180: Don't Cry for John, Argentina
27 Jul 2016Twitter’s Verified program, viability of podcast tools, and three Mac nerds figuring out how to play a Windows game.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Pokémon Free-to-Play Dogs
- Looking at the bright side of Apple's ancient Mac lineup
- Twitter Verification
- Marco's podcast post-production app
- Under the Radar #36: Should You Release Every App?
- Bugshot
- Quitter
- Piracy-reduction techniques
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- More on passwords and piracy protection
- How Tiff can play Inside
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- Hover: The best way to buy and manage domain names. Use coupon code VERIFIED for 10% off your first purchase.
- Trunk Club: Premium clothing, great advice, zero work.
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Chapters
- Intro
- Snopes and crappy websites
- Follow-up: Pokemon demographics
- Mac stagnation and buying used
- Sponsor: Trunk Club
- Twitter Verified status
- Sponsor: Hover (code VERIFIED)
- Viability of selling podcast tools
- Sponsor: Harry’s
- Piracy reduction for developers
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Passwordless login
- Post-show: Windows or Xbox One?
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right, it’s giving me time to, since we’re in the snowman’s land, give me time to eat this delicious warm apple pie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that Erin just brought up that she just made, because apparently that’s what we decide to do when it’s a thousand degrees outside.
⏹️ ▶️ John No eating while podcasting. Who do you think you are, John Roderick? No eating while podcasting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did you hear anything up until I admitted it? Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you yet spilled any apple pie into your iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. That would be quite an impressive feat, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John It really would. I mean, I just feel like eating and podcasting do not mix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s what the mute button’s for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for. It feels like we just got off the phone, like we just got off Skype for the last episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really honestly does. Here we are again, two nights later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours later, almost to the minute. I barely published the last episode. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we record, it is Friday evening, the 22nd of July, and one of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is skipping town next week. And so we’re recording early because we’re dedicated to you, our listeners, and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want you to go any time or any weeks, I should say, without a new episode of this Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Love podcast. And so we are recording very shortly after the last show and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not have a lot of time to accumulate follow-up. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as always, we do have some for you. Do we want to dive right in, gentlemen? Let’s do it. you
Snopes and crappy websites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with the dog rental, which was the namesake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the last episode, Free to Play Dogs. Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the internet has written in to correct us and has referred to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the true gift to humanity. That is Snopes.com, which says the title they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used was Pika Q, which I thought was kind of funny. They correct us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the story that we told about the animal shelter and the dogs to quote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Snopes claim, a shelter rented dogs for embarrassed adult Pokemon Go players and raked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in tons of cash for all their dogs were swiftly adopted. Mostly false. What’s true? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Muncie Animal Shelter of Muncie, Indiana enacted a novel Pokemon Go dog walking program inviting locals to walk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shelter dogs during their gaming sessions. What’s false? The shelter didn’t charge players $5 an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour per dog to, scare quote, rent dogs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco for walking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were not rapidly cleared of dogs for adoption, nor did they make Megabox off a program designed to harness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a gaming phenomenon to get shelter dogs some time outside. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was all a bunch of BS for the most part. But it’s still an adorable story and I’m kind of glad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so two things on this first. I intentionally didn’t retweet people pointing
⏹️ ▶️ John us to the Snopes because I wanted to give people like a week to think it’s real. Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t work. If we record two days after the previous one, people who aren’t listening to the live stream, I want to give them
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe you guys already are cheated. So that’s that’s too bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco did not. I didn’t have the heart.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to give people a week to believe like, I’m like, when we preface this in the past, the last show, we’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, who knows if this is true, it’s on the internet, blah, blah, blah. But it sounds like a good And that’s, of course, all the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are made up on the internet selling a good story. That’s how they spread. But I like to give people a week to
⏹️ ▶️ John think it was real, because it was a nice, heartwarming story. And the second, Casey referred to Snopes as like the
⏹️ ▶️ John gift of the internet or whatever. It used to be a lot more than it is now. The Snopes website
⏹️ ▶️ John is pretty grim. Pretty, pretty grim. Like it is not a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John place to be. I was scrolling through this story and there’s like this picture of maggots at the bottom that’s part of
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those terrible ads and everything is like blinking
⏹️ ▶️ John God, yeah, you’re right. No, it’s not a good site. I don’t know what happened to it. You feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John IMDB or whatever, I mean, IMDB has gotten worse too, but you think these old sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John things that were around a long time ago that have value, that sort of are category-defining websites should have found
⏹️ ▶️ John some way to make it work without making their sites
⏹️ ▶️ John more and more gross over time, but alas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s just the web these days. I mean, it isn’t like Snopes is run by horrible people. I mean, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who runs it, that’s not just the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no it really is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is and it’s just you’re in your cynical view that you think every website is doomed to this fate but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John true there are websites that are not like this like i said even imdb which has gotten worse in terms of usability
⏹️ ▶️ John but hasn’t become festooned with ads and viruses and pictures of maggots and there’s a pro version that you can pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John that gets rid of a lot of that crap like that’s the way you do it or wikipedia wikipedia is not you know it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have tabooly whatever ads at the bottom of it it’s got what’s his name’s face coming down asking you for money
⏹️ ▶️ John But still it’s not you know if this is not the ultimate fate of every website This is the fate of websites
⏹️ ▶️ John that are slowly going circling the drain It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very hard to monetize a website in 2016 that doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very particularly targeted audience like Snopes In ways that aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible like it. This is this is not like a gradual progression that happened over the last 20 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a very rapid progression that happened over the last like three years years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been very recent and very quick with the massive shift in traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where traffic comes from going all the way into Facebook, a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of desktop browsing going away being replaced by either phone browsing or just not browsing websites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just spending more time on social networks instead. And of course, all the robo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad networks and all the problems that go along with those, like the horrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads and the massive fraud problems. It’s a tough business now to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to make money by just having an ad-supported website. It’s very, very hard. It’s nearly impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most sites to do it in a way that they can both afford to have any kind of staff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quality at all and also have a site that is not very focused audience-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it can’t get very expensive ads, and that is not just full of horrible crap like that. I mean, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. How many websites do you see that are really in great shape these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have a staff of more than like two people? It’s really hard to find
⏹️ ▶️ John any. Yeah, but all the more reason that like the well-known sites have a leg up, because they’re like, where
⏹️ ▶️ John does everybody go for movie stuff? IMDb, right? I mean, Amazon bought them already. So they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John have already been saved by their plans. But you know, it’s not impossible. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s going to be more difficult now than it used to be, or whatever, However, the ones that have the most advantage are
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that are already established genre-defining categories. Even Slashdot never got this
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Or isn’t this bad now, because I believe it still exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, yeah, all Slashdot’s trash is in their comments. Fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what about, like, the Sweet Home, for example? That’s not festooned with terrible ads all over the place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, to be fair, they appear to be pretty reliant on affiliate, Amazon affiliate money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Ghostory is reporting what looks at a glance to be 20 different trackers that they’re using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it is basically a shopping site, so it’s different. If you’re a shopping site, you can make money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of affiliate stuff or off of the profit of things you’re directly selling. It’s very different for something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Snopes, which is a very basic content site. You make money off of page views, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is really hard to get anything good there these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when you are both big and untargeted like Snopes is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Snopes should be no different than Wikipedia though. Because the same thing, Wikipedia is general purpose, there’s no confined
⏹️ ▶️ John audience, it’s extremely broad, it’s a simple site that just contains text, and yet Wikipedia is not festooned
⏹️ ▶️ John with ads or viruses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well Wikipedia also, you know, first of all it is donation funded by what seems like a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large amount of people and even then they still have to put the giant Jimmy Wales head on top of Wikipedia in what seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a very increasing frequency. But that also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that they have a pretty small staff of actually paid people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re probably also non-profit,
⏹️ ▶️ John How many people do you think Snopes needs? I don’t think it needs a gigantic staff of people. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, they could leverage volunteers. This is not a site where people have to
⏹️ ▶️ John file seven stories a day. It’s not like a gaming site or something. There are much harder categories than Snopes. It
⏹️ ▶️ John just feels like a shame that Snopes is exactly one of those sites that, because it’s Mostly purely text and it’s simple site
⏹️ ▶️ John and it shouldn’t require a giant staff and they’re not you know Reviewing cars or sending
⏹️ ▶️ John people to trade shows or doing anything else that costs a lot of money up front You know, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a shame that it is Like and because it’s still popular people still link to Snopes I wish it had been replaced
⏹️ ▶️ John by like a stackoverflow versus Quora equivalent where the crappy site
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gets replaced by the better one
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead we all just go to Snopes and it just every time we do it gets worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and you know, it’s also possible, you know we don’t know that the Snopes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owner, who owns Snopes, is it some big company or is it just kind of its own thing? The maggots own Snopes now. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like, you know, they could just be really tired of running it and just maximizing profit for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. That is also a possibility here. But I think it’s more likely that they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least partially a victim of the problems that all web publishers face these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with trying to get any money out of ads in an age where almost everybody browses on phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all traffic comes from Facebook, and almost nobody clicks on ads on phones, by the way, so you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make money in other creepy ways, and also the ads that you’re selling are being sold by decreasingly few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brokers with decreasing prices.
Follow-up: Pokemon demographics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and to bring us back to Pokemon, he wrote in to say, hey, this is the rules,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you gotta get through the follow-up before we move on. He wrote in to say, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friend was very excited to play Pokemon Go with her seven-year-old son. She excitedly installed it and said, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go out and play. But he was quick with his rebuttal. No, mom, Pokemon is for old people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sad times. Just like that, we’re all old all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of true. Like, you look outside, was a couple stories about this but uh nintendo targeting
⏹️ ▶️ John uh people and in generational waves like if you played pokemon as a kid now you’re ready to play it on
⏹️ ▶️ John your smartphone because at the same situation with my family you realize that if your kid doesn’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphone it’s very difficult to play pokemon go without at least one person with a smartphone
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can tether to because you do have to be on the move with internet access at the same time and
⏹️ ▶️ John seven-year-olds don’t have a device a portable device with internet access that they can walk around the neighborhood with they would have
⏹️ ▶️ John to go i mean they should be going with a parent anyway but like when i look when i see all those pictures look at all
⏹️ ▶️ John these people they’re all playing pokemon go i don’t see 50 kids i don’t even see 25 kids
⏹️ ▶️ John i see maybe like five percent kids and 95 young adults and adults
⏹️ ▶️ John so it is a game for old people uh i don’t think nintendo cares old people have money right but uh
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see although they’re finally nintendo is making public statements trying to deflate his own stock
⏹️ ▶️ John price now like do you realize we don’t make that much money from this like we get a license fee and the actual money goes to this
⏹️ ▶️ John other company like please it’s great that you doubled our stock price but perhaps you don’t understand how this works
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not getting uh as rich as you think we are
Mac stagnation and buying used
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, any other follow-up?
⏹️ ▶️ John For 28 hours later, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, we did get one really nice note from a person named Cap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cap said, hi, one thing that’s great about Apple not updating the Mac for ages, there’s never been a better time to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a Mac secondhand. A few months ago, I managed to pick up a 2011 iMac with a SSD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installed for an absolute bargain, added a bunch of USB 3 ports via Thunderbolt dongle, and couldn’t be happier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t just that this machine was ridiculously cheap, I also didn’t feel like I’m missing out on anything besides retina by not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a new Mac. And this is, I thought this was a really good point because like, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see that the entire lineup in certain families, if not the whole Mac lineup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not changed that much in like three years, that means you can buy a three year old Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s still pretty competitive with the brand new ones that are coming out today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, it’s a mixed bag. Obviously we’d like things to be getting better over periods of three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years in the computer industry, But as long as they’re getting better so slowly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not at all, then you could pick up a three year old Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s almost out of warranty now for probably a decent price, and it’s still the same machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being sold new. More realistically, most people wouldn’t be doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people could get similarly great deals on a MacBook Pro. You can get the first generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Retina MacBook Pro is from 2012, that’s now four years old, And it’s not that different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the ones they’re selling brand new still today. Like it isn’t that much slower. You know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might have to replace the battery if it’s worn out, but these, you know, lithium poly batteries don’t wear out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly. So like, you can really get amazing deals on like three to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five year old Macs now that are almost as good as the ones they are still selling brand new today.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have trouble bending my mind in such a way that this is actually a good thing. Like I know some people can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m not missing out, it’s not much worse than what you could buy new, but it is still a really
⏹️ ▶️ John old and really slow computer. It just so happens that you can’t even buy one that’s that much better, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t change like an absolute values, the state of that old machine. And also, it may not change
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple’s sort of deprecation window of like, you know, like my Mac Pro and a bunch of other machines don’t have support for
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac OS Sierra and stuff. I’m not sure that window, Apple’s sort of sliding window of dropping old hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John support for OSs takes into account the fact that Apple not making their computers much better. So I think that window
⏹️ ▶️ John moves along whether Apple releases new Max or not, which is kind of sad and really
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re right. It’s not. They’re not that much worse than the current ones. And in some cases you can find a machine that’s a couple years old that
⏹️ ▶️ John has some attributes that are actually a little bit better than the current machines. But all you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is putting yourself even farther back so that when the new Max inevitably do come back
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, that gap will suddenly wide because we all presume Apple will continue to produce Macintosh is in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point. And when they come out, suddenly that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the feeling that you have, it’s like, oh, this is such a bargain. It’s such a good deal because the gap between you and the best
⏹️ ▶️ John available is small. The gap between you and the best available is about to take a giant leap and that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to feel too good. So yeah, I can see where this person is
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from but my to my mind and my personality I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John even worse to buy a used one now it’s kind of like if Apple was rapidly
⏹️ ▶️ John advancing you could get a used one that is better in terms of absolute value just because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going forward so quickly that you’d end up with better machine but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s bad all around but maybe I’m just sad about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I mean I suppose you could look at the the most horrible way which is If you buy a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machine from Apple today, you’re basically buying a three-year-old machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John price. Well, that’s what I’m saying. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John save your money. Rather than, don’t buy a new one, don’t buy a used one, just keep putting money into your
⏹️ ▶️ John little buy a Mac later fund, so that when they do come out with new ones, you can get a fancier one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but if you need a Mac now, and you need one for, I don’t know, 700 bucks, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what do you really, and especially if the Mac mini is not going to suit your needs, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 700 bucks it almost certainly won’t, and even with infinite money it might not if you really want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a laptop, which almost everybody does these days. You know, if you have that kind of budget and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good MacBook or MacBook Pro is gonna cost you nearly $2,000 once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s optioned reasonably, then that’s a pretty good option to get a three-year-old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for, basically get today’s Mac for what it’s actually worth today which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a three year old one surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if I had a business and I absolutely had to buy one because new employees were coming on board and we didn’t have computers for them,
⏹️ ▶️ John I might buy the cheapest used one I could possibly get with the idea that I will buy a new one also,
⏹️ ▶️ John like as soon as they come out. Because that is probably like, what’s the least amount of money we can spend
⏹️ ▶️ John now to get a computer on your desk that you can use while we wait for the new Macs to come out, knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John that as soon as they do, we’re going to resell those used ones and get a new one for you. That makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you could probably get a used 101 for the same price it’ll cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to upgrade the new one to one terabyte.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t remind me.
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Twitter Verified status
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s trunkclub.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked a lot about this on a recent episode of Reconcile the Differences that I think is not out yet. So I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John have that much to retread about it here, although honestly, I’m not sure how much overlap there
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the audience in those two shows. So maybe we’ll just say all the same things again in true Marco fashion, where he says he
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have anything to say about a topic and and then just has everything over again. So this topic is
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter’s little verified check mark that historically people have had if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John a super important celebrity and people want to know, like, is this the real Sheryl Crow? And you look at their little Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John profile and it shows a little check mark. And you’re like, oh, it must be the real one and not the million parody
⏹️ ▶️ John impersonation accounts or whatever, of which there are many.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How did you land on Sheryl Crow as your example? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I was trying to think of a celebrity. Who do the kids know these days? Not Sheryl Crow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is Sheryl Crow the most recent celebrity you can come up with?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s free association. No, it’s not the most recent, but I mean, I guess I could have gone with Taylor Swift. I mean, I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John you have. Anyway, that’s what the check mark has been for historically. And I think we’ve talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about this topic before, how it would be much better if that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John attestation where Twitter says, yes, we are telling you that this is actually the person you think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, if that was available to many more people, because it’s not just celebrities that suffer from accounts that impersonate them
⏹️ ▶️ John and otherwise make their lives miserable by people mistaking
⏹️ ▶️ John them for somebody else. Just put like different Unicode characters or capital I instead of an L or like whatever. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand that that much because you can just right click on your web browser and fake a screenshot much easier
⏹️ ▶️ John than making a fake Twitter account. But anyway, the second aspect of this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s historically been celebrities that get to have this checkmark. Twitter has rolled out a series
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, different views and tools and filters and features in their official client
⏹️ ▶️ John that are only available to people who are verified with the idea being they have so many followers and have so many replies to go through,
⏹️ ▶️ John they need extra tools to deal with their stuff. And again, a lot of people who deal with harassment
⏹️ ▶️ John and other problems on Twitter could also use those tools, but oh, they’re not important enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John get verified. And so I think our last conversations about this I was saying and
⏹️ ▶️ John so I think you two are agreeing that like verification should be available to everybody and
⏹️ ▶️ John we understand that it takes time and possibly money to verify because they like look at your they need like a state
⏹️ ▶️ John ID or they basically need to check that you really are you and that takes time and a human being has to do it and that costs
⏹️ ▶️ John money we’re like just charge a fee for it if it costs you money we’re not saying Twitter you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to give this away for for free charge a nominal fee because pretty much everybody I know who desperately
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to be verified for actual for a purpose You know to get the tools or to deal with harassment or to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re not impersonated Would gladly pay a nominal fee to I mean they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John throw the money at you in two seconds to get the little check mark That says yes, I really am who I am. Why is this limited
⏹️ ▶️ John to celebrities? Why not open it to everybody? So in theory recently Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed its rules in the light of the whole Ghostbusters Abuse thing and all you know one of the stars of
⏹️ ▶️ John Ghostbusters got chased off Twitter by a bunch of terrible people. I don’t know if that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the impetus behind this move. But you know, timing wise, it sure looks like it. Twitter verification
⏹️ ▶️ John is now open to anybody who wants to fill out an application on Twitter’s website, you fill in a bunch of fields, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell them why you think you should be verified. If you’re a brand or a company, you can check a
⏹️ ▶️ John checkbox for that if you’re an individual, you tell them like, here’s all the places where you can see who I am, here’s why I should be verified.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it goes into a big black hole. And theory they come back and say yes you’re verified or no you’re not.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this comes up specifically as it relates to this show because Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s verified for a long time right? You were, were you verified like the very beginning?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the thing I was, I got verified like three weeks ago or something. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was really recent.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you’ve been verified for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, like I started ranting about there was some when, oh it was was when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app Engage, that app they launched a couple weeks ago that we were on my phone of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, like the celebrity only
⏹️ ▶️ John what people are saying about your tweets or whatever. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ego surfing. Yeah, I mean, anybody could use it. But yeah, I mean, and I actually use it for a few days on my phone to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try it out. But when that launched, I was basically ranting about how this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app gave special privileges to verified people in the way that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not as verified people using the app, but if you were verified, your tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would show up in these filtered views higher than non-verified people. And it was just like yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one more thing that was… Because the verified system has… Having a system like this has lots of problems and inequalities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inherent in it. It’s one thing if it’s only for identity verification. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you add any other bonus features or higher statuses, once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you attach those to verified status, it makes this program something that should be available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to everybody. Because then it’s like, well, you know, if verified people get their tweets seen more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in certain filters or get higher priority things or get certain abuse control filters that other people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get, I mean, everybody should be able to be verified. Because then it’s a feature segment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like a status thing. And to tie status to also like abuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control features and relevancy in search hits and stuff is, that’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of icky, you know? So I was ranting and raving about that and a nice person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who worked at Twitter submitted me, but it seems like that’s just been up to the public now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great, sort of. It’s great in that, okay, well, now a lot more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get verified, but it still is subject to some kind of, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco importance judgment on the side of whoever’s reviewing these forms. Because we know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, for example, Federico Vatici got rejected.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is insane, by the way. Completely a person who is like he has his own website
⏹️ ▶️ John a popular website So around for years, yes, like I’m not gonna say a pillar of the community,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not an obscure place he’s not an obscure person and he’s not even like just
⏹️ ▶️ John like a random person who happens to have a blog like this is years and years of Working in like
⏹️ ▶️ John if he doesn’t I he should be verified under the the old Password Twitter went around to all the websites that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco tech exactly or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and say hey here you go go. Anybody who works your website can get a checkmark. He didn’t get one then,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the fact that he got rejected now makes no sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Because, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, like, for, you know, they always, you know, they had a lot of rule shifts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time of what kind of people would get verified. Initially, when it first started, it was basically, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who had the most followers on Twitter, and they kind of, like, worked their way down the follower count until they got just above
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my number of followers, and they stopped. And then they said… And then it was, okay, Okay, well now we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to do like, you know, public figures like celebrities, politicians and people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for the media. And that was kind of loosely defined the media. It always meant whatever kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco media I didn’t do. So it was, you know, not just bloggers and not podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not app developers. But if you work for like a journalism thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, however they define that. And it was it these definitions always shifted and were very vague and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really very much based on like, does some handful of people at Twitter think you’re important this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month? And then it was weird. It was like, if you worked for…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they declared a certain website or publication to be a verifiable publication,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anybody who worked for them would get verified in this big batch that they would do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you’d have people who wrote one article for a paper somewhere. They have 400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco followers and they’re verified. And then you have people who have like 50,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco followers who can’t get verified. It’s just it was always a weird system. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always been these kind of like vaguely defined, very like human judgey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of clarification. I know like one of our friends reached out about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year ago to try to get the three of us verified. And they told him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he knew a guy who knew a guy. And the response was, We don’t consider podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be media personalities at this time, and YouTubers were getting it, but podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were. It’s just like again. It’s always been this weird system, and it’s always going to rub me the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong way. And that’s why I started complaining. Eventually, I complained enough that I got verified, and I made a joke when I got verified that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, now that I got it in like three weeks, they’re going to just end the program. And they didn’t. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just open up to everybody, which I guess is better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, a couple things on that. So your complaint was originally, hey, like you said, it’s stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John to tie features and things that a lot of people could use to this whole vague status thing, right? Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying that whoever was to help you speaks for all of Twitter, but what happened was not,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, you know, Marco, you have a point. We should change the way we do things. Instead, it was, hey, you know, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we give you a checkmark, will you shut up? Like, again, I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the intent or whatever, But like it basically the person who did this view
⏹️ ▶️ John is not empowered to change Twitter’s policy right so they can’t like it’s not the CEO that did this for you I’m assuming right
⏹️ ▶️ John so they just tried to do the nice thing they could to make you feel better which is a good customer service move and it’s like I can’t actually solve your problem
⏹️ ▶️ John but how about if I do this doesn’t make you feel better and like you know what it kind of does make me feel a little better but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything to it to solve the actual problem because the person who cared about this was obviously not the CEO
⏹️ ▶️ John or anyone in a position to solve the problem. And as for the media things,
⏹️ ▶️ John to reinforce your point that anybody vaguely associated with the media thing could get one, when the
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter checkmark fairy came to Ars Technica, it was offered to everybody, including to me, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John am one of those people who writes like one article a year. I didn’t have 400 followers, but you know, I was not a…
⏹️ ▶️ John my contributions to Ars Technica, though they may have been large in size, were few a number.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and I was offered a checkmark and I didn’t take it because part of the conditions were you would be getting a checkmark
⏹️ ▶️ John as part of Ars Technica. So you had to use your Ars Technica email to be associated with it. And I didn’t want to checkmark as part of
⏹️ ▶️ John Ars A because I didn’t feel like I was part of Ars. Like I was a freelancer. I’m not, I don’t have any sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, stake in the company. I’m not even a full-time employee. I never have been right. And B,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want to checkmark as part of Ars Technica. I, because I’m a giant egomaniac or or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wanting to be recognized for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t want to recognize, give me a checkmark for being me, then fine, I don’t want one. Like I don’t want to be an
⏹️ ▶️ John architect, because coattails or whatever. So for multiple reasons, I turned that one down. And I figured
⏹️ ▶️ John like, look, well, you know, I’m never gonna check mark and never getting a checkmark, right. But this whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, whatever, I wish you could find the press release or whatever was opening it up to
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, the application process may be open to everybody. But as the teacher shows, it’s not as if
⏹️ ▶️ John they opened up the check mark to everybody. Not only do they not open it up to everybody, but their definition
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any sense. Because it’s maybe it’s a slightly broader definition. But if it doesn’t fit under
⏹️ ▶️ John the definition, then I shouldn’t get a checkmark either. And I don’t like that, because I want to checkmark and that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John because beyond all reason, I want a stupid checkmark. And as I
⏹️ ▶️ John wind about at length on reconcilable differences, I don’t need a checkmark like the people who actually need
⏹️ ▶️ John it. People who are actually the targets of harassment who who need these tools, people who have huge number
⏹️ ▶️ John of accounts impersonating them. And I mean, Brianna Wu is the poster child for this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that she doesn’t have a checkmark in her account makes no sense. She’s constantly in touch with Twitter, sending them hundreds of reports, getting
⏹️ ▶️ John accounts banned. And no one, at the receiving end of this flood of reports that are abusive to Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John goes, you know what might help this person? Maybe we should make her verified. And she has a huge number of followers,
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Like, every criteria that you could possibly think of, for someone who’s not a publication or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any sense so I’m frustrated with these strange rules I’m frustrated that even
⏹️ ▶️ John under the strange rules I still don’t have one and yes I did apply I applied on Wednesday
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to fill in a bio which I had never filled out on Twitter intentionally because again was another 10
⏹️ ▶️ John minutes of whining about this and reconcile the differences it’s impossible to write a bio that doesn’t sound
⏹️ ▶️ John god-awful so I just wrote a god-awful bio if you go look on twitter.com slash Syracuse or right now you’ll see my god-awful
⏹️ ▶️ John bio I had to put a birthday I already had a header image
⏹️ ▶️ John I when I do the application I was worried that they would get yelled at for my header image my header image is a picture from the video game journey which
⏹️ ▶️ John I love and everyone should play and no one should get be spoiled about and it’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John like a wallpaper that you could download from Sony’s website but technically it contains like copyrighted images
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever like I mean if you go to the Sony site it’s like hey if you’re just in journey come here and here are wallpapers and that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John wallpapers so I assume it’s free for me to take and put as my header image? I don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I filled it out. I have not heard back from them. Everyone else is tweeting, hey, I entered
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing into the application and I heard back and I’m verified and I have a checkmark, all sorts of checkmarks, blue checkmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John are sprouting everywhere. Honestly, I shouldn’t care. All I should care about is that the people who actually need checkmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John get them. And by the way, those people still aren’t getting them, which I don’t understand. But anyway, you need one, John,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need one. Yep, I’m not getting one either. This is like the good version of a Wikipedia page because everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John thinks they want a Wikipedia page, but anyone’s heard me talk about Wikipedia knows I have many
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with Wikipedia. I don’t want a Wikipedia page. It’s a curse more than a blessing. But a checkmark
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically only upside and no real downside. And anyway, I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. Let me tell you why you want one. I mean, because, like, you know, why I want one, you know, because we’re all egomaniacs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all. But like, you can look look at it from like the original purpose of verified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of like the lock icon on an SSL site you know like getting a little lock icon in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your address bar. First of all you can question it’s worth questioning like is that even effective because we know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we know very much that the lock icon and address bars has never been very effective because nobody goes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check it and all the web browsers keep updating their designs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more and more emphasize the security level of the site that you’re on or to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up even crazier and scarier warnings if something is not quite right and yet people still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get phished all the time and still enter their stuff into insecure forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So we know that that kind of warning doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work for the most part for most people because most people just don’t think to check that kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they don’t know to check that kind of thing and even if they know they sometimes forget and just miss it. Whether it serves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an original purpose is kind of it’s not that relevant because original purpose is not a very strong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purpose. What it really is is jewelry. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a prize. It is a sign awarded to you that says, I am important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because it is emphasized everywhere, you’re seeing those big blue check marks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all these important people in your timeline. So it is very much a status symbol. And whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need or want the additional filtering features it brings, you want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a special person. And honestly, when I got it, I have almost felt like a responsibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been granted to me and I have to tweet more responsibly now. It’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John How does one go about tweeting more responsibly? What are you not tweeting that previously you would have tweeted?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like getting a BS title at work to try to make you more responsible. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has totally worked on me where I’m like, well, I’m representing this blue checkmark now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I better, you know, it’s like how cops aren’t supposed to drink at bars in their uniforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of feel like I got to be good for this checkmark and be on better behavior now.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t say that it’s not really Marco? That’s not really me. That’s an impersonator.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it just it kind of feels like I’ve been blessed with this honor that I have to treat well. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not rational, but that’s how it feels. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for what it’s worth, there’s an account, which is at verified.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is an account on Twitter that from what I can tell follows every verified account.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it follows 190,014 accounts as we record. One of those accounts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ladies and gentlemen, is this guy. Because guess who got his blue checkmark a couple days ago?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did. And man, John, does it feel good. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, it’s okay. It’s not bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing that burns me up so much about your checkmark is that you got it six hours after
⏹️ ▶️ John filling out the application. Like, you filled out the application not too long before I did. Like, basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t fill it out because I was too busy podcasting with Merlin while trying to fill it out, which is why we ended up talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so when the show was over, I filled it out. You filled it out and you said, what, six hours
⏹️ ▶️ John later you got your checkmark?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was a little after noon on whatever day it was announced. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was just before I recorded the latest episode of Analog that I received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And so we actually talked Mike and I talk about this on Analog as well. But yeah, it was somewhere around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six or seven hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like showing up to like a really popular event just after the whole crowd gets there. Like there’s a line of five people
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you wait 15 minutes. There’s a line of 3000 people. So now I’m somewhere back in a queue. I just assume
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to get rejected because that would fit perfectly with the completely arbitrary pattern of like
⏹️ ▶️ John not giving Faticci one, rejecting Faticci and just never responding to Brianna, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John fits perfectly with the whole notion that is just like a hamster in a wheel over
⏹️ ▶️ John there or some kind of random number generator and no actual human with any kind of judgment is doing this. Because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was anybody with any kind of judgment doing this, like, not giving verified checkmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately to every single target of GamerGate, like, I don’t understand the meeting where you’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John should we do it and think about this and should we give them check no let’s just not ever do it for like a year
⏹️ ▶️ John does that sound good guys okay good let’s break for lunch like i don’t understand the logic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco i don’t even understand the
⏹️ ▶️ John neglect i don’t understand and how can it be staffed to such a degree that casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John wait time is six hours and that they they give him a thumbs up and yet all these other people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t get them it doesn’t make sense to me it doesn’t make sense anyway i totally recognize
⏹️ ▶️ John that this entire topic and conversation is obnoxious and that I shouldn’t care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care because they made us care. They manipulated us into caring with these blue checkmarks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there are some legit reasons that a regular person would want this, like people who
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need it like me, like I said, because you get more features that make Twitter nicer to use. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you’re thinking of the lock icon as great. It’s just like, I want my account to seem trustworthy and to
⏹️ ▶️ John people not to think it’s me. And I have had a few impersonators who’ve I’ve reported in their accounts have gotten closed and
⏹️ ▶️ John like whatever like it’s not I don’t have any any actual issues but put it this way
⏹️ ▶️ John if they literally opened it to everybody with 10 bucks I would pay 10 bucks in a second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah I mean like I registered the overcast account for and I I signed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up or I fill out the form roughly the same time you did I think john and I haven’t heard back from that either it’s still pending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I did it for for basically that reason of like, I wanted the Overcast Twitter account to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appear, you know, official to really make it look like this is a real business for a real app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that matters in the world because it’s good enough to get a blue checkmark. Like I want people to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is that it helps look more professional. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, we’re gonna do the same thing for the ATP account. ATP FM on Twitter. I want people to know that’s the official
⏹️ ▶️ John account of the show. And so a checkmark would be good to give them the reassurance that they like what was the ATP one because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just add ATP because that’s a different one and you might not be sure. And again, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing I think should be open to everybody as in if you have $10 boom, you’ve got a check mark
⏹️ ▶️ John no like a mechanical process with no humans involved, except for the verification part and that’s what you’re paying your $10
⏹️ ▶️ John for. But like the idea of being rejected for verification doesn’t make any sense to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, it is weird. With that said, in my what is this like three or four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days of living the sweet, sweet, sweet blue check mark lifestyle. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only noticed two differences so far. Did you get your gift bag? Yeah. Did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see that special present they gave us?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impressive. So good. That one was awesome. Anyway, so if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I look at the Twitter website in the settings area on the left-hand side where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it begins with accounts, security and privacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s another one which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe is new that’s notifications timeline. And I don’t recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having seen this before. And it says, filter tweets by, and then there’s a checkbox, and only one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of them that says quality filter. It says quality filtering aims to remove all tweets from your notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content or sent from suspicious accounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t yet turned that on just because I don’t feel like I really need to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what kind of people might need that feature? I’m having trouble thinking of any examples.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is this not available to everybody? Yeah, because I got the two accounts open here.
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not be available to everybody because, like, maybe there’s a computational or, like, scalability thing or whatever, but… Then too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad! Fix that! We have computers now! Computers do these things
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly! I’m trying to think of a scenario where it’s reasonable, but even if you’re going to give it to a limited set
⏹️ ▶️ John of people, who would you give it to? Who might you give this thing that’s limited? Say you only have, you know, 500,000
⏹️ ▶️ John to hand out, who would you give it to? I don’t know, maybe you would, like you said, divorce it from the verified and
⏹️ ▶️ John just offer to people who are constant targets of abuse, or no, maybe just not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so there’s that. And then it was actually Mike who got verified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a beautiful, wonderful turn of events got verified after we recorded analog. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of analog to lord over him and make fun of him for not being as cool as I am, which was delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, he had noticed once he got verified that apparently in the official app, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a notifications tab and there’s a new entry in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey segmented control there. So he sent me a screenshot and what he had was all mentions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I believe he said that the verified one was new. So he can look at notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from everyone, notifications just in terms of mentions, again, this is the official app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I guess mentions just from verified people or perhaps any sort of notification that’s sourced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a verified individual. And those are the only two differences that I’ve noticed. I don’t know, Marco, if you’ve noticed anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really, just because I don’t use the official client or the website very often. Same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. So most of the stuff only is visible in those places. And honestly, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be like, you know, if I started getting a lot of abuse again, you know, there were there have been periods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past where I’ve gotten here and there. I mean, nothing like what people like Brianna get. It’s not even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If that kind of thing became a problem for me, I would very much consider switching to these official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. Again, if you’re going to make this a content filter and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an abuse filter, you want as many people as possible who are legitimate account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holders to be verified. If you charge a bit of money to be verified, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco puts a big barrier in front of—not necessarily to the point where nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can pay, but not a lot of people will pay— in order to make a bunch of dummy accounts to troll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with or to harass people with. Typically, when you pay for an account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are less likely to be willing to just throw it away because you’ll lose that money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’d have to pay again if you want to come back to the service. My old friend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Something Awful Forums back from my early internet days, they had a system there where you had to pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it was $10 to register an account. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly effective at keeping out spam and crap. And if anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got banned, you know, if you broke a rule, you’d get banned, and like, you’re out $10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you wanna come back, you gotta pay another $10. And it really did make a big difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how well that community was run, and how little crap there really was there compared to the number of people that were there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that system probably doesn’t work for something that’s supposed to be as mass market as Twitter, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think they’d have to come up with a hybrid strategy where they would have to be like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will give out free check marks to everybody who we think deserves them, and then we will actually hire or
⏹️ ▶️ John set a policy where deserves make some sense to somebody in the entire universe, and then anybody can
⏹️ ▶️ John get it if they pay. Like, you need to hire, because you don’t want it to be like, oh, you know, so few people will pay. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be like, only people with this amount of disposable income are allowed to participate in Twitter, because I think Twitter has already
⏹️ ▶️ John established itself is sort of like everybody can be on Twitter. It’s open to everybody. It’s free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, maybe that’s not sustainable either, but it’s kind of a shame to take a service with that broad
⏹️ ▶️ John of appeal as opposed to something that’s like a community like Meta filter or those forms you were talking about where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going to be everybody. It’s gonna be a tiny subset, a very small community. And and even there, it’s kind of a shame
⏹️ ▶️ John to select only people who can afford to add that money. But you’re right that it is like incredibly effective,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, to raising the quality because no one wants to keep paying money
⏹️ ▶️ John to, to make sock pocket puppets because it just, it gets expensive and it doesn’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Um, I mean, I guess that unfortunately at the scale Twitter operates,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine people like running kickstarters to fund the creation of their sock puppet accounts. Like in the alternate universe where Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John was always a pay thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John would just raise tens of thousands of dollars from horrible people to constantly make it. And you know, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is like so many things Twitter does. This is in this weird state where it’s not clear
⏹️ ▶️ John what the new rules are. It’s not clear how long this will last. As Marco said, who knows? They could get rid of check marks
⏹️ ▶️ John tomorrow and split these features into two different things. But at least it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of motion. And by the way, speaking of the check mark, I use a third party client because I’m an old Twitter user.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always surprised when people use the official client, but apparently lots of actual people do anyway. And my third party
⏹️ ▶️ John client, it has an option for whether it should show the checkmark overlaid on
⏹️ ▶️ John the little avatars for individual accounts. And I always have that turned off. Because I didn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m going through my timeline, I didn’t like the visual indication that this person was more important
⏹️ ▶️ John and what they had to say was more important. I mean, if I dig into the account, if I ever have questions about, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John really the celebrity? I tap on their name and I can see the checkmark. But seeing the checkmark, mostly because I actually follow
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people who have checkmarks actually know, I don’t need to constantly be reminded that they all have check marks. And I felt
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was making me pay less attention to the ones that don’t have check marks. So I just turned it off on all of them, you know, pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John quickly after that, uh, that feature was available several years ago. And I would definitely not want to turn it back on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then you aren’t seeing our bling.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know. Believe
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thought, honestly, I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought you had had one for years. I’d forgotten about that whole little blow up thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. The funny thing is right after I got mine, Marco and I were talking privately and we had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concluded without a shadow of a doubt, collectively, that there was zero chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you would solicit your own checkmark because you are above that. And then fast forward like two hours and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John relay slack,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I totally asked them and I can’t believe I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it. No, I thought you knew this. I thought we discussed before I wanted to checkmark forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no, no, we knew that you wanted the checkmark. That wasn’t up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we also thought that there would be no chance that you would like apply.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t apply? No, you have to. You have to apply. Once they say it’s open to everybody have to apply like I just choked
⏹️ ▶️ John down writing that stupid bio I’m like kind of do it like you like in a little box where they say
⏹️ ▶️ John like tell us why we should verify you I wrote like the most craven like disgusting here’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m an important person thing like I am just I’m like this is the strongest argument I have
⏹️ ▶️ John here it is I’m not no no being coy no beating around the bush this is it thank God that’s not public
⏹️ ▶️ John what am I gonna do be like all shy and to mirror into like, well, probably you shouldn’t give it to me. I’m not that well known. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, I think I should have it like I maybe I should have taken a couple sentences to say. I mean, I can’t even be
⏹️ ▶️ John honest and say, you should not be giving this to me before you give it to every single person who’s ever been targeted by Gamergate. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s it. But if you if you start yelling at them and telling what they should do, also not a good way to get a checkmark.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, they’re just not responding to my request anyway. So it’s been three
⏹️ ▶️ John days now, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So on analog on the episode of analog that will be out by the time this episode is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. John, John, you’re John, Mike and I discussed what we had written.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was funny, because we took two different approaches on what we wrote to justify our coolness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I agree with you was it I am not a fan of writing that sort of thing about Oh, look at me, I’m just so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important. And let me tell you all the reasons why. But what I ended up doing is basically name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dropping people that I knew you and interact with that are also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verified. So like, that’s not a power move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My brother in law met Barack Obama once sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I mean, I’m serious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the approach I took was, you know, hey, I share a podcast with verified user Marco Armand and john Syracuse.
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that he’s verified that might have that actually, that actually strengthens it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right? That’s my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point. No, no, that was exactly my point. You know, and I talked about how I’m also on relay, which also has Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verified and CGP gray verified and, and my podcasts are heard, you know, by many thousands of people each week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John good approach. I mean, obviously it worked. But then again, like with this black box, we have no idea why it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could have been because what who the person who was inside to check your box listens to ADP boom, Casey less done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And Mike took a different approach. Shoot. What did he say he did? I forgotten now. But whatever it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John my name with a Y, which is much cooler than an eye.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what What it was, that’s what it was, was he had said, he thought to himself, well, what, why would they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made this available to everyone? It must be because they’re, they want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people to verify their, you know, their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so Mike was all, oh, you know, I’m really concerned that people that listen to me might not be able to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the real me, you know, and in playing the whole like a parody card and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very poorly paraphrasing what he said, go listen, go listen to that episode of analog. But we took two different approaches and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I gotta tell you, my bling looks great. How does yours look, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John But he got his too. Mike’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey approach worked
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I mean, Mike totally deserves one too. Like, I mean, it’s no question, but like that’s an interesting approach. I mean, like I said, I have
⏹️ ▶️ John had actual impersonators using my avatar and using variations on my name with different Unicode
⏹️ ▶️ John glyphs and stuff to make a thing like that has happened to me. Not a lot, but it has happened. He ended up going with that
⏹️ ▶️ John approach and it working. Was it, did he have real examples or was it just speculative as in like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t I don’t recall I feel like it was speculative, but I’m not a hundred percent sure about that
⏹️ ▶️ John You have no idea how annoyed I’m gonna be when I get rejected Cuz then where do I go from there? Do I
⏹️ ▶️ John just reapply every six months forever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three one month? Yeah, it’s one month
⏹️ ▶️ John every month I can’t I did save the paragraph of text I wrote in the box just so I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to think it up again So I’ll just paste it in every month but like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what a what an existence that is
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point I’m just gonna stop I’m not gonna be able to like to muster the
⏹️ ▶️ John It just What is the quote from Jerry Maguire and no I’m lying the world am
⏹️ ▶️ John I asking you guys Have you seen that movie yes, but forever ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually did see it, but I saw it like when it was new which was a very long time ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I know is I love looking at my bling every time it flies by after I tweet mm-hmm looks good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while I like I I actually had trouble recognizing myself on Twitter like if I’d like double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco click a tweet to like get the Conversation history and like mine would be at the root because I wanted to see like which of my tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is in response to Mm-hmm I for like the first few days I it didn’t register visually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as me at that like when I see the avatar with the checkmark on it So it’s like that’s not how I look on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, here you go. This is the scene that you guys don’t remember, but you should
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because I cut all this
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s full of quotable things. Oh, you’re not cutting my Jerry Maguire quote out. This is gold I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John this topic it’s so long well you but we don’t have much on the other end of it so you you
⏹️ ▶️ John know we need to fill it here this has been Jerry’s talking to uh whoever Kubu and Junior was playing
⏹️ ▶️ John like the athlete that he represents he’s a sports agent it’s I’m out here for you you don’t know what it’s like to be me
⏹️ ▶️ John out here for you it’s an up at dawn pride swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about oh I
⏹️ ▶️ John blew it I was so close so close anyway up at dawn pride swallowing siege
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I think of as a good description of reapplying to get twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John verified every month because that is a hell of a pride-swallowing siege.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh wow. Oh John, I genuinely feel bad for you and I really want you to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John verified. You
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t. No one should feel bad for me. For the love of God, no one, please
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you. But I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco important. This is the most pathetic
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco entire, it’s not actually important.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No it’s not, but it is. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John not feel bad for me, you should pity me that I care about this at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d do that too, but. Don’t cry for John, Argentina.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know something from pop culture or are you quoting like the Madonna remake?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No I saw the uh wait which one we came out like in the 90s? Madonna. That’s the Madonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John one. Okay that’s the one I saw. Yeah sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s fine. At least I saw one of them I mean come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah well anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um well I hope you get your check mark in no small part because it’ll make getting the ATPFM check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mark that much easier because we can say hey all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well it probably won’t because apparently the process is random and Vaticci doesn’t deserve one neither is anyone targeted by Gamergate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean this is part of the problem with any of these like human review it’s you know it’s just like the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like even if you set rules in place and even if the rules don’t change which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think for Twitter’s verification process those are two big requirements that probably have never been met before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but assuming you have you know codified rules that don’t change much over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you still have a team of humans enforcing them and like you know when when Viteechis went through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could it was right after this big rush started it It could have been a bunch of people who saw this giant pile behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, and it was right before lunch, and they were tired and they were grumpy, and they just started saying, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no, no, no, no. It could be so many things once you have, like, humans trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to review a whole bunch of stuff subjectively. It’s just… These kind of rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems will never be consistently enforced, as long as there is that subjective component to it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they should remove that, and it should just be, like, do you fit the basic qualifications? Can you prove your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identity with a government issued ID that we trust? And can you maybe pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few bucks for our time since we’re going to do this for a lot of people? That’s it. That should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all it is. And as soon as you put in judgment calls of, well, are you important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough? It’s never going to be consistently enforced.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, we’re doing pretty well. We’re about an hour in and we still have one more topic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left. And I think we might be able to dodge stupid Tivo for one more week. So we got to stretch this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. I will. We’ll see what we can do. So tell me everything that I could ever possibly want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know about serial number tracking and forecast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, now that you’ve ruined both product names of the things I was gonna make. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Wait. If he was looking at the show notes, you would know it was called that. I know. What was the other name?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The audio alignment? Side track. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John He didn’t say that, you did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it’s in the show notes and I missed it. It’s fine, it doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey sorry. Don’t worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you not announced forecast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been, I’ve kind of mentioned it here and there. It’s also, it’s in the ID3 tags of every MP3 I’ve made in the last two months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s just sitting right there. People have asked me on Twitter, like, hey, what’s this forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yeah, they figured it out. Oh, God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I feel such a turd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I’m sorry. Do we want to re-record that? We can re-record.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fine. No, no, now you have to explain the goofy origins of the name in typical Marco naming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am excellent at naming things. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is perfect, because this will delay TiVo even more. So please, tell me the name about this thing that I just spilled the beans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, so Forecast is my podcast post-production app for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It basically is an MP3 encoder as well as a chapter and metadata editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it allows you to input any audio file, WAV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AIF, you know, other MP3s, whatever else, and just edit the metadata on it. It encodes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to MP3 if it isn’t an MP3 already. It uses my parallel version of the Lame MP3 encoder like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I discussed a few episodes back. I did succeed in making that. It does work. The last few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes of this show have been encoded with it and nobody noticed, so that’s good. And it also can do things like edit chapters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You might have noticed in recent shows that not only have I been using chapters more in the encode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, but also that we’ve recently gotten here and there I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been throwing in some chapter images where you have a special image showing up at certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times in certain shows that’s topically relevant. And this is all being done by this app, Forecast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason I named it forecast is because it’s what comes before overcast. Come on. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, no, you got the three things. So it’s the connection to the weather. So overcast and forecast, you forecast the weather.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’ve also and then what was the one you just said? You’ve got the you do it before it appears in overcast. Uh
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, this application takes files and prepares them for overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. And overcast ends in cast, which is because it’s about podcasts. So it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these different, you know, all references in this name forecast so and also
⏹️ ▶️ John you are the famous creator of the podcast application instacast as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John right is that right I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah that’s I you know people for a while I thought I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owned like the insta prefix with insta paper and then Instagram came out and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John game is over because now like everybody just thinks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything insta people people think Instagram so So even if I tried to, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instacast was a different podcast app by a different person, but even if that never existed, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I tried to launch a new podcast app called Instacast, people would think I was ripping off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram’s name, not playing off my own name of my own products from, you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. So anyway, so my app is called Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s a Mac app, although as far as I know, there’s nothing really about it that would make it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would preclude an iOS version future if I really thought that it was warranted. But there’s not a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of podcast production happening on iOS these days. So the demand is mostly on the computer side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably mostly on the Mac side if I had to guess between Mac and PC. So that’s what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a small project. It’s not like a massive thing. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s in beta now, a very small private beta, and I haven’t really decided how to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how and when to release it and charge for it. And I talked a little bit about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Under the Radar two weeks ago so we’ll link to that. Just basically considerations of like whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you should even charge money for something like this or whether it’s not even worth the hassle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of charging money because like charging money brings a certain degree of overhead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of support burden and things like that. And if it’s only gonna make a small amount of money overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of a small volume of sales, it’s kind of questionable whether that’s even worth doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire run of Bugshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was charging for it and when I still own Bugshot, the entire run of it made something like $3,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And $3,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people, and it was for me at the time as well. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also took a pretty big portion of my summer to do that, and there was an opportunity cost. like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I probably should have been working on Overcast at the time and instead I made Bugshot. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to have made a relatively small amount of money over like a year worth of sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably wasn’t worth it in retrospect. And that’s why I eventually just decided to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it free and just, you know, learn from it whatever I could learn from having a free app in the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So with Forecast I’m kind of faced with a similar conclusion or a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dilemma here of do I charge for it or not. And I talked actually a little bit about this last week when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talked about Sidetrack, my alignment utility that also exists. Although Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way more in a releasable state because it’s just a simpler problem. But anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really know whether I’m going to charge for it or not. If I’m going to charge for it, it would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like 50 bucks. Because anything less than that, I don’t think it would be worth it. But the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, how many people are gonna pay for a podcast chapter utility? Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is a podcast chapter utility already in the Mac App Store today. I believe it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcast Chapters. It’s 20 bucks, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t look like it’s selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in meaningful volume, which is too bad, because I think this is a market that should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a strong market. With me going in there saying, I wanna be able to charge 50 bucks for this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not very promising that there’s already one for 20 that appears not to be selling very well. So I think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you gotta figure like, yeah, you know, I could push it, I could use my brand and my blue check mark to really sell this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how many copies am I really gonna sell? How many people are really making chapterized podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are willing to pay 50 bucks for my version of solving this problem? That number is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably something like 100 people at most in the most optimistic projection, 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. Probably more like 20 to 30 people, if I’m really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being honest. It’s probably a very small number of people who actually would buy this thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s so small, I’m leaning mostly towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even charging money for it, because it just seems like the overhead of charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money would not really be worth setting all that up. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, I also have an app called Quitter, which we plugged poorly last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode. I also have a Mac app called Quitter, and it would kind of be an interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learning experience to figure out how to charge money for Mac apps set up the infrastructure to charge money for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac apps. This is all outside the App Store because the Mac App Store does not really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer anything. It doesn’t offer enough to make it worth the 30% anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it ever did. Anyway, so big question is do I release this thing and then do I charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it? And then if I charge for it, how do I charge for it? And then the the follow-up topic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this which is how do I do license management and piracy prevention or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather piracy reduction. I guess I should say because I’m a realist here. I know how these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. So what do you think? What should I do here?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you weren’t going to charge for it, which you’re slowly convincing me before I was like, you should just charge a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of money for it because five people are going to buy it. And unfortunately you’re going to get free copies of those five people. So really
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to sell zero. Right. But now as you talk about it more, I’m like, well, if it’s going to be free, I start
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that like, not only should it be free, it should be open source because when some annoying corner case
⏹️ ▶️ John of the spec comes out there’s enough nerdy people that they’ll just you know send you a pull request
⏹️ ▶️ John and like like why why not get the benefits of it being free you’re not going to get the any of the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ John of making any money if you’re going to make it free why not go all the way the other direction and say not only is this free
⏹️ ▶️ John this is open source and then also like if you get tired of maintaining it some other person who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John more enthusiastic about maintaining it could take it over because you just want this tool to exist which is why you’re making it like you’re scratching
⏹️ ▶️ John your own itch here sure it’s not as if this is your grand plan for world domination right i think you would be fine if
⏹️ ▶️ John someone took it over and kept up with all these you know whenever you get a report like oh i tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John use your tool and didn’t work on this particular weird thing encoded with this like you don’t want to deal with that crap
⏹️ ▶️ John um so i would say free and open source is a good option
⏹️ ▶️ John or closed source and charge a huge amount of money as a deterrent
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep away the looky-loos. Yeah, and then see how it works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you really do want to figure out like how, how can people send me money for a Mac application?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, maybe as people were saying in the chat room, maybe make it like a tip jar type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not even like patronage. It’s not even like you’re promising that anyone that you’re even going to like put
⏹️ ▶️ John that money into further the development of this application, it’s just like, look, this is free. If you like it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to say thank you, put $1 in this jar, you get nothing for this dollar. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even guarantee that I’m ever going to make another version of this application. But if you just want to be a nice person, do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John could make as much money as the one where you charge five people 50 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might well, okay, so let me address these two separately, because these are two big topics, I think. So first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the open source question, that’s a very, very good question. And it’s an interesting theory of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should this just be open source? And I’ve thought about that for this and sidetrack. What I found, though, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in just being a person using computers for a while and a little bit, you know, a little bit of direct developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience, but mostly just being a user of this stuff. What I found is that there tends to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much value to entirely open sourced applications, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for fairly narrow uses like this. There is lots of value in open source components
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and utility libraries and stuff like that. There’s lots of value there, but the value of open sourcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire app here is not incredibly great unless there’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a lot of contributors working on it. For most apps, that simply doesn’t happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most apps, getting a lot of contributors is like this fantasy that you have when you think about open sourcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, but then if you actually do open source it, almost nobody contributes and you get a handful of pull requests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here and there, and then it just works. Then it’s like going through resumes, but people put all this work into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and then You have to, like, you know, you have the ones you want to accept, you gotta, like, you know, make sure they work. You gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test them with all of Casey’s unit tests and all this crazy stuff. And then, and even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones that work that you want to add, it might not really have been in the way that you would have wanted to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, or the code might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John messy. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta let go. When it’s open source, you gotta, like, let go of the thing. And I think you don’t want a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of contributors. I think you just want, like, two smart people contributing to it. And that’s it. And all it does is, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John relieve the maintenance burden for you with the idea that eventually you’ll be bored with it and someone else will just
⏹️ ▶️ John take it over and then you’ll be sending them five-line pull requests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but I mean I think in reality again that that’s a great theory in reality that doesn’t happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very often and also when you so when you open-source things you know especially a full app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that’s like you have the problem of like you’re generating work for yourself because you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to deal with the the contributions and and the reports from people and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to deal with the contribution you can just ignore it eventually people will fork it and like that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco only thing you’re a jerk no it’s not i think i feel like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John every open source thing i’ve ever done it’s been like look here it is maybe if i feel like it i’ll look at your pull request but
⏹️ ▶️ John if not like because if people are annoyed that you’re not taking the pull request they’ll just fork it and then like they’ve taken that’s the only way you get people
⏹️ ▶️ John to take it over is you just neglect it and then someone else takes over and they’ll go good done um
⏹️ ▶️ John like i i’m thinking of it as totally like not feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John any social responsibility because this is a very obscure
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Like it is not a mass market thing. It’s super obscure and it’s just kind of your way
⏹️ ▶️ John of having, it’s like buying a lottery ticket for removing a small amount of maintenance for your
⏹️ ▶️ John future, but it really is totally giving up ownership of it. So forget about like picking a cool name for it and having
⏹️ ▶️ John any ownership or any stake in it whatsoever. It’s just like completely open source. Like it’s the far extreme
⏹️ ▶️ John of these possibilities, which you haven’t ever done anything like this and the only reason I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John suggesting in this case is because this seems like the only time I would ever recommend it because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so it’s so clearly not not a thing that has any potential upside
⏹️ ▶️ John that like that is significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree with john unless you’re gonna be charging an absurd amount of money, which I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in principle, you could, because the kind of people that would use this are probably the kind of people that make a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent amount of money making these shows. not necessarily true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not necessarily true, but it’s certainly possible. But regardless of that, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John has convinced me, listening to him, that open sourcing is probably the best way to go. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the key to open sourcing it is that you can point at that GitHub repo and just say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, shrug. It’s up to you, man. I did my part. Now it’s up to you. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then if somebody complains to you that something isn’t working, you are completely absolved of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any guilt because it is within their power in principle to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a wonderful theory. That doesn’t work in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that way. No, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. Like you could just, it’s just a change in attitude. You just say like, I’m not offering
⏹️ ▶️ John you support for this. This is not a product. You didn’t pay me any money. Like if anyone actually complained, be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re getting what you paid for. I’ll refund all zero dollars of your money. Like don’t even respond to the emails. Don’t even look at the things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m good at that. Tons of, tons of open source stuff is like that. I don’t think anyone can get
⏹️ ▶️ John mad about it’s like, plop, here it is. And you can continue to edit your thing or like,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, there’s no obligation. I feel and this is, you know, this is a topic of some controversy in the
⏹️ ▶️ John open source world. People like once you have an open source, you have to like, maintain it and deal with pull requests. No, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m totally of the opinion. If you just want to plop a bunch of code down, and be like, here it is and never,
⏹️ ▶️ John never communicate with anyone in the entire world about it ever again. Just put it under a license. It’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John want it, here you go, fork it, do whatever the hell you want. You and your friends do whatever you want. If you don’t have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to change it, oh, well, you sucks to be you like, but whatever, I’m a programmer, I wrote this for my own
⏹️ ▶️ John purposes. And as a nice aside, I’m going to chuck it out there so other people can mess with it if they
⏹️ ▶️ John want. If I’m in the mood and someone sends me a progress, maybe I’ll incorporate it, but no promises. Maybe I’ll never look at it again,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I understand like that doesn’t feel good to a lot of people. It doesn’t. But like, to me, that feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like one of the beautiful things about open source like that you that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like rather than sort of keeping it to yourself like
⏹️ ▶️ John say you we take the the selling it to other people off the table which i don’t think it should be off the table but anyway say say
⏹️ ▶️ John the alternative was like i wrote this out for myself and i use it myself and this is the alternative like don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t hide it’s like it’s like uh taking all your belongings with you when you die right like you know as soon as i died burn
⏹️ ▶️ John every one of the the van gogh paintings i own because i don’t want anyone else to ever have have them. It’s like I made this thing for myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also I want to share it with the world. So if you want it, here
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. It is what it is. Uh, go nuts with it. And them having
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t affect you because it’s software. Like you can both have it at the same time. Um, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can both do whatever you want with it. Uh, develop it, not develop it, whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the final thing is like, it has all the benefits of being free because like if we look at the iTunes podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John directory, there are a huge number of podcasts. If you made a free tool like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John word would get around among the tons and tons of sort of like, you know, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the bell curve looks like for podcasts in terms of traffic numbers, the long tail of podcasts that are out there, there are a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasts. And I bet a few of them, if they needed a tool to do this, and word
⏹️ ▶️ John got out like, Oh, if you need a tool that does this, the easiest one is this free Mac app, click on this thing, download the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and use it. Whatever, you’re helping a lot of people do their podcast production,
⏹️ ▶️ John and if those people come looking for like, oh, I found a bug in this program or whatever, you don’t have to respond to them either
⏹️ ▶️ John because they got a free application off like a GitHub page. Maybe they won’t even be downloading it from your page, they’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading it from the seventh or eighth person who forked it, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, okay, and those are all reasonable concerns and reasonable points, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’m ready to give up that kind of control. I know. I
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I totally know from your personality you don’t want to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by open sourcing it, you close a lot of doors for yourself in the future. Like, I mean, yes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open some. Thank you, Richard Stallman. But you close a lot of doors for yourself of like, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I wanted to start charging for it in the next version or even just take this version and start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hurting for it? There are a lot of opportunities that you basically close off by doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, open source has a number of problems in today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world. I don’t know if this was always the case, but it certainly seems like today this is a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any kind of open source app now in the world of app stores will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lots of opportunistic vultures and scammers basically just taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, changing the name maybe if you’re lucky, and putting it on the app store for money and trying to make money off of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This happens to all sorts of open source applications now. It happens a lot. AppReview
⏹️ ▶️ John would never allow that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put a little icon of Mario on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Exactly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John call it Minecraft 2.0 and I’m sure that will go right through AppReview.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so basically, there’s a lot of problems with entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open source applications. That’s one of them. And so, yeah, I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’ll open source it. it, you know, if I ever decided that I was like done working on it and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was going to be unmaintained, you know, maybe then I would open source it. That would be kind of the classy move to do if there were no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obvious problems by doing that. But, you know, that’s, I think I’d keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it closed source until I figure out what to do with it. That being said, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, like, do I really charge for it or not? I don’t know. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ultimately, the world is better off if it’s free, but I have a hard time justifying working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it if it’s free. So I have to kind of balance that. Because every day I spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on this, I’m not improving Overcast. And I still need to do that too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This needs to be a project that I only work on in short bursts so that I can get back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to working on Overcast which is still providing the bulk of my software income.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a tough balance. I would love to be in a position where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could start making real money from podcasting tools and have that start being an important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough part of my business that I could spend more time working on it. But I think, as many people have found when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they try to enter this business, it’s just very hard to make money off of podcasting tools because even though podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really doing very well right now, the number of podcast producers is still fairly small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to things like blogging and stuff like that. It’s still a pretty small number producing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts. And of the ones who produce podcasts, there are so many different ways to produce them. So many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different tools people prefer to use or can afford to use or need to use in various conditions that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re working in that even if you make a tool, the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the market that will actually choose to use that tool, especially if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charged to charge money for, you’re talking about very small numbers of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you raise the price high enough to make it worth your time to develop it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people wouldn’t be able to afford it anymore. So it’s a very hard market to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really make money in directly through direct sales. Now of course there are other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategies I could use here. I could give away a whole bunch of great production tools for free that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all optimized for how Overcast works. And so this would put me in a position to do things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add new metadata formats that Overcast could debut being the first app to read them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would also piss off a lot of people, but that’s an option I could do. I could just have this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be something that pushes the MP3 chapter format, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love MP3 chapters. I hate M4A chapters. That’s a terrible format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This would help push it towards MP3, which Overcast deals better with, which everybody deals better with. It’s a much easier format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s actually documented. That’s a big one right there. Thanks Apple for never documenting the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M4AAC enhanced format. Anyway, there’s lots of options I have here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how interesting this is for all the listeners, so I guess I can move on from that portion of whether I release it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether I charge for it, and then we can move on to discussing Piracy! Fun, but first…
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Piracy reduction for developers
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⏹️ ▶️ John So based on your what we know about you and how you don’t want to do this open source and you don’t want to get away for free or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also what you said about the maximum addressable market for this application being relatively small,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s making me lean prettily heavily towards the idea that you’d not spend much time trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to prevent piracy because I’ve been discussing in slack for the past weeks and as has been discussed many times on the
⏹️ ▶️ John web, especially in the old days, back before, uh, you know, in the days of shareware and everything, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John invest essentially infinite time in trying to stop piracy. You will always lose. It’s almost impossible to stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, unless you’re really bad to your legitimate users and for what to,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get like two extra users out of an addressable market of a hundred. It’s just not worth it. Like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John not only should you not spend lots of your time on an application that you know is not going to make tons of money, uh, but
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time that you spend all that time should be on the actual application. Very little of
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be on the part that prevents piracy. You want to prevent super casual
⏹️ ▶️ John piracy, so do basically the simplest thing that will possibly work. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say that’s it. And then just like, you know, you don’t want to do nothing because it’s so easy to just do something
⏹️ ▶️ John and that helps. But and especially if, like, as you mentioned, the ambition to be like this
⏹️ ▶️ John could be a stepping stone to like a you know a suite of podcasting tools or an integrated integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast production application like you have to build your way up to an app like that it’s very difficult for single developer yeah with other applications
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that like but if you are going to build your way up to it you’d want to build it on a ladder of
⏹️ ▶️ John small applications that make money and that you learn things from and that once you do like Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John minimal casual piracy prevention kit you just reuse that and all other apps you do. And then, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s there’s a it’s an infrastructure win. Like you do it once, do it to your satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t worry about it again. And then try not to because as programmers, it’s fun to
⏹️ ▶️ John get sucked into like, oh, I can battle these hackers. And what if I did this clever thing and that and like you’re going to lose
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just a rat hole and no one gives you money for thwarting hackers. Like literally no one gives you money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s the old thing of like how many of those people would have paid if you prevented it,
⏹️ ▶️ John do enough to keep the people with a conscience vaguely honest and then call it a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s basically my thought here, too, which is if I charge for this, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I’m really leaning mostly towards keeping it closed source, but probably releasing it for free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I do charge for it, ultimately, I agree because I grew up as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a PC user in the late 90s pirating tons of crap as a stupid teenager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know how these things work and it’s been a while since I’ve been in that scene, but I’m pretty sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically works the same way now as it always has. The easiest case scenario is you share a key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even if you start doing like key checks, well then you just hack the binary to bypass the check and no matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how obscure and you know you can obfuscate the check, you can put multiple checks all over the code, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of strategies and techniques you can do and ultimately none of them really work for very long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can look at the gaming market, the PC gaming market, for all their wonderful tricks they’ve tried to do over the years and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of which get cracked fairly quickly. You know, granted a big reason those get cracked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because there’s a lot of people who want them to be cracked. And if for a very narrow tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, if there’s only gonna be like a hundred possible customers, you know, it’s very likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that none of those hundred people are actually like professional crackers. But But you know the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I agree that it’s not really worth spending a lot of time on it is worth spending some time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on because a little goes a long way. If you put in a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like all right I just bought it and I want to give it to Casey and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know do I email him a copy of my key and he just enters it and it works and then what if he wants to go to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friend is he just pass along my key to like you know how does all these things work or in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case where none of us have bought it you know, does he go on whatever the BitTorrent tracker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the month is and try to download it from there or download a crack from some, you know, big database or something? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried to pirate anything, but, or at least anything that wasn’t a TV show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I assume that’s how these things still work and you’re never going to win against that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, yeah, it isn’t worth a lot of effort. And there’s, and I am, I am of course not naive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to assume that every pirated copy is a lost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sale and that if I make it impossible to pirate on the craziest something that I can that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will somehow get all those sales again. Like I know that’s not how the world works but I would build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something you know I could do some kind of cryptographic key like that’s pretty easy. I have like a public private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key thing already set up to like you know I can verify that my server generated the certain string like and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know with a signature and everything but this all really seems like it’s probably not necessary at all because it’s probably not worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charging for at least for a while and maybe someday if I If I have a few years down the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco road, if I have a suite of tools that I can release together as one suite and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge $50 or $100 for that, maybe that becomes more compelling and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I charge then. But I just don’t see charging for this now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that would be really worth the trouble because I think at most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might make a couple thousand dollars over the course of a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that sounds like a lot of money to some people, but if I have to have this entire support system in place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make that, it’s probably not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, as I’m thinking about it and listening to you talk, the only reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see not to open source it on the assumption
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that it’s free, which is what it sounds like you’re kind of backing your way into, the only reason I can see not to open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey source it is if you wanted to eventually sell it down the road. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a weak argument to begin with, but if you make it free, there’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a support burden. It may not be quite as obnoxious as a paid app, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you still have a support burden. Whereas if you open source it, it should absolve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you of any support burden.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guarantee you it doesn’t. I guarantee it. Well, but that’s all in you, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the free one absolves you of support too. Because if it’s free, like I don’t think the open source gets
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the support. Like what the open source does is that I was just saying like if people do send you patches you don’t have to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John those but if you give a free app to that there’s no support button there it’s like it’s a free app
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is what I’m using right now I happen to put a link up on my website you feel free to download it and use it but
⏹️ ▶️ John you get nothing for me I don’t owe you anything again I will refund your entire zero dollars that you paid for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well but when if it’s open source then you can say we’ll go fix it yourself which is obnoxious but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t actually you can’t actually say that you should never actually say that and you can’t say that because nobody who complains
⏹️ ▶️ John knows how to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like I am a programmer. I use lots of open source libraries and stuff and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hardly ever fix bugs in them. I just if I find a problem with one I either work around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or I stop using it usually because usually it’s a deeper problem that I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco qualified to fix or don’t want to spend the time to get familiar enough with the code base to fix correctly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like how many podcast producers are also Mac programmers? Some of them are, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not a lot of them. Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair point. I really feel like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free app, you will definitely, a free closed source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, you will definitely get support requests and complaints. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it were me anyway, I would feel a lot more compulsion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, to address those because I’m the only person on the planet who can address them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as opposed to if this thing was on GitHub, which admittedly the people who are emailing may not have the capability
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fixing the problem. But, but at least there’s some other human being out there that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey able to. And that’s how I would rest easy at night is knowing, look, I’m not helping all these people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are whining about what doesn’t doesn’t does or does not work. But I’m also not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey standing in the way of them figuring out a way to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because any future designs on on podcast production products, which clearly he has, though all you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is giving a head start to your competitor to your future competitors essentially like someone could just pick up that code and say i’m going to use this as the
⏹️ ▶️ John basis of my competing suite and that’s that’s not a good plan if that’s here if you even not
⏹️ ▶️ John even plan to do that but like i might do that like like marco said it wants i want to leave that option open
⏹️ ▶️ John uh so yeah and getting back to the serial number thing i think the most important feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the antipiracy thing other than the fact that it exists at all as a you know a non-zero barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John is that it did not annoy honest people and
⏹️ ▶️ John is the part where most of these systems fall down because really we’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s again it’s so tempting to be to judge your anti-piracy system on how well it prevents piracy but your anti-piracy
⏹️ ▶️ John system should be judged on how little it annoys people who are not pirates and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really hard to do and you really mostly in terms of restraint you have to like back off and
⏹️ ▶️ John not be like but but but but if i can’t contact the server to verify the code I shouldn’t launch right it’s like no no
⏹️ ▶️ John you gotta you know just let go just think think about the honest user and how you never want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in their face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah no I mean that’s I mean I’ve because I am me I have brainstormed all sorts of crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways that I could do this that like thing of course I’m thinking about doing a passwordless email
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I do we already beta tested that the focus group is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still don’t have a problem with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s because maybe your emails likely show up in time And you’re not sitting there hitting refresh on your email client gun
⏹️ ▶️ John cursing Marco every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway those of us with really no clients love these kind of systems
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not the client. It’s your damn server. It’s stuck in a queue somewhere trying to get out of your ISP. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not my server It’s your client.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is why you don’t use the gmail web app kids. This is why you don’t use gmail
⏹️ ▶️ John kids Oh, Gmail’s fine. Oh, Gmail gets mail, Gmail gets mails like instantly. Except
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for yours apparently. Some, some,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no. Some websites, third-party websites that are not Google’s, I go and I do like reset
⏹️ ▶️ John my password. I click the reset my password link and like before the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ John button is up, it arrives in the other browser window in Gmail. Like, and when I see that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I realize it’s not Gmail that’s not checking my mail fast enough. It’s something else. Whether it’s internet
⏹️ ▶️ John traffic, email is a store and forward system, many things can go wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that it’s gray listing it’s always great if there’s ever a delay in email arriving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2016 it’s gray listing it is not like oh the postfix queue is full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no like that’s we are so far past that point these days so for those of you who aren’t familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gray listing is a type of spam prevention technique where basically the theory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that spam servers have to go through this massive list and don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to like retry and wait around if if the server says, I’m busy try again later. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea is, but a well-behaving mail sending server, if the destination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server says, sorry, I’m busy try again later, it’ll actually hold onto that message for a while, like a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’ll just try like every hour, or every, you know, whatever, it’ll try again after certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco short intervals and then followed by long intervals. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. So a spam prevention technique that a lot of places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is upon, like the first time you get email from a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sender, so you don’t already know that they’re legit, you just tell them, oh, you know what, I’m busy right now, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit. And the theory is that the spammers will just move on because the spam bots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have enough memory to keep track of all those things and try again later. But legit servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will try again later and it’ll get through. And that’s why so often the first email you get from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain service or whatever else will be delayed by like an hour. That’s what’s happening. It is not any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other reason. It is that. It is great listening.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not the first email from your servers that gets delayed. It’s random and it’s not an hour. It’s like 60
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds, but it seems like a long 60 seconds when I’m sitting there waiting for it to arrive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, it’s it’s kind of it’s up to you. Well, OK, I see you’re saying it where in your in your case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that long. But yeah, because like it’s I think it’s kind of up to the client as to like up to the sender as to when they try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again. But I think I think a common practice is about an hour or something like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s kind of like the the orders of magnitude in terms of like instantaneous is less than the speed
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, uh, you know, not waiting is less than, you know, a hundred milliseconds. And like, there’s a certain like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, orders of magnitude of like 10 milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds, one second of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, when does attention wander? When do you feel like you can go off and do other things? When do you
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like you’re waiting on it? And going from one, having a password and having it auto-fill
⏹️ ▶️ John and clicking the button is in a different order of magnitude than having to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John get an email. Like even before you get into the idea of like having to find a link to click on or whatever or
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste something or whatever it is you may have to do it is just a whole other order of magnitude in terms of responsiveness
⏹️ ▶️ John of like how long does it take me to log into this site and what other things does it involve so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright thank you to our three sponsors this week Hover, Trunk Club and Harry’s and we will see
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ 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 at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, accidental They
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to, accidental, accidental Check
Post-show: Passwordless login
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see all the articles? Like, oh, passwords, the end of the password, passwords are
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’re all just, I don’t know why I even click on those articles anymore, because all they’re talking about is like, oh, password, let’s log
⏹️ ▶️ John in. It’s like this, you know, hellscape where reset my password is the only way you can log into anything, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I mean, honestly, first of all, that is not that bad. I’ve done it. It’s fine. Second of all, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of the reality of how a lot of people log into things anyway, because a lot of people… I know, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a good reality. Like, it’s a bad reality. I don’t want that reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed, but a lot of people like to always forget their password to everything and they just click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that link almost every time they log in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but anyway, you still need a password for your email. You eventually get down to a one password situation and then, hey, why not just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s a question. What if my key system was a web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco login and what if it was basically like in the app, it would have like email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and password? No, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you not make a client-side application that does not have a server component? You do not need a server component
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. He’s just like, I want to write PHP, damn it. I know it’s a Mac app, but… Like there’s such a
⏹️ ▶️ John huge win to just giving people a binary and then they never touch your servers. Like it scales much better than
⏹️ ▶️ John you having to babysit servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well but that does not do anything about key sharing, which is probably the biggest form of casual piracy.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I’m saying like if it’s free. Like if it’s a free application. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to see you ship a
⏹️ ▶️ John free… Like Quitter. Quitter I guess you did. There’s no server component to Quitter, right? free but
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re just dying to do something in PHP like I’m gonna have a login page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like PHP I love all the backslashes in the namespaces no I’m just kidding I still haven’t used a the single namespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I hate the backslash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You quickly got over Windows then, huh?
Post-show: Windows or Xbox One?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so oh I could talk about that briefly if you want if we don’t have an after show it doesn’t have to do Tivo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, basically I I asked on Twitter so tiff wants to play a certain game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s only available on Xbox one yeah Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and Windows you asked on Twitter. That’s how you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna start the story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what’s the real start of the story
⏹️ ▶️ John real story is I was asked because I’m a person who you know who plays games on on Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey I want to play Inside, how should I do it? And I told you the answer, two days pass, and then you post on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey can anyone tell me how I can play Inside? As if we had never talked. As if the discussion never took place, as if
⏹️ ▶️ John what I had to say was just garbage and obviously not trustworthy, because what do I know, having actually played Inside on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What did you, you had this conversation with me or Tiff?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, one of you two, you’re the same person, you live in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, it’s not! Oh no they are not. No, wait a minute. Oh no
⏹️ ▶️ John they are not. We are two different people. She was like, can you convince
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco to do this? I’m like, you can convince
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, he’s your husband, I bet you have some influence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that area. So wait, so before I tell you what I did, what should I have done? So my options are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, should I attempt to go through the hassle of making a boot camp partition? And of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course, then having to install, first having to get Windows, having to install Windows, and then having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run Windows. Or should we just buy an Xbox One? Because they’re actually not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that expensive these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer, the surrounding context of this is that a bunch of people who are on the Encomperor have played Inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s the whole reason I wanted to play it, was like, they’ve already played it, and they wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a podcast about it, and if you want to be on the podcast, you have to have played it. And at this point, there was no implied schedule of like
⏹️ ▶️ John when we were gonna do this thing, but the point is they had just played it, like three or four people had played it. So there was a possibility that,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, three or four people played it. It could have gone up on the schedule for like next week’s show. And so time was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John of the essence here. And in that scenario, in the context of which it was asked, hey, a bunch of people played Inside, I want to play
⏹️ ▶️ John it too, I only have a Mac, the answer, the obvious answer is bootcamp, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just an investment for this game, because you can play lots of things in bootcamp. There are lots of games that are only available
⏹️ ▶️ John for Windows. And it’s really easy to do, and I know you have tons of spare hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drives laying around, and it gets you the game the fastest with the most bang for your
⏹️ ▶️ John buck. Now, the Windows thing is an issue, but had you followed up with me on that, I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John told you the same thing everyone on Twitter did, which is you can get a free trial. And does the free trial matter? For a game
⏹️ ▶️ John that takes three hours to play, who cares? 90 day 30 day free trial of Windows like this is the fastest way to go
⏹️ ▶️ John from zero to I have played inside with minimal especially if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not the one who has to install boot camp just make make you do it like just makes you do it and it’s fine but
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you have to do it yourself like I did before you even got to the point where you ask the same question on Twitter to get the
⏹️ ▶️ John same answers from other people I had finished the game already I didn’t stall I didn’t stall boot camp played the game finished
⏹️ ▶️ John it like it is not that bad and Now I actually have, I actually have a,
⏹️ ▶️ John had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 from back in the day. So now I have a more up-to-date bootcamp partition.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, yes, my 2008 Mac Pro played inside just fine at native res.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, of course. So Casey, what do you think I should have done?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you absolutely without a shadow of a doubt, buy the X-Bone. Because that is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco solution to this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, but you don’t know, like the backstory in the Xbox One is there’s two new ones coming out. A
⏹️ ▶️ John better version of the current one, and then a much more powerful one a year later. This is kind of the wrong time to buy an Xbox one as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much is the Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one you can get them on you can get on Amazon for about? 250 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely buy the Xbox one and then if you want to try to sell it for a hundred bucks later
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna be able to sell that Xbox one once the new ones come out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So so here is my dilemma basically like the Xbox is the lower effort Very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lower effort slightly more money version than just buying Windows or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the Marco version That is the Marco version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, probably right however And and if it was if it was a ps4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it already have a ps4. I might have done that however Our house is full of game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consoles that we’ve played very briefly and then they just sit around for the next seven years collecting dust under the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just I don’t want another console because like If you look at these two options, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do I have like after we’re done with this if? If it, whether it’s like a Windows partition, or an external
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows drive, or whatever, or this game system, what am I stuck with afterwards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the house? Like, what is going to collect dust in the house afterwards? If it’s a bootcamp partition, nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or at worst, an external disk of some kind. If it’s the game system, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admittedly is easier, I have this giant box sitting around, and these controllers, and these plugs, and these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adapters, and all this crap. I like I have games is we have a ps3 in the closet that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardly ever played we have a ps4 that we’ve played that tiff played like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two games on so far and but in VR stuff is gonna come out and make all these systems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco irrelevant anyway well let’s not go crazy here we have a 360 that without that I bought like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know back in like 2008 or something that’s that has very rarely actually you know we’ve used it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in bursts here there like to like to play a certain game on it or I play a certain game on it but for the most part it didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of use. Before that we had a Wii that didn’t get a lot of use because like everyone else’s Wii, we tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, had fun for a month and then never played it again. You know, somewhere we have a Wii Fit balance board where the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same fate happened. I mean, so like I have all these like giant plastic game systems all over the place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. You can’t really sell them. They’re not really worth enough to justify like their shipping weight once they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used and old. And so like I was like, what the heck do I do so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also the Xbox one in the current generation just seems like the loser system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I apologize for anybody who has one but it just seemed like I have so often in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life made the wrong choice on a format war or a game console generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something I’ve so often like shows in the losing side and then been stuck with this like losing hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know having all the problems that go along with that and so I try to avoid that as much as I can these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’ve done it so many times. Like I bought a DVD plus R drive. I mean come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. So I try to avoid that and the Xbox One just seems like it has so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitively lost this generation and you know some generations are closer than others. This one seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John Well the Xbox One that’s the reason you don’t want to buy now because it is poised to win the.5 generation
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re both doing. Like so when in the revised versions, the not the not the
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox that is essentially the same Xbox one, but smaller and quieter like it’s coming out like in a week. Yeah, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that one. Like, that’s fine. That’s just like what they normally do. But the one after that, which will be competing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the new new PS four, they will both be more powerful consoles. The new
⏹️ ▶️ John more powerful Xbox one will be much more powerful than the new more powerful PlayStation four. So it’ll be an inversion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the current scenario where the PlayStation four is slightly more powerful. This will this will widen the gap in the
⏹️ ▶️ John opposite direction. It will not be enough to make the Xbox one do better in this generation? Probably not, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since they’ll have to make the games play on the Xbox one too. But it’s all it means is
⏹️ ▶️ John that this is the wrong time to buy an Xbox one, essentially, unless there’s a whole bunch of games that you know, you want to play. But more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this whole big thing that you’ve this that you’ve gone through, the most salient fact here is why you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John been worrying about this. Tiff has not been playing inside and she can be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco done already. It’s a three hour
⏹️ ▶️ John game you could have been done like all this hemming and hawing is like pointless and like, oh, you’re not stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John with much in Steam. Not only you’re not stuck with much, if you make like a boot camp partition, that is an asset, she
⏹️ ▶️ John will not delete it. There are tons of games on Steam that are only available on Windows. When they have Steam sales, she’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John buy something for three bucks and get a day’s worth of fun out of it. And that’s a good deal. Like, you won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and I know you have hard drives hangar, you don’t have to buy a hard drive, like you have them there. This you
⏹️ ▶️ John should have already done this. I feel like you’re failing as a husband, and probably as a father, Adam is disappointed in you, too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the other the other side of this the rationale on the boot camp side is I find Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dirty like I don’t like Windows. I I was there for so long I Fled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t want to go back and I have I have occasionally maintained boot camp partition on my own computer on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own Mac Very occasionally and the last time was a very long time ago Because every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I do it I regret having done it because I just I realize how much I hate Windows and how much I actually Don’t like gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much anymore anyway, but TIFF does play games So you know so I wanted to I want to do something for her so I but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco her computer has like no free space because she has tons of photos on it because she’s a photographer so tons of photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there there’s no free space in the built-in drive I eventually learned that oh you can actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot camp on external drives these days I didn’t realize that until fairly recently that solves a lot of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems because then like I don’t feel like I have this like dirty Windows partition sitting around like junking up my Mac all the time because I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unplug the drive and put it in a drawer and then it’s it’s gone you know so I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also didn’t want to put it on a spinning disc because those are huge and ugly and loud and I actually don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any two and a half inch pendants I only have three and a half inch ones that I could devote to it and that would be even larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even louder and even hotter and slow and I don’t think I even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any three and a half inch enclosures
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a lot of excuses I installed it on a big spin through by five inch disc and you know what I already played the game
⏹️ ▶️ John good and I hate Windows more I guarantee I hate Windows more than you, guarantee. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, so instead of doing any of those options I had to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something, of course, because I like buying things. I went on Amazon and I bought one of those little Samsung T3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco external SSDs. Oh, of course you did. Yeah, because they’re great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall. They’re fantastic little SSDs. And I didn’t have any other SSDs that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large enough. I had like an old, really tiny one, but none that were large enough. So I just bought the 250 gig one for like 80 bucks on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few days ago. It arrived yesterday, I installed it all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco morning, I followed the Stack Overflow instructions on like how to do an external Windows. First you have to like load up VMware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load up Windows in that, use the disk image tool and whatever automated install tools
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever to do all this stuff to make it configurable on the external drive. Then install Windows on the external drive using these other Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco installation from your VMware. It’s like all this crap. It’s like all right, I’ll put all this crap on my laptop to configure all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want this cluttering up my desktop. So, like I don’t want a VMware installation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never gonna use that. It’s just gonna cause problems for me. So I just put it on my laptop. I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So then I configured it all and now it works. And as of this morning, we have now this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bootable little Samsung SSD, this little USB SSD that we can plug into either of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our computers whenever a game comes along that we wanna play and we can just play it. I installed Steam and our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco account for Steam is already set up. I already bought and downloaded inside. It’s all ready to go,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so Tiff can now play inside by plugging this into her computer and rebooting. And then when we’re done, we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unplug it and put it in a drawer. And if I really need a disc for external use, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on a trip or something, I can just bring this disc and we have a disc. And afterwards, I don’t have this giant game console collecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dust, I have this useful little external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m reminded of what Tiff told me when I was telling her that she should speed you
⏹️ ▶️ John along to get this done several days earlier instead of asking on Twitter and doing all this other stuff and not listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to the things that I already told you. You told her, not me. She told you too. You live together.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, do you know what she told me? She said, this is what Marco does. You just have to let it run its
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know these so well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just have to, this is what she said. You just have to let it run its course. Spoken like a woman who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John she’s dealing with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one knows me better than her.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it has run its course. You have acquired a new toy, you have read web pages
⏹️ ▶️ John about how to do something techy, and now you’re happy because you don’t have an Xbox in the house
⏹️ ▶️ John and you both have the capability to play Steam games. I just can’t wait for you to be fighting over this. I guess you could just clone it at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point, but then you have to look up Windows disk cloning tools. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guarantee you there will never be a time when Tiff and I both at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time want to play the same Windows game.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not going to happen. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should both play inside, it’s fun, although, yeah. You
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can just watch her play. It’ll be fine for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all I’m going to want to do. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I cannot believe you spent this much time on this. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it you’re supposed to be doing on overcast that you’re refusing to do or avoiding doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with such passion that you’re writing Mac apps and installing Windows a new watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app? Oh, from scratch for watchOS 3. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what I have to be doing. Because you skipped the generation like Apple and their Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because the generation sucked. Show me any watchOS 2 developer who’s like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I did did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t think of any. Underscore is glad. Is he? Because now he has the experience. Now he can do watch apps in