That's still considered inside trading, but as far as I can tell, nothing prevents it. Inside trading seems rampant and completely unenforced unless you're a regular Joe or Martha Stewart.
Perhaps you run in more criminally inflected circles, but I have never seen anyone committing insider trading, and if I did, I would be more than happy to report it to the SEC.
Insider trading is a crime that is definitely enforced and comes with serious consequences. The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year (nothing surprising since the population keeps growing). Martha Stewart was not exceptional. She was convicted because she committed crimes.
> Perhaps you run in more criminally inflected circles, but I have never seen anyone committing insider trading, and if I did, I would be more than happy to report it to the SEC.
I don't appreciate the linking you've done there. I do not condone or participate in insider trading nor do I personally know anyone who does. I actually want it regulated and prosecuted much more strictly.
> The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year
How many of those are CEOs, executives, or board members at large corporations or politicans? The point being that powerful and wealthy people can often get away with it. See Musk's market manipulation.
The entire point of my comment and the one I replied to was to point put the several loopholes that very probably allow rampant insider trading.
I would even go so far as to question whether CEOs, executives, and board members should even be allowed to own stock in their company and related industries given the level of conflict of interest. Certified accountants can't even hold the broadest of broad market ETFs in an IRA if the ETF is even tacitly related to a client. In other words, any trading done by top-level management at major corporations is likely technically insider trading.
Can the FTC show company leadership knew the announcement would be a "stock tanking" one? After all, why would they intentionally do that? Price increases are positive announcements for many companies.
Honestly, 2000 shares is nothing for JR. I expect he probably probably participates in the employee stock purchase program and offloads those shares each quarter.
> Last year, he apologised after labelling developers that don't prioritise monetisation in the creative process as "some of the biggest fucking idiots".
> "My word choice was crude. I am sorry. I am listening and I will do better," he later said.
I see he's taking his own advice, and doing better!
The vast majority of them have never lived a single day of life experiencing what "normal" people do. They've never interacted with normal society, normal government, or normal businesses. They spend all their time patting each other on the back for milking customers for more.
I think what he actually meant was that it should jump 50%, ie that it should be 50% higher than it is now. Still horrible but that would imply an unemployment rate of ~6%, not 50%.
Stop giving guys like Gurner what they want, which is for people like you to provide free marketing for him based on intentionally inflammatory comments.
It's incredible how people think this is "a rich guy revealing their true colors" as if they don't know what they are doing, which is manipulating you into linking more to him.
What exactly does he get from people linking to a video of him being crude. He's real estate CEO not a social media influencer. He might get a thrill out of being a public asshole, but it's not like he somehow profiting off his infamy.
“No such thing as bad press.” has been a thing for a while now.
PR teams peddle memes that play up character; “that persons a maverick and rebel” or “taken out of context” without ever providing the context, or retconning the clearly defined context the original comment was in response to.
It’s a form of obscurantism; use money to flood airwaves with spin, exhaust people with it so they move on; it’s intentional manipulation of innate biological systems; we get tired of the same old forms of information: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen...
That’s not just a teen biology thing, it’s just adults get conditioned to grit and bear their daily grind or reality will implode. Anecdotally I know more people tired of their repetitive office job than in love with it.
We’re stateful beings and while media does not have perfect mind control of an individual, media is good at manipulating state of the aggregate such we just start telling each other shut up when we’ve had our fill.
That would apply to a non-insignificant % of the population of HN. There are tons of authors, programmers and founders with that much money. You really think that if someone writes a book that goes on to sell enough that they make more than $9,999,999 they should fear for their safety if they dare reap the real value of their work?
Exactly why I think it’s fair. Poor people shouldn’t be the only group of people who have to constantly live in fear. The people who are creating the conditions of poverty should have to share that mental burden. They can keep their money though!
Bodyguards are almost always a status symbol more than safety. If you are concerned for your safety, and you have money, move away from the dangerous zip codes.
No one in this world should fear for their lives from other humans. We should always try to be civilized, and find other ways to solve issues other than violence.
> Behind the scenes, CEO John Riccitiello shifted 2000 shares last week on 6th September, as noted by Yahoo Finance, which noted this move was part of a trend over the past year where the exec has sold more than 50,000 shares in total and bought none.
This is normal. Many CEOs are paid primarily in stock. No matter how much you believe in your company, diversification is financially wise, so of course they are always selling stock. Typically they sell every month on a schedule pre-determined months or years in advance. No CEO is ever going to buy their own stock because it would make no financial sense.
Reporters looking for clicks love this situation because it means that whenever a company does something that makes people angry, you can always look up the CEO's stock sales and discover that, oh wow, they just sold a bunch of stock in the last month! And they never buy any! The reporter conveniently omits the fact that the CEO has been selling that exact same quantity of stock every single month going back years.
Sometimes the reporter gets extra-lucky and the CEO's stock is primarily in class B shares, which must first be converted to class A before sale. So every month, the CEO converts some number of shares to class A, and then immediately sells them. This shows up in financial records as the CEO sold 100% of their class A shares. So the reporter reports: "The CEO just sold ALL their stock last week!"
CEOs and other top execs are _not allowed_ to just sell stock on a whim, they have to set up a schedule far in advance. The SEC is quite serious about this.
(Now, if you do find that a CEO has sold an _unusually large_ amount of stock compared to their historical schedule, then maybe you have something, but somehow that's never what the reporters are saying...)
(BTW 2000 shares of Unity is like ~$80,000. 50,000 shares is ~$2M. The guy apparently receives over $10M of stock per year so these numbers are surprisingly small, he seems to be holding onto most of it: https://www1.salary.com/John-Riccitiello-Salary-Bonus-Stock-... )
I get why people are upset about the pricing changes because they are harmful. That said, I'd love to see more discourse around the macroeconomics of platformification of gaming (i.e. gamepass) because this Unity move feels analagous to what's happening in streaming and I think we're gonna see more of it.
With things like Gamepass, players have access to much more content for a lot less money. There's no way that this isn't having a massive impact on sales and revenue downstream for studios and other gaming vendors. If the revenue changes in indie gaming are anything like the shift from traditional album sales to iTunes and then Spotify, then things are going to get ugly.
Tech has identified that the most valuable position to hold is owning the market and we've seen it over and over again, and it never works out in favor of the suppliers or consumers in the long run.
These don't seem the same at all frankly, the unity thing seems like a blatant attempt at rent extraction. Gamepass is at least offering a genuine service in its role as middleman.
> the unity thing seems like a blatant attempt at rent extraction
Gamepass is literally renting games on a flat monthly fee (which they've recently increased, btw). Unity chose a really stupid approach to handle their new pricing, but they're doing what everyone is doing, hiking prices in an uncertain market. I suspect this is at least partially because of services like Gamepass, but I'd love to know more.
Gamepass is offering a service; smorgasbord of games on one end, guaranteed paycheck and platform on the other.
Unity is trying to redefine their existing product as a service. This isn't exactly 'just' a price hike and I think its why people are so upset about it.
And I agree with your suspicion. It seems that finding a way to offer a service instead of a product is a license to print money, so I imagine many companies have people pushing for this regardless of how well it would be received or how much sense it makes.
They are providing a game engine to make the game. If that's not worth it, switch. They don't own your C# code or assets, so they can be moved. For a lot of devs, it provides a lot of value. I understand for F2P, low ARPU games this pricing scheme doesn't work and people should complain until Unity fixes it.
Unity has ~7,000 employees, and is losing money. They need to a way to monetize, and they are clumsily trying to target their most successful users to pay more. Price increase aren't rent seeking.
Gamepass is not the same in that people knew what they signed up for, whereas what Unity did was more of a bait-and-switch.
If Unity had said that the new policy would only apply to games released (as opposed to installed) after 2024, and also say that existing developer subscription pricing would be honored for some number of years, it would at least seem more fair. They will still lose developers, but maybe they will be less susceptible to lawsuits and death threats.
When someone sinks their life into a creative pursuit that's already fraught with so much difficulty and uncertainty this kind of reaction is not surprising in the least.
HN aggressively moderates hateful and harmful comments, so they’re often not seen before they get flagged or removed. I’ve personally reported enough comments this year that I’m confident saying that some number of people who use threats of violence to silence those they disagree with are both reading and participating on HN, and so by the lurker principle, many more are reading HN but not behaving in that manner here. Thankfully, those few that participate are not the majority — but their perceived absence is the result of both peer pressure (via flags) and moderators (via bans) silencing their speech, not due to ‘we’re better than that here’.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. HN can't see an article on a open source frontend framework without someone equating it's maintainer to Hitler or getting on a soap box about how they're ruining the web. People in here have a view of the world that is rarely shared, even by people in tech.
Take an actual company making a visibly greedy decision and I would not be surprised.
If you can buy upvotes for a platform, then it's probably big enough that a nonzero percentage of its users is exactly the kind of person who would make death threats.
First, prove that a credible death threat actually happened. And by credible, a baseline for that should be an actual police report being filed, putting somebody on the hook for possible false police reports if it was fabricated.
All public claims of death threats when somebody is going through a bad PR cycle should be considered somewhat suspect unless some kind of police report or credible evidence is provided.
Their point is do we even know a death threat was sent? Or is Unity just trying to get the previous news about their licensing change buried under some sympathetic story about a death threat being sent?
I have a hard time understanding why some companies make absurd monetization policies even tho obviously they know it'll be very unpopular. Do they still usually end up making more money despite the backlash?
Because it almost never actually hurts their pocketbooks. Even if Unity the company completely died tomorrow from this, this CEO has still made bank off the whole thing.
Generally, perception is not as strong a variable in profit as we feel like it is, or should be, in the short and even medium term. In the long term, it's very hard to judge the effects of perception.
When a company makes a choice (actively or passively) that priorities perception, usually it is largely a function of the leadership's humanity, and not a shrewd decision based on some objective projection of long-term consequences.
Why does it seem like "death threats" are more common these days? Or are they just taken more seriously?
I ofc wouldn't be advocating to _not_ take them seriously but I don't understand if people are just getting crazier or people are taking them more seriously? Ironically, I feel like there used to be more back in the day but nobody treated them seriously.
If they're credible, by all means safety is at stake and close up shop.
The internet is a big place and it's easy to leave anonymous comments. If you want to find a death threat against you, it's easy to find one or create one if none can be found. Why would you want to? So you can point to it and say that you're a victim and even suggest that all of your critics are somehow culpable for that threat (any heated criticism of you is "stochastic terrorism" that will inspire some nutjob to come after you!)
I have been thinking about this a lot... it sucks because its very hard to prove. I will say, they always seem to come right in time for when sympathy is needed most... but that is all speculation.
I don't doubt the number of crazy people with the means and motivation to send a death threat is greater than 0. I just wonder how credible on the credible scale this is.
In the past you had to call the landline and risk getting *69ed, or use a payphone or something. Now, you can just sit at home in your underwear and tweet out a death threat.
I think they were probably taken as seriously before, it's just that the ease of making threats (empty or not) is different now.
That's fair. I just have memories of being on forums and interacting with those people you knew where unhinged. They had the protection of anonymity... but I think you have a great point that even then, you had to have at least a bit of technical know how to join a forum. Not so with twitter, so the barrier to entry is much lower.
It's the same problem as with forum trolls and the like - the more people know you exist and can communicate with you, the more likely one of them is unhinged enough to threaten to kill you over some non-murder-worthy thing.
That's the thing. Just by participating in internet forums, all the way up until around 2010s(?), it wouldn't be uncommon to see comments like "I'm going to go over there and kill you" between two people trying to be edgier than the person they were arguing with. It always gave me an uneasy feeling but I never treated it too seriously.
I don't at all doubt there are people that stupid/crazy. Jw if there are more credible crazies these days or have we changed how we react to them.
In 90s America (and perhaps elsewhere as well), "I'll kill you for that!" was a fairly common expression of mild displeasure, obvious hyperbole neither intended nor received as an earnest threat. In "IRL" this changed sometime between Columbine and 9/11 when people got super serious about such things, but I think that culture persisted online for several more years. Online was in some sense unreal, so hyperbolic death threats were obviously hyperbolic and were received as such. But as online has become "real life" for more and more people, hyperbolic death threats have been de-normalized online as well. Now it's mostly relegated to out of the way niches, like gamer chatrooms, but echoes of it still reverberate around the web anywhere people can comment anonymously.
Also I think there is aspect that coming out and saying you got death threats sells. Everyone has to be sympathetic about it. Or they will be attacked.
They might even be taken less seriously. As more correct approach is only to contact authorities and let them verify them or take needed action.
It's a convenient way to appear like a victim. The vast majority of "death threats" aren't serious, when you work at a large enough scale you will always be able to find a "death threat" to use as a justification.
If you took the number of anonymous death threats made online every day divided by actual killings, the percentage is probably as close to zero as you can get. I don't understand why anyone takes them seriously. I'd wager that the number of pre-announced killings for anything other than maybe religious extremism is vanishingly small, to the point of being virtually non-existent.
> I don't understand why anyone takes them seriously.
People don't take them seriously, they're used in cases like this to try to look like an innocent victim of radicals. Given a large enough company it is /always/ going to be possible to find a "death threat".
This is counter-productive, the top brass responsible for this decision will never be close to danger, while normal employees having zero say in this bears the brunt of any harrassments.
Just vote with your wallet and switch engines, optionally (ideally) donate to open source projects like Godot.
The video game industry is overflowing with toxic levels of immaturity and entitlement spanning consumer and producer sides. This is just another manifestation of that.
Show me an instance of SWATTING that didn't involve "gamers", I'd love to be proven wrong here.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadInsider trading is a crime that is definitely enforced and comes with serious consequences. The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year (nothing surprising since the population keeps growing). Martha Stewart was not exceptional. She was convicted because she committed crimes.
I don't appreciate the linking you've done there. I do not condone or participate in insider trading nor do I personally know anyone who does. I actually want it regulated and prosecuted much more strictly.
> The SEC regularly publishes a list of people who have been convicted and it made a record number of convictions last year
How many of those are CEOs, executives, or board members at large corporations or politicans? The point being that powerful and wealthy people can often get away with it. See Musk's market manipulation.
The entire point of my comment and the one I replied to was to point put the several loopholes that very probably allow rampant insider trading.
I would even go so far as to question whether CEOs, executives, and board members should even be allowed to own stock in their company and related industries given the level of conflict of interest. Certified accountants can't even hold the broadest of broad market ETFs in an IRA if the ETF is even tacitly related to a client. In other words, any trading done by top-level management at major corporations is likely technically insider trading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1
Plausible deniability.
Can the FTC show company leadership knew the announcement would be a "stock tanking" one? After all, why would they intentionally do that? Price increases are positive announcements for many companies.
> "My word choice was crude. I am sorry. I am listening and I will do better," he later said.
I see he's taking his own advice, and doing better!
Seems like many many american ceo's are hiring bodyguards for themselves... At least nobility had the concept of noblesse oblige.
Millionaire CEO Tim Gurner wants unemployment to jump to 50% because workers have become ‘arrogant’ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner...
He’s either a blowhard or an idiot. Or maybe both, I guess.
Populism (Trumpism) will NEVER go away as long as we have an executive class without a ounce of empathy.
It's incredible how people think this is "a rich guy revealing their true colors" as if they don't know what they are doing, which is manipulating you into linking more to him.
PR teams peddle memes that play up character; “that persons a maverick and rebel” or “taken out of context” without ever providing the context, or retconning the clearly defined context the original comment was in response to.
It’s a form of obscurantism; use money to flood airwaves with spin, exhaust people with it so they move on; it’s intentional manipulation of innate biological systems; we get tired of the same old forms of information: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mom-voice-kid-brain-teen...
That’s not just a teen biology thing, it’s just adults get conditioned to grit and bear their daily grind or reality will implode. Anecdotally I know more people tired of their repetitive office job than in love with it.
We’re stateful beings and while media does not have perfect mind control of an individual, media is good at manipulating state of the aggregate such we just start telling each other shut up when we’ve had our fill.
When villains unmask, believe them.
[1] https://thehustle.co/avocado-guy-goes-viral-again-and-other-....
In any case, I think its ridiculous.
That would apply to a non-insignificant % of the population of HN. There are tons of authors, programmers and founders with that much money. You really think that if someone writes a book that goes on to sell enough that they make more than $9,999,999 they should fear for their safety if they dare reap the real value of their work?
Certainly the life expectancy of millionaire CEO’s seems to be a lot higher.
Rich folks might be able to exert a bit more control, but I don't believe for a second that lessens fear. I'd actually suspect the opposite.
This is normal. Many CEOs are paid primarily in stock. No matter how much you believe in your company, diversification is financially wise, so of course they are always selling stock. Typically they sell every month on a schedule pre-determined months or years in advance. No CEO is ever going to buy their own stock because it would make no financial sense.
Reporters looking for clicks love this situation because it means that whenever a company does something that makes people angry, you can always look up the CEO's stock sales and discover that, oh wow, they just sold a bunch of stock in the last month! And they never buy any! The reporter conveniently omits the fact that the CEO has been selling that exact same quantity of stock every single month going back years.
Sometimes the reporter gets extra-lucky and the CEO's stock is primarily in class B shares, which must first be converted to class A before sale. So every month, the CEO converts some number of shares to class A, and then immediately sells them. This shows up in financial records as the CEO sold 100% of their class A shares. So the reporter reports: "The CEO just sold ALL their stock last week!"
CEOs and other top execs are _not allowed_ to just sell stock on a whim, they have to set up a schedule far in advance. The SEC is quite serious about this.
(Now, if you do find that a CEO has sold an _unusually large_ amount of stock compared to their historical schedule, then maybe you have something, but somehow that's never what the reporters are saying...)
(BTW 2000 shares of Unity is like ~$80,000. 50,000 shares is ~$2M. The guy apparently receives over $10M of stock per year so these numbers are surprisingly small, he seems to be holding onto most of it: https://www1.salary.com/John-Riccitiello-Salary-Bonus-Stock-... )
With things like Gamepass, players have access to much more content for a lot less money. There's no way that this isn't having a massive impact on sales and revenue downstream for studios and other gaming vendors. If the revenue changes in indie gaming are anything like the shift from traditional album sales to iTunes and then Spotify, then things are going to get ugly.
Tech has identified that the most valuable position to hold is owning the market and we've seen it over and over again, and it never works out in favor of the suppliers or consumers in the long run.
Gamepass is literally renting games on a flat monthly fee (which they've recently increased, btw). Unity chose a really stupid approach to handle their new pricing, but they're doing what everyone is doing, hiking prices in an uncertain market. I suspect this is at least partially because of services like Gamepass, but I'd love to know more.
Unity is trying to redefine their existing product as a service. This isn't exactly 'just' a price hike and I think its why people are so upset about it.
And I agree with your suspicion. It seems that finding a way to offer a service instead of a product is a license to print money, so I imagine many companies have people pushing for this regardless of how well it would be received or how much sense it makes.
Unity has ~7,000 employees, and is losing money. They need to a way to monetize, and they are clumsily trying to target their most successful users to pay more. Price increase aren't rent seeking.
If Unity had said that the new policy would only apply to games released (as opposed to installed) after 2024, and also say that existing developer subscription pricing would be honored for some number of years, it would at least seem more fair. They will still lose developers, but maybe they will be less susceptible to lawsuits and death threats.
Take an actual company making a visibly greedy decision and I would not be surprised.
This sort of crap becoming widespread will eventually result in the death of privacy for everyone.
And as if his message is going to change his mind! Thus my question.
All public claims of death threats when somebody is going through a bad PR cycle should be considered somewhat suspect unless some kind of police report or credible evidence is provided.
No. Don't send death threats!
This shouldn't need to be predicated by anything. If Unity made this whole story up, still don't.
PRO TIP: You can't.
> I hate Unity as next guy, but please don't do this. Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.
Do we care if a death threat was actually sent in this context? Would it change anything about this statement?
Did they mean to reply to someone else?
Yes it would change immensely. How would HN feel if I falsely claimed I was getting death threats from members so I could get attention.
> Vote with your engine choice, not death threat.
Wouldn't you?
When a company makes a choice (actively or passively) that priorities perception, usually it is largely a function of the leadership's humanity, and not a shrewd decision based on some objective projection of long-term consequences.
I ofc wouldn't be advocating to _not_ take them seriously but I don't understand if people are just getting crazier or people are taking them more seriously? Ironically, I feel like there used to be more back in the day but nobody treated them seriously.
If they're credible, by all means safety is at stake and close up shop.
I don't doubt the number of crazy people with the means and motivation to send a death threat is greater than 0. I just wonder how credible on the credible scale this is.
I think they were probably taken as seriously before, it's just that the ease of making threats (empty or not) is different now.
I don't at all doubt there are people that stupid/crazy. Jw if there are more credible crazies these days or have we changed how we react to them.
They might even be taken less seriously. As more correct approach is only to contact authorities and let them verify them or take needed action.
People don't take them seriously, they're used in cases like this to try to look like an innocent victim of radicals. Given a large enough company it is /always/ going to be possible to find a "death threat".
Just vote with your wallet and switch engines, optionally (ideally) donate to open source projects like Godot.
Show me an instance of SWATTING that didn't involve "gamers", I'd love to be proven wrong here.