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Wimbledon, Twitter, Threads and the Grand Marshal of the Boo Boo Parade
91 Plays1 year ago
- Mini-Topic: Wimbledon AI Commentators
- https://www.wimbledon.com/en_GB/video/media/1579db894840bfe89d5480ca4cd546e8.html
- REAL TOPICS:
- Twitter Rate Limiting Meltdown
- Twitter puts strict cap on how many tweets users can read each day | Engadget
- https://www.engadget.com/twitter-says-it-couldnt-tell-people-about-rate-limiting-in-advance-183928265.html
- Twitter silently removes login requirement for viewing tweets | TechCrunch
- Threads
- https://twitter.com/BenjySarlin/status/1677022769307951105
- Twitter threatens to sue Meta over its new Threads app | TechCrunch
- https://bookshop.org/p/books/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war-amal-el-mohtar/18270911
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Transcript
Introduction: Podcasting Mediocrity and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
Back in, I don't know, not better than better. No, certainly not. We're back and still aggressively mediocre. Every time we do this, we have to relearn how to do this every time we do a podcast, if we keep having to push it off. Nah, we got 20 of these under our belts.
00:00:19
Speaker
We got 20 of these under our belts. We know what we're doing now. We just don't do it well. That's true. Yeah. I mean, the talent is the ceiling, really. It doesn't matter how they say practice makes perfect. That's only if you have talent. That's not true. That's just something you tell kids to make them feel better about themselves.
00:00:34
Speaker
I thought you were going to go the other way, which is we have such natural talent. We could just put out absolute dog goo and we would just be golden.
Doxxing and Legal Perspectives
00:00:44
Speaker
We would be rocking up the charts. How are we doing in Australia, by the way? Oh, I haven't checked in on them. No, I don't know if they're still listening. I think we lost our Australian sort of common poster, frequent poster on esq.social. I think she might have been driving some of it.
00:00:59
Speaker
I won't name names because if she was the patient zero in Australia of this podcast, I'm sure she's probably trying to play that down. Strict anti-Australian doxing policy. Hey, by the way, did you guys see? I think it was the Netherlands. Doxing is now officially illegal.
00:01:17
Speaker
In the Netherlands? What? Did you all see this? Yeah. No. That is the extent of my knowledge about it right now. But I think, you know, I have ups and downs about that sort of thing. Like, you know what, doxxing is most of the time pretty bad. But also doxxing is a lot of the recreational stuff that I do at work, where I like, I'm trying to, no, no, no, not like that.
00:01:40
Speaker
I'm trying to locate a defendant. And so like, does I need to serve them with a lawsuit or something like that? Yeah, it's not exactly doxing. That's bona fide legal research. You're an officer of the court. It's different. You have an official capacity that you're doing it.
00:01:55
Speaker
Yeah, so if I wanna dock somebody on Reddit as an officer of the court, that's okay, right? I think so. Yeah, I think it's fine. I mean, certainly on Reddit you are not- You can file stuff under seal, so you know, that's the benefit. Yeah. Yeah, I found it here. So the Dutch Senate on Tuesday approved a law to make doxxing, the online publication of someone's address or other personal information, a crime, what it is done in an attempt to intimidate them. So it's only if you're trying to intimidate them. So if you just say it, like, oh, here's your address, that's fine. But if you post the address with like a knife or something, that's okay.
00:02:24
Speaker
If you accidentally post somebody's like mail and it has their full address, it's not a crime. And if you expose the owner of a meme webpage, then that's not a crime. But if you press their address with their, even with the intent to intimidate, it sounds like, you can say who the person is behind an anonymous page.
00:02:48
Speaker
But if you're not trying to intimidate them, you're fine. But if Jack Sweeney of Elon's jet fame was doing that with the explicit intent to intimidate, maybe it would be illegal. Is Elon susceptible to intimidation? I mean, other than by Mark Zuckerberg?
00:03:05
Speaker
Oh, extremely. I think he's paranoid. Yeah. Like, you know, about the whole thing where he said his family was attacked, but it turned out it was just a random guy that was driving. Yeah. No. Yeah. I didn't hear about that. Really? Yeah. Oh, it was a long time ago. It was. Yeah. It was months. It was months ago. It was, I mean, it was in Elon jet height, height period.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. A little bit of Elon. It was like pretty close to pre-acquisition, I think, of Twitter. So it was probably
Personal Updates and Humorous Commentary
00:03:38
Speaker
what might've been a year ago or something like that.
00:03:42
Speaker
Anyhow, I thought it was when he had banned Elon's jet and he was using this as justification because he was like, they're putting out my assassination coordinates. So that's why I had to ban all these news sites that had covered the Twitter account that I banned.
00:03:59
Speaker
When does the threshold cross where, does just being really wealthy make it an assassination if somebody does something to you? Like, what is the threshold for assassination? Because I would just get killed, right? If somebody just walks up to me and hits me over the head with a brick or something, they just murdered me. You should sell yourself short, man. By the way, your name is Andrew Leahy, tax attorney in New Jersey. You shouldn't sell yourself short. Thank you for doxing me. I would assassinate you, man. I would consider you assassination.
00:04:27
Speaker
Really? Like, silenced? Oh, wow. You're a columnist for Bloomberg, man. Those are genuinely different comments, by the way. I would assassinate you versus I would call your death an assassination. Yeah, I would call an assassination, just to be clear. I don't want to kill you, just to be clear. Thank you. You doxed, man. That's enough.
00:04:45
Speaker
Yeah. You said I'm a tax and technology attorney from New Jersey. Yeah, that's true. And you are our Jake. You're Jacob Schumer. And you are a land use and construction stuff now, right? Construction. Land use, construction, local government stuff. Yeah, and Florida. I was going to say, I won't say where you are, because I don't want to talk to you. I'm not a set. I might have been assassination worthy earlier this year, but not anymore. Not assassination worthy anymore. Well, here, let's adjust that. At the height of the Reedy Creek stuff. Yeah, I was going to say.
00:05:15
Speaker
To this day, I think if you if like you're in a diner somewhere and Ron DeSantis comes in and he kills you, I think that's an assassination. Yeah, that's true. Specifically if it's Ron DeSantis. Yes, I think that is it. Well, I mean, not this. Yeah, no, no, it has to be Ron DeSantis. Yeah. I was going to say, could it be the other side? But no, it has to be. I think so. Maybe that's something that's a component of assassination. Why is it being done and who is doing it?
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah. Yes, exactly. Guys, this was not on our topic list for tonight. The disambiguation of what qualifies as an assassination. I'm the last person to introduce myself. Hello, everybody. I'm Jason Ramsland. I am an employment litigator for plaintiffs. I sue people's bad bosses for them. And I am back home again in Indiana. No more Georgia for me. New house.
00:05:59
Speaker
Yeah, new house, kind of new office. I've had this office for months now, but I actually finally get to go to it regularly. And so things are pretty great. I actually had a court appearance here on some rinky dink thing that I didn't have to drive 10 hours here and 10 hours back to get to. It was awesome. Not rinky dink. There are no rinky dink things in the law. But it was not a trial or anything like that.
00:06:26
Speaker
It wasn't going to take 20 hours to handle, so you would be in the car longer than you would be handling the matter.
00:06:33
Speaker
Right. Yes. Uh, so no more, no more of that in my life. Very pleased to be back here. Uh, and, uh, you know, actually have a yard that's not on a 20 degree slope and. You know, slightly mile. It's great. It's great. Be farther from Florida. That's always great. You want to try to get some distance from, from Florida. I think that's true. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Everybody else in America is like, Oh, we can't handle this hundred degree weather. And I'm like, Oh, this is, you know,
00:07:01
Speaker
that it's been very hot, but this is what we live to prepare for. This is our normal. So now just the whole world is becoming Florida. And I know everybody loves it. Oh, that's a terrible thing to say. I thought we agreed this was going to be a G-rated podcast.
00:07:17
Speaker
We're talking about assassinations. We're talking about the whole world becoming Florida. Oof. Yeah. This has gone real fast. And the podcast is Esquiring Minds. It is. Oh, yeah. I should say that. Yes. And this is episode 21. It's ostensibly for July 12, 2023. So we've been taking blame for us missing a show. Last week, everybody else was ready to do the show. And I had an allergic reaction to a hamburger.
00:07:42
Speaker
So, so, yeah, so I was like, I'm ready. You guys ready? And then I had to say, turns out I'm not ready. Sorry. Can we do this at some other point? So last week was my fault. That's why we are so late. Are you allergic to before was my fault.
00:07:56
Speaker
I'm allergic to, it's called an alpha-gal. People are going to be very interested in this. It's called an alpha-gal allergy. It's mammalian meat, basically, beef, pork, that kind of stuff. I got bit by a Lone Star tick and you can... Maybe 20... No, I was studying for the bar, so 2013.
00:08:14
Speaker
Oh my gosh. It's been gone forever. So like I regularly eat meat, had no problems. And right before our show, I had a hamburger and things didn't go well. Suddenly the tick bit you again. The tick jumped up and bit me again. And yeah, I'm like the lamest superhero. You know, you get the beetle and Spider-Man, I get bit by a tick and I can't eat a hamburger. Oh no. Yeah. I read an article about this a couple of years ago and it made me scared to go outside. And then I went on the flight and I went back outside.
00:08:44
Speaker
Ticks are off. Permethrin works really well. I don't know if you guys are on the permethrin train. It works fantastically. Spray your pants down. It works for six months. It is absolutely doing something terrible to your body. It has to be. If it works for six months and multiple washes, that's not good.
00:09:00
Speaker
I mean, it's a neurotoxin to be sure, but you know, we're filling ourselves with low level neurotoxins all the time. I'm sitting here drinking a maker's Mark and Coke and, uh, you know, that's filling myself with neurotoxins.
AI Commentary in Sports: An Analysis
00:09:12
Speaker
It's all, it's all matter degrees. Hey, uh, tell me about this Wimbledon AI commentator thing, because, uh, you guys maybe watch 11 seconds of this video and I feel like I got the gist of it a little bit, but, uh, tell me what's going on with this.
00:09:27
Speaker
So IBM Wimbledon is happening right now. It's very exciting for some people. I think Wimbledon is like my favorite tennis event just because it's the grass courts. There are other tennis events, just to be clear. I'm not a tennis fan, so I didn't even know there was anything else. I thought they played then and then they never played again. Now there's the US Open, there's the French Open. They also play on other kinds of courts. They play on non-grass courts.
00:09:54
Speaker
uh but yeah Wimbledon uh famous uh tournament in Britain major um and this year Wimbledon has hired IBM for some reason to put uh to put AI commentary on the highlight videos on its app and on its web page
00:10:15
Speaker
And this commentary going so far, it is not. Nobody likes it. And also it's very bad and useless. So also it's not a. So it's basically just putting Microsoft Sam on for 10 seconds of video every on every video for some reason, because they wanted to throw AI into this thing for some reason.
00:10:41
Speaker
So I linked a video to you and maybe we can put it in the show notes or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. Of one of the many, many highlight videos on Wimbledon. I don't know whether it's the best one. It was the first one I found with this voice.
00:10:55
Speaker
It is, it is a four minute long highlight video. The AI starts like five or six seconds in and says like, which two people are playing, which you already know because you clicked on the video. And then that's it for like a minute. Like there's just a minute of silence. And then there's like, when it actually chimes in with something, it's not interest. It's like barely commentary.
00:11:20
Speaker
The only AI aspect seems to be where it puts it in the video. I don't know. Andrew, did you say that this was typewritten by a person, by a human? I was just speculating. It seems like it is. I don't exactly understand what else would be going on. It's doing image recognition frame by frame of the video and then determining. I don't buy that. What happens? Yeah, that doesn't strike me as plausible.
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah or like I could imagine an AI commentary where like it watches the stats like what are like you know the game outcomes and like starts you know logging what happened at one time and saying what happened but then that's totally useless that's literally the same as the scoreboard on the screen.
00:12:05
Speaker
It's just doing like voiceover or doing text-to-speech basically for the scoreboard. Yeah, exactly. It's like the accessibility settings on my Mac where when I hover over something, it'll just read it out loud. It's the sports TV equivalent of that.
00:12:19
Speaker
If it was, if it was sold like that, I'd be, I'd be up for it. But yeah, that sounds better. I mean, that's a much better way to pitch it. Yeah. It's accessibility. It's for people who can't read the scoreboard. That sounds like a great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or you want to listen to something at work in the background. That's about as useful as it would be if you're not, if you don't need it for any other reason, you know, maybe this, the whole thing gets refined and AI commentators on sporting events get to be a lot better.
00:12:46
Speaker
I have doubts about that, uh, because reasons, but you know, if there's an outside chance that it prevents me from having to listen to Joe Buck, do a play by play for a game, then like, great, I'm all for it. Let's work on that technology. I will suffer through the fortnight of Wimbledon, uh, and AI commentators there. If, you know, five, six, seven years down the road, it means that I don't have to listen to Joe Buck on a football game or a baseball game ever again. That'd be great.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, you're going to be disappointed in me because I think Joe Buck is underrated and in fact is one of the best announcers we've got. For what? For football. Okay, football. I think he's terrible for baseball. He used to be very bad for football and he's gotten much better. I will say that. I don't know about baseball, but
00:13:36
Speaker
Is he Fox? I think he's Fox, right? Yeah, I think so. Every time Fox has a postseason contract, it's just awful. The postseason soundtrack is just terrible announcers talking about players as though they've never heard of them before. I've never understood that in baseball. For some reason, in the postseason, they never get the announcers from the local team, from the local networks for the teams that are in the game. Why wouldn't they do that? I don't understand. These people have been with the team the whole season. They can speak to something.
00:14:05
Speaker
more than you can. It would be good to have like maybe one local guy because the reason I can imagine why you don't want both local people, usually you have the two-man crew on the announcing because they're biased and that's kind of their whole deal is actually rooting for the team, their local team that they're covering, right? So they don't want to do that for the postseason when there's one, you know, they're trying to be a more objective broadcast.
00:14:33
Speaker
Well, a lot of that boils down to chemistry too, because if you're going to put people on play-by-play together, it makes sense to have a crew that works together and does games all around.
00:14:44
Speaker
Who does with al Michaels, the Chris Collins worth an al Michaels, I think do, uh, or did I think al Michael works for Yahoo or, uh, maybe Amazon. Didn't they buy some rights to football? Start naming long retired announcers. Uh, but, uh, you know, you got these guys who go around and do the Sunday night football games every, every week. And then Monday night games every week.
00:15:10
Speaker
got the guys who are doing Monday night baseball, they develop a chemistry. You can't just toss people in there. But if you really want to talk about an utter lack of chemistry, let's talk about AI. Because no chemistry at all. Let me read this description. I found this in business today talking about this Wimbledon thing, the partnership with IBM. It's called the rise of bland and safe announcers is the subhead for this paragraph.
00:15:34
Speaker
In recent years, a shift has occurred in sports broadcasting. As beloved announcers retired or passed away, they were gradually replaced by a new wave of broadcasters who lacked distinctive personalities and were hired to avoid drawing attention to themselves. The emphasis shifted to being unobtrusive as possible, with a uniformity of accents and a corporate desire to prevent any controversy or criticism. So it seems like, I don't know, again, I have to turn to our resident, you're our youth correspondent, Jake, you're also now our tennis correspondent, I think, unless Jason wants to fight for that. I'm not the right person for that, and I'll take it.
00:16:03
Speaker
Is there some sort of controversy involving like is this solving a problem? Do you have a lot of people who are like just like Screaming out racial epithets or something as announcers for tennis matches and they finally had to just like get a bot to do it No, I mean I think
00:16:17
Speaker
I felt like an announcement is going the other way. We're like, we have the Manning simulcast. Do you know about that thing where like, football games are being simulcast with like a, you know, a traditional broadcast crew. And then there's another like simulcast with Eli and Peyton Manning just hanging out and like, BSing over the game. It's a hundred percent better in my opinion. The Manning cast, usually they'll have a guest. That's what I really, there's not a ton of value to me.
00:16:46
Speaker
from the normal commenting until there's a giant play. And it's literally like, if I can't identify who the player is involved, that's helpful. Or keeping up the emotion of the moment, that's basically the only reason I care about the announcing team. Otherwise, I like the hangout thing. Jason, you're indicating you don't agree.
00:17:13
Speaker
No, I think that watching Peyton and Eli do commentary on football games, I can't remember what night of the week they do it on. That is more fun in the playful sense. But if you're really interested and want to really digest a football game, listening to Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth is just objectively better. OK.
00:17:36
Speaker
I had problems with Chris Collinsworth at first. He's really grown on me over the years. It's two different flavors. And neither, you know, if you like Rocky Road versus chocolate chip cookie dough, like, yes, one is objectively better than the other, but it's okay to like other flavors. And that's what Peyton and Eli are. That is not, that is definitely definitively not what Wimbledon AI comes to. Yeah. Wow. If you could tune an AI to be like,
00:18:05
Speaker
the announcer on the Carrot Weather app on the iPhone, where it's just like, hey there, meat sack. You should put on a jacket today. Otherwise, you're going to be melted by the rain, like the Wicked Witch of the West. If you could tune the AI to do that sort of commentary, maybe a little bit more fun. And if you can constrain it to keep it PG so that it's not going off on racist tirades, then great. Turn on HK47 mode from. Yeah.
00:18:34
Speaker
Um, but that's the old Republic. That's a good callback. I love it. The thing is Al Michaels, Chris Collins, worth those were, those are like the a plus announcers. I feel like for football, like those are the best of the best, but 90% of 95% of football games are called by not, not good or like not good might be the wrong way to put it, but like, uh,
00:18:59
Speaker
ESPN, for example, has I don't I can't remember the last time ESPN had a good football crew. Their baseball is not great either. Every time baseball, you know, this game you want to watch and it's on ESPN, it's, you know, a downer.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, but yeah, there's like if you get a really good booth like booth traditional sports, I agree that that's I think I prefer that over the Peyton and Eli messing around, not not just hanging around and watching the game, not trying to digest the game, not trying to actually like pay attention to the game too too closely.
00:19:34
Speaker
I can see AI taking over for radio broadcasts of baseball games. I know I keep harping on baseball. It's the only thing I really know. But I can see that. I mean, our local baseball announcer is a million years old. And not that there's anything wrong with that. But he's been terrible for all of that time. I remember watching this guy announce the World Series in 1996.
00:19:56
Speaker
So he's been doing this for quite a while and he's got to be 90 years old and he goes into his home run call for it as far as gone and then has to walk it back. And he just sort of adds in place that didn't really exist that he imagined existed. Yeah. Are you talking about the, the yes guy? Uh, uh, no, he's on W F A N. John Sterling is his name on the radio. He's terrible. He got hit with a baseball recently. Anyway, okay. We should, we should, we should move on to real topics here.
00:20:24
Speaker
Okay. Did you have something else, Jason? No, I was just going to warn you that if we have a listener in the Netherlands, you should avoid doxxing John Sterling.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yes, yes. Or at least don't do it for Intimidating. Everybody at home, don't post John Sterling's address with an intent to Intimidate him. Be nice to John Sterling. If you just post it, it's fine, but don't post it with the intent to Intimidate. So our main topics, I think we have a smattering of tech topics that we're
Twitter's Rate Limiting and Strategic Decisions
00:20:49
Speaker
going for here. So this is now two weeks old, but Twitter rate limiting was something we wanted to talk about. I think this was
00:20:57
Speaker
Jacob's. Yeah, I mean, I put both of them. They're kind of play into each other because the two topics we have are the rate limiting on Twitter and threads. Right. And Twitter rate limiting, which is, you know, maybe I don't know whether it directly led to the early launch of threads. Obviously, they've been working on threads for a long time.
00:21:16
Speaker
It definitely, it definitely, it definitely did. Yes. Absolutely. Okay. I know that they moved it at, you said weeks. Leaks have indicated, leaks have indicated that, yeah. I know, I know they moved it up by at least a day because they had a date and then they moved up that date. Like, right. Literally I had a ticket in my Instagram app for the date and then they're like, nevermind, we're doing it a day early. Um, but yeah, the, what was it like?
00:21:43
Speaker
a week, a week and a half ago, or something like that, that weekend, a week and a half ago.
00:21:50
Speaker
Nobody's Twitter was working at all. And people was just like, oh, Twitter was down. And then Elon Musk announces actually to stop AI web crawling. We're reducing everybody's ability to read tweets so that you can only read 600 per day if you are not a Twitter blue subscriber. If you're a Twitter blue subscriber, you get like 6,000. It wasn't a ton more.
00:22:18
Speaker
Yeah, it was something like, you know, maybe double or even 10 times. It wasn't like 50,000. It wasn't, you know, a exponentially higher number. Yeah. Right.
00:22:27
Speaker
But if that's the real explanation for why he put that in and it had nothing to do with network pressure or technical problems, then that has got to go down as the stupidest decision in social media history by a corporation.
00:22:49
Speaker
So what's interesting is, I mean, it follows, okay, I have a couple of points. So Twitter and Reddit have been bouncing back and forth off of each other in a way, right? So Elon sort of is the first mover in the like, fire everybody and shut off third party apps and do all of that, right?
00:23:04
Speaker
And then Reddit does the same thing and says, well, no, we explicitly did not do, we're not, you know, it's not because Twitter crawled so we can walk. It's because we're doing it for this AI crawling issue, right? To sort of shut down chat GPT and all these other engines that could be crawling the data there, right? We want to hold onto this data. It's valuable now, right?
00:23:24
Speaker
then Elon does this and he grabs the same excuse reddit just used right and says well the reason why we're doing i'm doing it now is because i want to shut off the the scrapers right i want there's just too much going on and and and it seems implausible on its face
00:23:40
Speaker
Until you find out today, he announces he's putting whatever amount of money and X-Corp is starting an AI engine of their own, a language model of their own. But here's the little bit that I would want to add. I would not put it past Elon Musk to do that purely to make the previous lie true.
00:24:00
Speaker
You say you can't make it to some sort of event because you're in the hospital. You're not really in the hospital. People start to question it, so you throw yourself in front of a truck, so you wind up in the hospital. I wouldn't put it past them at all to have done exactly that.
00:24:15
Speaker
You know, I wouldn't put it past them at all. I would be interested if there's reporting that would indicate the existence of this AI company before the rate limiting fiasco. If there isn't, then yeah, absolutely. If there is no indication that this AI company existed before
00:24:35
Speaker
Last weekend a half ago then i absolutely agree and i'm on board with you because man was this embarrassing because like obviously rate limiting has been around forever to prevent like.
00:24:50
Speaker
This kind of thing. Like web scrapers. But not bluntly like this. Not this real blunt tool. It's a little smarter. Right. It's never supposed to really hit the normal usage at all. I would occasionally get hit with a year rate limited from Twitter back in the day when I was doing it a lot. And I was like, oh, OK. Yeah. And then you come back three minutes later, and it's fine.
00:25:20
Speaker
Um, then I was like refreshing a lot or something like that. Uh, when there was like a live event and I was like, I need to, you know, I'm trying to find, I'm trying to click on the link as fast as possible. Yeah. You're doing something that would simulate automated behavior. I mean, I get it sometimes with a Google, I'll search for something and I'll get a little capture saying your activity seems strange. Can you confirm that you're real or whatever? That all is, I assume baked into everything we use.
00:25:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And it would make sense for it, but 600 tweets, you can read 600 tweets in like five minutes of scrolling. That's the thing. And reading doesn't mean it actually hit your eyeballs. It means the database pulled the tweet. It loaded the tweet, which is also why the view counts on tweets are insanely high because
00:26:08
Speaker
It doesn't mean somebody read it. It means the database somebody scrolled past it. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't even mean you paused on it is my understanding from test people have done. It's not a matter of like, well, it was on your screen for, because I understand that like actually figuring out if you read it is difficult, right? Barring you, you pressing it and going into the tweet itself. If you just scroll past it,
00:26:27
Speaker
I get that it's hard to read that. But you would think there would be some sort of counter. The counter would be somewhat intelligent and would be based on the amount of time that it was on the screen, right? If it was on the screen for a fraction of a second, you would think it wouldn't do a count. But at least as of when the when that whole discussion was about these counts being inflated, some people did some tests then. And I'll see if I can find the link I'll put in the show notes. And they found that you just like pressing a quick scrolling as fast as you can with your finger. So the things just fly by. All of those are being counted as red. Yeah.
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah, so that's so that's the thing 600 you're done like I like I finished my 600 by like between the hours of 11 a.m. And 2 p.m. Well partially because I was kept I was so like into reading tweets about how stupid this was.
00:27:16
Speaker
It's the most compelling moment to be on Twitter. And that's one of the reasons it always happens with these Twitter meltdowns. Twitter melts down. We go talk about it on Twitter, and Twitter's like, oh my god, record traffic. And it's like, congratulations on your being the place of a car crash that everybody wants to watch.
00:27:36
Speaker
Yeah. The funny thing about record traffic too is Musk said, when he announced these limits, he said several hundred organizations, maybe more were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively to the point where it was affecting the real user experience. And almost every company doing AI was scraping Twitter to train their models. He doesn't even understand that when he talks about like how much traffic there is as this positive, as this measurement of Twitter is great. And then he says like, Oh man, there's so many bots on this thing.
00:28:00
Speaker
If you don't think that might. Yeah. We can't distinguish between bots and humans, but also our traffic is so high. Has never been better. Yeah. And we know that they're all real people. Well, CloudFlare has something else to say about that because the Twitter's traffic in July of 2023 is lower than it has been all year.
00:28:23
Speaker
Uh, and it's lower by, I don't know how to read this chart because this is one of those, uh, it's a ranking chart, right? Right. It is. So they've dropped from being like the 32nd most popular, uh, website, the highest traffic website, I guess is probably the right way to say it. According to cloud flare, which I think operates a content delivery network, a CDN. Yeah.
00:28:44
Speaker
Uh, and so they're the ones who are like caching this stuff for delivery to the end, the end user. Uh, and it dropped from 32nd down to 40th. Uh, and it looks like, uh, I can't tell from this chart exactly what leaped ahead of it, but, uh, some of the things that are on this chart are not particularly like heavy hitters. Right. And so there, uh, the Twitter's traffic is the worst that it's been in seven months. And, uh, I imagine that that.
00:29:14
Speaker
if we take that and extrapolate that back even further to like before Elon was offering to buy it for 542069 or whatever it was. Before that whole saga began, I bet you Twitter traffic was considerably higher. I bet you it was probably in the top 25 websites in terms of traffic.
00:29:36
Speaker
I wouldn't be surprised if it's not because Twitter has always, this is like one of those things about like Elon wanting to buy it never made sense from a like, from an objective money perspective. It always had a huge impact, a huge standing amongst the social media giants, but it was never anywhere close to as popular as Instagram or Facebook or even TikTok.
00:30:01
Speaker
It never made, it made money like one year. Oh, in terms of revenue. Yeah, it was just terrible. I mean, part of it is because it's hosting bills, it's CDN bills, it's content delivery bills are so high. And that was one of the speculations as to why he was doing this was like, apparently they're backlogged on paying Google for their cloud. So this might've been like a cost savings.
00:30:26
Speaker
thing. Yeah. Which is hilarious. It's just incredibly funny. This company you paid $44 billion for and you're just doing things like sending the rent check without signing it. So you buy yourself like an extra week. They're also suing Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen, Katz, the closing attorneys that sued Elon to close the deal for their closing feedback.
00:30:51
Speaker
They're not, they owe a bunch of, they owe like $500 million in severance based on the agreement with Twitter because in the closing agreement between Elon Musk and Twitter, Elon Musk agreed to pay that severance. There's like hundreds and hundreds of employee arbitration cases.
00:31:15
Speaker
where the employees are suing. It's like 913 or something like that. Yeah, that's an insane number. Something ridiculous. Yeah. And Twitter's refusing to pay the arbitration fees as it's required by the arbitration rules. Right.
00:31:31
Speaker
And the agreements they made the employees sign. Yes, exactly. It wasn't like the employees went in their demand. The employee agreement didn't say who would pay the, like I looked at the employee arbitration agreements as part of this. The employee agreement says, we'll pay the arbitration fees, except if your local government, if your local jurisdiction doesn't require that, then
00:31:56
Speaker
whoever, it'll be paid based on existing law, something like that. But then the standard arbitration rules say the employer pays the fees and they consented to those rules. So like a JAMs arbitration for an employment case. It's the employee pays like I think the first $400 filing fee and then the employee pays 400 bucks to file it just like you would in federal court.
00:32:23
Speaker
And then the employer pays like another 1500 or something like that. And then depending on the arbitrator, they want like a $25,000 retainer or something like that. So if you're doing that, you know, 913 times that.
00:32:38
Speaker
It gets to be fairly costly fairly quickly. That's another bill he won't be paying somewhere. Right. One of the things that's most interesting to me is to think about, okay, so if Twitter was going to engage in this sort of rate limiting activity where they're going to
00:32:53
Speaker
Rate limit, the people who are paying $8 or $11 per month for Twitter Blue, which I guess makes them verified accounts, and they get 6,000 posts a day. Then we're going to limit unverified accounts to 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts to 300 posts per day. Viewing, not making, viewing, like scrolling across your screen.
00:33:17
Speaker
Surely, this is something that you can know in advance that you're going to do, and you can give people notice. Like, for example, advertisers who are advertising on your platform who are now going to have substantially fewer eyeballs going across their ads. And apparently, Elon's excuse, so Twitter was confronted with this sort of argument about, hey, you guys probably could have saw this coming, right?
00:33:44
Speaker
Uh, and they said, well, uh, we did see it coming, right? Wink, wink. Uh, but we couldn't do it because we don't want the bad actors to have time to circumvent our rate limiting measures. Uh, the exact quote from the Twitter business blog post, uh, was any advanced notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection. So, okay. So you, uh,
00:34:10
Speaker
Don't give them any notice. Let's say that it would take those bad actors. Let's say you were going to give 30 days notice that you were going to do this. Okay, great. You've postponed the bad actors circumvention measures by 30 days. Is that worth the hit that you're taking here?
00:34:26
Speaker
Well, also, isn't the clock ticking once you then do take those actions? So then that means those actions only work for 30 days. Yeah, you've already lost. Okay, they've restarted now. And also, as part of this, Twitter locked off viewing tweets for people that weren't logged in. And now you can do it again. So the strippers can just come back and scrape again.
00:34:46
Speaker
I think that broke so much that even he had to realize that if you're reading a New York Times article and it wants to say some celebrity said something, oftentimes it'll be embedded in there. Or even not celebrity, a politician, whatever. Or just comments on something that's going on. Residents were very concerned and then they'll have 10 tweets that are embedded. And what I saw was quickly, I think it was the New York Times or the Washington Post, they were pretty quickly going in and putting screenshots of the, I mean, very jankily,
00:35:15
Speaker
you know, quickly grabbed screenshots probably by some poor intern that stuck doing or editor stuck doing this. But I think even he had to realize that, oh, that that is a value. I mean, that is something that is a valuable source of traffic. Right. We want people to click on Twitter and come to the site.
00:35:31
Speaker
And think of it as like where the conversation is happening, right? Like I'm reading a news article and it's about, you know, whatever, some some legal proceeding or something. And an attorney general said something on Twitter and there that's where it is. I need to be on Twitter if I want to be part of these conversations. I think it was so clear that even he had to fix it. But.
00:35:47
Speaker
to Jason's point, I think the fact that there was no notice suggests it was not anything. At this point, anytime he says something, you should just assume it's something else entirely. It's certainly not that. You can write that down and strike it out as being one of the reasons for this. I think the scraping thing is a non sequitur. I think the API access being cut off
00:36:07
Speaker
as being an AI issue was fake. I don't think that's a real reason. I think he saw this as a way to drive people to purchase Twitter Blue. I think maybe he thought about whether or not he could have a second tier for viewing more. And that's why he limited Twitter Blue subscribers also to 6,000. Let's see, is there a lot? Do we have a huge surge of people go to Twitter Blue in order to go from 600 to 6,000? If that's the case, maybe if you pay $16, I'll give you unlimited access.
00:36:33
Speaker
Can we do some tearing or something? I'm sure, I think it's all about money. All, I mean, Occam's Razor suggests Twitter is bleeding money, desperate for money. And he's just, I think that's the simplest answer to most of these things. Twitter is bleeding everything. They're bleeding money. They're bleeding users. They're bleeding advertisers. They're bleeding reputation and like, probably reputation more than absolutely anything else. So
00:36:59
Speaker
Yeah, the explanation and the claim that they're rate limiting, this claim of rate limitation is not the true occurrence. What's happening here is that rate limiting is being used as the beard to disguise a massive breakdown of Twitter systems. On what exact level? I don't know.
00:37:24
Speaker
All signs point to this, and in the absence of a plausible explanation, you have to take the most realistic expectation, which is either Twitter's not paying its bills, or there's a huge flaw in their code, or their database is breaking down, or something that is a technological and people failure on the backend, not a proactive thing to make a good business decision. That's not what's going on here.
00:37:47
Speaker
Right. I mean, the other thing is on the scraping front, why wouldn't he just sell the data to one of these AI, open AI has, you know, $30 billion to spare or whatever. Why not just sell the, the, uh,
00:37:57
Speaker
the data. It's one of the biggest sources of like plain language, like conversation data on the internet. So if this is really that, that's the concern, just sell it. That's all right. Open the, have an API for that and sell access to it. And I'm sure there'll be, you know, if it's not Google bard or, or, or open AI, it'll be some startup, uh, AI company that wants, not startup, obviously you don't need some money to do this, but
00:38:19
Speaker
There's plenty of money in AI right now that if they're interested, they could have done something else. And maybe the answer is that he did, right? This X Corp thing that he's starting with a new model or whatever. It's interesting, it's not under Twitter's umbrella, right? He's like, oh, no. Who has faith in this man to start a tech company at this point is to run a tech company for anything. Who? Who?
00:38:42
Speaker
Who's investing? Yeah. He's going to have to sell a lot of textile stock in order to make that thing work or very valuable at all.
Meta's Threads vs. Twitter: A Social Media Showdown
00:38:51
Speaker
Isn't there a new CEO? We continue to talk about him. Yeah, we can talk about him. I don't know her last name.
00:39:01
Speaker
I think is it Professor Ann Lipton on esq.social that has sort of compiled over time some of the like, there are I don't know if it's the FTC, I think it was the FTC sent some official letter to some warning letter to Twitter and sent it to Elon Musk as CEO like three days ago.
00:39:20
Speaker
It is just a widespread, just complete ignoring of what he has said that there's a new CEO. No, there's not. You're it. There was a letter sent by Twitter, CCing Elon Musk, but not the CEO. Yeah, I saw that correctly. Yeah. Okay, so that was about Twitter having
00:39:40
Speaker
done the stupidest thing a social media company could and limit how much time its users can spend on their app. Meta comes in with this product they've been working on for six months, threads, and smells blood in the water, and boom, launches weeks, months before they were thinking they were going to.
00:40:01
Speaker
and shoots off like a dang rocket to 100 million users in five days. Before we go too deep into threads, I just want to tie in the Twitter thing. My favorite thing is that Musk immediately threatened a lawsuit saying that they had hired a bunch of fired Twitter employees. And so their trade secrets have been sold. That is just perfect. You fired them, right?
00:40:23
Speaker
That's the letter I was talking about, I think. Oh, okay. That you were talking about where they didn't see the CEO of Twitter. Well, they don't need to know. Yeah, they don't need to know. So y'all know that I've been very threadsed up. I've been threads. I've been threads pill. Threaded. Threaded. Threaded. Threaded is good. I'm all in on threads like in like both
00:40:48
Speaker
in a good way and a bad way. It is all the destructive parts of social media that I hate, but also I somehow think it's extremely good and I'm very glad it exists. I think this is it. I don't think it's a Twitter killer.
00:41:11
Speaker
I don't even think it's going to replace Twitter for like live news stuff. I don't think it will do that. But I don't think I think it's taking a big old chunk of what Twitter was famous for.
00:41:23
Speaker
Um, it's going to take a huge chunk of that. I don't think, I think Twitter is going to be a shell from now on. I think it's all, it was already kind of a shell. It's going to be a super shell. And I think Facebook is kind of just styling on Elon Musk being like, we know how to make money and you don't. And so we're going to give this
00:41:41
Speaker
Oh yeah, you have a following chronological feed. Your default is chronological. We're going to give them one one feed. It's going to be algorithmic. It's going to be full of the most boring bland posts you can ever imagine at first.
00:41:58
Speaker
They were going after the young people were going after the tick talkers. They know how to hammer on an algorithm until the algorithm gives them exactly what they want. That's how we pull people into the to the app forever for hours and hours on end instead of for a few minutes at a time, catching up on the updates like you do with Twitter. It is. I mean, it's interesting you said tick tock. It is very much like tick tock and that it's sort of or Instagram reels.
00:42:27
Speaker
in that it's just sort of like there's not much to do. It's just sort of scroll. It is just turning you into a monkey brain sort of imbecile to just kind of scroll through it.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I think that's, everybody says it's a Twitter clone. Really, it's, I don't think it is. It's short form text, mostly. You can put in video, you can put in pictures. So how is that any different than Twitter? It's short form text, like it's Twitter. It's short form text, but it is not, that's not how people use Twitter. Twitter, people mostly use Twitter for the following, for the following algorithm, for not the algorithm, the following tab where it is not algorithmic based.
00:43:04
Speaker
where you just have your people on it. That's how most people use Twitter and your people and it's chronological. I'm not sure that's right. I mean, interaction with Twitter has been on the whatever the home button is like the top for you. Uh, I don't know what, whatever. I think it's for you now to take a look at it. But yeah, like, uh, my main interaction with Twitter is yeah, for you.
00:43:28
Speaker
Uh, maybe it's just, maybe I'm just bad at Twitter. I've never really tried to be good at Twitter. It's, it's not something that I've cared about. I care about it every October because it gets really active at this one particular, uh, legal conference that I go to. And that's interesting. And then otherwise it's, you know, I follow some people for good news takes.
00:43:47
Speaker
So in that respect, you're doing what they wanted. Threads. Threads is no different for me than my Twitter experiences, except there are fewer Nazis that crop up so far. Yes, that's true. Right. So far. The Nazis are going to find their way to threads. Yeah, yeah. There's nothing. OK, so a couple of things. One, I think to Jason's point on the for you thing being the most popular, I think among Twitter, the people that are really into Twitter, they get off for you pretty quickly because they don't want to feel like an algorithm is feeding them anything, right? They want, just like you said, a chronological thing.
00:44:17
Speaker
But I do think it's the Internet Explorer issue. Internet Explorer was like the default. It was like 98% of all browsers. So in all these things, I might be wrong, but I think a good heuristic is whatever the default is, probably 80% or more of people are using the default. Whatever it is. Open it. What do I see? That's it. So 4U is the default. I bet a lot of people are using the 4U thing. So in that way, I feel real basic.
00:44:44
Speaker
I mean like a real like a Luddite, like somebody doesn't know anything about technology, you'll be using for you. You're sheep under Elon Musk's thumb. Bad, bad, bad. Give me some more. Yeah, that's it. Some more cud to cheat. Ouch. If you're somebody like that, then that would be... No, but I mean like... This got hurtful. I think more what Jason is exhibiting is like he's not that into Twitter. He kind of hates Twitter. He doesn't really want to be on there. And so he's not going to sit around like messing with it. It's like playing a game that you're not that into. You're not going into the settings and changing all sorts of stuff. You just sort of...
00:45:13
Speaker
muddling your way through and that's it, right? And so for threads, I think it is very similar, but it has also taken away all that other stuff, or at least as of right now. It's just the one thing and that's it. It's a constant stream of content. I mean, I think that the real reason for the sudden uptick is just how much bigger Facebook, and this was your point before Jake about Twitter being relatively small, how much bigger Facebook and Instagram has always been. And so if you just threw, if you threw a link
00:45:43
Speaker
in the settings page of Instagram to a new website. That website would I bet immediately be in the top 100 websites instantly, right? Nevermind putting it right in people's profiles. Nevermind actually trying to push it a little bit.
00:45:56
Speaker
And so threads reminds me a lot of, I don't know if you remember when Google came out with Google plus and they tied it into Gmail and briefly it was the largest social media network in the world because everyone immediately at least looked at it and then immediately dropped it. Right. Yeah. The thing about that site is it didn't make any, did you do Google plus? I mean, not, I didn't use it. I did the same thing everybody else did. I looked at it and went like, Oh,
00:46:19
Speaker
Okay, I guess. I signed up, I made circles. Yeah, all circles. And then I was just like, why would I do this? Right. And so it seems like threads has gotten past that hump, right? Because you're getting people, like you said, right now the current problem is like, do you really want to see like,
00:46:36
Speaker
you know, Velveeta ask Ford what their favorite cheese is or something, right? But that will change. But I think when that changes to Jason's point, I don't see any controls for why there will be fewer Nazis. Like, there's nothing in there that's baked in that seems to me like, oh, it'll be better this time. It doesn't it doesn't seem like well, I don't know what is the algorithm? Well,
00:46:59
Speaker
Elon Musk obviously gave everybody who paid him $8 a boost in their algorithm. And that is a terrible, terrible idea for a million reasons. And also dismissed. He also dismissed. I have to assume I haven't looked at the detailed breakdown of who got dismissed in his layoffs, but
00:47:18
Speaker
like content moderation is obviously not a priority for Elon Musk, who has described himself inaccurately, but he has described himself as a free speech absolutist. And so content moderation, obviously not a priority for him. And so like, of course there are gonna be more Nazis there now. Meanwhile, I think meta, Facebook, Instagram threads, they have a much more honed sensibility as far as content moderation goes.
00:47:47
Speaker
especially in the wake of I think they got that sensibility coming out of like
00:47:52
Speaker
Cambridge Analytica, the 2016 election, you know, the 2020 racial unrest, you know, the 2018-19 me too stuff. Like they got a lot more into content moderation and there's a glimmer of hope for me with threads that we can have a, yeah, it's algorithmically curated and that's got its own weaknesses, but if we can have it
00:48:19
Speaker
well-moderated using whatever tools Facebook meta are using right now. I don't see a lot of really objectionable content on Facebook these days, which I'm an old guy and that's probably still my most... It's probably behind Instagram at this point.
00:48:41
Speaker
But I don't see a lot of objectionable content on there. I just see too many ads and a bunch of stuff algorithmically served to me that I don't care about. And that's what I'm getting in threads right now anyway. That'll get honed in as meta is watching how long my eyeballs linger on a particular post by a particular person.
00:49:03
Speaker
But I'll tell you what, if they do a better job at content moderation and make threads a more wholesome place for me to be, then yeah, heck yeah, it's gonna beat the pants off of Twitter. I think for sure, yeah. Just to be clear in what I was saying, I wasn't arguing with Jake when he said Twitter's done. Twitter's done. Threads is going to eat Twitter's lunch. Twitter's over. I think Threads is gonna make, it's already gonna make more money than
00:49:32
Speaker
than Twitter ever did. It's not even monetized yet. I bet like two years from now it'll make more money than Twitter ever did. But the first day of threads obviously
00:49:49
Speaker
You get in tons of celebrities, tons of brands posting. What's your favorite color as a hot dog, a sandwich, right? Normal stuff like that. Some of the big differences between threads and Twitter is Twitter. Your likes are public.
00:50:05
Speaker
So it kind of discourages you from liking stuff because your likes are public. Whereas on threads, your likes are basically a way of training the algorithm to show you more of that stuff.
00:50:21
Speaker
and i didn't know that uh yeah and it brings instagram and they brought over the instagram culture by linking it to your instagram account that's how you get your threads account is by linking your instagram account and the instagram culture is very positive it's very like
00:50:36
Speaker
Uh, very kind of bland. We'll see about that. I get a lot of spam. I was going to say this when you're saying about content moderation. I get a lot of spam on Instagram. So yeah, quite to this day, but I mean, up until relatively recently, I'll say within the last six months, if I ever had a DM on Instagram, it was spam. Oh yeah. I def. Yes.
00:50:55
Speaker
That is the case for me too. And I'm getting some thread spam already. Okay. And threads is Instagram. Like you were saying, they brought over sort of the culture, but also the app itself on both Android and iOS is heavily borrowing from the Instagram app. It uses modules that were made just for Instagram. It is clearly
00:51:16
Speaker
at least on the front end there, I wouldn't say cobbled together quickly, but they were in a little bit of a rush, right? Let's get this going as fast as possible. And I get why. I mean, that's not a slam on them or anything. It's interesting. I sort of remarked on this on Mastodon. It's interesting that it didn't seem to ever even be a question that they were going to tie it to Instagram rather than tie it to Facebook, which seems like that would be the logical
00:51:39
Speaker
point, right? Facebook is the main, it really seems like mothership. Yeah, it seems like this indicates a shift in meta from what they view as their main product, right? Yeah, Facebook is the old thing that doesn't make them as much money anymore. It's not cool. Instagram is still a little cool. Facebook is the Toyota and Instagram is the Lexus.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And so about making money, what I think is interesting is having it all tied in. If you imagine pitching to an advertiser for some advertisement space on threads, you can tie that into Instagram, you can tie it into Facebook, you can sell like it all is part of the Facebook ad network that it can all sort of make use of that.
00:52:18
Speaker
While still being culturally viewed as separate, we still kind of think of Instagram. We talk about Instagram as though it isn't just an arm of Facebook. And we talk about threads now as though it's an arm of Instagram. And so that culture thing is an interest. I would not have predicted that this would have been successful. This like slow walk away, like changing the name of the parent company to meta and all the little steps they've taken.
00:52:40
Speaker
really has seemed to work in that threads is launched and people don't just immediately scoff saying, uh, I'm not trading one billionaire for another. It really seemed to get, you know, obviously it's the most popular, you know, webs. It got the attraction faster than anything, uh, before it with, I guess, GPT being second. You talk about brands competing for attention on here.
00:53:01
Speaker
And you talked about billionaires competing for this. And one of the best brands on all social media is Wendy's. And I don't know if y'all follow Wendy's, but I immediately clicked the follow button on Wendy's when they posted this, just a horribly, just horrific
00:53:20
Speaker
picture of Wendy but like her face all scratched out in black in that particular art style that's like 4chan I think. It's like when the billionaires are fighting about where you post your cheeseburger jokes and like that totally just identified the moment for me where it's like this is Zuckerberg and Musk like duking it out and Zuck is coming in as the apparently like
00:53:46
Speaker
now jacked six-pack abs, totally caught up dude who's coming in to pound the old guy. If this whole thing isn't just a perfect metaphor for what's happening right now where it really feels like meta, Facebook, Instagram threads, the timing of it, the acceleration of it, they're clearly going for the jugular. That part of it, I am here for because
00:54:13
Speaker
Yeah. Twitter is a useful resource. It has been useful. It has been socially important for the world in some ways. Also, Twitter is poison now and it needs to be flushed. Go Zuck. I don't like you, Zuck, but in this respect, go get them.
00:54:34
Speaker
the enemy of my enemy for now. He's really come out of this, man. He looks like he's just having the time of his life. This is the best. This is the most he's been back. Since becoming human. Yeah. He's feeling the positivity for the first time in so many years. He's Zuckerberg rehabilitation is what it is. This is great rehab for his rep.
00:55:01
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, let's think about how he has become, like you just said, he's pounding the old guy. I know you meant in age with Elon Musk. Yeah. Musk and Twitter really seems like the old thing now, and this is the new thing. But I don't know. I don't have this on top of my head, but I think Zuckerberg may have been a billionaire prior to Elon. I think Elon is the new arrival to the top five wealthiest people in the world ranking. I think Zuckerberg's probably been there since
00:55:28
Speaker
The mid aughts probably, right? Oh, five or six, something like that. Point being, Zuckerberg is more the old money than than Musk is. And it's funny that now Zuckerberg seems like the and also he is going to physically destroy Elon Musk if they were to have any sort of I mean, an arm wrestle. And I think Musk would just fall to putrified jelly. I don't like fights. I don't like boxing. I don't like I don't like MMA. But I'd I'd buy that pay per view. Yeah, I would too.
00:55:58
Speaker
The reason why I was, uh, you know, one of the main reasons I'm so positive on this is because of that whole billionaire is fighting thing because threads, it's not this now, but they've been very clear. It's even like in their app that it's coming is this is going to be activity pub compliant. This is going to, and this is going to federate with mastodon.
00:56:21
Speaker
And so where are the billionaires? I've been getting more and more frustrated with people like, oh, we can only go to billionaires stuff. Mastodon is a open source protocol that anybody can run, and you can have an account there.
00:56:40
Speaker
Like, it's just annoying. You want the slick presentation, the ease of signing up. You want something that's like totally capital. That's that's what you're telling everybody that you actually don't want to deal with the slight annoyance that deal that comes with.
00:56:56
Speaker
doing something that is completely independent. But because of this, everybody came onto threads and was like, oh, this isn't gonna work if there's no chronological feed. This isn't gonna work if there's no followers only feed. I do think they're gonna bring in a followers only feed. And they said they're gonna do that very soon. But it was funny seeing the culture clash on there because the TikTokers came in and TikTokers
00:57:22
Speaker
usually aren't big fans of Twitter for the most part. They came in and they were like, no chronological feed. Because they're used to the algorithmic stuff. They know how to get the algorithm to show them what they want. It's like a generational issue slash Jason, I didn't realize that you were all in on the algorithm for you.
00:57:44
Speaker
But I didn't know it. I didn't know I was didn't know what I was Sucked in you didn't even know you're just an innocent victim. That's how they get you man. Yeah, but Eve child Yeah for people that want the followers only in chronological once that activity pub is activated And they you can federate with Mastodon then you can have I and this is how I plan on doing it and
00:58:07
Speaker
is I will have my threads account, but I'll have my mastodon account and the mastodon account will just have the, that's not algorithmic. That is chronological. I can make lists. I can do whatever the hell I want. It's not going to have all of the functionality of the threads app. Autumn necessary has been pretty clear that the
00:58:27
Speaker
The way that ActivityPub works is the text, basic stuff like text and image and pulling that post stuff will be easy, will be federated and that's part of the ActivityPub protocol. But they can add stuff on top of that that doesn't go to the other servers. And so the fun, maybe threads is where I have the fun like pull, watch forever entertainment stuff.
00:58:54
Speaker
Right. Because that's what it's best at. That's what the culture that that threads builds that it met as built. And I can use the Fed, you know, the Fed averse, the mastodon account to follow threads accounts.
00:59:10
Speaker
Just like I, you know, you could do on any other, other time and then no, you know, Zuck isn't in control of that extent to the extent that they can shut down threads anytime they want. Okay. Two things. Uh, first I, I'm going to right now register my skepticism and we can note it's nine 37 PM on July 12th, 2023. Uh, I have a lot of skepticism about whether threads will ever federate in a,
00:59:39
Speaker
in a genuine way that is akin to the feta verse that exists now. Second bit is, I think it is way too early to make any declarations about the culture of threads, which has been out for, what, 10 days? Yeah. If that.
01:00:01
Speaker
The culture of threads is going to rise and fall and change dramatically based on how meta tunes that algorithm and so saying that the culture is great now is easy.
01:00:16
Speaker
compared to what it's going to be later because we are not in, you know, it's 2023. It's the summer of 2023. And we are not even starting into presidential primary season. And I want to see before I make any declarations about what the culture of threads is going to be like. I want to see what happens when
01:00:36
Speaker
We get into the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries caucuses and like the throes of primary races and presidential elections. And I want to see what it does. Let me phrase this appropriately. I don't actually want to see this, but it will be telling it will be telling to see how threads is when we have our next tragic event in
01:01:05
Speaker
primarily American culture and news where it will be telling to see what threads looks like the next time we have a, it's sad that you even have to couch it this way, but like a remarkable mass shooting event or a remarkable, they're all remarkable, right? They're all tragic.
01:01:30
Speaker
but like they're so frequent now that a lot of them slide under the radar. When we have one that isn't sliding under the radar, it'll be interesting to see how threads behaves there. And that's when I think we can start making declarations about the culture. Maybe not a mass shooting event, maybe something akin to an Ahmaud Arbery or a Philando Castile or George Floyd or something like that. That's when we're going to get an actual idea about what the culture looks like
01:01:58
Speaker
not when I'm looking at funny Wendy's memes about cheeseburgers and stuff. Like that's when we'll know. So I'm withholding judgment and I'm skeptical about Federation. That part is an interesting point because I could see if the reputation of threads becomes that it is a sort of fun time, goofball, just silly stuff website. The pressure would be on the algorithm to, or beyond the people maintaining the algorithm and developing the algorithm.
01:02:25
Speaker
to kind of have like a sort of no bummers rule, right? Like, yeah, sort of the opposite of the surface, the things that are causing a lot of discussion, be it good or bad, you would you might see sort of the opposite. I can totally imagine that where, you know, some mass shooting event happens, some some tragedy happens and there's, you know, one or two posts you see, but like the conversation doesn't seem to be really surfacing to the top as much as
01:02:49
Speaker
you know, Wendy's posting a weird picture or something. Any of those sorts of things, I feel like Facebook, I feel like a large company, Facebook meta threads, once it's more well known, sort of being tone deaf could really cause harm.
01:03:04
Speaker
If the algorithm is what they're presenting as their value add and how this is an improvement over Twitter and this is really what they're offering you is that this is something like TikTok. It can just sort of learn what you want to see and show you those things. I can imagine some sort of event happening, it not showing enough of that and there being a backlash that is like, what is this algorithm? Why are you pushing this down? Why are you suppressing this tragedy or whatever that happened? Yeah, and maybe they want to take a page from like
01:03:33
Speaker
uh, apple TV plus and Ted lasso and like half the Ted lasso algorithm, the Ted lasso tuning in the algorithm and, uh, setting aside the fact that I think probably the moment for that has passed. Like, uh, you know, I could, I could foresee a future where they say, uh, yeah, take that negativity to Twitter. This is our fun, happy space over here. That's what threads is for. And so that seems like a genuine possibility. And I'm not sure that's entirely bad, probably not realistic, but not entirely bad.
01:04:03
Speaker
Yeah. You mentioned it being primarily in America. I think it's America's like 90% of it because you still isn't able to sign up for threads. Yeah, because yeah, it's only because of the new legislation coming up over there that's going to make a put a whole bunch of requirements on Facebook.
01:04:24
Speaker
I don't think that threads will have the same kind of uniculture like Twitter has had because of all the frictions they put into the fact that they're gonna be so algorithm-based. It's not gonna have that culture of activists having the, you know, basing it on, you know, seeking out specific chronological information.
01:04:52
Speaker
So we're going to have these more insular cultures like we have with TikTok. Like I mentioned about the lesbian lumberjack stuff. A lot of people never ever see that. Occasionally TikTok shows me a video. I'm like, who the hell is watching this? Why does this have 40 million views?
01:05:11
Speaker
And it's just like there's gonna, I think there's gonna be a lot more separation there. You can't search through people's quote, quote, reposts on threads. I bet you never will be. That seems like a pretty intentional decision. They might add trending stuff, which was one of the sources of toxicity in Twitter was going to trending.
01:05:35
Speaker
Which they don't have that a lot of people are saying never have that It wasn't one of the things that they said where was coming but they did say they were gonna try to do a search stuff
01:05:46
Speaker
Which is great. I mean, that's a value add over, to be honest, Mastodon and the Fediverse and all the sort of disaggregated servers, being able to search, it would be huge. I mean, that would be a big benefit. Yeah. And also, of course, the thing is, Twitter has basically said, you're going to look at the dumbest replies where somebody's paid us $8 to put us in front.
01:06:10
Speaker
Just by not having that, Meta is going to have a better culture. Even if you just import every single Twitter user, Meta is going to have a more pleasant place to be around by not having that problem alone. By not having the test tube to be elevated, be like, who wants to be the grand marshal of the boo-boo parade? The people who want to pay $8.
01:06:35
Speaker
people who want to pay eight dollars are the worst people on the service and then just surface them is just yeah yeah if they if they didn't if they had good enough tweets to build a following they would have built it already so instead they're paying eight dollars where you know their tweets are bad because they don't have a following yet and they want one so um the worst decision
01:06:56
Speaker
want to put it on a list of terrible decisions. One of the reasons why I'm long on threads, why I think in the long run it's going to do so well is because they've made it such a nice environment for celebrities and brands and posters who people want to come to the service for. You know, the number of users is nice, but
01:07:18
Speaker
One of the big indicators was that brands and celebrities, at least at the beginning, were getting more engagement on threads than they were on Twitter, even with a tenth of the followers. Could be the bots. Maybe it was the bots on Twitter. Who knows? I think that we're going to enter an era where there is no Twitter
01:07:40
Speaker
similarity to Twitter's peak where there was like a single place where everybody was at. Um, because there's Mastodon just hit record active subscribers. Blue sky is still increasing. Uh, it's at 300,000 users. I don't think, I think blue sky is the most dead because they are, they're supposed to make money at some point and nobody's gonna, who would make a federated AT protocol
01:08:09
Speaker
system now when massing out already exists and threads is going to be activity pub based. That was it. That was the beta max and VHS decision there, right? Once they threw it, it was, I think what was it, Sony that shows, uh, VHS and that's the route. Everything went right. That's, I think Facebook is the Sony in this. Yeah. So Sony was beta max. I thought, Oh, okay. Well, whatever, whoever picked the right one was the one who thumb on the scaled it.
01:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, I did. So like Mastodon, Blue Sky, threads, Twitter, their functionality isn't that different, but they have very different people that are using it right now. So we'll see how it goes. Threads is depending on what source you look at. It's either six or seven days old. So yeah, it's right. It's too early. It's too early to tell. And we only have the first 110 million people to sign up for it.
01:09:03
Speaker
And so it's great for right now, but also the early days of Twitter were great. And so as Kanye cautioned us, drive slow, homie. Before we move on to recommendations, I just want to point out that the real loser in all this, because we're not even talking about it, is Substack Notes. Do you remember? There was like 24 hours where Substack Notes was the Twitter killer that was going to be. You didn't even mention it in that. It's gone. Uh-uh.
01:09:31
Speaker
I was like, I never, I still don't understand. It's terrible. I get notifications for sub-stack notes and I'm like, what? I have no idea. I still don't understand the difference between sub-stack, like what's going on with that compared to the actual newsletter that gets sent out.
Recommendations and Personal Interests
01:09:45
Speaker
Anyway, I don't know either. But anyway, that's the real loser. Like they're definitely dead. Maybe blue sky hang down for a little while. I agree. I know it's done, uh, threads and Twitter moving forward. And I'm also, I'm with Jason. I, I, I could see it going either way. So you guys want to talk about recommendations? Yeah, I do.
01:09:59
Speaker
Okay. Jake, you go first. You always go first. I've listed like five things here. I've listed four things. Look, we had a long break. Yeah, that's true. The first one is the book. This is How You Lose the Time War.
01:10:15
Speaker
This is again, this is how you lose the time war. It's the name of the book. It's a novella. It's short. It's like 200 pages. Don't look any to quote the person that got me interested in reading this. Hold on. Let me pull up the actual quote. Was it Matt? No, it was a Twitter user who goes by the character two of.
01:10:45
Speaker
B.D. Wolfwood. I'm not giving you B.D. because it's this is a G rated podcast as we discuss. Read this. Do not look up anything about it. Just read it. It's only like 200 pages. You can download it on audible. It's only like four hours. Do it right now. I'm very extremely serious. Was this to you specifically or in general? This was in general. It was a tweet that went very viral and got 144000 likes. And because of that tweet,
01:11:16
Speaker
the book, which is like four years old, won a bunch of awards when it came out, suddenly became a New York Times bestseller because of that tweet. The tweet was by a Trigun fan account. Let's see Threads do that. See? Twitter. Yeah. What's the first book to be launched to the New York Times bestseller list by a thread? We'll find out. Whatever JLo posts about, whatever book JLo posts about.
01:11:42
Speaker
Yeah, but it's a it's a epistolary novel, a word I learned after reading this, which is letters. Yes, it's letters between two, two people. And it is a romance, I will tell you of a sort kind of a sci-fi romance. It is wild. It is very poetic. Just if you want to read it, just let the language wash over you. Don't try to figure out exactly what they're saying. It's very beautiful.
01:12:10
Speaker
Sounds good. I'm in. Yeah. Yeah.
Baseball Highlights: The Braves and Beyond
01:12:13
Speaker
I'll let you guys, I'm not going to do all four of my presentations. You get, you go next Jason. You can, you can take one of mine. All I was going to say is baseball is good this year. I don't have a recommendation. So you can have two if you want. Go ahead. The Braves are good. The Braves are good this year. Watch them. I was looking at the Braves are so fun. They've got the best infield in all of baseball. All four of their infielders made, uh, made the all-star game and their cash too. And, and like, I think at least two of their pitchers were in the all-star game.
01:12:40
Speaker
or were nominated as all stars. I don't think they played like the Braves. Awesome. Tune in there and watch them. Sorry, because there are like three players that are on pace to hit nearly 60 home runs on that team. I was looking at it. It's insane. There's something has like 29 home runs. There is something truly spectacular happening with Ronald Acuna this year, who is the first player ever at the All-Star break.
01:13:05
Speaker
to have 20 home runs, at least 20 home runs. I think he has 21, at least 40 stolen bases and at least 50 RBIs. There have only been four players in history that have
01:13:20
Speaker
at the end of a season had 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases. Ronald D'Acunya Jr. is on pace to have 40 home runs and 80 stolen bases. Oh, boy. If he can juice up the home runs here and hit 50, he's got a bona fide shot at 50-50 this year, which he would be the only person, and it's not close. So that would be pretty remarkable. The middle infield for the Braves, super fun.
01:13:47
Speaker
Orlando Arcea and Ozzy Albee's like I was watching a game the other night and Orlando Arcea caught caught a ball that was being thrown to him from the catcher trying to catch somebody stealing second base and Arcea just goofing around as holding the ball and just like trying to lift the guy's foot off the bag and just like screwing around like just such good fun and
01:14:11
Speaker
Uh, really wholesome. Uh, so yeah, baseball is good. That was, that was the all-star game too. I felt like everybody was actually playing. Everybody was having fun. They were into the game. Baseball is back. If it was ever gone, it's great. I'm so sorry. I mean, Jake is being quiet here because his precious Oakland days are getting bit by the possum that lives in the broadcast booth and the team is just falling apart. Like while, while the game is being played, I'm sorry, the stadium is falling apart while the game is being played. Sorry. Go ahead, Jake.
01:14:40
Speaker
There were four, well, there are four former Oakland A's that weren't given offers to stay on the Oakland A's that started in the All-Star game. It's just the new idea of the quality of, you know, how much good ownership wanted to win. The A's sell the team stuff went into the All-Star game. There was a little bit of a sell the team
01:15:06
Speaker
chant at the All-Star Game. Wasn't huge, obviously, because I mean, there weren't a lot of A's fans at the All-Star Game. But there was a little bit of an audible one. We'll see. I'm cautious. I have a little bit of hopium that the stadium deal won't actually happen because the ownership is at the draft
01:15:32
Speaker
Rob Manfred, at the MMOB draft, Rob Manfred got absolutely torched by everyone. When you said that's stupid. If only the politics in Oakland were different or something, right? Yeah. He's wearing the hot dog costume and saying, we're just trying to figure out who did this.
01:15:49
Speaker
I mean, everybody hates him is the thing. Like at the at the draft, he was booed by everybody. There was a sell the team chant that made him like he could not be heard over the sell the team chant when they announced the first days pick. But when he spoke at all, it was just like a chorus of boos to the point where he was like he was barely audible. And he announced today he would like to remain the commissioner for another term.
01:16:15
Speaker
Okay, sure. I mean, that's the thing is like the commissioner doesn't work for us. He works for the owners. Is he a good pain? You said pain sponge, right? And it's like he's a pain sponge. Or maybe not. Yeah, I might have gotten that from John Boyd. That is a succession.
01:16:32
Speaker
thing, right? But he's a pain sponge for the owners. Is he a good enough pain sponge? I think he makes the owners look bad when he says stupid stuff about Oakland. Yeah, because it's just like there's no benefit for the owners to look like to look so so callous about moving the team. They need to look more. They need to look more like all like he did. Like, oh, we tried. That's that's better.
01:17:01
Speaker
the more you can use the more you can use manfred as a lightning rod to draw the heat for that kind of thing which basically all the owners want they all want to be able to lunge at that money and oh yeah yeah so he's he's their cover he's the lightning rod that the pain sponge that's soaking up all that stuff so they can go and grab the money like i think that's his purpose but is it better for them if he actually says something smart or if he says uh oh congratulations on having an average mlb crowd in response to the reverse boycott if
01:17:31
Speaker
If he says the dumb thing that all the owners are thinking and takes all the heat that the owners could've taken, yeah, it is a benefit to them. I mean, hate is zero sum, right? If they're hucking rotten tomatoes at him, they're not doing it at Fisher or whoever else. Oh, there's plenty of hate. I don't think hate is zero sum. Oh, he's generated more hate out of it.
01:17:52
Speaker
I think that I have a lot more hate for the ownership in general, not just John Pfister, but all of the MLB owners who have to vote 75% to allow Oakland to move for being on board with this after hearing Rob Manfred. Hey, maybe you can get an expansion team in Oakland that's got a better owner.
01:18:15
Speaker
Well, if they call it the A's, I'll be down. But if it's not the A's, then they aren't going to do it, basically. And apparently John Fisher owns that name.
01:18:26
Speaker
We'll see.
Gaming Spotlight: Final Fantasy 16
01:18:28
Speaker
I'm going to recommend wholeheartedly Final Fantasy 16. You do not have to play Final Fantasies 1 through 15. I have not. But Final Fantasy 16 is a very good game as long as you do not have little ears listening and watching, little ears listening, little eyes watching. It is probably PG. Well, no, you only get one F-bomb in a PG-13 movie. So it's a rated R.
01:18:55
Speaker
I would prefer it if it were more wholesome on the language side and just focused on the story and the gameplay, but the story is good. The gameplay is good. It is like a interactive telenovela that has all of the elements of fantasy storytelling like
01:19:17
Speaker
It is good. It is fun. I can't say for sure that the whole game is good. I'm probably 15 hours into it. And that 15 hours is real good. So maybe more. Just to clear something up. I don't know if it counted. You said you haven't played any of the other Final Fantasies? No, no. Or you just haven't played all of them? OK. I haven't played all of them. OK. I'm just kidding. I think I've been playing since, like, 7.
01:19:40
Speaker
And so I get all of that for seven. Yeah, wow. I played about I played about half of them. And like for good and for for better and for worse, like some of them have been worse. There has been a slide lately where like 13 wasn't that good. Fifteen really wasn't that good. This is much, much better. It is. It is a good game. Highly endorse if you liked Final Fantasy.
01:20:09
Speaker
10 and 12 and seven, like this is good. Yeah, I was going to ask, where does it rank with seven, eight, nine and 10? That's when I last played. So that that gives me the answer. That sounds good. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I could rank it yet on an all time favorite, but it's in the fight with 10 for a favorite. Cool. All right. I think pay is five. So I'm going to sit here and play it in 2030 or whatever. Go buy a PS5 just to play this game.
01:20:38
Speaker
No, not that one. Oh, no. No, why is it still there? I'm so sorry. I forgot that music we had. Oh gosh, I hope it works. I think it will. I feel good about this. Bye. Just like you feel good about threads. Bye.