When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For a while.

These days Medium is focused on their membership offering, though. Trying to aggregate writing from many sources and sell a broad subscription on top of that. And it’s a neat model, and it’s wonderful to see Medium try something different. But it’s not for us, and it’s not for Signal v Noise.

Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. If some readers end up signing up for Basecamp, that’s great. But if they just like to read and not buy, that’s also great.

Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

That doesn’t mean we regret our time at Medium. Being on Medium helped propel some of our best writing to a whole new audience. But these days there’s less of a “what Medium is doing for us”, and a whole lot more of “what we’re doing for Medium”. It was a good time while it lasted, but good times are gone.

So now we’re back on the indie trail. The new blog is powered by our friends at WordPress, and the new amazing design is courtesy of our in-house designer Adam Stoddard.

Thanks to the fact that we kept our own domain when we moved to Medium, all the articles and links still work. The pieces have simply swapped the Medium styling for our own look. (Although, sad to say, Medium didn’t let us export the comments, so those are gone 😢).

With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas — big or small.

To that effect, we’ve setup a new mailing list for Signal v Noise that you might like. All the posts of the week bundled up in a single digest delivered on Mondays. And of course there’s an RSS feed as well. It’s not like we’re going off Twitter, but Twitter won’t be necessary for you to follow our thinking any more.

So there it is. In this, our twentieth year of Signal v Noise, we’re returning to our roots. Looking snazzy. As eager as ever to share our strong opinions and thoughts on design, business, and tech.

Thanks for reading!

Signal v Noise exits Medium was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether for profit, growth, or negligence.

While individuals have long been rallying around #DeleteFacebook, there hasn’t been a comparable campaign for business. Enter: The Facebook-Free Business.

Being a Facebook-Free Business means your customers can trust that you aren’t collaborators with the Facebook machine. That when you spend your money with a Facebook-Free Business, none of that money will find its way back to Facebook’s coffers.

The rules are pretty simple. Being Facebook Free means:

1. We do not buy advertisement on Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
2. We do not use Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp to promote or represent our business or to communicate with our customers.
3. We do not assist Facebook in its data collection regime through use of Facebook social Like buttons or by offering Facebook logins.

In short, that the business does not use Facebook or its subsidiaries in any way shape or form to operate, further, or conduct itself.

Now, some businesses are more dependent on Facebook than others, so it’ll be easier for some to go Facebook Free than others. That’s ok. All social movements have their innovators, early adopters, late adopters, early majority, and late majority. It’s up to each business to decide where on the adoption curve they could possible fit in. Or, of course, whether they’re fine funding Facebook’s continued operations with their patronage forever.

It’s also true that the lines aren’t clearly defined around what ultimately constitutes corporate behavior worth distancing yourself from, like Facebook Free is doing. But we don’t have to solve that riddle before we take action against companies that have clearly crossed the line, wherever that may be drawn.

Join us!

At Basecamp, we’ve decided to go Facebook Free from today. If you’d like to join, either today, tomorrow or next year, just comment on this post, and we’ll highlight credible pledges for all to see. You’re also free to use the 100% Facebook Free badge that we’ve released under Creative Commons (CA BY-SA 4.0) and have it link back to this page.

Apologies for the Facebook Like button on this Medium page. We’re just about ready to get off Medium as well, so that’ll take care of that!

Become A Facebook-Free Business was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Oh those superhuman CEOs who get up at 4am for that killer start to the day! Aren’t they just amazing? Such sacrifice, such grit, such tenacity.

Such fucking bullshit.

If you’re the CEO, and you can’t get work done at work, you only have one person to blame for it: Yourself. There’s no law of nature that dictates that it should be impossible to get deep work done at 11am or 2pm, just habits, values, and policies.

It’s your job to fix the damn workplace, not run away from it. Stop playing calendar Tetris with a whole organization. Stop loading up on meetings. Stop demanding endless status reports. Stop interrupting everyone all the time with shit that can wait.

Organizational dysfunction, such as the inability to get work done at work during regular work hours, is a reflection of executive habits and beliefs. Work isn’t crazy because of the nature of its being. Work is crazy because you’re making it crazy!

But it’s hard to fix that which you don’t know is broken. So let me spell it out: Having to get up at 4am to get real work done is broken. Busted. Kaput.

And it isn’t any less broken because a fawning business media keeps exalting the virtues of your morning routine or strict regiment. Quite contraire.

You know what’s cool? Getting to work at 9, putting in eight solid hours, and then being done by 5. There’s nothing stodgy or uncool about having reasonable work day that allows for a workout at 7:30am or playing with your kids at 5:30pm.

There’s no prize for being the first to rise. You’re not a fucking bird and there ain’t no fucking worm. So chill. Set a good example for your organization. Make calm a mission. Start getting work done at work again.

Oh waddayaknow, I wote a book called It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work with Jason Fried. If you’re ready for some calm at work, you should read it.

How about fixing the workplace rather than avoiding it at 4am? was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans, for humans.

I particularly like our refund policy and our Until The End of The Internet policy.

But I’m sure we don’t always succeed. And sometimes our policies may decay over time. Terms that are or become unreasonable linger on. Ugh.

So that’s why we now invite our customers and anyone else who’s interested in reviewing our policies to collaborate on making them better, making them fairer. To this purpose, we’ve put all our Basecamp policies on GitHub!

This also means that every revision is tracked and date stamped. You can even subscribe to be updated whenever they change, if you care to follow along at that level.

Furthermore, since the spirit of this idea is to collaborate, we’ve also licensed all these policies under the Creative Commons Attribution license. If you’d like to use any of the policies for your own business, feel free! All we ask is that you give us a bit of credit, if you either copy them entirely or materially.

This act of sharing was inspired by the reception to opening up our Basecamp Employee Handbook. We’ve heard from so many business owners and employees that our handbook helped them put together their own. That they were inspired by some of our values or practices enough to adopt them as their own.

Our hope is that the same might happen with our policies. If more companies would adopt a no-nonsense refund policy, we’d all be better off. If more companies — AND YES I’M LOOKING AT YOU GOOGLE 😂 — would honor their legacy systems, and not willy-nilly kick users to the curb, we’d all gain from the level-up in trust.

Policies are part of the organizational code of a company. Not only should that code be open source, it should be tinkered with, improved, critiqued, forked, and refactored. Let’s do that.

All Basecamp policies are now on GitHub and licensed under creative commons was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We don’t need to wait for the singularity before artificial intelligence becomes capable of turning the world into a dystopian nightmare. AI-branded algorithms are already serving up new portions of fresh hell on a regular basis. But instead of worrying about run-away computers, we should be worrying about the entrepreneurs that feed them the algorithms, and the consumers who mindlessly execute them.

It’s not that Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, et al are wrong to ponder whether Skynet might one day decide that humankind is a bug in the code of the universe that should be eliminated. In much the same way that evangelicals aren’t necessarily wrong to believe that the rapture will at some point prove the end of history. Having faith in supernatural stories about vengeful deities condemning us all to an eternity of misery is a bedrock pastime since the cognitive revolution. Precisely because there’s no scope for refuting such a story today.

It’s just that such a preoccupation with the possible calamities of tomorrow might distract us from dealing with the actual disasters of today. And algorithmic disasters are not only already here, but growing in scale, impact, and regularity.

A growing body of work is taking the algorithms of social media to task for optimizing for addiction and despair. Whipping its users into the highest possible state of frenzy, anxiety, and envy. Because that’s the deepest well of engagement to draw from.

We’re made increasingly miserable because connect-the-world imperialists are unleashing machine learning on our most vulnerable and base impulses. A constant loop of refinement that prods our psyche for weak spots, and then exploits them with maximal efficiency. All in the service of selling ads for cars, shampoo, or political discord.

Such exploitive self-optimizing AI is hardly constrained to social media, though. Although companies like Facebook are probably using it to inflect the broadest harm on the most people at the moment.

Yet however depressing it is to learn about how Facebook finds ways to deduce our precise mental state — and then agitate it further — there’s at least some plausible deniability. It’s possible to imagine that Zuckerberg and Sandberg really do believe that they’re actually doing something good for the world, even if evidence to the contrary is mounting at a rate much faster than they both can both feign surprise and outrage.

It’s harder to argue for plausible deniability when airlines employ AI-branded algorithms to spread families out across the plane, lest they pay a specific-seating ransom fee.

Or that the revenue-maximizing AI that runs the driver incentive programs for ride-sharing companies aren’t preying specifically on common cognitive frailties.

But at least those algorithms actually kinda work, however diabolical their purpose. That’s bad, but it’s a known kind of bad. A bad that you can reason about.

The AI apocalypse that’s really scaring me at the moment is the snake-oil shit show that is Predictim. Here’s a company that preys on the natural fears of parents everywhere of leaving their child with an abusive caretaker to sell get-the-fuck-outta-here abusive vetting services. This is their pitch:

Predictim is the Tool All Parents Need

221. It is a simple number that can mean nearly anything, right?

Well, in this case, it means how many charges a nightmare babysitter is facing out of rural Pennsylvania for abusing and torturing children she and a friend were in charge of watching.

A mother needed to go out of town, so she simply leaned on a person she’d trusted her children with in the past.

This time, however, the babysitter was out for pain.

Probably frightened now? If you have kids, of course you are. So now you’re in the perfect state of mind to buy their truly dystopian huckster solution: Predictim is going to ask potential babysitters to hand over their logins to all their social-media accounts such that the black-box AI algorithm can analyze it for drug use, explicit content, and bullying or disrespectful behavior. The output is a single, final one-out-of-five score for how “risky” the babysitter is deemed to be (which isn’t shared with the candidate).

It’s hard to know where even to begin with this fresh hell. But let’s pick the core idea that AI can deduce whether someone has a “disrespectful attitude” with any level of certainty based on 22 twitter posts. Setting aside the ludicrous lack of a significant statistical sample, just try to imagine diagnosing sarcasm, justified outrage, in-group jokes, quotes, or any of the million others forms of expression that a tweet might take that AI is not within a hundred miles of being able to reliably deduce the intent or justification behind. Hell, I have my tweets misunderstood by highly-educated humans half the time!

So that’s the first conclusion: There’s no way this even fucking works! Simply no way. How on earth can a company like Predictim sell and market a solution like this as though it does? In the same way horoscopes get away with it in the newspaper. By essentially declaring that this is not actual advice and should be regarded as for entertainment purposes only. Or in Predictim’s own words:

Disclaimer: This analysis is based solely on an analysis of the potential caregiver’s social media accounts to which they gave us access, which may or may not accurately reflect the caregiver’s actual attributes. As a result, we cannot provide any guarantee as to the accuracy of the analysis in the report or whether the subject of this report would be suitable for your needs… We are not responsible or liable in any manner for the performance or conduct of any caregivers or for your interactions or dealings with them. ALL USER OF THIS REPORT OR SERVICE IS AT YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE RISK.

This is of course a complete contradiction to what their marketing material claims:

There are lots of ways to find someone to look after children –agencies, online marketplaces and recommendations from friends and family. However, many of these online market placesdon’t provide comprehensive vetting, and don’t take responsibilityfor the actions of their sitters.

Predictim is going to keep your family safe, or not, whatever. It’s going to ensure that you don’t hire Risky Rebecca, or not, maybe, perhaps, we don’t know! This is that infamous Silicon Valley style of promising the world yet accepting zero responsibility for the consequences of its actions.

Let’s talk about those consequences. Asking babysitters, who may even be minors, to hand over the keys to their private social media accounts is not only a despicable violation of their privacy, it’s also extremely ripe for abusive and exploitive behavior.

Given such high criticality — dealing with the private and perhaps even intimate data of babysitters — you’d at the very least want some iron-clad assurances about how that data is stored and used. I mean, that still wouldn’t make this in any way alright, but let’s just play along for a second. What assurances do Predictim offer that this data is secure and protected?

“If we ever leaked a babysitter’s info, that would not be cool,” Simonoff said.

No, that really wouldn’t be cool, Joel. But forgive me if I don’t have such high confidence in the moral integrity of a college grad who’s about the same age as Zuckerberg was when he pondered why the “dumb fucks” trusted him with their information.

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks

Yet, this is even worse. Much worse. These babysitters may not even be college age yet. And let’s see what’s in the CTOs head when he thinks about the “explicit content” that should ding someone’s score on Predictim:

A picture of a girl in a bikini.

What odds would you put on the prospect that Predictim’s technical team has built an Uber-style God View that allows them to ogle those “explicit content” hits of girls in bikinis? I’d say better than even.

But here comes the most depressing part. According to the Washington Post, there is a ready market of parents eager to let the “advanced artificial intelligence” violate the privacy and dignity of babysitters such that they can reduce candidates to a single score.

But Diana Werner, a mother of two living just north of San Francisco, said she believes babysitters should be willing to share their personal information to help with parents’ peace of mind.

“A background check is nice, but Predictim goes into depth, really dissecting a person — their social and mental status,” she said.

Where she lives, “100 percent of the parents are going to want to use this,” she added. “We all want the perfect babysitter.”

“The perfect babysitter” sounds like a title of a horror movie. And that’s pretty apt, considering that psychopaths probably wouldn’t have much trouble manufacturing that wholesome appearance of goodness on some fake-ass social media accounts.

But I’ll excuse Ms Werner. Maybe she’s not in the technology business. When you have Musk and Hawking waving their hands wildly about how The Great AI is going to render us all slaves so soon that we need emergency legislation about it, I can’t fault people for thinking that it’s already good enough to assess the personality of a babysitter.

I have a much harder time excusing technologists who really should know better. Here’s Chis Messina endorsing the idea that every parent should be using Predictim or the like, EVEN IF IT DOESN’T WORK:

Chris Messina on Twitter

I mean, this is inevitable, even if the recommendations are "questionable". What parent WOULDN'T consult such a service if it were widely available? https://t.co/6yiUDduRZx

As I said, the AI apocalypse has already begun. The bugle has been blown, and parents like Ms Werner and Mr Messina are only all too eager to indulge in whatever monstrous invasions of privacy and dignity the Great AI in The Cloud demands.

But it’s not too late to fight back. Unlike when Skynet one day might take over, we actually have all the advantages in the fight of today. We can chose to reject, regulate, and ridicule when AI-branded algorithms turn against our better nature. Progress isn’t a straight line, and there’s a lot of dead ends en route.

The Great AI in the Cloud is not yet an omniscient being, and we absolutely should question how it works in all of its mysterious ways. Chances are good that when we do, we see it’s just two rubber bands of questionable ethics holding together four cans of bullshit.

The AI apocalypse is already here was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you really set your mind to it, you can do it. Get to the very top. Beat out all the others. That’s how I did it. I just wanted it more, worked hard, and eventually all my dreams came true. I won’t say it’s easy, but it’s up to you!

So goes the familiar song of entrepreneurial or professional success. The same song being played in a thousand different tunes by a thousand different hucksters. It’s the song we all want to believe. That the world is ours for the taking, and whoever wants it more, will get it, and when they get it, they’ll deserve it.But that’s a shit track, and we really need to change the station. Odds are overwhelmingly that you will not make it to the top. That you will not be the next baller posting champagne shots and private jet pics. Or be celebrated in parades of adoration by your peers. There just isn’t enough room up there, on the top.

There’s lots of room amongst the disillusioned, though. The disappointed. The self-loathing. All those who wanted it so bad, but didn’t get it, and now blame themselves (or others or both!) for their supposed failures. That group is easily thousands if not hundreds of thousands if not millions of times larger than the small crop up there on the top.

A shit track indeed. To give simultaneous false hope and a false idol to so many when you know, PER MATHS, that it just isn’t going to happen for the vast, vast majority. That’s not just a shit track, it’s cruel. Time. To. Change. The. Station.

So here’s a better one: Making it to the top isn’t the game you should be focused on. The top is full of people who hate what they had to do or who they had to become to get there. Even for the people who get there with a clean conscience often end up disappointed by how shallow the satisfaction really is.

Besides, you only have limited influence on whether you’re going to succeed at whatever you put your mind to. It’s by no means within your exclusive sphere of control. There are so many things that have to come together at the same time. Only a couple of which you own.

But you do have control over whether you’re doing a good job, as measured by your personal sense of satisfaction in the work. Over whether you’re taking the time to notice, to learn, to improve. That’s the most fulfilling part of being up there, at the top, anyway. The “being good” part. Hell, even the “becoming good” part is pretty amazing, if you play it right.

That’s a game worth winning: The one played with yourself for your own betterment. Not the one played against others, measured against them. Screw that game.

Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s a luxurious game to play. You’ve already made it to some satisfying station in life when you’re allowed to focus on your own personal development for subsistence rather than a survivalist climb out from the bottom. But that’s also true for most who are into that Getting To The Top game.

So resist the temptation to focus on where you want all of this to take you, if you can. Luxuriate in the experience and flow of getting better. Stop playing games where you can’t set the rules. Start winning the ones where you can.

You probably won’t make it to the top was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I left Instagram for the first time in 2012 over the Terms of Service debacle. When I returned in 2015, Instagram was something else. Gone from the spotlight were all the personal, crappy phone pictures, and in their place were these extremely glitzy and glamorous exposures of a perfect world.

The change was intoxicating. Overwhelming to the senses. Like going from a 14” black’n’white TV to the latest 70” HDR OLED flatscreen monster. Same medium, perhaps, but wow, what a difference in experience.

Everything was beautiful. Beautiful cars, beautiful landscapes, beautiful food, beautiful people. At first glance, it seemed to be a celebration of all the best life has to offer in goods and experiences.

It also seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to the negativity and hyper-realism of social media at large. No political bickering. No sad people (or, if they were sad, they were chic sad in that melancholically cool way). Just an endless, scrolling stream of hedonic pleasures.

It didn’t take long after returning before I felt an obligation to reciprocate. To invite the camera into my own HASHTAG BLESSED world of cool cars, world travels, amazing sunsets, modern architecture, and smiling kids being HASHTAG WILD. I was giving back what I was getting, and it felt good. For a while.

But it didn’t take long for the feelings to become mixed. While I was sharing beautiful pictures of beautiful things, it clearly wasn’t the whole story. I didn’t share many of the most beautiful discoveries or memories I was making writing software, reading philosophy, or building community. And I most certainly didn’t share any of the mundane or the hard or the tragic or the heartbreak. It was all visual pleasures.

That’s the stereotype, right. Instagram isn’t the place for reality. It’s for the curated highlight reel. And I thought I understood that bargain. Surely people wouldn’t take this to be the whole picture. Surely they’d understand that it’s not all race cars and champagne and glorious sunsets. Surely I would understand that. Surely?

But the ambience seeps in. The aesthetic becomes the essence. And the feedback loop sends you in circles. It’s addictive. Even when you’re aware of it, even when you have your guard up. And I was aware, and I was on guard.

Yet still I found myself trapped in the same habitual patterns that have ensnared millions of Instagram users. Post an image, then check back for likes and comments within a few minutes, then a few hours later, then again the next day. Ugh. Chasing affection from people I mostly didn’t know, so I could please an ego that vowed not to care.

Even when it becomes repetitive, it’s hard to snap out of it. You’d think there’d only be so many cars or watches or beaches or sunsets or whatever you could take in before you’re full. But somehow Instagram always just left me hungry for more. More consumption, more contribution.

You don’t really realize how cooked you’re getting while sitting in the stew. But something important is dissolving.

I’ve taken intentional breaks over the past three years, but they always just felt like that. Breaks. Not conclusive. Not final. So their reprieve was temporary and limited.

It wasn’t until the latest barrage of Facebook sludge washed over me that I gave serious thought to getting off again. To make another clean cut.

Funny thing, as soon as I made the choice, it seemed so perfectly clear. Why had I been stuck here for so long? Why had I kept feeding Facebook the fodder they were using to addict others?

Yes. This has all the charm of a steak lover suddenly turned proselytizing vegan. Or the born-again Christian who’ve just traded in last week’s debauchery to ask you too to accept Jesus into your heart.

It’s not that either are necessarily wrong, it’s just that the snap is suspect. The main ingredients in credibility is time and commitment. Otherwise it easily just comes off as obnoxious.

So yes, I recognize that this is a compromised tale, and that I’m in no position to stand grand. I’ve contributed to an utterly unrealistic and unhealthy depiction of success or even just The Good Life. I’ve feed an aesthetic that devours unfulfilled aspirations and spits out alienation and resignation.

I’m sorry.

And look, I’m sure there are people who know how to enjoy places like Instagram in moderation. But after they added the timestamp to the messenger, it was clear that I wasn’t the only one with a problem. The majority of the list had shockingly recent “last active” markers. That, ironically, was part of what made me look up and catch the reflection in the mirror. And I didn’t like what stared back.

Marcus Aurelius has a great line about how your thoughts color your soul. And surely what you see colors your thoughts. Ergo, what you watch colors your soul. That should have been obvious on a second look long ago. Now it is.

For me, that is. I’m exactly not here to tell you what to do. Just what I did, and what I was thinking. You probably have a completely healthy relationship with the lifestyle projections and Good Life aesthetics you’re consuming on Instagram. Right? Of course you do.

Interested in pondering further how social media is dyeing your soul? I’d recommend How To Break Up With Your Phone, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Acocunts Right Now, and the discussion on authentic thoughts and identities in Escape From Freedom.

I‘ve been thinking about your regret minimization framework for making decisions lately. I don’t recall whether I read about it in an interview, or if you shared it with Jason and me in person in those early days after your involvement in Basecamp. But regardless, I think you’re currently making bad decisions that you’re going to regret. Maybe even decisions that we as a whole society will come to regret.

It doesn’t have to be like this. You’re literally the richest man in the world. Markets have suspended disbelief for decades, and let you rule as you see fit. It’s well within your power and purvey to change course.

The HQ2 process has been demeaning if not outright cruel. At a time when politicians are viewed as more inept, more suspicious, and more corrupt than ever, you made city after city grovel in front of your selection committee. They debased themselves in a futile attempt to appeal to your grace and mercy, and you showed them little. The losers ended up worse than where they started, and even the winners may well too.

For what? Extracting a few more billions that Amazon does not need in subsidies? If you tilt your perspective a little, I think you’ll be able to catch the optics that the richest man in the world asking for tribute like this is an ugly one.

Amazon is Jeff Bezos. You can’t cover decisions behind committees or other shareholders. You hold the reins, you reap the lion’s share of the rewards, and thus you’re accountable for its actions.

As many great conquerors in history, I’d be surprised if you didn’t care about establishing a legacy. I mean, you clearly already have. But there’s still time to shape that legacy into something more than the man who killed retail, extracted the greatest loot from its HQ cities, and who expanded the most monopoly holdings the fastest.

Rather than keep asking what cities and countries can do for Amazon, maybe start asking what Amazon can do for them. Be magnanimous. Be responsible.

Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s the smart thing to do. The better business move. At some point people are going to have had enough, and when they figure out a way to channel that discontent into political action, they’re going to come looking for the heads of those that did them the most egregious wrongs.

I know it doesn’t look like that big of a risk right now. People still seem to trust Amazon more than most of the big tech companies, but that’s a lagging indicator. The clouds are gathering in the distance. It starts with a few pioneers calling for antitrust action, and then one day you wake up, and that’s what the whole world wants.

It’s hard to be proud of having you as a minority owner in Basecamp right now. Maybe there’s even a tinge of regret. I’d very much like to minimize that.

Jeff owns a minority, no-control stake in Basecamp (the company that Jason and I co-own). For the first few years after purchasing that, Jason and I would meet or talk to him about once a year. It’s probably been 7–8 years since we spoke with Jeff directly last. If we get another chance, this would be the most pressing topic.

Dear Jeff was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last Thursday, November 9th, Basecamp 3 was in read-only mode for almost five hours starting 7:21am CST and ending 12:11pm CST. That meant users could access existing messages, todo lists, and files, but no new information could be entered, and no existing information could be altered. Everything was frozen in place.

The root cause was that our database hit the ceiling of 2,147,483,647 on our very busy events table. Almost every single activity in Basecamp is tracked in this table. When you post a message, update a todo list, or applaud a comment, we track that activity in the events table. So when we became unable to write new events to that table, every attempt to do practically anything in Basecamp was halted.

This was an avoidable problem. We were actively working on expanding the capacity of the events table in the days prior to this outage, but we failed to properly account for how quickly we were running out of headroom.

To compound the avoidable factor, we should had been aware of the general issue much sooner. The programming framework we use, Ruby on Rails (which was originally extracted from Basecamp!), moved to a new default for database tables in version 5.1 that was released in 2017. That change lifting the headroom for records from 2,147,483,647 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 on all tables. Which ended up being the same root-cause fix that we applied to our tables.

It’s bad enough that we had the worst outage at Basecamp in probably 10 years, but to know that it was avoidable is hard to swallow. And I cannot express my apologies clearly or deeply enough.

We pride ourselves at Basecamp on being “boring software” because it just works and it’s always available. Since Basecamp 3 was launched, and up until this outage, we’ve had an uptime record of 99.998%. This near five-hour outage has taken that impressive statistic down to a more humbling 99.978%.

Some companies might choose to weasel around an outage like ours by claiming that it was only a “partial outage”, because the application remained available in read-only mode for the majority of this time. But that’s not what we’re going to do at Basecamp. We’re going to take the scar in our uptime record as a reminder to do better.

Because we owe everyone using Basecamp to do better. It’s embarrassing and humbling to have suffered the biggest outage at Basecamp in a decade from an issue that we should have addressed years ago, and that we were actively working on addressing, but failed to complete in time.

As the CTO of Basecamp and the creator of Ruby on Rails, I accept full responsibility for our failures. I should have been more vigilant with our own database schema when Rails 5.1 announced the new default, and I should have followed up and asked the right questions when we finally did start work on remediation. I’m really sorry to have failed you 😢

If you have any questions, or if we can help in any way, please reach out to our wonderful support crew who’ve been dealing with each report individually.

I also want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who’ve been so gracious with their kind words of encouragement and support during and after this ordeal. I don’t know if we’ve earned such understanding, given our clear culpability, but we are extremely grateful none the less.

Note: If you weren’t using Basecamp at the time, you can see how we kept everyone in the loop using our status.basecamp.com updates and a play-by-play record on our blog. We can’t promise to be perfect, but we promise always to keep you informed in a timely and completely transparent manner.

On a personal note, I want to apologize for not posting this postmortem until today. The plan was to have this final summary ready on Friday, but then the Woolsey fire hit, and our family was forced to evacuate our home in Malibu. It’s been a crazy week 😬

Postmortem on the read-only outage of Basecamp on November 9th, 2018 was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.