511: Moving to Antarctica
01 Dec 2022Increased traction for Mastodon, fallout from App Store ads, and progress on ButtDB.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Sharrows
- EVERYONE has written in to tell us about the bike-lane symbols, thank you, no need for anyone else to write in – ed.
- The ATP On-Demand Store is live for your holiday needs!
- Follow-up:
- Bridging
async/await↔ Obj-C (via Aaron Farnham) - Some updates on Mastodon
- There’s a WWDC video about instrumenting/tracing async issues
- Xfinity Wi-Fi does not use customer’s bandwidth (via Clayton O’Neill)
- Casey’s 🍑💨 about iPad at the park bench picnic table
- Bridging
ffmpeghas been ported to web assembly- Reactions to App Store ads
- Gambling ads
- iCloud Storage Over the Years
- The Talk Show #361: A Fit of Pique with Federico Viticci
- Apple Keynote Search Engine
- Apple Pauses Gambling Ads
- Gruber’s Take
- Michael Tsai
- Employees aren’t happy either
- Xcode Ads?
defaults write com.apple.dt.Xcode XcodeCloudUpsellPromptEnabled -bool false
- Post-show:
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code atp for 10% off your first order.
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. New accounts get a $100 credit.
- Kolide: Kolide is a cross-platform endpoint security solution for teams that value privacy and transparency. Check out our manifesto: https://honest.security.
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Sharrow copy-and-paste-o
- On-demand shirts
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Mastodon & Ivory
- Movetodon.org
- RecDiffs: Monetizing Twitter
- Sponsor: Linode
- ButtDB progress
- Follow-up: Xfinity Wi-Fi
- Follow-up: mmWave speeds
- ffmpeg ported to WebAssembly
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Fallout from App Store ads
- Ending theme
- Post-show: ButtDB
Sharrow copy-and-paste-o
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow, that’s a weird one. I wonder how that happened. Oh, you know, I think, okay, it’s probably just a copy and paste though. I think it
⏹️ ▶️ John was, yeah. Copy and paste-o.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we making that happen? Is that a thing that we’re making happen?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Copy and paste-o? Yeah, sure. I meant to kind of yell at you on Merlin’s behalf because you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just sh***** on all over Merlin for Sharo, which I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why you’re grumbly about it. It’s Sharo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Long Island, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, you’re crapping all over Merlin for Sharo, but then you busted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out Shoot. What was it? It was not a round wreck. There was something else that you’d said. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t bust out squircle. I did not invent squircle. That’s the problem with Sharo is the Merlin like
⏹️ ▶️ John Inventing a terrible word but squircle is not I didn’t invent squircle squircle was before all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first of all, I don’t I don’t think Sharo is bad However, I do agree that it seems to be a Merlinism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that no one else uses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Whereas squircle is a thing. It’s a term of art. I didn’t make up squircle. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John about squircle. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not yelling at you about squircle. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John are. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yelling at me about squircle. No, no, no. Because my point is, to my brain, they’re both, I can’t pronounce this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word properly, but they’re both portmanteaus, you know, share arrow and square
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John circle. If I say
⏹️ ▶️ John like a pent oval or something, feel free to yell at me, but squircle is not on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I’m sorry. All I’m saying is you’re grumbling at Merlin for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one portmanteau yet you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John because he’s making it up and it’s dumb where a squircle is pre-existing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pre-existing condition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So he’s not he’s not given the right to create
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no only to no I mean he
⏹️ ▶️ John can try to make he can try to make Shiro happen but good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So he does not have the C in crud is what you’re saying for those who are confused Shiro is the Merlinism which I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco I actually liked it is the Merlinism for a share arrow. So, you know, like the square
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a little arrow popping out that you see is like a share, a share icon on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, well, we’ll know he’s made it when you go into SF Symbols and type sharrow and it comes up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I didn’t mean to start this episode antagonistically, so we should probably come up with a happier pre-show than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we can’t. the weekend. Here we go. you
On-demand shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so if you wanted to order a shirt but missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sale because you don’t listen to your pal Casey and do your vision exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and visualize where you’re going to be when you can actually order things during the time limited sale,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well guess what, baby? The On Demand store is back open. And John, would you mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking us on a quick tour of what we have available, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. Normally, I wouldn’t even mention the On Demand store for the podcast listeners because the the podcast, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hear about the real time limited store which has much better quality shirts with better quality printing that yes
⏹️ ▶️ John cost a little bit more money.
⏹️ ▶️ John on this special occasion only I will mention the on demand store because the holidays are coming up
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you did happen to miss the other sale or you’re just desperate for a gift for a nerd in your life or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John the on demand store is up. The products we have in the on demand store are the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 and M2 shirts, no suffix, just plain old M1 and M2, also no back printing
⏹️ ▶️ John on any of these so if you wanted a shirt without anything on the back these all have nothing on the back right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that for the printing process that they use on these cheaper shirts I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John rainbow colored M1 and M2s don’t look as good as I hope the monochrome ones will look so we have
⏹️ ▶️ John monochrome M1 and M2 shirts as well there it’s just white printing on it and that I think will come
⏹️ ▶️ John out a lot better with this less expensive printing process and we also have monochrome
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP shirt. And for the rainbow M1 and M2 logo shirts,
⏹️ ▶️ John the shirts are just black because the logo you know has so many colors on it, it doesn’t, you know, it goes well with black.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the monochrome shirts, all the shirts come in different colors. And if you load ATP.FM slash store
⏹️ ▶️ John and wait a few seconds, you’ll see the shirts rotate through all the different colors that are available. So there you
⏹️ ▶️ John go. If you’re desperate for shirts and you missed it out on it before and you want a chance
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy slightly less expensive but slightly lesser quality shirts, they are available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. What about a chicken hat?
⏹️ ▶️ John We do not yet have more chicken hats. The chicken hats remain sold out. I promise you, if we
⏹️ ▶️ John manage to get more chicken hats in time for the holidays, we will tell you on this program. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably not going to happen. Because we are rapidly manufacturing and shipping all the chicken
⏹️ ▶️ John hat orders that we’ve already received. And we have made another order, so there will be more
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken hats eventually. But anyway, stay tuned to this program. In time for summer
⏹️ ▶️ John next year? Yeah, right? They’re going to be here in time for winter in the northern hemisphere this year. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a question of, like, will they be here in January or whatever. So we’ll let you know on the show.
Sponsor: Kolide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Collide, an endpoint security solution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that uses the most powerful untapped resource in IT, end users. When you’re trying to achieve security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goals, whether for a third-party audit or your own compliance standards, the conventional wisdom is to treat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every device like Fort Knox. Old-school device management tools like MDMs force disruptive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agents onto employee devices that slow performance down and treat privacy as an afterthought at best. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way of doing things turns IT admins and end users into enemies. And it creates some security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems because users turn to shadow IT just to do their jobs. So collide does things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco differently. Instead of forcing changes on users, collide sends them security recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via Slack. It’ll automatically notify your team if their devices are insecure, and give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step by step instructions on how to solve the problem themselves. By reaching out to employees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via friendly Slack DMS, and educating them about company policies, collide can help you build a culture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which everyone contributes to security because everyone understands how and why to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for it admins collide provides a single dashboard lets you monitor the security of your entire fleet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they’re running on Mac, Windows or Linux. You can see at a glance which employees have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disencrypted their OS up to date their password manager installed whatever else you might need, making it easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove compliance to your auditors, your customers or your leadership. So that’s collide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user centered cross platform endpoint security for teams that slack. You can meet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your compliance goals by putting users first visit collide.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find out how. If you follow that link, they’ll hook you up with a goodie bag including a t shirt just for activating a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free trial. That’s collide k o l i d e.com collide.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you so much to Collide for sponsoring our show.
Mastodon & Ivory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some follow-up. With regard to what I have called FC Model 2 in no small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part to try to encourage Marco to come up with a better name.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh wait, I have a better name. I just haven’t told you yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. Well, are you sharing it now or no? No. Okay, good talk. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so with regards to FC Model 2, aka Redacted, and Async Await
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then bridging Async Await into legacy Objective-C code, I certainly, and I think John also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was wondering, hey, how does that even work? And Aaron Farnham wrote in and pointed us to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an entry on GitHub within Swiss dilution that talks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly about this and talks about, hey, how do you go from Objective-C into async
⏹️ ▶️ Casey await and how do you go the other direction? And it talks about it. And it’s pretty straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and reasonably easy to read. And so, if you’re interested, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig into that. And the short, short version is basically compiler magic based on convention. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s more complicated than just that, but that’s a short, short version. As an aside, however, I wanted to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a toot that Marco made like a day ago. I would like to read it to you. This is Marco Arment at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mastodons.social. Spent the day working in Objective-C for the first time in a month. And for the first time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hated it. I think I finally fully crossed over Swift all the way now. I know, welcome to five years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago. And to this, I just would like to say, as I tooted, finally.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure about that dramatic reading. It didn’t really sound like Marco’s voice. And another thing before we get- Laughter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait, would you like Marco to do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John dramatic reading?
⏹️ ▶️ John Before we get to the substance of this, there is the problem that for many years, lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of us, including me, have occasionally referred to tweets on Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John with the word toot. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John an informal way to say tweet without saying tweet, right? And what you’re trying to say
⏹️ ▶️ John is Marco posted something on Mastodon, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I think they’ve decided to change the name though, haven’t they? Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John now that and the Mastodon has since stopped calling them toots like as of a while ago Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know because there was some controversy because some spoilsport was like I don’t like toot it sounds whatever anyway That
⏹️ ▶️ John they change they change it to post. So now when someone says toot, I can’t tell if they’re You know
⏹️ ▶️ John fancifully talking about something on twitter in a kind of informal fun whimsical way or if they mean
⏹️ ▶️ John The things on mastodon that are no longer called toots. Anyway, this was on mastodon continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which, by the way, by the way, I’m so now that I think they’ve publicly acknowledged this now that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god, I’m on the tap bots ivory beta, which is basically tweet bot for Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why are you on that beta and I’m not? This I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both of us are, both Marco and I.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why am I not on this? I’m the only one who is posting any content related to Mastodon clients on
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon and you both get on the beta? This is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m outraged. You should be. It’s really good. Like, okay, look, it’s just tweet bot for Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? It It doesn’t have a unified timeline, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? No, it does not have a unified timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s TweetPod for Mastodon, and that’s exactly what I want. So it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, what’s great about it, like, you know, as I’m trying to give Mastodon like a real solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, and honestly, I really do think it’s getting quite a bit of steam. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey think I think that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of people who I who I have followed mostly on Twitter, a lot of them are there now as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or instead. And there is enough of a community forming there that I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this this might stick especially once the app situation gets worked out, which is so I’ll get to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a second. But really, like, the the community that is forming on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has already formed, but you know, the community that is growing on Mastodon is really seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a bit of traction, not necessarily amongst like, you know, quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non geek people. I’m sure I mean, there are some non geek people there. I don’t think it’s anywhere near as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco successful as Twitter was and probably ever will be. But there’s enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who I want to follow, who I do follow, who are there and posting there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think if you consider yourself to be in similar circles of interests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as us, I think you should go try Mastodon. It’s time. It’s like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a lot of good posting happening there. There’s a lot of great people there, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting people there. Many of the people you know from Twitter and from our little nerd circle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are there. Many people who are outside of that circle are also there, which is even better because you get to diversify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re seeing and who you’re interacting with. It’s time. It has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won the current battle of where’s everyone going. I got in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco intervening time between the last episode, I also got into post, the post.news.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems fine, but no one I know seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And there’s no native app, it’s just like the PWA, like just the web app icon on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it just seems like, I don’t know why I would use that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Mastodon is there doing a better job of a similar thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, so far, I’m really getting a lot of success with Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m telling you, what changed it for me was when I got on this beta.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God, because when you’re a Twitter user and you try Mastodon, some of the friction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you encounter is, wow, there’s a bunch of weird new terms and conventions I need to learn. Some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friction you encounter is the whole nerd setup of like I gotta choose an instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and figure out where people are, and okay, that’s another thing. And those two, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of solve themselves once you get over the initial day of usage. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer term, the paper cuts that hit you are, wow, this is weirdly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from Twitter, but a lot of that is simply because the apps are all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different, and there’s a whole bunch of different Masson apps, and I have not been super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thrilled with any of them, frankly, I’ve tried I think five before Ivory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and including ones that are still in beta, ones that people say are great, and they’re all different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degrees of fine. But, but they’re not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you are accustomed to Twitterific or Tweetbot, which really provide great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter experiences, none of them are up to that level, not even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like using a web app versus using a native app. It’s that level of difference. So now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I, for the last like day or so, have had Ivory, which is effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tweetbot for Mastodon. It works like TweetBot. It looks like TweetBot. It feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like TweetBot. That makes such a massive difference in my opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall of Mastodon itself because now it seems much more like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a drop-in replacement for Twitter. There are still important differences, but they’re much more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor once… now that I have the exact same interface to it on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone than I have for Twitter because I’m accustomed to TweetBot. I’ve been using it for years. I’m extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confident now in the future of this because while it is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s certain areas where it’s never going to be like Twitter. Like, you know, the whole, you know, like there’s no quote tweeting, the Federation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle, like, you know, there’s different things that it’s just, it’s never going to be like Twitter in certain ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s definitely still all of the challenges we mentioned before about scaling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moderation, the Federation reality, you know, various like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of challenges in Macedon for sure. But I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the app situation once once the Ivory’s come out for because they’ve also they’ve been they’re making a Mac version,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’m not on any beta for that yet. But that would change everything for me. Like because right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I have TweetBot open on my Mac all the time. And I have I have four different columns open,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have, I have like my, you know, my account, then my mentions, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP’s mentions, then overcast mentions, because I have to be monitoring everything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are saying to these other two business accounts that we have to care about, right? So and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s and I can post to any of those three accounts from the app super easily switch between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, etc. So that’s it’s an important part of my workflow. The the Mac app situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for mastodon is dire. But But now that they’ve said they’re working on a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version, like from tap bots. If it’s anything like tweetbot for Mac, that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really raise the bar for me. And that’s going to be, you know, super great, just drop in replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Twitter. And at that point, I think I really might substantially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move over. Right now I’m kind of, I’ve kind of partially moved over. Once the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app situation gets worked out. I think I might really move over. Because it’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer place to be in a lot of ways. And, and again, yeah, there are problems. There are going to keep being problems. But it’s funny,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’ve crossed a threshold where… When I was trying out Post the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other night, I was like, you know, here I am in this proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco closed system, in this private VC-funded, Andresen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Horowitz-funded company. Why am I doing this? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve already been burned by one giant VC funded company with a closed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social network, why would I invest my time and content into another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one when we have this kind of open standards based ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over here in Mass Admin Activity Pub land? Why would I invest in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some closed VC funded one again? That thought process and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emotion, I don’t think anybody had that thought process a year ago or even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a a month ago necessarily. So I think it’s really interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon and the ActivityPub environment, the whole ecosystem there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is really gaining a lot of steam right now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think a lot of us are going to start thinking this way of like, now it’s going to be very hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco convince any of us nerd types to join closed, privately held,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VC funded social networks when we have this other ecosystem that we can participate in instead.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the ones that are already there, like Instagram, those will stick around because they’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco established. But for something to replace Twitter in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter has always been the more nerdy social network. It’s been the information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco junkies, the tech nerds, the news and politics nerds. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been that kind of community much more strongly on Twitter than the other social networks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that group might actually start to care in a meaningful way, like, wait, why should we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go invest in some other closed thing? Especially the nerdy half of it, which actually understands these kind of differences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even the information junkie part, I think they’re gonna largely feel burned by Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you go over to look at something like Post, and like, yeah, there are a bunch of people posting there, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not my scene. And I think my scene is now much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more likely to stick with the open ecosystem. And I feel really good about that. Like I hope it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works out. Again, major challenges around scaling and moderation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are massive challenges in this open ecosystem that I think are gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really big problems in the future to tackle. But I don’t know, maybe we’ll figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it out. I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been about this world now, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m seeing it really start to take off, and I’m feeling that feeling of, I don’t want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco invest my time into building up some giant following on post or whatever, when I can do this instead.
⏹️ ▶️ John JWZ has an even more, in his typical fashion, forceful and extreme version of what you just said about
⏹️ ▶️ John post in a blog post entitled, PSA, Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s about post and Hive and other things like that. And in terms of people ending up on proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms or whatever, it has happened before, and it will happen
⏹️ ▶️ John again. I mean, how did we all end up on Twitter? Part of the reason we all ended up on Twitter is because when we all
⏹️ ▶️ John went on Twitter, it wasn’t clear that Twitter would be anything other than a curiosity. People don’t, you know, if you didn’t join
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter in January of 2007, you don’t know this, but like Twitter, there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John million things that happen on the internet, and they come and they go and whatever, just so happens that Twitter became a thing. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason it got us all there is because that was a technical curiosity and we’ll try it out, the same reason we’re trying all those things out. And then it snowballed
⏹️ ▶️ John and we were already there and it became sort of self-sustaining in the way that social networks do. You could say
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing about our favorite computing platform. How are we all using this proprietary,
⏹️ ▶️ John publicly traded company that runs this closed ecosystem that creates our
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and our Macs and controls the app stores that do them? And we
⏹️ ▶️ John could be using an open alternative that is open source and has actual meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ John competition instead of two companies that control the entire market. And the answer to
⏹️ ▶️ John that question is the same as the Twitter answer we used to be, which is, well, Apple makes really good stuff. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of got there first and they built momentum and pulled us in with really good products. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they aren’t currently run by a terrible person who’s making bad decisions. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what would it take for us to go to Linux on the desktop or whatever? Well, things would have to get pretty dire
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple for that to be a thing that happens. And that’s basically what happened with Twitter, things
⏹️ ▶️ John are getting pretty dire, as far as a lot of us are concerned over Twitter. So we’re looking for alternatives.
⏹️ ▶️ John And luckily, there is an alternative. And then when it when it comes time to, you know, look for alternatives,
⏹️ ▶️ John then we can say, Okay, well, among the alternatives, let’s choose the one that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a not a repeat of past mistakes, not a private company that, you know, controls
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire platform, top to bottom, it doesn’t even have a web UI or whatever, can we find something better than that, and more
⏹️ ▶️ John open, right? And if, like, the reason we’re doing that is because we
⏹️ ▶️ John already like Margaret was saying, he already has the habit of using Twitter, it is a known quantity, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a technical curiosity, like, I wonder if I’ll enjoy reading and writing small snippets of text,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, no, we know that’s a thing already. So it’s not like we’re stumbling into this, just trying out a random thing, what we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for is something to fill a similar role in our lives. If you know, Twitter is not going in
⏹️ ▶️ John a direction that we want, right? I think the same thing would happen if Apple started going down the tubes would be looking for it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, laptops and And mobile phones are still a thing, so now I need to find a new place to get that. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John much more plausible than an open solution to the problem that Twitter tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to solve can happen and be feasible than, for example, to say, oh, let me find
⏹️ ▶️ John another mobile phone platform. Because once you get past Apple and Android, it’s slim pickings. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people have tried. We’ve just got these two left, and that’s a big problem, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sure we’ll talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. Well, Elon’s going to do it soon. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John worry. Yeah, no, that’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure it’ll be great. It’s not too hard to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I echo what you were saying earlier, Marco, that a lot of this has become a lot more appealing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. And I’ll be the first to tell you, I think I was the biggest curmudgeon of the three of us in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving my world over to Mastodon. But it’s gotten, perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s less new and scary, I don’t know, but it’s gotten a lot more palatable. And then I jumped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Ivory Beta about a day ago. And it is very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comforting to have that nice warm blanket over you and for everything to feel so familiar. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not exactly the same. And I really like that they’ve kind of refreshed their iconography to be kind of in a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spirit in a good way. But it’s an alpha. So like if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clamoring to be on the beta, it’s actually really an alpha. And that’s how they self-describe it. I mean, it crashes kind of a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s what an alpha is. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. They’re setting quality expectations by their standards. But that’s true. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this rough, sometimes crashing alpha of a tweetbot app for Mastodon is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already way better than every other master and app I have tried. Like it’s it’s better than all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them by a large margin.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon client app authors. Let me give you one tip. I don’t know why all Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John clients do this particular thing. I think it’s because my
⏹️ ▶️ John use case is not the common one. but I think my use case is a valid one so people
⏹️ ▶️ John should do it. Mastodon clients all seem to have, they usually use a little house icon
⏹️ ▶️ John for the home timeline, right? And then there’s usually some other icon or a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to switch to that’s your notifications timeline. Every single Mastodon client
⏹️ ▶️ John I have tried, when you go to the notifications timeline, it shows you a view that I never want, which includes
⏹️ ▶️ John like, here’s all the people who favorited you, here’s people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who are following you. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I never wanna see that. I don’t care about it ever, ever, ever. What do I want to see? Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioned it before. For people like us, which granted, we’re not the common use case, but we are a use case, and I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a reasonable one to accommodate. We just want to see our mentions. Don’t show us people who are favoriting our things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, actually, the client I was using before Ivory is called Tusker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still in beta, but the test file links are being shared like crazy. I’ve got it. Tusker has a setting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under, I believe it’s called something like digital well-being, or digital wellness, and it says default notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode, you can change it to mentions only. And so that when you go to that screen, then it’s doing what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only showing your mentions by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, most of the clients have this feature, which is it’s usually on notifications, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John filter notifications to just show mentions or whatever, right? But A is not the default, which whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can pick the defaults. But B, almost every single app doesn’t care how many times I change the show
⏹️ ▶️ John mention. Tusker is an exception, but you know, it’s a test flight beta, so who knows where that’s going, right? But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t make me filter to show mentions every single time I change the timeline. This
⏹️ ▶️ John aside things that I’m accustomed to in Twitterific where I can save searches. So I can, I don’t think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing you can even do in Mastodon yet, but, or at all, which is a shame. But I also,
⏹️ ▶️ John on my main Twitter account, I have a little icon in Twitterific that lets me see ATP
⏹️ ▶️ John FM mentions, right? Can’t do that in Mastodon. That’s a Mastodon thing, not a client app. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Notifications, if you allow me to filter it just be mentions. Remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that I did that. Otherwise, I have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it every single time. And it’s really and
⏹️ ▶️ John it amazes me that like, you know, I think Tusker may be the literally the only client that remembers that setting
⏹️ ▶️ John or has a way to make it remember all the other ones. You tap on notification and they’re like, look at all the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John favorited stuff. I don’t care. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I don’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can favor my thing. That’s fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just need to see a
⏹️ ▶️ John timeline of every single person who did the favorite. I just want to see mentions anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real time follow-up. John Syracusa on Mastodon, so syracuseatmastodon.social, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ivory, how are Casey List and Marco Armitage on the Ivory beta and I’m not? This is an outrage! Exclamation
⏹️ ▶️ John Lyle Troxell I feel a little bit bad because Aline replied to me and said that she was so sad that she missed the
⏹️ ▶️ John sign-up window, and I didn’t know there was a sign-up window.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Jim Collison
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there was.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Lyle Troxell I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if there was. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, I’m at it again. Never mind. Jim Collison Maybe there was and I missed it, but I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there was. Lyle Troxell I think one of the things that makes this this kind of migration or giant switch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from something like if Apple’s platforms go bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so easy to change where you are micro-blogging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so, the switching cost and the switching workload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just so tiny. And it’s not nothing, and depending on how integrated you are with Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can be substantial. But I think, first of all, it helps that most of us nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who even know what third party Twitter apps are, don’t use a large portion of the features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Twitter has made in the last 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they never exposed them to the third party API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so we don’t see things like the trends and ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t see, we don’t do Twitter spaces really. Like all these things they’ve added. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also helps they’ve barely moved their product forward in 10 years. But anyway, so I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of it too. if you look at like, you know, to change your operating system to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move platforms, either on mobile or on the desktop or, you know, or on your laptop, whatever, you know, to change that, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know our friend CGP Gray, one said in a long time ago, I think on cortex, once once said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like moving to a different country. Like it’s such a massive disruption to move like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from iPhone to Android or from Mac to PC or whatever. Like that’s such a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. And especially if you if you if your work involves one of those platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you have a lot of software investment or workflow investment in these platforms, like it’s a massive thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas changing from Twitter using Tweetbot to mastodon using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ivory is basically nothing. You just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco over and you got to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the people go along with you like this is true of computing platforms as well. But there is a network effect
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is super important because no one would care about Mastodon if no one was there. Like there has to be some critical
⏹️ ▶️ John mass of people you care about following or want to converse with. And the same thing with computing platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you decide you’re gonna change computing platforms, are you gonna change to like whatever that, those people
⏹️ ▶️ John who sort of took the code for BOS, the Haiku operating system, right? You’re probably not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John go to Haiku as much as you might like it, because you’re gonna be like, well, who else uses this, and who else develops software for
⏹️ ▶️ John it? And so there is a network effect on platforms as well. And you mentioned like moving to another country. It’s like, well, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if I don’t want to use Apple platforms and I don’t want to use Windows or Android
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna use Linux on a desktop. That’s like moving to Antarctica. I Mean
⏹️ ▶️ John it exists and there’s a landmass and you can go there and stand on it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not that I mean it’s not good mind you but
⏹️ ▶️ John like I mean compared to the software ecosystems of you know The Amazon jungle of
⏹️ ▶️ John software ecosystems of the you know, Windows Android iOS I guess, yeah, Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John is tough. But yeah, no, there’s not a lot of choices there. But like I said, the problem of
⏹️ ▶️ John a micro-blogging platform or whatever is small enough that a bunch of open standards
⏹️ ▶️ John and some reasonable software can hopefully get us over the finish line. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Well, and I think the movement here is so strong. Like, the last time we tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this was app.net. And there were a number of major differences between then and now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think the biggest one, first of all, first of all, it’s that that Mastodon is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this federated open source distributed thing after that was not that. So this this has that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling point that we didn’t have back then. But the biggest difference is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more people hate Elon Musk than we thought. Like, it’s such a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. Way more people are fleeing or have fled Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he has he has made so many more enemies, you know, back when the internet thing was trying to get started,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think our main beef then was that Twitter was being kind of jerks to API users and to developers
⏹️ ▶️ John And they were, but there’s no match for the series of just decisions that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like coming out of Twitter on a daily basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the number of people who were upset about Twitter’s API policies 10 years ago, whenever that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus the number of people who hate Elon Musk and what he’s done in the last month, it’s a world of difference. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there are just so many people fleeing from that sinking ship of Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or being kicked off of it, that I think it’s like an order of magnitude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more movement happening, or more momentum happening. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such a bigger difference now. And so I think once Ivory comes out on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mac, game over for all of us, all of our people, our community,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it won’t be there anymore, it won’t be on Twitter anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see about that. I’m still not entirely confident that that’s going to happen. But hey, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John in both places living two lives here. So we’ll see how it goes. And I also still kind of think that if
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter itself is going to have value, even if it is totally destroyed by Elon Musk,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the brand and the legacy. So that if, I know this is not a thing that he does,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if he gets bored and decides to move on, someone will scoop it up. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone scoops it up and starts running it, not like an idiot, they’ll get people back.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a pretty good chance. Well, they might. They might. I mean, it depends on how long that happens. If that
⏹️ ▶️ John if if Mastodon snowballs and becomes really big, an activity pub catches on and it becomes like RSS,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You know what I mean? If that if the good scenario happens, it’ll be tough to get people back. But the I feel like the brand
⏹️ ▶️ John cache of Twitter is such that the desiccated husk of Twitter, after it’s been hauled
⏹️ ▶️ John out and everyone has left, is still valuable enough that someone will scoop it up and try to make a go
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. And I think if they do do that, there’s a good chance that a lot of people will come back. Maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ John even us, but like, you know, the the the fat part of the bell curve would definitely return.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think where where we will keep using Twitter is probably for like, if there is some major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world event happens, like some earthquake happens or, you know, some big political event happens, then you’re like, oh, my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody somebody just died. Like you want to go, oh, my God, what happened? Where’s the news? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got to go somewhere where it’s not just your nerdy friends but like everybody else is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah and I think Twitter’s gonna remain that go-to place for that kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indefinitely into the future unless it really gets destroyed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, unless the Nazis just really take it over which is you know what seems to be the direction things are going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah but I think for like the casual hangout version of all this stuff I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many groups including most of our people I think I think have already moved over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things that I wanted to quickly point out which is known, but I’m now seeing it myself, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can set up your own instance of Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t see a lot of that, but I was exchanging don’t call them toots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with my dear friend Jelly who is running his own instance. So, he’s jelly at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jellystyle.social, if I remember right. And while that is not something I think I’m terribly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in doing, and it’s funny because I was speaking with Jelly about it, and he’s like, oh, you should set up one for ATP?”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, yes, I should. But none of the three of us are interested in doing it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen. Running an instance is, if one thing you can take away from our past discussions is running instances is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quite a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but even just for the three of us, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it would be manageable. I know. Even just
⏹️ ▶️ John for the three of us. I’m not entirely convinced that the scaling concern, like this came up with the person who
⏹️ ▶️ John shut down their server that I was on because they were
⏹️ ▶️ John of running it, right? What they said is basically, hey, here’s a server that basically nothing is going on on because it’s been like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s been in sort of like, you have to give like six months of warning or whatever, or they suggest you have six months of warning. So no one’s on it doing
⏹️ ▶️ John anything, right? This is basically a dead instance, right? But even this dead idle instance, where
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone had accounts there has moved elsewhere and stuff. When the mastodon spike happened, when all like
⏹️ ▶️ John the rest of us came back to mass down and everything on his dead instance, he saw huge spikes in activity
⏹️ ▶️ John and load, right? So even if you make a massive instance, which just literally the three of and we’re the only people in the instance,
⏹️ ▶️ John we still have to communicate with the rest of the network for all the people that the
⏹️ ▶️ John three of us follow. And if something big is happening elsewhere on the ActivityPub network,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would impact our server. And do any of us want to be babysitting another server? Marcus certainly doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to sign up for it either. There is a way to use your own domain name as sort of like a redirect through Webfinger
⏹️ ▶️ John with another instance. So you don’t run the instance, but your name is like your name at your domain.com.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that still looked a little bit janky to me, so I wasn’t ready to dive down that path. But yeah, no, if you want to run an instance
⏹️ ▶️ John for your friends, you can, but don’t think, it’ll only have three people on it, there’ll never be any load. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think that is necessarily the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think also, as this network of instances grows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and matures over time, as we start having more and more force required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve things like the moderation issues and scaling issues, it wouldn’t surprise me if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really small instances that have like one people on them, if they if they kind of become second class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco citizens in the ecosystem in the sense that like, you know, the major instances are all probably going to maintain like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you know, blocking lists and allow lists and everything else to try to try to keep moderation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under control. And it’s probably going to be kind of like trying to run your own email server now, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you’d be setting up for a world of headaches if you try to run it yourself. And you might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like no reputation among the network, it might make your post not show up right for everybody or not show up quickly
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. I hope it’ll be better than email, because I think the running instance with three people is easier
⏹️ ▶️ John than running an email. So three people definitely already is easier. And I think the scaling concerns, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to be overwhelmed, because your activity pub traffic is going to be related to how many people the three accounts
⏹️ ▶️ John actually follow. So you have some control over it. It’s just not zero. It’s not like, oh, it’ll be free. And I’ll never
⏹️ ▶️ John need to look at it. I’ll never need to babysit at minimum, you’ll need to update it when there’s like patches and software updates
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep up with the rest of the network. and then you underneath, eventually you need to update the underlining OS or the version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Docker or just like just running anything 24-7 you expect to be up all the time is a lot more work than people
⏹️ ▶️ John think it is. It’s less work than non-technical people think because you can just get it up and running and doing it but it is
⏹️ ▶️ John just one more thing to be thinking about and I really hope it doesn’t get as bad as email servers because the
⏹️ ▶️ John culture seems to be for the most part, federate with people by default
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know defederate as needed if that ever reverses uh then we’ll probably have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John but that seems against the spirit of activity pub like the idea that a new instance
⏹️ ▶️ John will only federate with like this hard-coded list and if you want to add anyone else you have to do it manually it seems like that just
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a way to go.
Movetodon.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then very quickly, since we’ve gone on quite a bit longer than I intended about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a better Mastodon friend finder, which I haven’t tried, but I think John has. Do you want to tell us about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. So there was a couple of ones we linked last time, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Fetty Finder.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this one that I found finally had an interface that was closer to what I wanted. I didn’t like the Fetty Finder one. I was like, oh, download
⏹️ ▶️ John this CSV and upload it to import all your things. I was like, I don’t want to do that. What I want to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is every once in a while be able to look at something and say, Hey, have any more people that I used to follow
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter? Have they come over to mastodon? And if they have, I want to follow them. And so move
⏹️ ▶️ John to don.org. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Um, as the interface that
⏹️ ▶️ John I want, you do the authentication with all the things and then it gives you a list of all the people and it says,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, if you’re already following them, it says you’re already following them. And if you’re not following them, right next to their name is a button that lets you follow
⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s all I want. Right. And I can just reload this page every day and see if any new people have arrived. And if they have a click
⏹️ ▶️ John the button to follow them, it is so much easier than like download a CSV or copy and paste this or go to their
⏹️ ▶️ John profile and hit follow and like, yeah, so I think move to dawn.org
⏹️ ▶️ John is has a way better interface than Feddy Finder. And I hope it’s not stealing all my information because you have to give lots of permissions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I actually also have used move to dawn and I just I’m keeping the tab in mobile Safari on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone just open. And I go back there like every couple days and refresh the page and just see like, Oh, I Oh, look,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so and so just just joined. So it’s it’s actually really nice. I really, really like
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, this is a flaw in the system. And for people who know like, how is this working? I think we mentioned this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to mention again, this only works if people on Twitter change their profile to
⏹️ ▶️ John put their mastodon address somewhere in there. Right? That’s how this works. It’s like, how does it know
⏹️ ▶️ John like it gets your list of followers, then it basically looks at their profile page on Twitter and tries to find something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks like a mastodon address. So it knows that Joe Schmoe that used to follow on Twitter, they have in
⏹️ ▶️ John their Twitter bio or something else or in their Twitter name somewhere, they have something that looks like a Mastodon address,
⏹️ ▶️ John so here’s where they are and you can follow them. If people don’t do that, they’re never going to show up in this tool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I follow a lot of people and I, you know, right now it has only found 53 out of the 314 people I follow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are the rest of those people I follow ever going to put a Mastodon handle in their address? Have they even moved to Mastodon?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. So this is a weak point. It’s definitely better than nothing and these tools are great and I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John we were at least enough of us have gotten on board with this convention to put the Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John address in our profiles but not everybody will and it’s kind of it’s kind of a shame and as you can imagine Twitter is not
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m surprised that they haven’t started removing those things from our profile because I think a bunch of Mastodon related stuff has already been like blocked
⏹️ ▶️ John or muted on Twitter because Elon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think do you think he actually like do you think we are registering on his radar like this kind of movement?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I’m not sure that we would.
⏹️ ▶️ John It will eventually if it keeps going in this direction. It’ll come up.
RecDiffs: Monetizing Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then speaking of Elon, very, very quickly, please, please, please, very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call attention to the after show, the paid after show of Reconcilable Differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode 196. Merlin posed a very, very interesting question, which I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure ever actually got answered, but nevertheless, the discussion was excellent. And Merlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked John, if you want Twitter to stay live, how do you want Twitter to make money? Which seems an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious question to ask, but it’s not a question I was asking. So
⏹️ ▶️ John totally answered it. I mean, it’s spread out over in the typical rectus way. But yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the way they’d make money is, because they’re too big to make money by
⏹️ ▶️ John charging everybody, because there’s just too many people and it’s not the right business model for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They were already making, I mean, they were, in terms of revenue, they had millions and millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John of advertising revenue. And they had a large desirable audience to advertise to.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like advertising to your pretty large audience filled with
⏹️ ▶️ John people that advertisers want to reach is a good business. So how should Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John make money? Again, assuming they weren’t just like spending all their time allowing Nazis to get their accounts back. You
⏹️ ▶️ John advertise to most of the people. And then for the people who are willing and able to pay for something,
⏹️ ▶️ John you allow them to pay for something. Like the way I phrased it on Rectifs was, the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John pay have to pay for something that does not make the service worse for people who don’t pay. So they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John pay to like make their posts more visible or like make them more prominent
⏹️ ▶️ John or they can’t pay to be able to like delete other people’s accounts. Like you can’t, what they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay for is instead is like now you have more powerful search features maybe. Even that could be abused. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s tricky to pick, but like obviously verification is worth paying for. You pay to have a human being to look at your
⏹️ ▶️ John ID and prove that you’re really you and so on and so forth. paying to have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John better API access for more sophisticated APIs for more sophisticated clients like tweet deck or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, right? So that’s, yeah, that’s how you should make money. You advertise to almost everybody and you make the people who want
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay for services that most people don’t want or need, but the people who do want or need find worthwhile.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, john, here was I was trying to get people to implicitly sign up for your show and in pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear the after show, which I will reiterate was excellent. But here it is, you’ve now just given us the TLDR
⏹️ ▶️ John But I didn’t know I didn’t I didn’t imagine if that took like 15 minutes and was filled with bad jokes. That’s what you’re paying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea. Anyways, anyway, so yeah, 196. You should listen to the after show. It starts at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about an hour 36 minutes, which speaking of how am I the one that wants chapters all of a sudden the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John three of us? I don’t edit that show. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CWO It’s just that you should have chapters. And finally, with regard to this 196 episode of rectifs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when the hell did that happen? I don’t know. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John episodes count isn’t the thing. It’s what we talked about last time. We did, it was like our seven year anniversary or something and both of
⏹️ ▶️ John us were very shocked by that. It seems like that’s my new show that I just started doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe we’ve been doing it for two years, but no.
Sponsor: Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite place to run all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my servers. Visit linode.com slash ATP and see for yourself why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people like me choose Linode to run our stuff. So first of all, they are a great host
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the regular stuff that we used to use host for all the time. Compute instances slash cloud instances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash VPS. These are all the same thing. They are the best at this. I’ve been with them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost a decade now using primarily that product. it’s it’s amazing what you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Linode for the price. So first of all, amazing value, right? They also have all sorts of different capabilities that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might need. So if you need a really small instance that prioritizes maybe price over everything else, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that I think it starts at five bucks a month. It’s amazing. Then if you need more resources, maybe you need more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk space, more CPU power, more RAM, they have amazing plans above that, that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in my experience, the best values in the business by far and they always have been. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, they have dedicated specialties. So if you need things like high memory plans, GPU compute plan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dedicated CPU plans, they have all that you need more disk space than what they offer on the regular ones. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have block storage, you can have giant volumes if you need to. They also have if you need something that’s maybe an s3 compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco object storage, they have that they have managed databases now they have managed load balancers, managed backups,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these things available at Linode and all this backed up by amazing support, an amazing API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing documentation, at an amazing value. So to me, honestly, you look at other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosts, and it’s no contest, Linode is the best. So see for yourself all this stuff at Linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, create your free account there, and you get $100 in credit to start looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around at Linode and trying stuff out. So Linode.com slash ATP, free accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there get $100 in credit. Linode makes cloud computing fast, simple and affordable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you can focus on your projects, not your infrastructure. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring
ButtDB progress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, finally, with regard to your recommendation to instrument your code, Marco, John was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommending the instrument your code and figure out ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, we were talking about my we’re talking about but DB.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And so we were we did you just drop the name and I missed it. Shoot. I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t joke about what he called last week is to make a Googleable call it but DB so you can find it instead of calling
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me signal light. Yes, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. Anyway, so but DB, you should instrument it and in so this way, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out how to debug concurrency issues. And we had a listener write and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, you should check out this WWDC session, which we will link in the show notes, with Harjes Manga and Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ash. Mike Ash, who used to be independent, then got sucked into Apple, as so many people do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few years back. And I’d seen it before, but had forgotten about it, and then re-watched it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and was reminded that it’s actually a very, very good session. And among other things, it will show you what they call a task forest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which this is an instrument. I’m sorry. And in instruments, you can see a task forest, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows you a hierarchical tree view of your tasks, which was super freaking cool. And I actually thought it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a really good, like it was contrived, but a semi real world example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of why actors are important and how you use them the correct way and so on and so forth. The whole video is like 25, 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes and it’s worth checking out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s definitely a cool tool. What I was saying was to instrument for metrics on like, you know, slow queries,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many queries are you running? How long did they take, you know, to just find performance bottlenecks? And this is the type of thing that you do while you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John developing your application to sort of make sure you’re not doing something silly in terms of concurrency or to debug issues you’re having.
⏹️ ▶️ John But obviously you can’t run this instruments thing when it’s running on other people’s phones and stuff. And so that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John where your telemetry and logging and everything will potentially save your butt to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out like, hey, someone says, when I go to this screen, it hangs for two seconds before the screen comes into view. Maybe you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John logging of like, oh, I see there’s a slow query happening here. And then you would go back to this instruments thing and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if this query is slow, can I make it not block the task? Like, am I using Actress poorly? And
⏹️ ▶️ John really, mostly just say, why is this query slow so I can fix it? Because he’s got that choke point with ButtDB of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all the queries go through this library. So if you’re wondering if you’ve got slow queries, well, there’s one place
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can instrument and for timings on every single one of your queries, and then you’ll find that, or even just do, just log
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that take longer than X number of milliseconds, and then you’ll only log the slow ones. And you can do that on everybody’s phone, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John have a button in your UI, which I think Mark already has somewhere, which is like, hey, email me your logs or whatever. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was my suggestion. But yeah, the instruments thing is definitely cool too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I’ve been working on BUDDb a lot for the last week and I’ve mostly just been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I learned yesterday, like, oh, wait a minute, I forgot to write a delete method.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whoops. Never delete data, it’s append only database. Yeah, right. Which is a thing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to just switch over to Xcode right now, right click and go to refactor and
⏹️ ▶️ John just write BUDDb. Just go do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like I like the name I picked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m just yeah that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the name you pick so go change the name of your actual class to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah so yeah and I did the the objective C compatibility layer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yesterday and today and boy that was not fun that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just because first I first I wrote like this whole you know Swift version of the class with the little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obj obj sees all over the place and then when I just went to try to use it I learned oh wait a a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Objective-C can’t subclass a Swift class, even if it’s an obj
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class subclassing an S object, you just can’t subclass it from Swift from Objective-C. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to like move a lot of that functionality into an Objective-C class and it had to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some stuff. It was a whole thing. So it’s been a little unfun, but I’ve been able to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of it in Swift. And I the way I designed this so that the Objective-C support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is only like a few extra little files. And then and you can and the whole library
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t depend on those files. And so if you have a project or you know, if I in the future have a project where I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to see compatibility, I can just omit those files and the rest of it still build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fine. And it’s fine. So I have I’m trying to be very forward looking here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with how I’m doing this. That being said, I still have not actually tried to integrate it into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a functioning app yet. Like there’s a there’s a thing in overcast, I need to build this month to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start trying to track stats a little bit better for listening stats. Because this is the month where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Spotify… What’s it called? Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John replay? Yearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey wrap. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Spotify wrap. Yeah, it’s when Spotify tells people in December, like, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artists you listened to the most this year. And then everyone posts them all over Twitter. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone starts emailing me asking, like, hey, when are you going to add this feature? my overcast wrapped. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I have to do really is at some point start like recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better stats on how much time you spend listening to each show or whatever and do that for a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. And so if I’m going to release this feature next December, the time to start doing that data collection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like now before January 1st when you know it’ll then be
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so like the Spotify thing and other podcast clients do because I’ve I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John some other people tweeting at us saying that we were their number one listen thing. That’s what happens when you make shows that are this long. We get a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John extra listen time in there. But like, people doing the Spotify things, I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John they do it now, because it’s kind of like, oh, the year is winding down, it’s kind of the new year, and it’s the time you do those types of things, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the year’s not over. What if you listen to like hundreds of hours of some other podcast on December
⏹️ ▶️ John 30th and 31st, right? I don’t know, you can pick any arbitrary time in the year, and that’s what I’m getting at with Marco trying to rush to get this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John done. Like, why? Why not just start your counting from January 15th? well, it’s because Spotify does it around this
⏹️ ▶️ John time and this is the time when people are thinking about the end of the year. So it’s probably wise that you do try to get it done in
⏹️ ▶️ John December. Just kind of annoys me that like, you can’t do any year-end accounting when the year hasn’t ended yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they do. I mean, in all fairness, a lot fewer people listen to podcasts in the last couple of weeks of December
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than in the rest of the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a long road trip or something. You never know what’s gonna happen. But anyway, yeah, so I haven’t done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any actual integration to an app yet. I think the async
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only nature of this library is going to prove to be a massive pain in the butt to integrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any legacy code. That being said, I still want it to be designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this way. So, that’s just gonna be, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco typical me fashion, I’m gonna start in fifth gear and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get myself going. And once I’m going, it’s gonna be great, but it’s gonna be a slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build. so we’ll see.
Follow-up: Xfinity Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to an ask ATP from last week, with regard to Xfinity Wi-Fi, I think one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or all of us had said, you know, oh, it’s a little bit weird using somebody else’s bandwidth. And Clayton
⏹️ ▶️ Casey O’Neill wrote in to say the following, this actually does not use the customer’s bandwidth. The cable modem is provisioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have a completely different quote service flow quote for the alternative SSID. The service flows effect effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how DOCSIS enforces quality. What is it? Quality of service. Yeah, quality of service. And it is how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable providers sell you a specific tier service. For example 75 down 10 up the Xfinity Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey service will have a separate service flow in addition to the service flow provision for the Customer service and there’s a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article about this That’s a little bit less explicit length or not explicit language. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discusses it less explicitly unless in a less nerdy way, but There’s an article link in the show notes about
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I understand what they’re saying about dividing up the different flows or whatever But in the end, it’s the same cable leaving the people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John house and you know Maybe there’s plenty of leftover bandwidth so it doesn’t affect the customer but there’s a reason cable
⏹️ ▶️ John have crappy cable, you know services have crappy upload speed and it’s how they choose to Apportion
⏹️ ▶️ John the you know the bandwidth they have going to and from the house And so yeah, you’re probably not screening things up too much But if you were
⏹️ ▶️ John to grab that and start uploading a massive amount I would imagine that you can impact the other quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John flow. Maybe it is maybe they do reserve bandwidth I don’t even know but anyway, as you said, this is part of the service that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John paying for So try and not using it out of some like form of politeness or because you feel bad is silly
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re paying for it Xfinity Service is bad in many other ways, at least take advantage of this perk.
Follow-up: mmWave speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, earlier this week, I took my iPad to my beloved picnic table.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think we had discussed this like three or four weeks ago, and I had said, oh, my iPad wasn’t on the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Verizon cellular plan such that I didn’t get ultra wideband. Well, I’ve since rectified that problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am getting ultra wideband. And I did a speed test, and it got 4,373.71 megabits down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s four gigabits, we’re almost four and a half gigabits down, 300 megabits up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used in the span of this, like 30 second speed test, I used six and a half gigs of data and I think I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 15 or 30 in a month, so it is, it was really wild, so I did the math.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is approximately 550 megabytes per second down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So at home I get in, in, in real world usage, I get something like 80
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megabytes on a good day and that’s on a gigabit files connection. Sitting on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picnic table in a park in the greater Richmond area, I was getting 550 megabytes a second down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is 85% of a standard CD in one second. Do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you remember when you would download like an album in the early Napster days? And I’ve told the story so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many times in this program, and I would be sitting in my dorm at Virginia Tech and I would get like a megabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a second and go, holy smokes, this must be somebody else on campus because look how fast this is at a megabyte a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it would take like an hour or two to download an entire CD’s worth of stuff. I mean, not that any of us would ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that. We would always pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But hypothetically, if you were to do that in the early 2000s, it would take like an hour. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would take one second or maybe a second and a half to download an entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CD worth of data. That’s just bananas. Technology is cool. Lyle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Troxell It is really funny to me to think that, like, you know, how many seconds would it take to use up your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire data cap for the month? Yeah, seriously. It’s so true. It’s definitely measured in seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, that’s ridiculous. And I’m also kind of impressed that like the speed test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture can serve things through all the way from wherever they’re serving it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your device at four gigabits. Like that nothing is throttling that along the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. That’s so true. And I mean, obviously, like so many people when I had tooted about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, so many people were like in a nice way, but like, okay, Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And honestly, I don’t have a good answer for that, but it’s just cool that you can do it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re basically, you’re basically like playing Ghostbusters where you’re trapping those bits inside your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey where they can’t get out except for through the
⏹️ ▶️ John wired connection that runs at USB 2.0 speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or no, actually, the iPads have Thunderbolt, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, some of them do. And previously there were a couple, I think the 10.5 and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first, the first couple 12.9s before that Thunderbolt, they had USB three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds over lightning. That was possible, and a few iPad models had that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but then, but iPhones for some reason have never gotten that capability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it’s just bananas. I think I told you, when I was first using ultra-wideband with my iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure I told this story already, but I was tethered via USB to my computer, and I did a speed test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my computer, and it was slower than dirt, and I was like, what the hell is going on? Oh, and then I tethered via Wi-Fi, and suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it got way freaking faster. So bring on our USB-C iPhones, is what I’m saying in a roundabout
ffmpeg ported to WebAssembly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk topics. I wanted to just briefly call out in part to prevent everyone and their mother from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeting this at me, but also because I think it’s freaking cool. FFmpeg has been ported to WebAssembly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Not sure, but that’s so freaking cool. And I just wanted to call that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean? I guess you can run FFmpeg in the browser, but like, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure why you would, but I mean, WebAssembly is supposed to be pretty damn fast, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone should make a website where the URLs are the command line strings, like with the appropriate translation
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so it works as a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco URL. So you have to come
⏹️ ▶️ John up with a weird command line, and then you just paste it into the address bar, and then it runs. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be very cool. Honestly, I don’t know why this is. I’m not even sure why I think this is cool. Other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s cool. So I just wanted to call to everyone’s attention, this is ffmpegwasm.netlify.app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’ll put a link in the show notes. But yeah, you can apparently transcode stuff in the browser for fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and profit. I don’t know. I just thought this was super cool.
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this week by Squarespace, the all in one platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your audience and sell anything, your products, your content, even your time. Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it super easy to make all kinds of websites and especially business websites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. So you can have things like member areas, you can monetize your content and expertise in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that fits your brand. You can unlock new revenue streams through your business with member areas, free up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in your schedule by selling access to gated content like videos, online courses or newsletters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And of course, you can sell other things you can have online stores for products, whether those are physical or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital goods, Squarespace has all the tools you need to sell online, you can have all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this backed up by SEO tools. So you can really make sure that you’re maximizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your prominence among search results. and you can have analytics to see where people are coming from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which channels are most effective that you might be advertising in. You can improve your website and build marketing strategies based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your top keywords, your most popular products and content. So it’s really everything you need at Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of this is backed by amazing support if you ever need it. But frankly, you probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Squarespace is super easy to use. And there’s all sorts of problems that running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco websites in other ways might have you deal with things like software patches and security updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and server maintenance, maybe maybe handling load if you get like a lot of links all at once. Squarespace doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make you deal with any of that stuff. Like it’s all behind the scenes. They take care of all that for you. You never have to worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing. So go to squarespace.com slash ATP to start your free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trial. No credit card is required. You can build the whole site and trial mode and see how you like it. When you’re ready to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch, use our code ATP to save 10% off your first purchase of website or domain. Once again, Squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to start that free trial offer code ATP at purchase to save 10% off your first purchase of website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or domain. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Fallout from App Store ads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ve had something in the show notes for about 13 years and it’s probably time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go ahead and talk about it. There’s been a couple more ads added to basically everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you touch on an Apple device.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about the ad slots already in a past show. We’re like, oh, here’s the new ad slots or whatever. But like there’s fallout
⏹️ ▶️ John from that. I think we just discussed the fact that they were going to do it. They were going to add these ad slots and this is where you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ John ads and this is where they’ll appear or whatever. But since then, we’ve been trying to let this
⏹️ ▶️ John run its course so we’d be able to say something conclusive about it. But it seems to kind of be in stasis at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point. So I guess we can talk about it the way it is now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So to recap very briefly, there’s a bunch more ads either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey already here or coming in other places. On the App Store, the Today View has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advertising on it now. It never used to. That’s kind of like the landing page of the App Store. used to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exclusively curated content, which although I didn’t personally look at it very often, it was very, very good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anytime I looked at it, I was impressed. Anyone I’ve ever spoken to about it was impressed. It was good stuff. But now on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day view, there’s advertising. There’s always been advertising in search. Alarmingly on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a product’s, on an app’s detail page, and Marco in particular was talking about this a few weeks ago, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are also advertisements there. And when this first dropped, Apple just assumed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best as people want to do. And it turns out that the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most likely to buy advertising on the App Store are gambling apps and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hookup apps and things like that. So a lot of people were pointing out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you did a search for an app that will help you with getting over an addiction to gambling,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, what’s getting advertised at the bottom? a tweet or something, a tweet from user John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes. And so John was looking at the app RecoverMe, which its subtitle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is manage a gambling addiction. At the bottom of the details page, you might also like Jackpot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey World, casino slots. Cool. That’s great. That’s not a bad look at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s just, and then they’ve said that there’s going to be ads and maps potentially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe that’s not been said, but it’s been rumored. just, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s hard for me not to just regurgitate what so many other very, very smart people have said about this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the reasons I like Apple stuff so much, and I’ve gotten the same feeling from Sonos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I used to get the same feeling from BMW and from Sony in the past, is that it just felt premium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just felt like people who really gave a crap made this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And having ads kind of junking up everything, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel like it’s gone too far. And it makes my devices, makes my Apple stuff feel less premium.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the same way that like Nickel and Diamond you over iCloud storage, I’m not gonna be able to find it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes, but I’ve saw a tweet recently where it showed a graph of iCloud storage since like iCloud debuted. And it’s a flat five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabyte line since like 08 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like 2011 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. It’s silly stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that. Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill that up over ultra wide band?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently about 30 seconds. But anyways, it’s silly things like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, that kind of nickel and dime my opinion of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just make me feel like, ugh, this thing that used to just unabashedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make me happy just kind of feels yucky now. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like it. I understand that services seems to be the golden child
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. And obviously, Apple has an interest, if not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a responsibility, in making as much money as they possibly can. I’m behind on my podcast, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was listening to the talk show with Gruber and Federico Vatici from, I don’t know, probably a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two ago. And they were talking about this quite a lot. And I think they had a lot of, both of them had a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of really smart things to say about it. But I don’t know, at what point does Apple look around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and realize, oh, this is, this is making us look gross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and crummy. And, and maybe they just don’t care as they’re making piles and piles of money. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not only is, does it just make them feel gross, but I think that there’s, this is just making the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey antitrust, like, uh, Tim Sweeney and Elon Musk, oh, it’s an Apple tax, it’s an Apple tax. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really don’t want Elon Musk or Tim Sweeney to be my champion on this issue, but I kind of agree with them. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is all just, it’s just all yucky and I don’t like it. I don’t, make it make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense, one of you, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember when Steve Jobs was talking about iAd, I think, like his pitch, which
⏹️ ▶️ John was that keynote search tool that Steve and I can link to today, where you can, it’s like a full text search of Apple keynotes,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway, Steve Jobs was talking about iAd, which was one of the early ad services, and I remember how he talked about it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of using the model that he grew up with and the model that we kind of grew up with, where
⏹️ ▶️ John he was saying like, you know, you as a user, when you see these ads, you’re gonna like these ads
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple has a hand in making them and they’re gonna be nice ads, right? That
⏹️ ▶️ John was why this was gonna be an Apple ad service. Like it’s not gonna be a punch the monkey, right? Because Apple is involved in
⏹️ ▶️ John this iAd process, you’ll like these ads. I don’t remember what the quote was, but it was something like, there’ll be ads that you want to see, right? And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very similar to the model from all of our youth where like, you’d watch a TV show and there’d be ads
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Those ads got on the TV show because advertisers connected with
⏹️ ▶️ John the television network and said, hey, we’d like to advertise on your show. And they would work something
⏹️ ▶️ John out between them and they would pay the money and their ad would go up, right? The networks performed an important function
⏹️ ▶️ John there, which is like, so Coca-Cola or whatever would contact the networks and there’d be some advertising
⏹️ ▶️ John department that sells ads. If you said you wanted to put a casino gambling ad
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Cosby show, NBC probably wouldn’t let you. Like there was some editorial control
⏹️ ▶️ John about what kind of ads go on there. There was human, at the very least, there were humans involved, right? If you wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John put an ad for, you know, Playboy magazine or your, you know, hardcore porn,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, on a particular show that was supposed to be a family show, the network wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take that ad. They wouldn’t let you do it. They exercised control and, you know, there were people involved
⏹️ ▶️ John in that process because the network would be protecting their show and their brand. And,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, bottom line is they would, you know, It was a human to human sales relationship. One of
⏹️ ▶️ John the innovations of the internet, and the innovation that has powered Google to great heights of
⏹️ ▶️ John money and fame, is you can take the people out of that equation and instead just make a quote unquote, efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John market for selling advertisements, where you have advertisement slots. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John advertisers bid on who wants to fill that slot. And the slot goes to the highest bidder. And boy, doesn’t that make you a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ John money. You don’t have to pay an ad sales staff. And you always get the maximum amount that people are willing to pay for a given ad
⏹️ ▶️ John slot. And that’s what Apple has done for advertising in the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like, well, we don’t need to sell these individual ad slots to individual people and have people involved. Why don’t we just do
⏹️ ▶️ John what everyone else does on the internet with advertising and use the power of the internet to make a site where you can bid on
⏹️ ▶️ John these ad slots and that will make us more money and it’ll be hands-off and it’ll be a self-service type of thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how you get casino ads because who’s going to pay the most money for ad slots? People who get the most
⏹️ ▶️ John revenue for a person who gets roped into the ad and casinos make a lot of money from people who go
⏹️ ▶️ John use their apps because it’s kind of the function of a casino app. And if, you know, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, oh, like it’s almost like Apple was taken aback by that. It’s like, what did you think was gonna happen? I’m sure the advertising people
⏹️ ▶️ John knew it was gonna happen. It’s what happens whenever you open up an ad slot to the highest bidder. You get a mesothelioma or whatever that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, asbestos, like a cancer law firm, lawsuit things. Like whoever has
⏹️ ▶️ John the most money to spend will get the slot. And it’s may not be who you’d want to have that slot,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t have people involved. What Apple said back on October 26th was, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a statement from Apple, we have paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories on App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John product pages. That is the extent of the statement. They used the word pause, which doesn’t mean they’ve stopped,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does show that Apple had decided that they didn’t like how this was going.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they didn’t like being yelled at for having casino ads. Maybe they said, we know those ads are gonna go to casinos
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have the most money and they’re gonna be the top bidder, but we’re okay with that. But then it turns out people weren’t and we stopped, or maybe they were surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John And someone somewhere in the organization said, I didn’t realize that casinos would be the top bidder for all these categories.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, if you didn’t realize that, like, what world were you? I think some people were
⏹️ ▶️ John still in the Steve Jobs world where they were envisioning the ads would be like the premium ads you would see on
⏹️ ▶️ John the top rated television program in 1987, right? Hand selected
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, or the ads that go on the Super Bowl. They’re expensive ads, artfully made. And it’s like, no, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Super Bowl’s shown cryptocurrency ads, too. so it’s probably not that much,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but hey, the cryptocurrency
⏹️ ▶️ John ads have movie stars in them. Anyway, that’s what it feels like to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple didn’t realize, didn’t fully take
⏹️ ▶️ John on board what it means to sell ad slots to the highest bidder in an automated process that
⏹️ ▶️ John does not involve humans. This is what that looks like. I don’t know how they didn’t know that. Didn’t you see Punch the Monkey?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, didn’t you live through the, that’s what happens. And yes, it is much more efficient than having a sales
⏹️ ▶️ John staff but you’re not going to get to Casey’s point that sort of high touch experience where
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is quality. You’re not gonna get that thing that Steve Jobs is talking about, iAds like, oh, you’ll like these ads. No, we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like these ads. And it is, yes, it is also worse that, hey, you know what they’re advertising?
⏹️ ▶️ John Stuff in their own app store. Like these are apps that Apple sells, which is itself another,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, not problem, but another sort of decision point that we’ve talked about in the past. What apps
⏹️ ▶️ John should Apple allow in the app store? On the one hand, we’re like, we hate that Apple has the control to say what is allowed in the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. But on the other hand, we don’t like casino games for children. And all this gets back to the root
⏹️ ▶️ John problem, which is there’s only two places where you can sell mobile applications. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can sell them the Android App Store, you can sell them the Apple App Store, and everything else is a rounding error. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that of course is the root problem. And that’s what puts Apple into these no-win scenarios where we
⏹️ ▶️ John yelled at them if they don’t allow apps on the App Store, but we yelled at them if they allow casino games for children
⏹️ ▶️ John on the App Store. And then we yelled at them some more they programmatically sell ad slots that are bought by casino games
⏹️ ▶️ John for children or adults.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what what had what got to me the most about this was twofold. I think number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, you know, having all having all of these, like, not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally irrelevant ads, but intentionally irrelevant ads, like, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the ad unit that that sparks all this is like is the under if you go to an app page in the app store, you scroll all all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way down and it says, you might also like. And this is a category that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search ads added, and they told us that they were gonna add it a couple of months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of time, and you could go in, like I buy search ads, whoever catches you, you could go in, you could pre-order these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week beforehand and they would start running on this day or whatever. It was not a surprise, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the surprise was that this was, I think, the first type of search ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could explicitly anti-target. You could, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other search ads, the way they launched, when they first launched search ads, whenever that was, five, six years ago, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launched them very carefully. That was the first time they were added in the App Store. They knew that they had to be careful, and they were being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful. And one of the things, the way they designed that system was you can bid on keywords.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can bid on any keywords you want. You can type in whatever you want, any arbitrary keywords, but they would only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show your ad in a context where they thought it was relevant based on their relevance algorithms. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their relevance algorithms are terrible, but they were at least trying to be relevant,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they would occasionally succeed in that. But this ad unit, it explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was anti-targetable. Like you could select on how to target it. You could actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, show it in other categories that my app is not considered relevant in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why you could get casino ads showing up on podcast apps. Like, because you would think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if you look at the bottom of the Overcast page right now, you might also like, you know, the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organic results are almost all podcast players, or at least things that are adjacent to podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco players. There’s also Pocket, which I guess, you know, that’s relevant. I wish it was Instapaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, whatever. And everything else is relevant. And then the ad for that, that I’m seeing right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Wolf Game, Wild Animal Hunters. The hunt is on. And it appears to be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game where you play as a wolf you go eating other animals and possibly fighting other wolves which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly a little close to dogfighting for my comfort but oh well I don’t know what this game is. So that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing to do at all with podcast apps or any of the other results
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are in that list. And so on one hand this offended me because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it allowed us to have all these totally unrelated apps some of which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were offensive to a lot of people myself included like all the gambling stuff and you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it had that problem of like all of a sudden you’re seeing dramatically irrelevant results in places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they make no sense whatsoever and it’s just insulting. And then the second part of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it revealed for, I think one of the first times ever at this level,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it revealed quite how large of an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of the money that Apple makes from the App Store is coming from really seedy places.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That they are making gobs and gobs of money. And by the way, this is a large chunk of what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call services revenue. The term services revenue when they use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a wonderful euphemism. And you think, when you hear that, you think things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like iCloud, Fitness Plus, TV Plus. You think of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things that are kind of more directly, obviously, services that people can sign up for and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay for and they serve them in some way. You know, that’s what you think of. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive chunks of Apple services revenue are the deal to make Google the default search engine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Safari, and also app store revenue, which is mostly the 30% cut,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then obviously some portion of it is now ads. That’s most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of services revenue. And services revenue is one of Apple’s biggest growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco areas in the last few years, as their hardware businesses have largely matured and have seen slowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco growth. So it’s a very important area of the company in finance, analytics ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stock price, and analysts. It’s very important for all those reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yet, when you look at what it actually is, such huge parts of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are this gross Google deal, and then this gross area of App Store revenue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is most, so like, what is the App Store revenue? Well, some of it is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be 15% of all my subscriptions, and the other indie apps that we make, and good games,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. But a lot of it, probably the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, is stuff that Apple probably would be more comfortable if we didn’t see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casinos, scammy dating apps, overpriced subscription scams for apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge for a weekly subscription for some calculator app or something. they broke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down in one of the trials.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t it like 85% games? Yeah. Or something like that? It was some massive like app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John income from the app store is basically games. It’s games and everything else. And it was like 85. But now all those games aren’t crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ John but boy, a lot of them are, right? Like, cause you’re not getting it. And even the games that are quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John good, like even like the high profile, like, oh, this is a high class, high profile game, like Candy
⏹️ ▶️ John Crush. That is a standard bearer for casino games for children or casino games for adults for
⏹️ ▶️ John that matter. Like they do not shady things, but they they they leverage
⏹️ ▶️ John human psychology to extract more money from you in exchange for hopefully the fun that you’re getting in
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of those games, even the quote unquote good ones, depending on how you feel about it, may cross a line
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of exploitive mechanics where their their main concern is not allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John you to have fun. The main concern is finding ways to get money out of you. And there’s there’s a balance to be struck there because they need
⏹️ ▶️ John money to make the game. don’t pay for games, but kind of like we’re like, we’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of all feeling with these ads in the app store, the relationship between how,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I give you money for the thing that I want to get? That’s delicate. Uh, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John people want to play games for free, but I think people also understand if you want games to be made, you have to give money for them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John how, what is the exchange there? How much money did I give you when in exchange for what? There’s lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John different ways to slice that up. And I think in the games industry in particular, there has been lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of experimentation in terms of what what relationship is sustainable and makes
⏹️ ▶️ John people not feel abused, but also makes the developer be able to continue to make the app. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like almost everything in the app store is on the wrong side of that line in terms of how
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes the customers feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and not necessarily almost everything, but almost all the money, like we’re almost all the money is going. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m talking about games. That 85% of game revenue for in-app things, Like even the very
⏹️ ▶️ John best of the best, the best games, I feel like the way they make money is not on, is
⏹️ ▶️ John not on the right side of that 50% point in terms of how the people who pay that money feel about the relationship.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas I would say, for example, console games, the very best console games
⏹️ ▶️ John have found a way to make money that the players do not, doesn’t make the players
⏹️ ▶️ John hate themselves, right? I mean, to give an example, like in Destiny or like Fortnite even, you sell cosmetics,
⏹️ ▶️ John which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but Lord, does it work right? And and and players
⏹️ ▶️ John feel okay about it because if you don’t want to buy the cosmetics, you don’t have to, but people
⏹️ ▶️ John do want to buy the cosmetics. But if you don’t buy them, it doesn’t make you know, you’re not going to get killed by someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a better gun than you. Like it’s not pay to win. It’s paid to look fancy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that relationship mostly is people are mostly okay with it can still
⏹️ ▶️ John be exploitive, right? But the whole energy mechanics and paying to, you know, watch this 30
⏹️ ▶️ John second ad to continue further or pay like you were saying with that Minecraft thing, paying a weekly fee and pay to like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it like pay to compile your thing or whatever? It was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pay to save your work. It was literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay to save. What? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. Each time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s so far across the line that just no one feels good about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I feel like, you know, when you look at, I think it’s so easy for us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and probably For most Apple executives and employees and shareholders,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s probably much, it’s so easy for us to not see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inconvenient underbelly of what’s really going on in the App Store and what’s really going on in revenue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and services revenue there. Because it’s so easy to just look at the apps that we use and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we care about. And most people, the iPhone is such a mature platform,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been around for so long, that most people are not just casually browsing in the app store as a pastime to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for new apps anymore. Like that’s one of the reasons why new user acquisition costs are so high and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why Apple’s trying to capture all that with search ads because it used to be a thing where,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the app store was new and when people were getting iPhones for the first time for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a good pastime. Hey, let’s go check out what’s new in the app store this weekend or whatever. Like you’d go browse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it casually just for fun, like the same way you’d browse Twitter or something. You’d go, oh, let me go look at some apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That doesn’t happen much anymore. And so I think it’s so easy for all of us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all of them to not see this if we’re not looking for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, part of the reason why this new ad unit was so offensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it just revealed it all to us. Everyone started looking at these ads and started seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of these high bidders for these ads were all these really disgusting apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it reminded people those apps exist. Forget about the fact that they have an ad slide, it just reminded people, hey, just so
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, These are things on Apple’s app store. They’ve been there. They’ve always been there. And you don’t want to think about them. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John think you’re not the type of person who would use them, but here they are. And they’re there. And that gets back to the rock and a hard place
⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking about before. Part of us would say, I want Apple to curate the app store, so it’s only the
⏹️ ▶️ John good apps. So the other part of us says, why is Apple being so restrictive about what they allow in the app store? And you can’t have both. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem that Apple has made for itself by choosing not to have side loading, to try to find some impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John balance between having an app store that allows you know that is open to innovation in
⏹️ ▶️ John apps but also that keeps out the crap and they’re not doing that now. We can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John which drag we take. We can tell which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way they picked right right and they’re making a killing from it and like that’s that’s I think the most uncomfortable part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this. It is not necessarily that these apps exist in the app store which is its own you know question which can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco debated but that it became so obvious to us in such a such a short time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my God Apple is making all of this money. This this is where so much of their profit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and growth is coming from is scams and garbage and low quality, low rent,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inconvenient apps that they really would rather the public not really pay much attention to or not know about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And things that exploit their customers in ways that the customers themselves
⏹️ ▶️ John feel somewhat a little icky about. Again, finding a way that the game developers themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on them to find a way to make a relationship where both sides that
⏹️ ▶️ John feel okay about and instead what game developers have done is become very very good at finding the most efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John way to extract money from people no matter how they feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or and I mean don’t don’t minimize the outright trickery also like there’s a lot of actual fraud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and BS going on too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I do think the scam apps don’t make as much money as the legitimately good app again you sorry to use Candy Crush as an example but
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a legitimately good fun game that’s well made and also uses every trick in the book to get
⏹️ ▶️ John money out of people right I think those are the real money makers. The actual scam ones, it’s it feels bad
⏹️ ▶️ John when we see it happening because we think no one should ever be scammed by this. And we see the big numbers like this. We estimate
⏹️ ▶️ John like those things that we estimate this made a million dollars like Candy Crush probably makes that in a week. Right. So it’s you know, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John crime does pay, but making a making a really good app that also
⏹️ ▶️ John extracts money from people efficiently pays way more for a longer period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you’re right individually. I think collectively, the collective damage done by scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and misleading apps and like, you know, trick trickly price subscriptions and everything. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco collectively quite a lot. I think you are right that in general, you know, the big whale apps are doing most of the you know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder how people blame for those things. Although speaking of damage, like this is part of the meta commentary about this from
⏹️ ▶️ John the people in our circles is about the reputational damage that Apple is taking by
⏹️ ▶️ John engaging in this thing. So here’s a quote from Gruber that I think, you know, boils us down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the different things they’re doing. I’ll put a link in the show notes to this. This is a post from
⏹️ ▶️ John October. Yeah, October, sorry. It remains true that Apple is not monetizing the information
⏹️ ▶️ John we store on our devices or in iCloud, but they’re certainly monetizing our attention and their exclusive hold on
⏹️ ▶️ John that attention for all apps and games for iOS. Apple’s business model is no longer the straightforward selling of great
⏹️ ▶️ John products, and these new ads in the App Store are not designed to make anything better other than
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple services, bottom line. So, you know, that’s again, harkening back to the old days is like Apple just makes
⏹️ ▶️ John really good products and they sell it to us for a lot of money and that makes them billions of dollars. And this is like, but they also sell our attention
⏹️ ▶️ John and that doesn’t make us feel better but it does make Apple money. And it is a change in our relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple. The relationship before was like, we pay really huge margins, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John For the things that we buy from them. But in the end, we’re satisfied by that. And when they come out with a fancy new
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, we want the fancy new thing. So we pay them the money and that is what has made Apple its billions of dollars. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John people didn’t buy the iPhone. You know, it’s like the iPhone was not a, didn’t make Apple tons of money
⏹️ ▶️ John because it made them tons of service revenue, at least initially. Initially they sold a lot of phones at like 40% margins and they still
⏹️ ▶️ John do that and it makes them a lot of money. But now this, you know, this app store, you know, the ad
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is not making the products better for its users. You could argue that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s making the products, the platform better for developers because developers do need some
⏹️ ▶️ John way to reach their customers. But if you look at what actually happens if
⏹️ ▶️ John you programmatically sell an ad slot, it’s not like the developers that you want to connect to customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people making the best applications that Apple features on stage and gives awards to, those aren’t filling the ad slots.
⏹️ ▶️ John They probably don’t have enough money to fill the ad slots. It’s the casino games that are lurking as the 85% thing underneath it all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll put a link to MJ Tsai’s blog post where he collected a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of comments from people. But a lot of them are just talking about the reputational and brand
⏹️ ▶️ John damage that’s being done by this because most people didn’t think of Apple as a company that sells
⏹️ ▶️ John their attention because Apple tends not to be in that business. And to that end, there was a one
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that did come out about this was there was a report in the information that tried to get some, uh, some
⏹️ ▶️ John information from inside Apple about this. Uh, this is a Mac rumors summary of it, but we’ll put a link to the information
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. Uh, the micro summary, it says a new report revealed internal disagreements within Apple causing some employees
⏹️ ▶️ John who work on the company’s ad business to raise concerns that showing more ads to iPhone users ruins the premium experience
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s long been offered to its customers. Makes sense, right? Because it’s not what they’re used to. Here, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John directly from the information report on this. It says, one person familiar with Apple’s ad business
⏹️ ▶️ John said the company doesn’t harbor ambitions to compete at the same level as Meta and Google in digital advertising, nor does
⏹️ ▶️ John it plan to build an advertising network similar to those of its rivals that would serve ads to users outside its own apps and services.
⏹️ ▶️ John The person said, ad executives are pleased with revenue growth based on Apple’s existing ad spots and don’t plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to significantly increase the number of ads on phones to meet growth targets. So this is from inside Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, yeah, we added more ad slots, but we’re not going full Google here. We’re not just like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to sell ads against every piece of information that we have, you know, because that’ll make us tons of more and it
⏹️ ▶️ John would make them tons more money. That is Google’s business model. We sell ads against what we know about people, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John Facebook’s business model. It’s a good business model in terms of if you want to make a lot of money. But this person is saying, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going down that road. but we’re, you know, we added these ad slots, but we’re not just
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna keep pursuing that to get more and more growth. Is that true? Or will it be irresistible
⏹️ ▶️ John for them to do that? But like, regardless, regardless of whether this is 100% true, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John they have crossed a threshold here with these ad slots, because
⏹️ ▶️ John like we were saying, we’ve already revealed things that people would rather not see. And I think it’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ John bridge too far. If this is the truth, if this Apple ad executive is leaking to the information, that they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to actually pursue this the extent that Google does. They just want to have like, you know, enough ad slots
⏹️ ▶️ John to give the developers a way to advertise. This is not helping. This is hurting. It’s making people think of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple in a new way. It’s making people less pleased with their phone, kind of like the search results when you try to search
⏹️ ▶️ John for an app and instead of finding the app that you wanted, you get a big blue ad for a different app. Most people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, both because Apple’s relevance is bad and because it just seems like it’s getting in your way. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John making the experience better for users, right? And that was before these new ad slots, these
⏹️ ▶️ John new ad slots at the bottom of the products, most people probably won’t see, but I just feel like this is crossing
⏹️ ▶️ John a line with at least the nerdy people in our circles, maybe not regular people, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John I do think it will be hard for Apple’s advertising folks to resist adding another
⏹️ ▶️ John slot, turning a dial to monetize this or whatever, despite the fact that they say that they’re not going down that
⏹️ ▶️ John road. Maybe that’s what every one of these ad executives is gonna say after they add every new ad slot
⏹️ ▶️ John for the next 10 years. you wake up one day and every part of the Apple’s applications are filled with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads. Yeah, I mean, because it’s it’s such you know, when you when you talk about adding ad slots everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a slippery slope. It really it’s so easy once like again, as I was just saying how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, when they added the very first ad to the App Store, the very first search ads, they were very careful about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still do a really mediocre job, but they were very careful about it at least. And they were very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sloppy about this one, because now it’s like, well, Well, once you have ads, what is it to add? Hey, look, there’s some real estate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down there. You know, it’s kind of out of the way, it’s below the full, you could just add a few more. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add, hey, what’s one more? It’s such a slippery slope with ads. I know, I’ve been there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I run ad-based businesses and have for like 20 years. Like, I’m very aware of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pressures here that result from this. But, you know, you do have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about the experience. And it matters a lot. Like we had many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago, we started out doing this podcast, once we got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going and started having ads, we briefly had two ads per show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then pretty early on went to three, because the length of the show made sense. We have six minutes of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads in a two hour show, no one really cares. But we have a format, and where we put them, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of ads we take, et cetera. And we’ve gotten so many offers over the years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, hey, you could make a lot of money if you do like a 30 second pre-roll ad, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the show starts, the very first thing you hear is an ad. And there’s a reason why a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of podcasts do that, because they’re very high priced, they make a lot of money. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we said no, because that is not the format of our show, and that’s not the experience we want it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, and we think the ads we have are enough, and that’s why we’ve had three ads, and it’s been fixed at three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads for something like six years. Or more.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John programmatically sell them in an auction that run
⏹️ ▶️ John being. Human being sells our ads, and we choose which ads go on the show. Like, obviously we’re much
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, we couldn’t programmatically sell them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We totally could.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey anyway, the whole point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is more quote unquote efficient, like the magic of the internet. Wow, we don’t have to have salespeople, and we can
⏹️ ▶️ John just have people bid, and we’ll always make sure we get the maximum money out of the advertisers, and it’s like, yeah, but what are you trading
⏹️ ▶️ John for? We know what you’re trading for, we know what that looks like. Every ad would be casino ads or mesothelioma
⏹️ ▶️ John ads, right? And that’s not what we want the show to be. And so we’re making less money and
⏹️ ▶️ John paying someone to sell our ads and everything. But in the end, we think we make a better product and blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And we’re small potatoes, but like, it’s the same exact decision for a company the size of Apple, Google, and Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ John And unlike Google and Facebook, Apple has a really, really good way to make a ton of money that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t involve ads. It’s a proven business model. It really makes a lot of money. Now, people in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ John room keep yelling, yelling growth, growth, growth. It’s like, oh, it makes a lot of money, doesn’t have growth or whatever. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is that’s supposed to be the lesson that Apple is always trying to teach the rest of the industry, that if you chase growth, you will catch
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing right. What you should be doing is, as we said before, like make great products, make things that people like. And in the
⏹️ ▶️ John end, that will actually make you more money and give you more growth than pursuing the other thing. But everyone else is no, ignore that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chase growth. Right. And Apple has been, you know, historically one of the best companies
⏹️ ▶️ John in the entire world at resisting that urge, which is why they have all this money. Right. It’s not. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have all this money because the service revenues has made them the richest company in the world. No, the the resistance
⏹️ ▶️ John to pursuing things like this is what has made them the richest company in the world. That is the lesson of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple of, you know, the last several decades. And this is just like, you know, one part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John company going down a dark path that we don’t want them to go down. And the statement from inside Apple makes me hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not that this is not going to consume the company from the inside out. But, you know, I guess the
⏹️ ▶️ John final little bit here is not not a great sign, but speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of ads and places where they can appear, every one of us who uses Xcode has been recently annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco dialog box that
⏹️ ▶️ John pops up in Xcode saying, hey, did you know you could use, what is it called? Xcode in the cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or whatever? Xcode cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah, Xcode cloud to compile this. Xcode cloud is a thing that will build your applications on cloud servers
⏹️ ▶️ John and if you have a complicated application or lots of unit tests or you wanna farm it out to more different kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ John devices, it’s cool. It’s a good product, it’s a good service. Apple should make this. I don’t have any objection to this
⏹️ ▶️ John product. What we object to is I just hit build and run on my application and you popped up a
⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue saying, hey, you can do the next code cloud. That’s a freaking ad. And when I dismiss it, like I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John the original dialogue box, the only choices were like, yes, or like later or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like the most pat, I wanna punch somebody in the face whenever I see a dialogue that says like maybe later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I just wanna say, no, I never wanna do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John They changed it, they changed the button in an Xcode update to say like, yes, and like, I don’t know if it says yes, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it says, it says like the positive one, then the other one says dismiss, which at least is better than later, because later is a
⏹️ ▶️ John lie. Later is like, but here’s the thing, you hit dismiss, right? You’re not saying later,
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit dismiss, but you’ll be seeing that dialogue again. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe it was every build and archive, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s every one, but it would pop up again, and it’s like, get out of my face. And this is the worst, because this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good service that is useful for the people who need it, and maybe worth money for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who want it, and it’s an Apple service. It’s not a casino game, it is a legitimate thing, but seriously, dirtying up your
⏹️ ▶️ John IDE by popping up this dialogue in our face? Like, I understand you want developers to be aware this feature exists, I get that,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of apps have an onboarding experience to say, hey, you might not know this, but in this menu here’s a new feature we want you to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fine, do it once. We all see the things in the upper right hand corner of macOS when we do a macOS update that
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to tell us what’s new in the OS? Eh, whatever, like, it’s annoying, you turn it off, you can just turn off notifications
⏹️ ▶️ John for tips and you’ll never see it again, right? But like, we’re fine with that. It’s like, hey, I want you to know
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s new features in the new OS you upgraded. But that’s it just one time you get that once.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this this I mean, they’re not alright. Is this part of the same ad fresh? No, but someone is
⏹️ ▶️ John involved with trying to to make money enough money with Xcode cloud to pay for its development
⏹️ ▶️ John and maintenance. I understand that. But if the go to move is, hey, we just made this, this product, and we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay for all these servers, we need enough people to sign up for it to make it worth our while we need
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to make this new service profitable. How can we do that? If the go-to move is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of developers use Xcode. Why don’t we put an ad in Xcode? And why don’t we have a comp every time they do build an
⏹️ ▶️ John R? It’s like, no, stop, don’t do that. Like, I understand you can do that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s right there in front of you, but that’s not the Apple move. And by the way, we’ll put it in the show notes. Apparently there’s a defaults
⏹️ ▶️ John write command that you can do for a com.apple.dt.xcode where you set
⏹️ ▶️ John xcode cloud upsell prompt enabled and set that to false. I love they call it the upsell
⏹️ ▶️ John prompt, so they know what they’re doing. So you can disable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I don’t I don’t want to have to run an ad blocker for my developer environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but again, it’s like this is this is the corrupting influence of like ads and services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco revenue upsells like that. They’re just going to keep doing this. Look, we we’ve just you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re not really a financial podcast because we don’t care and we don’t know anything about it. But you can look around the industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see, this is a bad time for the economy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around tech companies especially. We’re in a serious downturn.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re probably nowhere near the end of it. All the big tech companies are doing these massive layoffs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple at least has done a hiring freeze. Not layoffs yet, but obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times are getting tight. We’re in a crunch right now. And Apple has been,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has had trouble for years now trying to keep one-upping their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco previous sales numbers. You know, trying to keep the growth going because they’ve been so successful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, they’ve made so much money over time, it’s hard to keep making more money. When you’re at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those levels, it’s very hard to keep growing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they have been, like that’s the other thing. It’s hard to and also they have been. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is slowing down, and it isn’t because their products suck or anything, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because these industries are all maturing. Everyone has phones now. Everyone has…
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has phones because Apple can’t make enough phones to even meet demand due to the COVID stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ John China, so there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, well that’s a separate problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is, but it is, as they would say in the financial calls, a headwind that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple’s going to have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Right, but anyway, the point is we’re in tough times for that continued growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep going for the whole tech industry, many of whom are doing much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as these times are getting a little bit more tough for Apple to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their growth and their expectations, and possibly their stock price,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to keep tightening these screws. We’re going to keep having more and more upsells.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The prices are going to go up, the capabilities that you get for free are going to go down, the upsell points are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get more persistent and more in your face, and there’s there’s going to be more of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and anywhere they can squeeze harder they’re going to squeeze harder.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why I get concerned when I see moves like you know putting more search ads everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I know they’re going to just keep going on this. Anything that they get away with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like their whole business doesn’t collapse and there isn’t giant PR you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outburst anything that they can kind of slip by and wear people down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with they’re going to keep going and do more of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the pessimistic take. But the statement from inside Apple is that they’re explicitly saying that they don’t plan
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. This is like an anonymous leak, so I doubt it’s like Apple PR speaking through this
⏹️ ▶️ John leaking thing. It doesn’t seem like that’s the plan. But regardless of what they might say,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason we’re talking about this is we see on the outside new things like that coming out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we think they’re crossing a line, the thing in Xcode and these ad slots. And it’s just, you know, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like they are doing that. And I think that’s the only thing you can say, whether they take the lesson from that and back up again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they want to look at like, what is the lessons of the great success story in the technology market of our lifetime,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is Apple? The lesson is when when things were going bad for the whole tech industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple strategy, then under ICO, Steve Jobs or whatever, stated many times
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone in the industry was sad and their heads were down and things were bad. And it was a dot com bust and
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of terrible stuff was going on. And the Apple strategy was, we’re going to innovate
⏹️ ▶️ John our way out of the downturn or the recession or whatever, whatever, whatever the words were, they always say, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to innovate our way out of it, what we’re going to do here is, unlike everybody else who is like running scared
⏹️ ▶️ John and firing everybody and trying to figure out how to make money by selling punch the monkey ads or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to do something different. Instead, what we’re going to do is we’re going to invest in ourselves, we’re going to spend more money,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to hire more people, we’re going to undertake more projects that cost us more money and burn more
⏹️ ▶️ John of our capital and more time because we think the only way out of this downturn is to
⏹️ ▶️ John innovate our way out of it or whatever the catchphrase was. Like basically, we’re going to figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the iMac and the iPhone and the iPad and that’s what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to save us, not let’s scramble to run ads against everything we have or whatever. Again, against the instinct of
⏹️ ▶️ John other people, which is like, hey, business school, we need to find a way to make money, turn all the money dials up in the company, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hope that as things enter a downturn, that they pursue that strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John That what we’re seeing now is not the strategy of a downturn into trying to make growth grow, but instead what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is is the exuberance of success and saying, we make money everywhere. We turn all the dials up. Everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going great. And as things get worse for the industry, that Apple finds its previous
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy, which is that’s not the move. The move is, because we’re Apple and have a jillion dollars,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when we didn’t have a jillion dollars, we did this, is reinvest, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, maybe tighten down focus or whatever, but, you know, come out with the great thing. Let’s really work on
⏹️ ▶️ John that headset. Let’s figure out the car, whatever they’re going to do, right? Let’s make Max great again, which they did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s the move when things are in a downturn is not now’s the time to scramble and
⏹️ ▶️ John find out a way we can scrape more pennies from people by putting, you know, Xcode cloud ads and everyone’s ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t I don’t think modern Apple has those sensibilities anymore. Like, Literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right, in that one big tech downturn when Steve Jobs took over, his strategy was, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make our products better. Tim Cook’s strategy appears to be, let’s cover our products with ads for casinos.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that is a strategy of peak. I think that’s a strategy on things are going
⏹️ ▶️ John great. And it’s a lagging indicator. We don’t get to see what Apple has decided to
⏹️ ▶️ John do until much later when that actually does it. But I feel like if we actually enter a really
⏹️ ▶️ John bad tech downturn for, you know, it’s barely been touching Apple, but I feel like the manufacturing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in China is really gonna touch Apple and that’s gonna hit their revenue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait till their holiday quarter results come in and there’s not a lot of iPhone sales. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, it’s gonna be bad for them, right? But I hope what this does is, and the whole discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John around this whole issue with ads, I hope that what we’re seeing was the last burst of exuberance
⏹️ ▶️ John of the go, go, rah, rah, Apple always continues to grow, grow, grow, right? And instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they need to find other areas for growth, they’re available to them and they’re pursuing them. The whole like, let’s get sports
⏹️ ▶️ John people to watch Apple TV, let’s get more people signed up for Apple TV. Like there are other growth opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t destroy your brand, right? Getting more people to sign up for Apple TV Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John because they like the TV shows, that’s a clean win. If you can do that, do it, pursue it, right? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John service revenue that we’re not complaining about. People love Severance, they wanna sign up for Apple TV Plus to watch it, thumbs
⏹️ ▶️ John up, that’s the equivalent of making the iMac. You made a good show that people want and they signed up for your service so they could see the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Good, do that. Selling more ad slots, not good. Don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because that’s a service. Like when you’re offering something that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want for a reasonable price to them, that is a service you’re offering to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re gonna call it services revenue, that is exactly, first of all, that’s the story they probably tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves, but also that’s a good service. that fits within Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expertise. That is the best of Apple, is making something that people like, doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good job of it and selling it for the maximum price people will tolerate in that category.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we’re happy to pay it, most of us, most of the time, because it’s a good product. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how Apple should and usually has operated their business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I worry that we haven’t seen I mean, stuff really hit the fan yet with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and its expectations with the stock market and everything. I think we’re in for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rude awakening over the next few months. And we are just going to have these screws
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tightened so much more than we think. And I hope I’m wrong. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prove me wrong, Tim Apple. But I am worried. I’m really worried because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already see the direction they’re going. And because they have so much lock-in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for any of their metrics to go down in a meaningful way that would actually weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them up here. They are still sensitive to negative press. That’s why the casino ads got quote paused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that ad slot. But there’s only so much negative press that can be generated by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small paper cuts. If they do something really bad, like casino ads on gambling recovery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, that’ll get bad press. all these little paper cuts of minor ads and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor upsell opportunities all over the place here and there, those don’t get the bad press. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I worry that they’ve made so much money, they’re so wildly successful in so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways, and they are so good at smelling their own farts and thinking they’re just wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean that in the most loving way, Apple, but you know it’s true. I think they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the paper cut nature of things enough. The highest up people in the the company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are in charge of such directions and decisions are not seeing these things or are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sensitive to these things. Similar to the problems that our Twitter owner friend has where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has surrounded himself only with yes men and with numbers and things that support his worldview. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Apple suffers from that a lot of the time where a lot of the higher ups at Apple seem to be making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decisions without all the information or with bad information or with an inability to read the room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s going to really hurt them in this area. They’re going to keep adding these paper cuts and these little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoying missteps and these reputation and brand eroding factors into their user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experience. And I don’t think they have a good feedback loop up at the top for them to really say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, hey, you know what? This is kind of making things worse. And this might not be worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the dollar that we’re going to make from this today. It might not be worth the $10 we’re going to lose over time from the damage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it causes. I don’t think the higher up people think that way at Apple. I don’t think they have the the right sensibilities or priorities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to think that way. And I think they’ve demonstrated that over the last decade very effectively. That’s why I’m concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. I don’t have faith in the leaders to think this way. They’re really good at running operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making money, but they’re not really good at avoiding paper cuts in their product experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and properly valuing those long-term. They’re really not good at that. They’ve repeatedly showed themselves not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be good at that. And now that they are gonna face challenges in the things they are good at, the operations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the money, they’re going to start tightening those product screws and increasing the paper cut load because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how they know how to fix those problems. And they don’t care about the cost of these problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll say that part of the report was also that there was internal disagreement and that employees don’t like it. So maybe Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the asset that Apple needs to leverage here is all the, uh, the rank and file employees who,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, don’t want Apple to be like this. Cause I feel like Apple employees do to some extent have
⏹️ ▶️ John influence over what the company does. It sounds like silly to do. Of course, don’t the employees. Isn’t there, aren’t they plays the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that influences what Apple does? Well, certain employees, not all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey employees, right? There
⏹️ ▶️ John is a hierarchy. It is not a democracy, right? But internal agitation can move the lead
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit. It’s not the way you like to your point, Marco, like if you had internal agitation to do the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but you didn’t have Steve Jobs there, who is receptive to that or who already agreed with it, they wouldn’t have dug
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves out of the hole that they were in, like leadership in the end needs to be on board with that. I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John not as pessimistic about Apple’s leadership as you are. I agree that they definitely have blind spots and often seem to be living
⏹️ ▶️ John in a different universe than we are. But I think if they heard this conversation, they would
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly agree with all the things I said about like what Apple had done in the past. It’s just that they think they’re doing that now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re telling them you’re not doing that as much as you think you are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Linode. And thanks to our members
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who support us directly. You can join at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to Accidental, accidental, tech
Post-show: ButtDB
⏹️ ▶️ John Tell us the name of your database framework. Was this
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the point of having a secret name? Is it embarrassing? It is no sexual position like what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s called but TV. Yeah, sure it is. All right. It’s called Blackbird because I like the plane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey What’s wrong with that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing wrong with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t want to like, you know, name it and then have everyone tell me, you know, there’s a million other things called that. I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a million other things called that because it’s a cool name. It’s a cool plane. That’s, you know, it’s kind of long to type, though. You
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess autocomplete saves you there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and how often are you typing in blackbird.database? It’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common of a thing. Yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anyway. You didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make a capital B in the middle of it, did you? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What are you, crazy?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just making sure. We have to go to the title case site for all these ATP titles. I just want to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that nothing is going terribly wrong here. Yeah. Well, you can do lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of fun associated vocabulary that you could throw in there with all Lockheed,
⏹️ ▶️ John Skunk Works, Sled Driver, all sorts of other words associated with that whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and the thing is like, and there’s all sorts of different ways, like I’m not even a plane nerd.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just like that plane. So like I don’t even know most of the other references
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I could make. If you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to go onto YouTube, the SR-71 Blackbird YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John rabbit hole is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just go down there on YouTube and just watch these three hour videos like someone who flew this thing is their career
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you all about it or the engineers that worked on it or the engineering explain video that there’s like seven
⏹️ ▶️ John engineering explain videos to talk about this plane so good you can just spend if you like this kind of stuff and even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t think you like it it’s just hours and hours of qualities I should find the engineering explains one for notes let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah anyway yeah because it’s I like the plane it’s fast and it’s old and well I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a sequel light thing that’s and that’s old and and I made it fast so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like sequel light is like old and awesome and fast and that’s what this is. It’s you know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John when your library is on the runway it will leak fuel from the fuel tanks because it needs to get up to speed to have enough heat to close
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it will be a super big pain in the ass to use it but it will be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the async calls I’m gonna have to make like it’s gonna be a big pain in the ass to use this thing from my code.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, when I’m using it it’s going to be awesome and fast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I’ll put one engineering explain videos in there. Uh, and then probably once you watch
⏹️ ▶️ John that video, your recommended videos along the sidebar, we’ll just, just follow those. And yeah, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you get to Nazis, but it’ll be a while. Wow. One of the, one of my favorite things, I, uh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John S or 71 though, one of the videos, I don’t know which one it is. You’ll have to dig it out or whatever, but it was like, uh, I think it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was either predating GPS or they needed something. They need something to tell where they are
⏹️ ▶️ John right on the globe in this in the spy plane, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s so old and was engineered in such a long time. Like I was just I mean, I don’t know what I was thinking that they would
⏹️ ▶️ John use that. But like if you didn’t have GPS and you’re in your plane, how would you try to figure out like for the people
⏹️ ▶️ John in the plane so they know like where on earth they are?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I would. I mean, you know, obviously of like compasses, but beyond that, I guess I would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like descend until I could look around the landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and try to identify
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I don’t know. So what they did was they have they have a package that’s in the plane that has a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras in it. And what it does is it points up at the sky and looks at the stars.
⏹️ ▶️ John It positions itself by the positions of the freaking stars with an optical camera. That’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, well, how else are you gonna do it? It’s like, well, ships at sea, you navigate, because they have to know where they are anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John on the earth, and they can’t do like dead reckoning of like, well, I’ve been going this direction according to the compass headings for this amount of time, and the wind isn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they literally look at the stars. And it’s like, that’s what era this plane is from. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. That’s awesome. And then you look at the device, you’re like, who had to design that? Who had to
⏹️ ▶️ John engineer that? It’s like, okay, it’s gonna be in a plane, it will have a little window, and you’re gonna look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John sky, at the stars with 1960s technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out where we are on the planet, and show it on like, just, it’s mind boggling.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they didn’t really have Raspberry Pis and camera modules back then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that’s it, it’s not that exciting, but that’s what it’s called, and it’s super fast, and I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to call it, but DB. I feel like but DB now has some, you know, some