Hi!

In 2008, I had the opportunity to meet with a former eBay executive. He was one of the first 100 employees at the now-$20 billion company, and he was there for almost a decade, so he had a lot of stories about the company. He told us one that stuck with me — one that would be a great story for Now I Know. But this conversation happened two years before I even dreamed up this newsletter, so I didn’t capture any details or try to verify things at the moment. When I thought about sharing it with all of you a few years later, I realized my memory was wrong.

The story, as I remember it (and you’ll see quickly how I knew I was wrong): Early in the company’s history, eBay built a core group of super-users. And one day, the company decided to make a slight change to its logo, swapping out a yellow for something green. The super-users were upset, so eBay reverted the changes. Then, over the course of weeks if not months, they made a very slight incremental change to the yellow each day, making it closer and closer to the green they were after. When they finally hit that green, they stopped — and no one complained. The incremental changes were barely noticeable, and because no one noticed the change, no one complained.

(A quick aside: If you want to see a color change like this in action, this TikTok video does a great job of it.)

There are a lot of lessons to be learned from that story and it’d be a great one to share in the vein of a “fun fact and the story behind it” that I use to guide Now I Know, but I couldn’t verify the “fact” part of it. Rather, I was able to quickly prove it wasn’t true. Here is what eBay’s logo has looked like over time (via here), and as you can see, there are design changes and a shift from black and white to color, but there are no color changes otherwise.

So I gave up on the story — until a few weeks ago. That’s when I found a blog post by a digital designer, telling a similar story:

Companies have been known to go to great lengths to reduce friction to change. A great example in a talk by Rohan Puri (first noted by UX guru Jared M. Spool in 2006) is how the team at eBay took their original site design and changed the background color of some areas of text from a dated looking yellow, to a more modern white layout. Users lost their minds and sent so many complaints to eBay that they changed it back to yellow. But here’s the clever part, they wrote an algorithm that changed the color from yellow to white over the course of one year. So subtle was the update that none of the users even noticed and they received no complaints.

That makes a lot more sense! So I dug a little deeper…

… and again, came back unsatisfied.

First, I watched the talk by Puri; the relevant part is about four and a half minutes in if you’re interested. He shows “the original eBay website” and, sure enough, there’s a pale yellow background in some places. But something felt off. You wouldn’t need an algorithm to figure out how to make this change. The pale yellow is already pretty close to white — in HTML, you can specify colors by using a hexadecimal code (that’s explained here if you’re interested), and the pale yellow was probably something close to #FFFFCC, which is only about 50 steps away from white (#FFFFFF). You could take one step a day, manually, and get to a white background in two months — no algorithm needed, and again, it wouldn’t take a full year.

My skepticism kicked in so I dug a bit more, and I found that there was a problem with Puri’s screenshot. I went to the Internet Archive and went through dozens of snapshots of eBay’s homepage from 1999 to 2008. The one in Puri’s video comes from late 2003 or 2004, and the yellow was actually new to that design — the 2002 version didn’t have it. And I couldn’t find any examples of that layout with a white background. Here’s a snapshot from 2005 — a yellow background, not white. 2006? Different layout, but the yellow background is still there. The executive I met in 2008 left the company in 2006, so I didn’t go much further.

I’m not saying the story itself is wrong — in fact, I think this probably happened somewhere, in some capacity, on eBay’s website. But I can’t verify it. The tale of my behind-the-scenes effort will have to do!

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The Easy Way to Get into the Olympics: Funnily enough, I’m a pretty bad skier (and I don’t like skiing), so this way in wouldn’t be easy for me.

Tuesday: These Shoes Are Made for Talking: I mentioned that there are two slightly hidden movie quotes in this one. For those who submitted their guesses, you were across-the-board right — I made a Terminator reference (“Come with me if you want to live”) followed by a Shawshank Redemption one (“I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man’s shoes?”) Also, if you’re looking for the mathematically correct way to tie shoes, well, apparently, that exists. Thanks to reader Gary W. for sharing!

Wednesday: Why We Wake Up With Crusty Eyes: I broke the “From the Archives” link in this one — sorry about that. The story, about how you can see your own white blood cells, is here. (And it’s interesting!)

Thursday: What Cheaters Should Watch Out For: This is about an ultramarathon — a race longer than a typical 26.2-mile marathon. Coincidentally, long races were in the news this week. If you ran in the San Francisco half marathon last week, you, well, didn’t — the race organizers mismeasured the route, and it was half a mile short. Thanks to reader Andrew R. for telling me about this!

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend:

1) “Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias” (The Guardian, 18 minutes, June 2024). The subhead: “The spread of the avocado is a story of greed, ambition, corruption, water shortages, cartel battles and, in a number of towns and villages, a fierce fightback.”

2) A story about the 2016 Canadian men’s water polo team, and how winning a match made it harder for them to make it to the Olympics. This comes from Radiolab’s newsletter, and there’s no title, but it’s a five-minute read. (If you’re not familiar with the badminton story referenced, I talked about it in 2017.)

3) “Inside Nate Robinson’s silent battle — and his fight to live” (ESPN, 16 minutes, July 2024). I hope this one ends up well; time will tell.

Have a great weekend!

Dan