I tried out Noom, the weight loss and cognitive behavioral therapy program. The app is more like CBT for upselling customers than CBT for weight loss. Now I’m hoping they’ll delete my sensitive medical data and refund the $3 they tricked me out of.

I was excited to try Noom. I’ve used basic calorie counters in the past and was hoping for something better. I’m also curious about CBT. And a friend recommended it.

The account creation process goes OK at first. Then it gets more and more involved, taking 10–20 minutes to fill out the questions. There’s little UI tricks to keep you engaged: fake progress bars, questions injected at random intervals. Classic product UI hacking.

At first it told me that I’d reach my weight goal in about a year. Seemed reasonable! Then it kept shaving weeks off that as I answered questions, like I was making progress already. The conclusion it came to is that I was going to lose 18 pounds in the first month. Pretty sure that’s not possible, certainly not healthy.

Then the upselling begins. They ask some questions to find out your interests and then offer premium packages. “Folks who pay for this package lose 35% more weight” Look, I just want to try the basic thing.

It looks like a 7 day free trial but before you know it they want you to pay asserting “it costs $10 to offer a 7 day trial”. Really? They gave me a choice of what to pay from $0.50 to $18.83. I chose $3 and had to pay via PayPal / credit card; super sus they don’t just use Google Pay on the Android app.

They also try to get you to sign up your friends. They talk about how having folks involved in your program will make you more successful. Which is probably true but then immediately they’re asking for email addresses and offering discounts and gift certificates. It’s marketing, not therapy.

The whole thing was so sleazy and deceptive. Particularly for a therapy-like product. Real therapists have all sorts of ethical guidelines to stop them from exploiting their customers. Noom instead seems to be using CBT to trick customers into paying more. Gross, gross, gross.

My Starlink Internet service has gotten pretty bad; I’m well under 50Mbps every evening and some hours I only get 5Mbps. (Compare 100Mbps+ last year.) I’ve given up trying to stream 1080p video at night; that’s a pretty dismal result for a new Internet service in 2022.

Starlink imposed major restrictions on US customers last month: 1 TB / month data cap and expected download speeds dropped from 50-200Mbps to 20-100Mbps. Details of all that on my secret blog. Note they didn’t drop the price, we’re still paying $110/month.

Maybe the new caps will help the congestion? I’m sympathetic to their technical problem. They have limited bandwidth and they have to share it somehow. Caps are an awkward solution; most users have no idea how much bandwidth they are using or why and thus can’t control it. Starlink’s caps are nice in that if you exceed the cap you just get lowered in priority, not charged money or cut off. So maybe it’ll be self regulating.

My real fear is that instead of improving service the result of all this is Starlink is just going to add even more customers to an already overloaded network.

Starlink is oversold in North America. I’ve had the service since March 2021 and it’s mostly great. But every evening it slows down. On bad nights I can’t watch a single 1080p video stream reliably. Over half of Starlink customers report problems. Starlink’s speed test app now admits “the network may be affected by slower speeds during busy hours”. As if that were OK.

Overselling capacity is a common problem with American ISPs. More customers = more revenue and if customers get a crappy experience? Too bad, there’s no regulation to stop them. Starlink has a serious financial challenge, so of course they have an incentive to oversell. And service quality is likely to keep getting worse. Their user growth is accelerating and the new RV service means literally anyone can buy a dish now without waiting (albeit at a lower service tier.) They are adding capacity but their growth plan hinges on the troubled Starship launch vehicle.

Customers were promised better. Starlink was advertised as offering 100-200Mbps and 20ms latency; their legalese description promises 50-250Mbps / 20-40ms. My reality is speeds drop to 10-20Mbps every evening. Upload speeds are tiny, often well below 5Mbps. 20ms latency is a fantasy; 50ms is typical. And capacity is highly variable minute by minute, a technical challenge for rate limiting protocols.

The US government is giving Starlink $900M to sell rural Americans 100Mbps download / 20Mbps upload. But Starlink is delivering just a tenth of that download speed during peak hours and nowhere near that upload speed ever. I hope the FCC RDOF contract includes measured performance targets.

I am still grateful for Starlink, it’s significantly better than anything else I can get in Grass Valley, CA. But they’re making a business decision that’s bad for customers. It’s a reminder of how important it is to have Internet competition. Investing in wired infrastructure is as important as ever.

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.

Do you use Goodreads? Don’t trust them with your data. Protect yourself with a backup; use their data export service right now. Consider quitting Goodreads entirely. LibraryThing and The StoryGraph are promising competitors. This blog post also has some ideas on DIY indieweb alternatives.

Don’t trust any cloud service with the only copy of your data. Most companies are not quite so reckless but consider what you’d lose if an uncaring company lost your data. Many of the better services have data export products; Google Takeout is fantastic, Twitter has good export, as does Facebook and Instagram and Letterboxd and others.

I’ve enjoyed using a product like Goodreads. My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does. It will be a lot of work to set up. Fortunately not all is lost, I happened to take a data export last July and I can recover some of the more recent data from emails they sent to my friends. It’s a shame they block Archive.org.

For anyone wondering how Goodreads could have simply lost all my data, I’m wondering too! It bespeaks contempt for users. And terrible system design, services should not be able to lose data irrecoverably. The specific bug is related to my removing Twitter API access to Goodreads last week (they stopped supporting Twitter login months before). Somehow that triggered their system to delete everything. Goodreads promises me it was a true delete, the data is wiped from their database. I don’t believe this: sites generally flag data as deleted, they don’t actually remove it. Goodreads also ignored my request to restore my data from backup. Either they don’t have backups or they can’t be bothered.

I’ve learned a hard lesson in trusting cloud services. Unfortunately just having a copy of your data isn’t enough; it’s a lot of work to build a useful product. In the meantime I will be more careful about which companies I trust. Goodreads has been in decline ever since Amazon bought them in 2013. Apparently an anti-competitive purchase, not a strategic acquisition.