MattMaroon.com

I posted yesterday’s post about quitting Hacker News right before lunch. (I’d actually written it the week prior but never got around to posting it because I had a business trip to Chicago to deal with.) When I got back from lunch I had a long list of emails from WordPress full of comments which is the telltale sign of a front page article on HN, and sure enough it was #1.

So a few thoughts on the responses. For one, I didn’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t visit the site anymore, I’ll still lurk. I like the links. I think there are some great people on the site. I think good discussions do occur, though you have to dig for them. I just don’t think it’s worth getting in 20 discussions to have one where I learn something.

One person said of HN

as far as I know is still one of the few sites with a large community and a strong bias towards intellectualism and knowledge sharing

I wish I believed that, I’d still be  commenting there if I did. It’s not biased toward intellectualism, it’s biased toward nerdiness. Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic. Nerds have partisan conversations about geeky topics. HN isn’t intellectual, it’s nerdy. There’s a big difference.

Most smart people aren’t intellectuals. It’s not their fault, they largely haven’t been exposed to other intellectuals. It’s easy to confuse talking about esoteric things for talking about things intellectually. I’ll give a few examples to help.

One  common thread over the last year or two is that people are often focusing on how HN has changed as it’s grown. That’s a common topic on the site. Some people say it’s gotten better, some people say it’s gotten worse and whenever you hear people generalize like that, you know the result is not going to be an intellectual conversation.

An intellectual would discuss the community changes in a nuanced way, which would be to talk about specific facets of it that have gotten better or worse and implicitly admit the possibility that words like “better” or “worse” are useless when applied as generalities. I will say that the community has changed in the time I’ve been there, in some ways I would consider positive and some I’d consider negative, but that’s a post in and of itself, and to be honest not the one I’m interested in writing now, but you get the picture. The point is that there are things about it that are better, and things about it that are worse, and whether it’s better or worse overall depends greatly on what you visit the site for.

Another total failure of intellectualism: some people mistook my leaving to be the result of the glut of TSA articles. That’s like saying the guy who suffered from AIDS for the last ten years died of a cold. It might have been the nail in the coffin, but it was just a result of something deeper, which is that the lack of down-votes leads to annoying trends and makes vocal minorities overrepresented. 

And, for the record, I’m not in favor of the backscatter machines. I actually agree with the community sentiment on that from a very high level which, admittedly, doesn’t say much. I just recognize that the issue is incredibly complex and the discussions I’m seeing there don’t reflect that at all. I hesitate to even bring it up here, as I don’t want people to think this post is about the TSA either, or even about the glut of TSA stories, but it’s a great example of how conversation could be better.

The issue is right up there with abortion in terms of complexity. There’s the issue of the TSA itself. What knowledge it has (perhaps there’s a legitimate reason that someone with a lot more information and experience preventing terrorism than me feels these are worth the expense and invasion of privacy).  Who is making the decisions and why, who is enforcing them and how? There’s the issue of civil liberties issue (i.e. even  if these things do make us safer, are they worth it? What’s the tradeoff?). There’s the health issue (these things use X-rays, is there a cancer risk to travellers? What about to TSA agents?) There’s the issue of enforcement (how much culpability do the ground level TSA agents have? If the system is immoral, does that make the TSA agent amoral for accepting that job? I personally feel that way about telemarketers, but not TSA agents, why?) There are the questions us travellers who think they’re a bad idea should be asking, most specifically what do we do about it? The answer clearly isn’t being a douche to some TSA agent at the airport, but beyond that it gets murky.

My problem is that what I’m not seeing is that nuanced discussion of any of these myriad of facets. Even if we accept that this issue is on-topic for Hacker News (which I don’t, it’s no more relevant than abortion, which is verboten, or any other civil liberties topic) I’m not seeing the sort of discussion I should from a community that routinely pats itself on the back for being so intelligent. I’m just seeing senseless partisanship. If I wanted that I’d watch cable news.

And that was my point. I’m not quitting the discussions because they are too frequently about the TSA (which seems to have abated anyway) or that they aren’t intelligent, it’s because they aren’t intellectual. I don’t learn anything from them.

Last week I finally gave up and ditched my Hacker News account. I just changed the password to some long random string so I’d never be tempted to log in again. Lack of password recovery isn’t a bug there, it’s a feature.

I’m going to avoid writing one of those stereotypical flameout posts that users with lots of karma who quit usually write. I’m not bitter about any time I spent there, and though I perhaps regret the amount of it, that’s nobody’s fault but mine. But I do see some problems with the community that I’m going to enumerate here. Many are probably endemic to any online community.

1. Lack of a down-vote means vocal minorities are disproportionately represented. How many Hacker News users really want to see 5 stories about the TSA body scanners every time they log in? It doesn’t matter, because as long as 10% of them up-vote every story on the topic it’s going to flood the top page with them until they move on to something else.

Some people will say “they have flags” but flags are not down-votes, and even most people like myself who wish there were down-votes don’t use them as such. Flagging is for spam, trolling, etc. I may not like what you have to say, but I’ll fight for your right to not be flagged for saying it.

2. Votes on comments are used to express agreement or disagreement rather than value, perhaps because many people simply cannot see the difference between the two. In an ideal community people would up-vote arguments for adding value to the conversation and down-vote only for detracting. I’d much rather see something well-reasoned and well-stated that I disagree with than just another guy confirming my own opinion about something. That puts me square in the minority on Hacker News and, to be fair, probably just about any site with voting. In fact it probably puts me less in the minority on Hacker News than it would be on most similar sites, but it’s still problematic enough that karma isn’t really a quantification of the value you bring to the community but rather the popularity of your viewpoint within it.

3. The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. Everyone talks about the intelligent conversation, and it does happen, but far more times it’s just the same clichés repeated over and over.

You know whenever you see a post about Microsoft’s revenues going up that the first thing you’ll see when you click comments will be the old internet standby of “Yeah but it’s all Windows and Office and those will be worthless in 5 years”. People said that on Slashdot 10 years ago, and they’ll say that on whatever comes after Hacker News 10 years from now.

You know that any comment that could be conceivably taken as anti-Apple or in favor of any big corporation other than Apple will be down-voted for disagreement (not lack of value) and the opposite will be true as well. Fluff posts from John Gruber, who rarely says anything at all of value (and I say this as someone who spends most of my time working on iOS projects) are extraordinarily popular because it fits within the community’s ideology

The ideology is often anti-corporate to the point of naiveté, and that’s nothing compared to how anti-government it is. These are the result of a larger problem (which is certainly not endemic to HN, and is in fact ruining discourse everywhere) which is that everything is always discussed in extremes. There is only black and white, with little room left for shades of gray. The term “evil” (the silliest and most counterproductive word to enter tech discussions ever) is thrown about haphazardly.

4. The community is often snobbish and out of touch with how the other half lives. This is a community of white collar workers who quite frequently look down on blue collar workers. I’m sorry but it’s true. A TSA worker, to them, is not some guy without a college degree who is feeding his family, he’s an amoral pawn of an evil bureaucracy that exists solely to ensure that peaceful Americans have to get their junk touched by the back of someone’s hand before boarding a plane.

5. It’s a time suck. That one’s self-explanatory to anyone who has used the site.

6. It removes comments from where they should be, on the destination site. When you read a blog post, then click back, then comment, you’ve greatly reduced your chance of speaking to the author. Unless he’s an HN user (which has grown increasingly more likely as the community has grown more insular and self-referential which is a problem in and of itself) you’re not even going to get the perspectives of a wide range of people. You’ve instead decided to converse only with a very specific subset of the people who read the same thing which, in and of itself, is a somewhat self-selected subset of the overall population.

7. It reduces blogging time. My thoughts and ideas belong here where people who are interested can easily see them aggregated, not in an out-of-context threads paged linked to from a profile page on another site that. I like that my comments are recorded here for posterity.

So from now on, for all those reasons and more, I’ll be opting out of pretty much all sites of that ilk. What little writing time I have is precious and should and will remain public, rather than a response to a response to someone who can’t tell the difference between being a freedom fighter and being a douche to a guy who makes $12 an hour trying to stop planes from getting blown up.

For my 30th birthday, about a month ago, my wife got me a Kindle. I’ve been eyeing that device since it launched, and wondering if it was worth buying. I read a decent amount, but not a ton, in normal years, though this year I’ve probably read more than in the two or three previous.

So I never really got a Kindle myself. I figured I’d like it, but not love it, so I’d wait until I maybe got one for a gift, or the price of a future generation dropped so low that it seemed inconsequential. Since the two major players in the digital reader space are Amazon and Barnes and Noble, both of whom are more interested in selling the books than the hardware, I suspect that the prices on them will keep dropping until one day they’re free if you purchase some number of books. Verizon will give you a phone for free so they can sell you the service for it, and I think Amazon will eventually do the same. They’re already rumored to be selling them below cost, and selling large numbers of books to their owners, and the price of e-ink screens will keep dropping from here.

Anyway, what I really didn’t expect was just how much I would love the device. It really is to books what mp3 players are to music. In fact it’s perhaps more than that. The ability to find new stuff to read without going to a book store, to always pick up right where you left off, the ability to store dozens of books online and not need a bookshelf, the ability to read blogs, magazines, and even web pages (with a little effort) without staring at a monitor, it adds up to more than just playback.

So it’s safe to say it’s my new favorite device. I don’t think I’ve used it for less than an hour in any day since I got it.

At work we also got a slew of iPads a few days after I got the Kindle. We bought them for making our first iOS application, Hearts HD, for it. I’ve been taking them home on the weekends. Overall I’d say it’s a little nicer than I expected it to be, but not much.

The main thing I’d overlooked in my initial impression is how good it is for gaming. This, along with frustration at Facebook’s platform changes, is why we’re testing the waters of the platform. The iPod Touch and iPhone are pretty decent for gaming, but the extra screen space of the iPad really lets you make gaming more immersive. Games like Plants vs. Zombies, Angry Birds HD, Ten Pin Shuffle, etc. feel as if they were made for exactly this sort of device. I even gave it to an elderly lady I know (who has rarely used computers in her life) and she was able to get the hang a Mahjong app I found.

When not gaming, though, you feel the device’s limitations quite frequently. The email app is pretty nice and works very well with my Exchange Server account. But typing on it sucks so badly that I hesitate to write anything more than a cursory reply with it. The device is heavy and awkward if you try to hold it up in portrait mode and thumb-type on it Blackberry-style, and it’s still much too small to set on your laptop and type like you would on a normal keyboard. You bump the wrong key a lot and the autocorrect often seems as annoying as it is helpful.

The screen is by far the smudgiest thing I’ve ever seen. That’s been fixed by putting an Invisible Shield screen protector on it (and it’s now nearly bullet-proof) but the protector just doesn’t feel as nice as glass. Still, it’s a win since you don’t have to Windex it every 20 minutes or deal with blurry words when reading.

You really feel the lack of Flash frequently, more so than I do on my phone. Recently I took it on a trip with me and discovered just how annoying it was to be unable to view something as simple as a restaurant’s website. Granted, there’s no reason whatsoever for a restaurant websites to be entirely Flash-based, but all of the good restaurants sites’ are, and you just can’t view them on the iPad. It seems to me that you design for the world as it is, not as it should be, and the internet portion of the world runs on Flash these days.

Video is just so pervasive on the internet now, and even though much of it is on YouTube (which works pretty well on the iPad) much of it is on other services that don’t. You don’t realize how much, I suppose, until you use the thing for awhile. Perhaps HTML 5 will change this eventually, but for now it’s extremely annoying.

The device has many good points. For one, it’s highly responsive. The processor feels like a clear upgrade over all but the newest smart phones. Browsing the web is much nicer than on a phone because you do a lot less pinching and tapping to zoom, so that’s great. The battery life is excellent, though I wish it would charge off of a computer in under a day. It apparently just needs more power than a USB port can give to get to full charge quickly, but if you plug it into the wall it fills up fast enough.

The App Store is, of course, the App Store. Running iPhone apps sucks, but there are lots of good native iPad apps and more coming out all the time. Especially games.

Unfortunately you have to tether it and use iTunes on your computer a decent amount, which has gotten better on Windows since I used it last but still sucks. I don’t ever have to plug my laptop into my desktop, and I don’t much care for having to do it to sync the iPad either.

I’ll leave out most discussion about iOS because by now you probably know whether you love it or hate it. My personal opinion is that it’s good but not great, being held back mainly by one thing: the inability to multitask. That is extremely frustrating and bugs me every single time I use it. The notifications system is clunky at best when you’re used to WebOS, but I don’t want obtrusive notifications on a full-sized device, I want a task bar. I don’t even want the pseudo multitasking we’re getting soon (though I suppose that can’t hurt) I want the genuine ability to flip between programs, and battery life be damned. We’re all used to plugging in our smart phones every time we’re in one place for more than 10 minutes by now, and no amount multitasking is going to get the iPad’s relatively enormous battery down to less than that.

So overall I suppose I’d say the device is ok, but just doesn’t feel like it fills a purpose. It isn’t replacing your laptop, and it isn’t replacing your phone. The virtual keyboard blows, worse than virtual keyboards on phones due to the size and weight, and you could connect a regular keyboard via Bluetooth but then all you have is a really crappy laptop that isn’t even cheap. I won’t be buying a WebOS or Android tablet either for pretty much the same reasons.

When I use the Kindle, I constantly feel what I can do with it. When I use the iPad, I constantly feel what I can’t. The expectations for this sort of device are so much higher than with a modern smart phone (given the increased size and expense) but the experience is about the same, and in some ways worse.

A week ago we released the third Facebook application in our Starfleet Commander series, Starfleet Commander Universe 2. It’s essentially Starfleet Commander with a couple game play changes (mainly mine payouts are accelerated) and other than that it’s pretty much identical to the original. It was meant mainly to be a fresh new galaxy for users to start over. While we love the original universe, and will continue supporting it indefinitely, there are now players who have been playing for over a year, making it tough for newer players to compete.

Within a couple hours of launching we got an email saying:

Hi,

We take abuse on Platform very seriously, and our systems routinely screen for abusive applications receiving negative user feedback.

Starfleet Commander – Uni 2 has been permanently disabled, as our automated systems detected it was abusive and generating user complaints. Please read our Developer Principles and Policies at http://developers.facebook.com/policy for more information.

If your application was not abusive or generating user complaints, please visit the Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/help?page=431 for further assistance.

Thanks,

Facebook Platform Team

We were immediately freaking out. We knew the app wasn’t abusive as it was identical (as far as API usage goes) to the original, which we know has been vetted by Facebook on many occasions.

In the past Facebook has been great about letting us know if there was something that violated their platform terms. We’ve always tried to comply with every term, but there are so many of them, many subjective, and often seemingly not enforced at all, that it’s impossible for an app developer to not step over the line. But every time we’ve been contacted we’ve fixed the problem within hours, and every time Facebook has been pretty responsive about the whole thing. Until this time.

We filled out the contact forms which said that they would contact us back within 5 to 7 business days. (It’s been that long now, still nothing, for the record.) That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s potentially a very large amount of revenue to us lost while waiting for a reply that may never come.

First I tried emailing my contact in their ad department. We’ve spent a large sum (for us) in ads. Probably more than they pay our contact in a couple years. No response. We then tried talking to some people who work on the credits team that we had dealt with (we were one of the first apps to integrate that) but they were unable to accomplish much and gave up rather quickly, telling us the app couldn’t be restored, and nor could the one developer account that had gotten locked out and couldn’t get past the security question to restore.

Out of curiosity I did some calculations from looking at our Google Analytics page and plugging in some numbers from my days of buying users via Facebook ads. Assuming that ads targeting our customers cost about the same as the ads I bought to get many of them (it’s probably pretty close) they’re making about $0.54 CPM running their platform adds alongside on our app. We’ve generated (according to Google Analytics) 1.26 billion pageviews. That means they’ve made about $681k off of our ads.

In fairness, it’s possible the CPM they make is nowhere near what I think it is, and also many pageviews come from our standalone website, so my math is probably an overestimate, but the point is they could easily afford to hire a few people to work full time to do nothing but answer my emails and they’d still be making a bundle off of us! That’s not even counting what we’ve spent in ads. And I’ve needed maybe two emails answered in the entire year, meaning one person could probably handle about 1,000 developers our size (which there aren’t).

So needless to say we were rather frustrated. Then right in the middle of this, Y Combinator announced their partnership with Facebook. I got the email of someone to contact, emailed him, and had the app fixed and back online within a matter of hours.

The moral of the story: Y Combinator just saved our bacon.

Long time no blog. I‘ve been meaning to find the time to write more, but I’ve been pretty busy. My startup is now up to 14 people, so that takes up a good chunk of the week. I’m near the end of a week-long vacation today, so it’s pretty much now or never.

I realized a few months back that I was slowly sinking into a state of misery, the root cause of which was not work (which is going pretty well) but the lack of anything outside of it. I’d pretty much go to work, go home, and often do work-related stuff there. I’d waste time by playing video games or watching TV, neither of which is very fulfilling in the long run.

I was definitely watching far more TV than I am accustomed to, though still probably 1/4^th of what the average American does, and it was only partially because we’re living in the golden era of television. I’m the rare person who doesn’t have a cable subscription but isn’t some sort of anti-television snob. I just don’t like that much of it, and what I do want to see, I can download.

Many people view TV as vastly inferior to reading, but personally I’m skeptical. I’m still not sold that the crap that most people read is really much better for the brain than the crap they watch on TV. I’ve read Dan Brown and I’ve seen about half an episode of American Idol, and if you asked me which one decreased my IQ by more, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an answer.

So I’ve pretty much ditched both television (easy to do in the summer when all of the good shows are on hiatus anyway) and video games in favor of more active and social activities. I’ve been golfing a decent amount, and recently joined a bowling league. I’ve deleted a number of RSS feeds from my Google Reader (pretty much everything that isn’t work-related) and started writing a novel. I’ve read a few books old-school paper style, and have used my commute to listen to a few more rather than constantly flipping from one bad rock station to another, so it’s been my most literate year in a long while.

All in all it’s been a solid improvement. I still need to fix a few things. For one, I need to exercise more. Golf isn’t too bad, especially if you’re walking, but it isn’t really what I’d call strenuous. Exhausting perhaps. Agitating, most definitely. But not really a workout.

For another, I need to travel more. That and not waking on an alarm are the only two things I miss from the professional poker days. I definitely can’t do the constant week-long getaways I used to back then (and the alarm clock situation is hopeless) but I could start taking advantage of long weekends and such.

I took a road trip to Chicago for a few days this week. I should have stayed longer. Chicago is the one big city I actually like. I wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s a great place to visit. The Shedd Aquarium is truly impressive, though since they ruined the show I may actually like Atlanta’s better. The pizza is to die for, and I say this as possibly the only American who doesn’t really like pizza very much. If a New Yorker ever tells you how good their pizza is, kick them in the genitals swiftly to prevent them from procreating. What they call a pizza on the East Coast would be considered merely a topping in Chicago.

And then there’s the blues. Somehow, despite being a white boy from Akron, I’ve been a blues fan for a long time, and on this vacation I had the closest thing to a religious experience I’ll likely ever get. I got to meet Buddy Guy. It turns out the club he’s owned for 20 years had just moved to a new space about a block from my hotel a couple weeks before I arrived. My wife was feeling ill Monday night so I walked over to see what was going on.

I walked in and found an open space at the bar. I looked to my right and sure enough there was Buddy in a cowboy hat. I eventually introduced myself to him, and told him that I was a big fan of Stevie Ray Vaughn, which was how I had initially found his music. Buddy talked a bit about Stevie, and playing that final concert with him in Alpine Valley (Vaughn died in a helicopter crash on the way back to Chicago right after an encore with Buddy, his brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, and Robert Cray). Then he politely excused himself, went up on stage, and played with the band for a bit.

Afterward he came back and reminisced a bit. I asked him if he’d lived in Chicago all his life, and he said he moved there in his early 20’s.

“To play the blues?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just wanted to find a good job. Back then there wasn’t no money in the blues. You’d play and the audiences would be 99% black.”

He talked a bit more about how much times had changed since then. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have lived through what he’s lived through. He started out long before our nation began to make any real and lasting progress toward racial equity, toiling for decades in relative obscurity in an industry that was extremely exploitive of artists, especially black ones. Musicians like Hendrix, Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughn, whom he practically mentored, and blues-based rockers like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, who followed directly in his footsteps, became multiplatinum selling artists while he remained virtually unknown for three decades.

And now he’s a 74 year old black man in a nation with a black President who has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, won numerous Grammys, and owns a blues bar where 20-something white tourists like me come snap pictures of him with camera phones. While he was talking to me about how much more cars cost today than they did back then, I have to think that’s the least of the changes he’s seen.

Either way, he can still play a guitar like he could twenty years ago. And he’s a personable guy. He takes great pride in being so approachable, showing up at his club on a regular basis, signing autographs and taking pictures. I’m not really the autograph sort, but talking to the man I was as close to starstruck as I’ve ever been.

When I’d first walked in, a guy had made a space for me at the bar. I introduced myself and he said his name was Cortez. He told me a bit of his story over the next hour or so. Apparently he’d been a jazz drummer, but had stopped playing about 15 years prior. He’d had a job as an IT worker for a Chicago newspaper, and when he got laid of he’d decided to start playing again. Since he lived in Chicago he decided he might as well learn to play the blues.

Monday nights are jam nights at the club. After the opening act anyone who wants to can put their name and what instrument they play on a list and an emcee assembles bands from it. Blues is very much based on instrumental solos and vocal showmanship, deriving an infinite permutation of songs and experiences from just a few simple melodies, so it lends itself to jamming like no other genre. If you can just play three or four different songs and hold your own when it’s your turn to solo, you’re good to go.

I stuck around just long enough to see Cortez play. He was nervous but did a great job. I’m certainly no expert at evaluating drummers, but I’ve listened to a lot of blues music and he held his own.

Now I’m back and hoping to spend the rest of the week doing as little resembling work as possible, and maybe even bang out a couple chapters. Wish me luck.