Basically a one-stop shop for fall festivals, Oktoberfest, haunted houses, pumpkin patches, etc. Still have a long way to go to make it what I would like but traffic last year was roughly 1 million in the month of October. Anticipate it will double to 2 million/October this year. Still working on the right revenue model.
There's something to be said for seasonal niches. It seems to me there's a bit of a reset in terms of search rankings that can mitigate the authority bigger players may have. Do you find that be true?
I could talk about the SEO behind it for days but:
We did use the reset to our advantage to pick up rankings, but I don't think it mitigates the authority of bigger players much. The reset tends to wash out small-time players in the space and bigger players who can't niche effectively more so than it does committed players. Now that I have traffic, I don't worry too much that we are going to get bounced in the reset. I am much more worried that someone will beat us with better content for the next year. Everfest is another startup that I have seen that appears to have pretty much conquered the reset at this point.
Funtober had a very hard time displacing a couple mid-sized players in some of our seasonal niches that were established. Even with the reset, it can take years for their information to become truly out of date and people to look for alternatives. There are also a few things that they can do to keep their information current with little effort. We're just about even now with two in particular that I have in mind, but it took 5 years to get there.
Black Friday would be an obvious example of an area where the reset should be biggest if your theory is true. I think the players there have been pretty consistent and my internal estimate is that even with the reset it will take 5+ years to crack it.
Some scammers on Facebook have seized on to my aunt's name and image as the front for their operations. As family, they friend us from fake accounts on at least a weekly basis. Despite reporting these fake accounts more than 100 times, I got a new one today. They ask me for feedback every time I report an account. They are not getting positive reviews.
Based on this experience, I'm not optimistic in their abilities.
I should start photoshopping a fake scar onto my face in profile pics, so that I have a chance to be believed when I cry "Doppleganger!" with no scar on my real face.
I think a small lighting bolt on the forehead would look dashing.
I've heard reports that a non-trivial percentage of their accounts are fake. I share your lack of optimism, though I also wonder how hard they've really tried until now.
There are persistent rumors that Zuckerberg wants to get into national politics. The spin will ramp up to neutron-star velocities when that happens. It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.
He is literally doing a whistlestop tour around America right now, replete with bizarrely folksy essays laced with nakedly political rhetoric. Not so much a rumor as an impression he appears to be intentionally cultivating
Well, Trump has shown that the populace is accepting of businessmen as leaders. I'm sure if the rumors are true Zuckerberg won't be the last to think they can parlay success and fame into political power, and he wasn't the first (Reagon comes to mind).
Reagan was an actor, not a businessman. He did shill though.
Zuckerberg is waking up
to how easily manipulable the portion of Americans who voted for Trump are. It's too easy. Just look at the republican response to sb18 in CA. The counseling association was suppossed to be working on an initiative to help but I'm starting to worry.
There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left. The infamous poll results on the Syrian strike[1] show this behavior. I'm not sure this counts as manipulation exactly, but sometimes the effect is the same.
There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left
It's tough to justify this generalization in a world where leftist leaders like Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Chavez are still warm in their graves.
I used to believe the same thing until the aftermath of this election. It's not even remotely in the same ballpark. It's like the Dunning-Krueger effect except there's two more peaks in the 0-20% range, and a lot of people with an island of intelligence in their career path outside that range.
it's actually very much in the same ball-park. The sheer fact that many liberals believe that a sizeable portion of Trump's supporters are fascists, or that he himself is a fascist, is proof of this. In fact, in my experience right-leaning people tend to be more skeptical than left-leaning people - too skeptical in some cases, leading to things like conspiracy theory and climate change denial.
I know far more people who believe Trump represented military aggression and big business while Hillary'just wanted to help people;' which is a very strange idea given that Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and Saudi Arabia donated more money to her than any of them donated to anyone in history.
Meanwhile Obama prosecuted more whistle blowers than any candidate in history after campaigning to protect them. Then dropped 26,000 bombs on Muslims last year.
What about the evidence that came out that the Iraq War's WMDs were a fsbrication of the Bush admin's? Who has gone to jail over that? I personally know Americans murdered in this fabricated war for profit and oil. Even insiders like Greenspan wrote about how that Iraq War was for profit and oil.
The people who are represented are not the working class, productive and honest citizens. You are all too tied up in the Dems vs Repubs debate and other politics to notice this though.
Oh no I'm actually completely with you on that one. I think Bush and Obama were two sides of the same coin, although I don't think anyone knew that in 2008.
Living around a great number of conservatives, but interacting with a great number of liberals online, my experience is that it simply goes both ways. It's a much-remarked-on idea that "red" and "blue" America are increasingly more divided. If you see people being skeptical today, it is rarely based on the content of the idea but rather on the political implications of it. Right-leaning people are suspicious of things that left-leaning politicians say or promote, and vice versa. I don't think either party, as a whole, is more skeptical or, conversely, more incredulous. Ideas have become more political, and to the extent that one idea is more or less accepted at face value it is probably because that idea has already been normalized by the mass culture.
You're saying your own personal denial of this election's results led you to double down on accepting your own personal biases as fact and justify your resulting increased conformity in believing 'what should have happened' onto others whose non-conformity bothered you?
Not a Trumper, but the 'boo hoo' media pity-party in the aftermath of this election has been oh-so delicious to watch after seeing through the level of spin in the last couple of years...
"But we told them to vote for Hillary, and they didn't! What went wrong??? Must be 'facism' and 'russian fake news'! Anything but people actually disagreeing with the moral/philosophical/political position I have absorbed without thinking from MSNBC-Universal-Vivendi funded Saturday Night Live skits!"
But yes, absolutely, the 'conformity' is entirely on the 'right'..
No, that's not even remotely close to what I'm saying or believe, you've constructed a strawman.
But your comment is shockingly similar to what I've heard from people who still support Trump irl. Do you personally ever talk about what's actually happening in washington, or just stick to this he-said she-said crap?
Trump is about American nationalism, and he resonated with the poorer parts of the country by talking about making America great again. He's also "old school". Zuckerberg is in most ways the opposite.
> It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.
It was safe to stop believing anything they say after facebook got caught neck deep in wrongdoings and apologized for the first time. IIRC this was circa early 2004 or late 2003 and it's been downhill from there.
Haha I started at least five years ago, the fourteenth time I heard someone complaining about automatically-changed FB privacy settings. Fool me thirteen times... Thus I wasn't surprised by #JeSuisCharlie or the recent wall-building kerfuffle.
I've got a similar problem with my own face. Scammers take public information from bar associations (I'm a lawyer) and build fake profiles using photos from firm websites. As I don't have any facebook account myself, finding and reporting these is a real difficulty. Most large law firms have someone dedicated to protecting the firm's name on social media but small firms just don't have the time.
FYI, don't believe anything said by a "lawyer" on facebook. We don't ever start communications that way. Visit the local bar association's website and check the lawyer's real contact info before saying anything.
It sounds like they're using your name, not just your face. Or are they just creating plausible fake lawyers? And what's the game? I can imagine that they're soliciting "customers", who they'll go on to dupe and rip off.
I do like your profile, by the way. It sounds like the lawyer-expert dynamic to me.
They send threatening messages to people that include links and data from firm/bar websites to make it seem as if it comes from a real lawyer. In extreme cases they setup entirely fake websites with data harvested from legit law firms.
No lawyer will send a threat via facebook. And no lawyer will ever demand a payment via bitcoin or gift cards.
So they scam people into "settling" fake litigation. Over Facebook. And many people, who of course don't have much of a clue, fall for it. Amazing. But some of them, frightened and angry, contact your firm.
In some other world, where GnuPG had become widely used, legal communications would be signed, and people could just check signatures. That wouldn't help for fake websites, however.
Law firms arent coke or pepsi. They generally dont care about public opinion. Only client opinion matters. What they dont want to see is thier name being used for criminal activity. But being seen as dark and scary isnt always a bad thing (see Wolfram & Heart).
Attorney here. Frequently do case evaluations for my firm. I prototyped this last year. It was not as hard as you would think if you have some experience in the area of law.
I think affiliate relationships will be our next test but haven't pursued because our visitors value experiences over merchandise. I was hoping an entrepreneur would setup a ticketing affiliate in our niche area but alas I may have to do it myself.
These sorts of mistakes happened when I was trading options more than a decade ago. In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters.
Back in the old days, I feel the broker would have gone to the market makers, said there was an error, and gotten out of the trade.
>>In most transactions, such a confirmation would have cost money on every transaction since speed matters.
Which is why I said you would enable it based on a threshold and/or only on unusual threads. These systems are capable of extremely complex decision-making at very high frequency. Surely something like "sell 610,000 shares for 1 yen" would have stood out as strange.
Hi. Nights & weekends startup founder with a day job at a whistleblower law firm here. [1]. The following comes with all of the standard caveats about this not being legal advice. [2]. I'm going to talk generally and you can draw your own conclusions. But my advice is to call an employment attorney tomorrow so they can give you specific advice. Most will do a free initial consultation, and anyone good would take a look at whether you should be reporting this to the government under one of the whistleblower programs.
Quitting is almost always a bad idea unless you have enough savings to last a ridiculously long time. If someone quits, they forfeit unemployment in most situations. Future employers will ask you why you quit, and you will be in essentially the same position as if you were let go.
Interviewing: Everyone should always be interviewing. Most employment is at-will and you can be fired for almost any reason. It's easier to find a job while you still have a job.
Internal Reporting: Frequently doesn't end well for the person reporting compliance issues. Be especially sure that the violation is a real issue before continuing to report it.
Retaliation Lawsuit: There is no catch-all law protecting people from retaliation. There are piecemeal statutes that cover a number of popular situations, but they also depend on your state and the specific issue that you reported. If you are covered, you are looking at several years of litigation in order to receive a maximum of what is usually 1-2 times your lost compensation while they attempt to prove that they fired you for a legitimate reason. If the company is legit, they would probably offer you severance that eliminates this possibility.
Whistleblower Rewards: There are a number of federal programs that offer rewards for bringing information to the government. The two that would be most applicable to a data scientist I think are the False Claims Act (health care, etc) and the Dodd Frank Act programs (SEC & CFTC for violations of securities laws). If you take information to the government and they fine the company as a result (greatly simplified as there are lots of other terms and conditions), then they offer between 10 and 30 percent to the whistleblower.
Sorry this has happened to you.
[1] Feel free to track me down if you want to chat. For those considering downvoting this as solicitation, I will say up front that it's unlikely that my firm would be interested in the situation as described.
[2] This is general information that you can find elsewhere on the internet. It isn't specific advice to your situation. This answer does not form an attorney-client relationship. We would only have one if you signed a written retainer agreement with my firm. Each state has its own laws/rules and I'm only licensed in one state, which is likely not yours. So you should seek legal advice from an employment attorney in your state immediately. Sorry that this is even necessary to say.
Build consumer demand on the site first and you'll be able to sell something in the long term. At least that's what I'm hoping works with my current project.
I am curious if anyone knows the answer to this or has tried it. If you had a judgment against them, couldn't you attach the judgment to their app store earnings and have apple send you their check?
I suspect they would just start publishing under a new user? Just thinking out loud as my law grad self is intrigued by this question.
