find interesting, however, is that so many journalists clamored to Gawker’s defense. Most non-journalists that I converse with were delighted to see Gawker taken down so spectacularly. Gawker is a morally repulsive publication — and not Larry Flynt repulsive, but let’s utterly destroy some random person’s life for giggles repulsive.

Gawker relishes abusive content and most of the time does not care if the claims they are making about people can be verified. We aren’t talking about a publication that stops at publishing celebrity nudes and sex tapes without permission, but that publishes videos of a woman being raped in a bathroom stall in a sports bar despite her begging them not to. Contrary to what several of the reporters in my Twitter feed have suggested, Gawker does not have a reputation for “punching up.” They just punch.

I think reporters’ displays of support for Gawker in this case raises a lot of questions about ethics in journalism and demonstrates an overarching decline in editorial standards as traditional media competes with online venues. The test of journalism should be whether reporting or writing serves a public purpose. It says a lot about the state of journalism that public interest is now confused with arbitrary victimization and cyberbullying. There are pre-teens on Facebook with more professional restraint.

«

Culpepper describes herself as a “bond market geek” (so hardly a hedge fund owner or billionaire), and points to the fact that it was Gawker which published the ironic tweet by a PR boarding a plane and turned it into a job- and career-destroying experience, besides plenty else.

That said, print publications have done plenty of mad damage to people too.
link to this extract

The market failure of first dates • Priceonomics

Sarah Scharf:

»While not rocking the boat may seem like ideal strategy for getting a second date, [economist Dan] Ariely argues that sticking to neutral topics (haven’t we all been on a date where the weather was discussed ad nauseum?) creates a “bad equilibrium”—an outcome where both sides converge, but neither side is pleased with it.

In an experiment he ran with online daters, subjects were forced to eschew safe topics in their messages and only throw out probing, personally revealing questions like “How many lovers have you had?” or “Do you have any STDs?”

The result? Both sides were more satisfied with the outcome. So the next time you find yourself on a “boring” date, the solution may be to push the envelope—and converge upon a new equilibrium.

«

This economic look at why and how dates work is great. (Note: I haven’t been on a first date for more than 20 years but am guessing stuff hasn’t really changed.) the next article in the series is how Subaru targeted lesbians to get a foothold in the US market. I’m agog.
link to this extract

Jawbone stops production of fitness trackers • Tech Insider

Steve Kovach:

»It’s been over a year since Jawbone has released a new flagship fitness tracker. Despite entering the wearables market almost five years ago, Jawbone has failed to gain any significant market share in the space. FitBit and Apple currently dominate.

Jawbone raised a new $165m round of funding in January. The company’s CEO Hosain Rahman told Tech Insider a few months ago that the company plans to use that money to develop clinical-grade fitness trackers.

«

Jawbone is also looking to sell its speaker business. It’s cashing in its chips in the consumer space and heading upmarket, having been driven out of business at the low end. Wearables is consolidating fast: there have been a number of purchases of smaller companies by larger ones in adjacent spaces.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida:

Start up: SWIFT’s hacking problem, Apple swoons, the emoji war, the medical firm shut by filesharing, and more

Posted on by
Reply


The price tag isn’t necessarily about what it’s worth to the maker. It might be what it’s worth to you. Photo by DaMongMan on Flickr.

You can now sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.

A selection of 10 links for you. (Check against delivery. Might not be decimal-based.) I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.

Exclusive: SWIFT warns customers of multiple cyber fraud cases » Reuters

Jim Finkle:

»SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers on Monday that it was aware of “a number of recent cyber incidents” where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system.

The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere investigated the February cyber theft of $81m from the Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. SWIFT has acknowledged that the scheme involved altering SWIFT software on Bangladesh Bank’s computers to hide evidence of fraudulent transfers.

Monday’s statement from SWIFT marked the first acknowledgement that the Bangladesh Bank attack was not an isolated incident but one of several recent criminal schemes that aimed to take advantage of the global messaging platform used by some 11,000 financial institutions.

«

Let’s see – since the Bangladesh hack we’ve gone through “not affected” and “isolated incident” and now “multiple incidents”. I believe the next stage is “it emerged that hackers have known for years…”
link to this extract

Apple ends 13 years of continuous quarterly growth » NBC News

Everett Rosenfeld:

»Shares in the company fell more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.

Speaking with CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company is in “the early innings of the iPhone” and that they “feel good” about their business in China.

In fact, Apple beat Wall Street’s estimates on iPhone shipments, reporting 51.2m for the quarter. Analysts had expected 50.3m, according to StreetAccount.

Still, that iPhone unit count was a 16% decline from the 61.17m shipped during the same period last year.

Looking ahead to the fiscal third quarter, Apple said it expects revenue between $41bn and $43bn — Wall Street had expected $47.42bn on average, according to StreetAccount.

«

That’s a long way down. Notable that Google, Microsoft, Intel and others have also had poor earnings. So one asks…
link to this extract

The End of Hardware? » LinkedIn

Bob O’Donnell:

»Whether it’s PCs, tablets, smart watches or now, even smartphones, the outlook for most major hardware device categories is not looking good, particularly here in the US.

The issue is that both consumers and businesses have already bought a lot of these devices. Plus, they’re hanging on to their purchases longer than they used to, and longer than many people originally thought they would.

Many companies, including both Intel and Qualcomm, have been forced to make some painful employee reductions as a result of these challenges, and there are likely more from other vendors still to come.

So, does this signal the end of hardware as we know it?

On one hand, yes, we are arguably at the peak of these key hardware categories, particularly when you add them all together. As a result, we are likely to see modest declines in unit shipments from this point forward. After a 30+-year run of growth, that’s tough news to take.

But there is hope in hardware-land. It just requires thinking about the market in a different way.

«

link to this extract

‘It sounded like my child’: the ‘virtual kidnappers’ scamming Americans » The Guardian

Sam Levin:

»Tracy Holczer was driving with a friend to their writers’ group in a suburb of Los Angeles when she got a terrifying call on her cellphone from a number she didn’t recognize. A hysterical girl was screaming on the other end of the line.

“Mommy, please help me! Someone grabbed me, and I’m in a van. I don’t know where I am!”

It was 4.45pm on 22 March, and it was immediately clear to Holczer that she was experiencing the most unimaginable horror any parent could comprehend: her 14-year-old daughter, Maddy, whom she had left at home 30 minutes earlier, had been kidnapped.

A man quickly got on the line and demanded that the mother withdraw money from her bank and transfer it to his account. He told her that if she or her friend contacted anyone, he would know, and if she refused to comply, he would kill Maddy – whom Holczer could periodically hear screaming in the background. “He said they are happy to send body parts,” the 48-year-old mother recalled.

«

Terrifies people enough that they don’t think to ask to speak to the child, or get an identifying detail, or anything else that would prove it’s anything but a scam. You can understand it, though. And how do you stop this scam?
link to this extract

Inside “Emojigeddon”: the fight over the future of the Unicode consortium » BuzzFeed News

Charlie Warzel:

»There’s trouble afoot inside the Emoji Council of Elders, or, at the very least, signs of a low-simmering schism that’s being referred to by some of its participants — perhaps with less humor than one might expect — as “Emojigeddon.”

Emails seen by BuzzFeed News reveal an emerging tension at the Unicode Consortium — the 24-year-old organization that was established to develop standards for translating alphabets into code that can be read across all computers and operating systems.

The series of frustrated messages show a deepening rift between those who adhere to the organization’s original mission to code old and obscure and minority languages and those who are investing time and resources toward Unicode’s newer and most popular character sets: emojis, a quirky periodic table of ideograms and smiley faces that cover everything from bemused laughter to swirling, smiling piles of poop. The correspondence offers a peek behind the scenes of the peculiar and little-known organization that’s unexpectedly been tasked with building what some see as the first digital universal language.

«

🤔
link to this extract

The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing » Medium

Tom Whitwell, in a terrific essay that has been doing the rounds, but should be bookmarked by everyone who ever has to set a price:

»It’s tempting to talk to customers about price.

Your customers — real or potential — will certainly have views about prices that they are keen to share.
Ignore them.

“It is not your customer’s job to set pricing. An optimal price is one that is accepted but not without some initial resistance” as Ash Mauyra explains in this great piece.

It is almost impossible to predict how a customer will react to a particular price by asking them. That’s because they don’t know how they will react.

They have no idea.

“Are you in the market for tea lights on this trip to IKEA?” you might ask. “No” They might say. Or “Yes”. Neither is a useful signal, because they don’t have a clue.

There’s one easy way to find out what customers think about prices. By selling them things.

«

Whitwell was one of the teams at The Times digital edition, which raised its price in 2010 from zero to £2. Calamity didn’t follow. Why not?
link to this extract

A revolutionary new way to access all your files » Dropbox Business Blog

»With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve. The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity. While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals’ laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team’s data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best.

Project Infinite will enable users to seamlessly and securely access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space they have available on their hard drives. Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it’s stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it’s synced locally, you’ll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon.

«

I suspect this is going to be a business- (or paid-)-only thing. It’s a clever upsell. Here’s the user interface problem you have to figure out, though: if I download a file but now want to free up that space on the hard drive, when I hit “delete” should it be deleted from the cloud? I expect a three-option dialog (Cancel, only from hard drive, from cloud too). But it gets messy.
link to this extract

The iPhone 6 Blip » Beyond Devices

Jan Dawson argues that iPhone sales growth was on a slowing long-term trend which was artificially interrupted by the larger-screened iPhone 6, for a year:

»The iPhone 6 blip is over, but if iPhone sales land roughly where the analysts expect them to, they’ll be right back on track with where they were headed before the iPhone 6 launched. That’s a big “if” – sales could come in above or below that number, which would suggest either that underlying growth had slowed more dramatically in the past, or that Apple has successfully pushed to a slightly higher long-term growth rate off the back of the iPhone 6 and 6S.

The other big question is what happens in the next few quarters, and whether Apple is able to stay on or above that long-term trend line. Remember that the trend line calls for a 1-1.5% reduction in year on year growth per quarter – on that basis, growth would slow to 6%, 5%, and 4% over the remaining quarters of 2016 with 1% shrinkage, or drop as low as a 1% decline by the end of the year. This is obviously far too precise for a real-world projection, but it gives you some sense of that trajectory if it does continue. It’ll be very interesting to see Apple’s guidance for the June quarter – on the basis of the trajectory, Apple would sell between 39 and 41 million iPhones next quarter. But of course, it’s just launched the iPhone SE, which could change things. Anything below 40m iPhones (or $40bn in revenue guidance) is a sign that Apple is dropping below its long-term trajectory, and would be bad news. Anything above that is cause for optimism, at least in the short term.

«

As noted above, Apple is guiding $41-43bn.
link to this extract

Your media business will not be saved » Medium

Joshua Topolsky (a key mover behind the original Engadget, and then The Verge, who then went to Bloomberg, where things didn’t go well; he’s currently freelance):

»The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let’s say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people — they were made to reach the right people. Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines. What will save the media industry — or at least the part worth saving — is when we start making Real Things for people again, instead of programming for algorithms or New Things.

So what will matter in the next age of media?

Compelling voices and stories, real and raw talent, new ideas that actually serve or delight an audience, brands that have meaning and ballast; these are things that matter in the next age of media. Thinking of your platform as an actual platform, not a delivery method.

«

This sounds great; there’s also an excoriation earlier of the business model of most publishing sites, and an overdone – to my view – criticism of news organisations for not “getting” digital; the ones I’ve been at have got it all too well. But this sound like a recipe for targeting premium readers/viewers, which already happens (FT, WSJ, New York Times). And I don’t quite see what “thinking of your platform as an actual platform” means in terms of “compelling voices and stories”. Clearly Topolsky does, but he isn’t quite willing to share it yet.
link to this extract

A leak wounded this company. Fighting the Feds finished it off » Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Dune Lawrence:

»That Tuesday, LabMD’s general manager came in to tell Daugherty about a call he’d just fielded from a man named Robert Boback. Boback claimed to have gotten hold of a file full of LabMD patient information. This was scary for a medical business that had to comply with federal rules on privacy, enshrined in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. I need proof, Daugherty told his deputy. Get it in writing.

Boback e-mailed the document. It was a LabMD billing report containing data, including Social Security numbers, on more than 9,000 patients. Boback quickly got to the sales pitch: His company, Tiversa, offered an investigative service that could identify the source and severity of the breach that had exposed this data and stop any further spread of sensitive information.

LabMD’s four-person IT team found the problem almost immediately: The manager of the billing department had been using LimeWire file-sharing software to download music. Without knowing it, she’d left her documents folder, which contained the insurance report now in Tiversa’s possession, open for sharing with other users of the peer-to-peer network.

«

You think (because of the headline and that last sentence) that you know where this story goes. You don’t. Read it; it’s shocking and disquieting.
link to this extract

Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified.

Start up: Chromebooks beat iPads, Netscape’s growing pains, OnePlus’s India problem, Nexus 9 before and after, and more

Posted on by
Reply


The inside of Peter Morgan’s eye.

A selection of 12 links for you. Clean regularly. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter – observations and links welcome. (Note: I’ve tweaked – I hope – the font size on each link entry. If the spacing seems off, suggest a better CSS for it. I’m all ears, having twiddled with it to little satisfaction.)

Google overtakes Apple in the US classroom >> FT.com

 

Apple has lost its longstanding lead over Google in US schools, with Chromebook laptop computers overtaking iPads for the first time as the most popular new device for education authorities purchasing in bulk for students.

Google shipped 715,500 of the low-cost laptops into US schools in the third quarter, compared with 702,000 iPads, according to IDC, the market research firm. Chromebooks, which sell for as little as $199, have gone from a standing start two years ago to more than a quarter of the market.

It marks the first time Google has outsold its rival and consolidates a lead it opened up over Apple this year in the broader education market, which includes higher education establishments, as it closes in on Microsoft Windows, the market leader.

The multibillion-dollar education market has become a battleground for hardware makers trying to win the loyalties of the next generation of consumers. It has traditionally been dominated by Windows devices, which have a decades-long head start on iPads and Chromebooks, but schools are increasingly turning to lower-cost alternatives.

A $500m schools contract in Los Angeles was going to be all-iPad – and then the deal hit the rocks, and LA went for Chromebooks instead.

Peek Retina >> Indiegogo

What is Peek Retina?
It’s a clip-on camera adapter that gives high quality images of the back of the eye and the retina. This helps us to diagnose cataracts, glaucoma and many other eye diseases, ready for treatment.

It has been developed by an award-winning team of experts in eye care, engineering and technology.

Peek Retina combines both a traditional ophthalmoscope and a retinal camera in a mobile phone, providing a portable, affordable and easy way to carry out comprehensive examinations.

It sits neatly over the top of the device allowing a healthcare worker to easily take high-quality images of the back of the eye. It feels much less intrusive for the patient too.

The aim is to bring it to the millions of people who need affordable eye care in poorer regions. A donation would make a great Christmas gift. Or buy one for yourself.

A letter to our Indian users >> OnePlus Blog

This week, we announced that the OnePlus One will finally launch in India on December 2, 2014. This has been a long time coming both for our Indian fans, who have been incredibly patient, and everyone behind the scenes who have been working towards this moment since June.

OnePlus and all of our partners, including Cyanogen, have put countless hours of work into making this launch a success. Just last month, on October 7, Cyanogen released the 38R OTA update which included SAR values inside phone settings to comply with Indian regulations. Therefore, it was surprising and disappointing to hear from Cyanogen on November 26 that they had granted exclusive rights in India over the Cyanogen system to another company. Prior to this, OnePlus and Cyanogen have successfully cooperated to release the OnePlus One or carry out commercial operations in 17 countries and regions (including India). It is truly unfortunate that a commitment we both made to our Indian users will now not be upheld.

Cyanogen’s exclusive partner in India: home-grown Micromax. OnePlus’s solution: set up physical places where it will flash peoples’ OnePlus phones to the newest system. That’s going to be expensive.

Smartphones to commoditise like PCs; margins to contract >> Fitch Ratings

The margins of Asian smartphone makers are likely to contract in the medium term amid heightened competition and product commoditisation, says Fitch Ratings. The slowing pace of hardware development, and more manufacturers achieving a threshold level of build quality and functionality, means that the rapid growth of lower-cost smartphone producers will challenge market-leading incumbents and reduce profitability.

The smartphone industry runs the risk of following the cycle seen in PCs, where device-makers’ share of the value chain was squeezed by competition and where operating systems and applications software have become more important to consumers than hardware from a specific manufacturer. The dominance of Microsoft’s operating systems and applications enabled this trend in PCs. In smartphones, this trend may be facilitated by the Android operating system and the open environment for third-party application developers…

…Fitch expects that Samsung’s credit profile will remain solid, given its technology leadership, integrated structure and wider product range. Apple too is relatively well positioned owing to its strong brand value and ecosystem. Outside the big two, established brands such as LG Electronics, Sony, HTC and Nokia, will face stiffer competition from low-cost Chinese vendors.

It’s the value trap all over again.

Uber Josh Mohrer: New York’s general manager is facing disciplinary action over privacy violations >> Slate

Uber said Friday that it has concluded an investigation of New York City general manager Josh Mohrer for alleged privacy violations and has “taken disciplinary actions” against him.

Uber began looking into Mohrer 10 days ago after BuzzFeed’s Johana Bhuiyan reported that Mohrer had accessed her Uber travel data without her permission on multiple occasions. In one instance earlier this month, Bhuiyan arrived for a meeting with Mohrer at Uber’s New York headquarters in Long Island City to find him waiting for her. “There you are,” she recalled him telling her. “I was tracking you.”

Reached Friday afternoon, a spokeswoman for Uber declined to comment on any specifics of the “disciplinary actions” or discuss what might have prompted them other than the BuzzFeed report.

Somehow unsurprising that Uber would go for undisclosed self-regulation on this.

The best travel gear of 2014 >> Co.Design

If you need an unusual present for someone who’s always in and out of airports, or rides a bike, or needs an umbrella, here you go. Some great ideas in here.

Is Monument Valley overpriced? Yes. >> Terence Eden’s Blog

We live in times of desperate austerity. When you say “well, it’s only the price of a cup of coffee!” you utterly fail to realise that for many people Starbucks represents an unobtainable level of decadent spending.
People have hard lives. After working two jobs, slumped on an endless night bus home, they want relief from the pain and tedium of the working day. Pulling out an old phone – perhaps a hand-me-down, or one bought in happier times – they want to spend what little disposable income they have wisely. Something that gives them bang for their buck.

Renting a movie, like Transformers, works out at £1.30 per hour of enjoyment. Twice as cheap as Monument Valley.

Reading a book, knitting, chatting on the phone with a friend – all cheaper.

As the reviewer [quoted earlier in the post] said – there are many games which are just as good looking as Monument Valley, with far longer play times. Often for free.

This is a classic “functional pricing” argument, which I find is much more widely made (especially over PCs and smartphones and tablets, where “measurement” seems superficially easy – x GHz processor, y RAM, z hard drive storage). It’s also meaningless. I wouldn’t rent Transformers; you could offer it to me free and I wouldn’t watch it. Why? Because in my view it’s crap. Therefore no (non-negative) price is sufficiently low for me.

By contrast, I find Monument Valley to be fascinating, clever, unexpected, memorable – all those things that for me Transformers is not. As for other games that have longer play times and are free – sure, but is Doodle Jump or Angry Birds as memorable as Monument Valley?

I don’t often disagree with Eden, but this seems to me a classic case of mistaking price and value. Equally, it’s one that lots of people make when it comes to apps – which is the problem app makers face.

An Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool

From the teeny tiny to the gianty–… anyway. Terrific way to feel small. (Via Jake Davis.)

The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever” >> Ars Technica

Sean Gallagher:

When viewed in the right light, the Passport ends up looking pretty. It was unexpectedly the best smartphone we’ve ever used from the perspective of taking care of business. Yes, it benchmarks somewhat below phones in its price range on the tests that would run in the BlackBerry 10 OS. And there’s still a significant “app gap” between the Passport and competing devices. But that’s all background noise when you use the Passport as it’s intended—as an information and communications machine, designed for people who still live and die by the e-mail inbox rather than iMessages and Hangouts and Snapchats.

Unlike this one, most reviews of the Passport miss its point – it’s not a general-purpose smartphone. It’s a BlackBerry.

The baffling and beautiful wormhole between branches of math >> WIRED

Lee Simmons, capitalising on the fact that “wormhole” is a key phrase at the moment (because of Interstellar) and hey, maybe this is new! But it isn’t. If you don’t know Euler’s identity equation, you’re in for a treat though:

the weirdest thing about Euler’s formula — given that it relies on imaginary numbers — is that it’s so immensely useful in the real world. By translating one type of motion into another, it lets engineers convert messy trig problems (you know, sines, secants, and so on) into more tractable algebra—like a wormhole between separate branches of math. It’s the secret sauce in Fourier transforms used to digitize music, and it tames all manner of wavy things in quantum mechanics, electron ics, and signal processing; without it, computers might not exist.

Nexus 9 made on Thursday vs before launch buttons comparison >> Nexus9

Poster “Sebianoti” posted a picture of his old and new Nexus 9 tablets, and commented:

Today my new Nexus 9 arrived, it was manufactured last week, it was shipped to me on Friday from Taiwan and it arrived today. It’s my replacement to my faulty one with extreme light bleed and buttons that are almost impossible to press, as you can see that’s one issue that’s been fixed. This may be the first Nexus 9 in white that has the buttons fixed, at least that’s what HTC’s AVP told me. Light bleed is still present however it’s nowhere near as bad as before.

Seems like damning with faint praise. The LTE version has apparently been delayed. HTC isn’t covering the Nexus name with glory here (and replacements aren’t going to help its bottom line).

Excerpts from my diary of early days at Netscape >> Jamie Zawinski

Here are some excerpts from my diary during the first few months of the existence of Netscape Communications (All Praise the Company), back when we were still called Mosaic. Back when there were only 20 or 30 of us, instead of however-many thousands of people there are today. Back before we had any middle managers.

This is the time period that is traditionally referred to as “the good old days”, but time always softens the pain and makes things look like more fun than they really were. But who said everything has to be fun? Pain builds character. (Sometimes it builds products, too.)

So you want to go work for a startup? Perhaps this will serve as a cautionary tale…

The first one starts at 4am. SGI hardware, Irix 5.3… but the same frustration that will be recognisable to many startups. It starts in July. By September:

We’re doomed.

We’ve finally announced a public beta to the net, and there are loads of bugs, and they’re hard bugs, sucky, hardware-dependent ones. Some of our private beta testers crash at startup on some SunOS 4.1.3 systems, and I’ve got what seems like an identical system here and it doesn’t crash. And scrolling text doesn’t work with the OpenWindows X server, though it works fine elsewhere.

(Via Steve Werby.)

How Gresham’s Law explains why news sites are turning off comments

Posted on by
31

Re/Code is turning off comments. This comes after Reuters turned off comments, and many other sites have dialled back on allowing comments – Popular Science, the Chicago Sun-Times, and so on. Huffington Post stopped “anonymous” (actually pseudonymous) comments in August 2013.

Pew Research coincidentally has some new research out headlined “About 1 in 5 victims of online harassment say it happened in the comments section“.

It says:

While social media sites (66%) were the most common place noted for harassment, comments sections were named more frequently than online gaming sites (16%) and discussion sites like reddit (10%)… One respondent said, “Comment sections of news articles often contain some very racist, homophobic, sexist language.” Another noted that, on news sites, “people are brutal and seem to feel way too comfortable in their anonymity.”

Comments on newspaper sites are generally rubbish, aren’t they? Snarky, pointless, off-topic, flame-baiting… I think it’s because Gresham’s Law mostly applies.

Gresham’s Law is an economic tenet which is often stated as “bad money drives out good”. That isn’t a good way to put it, really. It’s better described (as in Wikipedia) through an example about money.

Minted

The US used to mint silver to make its nickels and dimes. But the rising price of silver made this expensive – so expensive that the silver in a nickel or dime would be worth more than 5c or 10c. So it began minting nickels and dimes with cheaper metals, bringing the “true” value of the coins below their face value. This preserves their usefulness as currency.

But some of the silver-bearing coins remained in circulation. What’s the logical response to this? If you’re someone with an eye for profit, you offer the equivalent face value of non-silver coins (or paper dollars) for those silver-bearing coins, and leave the rubbish coins to everyone else. In theory, you’ve just made an instant profit. Will you spend those coins as “coins”? Of course not.

What’s happened here is that high-value coins have been replaced with cheap, lower-value ones. People will keep the high-value coins out of circulation because they’re not being properly rewarded for spending them – what they get for spending them is less than the value they perceive in them. They can get better elsewhere.

Bitcoined

Gresham’s Law has more general application, though. In general, you can use it to mean that “people will opt for the cheaper way to get it done”. There’s an interesting economics paper around at the moment which looks at the economics of mining Bitcoin, and suggests that in the long run it will be mined by botnets because then you don’t have to pay for the electricity. You can dispute their reasoning (most profitable Bitcoin mining is done on ASIC rigs these days) but we’ve seen a version before – it’s much easier to hire a botnet to send a gazillion pieces of spam than to hire a server.

So now we come to comments on newspaper sites. I highlight these because they’re different from specialist forums where people with similar interests tend to gather. Newspaper sites get huge numbers of people passing by, though the number who comment is tiny (typically far less than 1% of those who view an article).

But a significant number of those commenters are persistent – and this is where the “bad” can drive out the “good”. There are determined people who just want to leave comments, and view the space below the line as “their” territory. They aren’t interested in adding quality, or bringing new information to the discussion. They just want to dominate.

For an example, look at the comments below this article by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. There’s a couple of people in there who I can recognise as “regulars” from just having read two of AKH’ articles in the past 24 hours, and looking at the comments: “Owl;Net” and “William.Farrel”. It’s clear that they don’t really have any new information to bring; they’re just there to wind people up.

For people who might have useful experiences, or insight, to bring, the sight of comments and threads like those are a natural STOP sign. Why would you invest your time, knowledge and special insight adding a comment to a thread when you have idiots like that already busy (and commenting repeatedly, and repetitively)? Why would you want to be the 133rd commenter on a story, if you have an insight that you consider has a separate and unique value?

In the manner of someone choosing not to spend their silver-bearing coin, the smart people will tend to stay away from places like that. They might try it once or twice, but then discover that nothing special happens to their comment; it’s just left to twist in the morass of snakes. Deleting comments doesn’t help much; at worst it leaves a sort of potholed wasteland where you wonder quite how offensive the person was to merit the thunderbolt.

What’s been tried

There have been attempts to improve this situation: the Guardian has “staff picks” where particularly insightful or helpful comments get flagged for more visibility, and can be found through a special tab. At the Daily Mail, there’s up- and down-voting – though this doesn’t of course ensure that comments which are intelligent or knowledgeable will be rewarded.

In fact, there’s negative reward. If someone talks nonsense, you can rebut them with facts. Then what happens? Nothing. The person who talked nonsense is free to keep on talking nonsense. There’s no reputation harm for talking rubbish. (By the way, that exchange is a rare case of someone whose views have high externally perceived worth taking the time to rebut twaddle. He doesn’t do it very often 17 comments in more than two years.

For the knowledgeable person, this is negative reward – swapping silver coins for dud metal.

Problems like this are found in all sorts of places where you have unmoderated discussion, though I think that specialist forums probably avoid some of it simply because there’s a shared interest in the topic, rather than the conflict that you often see around topics on newspaper sites. (It’s also why the comments on what we can politely call fan sites will tend towards an echo chamber of approval or disapproval, depending on how the story above leads them.)

There’s the companion problem of pseudonymity causing people to simply find it easy to be rude – letting out their frustrations with everything else in flinging insults around – but that doesn’t fully explain why there are so infrequently any useful comments, especially on technology articles (which is what I see the most, of course).

But rationally, would you want to dump your useful insights into a place where you’ll get someone who has too much time on their hands just writing “LOL FANBOI OMG”, and whose remarks will get just as much prominence as yours? No. Perhaps that’s why less than 1% of people comment: all the other 99% tried it and discovered it was a waste of their time.

Et tu, Twitter?

Why doesn’t Twitter have the same problem? By contrast to the mess that is commenting on news sites, I generally find that people who interact with me on Twitter are interesting, helpful, polite, and offer links to stuff I didn’t know about. And they’re willing to correct me without making it necessary to hang an insult on them. Well, usually.

The difference with Twitter, I think, is that it’s a conversation: there’s always the chance that you can have a rational discussion, which seems often to be almost impossible in comments. If someone’s hell-bent on annoying and insulting you on Twitter, you can just ignore them or block them. If they’re hell-bent on the same in a comment thread, there’s not much you can do, especially since being rational and quoting facts brings no benefit. The proportion of people who’ve admitted they’re wrong on comment threads is as close to zero as you can get and still be a number. The number who’ve admitted being wrong on Twitter might not be high, but I’d bet it’s significantly higher.

Twitter has key two advantages: it’s live, and it streams past. You don’t get either of those feelings on comments threads. As Mic Wright once wrote, newspaper site comments are the radioactive waste of the internet:

At their worst, comments are like toxic waste buried under the foundations of an article and irradiating all rational debate with ignorance and aggression. And, like radiation, the effect of the internet commenting culture is spreading. The degradation of discourse online is mirrored in real-world dialogue. Adults who would balk at bullying in school playgrounds are happy to fling snide and often extremely aggressive comments around.

Kill them with a file

For general-purpose, general-readership sites, commenting is broken in its present form. The irony is that it used to work really well, back in the days of newsgroups and Usenet. Even though newsgroups were ostensibly free for anyone to post on, you could also configure your newsreader to ignore particular posters or topics or pieces of content in posts. (Usenet died because the spambots overran it in the end.) Slashdot had, and still has, its scoring system which you can use for filtering to choose what comments you see (score 5: damn good idea).

I often long for the days of killfiles; it would make the experience of finding the needles in the haystack far more pleasant, and less like finding needles in a slurry tank. Some people do have useful things to say; some people don’t. Yes, some people can write scripts that will make comments by particular people invisible, but those don’t work for the majority. We need something akin to killfiles, akin to Slashdot’s scoring system, to reclaim comments.

Although the logical extension is that if we treat the leaving of comments as being like “spending” (which it is – of the commenter’s attention and knowledge) then the only way to retrieve it from the inexorable creep of Gresham’s Law is to directly reward people for doing it well. Quite what form that “reward” needs to take isn’t obvious (you can come up with a few, I’m sure). But I think it would make a difference.

In the meantime, the comments are going off all over the internet, tiny bit by tiny bit. It calls to mind the death of the long tail of blogging which I wrote about in 2009. (I’m never sure that Tumblr’s quick grab-someone-else’s-content-and-+1 format is really “blogging”. Low friction tends to low value-added.)

Comments have their supporters – Mathew Ingram of Gigaom in particular (and he’s spent his time in the moderation trenches) – but there’s a clear trend away from them.

The radioactive nature, the abuse, the lack of broader engagement, and the fact that lots of the writers are actually on social media, not trawling those comments, all points towards Gresham’s Law taking its inexorable toll. Comments on news sites are broken. Until and unless there’s a fix, the number of established sites that drop them will keep growing.