>Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This comment is really, really tone-deaf. People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction and/or making decisions that negatively impact the company's mission.
Exactly. I remember when ponytail became the CEO at Sun. Most of Sun employees loved Sun to a level that hasn't been experienced anywhere else, while hating the new CEO.
Interesting. When I learned about Ponytail (Jonathan Schwartz, possibly spelled incorrectly), I perceived him as the guy who would rescue Sun. I still remember his presentation of Looking Glass - it felt so modern. Little did I know...
> People can believe strongly in the vision and mission of a company while also feeling strongly that upper leadership is steering it in the wrong direction
Clearly that is the case here. CEO really comes off as if he’s living in a fantasy world here.
Which isn’t surprising given he started a crypto company.
It's wierd tho because it's not ENTIRELY tone-deaf. When i was reading it i would agree wholehearitly with some, and wince at others.
If he would have left it at these two points and immeditaly called a company all hands:
>First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
> Our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private. Posting this publicly is also deeply unethical because it harms your fellow co-workers, along with shareholders and customers.
> But wait, you bluster, the custodial agreement clearly says that I am the owner, that it’s my property, that I retain title to it. Yup, but that’s not how the law actually works. Just because they wrote that doesn’t mean it’s true.
> In fact, the exchanges are lulling the consumers with language claiming that the consumer "owns" the coins, when in fact the legal treatment is quite likely to be different in bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, it is likely to be treated as a debtor-creditor relationship, not a custodial (bailment) relationship.
> Not only are the customers likely mere creditors, but they are also likely general unsecured creditors, which means they will have to wait at the back of the line for repayment with everyone else. They will share on a pro rata basis whatever assets are leftover (if any) after the secured creditors and the priority creditors (including the expenses of running the bankruptcy) get paid, and any payment might not be for quite a while. That’s not a happy to place to be. Recoveries could be pennies on the dollar.
Your citation refers to the status of customers with respect to other creditors.
It says diddly squat about shareholders, who are below creditors in the event of a bankruptcy. Because, in a corporate bankruptcy, shareholders generally lose their investment.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests. In bankruptcy, customers will be screwed over to benefit the other creditors, not to benefit the shareholders as I mistakenly said.
Absent bankruptcy, fiduciary duty to shareholders is prioritized over creditor's interests.
No, this is still wrong. Shareholders are not prioritized over creditors, at any time. Shareholders are the least important stakeholders in a corporation, because by virtue of their limited investment, they have the least at risk.
Probably gonna get blacklisted by someone for this, but it’s astonishing to me that people can (with a straight face) say this at one moment then at another claim there’s no reason software engineers should ever unionize since they get paid well.
That argument really falls flat when you realize that this guy is the co-founder and CEO, i.e. he was already there and in charge when these people decided to join him.
If you don't like a company's leadership, obviously don't go work there. If you do, then decide you don't like them, obviously you quit. A 5-year old could understand that. Though it's beyond the anarchist collective on HN, apparently.
When you have poured your life energy out creating technology for a business you believe in and find to be a force for good, it is hard when business people come in and systematically uproot all the good. Yes, one must leave, but one leaves behind a lot of good work.
Yikes. Insulting your employees is not a good look.
> We praise in public and criticize in private
But you’re criticizing employees in public right now? As the CEO and founder I think you need to be receptive to criticism and take it on the chin. This tweet reads as if it was written in a frustrated, spontaneous episode. That’s also not a really inspiring look for outsiders or investors.
Best of luck, I’m moving over to Kraken. Treating and talking about employees like this isn’t okay.
>If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution).
Yet all his thread does is criticize this petition without trying to understand and work with the person who wrote it. I understand that a CEO would be very unhappy at something like this and I can't fault him for feeling that way, but he'd do well to listen to his own point in this instance - "be a part of the solution".
The petitioners publicly called for the ousting of senior executives, while airing confidential dirty laundry. The idea that this deserves to be met with a receptive and empathetic response is absurd. If you want collaboration, approach collaboratively. You might not get what you want, but at the end of the day, a company needs to be led by somebody, and I would much rather be led by a designated leader than by public pressure campaigns brought by whatever employees are most willing to escalate their grievances to the public square.
Do you have backchannel information to suggest that the collaborative approach wasn't tried first? In my experience, going public never is the first step people take.
I have no inside info about this, but it wouldn't change my opinion if there had been an internal ask first. It's a fact of life that sometimes you will lose the argument, and fail to convince others of your ideas, even when you care deeply. I have been there, and it sucks. At that point, you can chose to stay and live with it, or decide it's a dealbreaker for you and move on.
The third option -- to escalate the argument to the public square and enlist the public as allies -- is available, but think what would happen if everybody did this. In a company of thousands of people there will always be passionate disagreement. If companies tolerated this kind of public escalation, it would erode the trust that is necessary for any organization to operate. It would be its own kind of toxic culture.
It's not a political stunt. The people who haven't left clearly want to remain their for various reasons asides from the issues they expressed. It's an attempt from those employees to actually improve the company and address the issues they have.
It's a publicly traded company. The shareholders have a right to know if the company is being mismanaged, so they can take action to improve management of the company they own.
There is a middle ground between saying nothing and raising it to the general public. The public square is a terrible place to litigate what are effectively unsourced, one-sided allegations.
Brian has an exceptionally long history of holding himself to a dramatically lower standard than he holds his employees. It is hard to imagine a reason that he would change.
I get where you're coming from - this response seemed overly harsh. But I do think there's an important difference - this petition is anonymous and criticizes three people by name. Armstrong's response criticizes nobody by name (he couldn't!)
If he knew their name(s), he would have just fired them. Posting anonymously is the only real option they have if they love the company but think leadership has gone astray.
Yeah, but the employees aren’t exactly in a position of power here. He already indirectly said “it’s good I can’t name you, because you’d be fired now”.
This will probably never be read, but I'll say it anyway.
Not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user here. The CEO responding to petitions like this on Twitter in a childish and heated manner is reducing my confidence in Coinbase as a company. The same might be true for other users who are watching.
You are the CEO of a public company, and will have to see many such petitions over the course of your career if things go well. Lashing out on Twitter is a shortcut to achieving much worse outcomes that will not end well.
I suggest apologizing publicly to your employees for your heated Tweets, and cite that you will definitely not use Dot Collector in the future. If it's such a non-event, why not take the win and admit that it was a bad idea? It is well-known as controversial anyway from all I have heard about it.
Also not an employee or shareholder, but a Coinbase user. I don't know that Brian's set of tweets does anything to my confidence in Coinbase as a company. These tweets are trivial.
The biggest threat to my confidence about Coinbase is the structural parts of it, the fact that they are a growing centralized for-profit company responsible for a large amount of assets.
On this trivial (to me, maybe not to Coinbase) Twitter matter: I can see how both sides would go public like this. If you are an internal employee and you think there are C-level personnel changes that should be made, the odds are definitely not in your favor to propose such a thing internally. The risk is high that there will be retribution (whether direct or indirect). Going public is a way to drive attention to the issues, and incentivize that execs act in a legal manner in their responses.
I can also see why Brian would want to address this. Employees are airing their dirty laundry publicly. Shareholders and users can see this. If all you saw was this petition, it would certainly raise a lot of questions. It needs to be addressed in the arena in which it was surfaced by leadership. Where I think Brian is going wrong is he is being 100% defensive and 0% open-minded/empathetic. What about Coinbase's environment led to employees feeling the need to go public like this? This should be a time for some introspection, to hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.
Imagining how other founders such as Jack Dorsey or Reed Hastings would have reacted to these with tact. If the company has a transparent culture, they isn't much harm or fear for non MNPI to be discussed publicly.
it's nice to see you haven't changed in the sense that you're responding here directly and address the issue without mincing words. The content is less nice though, very misguided even. I don't have inside knowledge and can't speak for the employees but I can tell you that other shareholders also aren't happy with the way things are going and what's been said in the petition largely resonates with me.
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that. Most long term investors don't care about the current share price either, but we're worried about the future value of the company. The out of control hiring was completely incomprehensible after you and other execs for months repeated the mantra that Coinbase is well prepared for the bear market. Spending has been out of control lately as the Q1 figures showed, especially on administration and employee stock options, wherever that money went. The company is quickly turning into another Silicon Valley bureaucratic monster, eating up funds with little real world gain in terms of productivity. (Foreign) acquisitions don't seem to be going great. And neither do you communicate any of the "challenges" to the shareholders, you seem to be treating us the same way as the employees. One day you announce the plan to hire thousands of new employees, a few weeks later that gets completely scrapped and a hiring stop put in place. This isn't good leadership and doesn't look like there is sufficient foresight.
Lastly in terms of investments, one of the great opportunities Coinbase has at the moment is investing aggressively in startups in the space, given the cash reserves. Having a chief people officer who doesn't understand crypto hire more and more people who don't know what they're doing at Coinbase isn't needed at this point, it would be better to invest in talent that does understand the space and actively builds solutions.
And while of course the leadership should lead and the employees should follow, not the other way around, it doesn't hurt to listen to them once in a while. Publicly dismissing their concerns in an arrogant and aggressive manner is not helpful!
It's not because of the downcycle, no one who's been in crypto long enough cares about that
It absolutely is and there is a lot more of this blame game to come as people’s illusions are crushed. BTW it’s not a downcycle or a season, it’s a crash and cryptocurrencies will not recover because:
Nobody is using them as currencies - the experiment has failed, instead they are vehicles for speculation
The supply of greater fools in the world population has been exhausted, and after they lose all their money they will never return
That’s not to say coinbase and Armstrong don’t deserve criticism but let’s be clear about why it is happening now - his actions haven’t changed, the context has, and a lot of people have lost money they’re never getting back invested in coinbase itself and cryptocurrencies so they are angry (esp employees who probably invest in crypto, in coinbase and depend on the company).
When crypto was rising there was a lot of back-patting about how the cryptocurrency industry was slurping up talent from other sectors.
Granted, maybe the crypto aficionados celebrating the hiring spree are different from the ones now demanding labor austerity, but it strikes me as quite the heel-turn.
“If you're unhappy about something, work as part of the team to raise it along with proposed solutions (it's easy to be a critic, harder to be a part of the solution). If you can't do that and you're going to leak/rant externally then quit. Thanks!”
The amount of blatant hypocrisy in this tweet is mindblowing. If I knew I wasn’t smart enough to run a company I’d at the very least get someone to proofread my tweets before exposing my lack of logical consistency and awareness.
This whole leak/rant is something that should have been addressed internally. Shot in the foot.
This response reminds me of a company in the cannabis software space where recently the engineers put together a letter essentially saying they were not happy with the work environment, that the company was focused on the wrong things and that the CTO was not doing a good job. It was signed by 10 out of 12 engineers I think. They got no response. 2 weeks later they had layoffs and got rid of every engineer that signed the letter. I think they have 2 engineers left. This happened a few weeks ago. This is the second time the engineers have expressed something like this, the last time, every Sr. engineer just quit in a ~6 month period (7 total I think).
Well that's a sinking ship, people seem to think replacing software developers is like hiring for a fry cook where you can get going in a day but in reality it's months to get up to speed and it a rotating door of devs makes for some really bad code.
The initial petition alleged problems at exec level. Brian's response confirmed it. And he wonders why the employees wouldn't bring this up internally..
Aside from the fact that his response is likely illegal according to California labor code, threatening to fire employee for discussing workplace conditions, it blows my mind how ignorant and illiterate he is when it comes to understanding power dynamics, and even the basic history of labor.
How do you go from being a startup founder to a public company CEO without deeply reflecting about workplaces, employee happiness, dysfunction, power dynamics and history of all of that?!
As others said this tweet feels childish for a CEO of a public company. Also, responding to it on Twitter this way can't be in the best interest of shareholders because you are making it way more heated and thus accelerating the spread of the bad look of your company.
Employees took a massive risk to organize (which you confirmed by threatening to fire them in this tweet) to try to help the company. I believe this should be rewarded, and you should apologize for creating an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this.
Or, you could hope that people will stop having emotions and acting irrationally based on those emotions. I seriously doubt that will pan out well.
> an environment where the only workable solution for employees to make their voices heard is to stage something like this
So much this. I’ve worked at a couple companies that at some point had a lot of leaks. In every case it was because employees had become disgruntled because there was no way to affect change inside the system.
> 2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. Who do you think is running this company? I was a little offended not to be included :)
My first thought after reading that - maybe your employees actually believe that their execs are the ones running the show?
Honestly surprised he even responded to it, and every single tweet is a red flag there. Not a good look, and he didn't even address the rescinded offers which I think is dragging coinbase's rep down the most.
Responses like this from C-levels in crypto make me glad I moved from the space after 4 years. Everyone is so egotistical. Blaming it on mental patterns of the employees without accepting it could be some really shitty management from your colleagues instead is toxic. Have a good hard look at the people named in this petition.
Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
2/ First of all, if you want to do a vote of no confidence, you should do it on me and not blame the execs. I was a little offended not to be included :)
3/ Second, let’s separate the problems that you perceive to stem from a few execs, and those that you believe are core to the company's mission. If you don’t like the mission, your decision is easy: you should leave. If a few unpopular execs, my decision is hard.
4/ Third, making suggestions on how to improve the company is a great idea (in fact, we expect everyone to be a part of that). But our culture is to praise in public, and criticize in private.
5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
"""
>Brian, you have legitimate points. Here are my edits to your tweets to help people receive them better (i've tried to not change the message, just the tone):
>5/ Fourth, our culture is to retaliate against whistleblowers. Instead of negotiating with you, if you get caught you will be fired.
That's just terrible advice - whistleblower retaliation is illegal, and you're suggesting he retaliate publicly? I'd argue that your post could best be condensed to, "Speak with your legal team before you publicly respond to something like this."
You can't just leak anything you want and claim you're a whistleblower. Whistleblower protection is for leaking illegal actions, not for posting a petition that you don't like some executives.
Not a great look for the cofounder to be berating small groups of employees externally - the irony of the power dynamics at play seems to be lost.
Coinbase seems like a dumpster fire. Heed the warnings of the recent announcements that your assets can be considered the company's in bankruptcy proceedings - and move your assets into hardware wallets.
That email about bankruptcy seemed to be a call to action to move funds off platform. Not sure why it was framed that way or sent to account holders — was it supposed to be a shakedown (“support us, or else…”)? Either way, Ledger just got a new customer.
A generally apathetic and sometimes condescending attitude from the CPO, COO, and Chief People Officer
Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending:
Second, if you have no confidence in the execs or CEO of a company then why are you working at that company? Quit and find a company to work at that you believe in!
This is a very amateurish response, and honestly I'm expecting better from some exec of a publicly traded company. You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice, share how Coinbase is always (supposed to be) looking for new ways to improve, and how there are more appropriate channels for this kind of feedback.
Instead you let your ego get in the way, shared some childish tweets (that you'll probably regret soon), and alienated the majority of your employees.
>Which you replied to with a very apathetic and condescending
Well, he did say he felt offended that he wasn't included in the list.
>You should have used this as an opportunity to make your employees believe they made the right choice
Brian is doing that here. Except he is appealing to the employees that aligns with him and his choice of people for exec leadership. You seem to assume that a vast majority of the employee base agrees with the petitioner, and Brian seems to assume that a vast majority agrees with his PoV.
There are a lot of people that agree with the petitioner, but employees aren’t given an open forum to talk about internal problems. If you talk about things that are wrong too much with your manager, you get marked down for not being positive. There’s no “free speech” internally and it is a pretty oppressive environment in that it doesn’t feel safe to express yourself to anyone.
Was Coinbase the company that paid-off employees to leave when it implemented the "no politics at work" policy? I had my suspicions that this would result in chilling /suppression of dissent as "politics".
Brian, I feel your urge to solve this huge issue. Though I think only Elon gets to do this (with a tweet storm) while getting away with it The mere mortals should probably solve it in meetings. Hope you can weather through this and wish you the best
Not really, you just degraded your employees who had a complaint and told them their jobs aren’t safe without assessing their concerns, you just dismissed the concerns offfhand. Kinda shitty, IMO, but I don’t have a dog in this race so my opinion is not really important. Good luck navigating the future.
This petition was created by one person (may or may not be a current employee) and posted to Blind. There were zero replies before they deleted it.
The creator of this petition then sent it to @Carnage4Life/@GergelyOrosz[1] on Twitter who perpetuated the idea that this had actually been signed by employees and was causing a rucks at Coinbase.
To me this is borderline misinformation because it is not representative of any reality.
I don’t care about the initial trigger much, mostly that the CEO’s first response to a possible employee problem was that it was dumb and to threaten his employees over it. Not a great look regardless of whether it was one employee, zero, or several hundred. Leaders should have much more compassion than this.
I guess I'm just frustrated at these "tech writers" for re-posting unverified information from Blind and then needing to walk it back later. It's unprofessional and risky.
Too bad Mr. Armstrong didn't choose to keep his mouth shut for a bit longer, to verify if the claims were from actual employees. Alternatively, he could have made a single tweet:
"I am aware of the open letter published today that was claimed to be from Coinbase empoyees. We will do our best to verify this and also respond to those employees internally to try and solve any issues they have with the direction of our company. I appreciate all feedback from Coinbase employees, positive or negative."
Sure, but not in an illegal way, I think its warranted. Its one thing to post the recall letter internally but to publicly bash your employer and call for the firing of others and expect to keep your job is insanity. They could have easily rewritten the letter to be less inflammatory, identified the problems, proposed solutions that did not target individual leaders and posted it on an internal board. We are at a strange time in industry where people don't think they will be fired for publicly torching their employer (see the recent Washington Post debacle). With that said, Brian's response was equally bad.
If your execs prevent your employees from interacting with the board of directors, their only option is to go public to get the board and investors' attention. Brian only wants this to stay internal because he can control the narrative, how people communicate about it, and what the board and investors are made aware of.
Now, I am no lawyer, but i am pretty sure that this would fall under "discussion of workplace conditions" - a type of speech in California protected by the labour code and not allowed to be retaliated against.
I'm not sure it's that clear cut, since they're singling out and attacking fellow employees in the process. Seems like the kind of complex labor case that would be heavily litigated.
I disagree with most of the comments here; this tweet chain was mostly fine. It seems like the biggest problem was not the petition, but the leak. Unnecessarily tarnishing the company reputation publicly would piss off any CEO.
If this same response were posted after an internal petition, it would have the wrong tone. Externally, I'm not going to condemn it so much.
Really liked this post - brings up some great points, and I consider Moxie a friend.
Here are a few notes that came to mind though...
1. For NFTs, some keep their data in IPFS (decentralized file storage) or in the smart contract itself for procedurally generated images. We (as a community) should probably move more to solutions like this over time, since it is indeed more decentralized to build them that way.
2. I agree with the overall point that clients don't behave like full nodes. However, there has been quite a bit of discussion about "light clients" in the crypto community even going back to the early days of Bitcoin/Ethereum, so i wouldn't say it hasn't been an area of focus.
3. I agree there is an overall move toward using platforms. But there is a big difference between using a platform that also owns all the data also (web2) and a platform that is merely a proxy to decentralized data (web3). In the latter, if a platform ever turns evil, people will switch. Not owning the data counts for a lot.
4. There are more options than Infura and Alchemy. Access to simple blockchain data will be relatively commoditized. Which is good for decentralization.
As Moxie points out, it's still difficult to build things in a decentralized way (nascent tools), so you are seeing various apps/companies revert to using more centralized web2 techniques when they run into a hairy technical problem. As a result, there are a lot of "hybrid" web2/web3 apps during this phase of web3 development. That doesn't mean the overall trend is bad though. I think it's great that more and more web3/decentralized technologies are being developed.
I don't think crypto is anywhere near this end stage though. We are still seeing a lot of new technology and players enter the space. It's not "already centralized" as much as it is "still using some web2 components".
These points aside, the post is great and I basically agree with the overall premise.
1) The addressing side of IPFS could probably actually be standardized to be as ubiquitous as URLs or email addresses. DNS style stuff is honestly a reasonably good blockchain fit. The storage and server side of it still has a ton of gaps, where lessons learned from torrents are being somewhat inefficiently rediscovered.
4) It sounds like the data available already from those two isn't that simple and is likely to only become more complex over time.
Heck, web2 is still using a ton of web1 components. What are the forces to push some dapp to be fully decentralized e2e?
I think it really is light client development that will make a big change to being decentralised e2e. Being able to talk with the chain directly from an app or webpage without needing to make api requests to a node (be it local or infura/alchemy). If we can get light clients for indexing/search networks too that would be the dream.
I'm also a founder of an $xB fintech (Coinbase!) and I have to say, this does not ring true to me at all.
I've known Patrick since 2013 or so, and I have found him to be nothing but the highest integrity. Same for John. We are semi-competitors (not a ton of overlap) so you might find it strange for me to stick up for him like this, but I just think this description is wildly inaccurate. As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
He has direct control over reporters and YC? I'm sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory.
People are living all over due to covid - so what. Remote is the future of work.
There are plenty of more reasonable Occam's razor explanations for some of what is being reported in this thread (and from the OP). You always have to assume ignorance over malice first. For example:
- companies often look at startups they may want to acquire, and decide to pass for various reasons (saying no more than yes is a good process), they then launch their own products (this is why they were looking at acquisitions in the first place), pretty normal
- any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences, I know for instance these happen in Coinbase periodically, and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
- most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
- also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
Anyway - if people had negative experiences, then feedback is great. I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this. Patrick and John are great founders we can all learn from, and yes human like all of us (not perfect). Let's all help each other improve here, and assume positive intent.
The point is not that they have direct control over YC or HN, it's that they have massive indirect control over the organization and have done a wizard's job of making themselves untouchable in the media.
Some context:
I'm a former (early) YC founder, and during my batch the YC team recommended that we spend time with the HN team. The HN team gave us edits on our posts, recommended the best times of day to submit, emailed us when stories about our companies hit the front page, and explained how the ranking algorithms worked (and thus we learned how to game them). And we are not the most valuable YC company ever -- so it's possible more was done for Stripe.
It's not direct influence, but rather indirect impact. So again I ask -- Did Patrick request that you write this post?
That sounds weird to me. There was no "HN team" before I started working on HN in October 2012 - just pg, and no one would have referred to him as "the HN team".
The HN team originates in April 2014, when I became public as a mod. (That's not early in YC btw.) In that case you're talking about me (and possibly Scott), and while I guess it's dangerous to make strong claims about some meeting I don't remember, there's no way we would have "explained how the ranking algorithms worked" in such a way that you could game HN. That's precisely what we would not have done. I've worked way too hard on that shit to blab about it and see all that sand run through my fingers.
I also doubt that we'd have told you "the best times of day to submit"—people ask us that all the time and the stock answer is we have no idea, there are all sorts of dodgy analyses out there, and you can take your pick.
As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, yes—I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
Perhaps it was just our batch, but there was a long discussion about how the algo worked amongst founders. Admittedly, you + Scott were not there. Some partners were and the discussion was seeded by them, but I don't remember how much they contributed vs. others in the group.
Edit: Apologies if this came off as accusatory. Was trying to make the point that they don't have control of the media, but instead are just flawless in their use of it.
In that case it was the blind leading the blind. The advice that founders give each other about how to game HN routinely backfires. Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.
Thanks for the reply - you had me wondering for a minute what the hell I wasn't remembering.
> Unfortunately, people are so conditioned to conflate "feels like it should work" with "actually works", that no matter how much we repeat the contrary it seems to have little effect.
Thank you for this. This sentiment applies to so much online, especially in the field of online content, social media posting and conversion rates.
What feels like it should work is not the same as what actually works.
This site was posted on here at some point and it made me mad because everything the guy recommends sounds awesome, but where is any proof that it actually improves sales?
https://examples.roastmylandingpage.com/
This is interesting. I have not done a launch or a Show HN post in some time but back in the day HN was pretty easy to game: three rapid upvotes from unrelated accounts and IPs got you to the bottom of the front page (I did not use sock puppets ever, instead just asking geographically diverse friends to upvote the post immediately after posting it). If the content was mildly interesting you got to see it spend some time at the top. Posting when the New page had a longer delta T between the top and bottom post was also helpful. I definitely got a lot of front page time for what I now consider fairly mediocre content.
That's not really the "HN team," though. What you're describing that the partners did is scummy, but makes sense when you realize that partners and dang have effectively an adversarial relationship when it comes to the quality of HN. People invested in you have strong reason to try and ensure your popularity here; they very well could have just tried throwing tips at you to get you to manipulate the site better.
Most people can't stare at the News source for an hour straight without getting a headache, let alone a rich investor type. They wouldn't find much of value in what's been publicly released of it, anyway (the released source is ancient and includes little as far as quality control goes).
If what you're saying is based in truth, you were probably just getting tips from someone with a strong financial incentive to have brute forced their way into understanding the site the manual way (throwing posts at it) rather than someone who had any genuine inside knowledge.
Me too -- dang has given me valuable feedback about what kinds of things to post, and how to focus and frame posts so people will find them useful and interesting, how to save and respect people's time, and how not to overwhelm or tire people out so much. Much of that advice applies to writing and life in general, not just posting to HN! And he's even done kind favors like correcting an embarrassing typo I made in quote of a transcript that accidentally inverted the meaning of what the person was trying to say, when I only noticed it after the paint dried.
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
Fact: dang's helped me a few times with this when I've goofed with my own comments, and as best as I can tell, I'm not a founder of any kind.
Indeed once you understand that the moderators are helping people with brand management and suggestions at the very least, and the extent to which this occurs is hidden, they lose the ability to claim neutrality and open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they're doing
That's a result of actions taken not some kind of theoretical argument.
> open themselves up to lots of questions about what else they are doing
Is there a name for this pattern?
1. Observe that a human is taking some action to more effectively do their jobs… but in a way that has some risk of being unevenly applied or also self-beneficial.
2. Conclude that this action is itself malfeasance.
3. Conclude that this person merits generalized distrust.
I see this all the time in comments on (for example) youtube. I struggle to see how social cohesion could survive in a world where more people do this: If you lose trust by doing your job well, then its harder to motivate yourself to maintain others’ trust that you’ll do your job.
It depends what you think their job is I guess. I never imagined that forum moderation would include helping brand management for forum users - in fact I'd say those two behaviours are in direct conflict with each other.
If your job is forum moderation and you do that well great. But if the same people use those same accesses to give some forum users help over other forum users without any transparency then there is no illusion of neutral moderation and this whole forum just may be undisclosed pr/ brand management whole people are discussing companies/jobs/tech in a way that might bias others.
I haven't read anything on the site providing brand management to some users. Was that disclosed somewhere? How could you trust any post talking about a new company or having to do with companies in general if some are getting assistance to boost their reception and others aren't?
I think their job is maintaining the health and ambient trust within the social system that is HN -- keeping HN a place people generally want to keep coming back to for thoughtful conversation. Assuming thats reasonably close, lets look at the activities we're talking about:
> As for helping you by editing text, or emailing people when their stuff shows up on HN's front page, I do that frequently for YC founders, non-YC founders, and non-founders.
So there are two categories:
1. Helping clarify each others messages.
2. Letting people know when something is happening that concerns them.
Why do they not disclose this? Suppose you have two friends Alice and Bob. Suppose Alice tells you that about something Bob said which really upset her. Would you:
A. Commiserate with Alice by telling her about something ambiguously untrustworthy that Bob said.
B. Reply to Alice by comparing Bob unfavourably to Frank.
C. Listen empathetically to Alice and then when she's vented, offer another more charitable interpretation of Bob's words.
D. Later, let Bob know that Alice is upset with him and he might want to chat with her.
I bet most folks would advocate options C and D. Yet that is is basically doing "undisclosed pr/brand management" on behalf of Bob. It is pretty much the same as what dang says he does for HN. I don't think HN discloses this for the same reason that they don't disclose a habit of holding doors open for people -- I assume they don't remark on it because it seems unremarkable to them.
----------------------------------------
Your words like "neutral", "give some forum users help over other forum users" imply a strict duty to avoid cooperative behaviour in favour of competitive behaviour. I don't think that duty is nearly so strict.
This is probably the crux of the problem, the scenario you're describing is based mostly on assumptions of your own - like 'brand management' (whatever that is) and 'secret'. See for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29231229
As with any online thing made mostly of people, there are lot of not entirely obvious things about HN, both good and bad. It's not the Brand Management (whatever that is) Shadow Council you seem convinced it is.
There are wheels within wheels in this village, and fires within fires! When Reverend Hale comes, you will proceed to look for signs of witchcraft here.
You mean he ought to spend his limited time picking random comments from unimportant people that noone wants to read and help edit those comments, so that the world becomes more fair and just?
FWIW dang was extremely helpful when I had an issue. He worked with me to resolve it, rather than take arbitrary executive action. I don’t credit any accusation of dang playing favourites to YC founders. Basically, there is no level of assistance higher than what I received, therefore there is no way someone is getting preferential treatment. There’s simply no more that could’ve been done.
Note: I wasn’t completely happy with the outcome at the time, but I respected the decision. I hindsight I agree with it too.
I'm also a YC founder of a (smaller, but top ~100 in terms of valuation) YC company. I don't know what your experience was like with Stripe, but the notion that Patrick has some unduly amount of power to exercise over HN and YC immediately flags to me as untrue. I've been on the receiving end of a lot of HN criticism, and I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Edits on your posts, recommending the best times of day to submit, explaining how HN algorithms work broadly, are accessible to everyone; these are discussed frequently on HN, and were all accessible to me even before I was a YC founder. I'm also certain the HN team wouldn't need to email Patrick about something like this being on the front page; when my company (~150 employees) is on the front page I get a bunch of messages about it from all sorts of different angles; certainly many of the thousands of Stripe employees use HN and would be capable of sending a Slack or text.
To me it seems the notion that Patrick has "indirect control" over parts of HN is a longer way of saying he has respect. I think Patrick may be the most universally respected founder in Silicon Valley, and perhaps doubly so amongst engineers. I am not surprised at all that people upvote his comments, as he's both the person speaking from authority, and they're usually well reasoned - I use them as a model for how to respond well (something I have not always done).
I'm not saying you're being untrue about your experience (and I don't think OP was being untrue about theirs), but the notion that Patrick as at the helm of an evil empire stealing from companies and manipulating folks to keep it quiet just feels farcically different from reality across the dozens of Stripe and YC/HN touch points I have.
> I can assure you the HN mods and all of YC go above and beyond to not tip the scale in YC founders' favor.
Consider [1] which was flagged dead. It was ~10 years ago, so I could be wrong, but I believe there was a follow-up meta "Ask HN" where someone asked why it was flagged (I can't find it), and I __believe__ PG said something along the lines that he didn't find the original constructive, hence flagging it dead. Top comment on the non-constructive OP was from spolsky with some insightful information on job postings...
Definitely seemed like going above and beyond to tip the scale in YC founder's favor.
Edit: found the followup/meta [2] (I was wrong, no official explanation was given, sorry about that).
I think you might be getting conspiratorial about this. Here's my take on reading the comment thread. I am an outsider peering in - no connection to the companies etc.
1. Your single experience doesn't represent a pattern of behavior - and dang comment's certainly corrected some of your original inaccuracies in your comments. If you can attribute many cases of this happening then maybe it represents a pattern of behavior.
2. Patrick might have different relationships depending where you are on the power curve of importance to them (competitor, investor, partner, etc) - which could explain the discrepancy between your experience + barmstrong. There are also a host of other possibilities.
3. In terms of barmstrong's positive comments does he have an investment in square either personally or through his company, any partnership with the organization, or is personally friends with Patrick. Any of those would bias his comments in favor. He might have a great relationship with Patrick.
At the end of the day - I'm not sure where this goes. It comes across like a strong personal attack from a bad situation that is getting a lot of response on HN.
> Did Patrick message you to ask you to post this?
Is a pretty direct question and barmstrong gave a direct answer. It's possible that temp7536 and barmstrong simply had different experiences with Patrick.
It seems to me that barmstrong wanted to share their experience.
Unless you have more information than I do, I really don't understand how that is an example of divisiveness. Picking sides is a great way of being divisive.
If they picked a side, people would've also left the company because they disagreed with the side that was picked. Which would mean that the company culture will become that side. People who think differently will be discouraged to join the company because they don't want to work for a company with stand points they disagree with. A company like that will possibly end up blind to whatever the 'other side' thinks. That's how you end up with Juicero.
I don't think every organization should be apolitical by default. But there really is a point to being apolitical as an organization, especially in the Crypto market, since there are so many different reasons for people supporting Crypto, any political stand point might cause you to lose customers.
This is the first time I’ve seen a post with anything negative about Patrick and having a Coinbase founder come out of the woodwork to make a post like this defending all of this with nothing more than conjecture sends a completely different message than you think.
I bet Patrick will never have to deal with his Coinbase support tickets going unanswered for months. It was nice of Brian to take time out of his day to come here and defend his buddy, but I wish he'd invest some of that $xB into building a support team for his paying customers.
Seriously. I am a fan of some crypto coins because in contrast to bitcoin there is actually future-proof concepts, but this "you will never face any consequences" advertising is delusional and would only work in a perfect alternative reality where everone acts in the interest of society.
At least they ask founders to be not mean [0] and specifically be nice [1] but do ask them to be relentless [2] and formidable [3], which may come off as shrewd?
YC has pretty strong ethical guidelines for founders and people have been removed from YC for violating them, so I'm not sure where you're coming from with that, unless it's just a cheap shot.
Please do not post nationalistic or ethnic slurs to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. That should be obvious if you're familiar with the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - would you please review them?
As someone who has had to face casual racism like this a lot due to being Indian, please take these casually racist tropes somewhere else. It's not okay.
Props for attaching your name to your comment, something I wish the throwaway OP also did, though in the spirit of believing the victim, I can understand why they didn't.
That said, with threads like this, there's also value in letting people come forward with their experiences (positive or otherwise) to see if there's any sort of pattern; any such patterns can then inform future interactions with the people or companies involved.
My own personal experience over the last year as a manager of managers that may be relevant to both pc and barmstrong: seeing a surprising number of security resumes on the market from current Stripe talent suggests there may be a bit of impending brain drain (for reasons I can't put a finger on as I'm not inside). I've seen less of this with Coinbase talent.
The only kind of sense this could make is as a tautology. If the commenter is a "victim" then you've already decided to believe him or her. But what evidence do you have to support this belief?
I don't see the tautology. The point is, when someone claims they are a "victim" (I would agree the term is only a loose fit here), we believe them. The whole point of the statement is to not demand evidence.
Obviously we're not talking about the legal system here.
I do think this whole idea has minimal relevance to the thread as I really don't think the PC qualifies as a victim. Just wanted to clarify the idea of "believe the victim" as it's extremely important in potential cases of sexual assault (which, again, not relevant here).
Yeah, it is no wonder that a founder-CEO of a 70 billion dollar company is having very little negative interactions with about anyone.
Personally I have became from poor ass bootstrapping startup founder to rich and successful retired entrpreneur (now investor) and it is ridiculous how people will treat you wildly differently as you get wealthier. And at times the exactly same people.
I have seen this type of behavior before even though I am not rich or successful. These people act like they never behaved the way they did or simply pretend it never happened, while they continue to do it to others. Its disgusting how people can be so fake.
If you don't expect repeat interactions with an agent, or expect the agent won't remember / weigh these past interactions strongly, you do what's best for you in the moment.
Which happens to be taking the counterparty's current situation into account – including their wealth/power, AKA how much they can do for you. Entirely pragmatic, if selfish ("disgusting" in your words).
The way to combat this fake behaviour is to increase its cost, forcing the "fake" person to interact differently.
But I wouldn't hold my breath:
1) To "increase the cost" you need something of value in the first place. If you're poor and powerless, you are… powerless. Your only strength is in numbers: social pressure, `∑ little_power * lots_of_people`.
2) This "fake" personality is likely something learned in early childhood. A person would probably need to experience lots of negative feedback to readjust later in life.
3) Have you considered that their strategy ("fakeness", taking into account extrinsic factors like wealth or fame) may be superior to yours ("integrity", interacting based solely on a someone's intrinsic traits)? You know, it is not a physical law that being nice and consistent to people pays off. It's a pretty wild social dynamic, evolved only recently.
Regarding 3), how well someone's social strategies pay off is completely separate from their morality. It's irrelevant.
Just as a thought experiment: if there was little social cost to it, killing your competitors would probably be a very successful strategy. Would you go: "sure, he kills people, but it makes him very successful and we should give him kudos for that"?
Regarding your last statement, that "being nice and consistent" is a recent social norm, I call bullshit and citation needed.
Morality certainly has its merits – after all, it's omnipresent across nearly all human groups (that survived to this day). So it has undoubtedly played a central role in advancing humankind.
But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).
If all its proponents "were killed" – your words; an unlikely proposition in my estimation – then yes, that would be it for morality. Something else would take its / our place, but the world would still go round.
> But please note morality is an evolved collective strategy as well, a survivor in an extremely competitive landscape. It's not "above" evolution (unless you're into religious metaphysical arguments).
I don't fancy a debate right now, but I feel I should point out for observers that this is a minority position in the philosophy of ethics (for atheists and religious philosophers alike). At the very least it is possible (and common) to be a moral realist without making "religious" arguments.
I have not revealed my preference, one way or another (I'm personally not a fan of fakeness, if you must know; which is precisely the reason why I think about such things and take time to reply on HN).
But seeing your visceral response, I'll offer one advice now: don't let your biases blind-side you.
> I have not revealed my preference, one way or another
You have revealed your preference of evaluating morality as a choice.
I think morality is a basic assumption for pretty much all human interaction. If someone chooses to be immoral, then why would I want to interact at all with that person? If being fake and untruthful is a choice for that person, I don't see how any interaction made sense. Just the only sensible choice is to run away from that person and if you have business going on just try to close them as quickly as possible. Even online discussions like these would be totally pointless with a person who has selected to be immoral/fake.
What you do and whether you "run away" or "close business" is up to you. But likewise, what other people do is up to them – how would you impose your choices and preferences onto others?
You're able to do that only to the degree that you hold power over them. That is what "power" is.
Which is precisely what is being discussed here. Not the personal preferences and animosities of human X (Radim, repomies69, whoever), but how social interactions evolve over aeons. It is a pretty complex dynamic system with feedback loops that span individual interactions (the repeated prisonner's dilemma from my OP), generations and even civilizations.
Let me try another way: You can be perfectly happy with your strategy Y and die content you did what you thought was best. In fact, it's probably the best anyone can hope for. Alea iacta est.
But if you're the last person believing Y, that strategy dies with you. It is not a personal attack on you to observe that there are people who do not follow Y, and evaluate relative merits of strategy Y vs Z. You can wish everyone followed Y (was more like you), and still do that.
Interestingly, lashing out at people who observe other strategies than Y even exist is a strategy in itself. Proselytizing, ostracizing and zealotry are a form of social pressure, and humans evolved to be quite susceptible to that.
On a technical note, "if A then B" is an implication, a form of logical reasoning. An implication doesn't mean that A is true, or that the person proposing the implication believes A (or B). For example, you could say "if everyone is dead, money will be worthless". An implication is an observation about relationships, trying to make sense of the world.
Exactly. It was at that moment I understand why most successful and rich people tends to be wary.
I wasn't even rich or successful, I only got promoted to a senior position, and their faces changed the next day. Those a-hole faces still makes me want to puke.
That was a long time ago. But I still have vivid memory of it.
Not to fuel the fire here, but from the startups perspective I'm not sure there's much functional difference between a company attempting to acquire a startup and then deciding to go it alone, and using the acquisition process for research on their future products other than intent.
No matter what if you do the DD process on an acquisition you'll certainly apply those learnings to your future efforts.
Side Note: I'm always amazed to find people that run large companies posting on hackernews. Doubly amazed that two companies I'm interviewing for are mentioned in the same post (about interviews no less.) :D
I know so many people who have been screwed over by Coinbase, it's complete lack of customer support, and dark business practices (it's borderline criminal at this point). The fact that you're associated directly with Coinbase does not benefit your reputation nor does it add any weight to what you're saying - it in fact does the opposite.
This is biased because they are your acquaintance. Because they act a certain way in your circle doesn’t mean they aren’t being a bad actor in others.
Your post makes it clear you’re very out of touch with the reality of interviewing. I’ve had this same stuff pulled on me at Google, Amazon, and multiple other companies. Being offered a position and then getting surprise interview and then ghosted. It’s draining and demoralizing, and a major waste of my time.
> Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I used to get very frustrated at a previous job (realestate.com.au) that they would treat their main competitor in such a venomous way.
If the features looked similar then they 'copied' if they launched a feature first then denigrate it until you can launch the same feature. There are only so many ways you can do a real estate (car, job) ad portal. Especially if you're following best practice UI/UX guidelines.
I get being competitive, but you can be competitive and still be civil. Making the other company to be an arch-villain is such small-minded zero-sum thinking.
Sadly there were also many things where they could have worked on collaboratively to make everyone's lives better (e.g. Rental standards and processes), but this is impossible when you frame the competitor in such a negative way.
This. It is important to remember not everyone works in Tech. Many commodity markets are zero-sum game. Which is often why Tech circle don't understand a thing about other market. You cant apply the same thinking to everything.
> most rational explanation for OPs issue is that references were checked and came back luke warm/negative, so more were done which delayed it etc (they may not tell you this was the reason to protect sources btw), this is one of many potential reasons, i'm guessing, but benign explanations are more likely
> also, "discussing details of an offer" is not the same as receiving an offer
All reasonable things to happen, for sure. Would other HMs in the same building show interest after bad references? Debatable.
I don't think Coinbase and Stripe are in the same business but...
> As one small example, Patrick has proactively told me when wanting to build competitive products, even when he didn't have to (very positive sum thinking).
I'm not sure why this is positive or signals a high-integrity person. If he doesn't have to tell you, he probably shouldn't. He runs a private company and that's what he should care about.
Or maybe he did that, so that in the future you can kick back and write this comment?
Sometime one does favors in the hopes of being treated likewise in future. It is an investment, even though not guaranteed to pay-off; but when done to powerful people, that off-hand chance can pay-off handsomely and be worth it.
"I'm an $xB ceo and everyone you mentioned have been lovely to me" is a data point, but being successful means even your true friends are networking with you (because it's logical, not implying sneaky intentions)
> any time you have thousand of interviews going on, you are bound to get some bad candidate experiences... and we try to minimize it for sure, but you will not get it to zero (especially when growing quickly)
Spot on. Nor should anyone expend disproportionate energy in bringing down common causes of quality issues to zero. https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226
> I just hate to see HN jumping into tear downs and wild conjecture like this.
I agree with you but after being an employee of a dozen of companies and founded some, I started the Stripe's application processe and after a waterfall or red flags I decided myself to do not continue. I couldn't ignore my gut feeling clearly saying me that there is the place to have a good salary in a very miserable, unhealthy and unstable job.
PS: I don't know how they are managing to have such a good product.
Japan has a long tradition in coopetition. SV has adopted many Japanese traditions. Unfortunately some people seem to take competition too seriously, ruining the culture. It seems some are suggesting Patrick and John take competition too seriously. Whether the allegations are true or not, it can unfortunately be damaging.
Adam Smith, on his work on competition, took many ideas from the Muslim Caliphate. Where markets can only work on trust. That nobody will do business with someone they don't trust.
Trust is what underlies communities like this, even if people are competitors.
I have never interviewed at Stripe, but I did interview at Coinbase in mid-2020 and it was among the best interviewing experiences I've had. The hiring manager for a TPM role (NM) was awesome, as was the entire loop. I didn't end up with an offer (I suspect that I flubbed one of the interviews) but left with a mostly positive experience (aside from what seemed like an implied offer from the recruiter, which I consider to just be miscommunication).
As opposed to K (another SF-based exchange), which took a month to set up the loop in the first place, had one-way video during interviews (candidates on, interviewers off), and took 3 weeks after the interview loop to send an offer which I declined for another company (65% of CB's pre-offer, not that it mattered based on the other stuff).
These experiences make a difference and really help sell the organization to a potential hire.
> You always have to assume ignorance over malice first
At a certain valuation (namely, well before yours or Patrick's), ignorance becomes malice. With the resources Stripe has, it is outrageous that there have been a non-zero number of cases where for example references haven't been checked before an offer letter was sent. That Patrick is ignorant about this, as you claim, is even more damning, as it suggests no one knows what is going on at Stripe.
So I guess thank you for your scathing review of Stripe's hiring process, and for giving us the notion that Coinbase is probably an equally toxic workspace?
You know the best you could have done is say nothing. People like this, best way to prove them wrong is to show there's nothing. Even a "oh it's true but we ll try to change" helps more than doing exactly what the OP did with his catch-22: if you defend here, he's proven right.
I figure at this point my easiest path to becoming a billionaire would be to develop a time machine, go back to when you could buy a bitcoin for a dollar, and plop down $20K or so. That feels more realistic than me actually building a valuable company.
Is there any way to get support regarding the API? We are trying to increase the send limit of our application, but can't get any support for over 3 months. No one's monitoring the SO tag as is mentioned in documentation.
Non-techie Family member got scammed with this last month and lost $4k ETH while using coinbase. Thought I would let you know since it seems very common at the moment, might be worth having an alert to users not to send ETH to anyone who says they will 2x their coins. Cheers,
I'm not sure it's coinbase's responsibility to tell users not to run with scissors. Anyone who thinks sending money to random links they see on the internet that are promising to send them more money back for free probably shouldn't be entrusted with managing money.
What should a founder do? Focus on their product, the better they become more scamers will attract, but is for the user to use some basic logic.
Otherwise, should they tell people that there is no such thing as Nigerian Prince? Because Nigeria is a Republic but some people don't even check the basics, they tend to just refuse their responsibility.
I think a good solution would be to allow users to flag a wallet interaction as a scam (akin to a down vote). Then, after enough votes, you could get a warning analogous to what Safari does when you are about to go to a known scam website.
People here forget that the average person (especially as they age) will at some point fall for a scam. Insurance companies are starting to recognize that, because as you approach old age and death, apparently the mind gets more trusting of strangers to reduce mental load.
If this system existed it would immediately cause all scammers that aren't already doing it to make a new wallet address for each 'lead' and make a reputation system worthless. I would be very surprised if this wasn't already common practice.
This post doesn’t seem at all appropriate to me. Those scams are the most bottom of the barrel, low effort, have existed forever, and have nothing to do with Coinbase at all. I worry that pinging founders direct with this nonsense will keep them out of one of the few forums where I ever get to see them contribute.
Depends. Most CEOs I interact with are anti-fragile. The legitimacy of crypto has a lot to do with CB, so it is in everyone’s best interest to fight scammers being front page promoted by YouTube:)
This is part of what we created https://www.researchhub.com to improve on. We should be getting weighted ratings (peer reviews) in real time on all research.
The study has this line which caught my attention:
> The incidence of any psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis was 18·1% (95% CI 17·6–18·6), including 5·8% (5·2–6·4) that were a first diagnosis.
So only 5.8% of people got a first diagnosis, and the remainder of the 18% were people who had been previously diagnosed with one of these conditions.
This seems to contradict what is written in the linked article:
> In the three months following testing positive for COVID-19, 1 in 5 survivors were recorded as having a first time diagnosis of anxiety, depression or insomnia.
So it seems like the linked article has a bit of hyperbole in it.
The abstract says it’s “reoccurrence” so the r implication is that these cases had been previusy cured. It’s technically correct to include this as incidence. Even so, the new cases are statistically significant.
EDIT I can only presume this is all stress related. From the people I know that got COVID they found it a fairly tough experience.
