127: Not a Cactus in Sight

22 Jul 2015

There’s no hole count on Twitter.

Episode Description:

• Pre-follow-up:
  • Streaming over cellular and UI dilemmas in Overcast 2.0
• Follow-up:
  • Original Half Life is available on the Mac (via @Kristian)
  • On-demand resources API and NSProgress (via @Hunter)
  • Marco tries to deny he likes playing games
    • Desert Golfing
    • Alto's Adventure
    • Prison Architect
    • Theme Hospital
    • OpenTTD, the rewritten and expanded Transport Tycoon
• Intel's tick-tock seems to be over
• Reddit kerfuffle
  • CGP Grey's video: What is Reddit?
  • Hello Internet #43
  • Rocket #26 and #27
  • Laurie Voss's two tweets (sorry for the wrong gender pronoun)
• Post-show:
  • More on Reddit
    • Something Awful Forums
    • Marco's old coffee shop closed

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Pre-show
2. Overcast UI dilemma
3. Sponsor: Lynda.com
4. Follow-up: Half-Life on Mac
5. Follow-up: On-demand app resources
6. Game size vs. success
7. Sponsor: Hover
8. The end of Intel tick-tock
9. Sponsor: MailRoute
10. Reddit kerfuffle
11. Post-show: More on Reddit

Pre-show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How do you pronounce S-T-A-H-P? What? That’s not a word. Yes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is. Well, not really, but it’s what the kids say when they really want you to stop doing something. Is it stop?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess. Stop? I don’t know. Something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. I’m gonna go with stop. Like maybe, maybe like the Great Lakes accent. Stop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, because that’s what this podcast needs is more talk about regional accents. Yes, definitely. I actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got called out at work today in a happy way. Some coworker

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey asked me, a coworker that I just started working with, asked me if I was from Jersey. Well, that part wasn’t happy at all, that was miserable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But point being, I said mash on something as in to like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hit emphatically or repeatedly, and apparently that’s a Northeastern thing, or so I’m told.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, that’s a drink in Great Britain, right? Smush or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, that was squash that you’re thinking of.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Squash, oh, okay. I thought it was smooshed. So Tiff’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco opinion of that, when she heard this, she said it’s probably like getting like frozen fruit concentrate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, like the fruit juice concentrate.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that’s correct. From the most I can piece together, but as we talked about on the last episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of Analog, I sent an emergency text to underscore David

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Smith, the internet’s arbiter of all things UK versus American,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and also the internet’s historian. And he indicated to me that we do not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have anything that’s really equivalent to squash.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, we have things that have that name, but it’s different. It’s like football. It’s like, well, we have that, but that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not what you think it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, well, it’s either football or vegetable. Yeah.

Overcast UI dilemma

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So anyway, I was asking you what’s going on with cellular downloads on Overcast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and this is okay because I see in the show notes it says pre-follow-up and then Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey talks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did not type that this time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know who did. Clearly it was John. Why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t you just keep adding sections? What about pre-pre-follow-up? We’ll get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Maybe next episode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What happens if the pre-follow-up generates follow-up? What do we do with it next episode? Where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do we put it? Then it gets lumped into regular follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doesn’t get pre follow-up follow-up? I don’t think so. This is getting recursive. I’m uncomfortable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, I was asking you what’s going on with cellular downloads and overcast because you seem to be stressing out about it quite a bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well it’s you know it this is a constant battle I have with designing overcast is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like how where do I strike the balance between offering settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for customization versus complexity of the app because if you look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like so many Many well-featured, well-regarded podcast apps have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just these massive setting screens. It’s not because they’re badly designed by idiots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s because it’s a hard problem. When you make a podcast app, everybody asks for all these features.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really hard to please a large number of people without adding a ton of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options and customizations and features. I’ve always tried to differentiate Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from the other well-established clients by being simpler in those regards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really, really hard to keep that up, to manage that, because like right now I’m working on version 2.0.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco One of the big features of 2.0 that I’m willing to talk about is streaming. I’ve been working on streaming for a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time, as I mentioned on this show a couple times in various after shows. It does finally work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is working. I’ve been using it myself for the last couple of weeks and I really like it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It works well. It is solid and it It is awesome. Steven Connelly And to be clear, it works with SmartSpeed?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Michael Martin Of course. I wouldn’t do it without it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steven Connelly That’s what I thought. Just wanted to make sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Michael Martin Now I have to face the other issues of having streaming in the app. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are certain options that it needs. Things like what do you do when a new episode

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comes in? Do you mark it for streaming or do you download it automatically? There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has to be some choice there. There has to be an issue of what do you do if you’re playing a playlist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the episode you’re on ends and the next episode is a streaming episode but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are offline what do you do no matter what you pick you’re gonna you’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anger some people and you’re gonna please some people and it’s really hard to know a lot of times ahead of time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which one of those sides will come out ahead you know so it the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the question I have now is should I permit cellular data usage for streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because right now I have cellular downloads and so in a world where you in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an app that you have mixed streaming and downloads now you have to have a little more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control over that so it’s it’s questionable so no question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the thing that I agree on no question is that cellular data not only will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco allowed for streaming but it will be allowed by default and it’ll be on by default because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the world we live in today I think people widely expect things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to just work when you tap them and lots of other media apps stream by default over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cellular and don’t ask you first things like YouTube or most of the streaming music services

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco although I think Apple Music does not I think they they ask you first but anyway almost all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco media streaming apps they will just do it if you if you say play this video and you’re on cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on your phone it’ll just do it over cellular and that’s fine. So no question,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco streaming has to be there and it has to be enabled by default over cellular. The problem is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are lots of people… And when I posted these tweets, it’s funny, everybody thinks that they have the most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco advanced worldview on this issue. And of course, I’m the stupid American,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so I don’t know what the rest of the world is like. So I have heard from about equal numbers today

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people saying both, in my country, we have very bad data plan, so you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to have restrictions. The rest of the world works this way, and therefore you need to have very strong

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco restrictions. I’ve also heard from other people saying, well, in my country, everybody has unlimited data,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that’s the world we live in now, and so you don’t need to even bother with this. I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco heard both ends of this a lot. Right now, I have two cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco options in the app, and I wish I could get away with just one. But right now I have two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the big one, the main one, is whether I allow background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or foreground, whatever, when the app downloads full episodes ahead of time or when it gets a notification or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco When it downloads full episodes, do you download the whole thing over cellular or do you wait for Wi-Fi? So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an option and I think that option is good. That deserves to stick around because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you just stream and you say, all right, play this right now, That’s an action you’re taking. You’re deliberately saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco play this episode right now and I’m recognizing that I’m playing a podcast while I’m on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my phone on a cell network. This might use data. Fine. But if you background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco download things that just come in, like overnight, somebody could blow their data cap if a whole bunch of episodes are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco released by their favorite podcast. Maybe their feed messes up and it releases like 10 new episodes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accidentally and then the phone downloads 10 things over cellular without them even knowing or initiating it. So it makes sense to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco differentiate between automatic background downloads using it and things that you initiate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as the user for playback using it. So that makes sense. You should have an option to disable cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on background downloads. Fine. But then there’s an iOS annoyance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I have. I consider it a bug. I’m not sure that Apple does. For every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app that you have on your phone that uses data at all, you can go into settings and you can turn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off cellular data usage for the app at the at the iOS level. So the app doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to have an option for that you can just go in and disable it and many people do who are on limited plans who really need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch their their usage. So the problem is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in previous versions of iOS you’ve always had this this so-called reachability API it actually has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this long CF network whatever name but it’s shortened everyone says the reachability API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and And this is the API that can notify you of changes in Internet connectivity so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you can, for instance, your app can know whether the connection is offline and when it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes back online. And you can also tell whether it’s online via cellular or Wi-Fi or neither.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you can make a whole bunch of intelligent decisions. And it isn’t perfect. Sometimes it isn’t that reliable, but it’s pretty close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s pretty good most of the time. In previous versions before iOS 8, if somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco turned off that cellular option for you in system settings. So they say this app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t use cell data anymore. Your app would see when it asks the reachability API,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco am I online? The system would say, no, you’re offline. So the app couldn’t tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the switch was on. It just seemed like it was offline. And so if the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app tried something, it would show that annoying dialog box that everyone has seen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco says cellular data is disabled for app name. You can enable it in settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s no way for an app to initiate a network connection that does not show that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco box. So there’s no way that I can say, like, you know, I’m going to do a background sync here. If it fails,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the user doesn’t even need to know doesn’t matter. It’s not it’s not that important. Or I’m going to download some artwork for the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s showing in this table cell. If that fails, it doesn’t really matter either. Just you know, you don’t have to alert the user

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with a modal dialog box saying cell data is off for me downloading artwork to show in a table. So right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t matter. The smart thing to do as a developer in that case was is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to before you do something optional that the user didn’t really initiate, you know, something like a background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sink or an artwork download, check reachability. And if it says it’s offline, don’t even try.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then that dialogue will never show up. Because if you don’t do that, then every time somebody goes to your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app, and it tries to do a background sync, and they’ve disabled cell data for your app, the connection will not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fail, but it’ll show that box in Illinois, the crap out of them. And so then they will write you saying, why does your app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep showing this box? So they don’t know it’s a system box you don’t have any control over. So that’s bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, with iOS 8, there’s what I consider a bug, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if someone has disabled cellular data for your app in iOS settings, reachability API

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will tell you that you are online. It will not say you’re offline anymore. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have no way to tell whether you are online unrestricted or or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whether you’re online but with cell data disabled. And so you can’t avoid

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making those requests. And you also still can’t make a request that’s marked as some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of optional so it doesn’t show that dialog box. So therefore, if someone disables

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that for your app, and you try to make a connection, it will show that box every time, or at least like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, once every 10 minutes or whatever. There’s some kind of throttling on so it doesn’t show them constantly, but it still shows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them enough that it annoys people and they email me. So in order to work around this slightly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had to add the second option called sync over cellular. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in my nitpicky details settings level, which is where I bury all my other options. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reason why this is there is not to let people save data, because it doesn’t save that much data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s to let people avoid that dialog box if they’ve disabled cell data for my whole app. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with that, if you trigger that option, then I won’t even attempt to make those connections over cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because again I can’t distinguish between cellular that I’m allowed to use and cellular that I’m not allowed to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So with that setting that’s what that whole thing is for. It’s to work around this giant bug in iOS 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I think is still there in 9. I’ll have to do some tests maybe I really hope 9 fixed it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I don’t think it did but I’ll double check before next week and I’ll well before our fake next week show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’ll report back because if that fixed it I can remove that whole option and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would be awesome. Anyway, sorry for the very long-winded thing here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, so now, faced with the question of adding streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this and having some kind of cellular control over streaming, do I have three cellular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data options? That’s terrible. I’d have to just make a whole separate screen for them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and explain. I mean, I will if I have to, but that sounds terrible. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my best idea so far is to keep the two options I have now and just attack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco streaming to the second one. So that the background downloads is still separately controllable. Because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something I can see somebody wanting to do background downloads only when they’re on Wi-Fi. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be willing to stream wherever they are if they actually ask for it. The second option, rather than calling it sync over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cellular, rename it to stream and sync over cellular. Does that make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sense? I know this is very long. Probably very boring. We’ll cut all this out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it does make sense. I would probably agree with you that sync over cellular could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey become stream and sync over cellular. I don’t know, it’s interesting because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have an unlimited data plan from AT&T on my iPhone. I’ve gotten grandfathered in and I’ve never had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a terribly compelling reason to walk away from it. I know that I could probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey save a few bucks a month if I didn’t keep it anymore, but whatever, it is what it is. However, on my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad, as I’ve said numerous times in the past, I have the free 200 megs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a month from T-Mobile. And that’s typically how I use cellular on my iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if I’m going to use it at all. And occasionally, like if I’m on vacation, for example, I’ll actually pay for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a few gigs for that month or whatever. But generally speaking, I just live on the 200 megs a month.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So I have gone in on my iPad and turned off cellular data at the iOS level, pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much everywhere. And I can assure you that if I saw that dialogue all the time when using overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would drive me nuts. So I think you need to stick around with the nitpicky detail version. Um, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I see no reason not to put sync in there or excuse me, a stream in there. Especially

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey since anytime you’re streaming from what I, from what I’ve gathered from you, any single time you’re streaming, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you have said a couple of times, it’s based on user action. So, at that point, I should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know what I’m doing, and I should know, no matter how advanced a user I am, if I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to play a podcast that is not on my device, it’s gonna have to come from somewhere, and if I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on Wi-Fi, if I’m not on the fan, as we jokingly call it around these parts,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I know that it’s gonna have to go via cellular, and I should be able to figure that out. So, I think you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got the right approach, but I’m curious to hear what John has to say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and there is one little complexity that you said, as long as you’re streaming and you always chose that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are scenarios in which you can unexpectedly stream.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That sounds like a condition.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Wow. All right. Oh my. So for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suppose you are on a trip that, suppose you have it set so that new episodes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come in in streaming mode, so that basically you disable auto download, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new episodes come in and they’re marked for streaming only. they’re not automatically downloaded by default. Okay, so you have it set

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that way you are listening to a playlist and you’ve downloaded everything on the playlist anyway because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you are gonna go somewhere and so you’re like a lot of want to burn on my data when I’m on this trip so I’m gonna download everything in advance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco while you are listening to something and the screen is off a new episode comes in it’s marked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for streaming by default and it’s inserted right after the thing you’re listening to so as you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco listening the episode that you’re listening to ends it starts up the next episode which is a streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco episode so it is possible for streaming to happen to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somewhat unexpectedly it’s not going to be the common case but it is possible so like it’s like the web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just happens to you right exactly so you see like there there are lots of little complexities

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a lot of people said why don’t you just pop up a dialogue asking people to approve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco streaming when you’re on cellular or have an option to do that the problem is lots of times when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I have to make that decision the display of the phone is off because it’s in somebody’s pocket or it’s in somebody’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco dock somewhere on in a car or in their house and a lot of times like if you’re driving you really I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shouldn’t be asking people to interact with the UI that’s dangerous so like or you know you or you’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exercising and it’s in your pocket and you you know it’s there’s all these all these situations where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have to make a decision without asking the user with a dialog box so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think the way to do it is to just have it is to just never prompt the user for this decision.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You just have a setting that you can change either on or off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know, John, what do you have to say about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re gonna talk about all these settings makes me think that like, the key point here is not the raw

⏹️ ▶️ ^John count of little toggle switches you have in your settings. I know, there’s sort of a, you know, combinatoric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John explosion of possibilities that you have to debug. So keeping the counter under control is a good first approximation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of how you should keep your app from going crazy. But for the cellular stuff, setting aside the bugs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which you know, can you do just file the radars and keep your fingers crossed these the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the settings that come to mind when you’re describing all this functionality that I can imagine users feeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comfortable in the way I’m conceptualizing is somewhere in the settings screen there’s gonna be a list of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John either split into Wi-Fi and cellular or just do cellular if you like Wi-Fi is if you’re not gonna disable anything on Wi-Fi it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John says here are the things I want this app to be allowed to do on cellular and it’s just it’s a fairly long list

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of things I want to say yes to that no to that yes, then you can get increasingly specific about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. You can start off with a few number and that’s what when I hear like, stream and sync over cellular, I really just see a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cellular section, what am I allowed to do over sell you? Download new episodes, stream episodes that I’ve asked you to stream,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John download, you know, stream episodes that come in while listening to if I don’t know what the options are, but it’s like you can you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go through all the possibilities and just because I think yeah, that’s a lot of options. And it’s like, Oh, who wants to answer all these questions,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re going to come up with some set of defaults that you think are appropriate for most people. But when someone goes to settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can imagine them going down a list and going yes, no, no, yes, and if you want to help them you could even put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like average of X number of megabytes over the past month which probably won’t help them initially because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t pre-populate that because you don’t know what the usage is unless you collect it for everybody. But after a month of usage they can go down

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that list and say like what’s using all my cell data it’s like I want overcast to you know they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can only guess like what things I don’t understand does this take up a lot of data or not you can see over the past month because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowed us to download new episodes over cellular it’s used this amount of data right and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then they can you know just a bunch of switches going yes no no no yes no I feel like six seven eight nine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even ten options in that type of thing isn’t crazy especially when you look at the actual iOS setting screens they’re just giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John walls of toggle switches and people are okay going who can use location data not you you not you you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you not you like I think that’s a reasonable interaction even though it seems really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complicated if you’re gonna have this complexity anyway because you’ve got to have all these conditionals in the code of like, when do I do this? When

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do I do that? And you’re going to pick defaults for them? Just throw in the switches buried in a section if it makes you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel better. But I think that is actually the most straightforward way as long as you sort of organize

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these fleets of switches into logical groups, then people feel like they’re you know that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each one because like there’s a topic the topic is I don’t know how you’d phrase it, but like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is what overcast is allowed to do over your cell connection, like in And when they’re in that frame of mind, I feel like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the mode to go down those questions and just sort of, you know, give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes or no. Rather than just going down a list of options and having to read each one and see what the topic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, what is it discussing? And what is the decision I have to make and then go to the next one, which is entirely unrelated? What is this one talking about?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What is it discussing? You know, whatever. I don’t know. I maybe I haven’t thought of all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John options, but of all the ones you listed so far, I’m I’m like, those are all reasonable things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that people could conceivably want settings for. But I think there’s no way to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to express that in a UI without just a really big long list of options. I think when you try to combine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them into a single line item, it gets confusing because it’s less clear what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going on, or like people might want different options for the two things that you’ve combined into one or two settings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, there’s more complexity to it than that. It isn’t as simple as, do I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco combo settings or do I have a whole bunch of settings and a big long list? Because one of the biggest problems is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if presenting with a big long list, there is a cost to having that in the app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People will see that screen, it will confuse them, and it will give them the general impression that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either this app is too complex for my taste, or I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco understand this app and And therefore I don’t feel good about it. And you know, people don’t like to be made to feel dumb or to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco confused.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s why you’re burying it. You buried in the advanced or nitpicky or whatever section like I don’t think anyone’s gonna go to the settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John period unless the app doesn’t do what they want by default. So it’s all about picking the good defaults. As you discussed, I think you have a good handle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on what the reasonable defaults are. You just want to have a go to section that when someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gets into that mode where they feel like this app is doing something that I don’t, that’s why I mentioned the sizes on the things because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they really want is stop using so much of my data. And if they just see a bunch of switches,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or even one or two options, even if there’s two options, like which one of those if I change will make it use less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of my data. That’s why stats on like, because this thing has been enabled, we have downloaded this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of things over your cell connection over this period of time. So and even if it’s just two settings and two

⏹️ ▶️ ^John numbers, then okay, well, that’s the one that’s using my data. So I want to turn that one off. Right. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably it stats are tricky, because I don’t know if I can really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guarantee them. I think it’d be hard to measure total bytes used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accurately. There’s things like redirects and header sizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and everything that I’d have to go very low level in the APIs to be able to actually count all of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accurately. I don’t really want to be in the game of being incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specific, because also there’s some degree of liability there. Maybe not. I’m sure legally it wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cause me huge problems, but it might anger people if I say something that is wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if I say, for instance, if I have in the app a big toggle that says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all cell data off, I don’t offer that because I can’t guarantee that my app will use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no cell data. The iOS at the system level option can. I can’t because there are things like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco WKWebView and a web view that tries to load images. I can’t prevent that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from hitting the cell network easily. I can’t guarantee that my app will use no data. So that’s why I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer that option. Also I don’t show the file sizes of the podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before they’re downloaded. A lot of people request this. The big problem with that is that it basically would require

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doing a head request in the file before you download it and right before you download it to really get it accurately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There is a field in feeds where people are supposed to specify that. We do in our feed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that is manually entered by a human being. So it is unreliable and it is often absent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The only way to do it is to do a head request. I can do that server-side for every single thing. That’s complicated. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s also kind of unreliable. Because then what if the server you know what if one of these things blocks me, then I report zeros for everything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What if my information is out of date or like the first crawl? Maybe it was just one megabyte because they uploaded only part

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the file and then you go to download it two hours later and it’s 100 megs and then you’re angry at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me. I said it was only one meg. There’s like there’s all these like weird complex edge cases that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I don’t want to make a promise I can’t keep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well, you can make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fudge it like the people in the chat room. Low, medium, high percentages. I’m trying to just reconceptualize this whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cellular thing from users perspective. What they’re concerned about is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, you know, they can get the idea from the settings thing of which apps are using most of my data, like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John provides that. But then if they find out, okay, overcast is a big consumer of things. I subscribed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to a lot of podcasts and the settings app says it does a lot. I like podcasts. I don’t want to uninstall

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overcast. I want to continue to listen to them, but now I have to go into overcast and say, how can I make overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use less data? And other than the big giant switches, there’s no cell data at all. They’re going into overcast with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a mission. And the mission is figure out what little thingies I have to flip to make it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use less data. And, you know, I’m just anything to guide them in terms of which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of these options will have the most effect, rather than relying on people reading the descriptions and understanding which one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is bigger. And, you know, it can’t give sizes in megabytes. Maybe you can give percentages, maybe give low, medium,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John high, I don’t know. And just that’s what I’m trying to think. But like, rather than worrying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about it for the people who are like super picky and want to control every aspect of your app and want to like, be able to write their own code to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make decisions on each decision point. Most people just want to know how to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make the app use less data and know you know what the consequences are like, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, here’s what the option says, here’s some sort of rating for if I were to turn off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how much I might I save. And then I’ll make that decision and understand because I turn that off now I won’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that anymore from on a cell network I don’t know it is it is a hard problem but I’m just I’m trying to simplify it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two ways one changing the way you think about it with terms of like what is the goal the goal is to use less data and I feel like sizes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or ratings or something like that have to be in there and then to the other extreme is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know just introduce the topic you give a big fleet of things that can go and then people just go down the list and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go yay or nay and like that sync over cellular thing. I’ve never even seen that option.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t like I’m trying to think of my usage. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the overcast setting screens. Maybe it’s because you just happen to pick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the defaults that are right for me. Maybe it’s because I’m always on Wi-Fi. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who write you in to to complain about cell usage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they may be noisy, but I don’t I think most of your job is just picking good defaults. And then after that, I think you have to worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less about the intimidations of your setting screen because I don’t think make a billion visit it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe well and the other problem is this this is what I affectionately call the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco user problem that if you give people settings they will use them and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will forget the that they use them and then the app will will behave differently from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the default because they change settings and then they forgot that they change them and then they will write in or complain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Twitter or complain in public that my app is not working properly because of a setting they change this happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time with with the continuous playback setting, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the playback effects pane thing, I have an option that most people would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco consider called continuous play, and I title it, when this episode ends,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and at the bottom I have two buttons, play next or stop. And I thought this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was very clear. Many people, when they’re poking around in the options, they will toggle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Then they will forget that they toggled that. And they were right in saying, my app used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to just automatically move to the next episode and now it doesn’t. What happened? It’s a bug.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And every time I have to explain and it’s this is kind of like a, you know, blow on the power cord kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco solution. It’s like I don’t want to embarrass them when in my response. So I have to be very gentle and like how I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco say this, you know, but it’s it’s just a bad. It’s a bad thing for everybody. Because if you give people settings, they will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use them. Many of them will forget about it or use them badly or in ways they don’t understand. And then the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app will break for them. And regardless of what it does to me or my reputation, it makes the app suck for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s also something I want to avoid. Aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they happy when when you gently lead them to the option? Like, oh, my problem is solved.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I found a setting I’ve plus a little toggle switch. And now I feel like you know, I mean, I feel like it turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around on them at that point where it’s like, I thought that this app that I used to like was ruined

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me forever. But really, all I needed to do was tap a little toggle switch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yes, but a lot of times those people are not writing in. So like this is all these are always

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco indicative of like well if these five people on Twitter said this happened to them and they Didn’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s why it happened Think of how many people there are who didn’t get in touch with me who just thought the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app was broken

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why do people like to I don’t understand why someone would want would turn that off while they’re wandering through settings or why they’d be Wandering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John through setting again. I’ve also never seen this setting I don’t even know I guess the default is to go to the next track because I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what mine does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh John you are you are a responsible power user you are the power user that developers wish all power

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco users were like but unfortunately that’s not the case and there are so many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who like if you give them a way to customize or change something they will and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will always demand more of those things and then they will become support problems for you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know why I don’t go to settings I just launched the app just to figure out it’s because it’s not a gear icon I was like where the hell is settings

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in this thing we’ve been through this before no wonder I never go to settings it’s hidden

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s that that was one of those things like I said I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} know can I get away

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with not using a gear icon and you can it keeps me away from the settings that maybe so maybe that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why maybe you know regular people are so confused by everything because everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is horrible that they’ll you know they’ll push anything and not think about it power users look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for a gear and they don’t see a gear they used to assume well I guess there’s no settings that’s perfect maybe maybe I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco should make all my icons make less sense have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John squirm out of the way when you try to tap it. Wasn’t that a thing? Yeah, like on Windows. You can’t do proximity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John detection with the… Yeah. Wait for the iPad that has a stylus support, then you’ll have proximity

⏹️ ▶️ ^John detection.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, for all my iPad users. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Totally. Hey, I’m one of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} So before we leave this topic… It’s like less than 5%. Yeah, well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Before we leave this topic, maybe mention this and I blanked, but why not just have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one universal… Can I do anything on non-cellular yes or no?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because I can’t enforce that, basically. Because that’s why, like I said earlier, if a web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco view for show notes loads an image, there’s stuff that is very hard to enforce.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, you could rephrase it. Can I download any podcast-related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey materials over cell—well, that’s still a little weak, but you know what I’m driving at? You can wordsmith it to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the wording right. You just think that’s not granular enough for your average

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey user?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I think people either want the app to literally use zero, in which case they have to use the iOS system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco toggle, which they probably already have without even looking in the app. Most apps don’t have these options. Most apps just do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, and it’s up to you as the user to minimize the usage or to go in settings and disable it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So if somebody wants to literally use no data, they will use the system pane for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think some data for you know because every app that that syncs with the web or or you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know get status or info from the web like you’re all you’re losing you know a few hundred kilobytes here and there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to all these apps and you know you just have to not care about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco level of use like if you’re gonna have cell data enabled for anything so like some some data using is fine but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again I don’t want to make a promise that I can’t really keep and especially with like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this where like making a mistake here could cost people money.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I guess that makes sense. It’s a tough thing for sure. But before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we move on to start the show with follow-up, You should probably tell us about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that’s cool.

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Follow-up: Half-Life on Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so now that we’re what 30 40 minutes in let’s do some follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John See what you’ve done here with this pre follow-up you’ve just broken the show Not a complicated

⏹️ ▶️ ^John format. No really straightforward

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all those all those years of follow-up ruined

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just like that Just like that. I’m sorry some men just like to see the world burn. Yeah, it’s true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s a reference John Except I think that’s actually watch the world burn, but that’s okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait, is this like Nero

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or… Yeah, Marco just learned about the cowbell SNL skit today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Oh, so bad. He’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} down from it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So bad. So no, this is how this went. I want to defend myself here. Tiff said, she made like the cowbell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fever joke, and I knew there was a joke about more cowbell and I wasn’t quite sure where it was from, so I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco said, oh, is that from Spinal Tap? And it turns out, no, but I at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco knew that the joke was about having more cowbell in that Blue Oyster Cult whatever song that is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} The thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that it’s it’s something that you heard about but didn’t know like the original.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what we’re getting at. It’s not it’s not whether you get references is that you haven’t actually experienced the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John original piece of media from pop culture.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I just I can’t believe you didn’t recognize that quote from Dark Knight. Now I know how John feels with me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you know I’ve seen that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} so good it’s one of my favorite movies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh god anyway so we should probably correct our incorrect statements about half-life

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for like the third week in a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} row

⏹️ ▶️ ^John half-life just keeps coming it’s the real one is out for the Mac has been for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not just the source port but the plain old cruddy look in the original half-life so half life is completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and fully available for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t believe this game came out when I was like 16 and we’re talking about it still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like Halo also completely available for the Mac too little too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey late wait what the original Halo is on that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s where I played the Original hell I played it on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what I genuinely did not know that I assumed it was always Xbox on Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thank God never gonna email you No, cuz I knew there was like a history were like Bungie was making it for the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Microsoft bought them And then they canned it right you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guys I guess you guys weren’t in Apple circles when they were when they the Halo trailer was shown

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to Macworld or whatever that was Was it Macworlds?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it might have been a Macworld. Anyway, on stage, look at this amazing new game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John coming for the Mac. I don’t want to talk about it. It hurts too much to talk about. It’s dark time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. All right. So thank you, Christian,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for that correction.

Follow-up: On-demand app resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Uh, this is from Hunter mentioned last week about on demand resources, where if your app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t come with a bunch of stuff, it can download them on demand. And you can sort of spec that out when you build your application, which resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^John won’t be bundled with the application, but can be downloaded by the application at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any point. And I mentioned that didn’t seem like there was enough UI hooks to give a good user experience.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The Hunter says that the on demand resource API does support NS progress for tracking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John progress and displaying it to the user. So that’s nice. Although, you think you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a bad, think about games that have like 500 meg levels that download levels over cellular?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, no. What’s the right answer there? Probably no, but then if they’re playing a game and a car ride and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get to the next level, the only thing you really do is say, sorry, you can’t play the next level because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have cellular downloads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the kid immediately goes in and changes the setting, turns it on and uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of his parents’ data.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Or just waits a really long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the next half an hour in the car for a 500 meg level to download while he travels along the highway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or any game that uses it gets so many one-star reviews from people having this problem that it stops using it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but I think it’s still a good option. You just gotta break it up into smaller chunks, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know? Like, instead of, hopefully no level is 500 megs, but if games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like three gigs and they have a small number of levels, each one’s gotta be pretty big. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I hope game developers figured this out. I kinda like the PS4 thing where if you download

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a game, You can start playing it before the game is entirely downloading because they just download the early parts of the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sooner Still takes a long time to download but it’s nice that you don’t have to wait for the whole thing to download because you’re not going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Outrun it by playing like some of these games take a certain minimum amount of time to get through especially when you’re playing for the First time they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just let you start playing As soon as you’ve got like the first You know hours worth of levels or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about a time you grind through those even if you’re an expert in the game the rest Will be downloaded or so they hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I don’t see this working out We’ll see, someone’s gonna implement it.

Game size vs. success

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do think it’s interesting also that like there seems on the iOS App Store there seems to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be no correlation between game size and commercial success.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay. Think about it, man you guys are off tonight. Either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone else is crazy or I am. Alright, keep going.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You expect there to be like you expected big games to be more successful?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah I’m kind of saying like maybe it’s not worth making games so big?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well it really depends on the type of game. Like if you’re making a puzzle game, how big could it possibly be? Right? I mean, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big? Talk about having no assets. How big is Letterpress? I don’t know if there’s any graphics in that entire game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} There’s just like the launch icon. That’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. But other types of games, like if you’re making a 3D game, there’s going to be geometry, there’s going to be textures,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like there’s no getting around that. And it’s going to be much bigger than a game with a static screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. I don’t think people have the same expectations of mobile games, but I think genre plays

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into how big things are and art style if you do things with texture mapping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John textures take up room if you do everything with flat shading you just have geometry then you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s reasonable on a small platform like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco desert golf not be enough for anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you love that game so much

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s really good I haven’t played that since the Alto came out I realized so I still haven’t installed but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m stuck at whatever yeah me I’m not stuck stuck if I played it I will continue but it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s not not making progress But I do not install because I’m afraid that if I delete it, I’ll lose my progress I don’t know if that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually true, but I’m afraid it is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I’ve never played it and I’m pretty happy about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Get out those adventure. It’s better game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have it. I’ve had it for weeks still never played it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Disagree you think you don’t think out those adventures better than desert golfing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I Think everyone else thinks it is but I don’t think it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is. Oh my God, this is like you as a gamer in a nutshell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s too much like a game. I don’t like that gaming game park and you put me in a desert with a ball. That’s all I can handle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, I mean they’re both good games. They’re I would say they’re both excellent games, but I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco got a lot more time out of desert golfing just because of like the kind of like Zen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco commentary qualities I got out of it where Alto is a great game but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once I played like I played it like on one plane flight and then I was like all right well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time I play this game it’s basically the same thing over and over again and I know desert golfing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is similar but for whatever reason I didn’t get any depth out of Alto so like it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cool for like the one day I was playing it a lot but then I tried playing it here and there afterwards and I just like okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just felt too repetitive to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t have any competitive juices flowing with Alto is all about later competing with yourself trying to best

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your previous best run or competing with other people whereas there’s no Competitive aspect in desert golfing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s what makes desert golfing so great is that it really shows you How pointless

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything else in the universe is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is a man whose wife plays all console games in hard mode by the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} yes It could not be more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s correct. Yeah. No she is the gamer. I am totally not She’s that she’s playing prison architect now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks to CGP gray That sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey awful. Like, it just sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} like work to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, it looks, it’s like Theme Hospital. You know, like it’s one of those kind of games. Like, you know, it’s basically Sim Prison.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I was like more of a gamer right now, I would probably play it too, because it looks pretty cool. I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t. I can’t, you know, like I’m doing great with work stuff, with Overcast,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and with the show, and everything else. And I’m like, the last thing I want to do is take time playing games. Like, I just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t, whenever the opportunity comes up spend time doing something I’d rather work than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then play games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and can you tell everybody exactly what level you’re on desert golfing just so they can add some context

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your previous statement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s been a while that played it so I gotta

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I gotta take it up the man who doesn’t want to spend too much time playing games go ahead what level 3,054

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all right yeah and I’ve been stuck on this one for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s 3,054 holes people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah I think we’ve solved that. I don’t know. I haven’t seen Prison Architect, but,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so, uh, clearly I’m unqualified to talk about it. With that said, let me talk about it. Um, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sounds like so much work and I stopped doing work like that at SimTower. Like SimTower is when I pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey much stopped doing work for games. I remember vividly trying World of Warcraft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when it was relatively new and all I did was run around killing like boars

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or something like that. And I lasted two hours before I decided I’m just doing work this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t a game this is just me doing work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Prison Architect is more like Transport Tycoon than Wow I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah it’s more like the building sim games but even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love Transport Tycoon I haven’t played it in probably five years. Oh yeah I haven’t played it in more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than that. Right because like an open TTD is awesome like it’s it was such a fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco re-implementation of the game engine and added so much stuff and it’s fantastic I lost a lot of time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to to it in 2007 or 2008 kind of era. But again, there’s never a time when I want to spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hours and hours and hours playing games instead of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco producing something that I want to be working on. That’s just me, it’s what motivates me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right now. And maybe that’ll change over time. I’m sure it’ll be different once my kid’s old enough to enjoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco games and I wanna do it with him. But for now, I just don’t care about games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over 3,000 holes, people, over 3,000. Doesn’t wanna spend a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} games. He’d much rather be doing something else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That was almost a meditation for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Like, desert golfing, it was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You’re lucky that game does not have a count of hours played inside it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, it doesn’t, but I mean, I know it took like 8,000 strokes. I mean, that’s, that can, you can kind of figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some idea, like, you know, well, if each one takes a few seconds or whatever, then, but, you know, so obviously, I know I spent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot of time there, but how much time do I spend on Twitter? It’s way more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, what do you have to show for that? There’s no whole count on Twitter. We don’t even know, there’s no background color change, no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing, no rocks, not a cactus in sight. My God. I don’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what kind of things you’re seeing at hole 3000. This show has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey been totally, I had no idea when we started before follow-up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing things before follow-up, that that would really take this entire show right off the rails. I had an idea. I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you, John.

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The end of Intel tick-tock

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey little bit more follow up. John, tell us about Satya Nadella.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now I’m saving it for next week. We’re moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Good call. All right, we’re done with follow up. Really? The show’s out of control. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re almost an hour in. So we are really only an hour in we’re done with follow up. Boy, I wonder what it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John made that take so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would it must be too much follow up. Yeah, God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m staying out of this. Okay, so are we talking about the end of tick tockers that also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if not for right now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s a good one. Oh, yeah, I don’t know why that has that prefix on it. I’ll fix it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the pre this says in the show notes next week end of tick tock, which kind of makes it sound like tick tock

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is ending next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It could be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} All right, so what is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is the end of the computer age. I messed that up to. It was welcome to the end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We might as well just stop the show now because we’re all out of control.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Welcome to the end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the computer age.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, try to bring us back if you please and tell us about TikTok and why it’s ending. Oh no, the one part I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in the show notes is the part I always forget. So I’m going to wing it. Intel has this strategy that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John call TikTok, where they, they make a new micro architecture. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next round of chips that they offer for sale is is, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I screwed it up already.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Since 2007 Intel has been operating on a staggered release schedule that alternates manufacturing process shrinks ticks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with major micro architectural changes. Tox

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, if you don’t help me know which is the which sometimes they just do a shrink that would be a tick and sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they they they change the micro architecture. That’s a talk. All right, there you have it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey How am I the voice of reason between the three of us. What is going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can never they picked a bad naming scheme. Yeah, the point is they alternate. And so this has been sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of regular schedule. What it meant that was that every other round of chips, you would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a new process size. So you’d have 32 nanometer chips, another set of 32

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometer chips, and then you go to the next size smaller, which I think was 20 and 28. Did they skip a 22? Anyway, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had 14 nanometer chips for two generations now. And so in theory,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the next round of chip should be on their next process size which is supposed to be 10 but Intel has basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said the next round of chips will not be 10 nanometer there’ll be a third round of 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nanometer chips basically because they’re 10 nanometer manufacturing process is not ready yet so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well and also it’s worth pointing out that the 14 nanometer process it is just barely coming online

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now like it was also like that whatever one saying was the Broadwell delay much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that or or maybe all that, I don’t know, much of that was the process, the 14 nanometer process

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being so delayed. And so they had a huge delay just trying to get this out. It was about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a year late or a year and a half late, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and so this is like getting out ahead of the next one by saying, we’re not gonna do what we did, but we’re like, oh, we’re kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of on schedule, but things are kind of late and they’ll come out or whatever. It’s like, look, it’s just 10 nanometers, it’s not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be ready. But we’re also not gonna delay having a new line of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John chips, we are going to make one more round of chips on 14 nanometers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they had to come up with a new name for them, apparently doing the names these things. It’s it was going to be Sky Lake and then it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was to be followed by Cannon Lake. So in between them, the the third line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 14 nanometer things is going to be Kaby Lake. Anyone want to take a swing at that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Kaby? It’s pronounced hover. Kaby, Kaby. I don’t know. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sure it’s probably Kaby. Anyway, that’s what they’re going to call the third round of 14 nanometer chips,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which is pretty weird. As we’ve discussed on previous shows, Moore’s law can’t continue

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever because there, as far as modern science knows, there is a minimum size that things can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be. We are always trying to smash them up into smaller and smaller pieces to find out what can be smaller, but the rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of physics change in crazy ways when you get really small. So we were not going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John double the number of things we can fit in a unit of space every 18 months

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever and ever. This does not mean the end of Moore’s Law, it just definitely needs to slow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John down. I think I’m fine with that, I like the fact that Intel is owning up to this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rather than just saying, oh, it might be a little bit late, because then they’re gonna end up shifting a whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year over, and I’m glad that they’re gonna do another round of 14 nanometer chips rather than just delaying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever and ever until 10 nanometers ready.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but I mean, they basically did that with Haswell. I know, and it was bad, wasn’t it? Yeah, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m using one now. Right now, if you’ve bought a Mac in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the last couple years, you’ve gotten Haswell, unless you bought one of the 2015 revisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of only the Retina MacBook 13, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco MacBook Air, or the MacBook One. The 15’s still using Haswell. The iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is still using Haswell. The Mac Pro is using the Pentium Pro. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mean, it’s like, everything is delayed and old because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this one was so, so delayed. Like, getting to 14 was so delayed. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what Intel did in the last year and a half, while Broadwell was being delayed, they released

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a kind of like 1.5 version of Haswell. You know, it’s the same core, but they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like gave us like higher binned, higher clocked parts just to kind of tide us over and tied over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their partners like Apple, who are trying to sell computers around these things and trying to make prior decisions around these things. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why I’m using a four gigahertz computer right now, because Haswell didn’t start out at four gigahertz

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it probably, I’m sure Apple’s margins on the four gigahertz chips are not that great because of the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco binning and yield issues that are typical of the business. But they had to give us some kind of minor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco increase, like all right, take what we have, raise the clocks as much as we can without shrinking the process,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ll do something. We can give people something new to tie them over while we work

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out our next revision’s delays. So, they already did a third revision,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of, with Haswell. So what they’re basically saying here is that this is going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to happen again, this time we’re just warning you in advance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And they’re giving it a new name, and I don’t think much is known about this new line of chips. Like, will it just be, like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, just, you know, the higher binned versions of the other things with maybe a couple of little errors fixing them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or something? or will it be, you know, like, will they bump the GPU? Like, will this actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a significant new line of chips? Seems like that by giving it a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name, a new lake name, that it’s not just going to be like a 1.5, but it’s certainly not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be a new architecture, a TOC, right guys? It’s not gonna be a new architecture, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess. They’re saving that for, I don’t know. It’s confusing. Although,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, the relationship between Intel’s roadmap and what Apple releases, in some ways, seems like it’s tied tightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John together where you’re like, oh, the Apple can’t release the machines because Intel doesn’t have the chips ready. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in other respects, they’re totally unrelated. See the Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, no, that’s not entirely true. The Mac Pro is very related, but it’s related to the Xeon roadmap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, but aren’t they already behind an entire year on Xeon chips? They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are, but the last revision of Xeons was a little bit questionable. The problem that I saw

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when looking at what you would do with the Haswell chips, on the Xeons, Intel sells most of these things in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco servers. The server business is very different from the desktop workstation business that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Mac Pro sits in. On servers, what you generally want with the market demands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is more and more cores, even if each core isn’t as fast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s why you have most of the Xeon lineup, at least the high ones that sell nicely and have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nice profit margins, and have all the PCI Express lanes and everything, most of those optimized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for core count and have a clock speed of like 2 gigahertz you know so you’re getting like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relatively low clock speeds very high core counts the Mac Pro it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it uses a very small number of these chips it offers three or four of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they’re they’re like the highest clocked versions they can get at each core count basically without blowing thermals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems when they move from the previous ones which was Sandy Bridge EP I think into Haswell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco EP when Haswell AP came out, sorry, this is the generation that they’ve skipped,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there really was not much of a gain to be had in the areas that the Mac Pro actually sells chips from.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like in those parts, it really was, it was like the core counts went up slightly, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you could get like a 10 core and like a 14 core, and stuff like that, there was like a small core count upgrade, but like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the clock speeds went down or stayed the same, and power was a little bit weird, so it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not a great update, And so that might have been why Apple seemingly hasn’t and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seemingly won’t use those. I don’t know. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it also, you know, the Mac Pro also has skipped generations before. This won’t be the first time. And so it might also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just be partly that, that it wasn’t a major upgrade from Intel, and partly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple doesn’t care that strongly about upgrading these on a frequent basis.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. Back in the good old days when a new chip came out, everybody put it in their machines because you had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, because there was competitive pressure too. And for the most part, that was a pretty good thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even if these were not a big upgrade over the old ones, especially on a thing like the Mac Pro, like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more cores, who cares? But like, that’s, isn’t that what people are buying this for? Like the super parallel task where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two extra cores would be a significant difference, right? Like of all the machines that are actually gonna care

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you have, you know, 12 versus 10 cores, the Mac Pro is the one. The tips are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying that they didn’t have any good GPU options, so they would have had to jump, bumped the CPU without the GPU. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple historically has not liked to play that game and they’re like, well, unless we have an impressive new machine,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re not just gonna give you new CPUs. Except, I guess, in the laptops where they’ll do that with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Haswell 1.5s, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, I mean, I don’t know if they’ve ever skipped a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco major laptop CPU generation until now where they appear to be skipping the quad-core Broadwells

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and going right to Skylake. But, and this is a weird situation timing of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think they’ve ever skipped one before that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So what does this mean if hypothetically you have two copies of, I think it’s a late 2011

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey high-res Antigua 15-inch MacBook Pro, and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not one Retina Mac in your entire household, and you’re thinking you’re going to hold on for the next

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey major MacBook Pro revision, or well, I shouldn’t say major, but you know, the next big chip set.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last I heard, that was theoretically coming this fall. Does any of this change that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, because what they’re saying is that the generation of chips that we’re moving into the 14

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco nanometer, like this is what started with Broadwell this past spring with the MacBook 1 and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then the Airs and then later on the 13, that generation is the 14 nanometer one. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like we are just in the infancy of that. And we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be at 14 for a while. Yeah, exactly. As

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} they’re saying, yeah. Which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is fine because Skylake is apparently, you know, a big deal, gets some nice power savings like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think it’s the end of the world and it’s not you know there if you are waiting for a new line of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Macs to buy when the Skylake Macs come out they ought to be pretty nice machines so that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big deal it’s just the next year and the year after

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what the the strategy is for I mean if there’s just gonna be three years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 14 nanometer chips yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well I I mean we’ve had what two and a half years of Haswell’s and you know it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hasn’t been great like we’ve been we’ve been kind of stalled at performance for a long time but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re still good chips I mean like this iMac this this 4 gigahertz 4 core iMac

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I have is amazing like it is by far the best computer I’ve ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco owned and by far not by far it’s one of the fastest I did briefly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have these six core cylinder Mac Pro and that was that was faster in parallel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tasks but this actually beats it in single threaded which is another problem the Xeon line has that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the consumer desktop chips because they are newer in their core revision

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually beat the Mac Pro Xeons in single threaded tasks which is embarrassing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the Mac Pro. Anyway I don’t think this is gonna be that bad of a thing I think it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really just a continuation of what we’ve seen for the last few years, just now again, now they’re just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making it official. Now they’re admitting up front and warning us up front, okay, this is what’s going to happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, and we’ll see what we can do about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey On a final note, I should point out, lest my father, the ex-IBMer, give me hell about it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that IBM is actually at seven nanometers, is that right? Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really, they’re just demoing, it’s like a tech demo. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} look

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} at what we

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} can

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the lab when the cost is no

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco object. Try shipping millions of those things every quarter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I agree, I agree, but I just wanted to point it out because obviously other people are making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey progress in this arena, but just like you both said, I mean, that’s not producing millions of them, that’s making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one in a lab. At

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great expense with very exotic materials. Is that a… what element are they using?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Expensive stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In summary, it’s going to be expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s the same, like, I remember back in the PowerPC days, they had similar type of things companies that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would say we can make a chip at amazing speeds it was probably like 1 gigahertz or 2 gigahertz back then but like you know we were

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at like 300 megahertz like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} wow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how can you make something that fast we use these exotic materials and just you could do lots of things for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough money right you can’t if it’s gonna cost $10,000 per chip or whatever that doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a difference it’s not viable you have to make it into something that could be manufactured cheaply

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then then you’ve got something that’s that’s the Intel’s whole thing like they’re gonna do a shrink and And suddenly the cost of all the chips aren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to triple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The first computer magazine issue I ever bought from a newsstand had a cover that was advertising

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 100 megahertz, because this was a big deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} in 1993 or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was a DEC alpha chip that had been announced that could hit 100 megahertz.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I was very disappointed to learn that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I vividly remember having a really intense argument with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a, I think he’s a second cousin of mine, I don’t know, a relative of mine, who was in college

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at the time, and I was in like middle school or something like that. And he had,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if memory serves, he had, I want to say it was like a gigabyte of storage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey across probably like six hard drives, because it was that long ago. And I remember arguing with him, there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no possible way a human being could use a gigabyte of storage. It’s just not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey possible. What could you possibly put over a gigabyte of storage?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because back then you were storing like, you know, pages or like Word documents. It wasn’t like anything big. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was like… He didn’t have like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these podcast apps downloading his audio and leaving the temp files around on your disks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Well done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well done. But yeah, it’s wild how things change. In any case, why don’t you tell us about one last thing that’s awesome, and then we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have one more thing to talk about.

Sponsor: MailRoute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Our final sponsor this week is MailRoute. Once again, MailRoute. Go to mailroute.net

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP. You’ve heard from me over the years that I don’t use Gmail. I use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco regular IMAP hosts because I don’t like proprietary email systems and I don’t like web mail.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I just want something that will work with regular mail apps that I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get them anywhere on any platform and I don’t have to be tied to somebody’s web interface I don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or somebody’s terrible IMAP gateway Gmail. So anyway, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the problems when you try to host mail somewhere other than Gmail somewhere else, or you try to host it yourself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you’re on your own server, or if you have a business and you have to administer their email server,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the big problems with doing this is spam filtering. Spam filtering is so complex these days,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s so advanced, that really doing it right requires like a dedicated service that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specializes in that, and like a cloud service that can combine wisdom from all sorts of things

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people try to send you that’s spam and viruses. I admit when I When I first heard about it, I was skeptical. I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how well could it really work compared to the customizable spam filtering and stuff that Fastmail

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had that I’d been using for years before that? It worked so well that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I was using other things, I would still get spam. I would get maybe three to five

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in weeks or months. Mail route is so good, you literally go from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever amount of spam you’re getting, you go to zero most of the time. It becomes a very

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so aggressive that they’re constantly throwing away legitimate mail either. that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the border where they’re not quite sure if it’s spam, they put in the quarantine section for like a week or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two or something, and then they email you a summary of just the subject lines of those things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you can just give a quick little glance down that list every day, every week, or whatever, and you can see, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know what? That one, that was legitimate. Let that through. All the rest of these, forget about it. Those are all spam. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s very, very easy to make sure you don’t have false positives for too long and to train it not

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I recommended people go to IMAP posts I recommended fast mail a lot specifically I will say now

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hear from gmail people it sounds like it’s actually better than Gmail spam filtering.

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Reddit kerfuffle

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So lately there’s been a humongous kerfuffle with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Reddit. I have to admit, I don’t really ever use Reddit. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I may have mentioned on the show in the past, I don’t know if it ever made it to the final version, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the only time I ever really used Reddit was when I needed to acquire things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after one of my favorite websites got shut down. And I used Reddit here and there for that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but I don’t use it for discussions. I don’t use it for really anything else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I guess there was a real big, there was a lot of agita with regard to their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now ex CEO, Ellen Powell. Is that right? Did I get that right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I believe so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I can’t pass judgment as to whether or not she was good at her job because I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really use Reddit, but it seemed like a lot of people came out of the woodwork

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to try to get her out of the CEO position. And it seemed like from an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey outsider’s perspective, the whole of Reddit tried to kind of hoist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey her out of the chair, if you will. And the only real concrete information

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve gotten about this is from Hello Internet. And I just listened, I think it was today actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to their latest episode, and I’ll have a link in the show notes, where they talk about this. And CGP Grey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seems to be a pretty big Reddit user and a pretty big Reddit fan. as Brady

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hare and the other host seems to have a much more similar perspective to myself, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should say I have a more similar perspective to him in that it all seems really gross

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me from the outside. And it all seems like, it seems like a kind of crummy corner

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the internet, but I’m probably judging unfairly because I’m only hearing about the crummiest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey parts of this corner of the internet. So I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, do you use Reddit at all? Do you have any thoughts on this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do. I think it’s worth explaining what Reddit is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John broadly speaking, because if people don’t use it, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think the name tells you anything about it, and you could get confused about what the heck goes on there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a website where people go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have little communities. You make a subreddit about whatever topic you’re interested in talking about, and there people can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John share links with each other and they can comment on the links and they can also vote on each other’s comments. That’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it boils down to. You’ve probably heard of lots of sites about like this where you can make a little sub community, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have an account, you can share information with each other and links and comments

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then the things that you share other people can comment on and then everyone gets to vote on the things that you say and it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like alright well whatever but you know we’ve had web bulletin boards, we had you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Dig and Hacker News and like a million other sites that are like this. Reddit is one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of those sites. It was one of the ones that it kind of caught on. It’s very large, very popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There are subreddits for everything you could possibly imagine from technologies to cats to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alligators to knitting to everything you can imagine. It seems like, you know, everything’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like whatever. It’s it’s like content. Asked owns them now. I’m not sure if they ever made money. They have difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to come up with a monetization pattern, but they got a tremendous amount of traffic and it’s a place where people go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everything else about it is sort of problems of their own making, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John setting aside how do you make money, like we talk about that to death, like, hey, you got a lot of traffic, you got a lot of users, you got a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eyeballs or whatever, figured how to monetize them, stuff like that. The decision Reddit was faced with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a decision that many sites that are very popular are faced with, and almost every site I can think of off the top of my head

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes better decisions about this, which is, since anyone can come and make an account, and anyone can come can make a little subgroup

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever about whatever topic they want. Do you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some kind of policy, terms and conditions, code of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John conduct, something saying what are you allowed to do and say and what kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John groups are you allowed to have on this site? And for the life of me, I can’t think of another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John website that doesn’t have something like that. Certainly Twitter does, and Twitter, you know, we always complain about the harassment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on Twitter and stuff like that. At least they have a policy, right? big thing was like no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John man free speech anybody can come here and make a subreddit about anything and like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we should be allowed to say what like anyone anytime when something brings up free speech on the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i just i i don’t think i’ve seen an example of it being correct maybe because i don’t hang out on constitutional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John law boards maybe that’s the place where it’s great what people really mean is i’m allowed to say whatever i want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on someone else’s website because free speech right? So Reddit, the people who run Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fancy themselves as like, we’re not just a website, we are the internet and we are completely neutral.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And even though we’re a privately held company that pays money to someone to run our servers and pays employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to write the software for them and does all this stuff. Really, we are just a giant level playing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John field for everybody to come and, and do it. And therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t want to have pretty much any controls over what you’re you’re allowed to do what you’re allowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say what kind of groups you’re allowed to have all everything is welcome all people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all ideas all behavior as long as I guess you don’t hack us and destroy our servers or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that because that would be bad but anything beyond that like if you’re just using our site if you are typing words into a box and clicking buttons

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything you do is a-okay with us and a lot of the controversy with the new CEO came in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because she decided that some things are not okay they were gonna have some sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barriers and rules about Oh, okay, well, you can’t just type any words you want into this box, you can’t have community

⏹️ ▶️ ^John surrounding anything you want. Because we don’t want we don’t want those type of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using our website, we don’t want them to be part of our quote unquote community. And you were saying Casey, like, oh, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like an icky place or whatever. There is no Reddit community. Reddit is gigantic. Reddit has people who are just obsessed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with cute cat pictures, right. And then Reddit has people who were just you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John showing what is it pictures of fat people to make fun of them or whatever, or like racist bulletin

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boards or you know, like every possible vile idea you can imagine the whole idea is like, Oh, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this is a place where we can go and we’re allowed to use these people’s website and put our information in their database

⏹️ ▶️ ^John servers and send requests to their web servers. And it’s all free speech, man, we can do whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we want. And Reddit trying to add some kind of controls of like, okay, well, there’s certain things we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to be on something dot reddit dot com like the certain things we don’t want so if you want to do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go someplace else and do it the reddit community such as it is like the people who believe in free speech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like you can’t stop us from putting words into your servers that’s our

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s our birthright reddit is about free speech um and it’s just so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John depressing to me to see and by the way they’re backsliding on that now they’re like oh that that ceo is gone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and and the new person in here i don’t know all the backstory of but the new person is actually one of the early people on Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, actually we want you to be allowed to do anything you want, except for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these very few things that we narrowly define as being bad. I don’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what the sort of the mental barrier here is to the people who are running the site, to putting their foot down and saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is okay, and this is not. They somehow feel like by doing that, they’re crushing freedom under

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their jackboot. Like you just run reddit.com, it’s a website on the internet where people type words into boxes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and put them into server database servers that you run like that is not that doesn’t define

⏹️ ▶️ ^John free speech so i find it incredibly frustrating to see like all this posturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all this anger also misdirected and the only thing i put in the show it’s about this is two tweets from lori

⏹️ ▶️ ^John voss who i think that i think sum up this this entire thing she says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the tragedy of all online community spaces is that the goals of inclusive and safe are at the extreme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mutually exclusive goals so what What she’s saying is like, do you want to have a place where everybody is welcome?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, we are an inclusive site. Anyone can come to Reddit. Anyone can make a subreddit. Like it’s good to be inclusive. Everyone likes inclusive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? We don’t we don’t tell you you can’t come here because your eyes are the wrong color or because you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speak the wrong language or you know, you’re into the wrong you like dogs instead of cats. We’re an inclusive site,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? But also safe. What is safe mean right her next week at some point you have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exclude someone you get to pick if it’s the people feeling unsafe or the people making them feel unsafe.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So at some point you have to exclude somebody because if you let everybody come in, people come in and do terrible things. So you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to at certain point exclude somebody. Who do you want to exclude? Do you want to exclude the people who don’t feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John safe because there’s a bulletin board about how to rape women and that kind of makes the women on Reddit not feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very good, you know, they are somehow associated with the same website where this board exists? Or do you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people who are making the let me tell you how to rape women subreddit, do you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make them leave? You have to exclude somebody because if you let everybody in, some people are not going to feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John safe or comfortable or welcome in this community. These two tweets basically sum it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and incredibly every time I read anything from these Reddit people they make the decision of like what we really want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is for the people to be able to make the rape boards. Like you know not the specific examples I don’t know if they ban

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them or whatever but like some people are made to feel uncomfortable by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what pretty much anyone would say is vile terrible ideas and behavior.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s like, well, they need to be allowed to do that because we are the government of the United States and we must

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allow them the freedom to put their words into our database servers. Therefore, free speech. Sorry, I just got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to let him do that. It’s just it boggles my mind. It makes me angry and frustrated,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mostly because there is a lot of good stuff on Reddit, because again, the people who are making the cute cat pictures, those cat

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pictures are really cute. They’re not

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} bothering anybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the thing is, I think I saw a a graph somewhere trying to show like the overlap between the various boards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is some surprising overlap, but it’s sometimes not so surprising overlap like you know, how many people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are member of the white supremacy board, but also member of the cute cat pictures board. Okay, how about members

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the white supremacy board and members of the men’s rights board? All right, and you start to see a little bit more members of Gamergate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and members of the young Nazis of America board. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} know, it’s not 100%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overlap, but I don’t I would love to see a graph of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the cat people really just cat people? Or are so many people love cats that an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John equal number of neo-Nazis are in the cat boards as are in every other board? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, I think that it is a ridiculous thing that the people running Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t seem to get a handle on the idea that they get to choose what kind of people get to put words

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into their database servers and they seem incapable of making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any sort of common sense decision about what should be allowed to happen on Reddit. Or maybe they’re just totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it. Like, we, they’re, maybe they’re anarchists. Maybe they say, we want to run a bunch of servers and we want to let everyone say anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Go for it. And like, there you go. That’s, that’s what you’re gonna do. But that’s why people keep talking like the downfall of Reddit and everything, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think most people who use Reddit had an idea that the people who ran Reddit had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar standards to them about what is and isn’t sort of decent and acceptable. And if the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who run Reddit want to let everybody do everything, the rest of the people I have to think are just going to slowly fade away because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one wants to be associated with a site like that. Like a very small number you’re just going to turn into you know 4chan or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John 8chan right? Like if if you let everybody in eventually everybody leaves except for the most terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people and congratulations you know Reddit you are running a site filled with the most terrible people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Feel free to do that. Feel free to let them all type in text boxes to each other. I hope you feel good about the new site you’ve built

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that’s what you’re effectively creating by allowing anybody to do everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t have much to say on on reddit because I don’t know anything about reddit and every time I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco visited it for something either trying to find information on something or following a link there every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco visit to it has made me never want to visit it again literally I like I’m not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exaggerating every time like oh this is terrible why do Pete like and I know know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like academically I know there are good parts of it I’ve never stumbled upon those really

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never read a good ask me anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} or I am a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing those are usually really hard to navigate first of all I hate nested comments like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and I was an old form nerd back in the day so I know the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know the problems with both with both nested comments and also flat threads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they both have dysfunction, just different dysfunction. So, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m very familiar with the challenges in both the community monitoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and regulation and also the technical side of how community software online,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how this community style thing is built and how things are enforced.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s a very hard problem. Not to mention my time at Tumblr, we saw a lot of things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not quite the same level as what Reddit is dealing with but a lot of kind of related

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems of things like you know like every every couple days we get a phone call

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from like a high school principal or like some kind of like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know middle-of-nowhere police department or something complaining about something that some kids had about some other kid on tumblr

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and wanting us to take it down and like when you you have to deal with stuff like that when you’re a community site.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Dealing with community stuff is just really messy. It’s very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s very, very messy for all the reasons you just said, John. There’s a lot of these decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that there is no good option. You just have to choose between two bad options. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what I was saying with my sell download stuff earlier, a lot of these things you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have to pick the lesser of two evils. No matter what you pick, it’s going to have big downsides for someone or it’s going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco disincentivize good stuff or incentivize bad stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, but we’re not like we’re not even at the hard questions like there are the type of things like am I allowed to threaten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to rape somebody on Reddit and the Reddit CEO is like well I’ll allow it technically it’s not a threat of violence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean we’re not talking about the people get into a heated argument and should they be allowed to call each other jerks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like you know sort of oh ad hominem attacks are not allowed like that’s in the gray area it’s difficult to figure out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever we’re talking about just like straight up like you know racism,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sexism, real threats of violence and just and and seriously like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new CEO is like on the board going, responding to people, I’m not sure if that, you’re not sure?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like that’s I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the kind of community you again I’m not saying he shouldn’t be allowed to do this feel free to make this kind of community but if he’s like waffling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like these are the tough decisions boy should we allow rape threats or is that against real, I guess we have to allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it I don’t want that guy’s speech to be impinged because

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I am

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the government of the United States of America.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well and I think first of all we should definitely say that the last episode of Hello Internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the last two episodes of Rocket covered this probably way better than we can because those are people who know a lot more about Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than we do and so they really did a very good job of that. So listen to those if you want more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the inside stuff about like you know what specific challenges that the CEO of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Reddit faces and you know why Ellen One pal might have been good or bad for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But it seems like one of the big pressures they have now is business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They make some money, and they have this corporate owner, and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have a board of directors, and they want more money, because the money they make is not really commensurate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the amount of traffic they get. They should be making a lot more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But is this what you would do to make more money? Wouldn’t you try to go mainstream? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to? Well, so that’s the thing. Like, so let me tell you another story from my past that’s long and boring. The reason I’m telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is because it’s actually about the same coffee shop as the last long and boring story. Oh, God. Here we go. So this coffee

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shop in my hometown, Cup O’ Joe in Bexley, Ohio, while

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I was there, they had a big problem where middle schoolers discovered it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it was always packed full of, like, you know, 12-year-olds

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who were just kind of loitering around, hardly buying anything, but just taking up all the seats and hanging

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco around outside and kind of, you know, standing around smoking and all. It was like, it was just not a great scene.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And, and they, it kind of drove other customers away because who

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wants to hang out around a bunch of delinquent middle schoolers who are bored and loitering and not doing anything and smoking.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so one summer, they banned them. I don’t know how, doesn’t really matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how. They banned all the middle schoolers. They implemented some kind of like minimum age thing or you had to be with a parent or whatever it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco matter somehow they banned them and for a while the place was empty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and I knew the manager at the time and I asked him like you know how was this going and he said they were making more money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than ever because the you know even though it wasn’t getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the volume it got before it was getting more of the profitable customers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the older people like the college students who were there studying and buying buying drinks all day the people who were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who come in the morning and come in the evenings who you know we’re just buying stuff drinking it and leaving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and making you know cycling the tables more often not putting off other people like when they when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they come in there and I don’t know how the result that I left but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they I was very surprised at the time and looking back on it I shouldn’t be that that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worked so well for them and you know red I think faces not that different

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of a dilemma here where it’s If they want to become more mainstream, if they want to become more attractive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to advertisers and therefore more profitable, if they want the value of their ads to go up, if they want the number of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco advertisers to go up, I think they have to get rid of all this garbage. They have to get rid of all this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anarchist-slash-libertarian, free-speech, crazy people who are really just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aggressive, hateful people for a lot of them. Not all of them, obviously, but many of them are these just very aggressive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hateful people who feel entitled to have their words all over the place. I think you can’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both ways. You can’t have that garbage on your site that is highly offensive,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco legally questionable. No advertiser wants to be associated with that and also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make more money with advertising. You have to pick one or the other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It seems like they’re trying to hide the most objectionable stuff. Like, okay, a lot of people are offended by this, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we won’t run ads against it. So we’re technically not making money off of it. And everyone’s like, well, you’re just subsidizing with the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff and we’ll put it off in the corner and they’ll stay by themselves and it’s like why why are you bending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over backwards to make sure that these people have a place to share hate with each other like never mind like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not just oh we’re just letting them put their words into our database like if you want to go out to like the the sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of secondary effects of of allowing a place for people to reinforce each other’s hateful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ideas and recruit new people and like oh no incitement to violence that’s against the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reddit guidelines yeah i’m sure that will work exactly as intended when you get a bunch of hateful people talking to each other constantly over and over

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again and sharing hateful pictures and videos and all sorts of terrible things. I’m sure nothing bad will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come out of that. It’ll just be positive, like as long as they stay within the terms and conditions, no, it’s so ridiculous. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s so asinine. And again, if that’s the site they want to run, go for it. But if their job is to make money for like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for their parent company, this is not the way to do it. And using your middle school coffee shop example,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s as if at a certain point, all the non middle schoolers left and all that was left was middle

⏹️ ▶️ ^John school students and you realize well now we have to cater to them because there are only customers like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not that right it is at this point but it’s like if you suddenly turn into well I guess we have to become a dance club or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} because everyone else is gone right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reddit is not at that point not even close to it but like if you just keep going down this path I think I feel like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John regular people will leave and you’ll just be left with like we are a community of hate speech

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bulletin boards because these people have no place else to go. It’s like 8chan or 4chan to a lesser extent.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not the kind of business you want to run. That’s not a growth market. That’s not a lot of people with a lot of spending

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power. If you want money, you want to go mainstream. And it just seems like the Reddit CEO

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is trying to preserve this ideal of we provide a forum for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to openly share ideas. That’s sort of a high-minded ideal of Reddit, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the consequences of it are not going to be good for Reddit’s bottom line

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or for the popularity of Reddit or for Reddit’s reputation or for his reputation or just anything really. It just seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like all downside. And again, let him go ahead. You know, if that’s what the company wants to do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel free to pursue that path. But I don’t see it turning into anything good for anyone involved.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably doesn’t mean anything for the purpose of our discussion. And I probably shouldn’t take as a sign of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me being right or wrong about this. But that coffee shop closed last fall. Coffee shops close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time. I know. It sounded like the building they were in sold to get knocked down and built

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but I don’t know. That’s part of the whole idea of the sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the, someone in the chat room said there really is a Reddit community. I think there’s a stereotype

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a typical Reddit user that’s perhaps somewhat accurate. But I think there are a lot of people,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like all three of us, who don’t go to Reddit unless someone links to it. And when we link to it, we look at the funny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cat gif and then we move on with our lives. Right. Like, but are we Reddit users? Are we part of the community? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re not part of the community, but we follow, you know, it’s a popular site. People link you to it. You end up there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you look at something and then you go someplace else. I think a lot of that traffic is from things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. All right. Maybe they know the breakdowns. I don’t know. I don’t know if if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most of the traffic comes from people just, you know, posting hate to each other and over and over again are getting in big

⏹️ ▶️ ^John arguments and 17 level indented comment threads attached to things maybe that is where their stuff comes from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it just it just seems to me it’s a bad decision I think less of the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who run reddit every time I hear one of the decisions or see them in this sort of this sort of like lawyerly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nuanced discussions as they try to to parse what should and shouldn’t be acceptable behavior on reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just reveal themselves to have no understanding of other people’s experiences and you know It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, I’m sure that all the specific examples I cited in this podcast are not accurate. Feel free to wander

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Reddit yourself and try to find out what these people’s opinions are. But every time I see anything from them, every time I go to Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and see these discussions with the new leadership behind Reddit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just think like I was excited when the Ellen Powell came in and started making changes like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really straightforward, sensible changes. Get rid of the hate groups. And it was like, oh, you can’t get rid of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hate groups. What do you mean?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just I don’t again. I don’t know the details. I don’t know why she was pushed out I know I’m sure she was subject

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the same harassment that every woman gets who Opens her mouth and says anything ever let alone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the CEO of a company is in charge of a bunch of little Man children who are just angry about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything especially like that company like I I can’t imagine a more hostile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, maybe there are some but that’s like that was definitely on the on the more hostile side

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t know if she, you know, I have no idea what her story, but all I know is that the few things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I heard announced to come out of her leadership seemed like good ideas and then was backlash against them. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John felt depressed about and then when she was kicked out, I got even more depressed and then seeing the views of the new CEO, who is apparently one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John founders. It’s just like, no, they’re not getting it. So anyway, Reddit is Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is really not for me. And furthermore, I think if Reddit’s goals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are to be a place that has, that continues to have a lot of traffic and then makes a lot of money that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the current strategy they’re pursuing doesn’t make any sense to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think the other thing that I find fascinating about all this, which I kind of hinted at earlier is how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a group of users of a website

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can seemingly have so much influence that they can cause the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey chief executive officer of a company to be fired, dismissed, quit, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s just weird to me that even a couple hundred thousand people, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d heard that there were a couple hundred thousand signatures on this petition, this online petition, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t even really signatures, but whatever, that that many people came

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey together to decide to try to oust a CEO.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Man, woman, it doesn’t matter. Like that’s just insane to me that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey users of a website, none of whom I think are paying the website any money seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to think that they can have that kind of influence and in numbers seem to have that kind of influence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I think a lot of this started if I understand things correctly because a really beloved moderator

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was Dismissed or something like that. I guess the person who

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} did well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s this is kind of like this is really about ethics and gaming journalism It’s like that was not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really the reason like that was that was like what ignited a lot of the argument But you know it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really a lot of other pressures I think that’s what it sounds like but you know and and especially because like you know it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Even that is just like the came journalism BS line even that official storyline

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is questionable because She didn’t fire that moderator the male co-founder did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t realize that yeah, this whole thing’s a mess anyway It’s getting into detail of it is is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just a rat hole Yeah, you know there’s no there’s no good to come of diving into the details of it because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s not really what the argument was about and what it comes down to is if if a whole bunch of users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were calling for someone’s head and that resulted in her getting what I call quit fired

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is you know she was you know she was forced to quit that was not you know oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I’m just done now coincidentally this week no she was quit fired it’s cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happens to the best of us but that That wouldn’t have happened if just some angry users

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are hateful, horrible people, if just they had a problem with her. The reason that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happened, I think you can read into who they appointed instead. This other co-founder

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who’s been gone for a while, who has these very much libertarian kind of anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco goes viewpoints. If the board appointed him as the new CEO,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that means that the members of the board and the people who have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control and equity and influence of the company, a good portion of them want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this anything-goes attitude to stay. It’s not enough that a whole bunch of users complained.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If only these users were getting angry, and these users are people who are not particularly credible, who you don’t really want to cater

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to if you can help it, that wouldn’t have been enough to get her out. This only gave the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in power a motivating reason to get her out now, because she was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pushing in a direction that, not that the users didn’t want that they didn’t want that the power holders

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did not want. And they put in a guy who is the complete opposite in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco area, in this area, you know, like trying to keep things tame and under control or being where everything goes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So obviously, the people who own and control the company wanted to be the other way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think it’s I mean, the CEO situation again, I don’t think the details are important. It’s just basically like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a vote of no confidence. It was a vote of no confidence from the most local users with the whole petition thing. And apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a vote of no confidence from the board. It just seems like, you know, you came in, you started to make some bold changes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But in the end, we are not behind you. This is the board saying this, in the end, we do not support your decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough to let you see this through. And we’re changing course and you’re out. Right? So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what it comes down to is like, it’s lots of company, you if you’re going to be the leader of a company, you either actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to have absolute power, in which case you can weather any storm and do what you want to do. Or if there are people who are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bosses of you, and they from their perspective, they don’t have confidence that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the changes you’re going to make are good. And they’re hearing a lot of noise from the users and the users are the most vocal users

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are, are saying with their actions and their words that they don’t like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you’re doing either. You can imagine a board that’s nervous about a company. It’s like, oh, we have this thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We think it can be good. This person comes in makes a bunch of changes. And then all I hear is a bunch of noise and bad things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Change course change course, right. And then the new course, like some people in the chat room are saying this new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John CEO is going to you know get rid of the bad even more than she could. That’s possible because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s kind of like the you know only Nixon can go to China like in Reddit only a man can make changes because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people will only accept like the same exact words come out of this guy’s mouth and everyone’s like oh that’s interesting I’d like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to hear more of your ideas and if she says it it’s like you are destroying our freedom like so it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just have to go back to this thing like what kind of community does these people want Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be? Who do want to be in this community and and what do they want it to be like what do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they want the experience of red to be like same thing for the Twitter people what do you want the experience of Twitter to be like I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Twitter CEO at least came out and said we are terrible about dealing with harassment do you want Twitter to be a place where you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and if you are any type of group that’s typically harassed you’re going to get harassed and you have no recourse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Twitter’s trying to make that better by having the tools to report people not require you know I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think I’ve originally way back in the day on Twitter, if you reported someone for harassment, you had to inform the person that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you were informing on them, like it was part of the process. Like they would send them an email and say, hey, just so you know, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person reported you for harassment or something like that. It was just a crazy setup made by people who didn’t understand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the dynamics of harassment. Anyway, like I said, Reddit, they can do what they want, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I hear, everything I hear coming out of this company so far is making me, like now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m at the point where I’m almost like questioning whether I want to tap links to what I know is probably good content

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’ll enjoy like the interviews or you know funny cat pictures and stuff like that and now I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by tapping this link am I supporting an organization that is trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know make a home for people who I think should not have a home. Let’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put it this way I wouldn’t give these people a home on a website that I ran. These people give them a home on the website that they run which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine but do I want to support that with my clicks and whatever ads I’m going to load by tapping that. That’s the point where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am with reddit where I’m thinking that. And I’ve never thought that about Twitter. Maybe it’s because I don’t feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m viewing ads in Twitter because I’m using a third party client or whatever, but at this point with the Reddit links,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even know, even in my casual usage, if I’m gonna continue to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You just installed AdBlocker. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Lynda.com, Hover, and MailRoute.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ♪ Now the show is over ♪ ♪ They didn’t even mean to begin ♪ Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental Oh, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter You can follow them Follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S That’s Casey Liss,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Auntie Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean to, accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Tech Podcasts, so long.

Post-show: More on Reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Boy, I hope no one who is big in Reddit listens to our show, because it’s just going to be a long series of corrections

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about everything we got wrong about Reddit. That’s why I keep trying to pull back to the big picture. Big picture, we are casual users. It seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like a place I don’t want to hang out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, as I said, like every time, literally every time I’ve gone there, I’ve been turned off to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t see, I don’t know how that broke. I’ve gone to good content, but just like, boy, everything I read about it, and every time I dive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into these threads, I’m like, that screenshot can’t be real. This is obviously Photoshopped. And I’ll go to the actual site and find the actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comment. I’m like this guy this is the guy who’s in charge now. There’s not like someone impersonating him

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The site hasn’t been hacked like these are the real words out of these people’s mouths like not You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it’s basically saying not a place. I want to Hang out or be associated with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s probably gonna sound weird, but I get really turned off by reddit because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know a few people I know certainly plenty people online that use reddit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I know a handful of people in real life that use Reddit and it’s kind of creepy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me how people who take Reddit really seriously seem to think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, and one of you said this earlier, the entirety of the internet happens because of Reddit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like anything that’s good on the internet, it’s because of Reddit, according to these people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s just, I don’t know, it’s almost like a cult. And I don’t, I don’t mean that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I’m sure someone’s going to be offended by that. And I don’t mean it to be offensive. It’s just it’s the that’s the closest analogy I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can think of is that oh man You don’t understand reddit is where the internet happens

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey man. It’s because of us That’s why you know all this cool stuff and you know every gift that’s ever been on the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s because of us man. There’s no

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} place else to get gifts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, and it’s just I don’t know It’s just it’s creepy to me and and that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I find that to be a real turnoff and and admittedly I’m very ignorant when it comes to Reddit like you guys have said, you know I kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of, I’ll browse over to something typically like an IMA or an AMA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then I’ll leave and that’s that. But God, it just seems so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey weird and creepy and cultish to me that I’ve never wanted to invest any real

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time in it. And now with what, with their tacit, if not explicit support of all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hate groups, I just, no, thank you. Not for me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is something to that. Like the whole of, you know, you get enough people together who are enthusiastic about sharing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things with each other and they make these little communities like that is what makes the internet great but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have to realize that when you reach a certain level of popularity you will like percentage-wise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will never get a certain subset of people who exhibit what most of us would consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be bad behavior that they’re they’re abusive to people they are they do obnoxious things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like griefing and trolling they make they make your site worse. And so most sites

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have at least an attempt to come up, especially this is the whole thing. It’s just a big community. I come up with a set of rules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try to contain that. And the perverse thing about Reddit is like, no, our philosophy is we don’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. That’s the whole thing, man. Just anything goes, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John again, anything goes except you can’t hack us. We don’t like that. That is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that is social.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But anything else, anything goes type anywhere. It’s like that’s how every

⏹️ ▶️ ^John community dies like that. Back in the use newsnet days you’d see entire newsgroups go south because a set

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of bad people would come in. They’d make everyone miserable because you can’t stop them from posting in the newsgroup.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You add them to your kill files, but it would just likely be, you know, eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people okay fine this group is yours. We’ll leave and we’ll start a different group. This belongs to you now. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk about whatever you want here and we’ll go elsewhere. And that I think is the dynamic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you have a very popular community you have to have some kind of rules to control things things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Otherwise, you will inevitably only be left with the worst of the worst, because there are some set of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who are going to be obnoxious. And other people don’t want to be around obnoxious people. And eventually, all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re left with are obnoxious people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean, this this whole this whole mess of what it takes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to maintain a community site and all the garbage you have to deal with, as the platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco owner, like as the you know, I saw I saw a lot of tumblr I’ve seen a lot in the past with sites I’ve been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a part of it has made me never want to make something that includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like hosting user published content ever again. Someday I might forget that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying this and do it anyway, but like there are some features of Overcast that I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco considered doing or some related things like, oh maybe it’d be cool to make like a podcast CMS and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you know host a podcast for people like like the Tumblr for podcast kind of thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then I think oh well then I to have to deal with all this crap. I have to deal with, oh well, someone’s gonna post a hate podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I gotta hear from some police officers and take it down and deal with them arguing with me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t want to have to deal with any of that. Even simple things like user reviews

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of podcasts. I never want to do that for so many reasons and this is one of them. There’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many things I don’t want to have to deal with. The position I take

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is much like some of the design decisions Nintendo has made with online gameplay. You You don’t really give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people a way to be horrible so you don’t have to deal with it. That’s generally my goal,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is just make products that don’t involve people publishing stuff on something you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco own and you having to deal with the ramifications.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s hard work and volume-wise you’ve got a problem, but I’m boggled by the easy decisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I feel like if you did a podcast hosting thing and someone put up KKK Weekly,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would feel like, no, boom, out. And why do you get to cut off? company get to pick what I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s like oh slippery slope don’t try to put your podcast on Marco because he censors you I honestly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that nobody would be like because Marco got rid of the KKK podcast we should not we should not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put our podcast on his site because he’s obviously like the whole slippery slope central thing like most people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would be like all right well duh like why would he want that there well you know it’s like well he was gonna ban

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that what else is he gonna ban what a baby doesn’t like vegetarians like I’m a vegetarian podcast really are you really afraid

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that like I feel like that is your job as someone who starts or runs a company to say yes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am imposing my values on the private company that I own like that’s yes that’s what I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I am NOT the US government if I don’t want vegetarians I can ban them and then they can say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t go to Marco’s podcast site because he banned that vegetarian podcast and he’s a censor

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all right well fine then that is up to you Marco to decide what are you going to ban what are you gonna but I honestly think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you ban the KKK podcast nobody who you care about is going to say well I’m not going to go there because you ban that KKK

⏹️ ▶️ ^John podcast. Well, you know, then go someplace else. I’m not the only private Internet in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world that will store your text in my database. Right? Make your own site, go somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else. Like, obviously, you get down to the hard decisions, right? Well, what if you’re a staunch Democrat? Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want Republican podcast or whatever? Oh, don’t go there because that’s like you, you build the community through your decisions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you didn’t allow Republican podcasts and only a lot of Democrat ones, guess what? You’d have an entire site

⏹️ ▶️ ^John filled with Democrat and left leaning sites. Is that the thing you wanted to build if it’s not then you made a bad decision if it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John congratulations you are the world’s biggest collector of you know left leaning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John political podcast in the United States like you design your own community by deciding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you want to let in and what you don’t want to let in and not making any decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a very big decision in and of itself I don’t know I just don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s I find

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it depressing Well, I mean and the biggest problem is that reddit is this big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco public online community That seems from from the little I know about it. It

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems to have by design and intentionally Incredibly light moderation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’ve never seen an online community that had very light to no moderation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where that worked out well, it just doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not I think they have think they have heavy moderation but just within the groups and if you don’t like it start

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your own subreddit and then you can be the moderator and then You get to decide the rules like that is that’s the whole system It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can make your own little cabal and have whatever rules you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but right but then then but then so the site as a whole doesn’t practice heavier heavy moderation Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can just create your own hate area over here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why that’s why people think of it as the Internet like oh It’s not it’s not no reddit is the Internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like yeah within your subreddit you can have rules and you can have mods and you can say in this post you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only in this subreddit you can only post things in Pig Latin if you post anything not in Pig Latin you’ll be banned and we’ll vote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you down like fine whatever you want but that’s like yeah they have perfect control but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the whole of reddit you telling me I can’t start my own subreddit censorship reddit is the internet no it’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah that’s that’s what I’m talking like you know in general there is seemingly little to no moderation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the entire reddit community it is you know yes within subreddits you can moderate but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there you know so the community at large has very little and like that like you know we’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve saw so many times in the past community like what one of my my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco best online community experiences was the the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I spent on the something awful forums and I don’t sound stupid now to a lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that like when I was there I don’t know what it’s like now but when I was there in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco early 2000s very heavily. I basically lived there. That was my internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was insanely well run because it was very tightly moderated and there was a paywall to get in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so you didn’t have problems of spam, you didn’t have people being total jerks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because if they were they’d get banned and they’d lose their ten bucks. And if they wanted to cut back in, they had to pay ten bucks again. So like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was it was incredibly healthy. I mean I know I know it sounds crazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to people who know of something awful on a surface level, but it was an incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well-run community because it had very distinct rules and they were enforced very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very well most of the time. And so you didn’t have this kind of rush of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco craziness from the public and just hate everywhere constantly. It was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very well-run. And I was a member of other communities before and after that that were way, way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less well-run. Twitter being a good example. I mean, Twitter is not quite the same thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it has many of the same challenges. And there are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many, many problems. Once you start removing layers of moderation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and involvement by moderators, and you start permitting more and more things and having fewer and fewer filters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it just it deteriorates very, very quickly into all these things that people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hate about Reddit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think the Ars Technica comments are a good example because they are also kind of like, We don’t want to stop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anybody from saying whatever they want to say, so on and so forth. But they have guidelines that seem unenforceable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They basically have like, don’t insult other people, like no ad hominem attacks, right? That’s like, oh, that’s totally unenforceable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How can you have a board where people argue over, you know, Mac versus PC or argue about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Scientology, argue about global warming and enforce that? It’s impossible to enforce. People are going to call each other jerks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? They do it with human beings. beings look at things and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is this person just saying something that the only purpose is to put this other person down doesn’t add

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything to the argument? Like, then you can I mean, this is even before they had downvoting, like the moderators

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will come in and moderate a particular comment by a particular person, and then they would complain about it, and they would fight over it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just a tremendous amount of work. But having those people in there constantly trying to make those decisions about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John our Are you violating our posting guidelines with the posting guidelines were just so like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s seemingly unenforceable, certainly not machine enforceable. And people can just make new accounts and so on and so forth. But they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, they had a few things over there. One, having an account with a lot of posts and a long registration date

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was seen as something like valuable, like you had reputation based on how long you’d been there and how many posts you’d made and so on and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forth. Again, this is even before voting. So people didn’t want to just abandon their account and start a new one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that meant that essentially the equivalent of Twitter eggs were like kind of a, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an indicator that maybe someone is just here to cause problems if they have like one post and it was they registered their account

⏹️ ▶️ ^John today or whatever even though registering the account was free stuff like that but just having those moderators in there trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do trying and basically failing because this you know you can’t place a community this large but just trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it knowing that if you say something too obnoxious like it’s kind of like you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know speeding if you go 70 miles an hour maybe fine but if you go 300 miles an hour someone’s going to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you and stop you eventually right? People would and so people get moderated, people get banned,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people make new accounts, those new accounts get banned, it’s just a constant battle. Like, I just feel like having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people in there trying to do the right thing, the right thing according to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it lets you know what does Ars Technica think is the right thing to do? Ars Technica thinks the right thing to do is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not be insulting to each other. That’s I mean, it’s not again, not a high bar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people can still say some pretty terrible things within the rules of the guidelines, but it lets you know, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this a site where I’m going to come on and people are going to tell me to kill myself immediately? No, because that person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eventually will get, you know, their post will disappear and now they have down voting and that account will get banned. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, there are people fighting on the side of the users, so to speak. There are people there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trying to moderate and as unsuccessful as it may be, it sends a signal about what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the site, like the site sort of has a personality. And this, the personality is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this bad thing that most people think is bad, this site also believes is bad and is trying to do something about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though it’s really hard.