Not a Cactus in Sight
Casey:
How do you pronounce S-T-A-H-P?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
That's not a word.
Casey:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
Well, not really, but it's what the kids say when they really want you to stop doing something.
Casey:
Is it stop?
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
Stop?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Something like that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm going to go with stop.
Marco:
Maybe like the Great Lakes accent.
Marco:
Stop.
Oh, God.
Casey:
Yes, because that's what this podcast needs is more talk about regional accents.
Marco:
Yes, definitely.
Casey:
I actually got called out at work today in a happy way.
Casey:
A coworker asked me, a coworker that I just started working with, asked me if I was from Jersey.
Casey:
Well, that part wasn't happy at all.
Casey:
That was miserable.
Casey:
But point being, I said mash on something as in to like hit emphatically or repeatedly.
Casey:
And apparently that's a Northeastern thing or so I'm told.
Marco:
Well, that's a drink in Great Britain, right?
Marco:
Smush or whatever?
Casey:
Oh, that was squash that you're thinking of.
Marco:
Squash!
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
I thought it was smush.
Marco:
So Tiff's opinion of that, when she heard this, she said it's probably like getting frozen fruit concentrate here, like the fruit juice concentrate?
Casey:
I think that's correct.
Casey:
From the most I can piece together, but as we talked about on the last episode of Analog...
Casey:
I sent an emergency text to underscore David Smith, the Internet's arbiter of all things UK versus American, and also the Internet's historian.
Casey:
And he indicated to me that we do not have anything that's really equivalent to squash.
Marco:
Well, we have things that have that name, but it's different.
Marco:
It's like football.
Marco:
It's like, well, we have that, but that's not what you think it is.
Casey:
Yeah, well, it's either football or a vegetable.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, I was asking you what's going on with cellular downloads on Overcast.
Casey:
And this is okay because I see in the show notes it says pre-follow-up and then Marco talks.
Marco:
I did not type that this time.
Casey:
I don't know who did.
Casey:
Clearly it was John.
John:
Why don't you just keep adding sections?
Casey:
What about pre-pre-follow-up?
Casey:
We'll get there.
Casey:
Maybe next episode.
Marco:
What happens if the pre-follow-up generates follow-up?
Marco:
What do we do with it next episode?
Marco:
Where do we put it?
Casey:
Then it gets lumped into regular follow-up.
Marco:
It doesn't get pre-follow-up follow-up?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
This is getting recursive.
Casey:
I'm uncomfortable.
Casey:
No, I was asking you what's going on with cellular downloads and overcast because you seem to be stressing out about it quite a bit.
Marco:
Well, this is a constant battle I have with designing Overcast.
Marco:
Where do I strike the balance between offering settings for customization versus complexity of the app?
Marco:
Because if you look...
Marco:
So many well-featured, well-regarded podcast apps have just these massive setting screens.
Marco:
And it's not because they're badly designed by idiots.
Marco:
It's because it's a hard problem.
Marco:
And when you make a podcast app, everybody asks for all these features.
Marco:
And it's really hard to please a large number of people without adding a ton of options and customizations and features.
Marco:
I've always tried to differentiate Overcast from the other well-established clients by being simpler in those regards.
Marco:
It's really, really hard to keep that up, to manage that.
Marco:
Because right now, I'm working on version 2.0.
Marco:
One of the big features of 2.0 that I'm willing to talk about is streaming.
Marco:
I've been working on streaming for a long time, as I mentioned on this show, a couple times in various aftershows.
Marco:
It does finally work.
Marco:
It is working.
Marco:
I've been using it myself for the last couple of weeks.
Marco:
I don't really like it.
Marco:
It's...
Marco:
It works well.
Marco:
It is solid.
Marco:
And it is awesome.
Casey:
And to be clear, it works with smart speed.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
I wouldn't do it without it.
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Casey:
Just want to make sure.
Marco:
Now I have to face the other issues of having streaming in the app.
Marco:
So there are certain options that it needs.
Marco:
Things like, you know, what do you do when a new episode comes in?
Marco:
Do you market for streaming or do you download it automatically?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There has to be some choice there.
Marco:
There has to be an issue of what do you do if you're playing a playlist and the episode that you're on ends and the next episode is a streaming episode, but you are offline.
Marco:
What do you do?
Marco:
No matter what you pick, you're going to anger some people and you're going to please some people.
Marco:
And it's really hard to know a lot of times ahead of time which one of those sides will come out ahead.
Marco:
So the question I have now is should I permit cellular data usage for streaming?
Marco:
Because right now I have cellular downloads.
Marco:
And so in an app that you have mixed streaming and downloads, now you have to have a little more control over that.
Marco:
So it's questionable.
Marco:
So
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
The thing that I agree on, no question, is that cellular data not only will be allowed for streaming, but it will be allowed by default, and it'll be on by default.
Marco:
Because in the world we live in today, I think people widely expect...
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Almost all media streaming apps, they will just do it.
Marco:
If you say play this video and you're on cellular on your phone, it'll just do it over cellular and that's fine.
Marco:
So no question streaming has to be there and it has to be enabled by default over cellular.
Marco:
The problem is there are lots of – and when I posted these tweets, it's funny.
Marco:
Everybody thinks that they have the most advanced worldview on this issue.
Marco:
And, of course, I'm the stupid American, so I don't know what the rest of the world is like.
Marco:
So I have heard from about equal numbers today of people saying both, in my country, we have very bad data plans, so you have to have restrictions.
Marco:
And the rest of the world works this way.
Marco:
And therefore, you need to have very strong restrictions.
Marco:
And I've also heard from other people saying, well, in my country, everybody has unlimited data.
Marco:
And that's the world we live in now.
Marco:
And so you don't need to even bother with this.
Marco:
So I've heard both ends of this a lot.
Marco:
But right now, I have two cellular options in the app.
Marco:
And I wish I could get away with just one.
Marco:
but right now I have two.
Marco:
So the big one, the main one is whether I allow background or foreground, whatever, when the app downloads full episodes ahead of time or when it gets a notification or whatever, when it downloads full episodes, do you download the whole thing over cellular or do you wait for Wi-Fi?
Marco:
So that is an option.
Marco:
And I think that option is good.
Marco:
That deserves to stick around because if you just stream and you say, all right, play this right now, that's an action you're taking.
Marco:
You're deliberately saying, play this episode right now.
Marco:
And I'm recognizing that I'm playing a podcast while I'm on my phone on a cell network.
Marco:
This might use data.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
But if you background download things that just come in, like overnight, somebody could blow their data cap if a whole bunch of episodes are released by their favorite podcast.
Marco:
Maybe their feed messes up and it releases like 10 new episodes accidentally, and then the phone downloads 10 things over cellular without them even knowing or initiating it.
Marco:
So it makes sense to differentiate between automatic background downloads using it and things that you initiate as the user for playback using it.
Marco:
So that makes sense.
Marco:
You should have an option to disable cellular on background downloads.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
But then there's an iOS annoyance that I have.
Marco:
I consider it a bug.
Marco:
I'm not sure that Apple does.
Marco:
For every app that you have on your phone that uses data at all, you can go into settings and you can turn off cellular data usage for the app at the iOS level.
Marco:
So the app doesn't have to have an option for that.
Marco:
You can just go in and disable it.
Marco:
And many people do who are on limited plans who really need to watch their usage.
Marco:
So the problem is...
Marco:
In previous versions of iOS, you've always had this so-called reachability API.
Marco:
It actually has this long CF network, whatever name, but it's shortened.
Marco:
Everyone says the reachability API.
Marco:
And this is the API that can notify you of changes in internet connectivity so that you can, for instance, your app can know whether the connection's offline and when it goes back online.
Marco:
And you can also tell whether it's online via cellular or Wi-Fi or neither, right?
Marco:
So you can make a whole bunch of intelligent decisions and it isn't perfect.
Marco:
Sometimes it isn't that reliable, but it's pretty close.
Marco:
It's pretty good most of the time.
Marco:
In previous versions before iOS 8, if somebody turned off that cellular option for you in system settings,
Marco:
So they say, this app can't use cell data anymore.
Marco:
Your app would see, when it asked the reachability API, am I online?
Marco:
The system would say, no, you're offline.
Marco:
So the app couldn't tell the switch was on.
Marco:
It just seemed like it was offline.
Marco:
And so if the app tried something, it would show that annoying dialog box that everyone has seen that says, cellular data is disabled for app name.
Marco:
You can enable it in settings.
Marco:
And there's no way for an app to initiate a network connection that does not show that box.
Marco:
So there's no way that I can say like, you know what, I'm going to do a background sync here.
Marco:
If it fails, the user doesn't even need to know.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
It's not that important.
Marco:
Or I'm going to download some artwork for the show that's showing in this table cell.
Marco:
If that fails, it doesn't really matter either.
Marco:
Just, you know, you don't have to alert the user with a modal dialog box saying cell data is off for me downloading an artwork to show in a table cell, right?
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
the smart thing to do as a developer in that case was to, before you do something optional that the user didn't really initiate, you know, something like a background sync or an artwork download, check reachability.
Marco:
And if it says it's offline, don't even try.
Marco:
And then that dialogue will never show up because if you don't do that,
Marco:
Then every time somebody goes to your app and it tries to do a background sync and they've disabled cell data for your app, the connection will not only fail, but it will show that box and it will annoy the crap out of them.
Marco:
And so then they will write you saying, why does your app keep showing this box?
Marco:
Because they don't know it's a system box you don't have any control over.
Marco:
So that's bad.
Marco:
Anyway, with iOS 8, there's what I consider a bug, which is if someone has disabled cellular data for your app in iOS settings...
Marco:
reachability API will tell you that you are online it will not say you're offline anymore so that you have no way to tell whether you are online unrestricted or whether you are online but with cell data disabled and so you can't avoid making those requests
Marco:
And you also still can't make a request that's marked as some kind of optional so it doesn't show that dialogue box.
Marco:
So therefore, if someone disables that for your app and you try to make a connection, it will show that box every time.
Marco:
Or at least once every 10 minutes or whatever.
Marco:
There's some kind of throttling on so it doesn't show them constantly.
Marco:
But it still shows them enough that it annoys people and they email me.
Marco:
So in order to work around this slightly...
Marco:
I had to add the second option called sync over cellular.
Marco:
And that's it's in my nitpicky details settings level, which is where I bury all my other options.
Marco:
And the reason why this is there is not to let people save data because it doesn't save that much data.
Marco:
It's to let people avoid that dialog box if they've disabled cell data for my whole app.
Marco:
Because with that, if you trigger that option, then I won't even attempt to make those connections over cellular.
Marco:
Because again, I can't distinguish between cellular that I'm allowed to use and cellular that I'm not allowed to use.
Marco:
So with that setting, that's what that whole thing is for.
Marco:
It's to work around this giant bug in iOS 8 that I think is still there in 9.
Marco:
You know, I'll have to do some tests.
Marco:
Maybe I really hope 9 fixed it, but I don't think it did.
Marco:
But I'll double check before next week.
Marco:
Well, before our fake next week show.
Marco:
And I'll report back.
Marco:
Because if that fixed it, I can remove that whole option.
Marco:
And that would be awesome.
Marco:
Anyway, sorry for the very long-winded thing here.
Marco:
Anyway, so now, faced with the question of adding streaming to this and having some kind of cellular control over streaming...
Marco:
Do I have three cellular data options?
Marco:
That's terrible.
Marco:
I'd have to just make a whole separate screen for them and explain.
Marco:
I mean, I will if I have to, but that sounds terrible.
Marco:
Or my best idea so far is to keep the two options I have now and just attack streaming to the second one.
Marco:
So that the background downloads is still separately controllable.
Marco:
Because that's something I can see somebody wanting to do background downloads only when they're on Wi-Fi, but be willing to stream wherever they are if they actually ask for it.
Marco:
The second option, rather than calling it sync over cellular, rename it to stream and sync over cellular.
Marco:
Does that make sense?
Marco:
I know this is very long.
Marco:
Probably very boring.
Marco:
We'll cut all this out.
Casey:
I think it does make sense.
Casey:
I would probably agree with you that sync over cellular could become stream and sync over cellular.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's interesting because I have an unlimited data plan from AT&T on my iPhone.
Casey:
I've gotten grandfathered in and I've never had a terribly compelling reason to walk away from it.
Casey:
I know that I could probably save a few bucks a month if I didn't keep it anymore, but whatever, it is what it is.
Casey:
However, on my iPad, as I've said numerous times in the past, I have the free 200 megs a month from T-Mobile.
Casey:
And that's typically how I use cellular on my iPad if I'm going to use it at all.
Casey:
And occasionally, like if I'm on vacation, for example, I'll actually pay for a few gigs for that month or whatever.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Generally speaking, I just live on the 200 megs a month.
Casey:
And so I have gone in on my iPad and turned off cellular data at the iOS level pretty much everywhere.
Casey:
And I can assure you that if I saw that dialogue all the time when using Overcast would drive me nuts.
Casey:
So I think you need to stick around with the nitpicky detail version.
Casey:
And I see no reason not to put stream in there.
Casey:
Especially since any time you're streaming, from what I've gathered from you, any single time you're streaming, like you have said a couple times, it's based on user action.
Casey:
So at that point, I should know what I'm doing.
Casey:
And I should know...
Casey:
no matter how advanced user I am, if I'm trying to play a podcast that is not on my device, it's going to have to come from somewhere.
Casey:
And if I'm not on Wi-Fi, if I'm not on the fan, as we jokingly call it around these parts, then I know that it's going to have to go via cellular and I should be able to figure that out.
Casey:
So I think you've got the right approach, but I'm curious to hear what John has to say.
Marco:
Well, and there is one little complexity that you said, as long as you're streaming and you always chose that,
Marco:
there are scenarios in which you can unexpectedly stream.
Marco:
That sounds like a condition.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Oh, my.
Marco:
So, for instance, suppose you are on a trip that, you know, suppose you have it set so that new episodes come in in streaming mode, so that basically you disable auto-download, right?
Marco:
So new episodes come in and they're marked for streaming only.
Marco:
They're not automatically downloaded by default.
Marco:
Okay, so you have it set that way.
Marco:
You are listening to a playlist and you've downloaded everything on the playlist anyway because you are going to go somewhere.
Marco:
And so you're like, well, I don't want to burn all my data when I'm on this trip.
Marco:
So I'm going to download everything in advance.
Marco:
While you are listening to something and the screen is off, a new episode comes in.
Marco:
It's marked for streaming by default and it's inserted right after the thing you're listening to.
Marco:
So as you're listening, the episode that you're listening to ends.
Marco:
It starts up the next episode, which is a streaming only episode.
Marco:
So it is possible for streaming to happen to you somewhat unexpectedly.
Marco:
It's not going to be the common case, but it is possible.
Marco:
It's like the web.
Marco:
It just happens to you.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So you see there are lots of little complexities.
Marco:
Like a lot of people said, why don't you just pop up a dialogue asking people to approve streaming when you're on cellular or have an option to do that?
Marco:
The problem is lots of times when...
Marco:
When I have to make that decision, the display of the phone is off because it's in somebody's pocket or it's in somebody's dock somewhere in a car or in their house.
Marco:
And a lot of times, if you're driving, I really shouldn't be asking people to interact with the UI.
Marco:
That's dangerous.
Marco:
Or you're exercising and it's in your pocket.
Marco:
There's all these situations where I have to make a decision without asking the user with a dialog box.
Marco:
So I think the way to do it is to just never prompt the user for this decision.
Marco:
You just have a setting that you can change, either on or off.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, what do you have to say about this?
John:
You're going to talk about all these settings.
John:
It makes me think that the key point to hear is not the raw count of little toggle switches you have in your settings.
John:
I know there's sort of a combinatoric explosion of possibilities that you have to debug, so keeping the counter under control is a good first approximation of how you should keep your app from going crazy.
John:
But for the cellular stuff, setting aside the bugs, which, you know, what can you do?
John:
Just file the radars and keep your fingers crossed.
John:
The settings that come to mind when you're describing all this functionality that I can imagine users feeling comfortable with, and the way I'm conceptualizing it is, somewhere in the settings screen, there's going to be a list of either split into Wi-Fi and cellular or just do cellular if you're not going to disable anything in Wi-Fi.
John:
Here are the things I want this app to be allowed to do on cellular.
John:
It's a fairly long list of things.
John:
I want to say yes to that, no to that, yes to that.
John:
You can get increasingly specific about them.
John:
You can start off with a few numbers.
John:
When I hear stream and sync over cellular, I'd rather just see a cellular section.
John:
What am I allowed to do over cellular?
John:
Download new episodes.
John:
Stream episodes that I've asked you to stream.
John:
Download...
John:
stream episodes that come in while i'm listening to it but i don't know what the options are but it's like you can you can go through all the possibilities and just because i think yeah that's a lot of options and it's like who wants to answer all these questions you're going to come up with some set of defaults that you think are appropriate for most people but when someone goes to settings i can imagine them going down the list and going yes no no yes and if you want to help them you could even put like
John:
uh average of x number of megabytes over the past month which probably won't help them initially because you can't pre-populate that because you don't know what the usage is unless you collect it for everybody but after a month of usage they can go down that list and say like what's using all my cell data it's like i want overcast to uh you know they can only guess like what things i don't understand does this take up a lot of data or not you can see over the past month because you allowed us to download new episodes over cellular it's used this amount of data right and then they can you know just a bunch of switches going yes no no no yes no
John:
I feel like 6, 7, 8, 9, even 10 options in that type of thing isn't crazy, especially when you look at the actual iOS settings screens.
John:
They're just giant walls of toggle switches, and people are okay going, who can use location data?
John:
Not you, you, not you, you, you, not you.
John:
I think that's a reasonable...
John:
even though it seems really complicated if you're going to have this complexity anyway because you've got to have all these conditionals in the code of like when do i do this when do i do that and you're going to pick defaults for them just throw in the switches bury it in a section if it makes you feel better but i think that is actually the most straightforward way as long as you sort of organize these fleets of switches into logical groups
John:
than people feel like they're you know that each one because like there's a topic the topic is uh i don't know how you'd phrase it but like this is what overcast is allowed to do over your cell connection like and when they're in that frame of mind i feel like they're in the mode to
John:
go down those questions and just sort of give yes or no's rather than just going down a list of options and having to read each one and see what the topic is, what is it discussing, and what does the decision have to make, and then go to the next one, which is entirely unrelated.
John:
What is this one talking about?
John:
What is it discussing?
John:
You know, whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe I haven't thought of all the options, but of all the ones you listed so far, I'm like, those are all reasonable...
John:
Things that people could conceivably want settings for, but I think there's no way to express that in a UI without just a really big, long list of options.
John:
I think when you try to combine them into a single line item, it gets confusing because...
John:
It's less clear what's going on or like people might want different options for the two things that you've combined into one or two settings.
Marco:
Well, and there's more complexity to it than that.
Marco:
It isn't as simple as do I have combo settings or do I have a whole bunch of settings and a big long list?
Marco:
Because one of the biggest problems is if presenting with a big long list...
Marco:
There is a cost to having that in the app in that people will see that screen, it will confuse them, and it will give them the general impression that either this app is too complex for my taste or I don't understand this app and therefore I don't feel good about it.
Marco:
People don't like to be made to feel dumb or to be confused.
John:
Well, that's why you're burying it.
John:
You bury it in the advanced or nitpicky or whatever section.
John:
Like, I don't think anyone's going to go to the settings, period, unless the app doesn't do what they want by default.
John:
So it's all about picking the good defaults, as you discussed.
John:
I think you have a good handle on what the reasonable defaults are.
John:
You just want to have a go to section.
John:
And when someone gets into that mode where they feel like this app is doing something that I don't.
John:
That's why I mentioned the sizes on the things, because what they really want is stop using so much of my data.
John:
And if they just see a bunch of switches or even one or two options, even if it's just two options, like which one of those, if I change, will make it use less of my data.
John:
That's why stats on like, because this thing has been enabled, we have downloaded this number of things over your cell connection over this period of time.
John:
So and even if it's just two settings and two numbers, then go, OK, well, that's the one that's using my data.
John:
So I want to turn that one off.
Marco:
And I probably... Stats are tricky because I don't know if I can really guarantee them.
Marco:
I think it'd be hard to measure total bytes used accurately.
Marco:
There's things like redirects and header sizes and everything that I'd have to go very low level in the APIs to be able to actually count all of those accurately.
Marco:
So I wouldn't...
Marco:
I don't really want to be in the game of being incredibly specific because also there's some degree of liability there.
Marco:
I'm sure legally it wouldn't cause me huge problems, but it might anger people.
Marco:
If I say something that is wrong, so if I say, for instance, if I have in the app a big toggle that says all cell data off,
Marco:
I don't offer that because I can't guarantee that my app will use no cell data.
Marco:
The iOS at the system level option can.
Marco:
I can't because there are things like WK WebView and a WebView that tries to load images.
Marco:
I can't prevent that from hitting the cell network easily.
Marco:
I can't guarantee that my app will use no data.
Marco:
So that's why I don't offer that option.
Marco:
Also, I don't show the file sizes of the podcasts before they're downloaded.
Marco:
A lot of people request this.
Marco:
The big problem with that is that it basically would require doing a head request in the file before you download it and right before you download it to really get it accurately.
Marco:
Because there is a field in feeds where people are supposed to specify that.
Marco:
We do in our feed.
Marco:
But that is manually entered by a human being.
Marco:
So it is unreliable and it is often absent.
Marco:
So the only way to do it is to do a head request.
Marco:
And I can do that server side for every single thing.
Marco:
That's complicated.
Marco:
And that's also kind of unreliable because then what if the server... What if one of these things blocks me?
Marco:
Then I report zeros for everything.
Marco:
What if my information is out of date where the first crawl, maybe it was just one megabyte because they uploaded only part of the file.
Marco:
And then you go to download it two hours later and it's 100 megs.
Marco:
And then you're angry at me because I said it was only one meg.
Marco:
There's all these weird complex edge cases that I don't want to make a promise I can't keep.
John:
Well, you can make a fudge it like the people say in the chat room, low, medium, high percentages.
John:
I'm trying to just reconceptualize this whole cellular thing from a user's perspective.
John:
What they're concerned about is, you know, they can get the idea from the settings thing of which apps are using most of my data like Apple provides that.
John:
But then if they find out, OK, Overcast is a big consumer of things.
John:
I subscribe to a lot of podcasts and the settings app says it does a lot.
John:
i like podcasts i don't want to uninstall overcast i want to continue to listen to them but now i have to go into overcast and say how can i make overcast use less data and other than the big giant switch that says no cell data at all they're going into overcast with a mission and the mission is figure out what little thingies i have to flip to make it use less data and this you know i'm just anything to guide them in terms of which one of these options will have the most effect rather than relying on people reading the descriptions and understanding which one is
John:
is bigger and you know it can't give sizes in megabytes maybe you can give percentages maybe give low medium high i don't know i'm just that that's what i'm trying to think but like rather than uh worrying about it for the people who are like super picky and want to control every aspect of your app and want to like be able to write their own code to make decisions on each uh decision point
John:
Most people just want to know how to make the app use less data and know, you know, what the consequences are.
John:
Like, it's, you know, here's what the option says.
John:
Here's some sort of rating for if I were to turn off, how much might I save?
John:
And then I'll make that decision and understand because I turn that off now, I won't get that anymore from on a cell network.
John:
I don't know.
John:
it is it is a hard problem but i'm just i'm trying to simplify it in two ways one changing the way you think about it with terms of like what is the goal the goal is to use less data and i feel like sizes or ratings or something like that have to be in there and then two of the other extreme is you know just introduce the topic you give a big fleet of things that can go and then people will just go down the list and go uh
John:
yay or nay and like that sync over cellular thing i've never even seen that option so i don't you know like i'm trying to think of my usage i don't think i've ever been to the overcast setting screens maybe it's because you just happen to pick the defaults that are right for me maybe it's because i'm always on wi-fi but uh yeah the people who write you in to uh to complain about uh cell usage they may be noisy but i don't i i think most of your job is just picking good defaults and then after that i think you have to worry less about the intimidations of your setting screen because i don't think many people even visit it
John:
Maybe.
Marco:
Well, and the other problem is, this is what I affectionately call the power user problem, that if you give people settings, they will use them, and then they will forget that they use them.
Marco:
And then the app will behave differently from the default because they change settings, and then they forgot that they changed them.
Marco:
And then they will write in or complain on Twitter or complain in public that my app is not working properly because of a setting they changed.
Marco:
This happens regularly.
Marco:
all the time with the continuous playback setting, where in the playback effects pane thing, I have an option that most people would consider called continuous play, and I title it, when this episode ends, and at the bottom I have two buttons, play next or stop.
Marco:
And I thought this was very clear.
Marco:
Many people, when they're poking around in the options, they will toggle that.
Marco:
Then they will forget that they toggled that.
Marco:
And then they will write in saying, my app used to just automatically move to the next episode, and now it doesn't.
Marco:
What happened?
Marco:
It's a bug.
Marco:
And every time I have to explain, and this is kind of like a blow on the power cord kind of solution.
Marco:
It's like I don't want to embarrass them in my response.
Marco:
So I have to be very gentle in how I say this.
Marco:
But it's just a bad thing for everybody because if you give people settings, they will use them.
Marco:
Many of them will forget about it or use them badly or in ways they don't understand.
Marco:
And then the app will break for them.
Marco:
And regardless of what it does to me or my reputation, it makes the app suck for them.
Marco:
So that's also something I want to avoid.
John:
Aren't they happy when you gently lead them to the option?
John:
Aren't they like, oh, my problem is solved.
John:
I found a setting.
John:
I've plus a little toggle switch.
John:
And now I feel like, you know, I mean, I feel like it turns around on them at that point where it's like, I thought that this app that I used to like was ruined for me forever.
John:
But really, all I needed to do was tap a little toggle switch.
Marco:
Yes, but a lot of times those people are not writing in.
Marco:
These are always indicative of, well, if these five people on Twitter said this happened to them and they didn't understand that's why it happened, think of how many people there are who didn't get in touch with me, who just thought the app was broken.
John:
Why do people like to, I don't understand why someone would turn that off while they're wandering through settings or why they'd be wandering through settings.
John:
Again, I've also never seen this setting.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I guess the default is to go to the next track because I think that's what mine does.
Marco:
Oh, John, you are a responsible power user.
Marco:
You are the power user that developers wish all power users were like.
Marco:
But unfortunately, that's not the case.
Marco:
And there are so many people who like, if you give them a way to customize or change something, they will and they will always demand more of those things and then they will become support problems for you.
Marco:
you know why i don't go to settings i just launched the app just to figure out it's because it's not a gear icon i'm like where the hell is settings in this thing we've been we've been through this before no wonder i never go to settings it's hidden that's that that was one of those things like i i said i know can i get away with not using a gear icon and you can it keeps me away from the settings that maybe maybe that's why maybe
Marco:
you know regular people are so confused by everything because everything is horrible that uh they'll you know they'll push anything and not think about it power users look for a gear and they don't see a gear they just assume well i guess there's no settings that's perfect maybe maybe i should make all my icons make less sense have it squirm out of the way when you try to tap it
Marco:
Wasn't that a thing?
John:
Yeah, like on Windows.
John:
You can't do proximity detection with the... Wait for the iPad that has a stylus support, then you'll have proximity detection.
Marco:
Yeah, for all my iPad users.
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
Hey, I'm one of them.
Casey:
So before we leave this topic... It's like less than 5%.
Casey:
Before we leave this topic, maybe mention this and I blanked, but why not just have one universal... Can I do this?
Casey:
Can I do anything on cellular?
Casey:
Yes or no?
Marco:
Because I can't enforce that, basically.
Marco:
Because that's why, like I said earlier, if a web view for show notes loads an image, there's stuff that is very hard to enforce.
Casey:
Well, you could rephrase it.
Casey:
Can I download any podcast-related materials overselling?
Casey:
Well, okay, that's still a little weak, but you know what I'm driving at?
Casey:
You can wordsmith it to get the wording right.
Casey:
You just think that's not granular enough for your average user?
Marco:
Well, I think people either want the app to literally use zero, in which case they have to use the iOS system toggle, which they probably already have without even looking in the app.
Marco:
Because most apps don't have these options.
Marco:
Most apps just do it.
Marco:
And it's up to you as the user to minimize the usage or to go in settings and disable it.
Marco:
So if somebody wants to literally use no data, they will use the system pane for that.
Marco:
I think some data... Because every app that syncs with the web or gets status or info from the web, you're losing a few hundred kilobytes here and there to all these apps.
Marco:
And you just have to...
Marco:
Not care about that level of usage if you're going to have cell data enabled for anything.
Marco:
So some data usage is fine.
Marco:
But again, I don't want to make a promise that I can't really keep.
Marco:
And especially with something like this where making a mistake here could cost people money.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
Casey:
It's a tough thing for sure.
Casey:
But before we move on to start the show with follow-up, you should probably tell us about something that's cool.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
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Every Lynda.com course is very high quality and just high production value, everything.
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Marco:
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Again, they have programming, they have management skills, creative apps like Adobe's Creative Suite, Logic, Final Cut, negotiation skills, all sorts of great courses that almost everybody can find something here that they would like.
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So anyway, Lynda.com is offering a 10-day free trial.
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Once again, that is a 10-day free trial with access to all courses.
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So now that we're, what, 30, 40 minutes in, let's do some follow-up.
John:
See what you've done here with this pre-follow-up?
John:
You've just broken the show.
John:
It's not a complicated format.
John:
No.
Marco:
It's fairly straightforward.
Marco:
All those years of follow-up ruined.
Casey:
Just like that.
Casey:
Just like that.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Some men just like to see the world burn.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Casey:
Except I think that's actually watch the world burn, but that's okay.
John:
Wait, is this like Nero or?
John:
Yeah, Marco just learned about the cowbell SNL skit today.
Marco:
So he's coming down.
Marco:
So bad.
Marco:
So when so no, this is how this went.
Marco:
I want to defend myself here.
Marco:
Tiff said she made she made like the cowbell fever joke.
Marco:
And I knew there was a joke about more cowbell and I wasn't quite sure where it was from.
Marco:
So I said, oh, is that from Spinal Tap?
Marco:
And it turns out no, but I at least knew that the joke was about having more cowbell in that Blue Oyster Cult, whatever song that is.
John:
The thing is that it's something that you heard about, but didn't know the original.
John:
That's correct.
John:
That's what we're getting at.
John:
It's not whether you get references, it's that you haven't actually experienced the original...
Casey:
uh piece of media from pop culture i just i can't believe you didn't recognize that quote from dark knight now i know how john feels with me you know i've seen that so good it's one of my favorite movies oh god anyway so um we should probably correct our incorrect statements about half-life for like the third week in a row
John:
half-life just keeps coming it's the real one is out for the mac uh has been for a long time not just the source port but the plain old cruddy looking original half-life so half-life is completely and fully available for the mac i can't believe this game came out when i was like 16 and we're talking about it still
John:
Kind of like Halo, also completely available for the Mac.
John:
Too little, too late.
John:
Wait, what?
John:
The original Halo is on... That's where I played the original Halo.
John:
I played it on the Mac.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I genuinely did not know that.
Casey:
I assumed it was always Xbox One.
Marco:
Oh, thank God.
Marco:
Now everyone's going to email you.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Because I knew there was a history where Bungie was making it for the Mac and then Microsoft bought them and then they canned it, right?
John:
I guess you guys weren't in Apple circles when the Halo trailer was shown at Macworld or whatever that was.
John:
no was it mac worlds or yeah i guess i'm had to have been a mac world anyway on stage look at this amazing new game coming for the mac i don't want to talk about it it hurts too much to talk about it's dark time yeah um all right so thank you uh christian for that correction um
John:
uh this is from hunter i mentioned last week about on-demand resources where if your app doesn't come with a bunch of stuff it can download them on demand and you can sort of spec that out when you build your application which resources won't be bundled with the application but can be downloaded by the application uh at any point and i mentioned that
John:
Didn't seem like there was enough UI hooks to give a good user experience.
John:
The hunter says that the on-demand resource API does support NS progress for tracking progress and displaying it to the user.
John:
So that's nice.
John:
Although you think you have a bad thing about games that have like 500 meg levels that...
John:
Download levels over cellular?
John:
Yes, no.
John:
What's the right answer there?
John:
Probably no, but then if they're playing a game in a car ride and they get to the next level, the only thing you can really do is say, sorry, you can't play the next level because you have cellular downloads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and the kid immediately goes in, changes the setting, turns it on, and uses all of his parents' data.
John:
Or just waits a really long time for the next half an hour in the car for a 500 meg level to download while he travels along the highway.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Or any game that uses it gets so many one-star reviews from people having this problem that it stops using it.
John:
yeah uh but i think it's still a good option you just gotta break it up into smaller chunks you know like instead of hopefully no levels 500 megs but if games are like three gigs and they have a small number of levels each one's got to be pretty big anyway
John:
I hope game developers figured this out.
John:
I kind of like the PS4 thing where if you download a game, you can start playing it before the game is entirely downloading because they just download the early parts of the game sooner.
John:
It still takes a long time to download, but it's nice that you don't have to wait for the whole thing to download because you're not going to...
John:
outrun it by playing like some of these games take a certain minimum amount of time to get through especially when you're playing for the first time they just let you start playing as soon as you've got like the first you know hours worth of levels or something by the time you grind through those even if you're an expert in the game the rest will be downloaded or so they hope
Marco:
yeah I don't see this working out we'll see someone's gonna implement it I do think it's interesting also that like there seems on the iOS app store there seems to be no correlation between game size and commercial success
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Think about it.
Marco:
Man, you guys are off tonight.
Marco:
Either everyone else is crazy or I am.
Marco:
All right, so keep going.
Marco:
You expect there to be?
Marco:
You expect big games to be more successful?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm kind of saying maybe it's not worth making games so big.
John:
Well, it really depends on the type of game.
John:
Like, if you're making a puzzle game, how big could it possibly be, right?
John:
I mean, talk about having no assets.
John:
How big is Letterpress?
John:
I don't know if there's any graphics in that entire game.
John:
There's just, like, the launch icon.
John:
That's it.
John:
Right, right.
John:
But other types of games, like, if you're making a 3D game, there's going to be geometry, there's going to be textures, and, like, there's no getting around that, and it's going to be much bigger than a game with a static screen.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't think people have the same expectations of mobile games, but I think genre plays into...
John:
uh how big things are and and art style if you do things with texture mapping textures take up room if you do everything with flat shading you just have geometry then you know i think it's reasonable on a small platform like this desert golf gonna be enough for anybody yeah you love that game so much
John:
It's really good.
John:
I haven't played that since the Alto came out, I realized.
John:
I still have it installed, but I'm stuck at whatever.
John:
Yeah, me too.
John:
I'm not stuck stuck.
John:
If I played it, I would continue, but it's not making progress.
John:
But I do not install it because I'm afraid that if I delete it, I'll lose all my progress.
John:
I don't know if that's actually true, but I'm afraid it is.
Casey:
Yeah, I've never played it, and I'm pretty happy about that.
John:
Get Alto's Adventure.
John:
It's a better game.
Casey:
I have it.
Casey:
I've had it for weeks, still never played it.
Casey:
Eh, I disagree.
John:
You don't think Alto's Adventure is better than desert golfing?
Marco:
I think everyone else thinks it is, but I don't think it is.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
This is like you as a gamer in a nutshell.
John:
It's too much like a game.
John:
I don't like that gaming game part.
Marco:
Can you put me in a desert with a ball?
Marco:
That's all I can handle.
Marco:
No, they're both good games.
Marco:
I would say they're both excellent games, but...
Marco:
I got a lot more time out of Desert Golfing just because of the kind of zen commentary qualities I got out of it, where Alto is a great game.
Marco:
But once I played it on one plane flight, and then I was like, all right, well, every time I play this game, it's basically the same thing over and over again.
Marco:
And I know Desert Golfing is similar, but for whatever reason...
John:
i didn't get any depth out of alto so like it was cool for like the one day i was playing it a lot but then i tried playing it here and there afterwards and i just like okay it just felt too repetitive to me you don't have any competitive juices flowing with alto is all about like they're competing with yourself trying to best your previous best run or competing with other people whereas there's no competitive aspect in desert golfing really
Marco:
That's what makes desert golfing so great is that it really shows you how pointless everything else in the universe is.
John:
This is a man whose wife plays all console games in hard mode, by the way.
John:
Yes.
John:
Could not be more different.
Marco:
That's correct.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, she is the gamer.
Marco:
I am totally not.
Marco:
She's playing Prison Architect now, thanks to CGP Grey.
Marco:
That sounds awful.
Marco:
Like, it just sounds like work to me.
Marco:
I mean, it looks... It's like Theme Hospital.
Marco:
You know, like, it's one of those kind of games.
Marco:
Like, you know, it's basically Sim Prison.
Marco:
If I was, like, more of a gamer right now, I would probably play it, too, because it looks pretty cool.
Marco:
I just don't... I can't... You know, like, I'm doing great with work stuff with Overcast and with the show and everything else, and I'm like... The last thing I want to do is take time playing games.
Marco:
Like, I just... I don't...
John:
whenever the opportunity comes up to spend time doing something i'd rather work than than play games and can you tell everybody exactly what level you're on desert golfing just so they can add add some uh context to your previous statement yeah give me a sec because it's been a while since i played it so i gotta i gotta take it up the man who doesn't want to spend too much time playing games go ahead what level uh 3054 all right yeah and i've been stuck on this one for a long time that's 3054 holes people
Casey:
Yeah, I think we've solved that.
Casey:
I haven't seen Prison Architect, so clearly I'm unqualified to talk about it.
Casey:
With that said, let me talk about it.
Casey:
It sounds like so much work, and I stopped doing work like that at SimTower.
Casey:
SimTower is when I pretty much stopped doing work for games.
Casey:
I remember vividly trying World of Warcraft when it was relatively new.
Casey:
And all I did was run around killing like boars or something like that.
Casey:
And I lasted two hours before I decided I'm just doing work.
Casey:
This isn't a game.
Casey:
This is just me doing work.
John:
Prison Architect is more like Transport Tycoon than WoW.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
Yeah, it's more like the building sim games.
Marco:
I love Transport Tycoon.
Marco:
I haven't played it in probably five years.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I haven't played it in more than that.
Marco:
Right, because an open TCD is awesome.
Marco:
It was such a fantastic re-implementation of the game engine.
Marco:
It added so much stuff.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
I lost a lot of time to it in 2007 or 2008 kind of era, but...
Marco:
Again, there's never a time when I want to spend hours and hours and hours playing games instead of producing something that I want to be working on.
Marco:
That's just me.
Marco:
It's what motivates me right now.
Marco:
And maybe that'll change over time.
Marco:
I'm sure it'll be different once my kid's old enough to enjoy games and I want to do it with him.
Marco:
But for now, I just don't care about games.
John:
Over 3,000 holes, people.
John:
Over 3,000.
John:
Doesn't want to spend a lot of time playing games.
John:
He'd much rather be doing something else.
John:
That was almost a meditation for me.
John:
Desert golfing, it was... You're lucky that game does not have a count of hours played inside it.
Marco:
No, it doesn't.
Marco:
But I mean, I know it took like 8,000 strokes.
Marco:
I mean, that's that kind of you can figure some idea like, you know, well, if each one takes a few seconds or whatever.
Marco:
But, you know, so obviously I know I spend a lot of time there, but how much time do I spend on Twitter?
Marco:
It's way more than that.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
What do you have to show for that?
John:
There's no whole count on Twitter.
John:
We don't even know.
John:
There's no background color change.
John:
No, nothing.
John:
No rocks.
John:
Not a cactus in sight.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I don't even know what kind of things you're seeing at Whole 3000.
Casey:
This show has been totally... I had no idea when we started before follow-up, doing things before follow-up, that that would really take this entire show right off the rails.
John:
I had an idea.
Casey:
LAUGHTER
Marco:
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I mean, throughout my past life when I had a real job and through all my personal stuff, I've used probably 10 different registrar's control panels at least over the years.
Marco:
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Marco:
They call this a valid transfer service.
Marco:
I don't know anyone else who offers this.
Marco:
And so that way, they'll move over everything without making a mistake, like DNS entries, stuff like that that's kind of tricky to get right and has pretty big ramifications if you mess anything up.
Marco:
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Marco:
And even just annoyances like dealing with the transfer codes and the unlocks and all that crap, they will deal with it all for you if you let them.
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They also have email features.
Marco:
Just $20 a year if you want a fully functional email account on a domain with 10 gigs of storage.
Marco:
$29 a year gets you a terabyte of storage.
Marco:
And then if you want just email forwarding, let's say you already have email hosting, you just want a domain that can receive email at that domain, just $5 a year.
Marco:
So you can keep using the host you already have if you want that.
Marco:
So great options here.
Marco:
Go to hover.com.
Marco:
hover.com for people who don't understand the word i'm saying go to hover.com and use promo code passing lane this week that's passing lane one word for 10 off your first purchase thanks a lot to hover for sponsoring our show a little bit more follow-up john tell us about sachi nadella no i'm saving it for next week we're moving on good call all right we're done with follow-up really this show's out of control it's we're almost an hour in we are really only an hour in we're done with follow-up boy i wonder what made that take so long
Marco:
it must be too much follow-up oh god i'm staying out of this okay so um are we talking about the end of tiktok or is that also not for right now oh i think that's a good one oh yeah i don't know why that has that prefix on it i'll fix it so the free this says in the show notes next week end of tiktok which kind of makes it sound like tiktok is ending next week it could be
Marco:
This is the end of the computer age.
Marco:
I messed that up too.
Marco:
It was welcome to the end.
Casey:
We might as well just stop the show now because we're all out of control.
Marco:
Welcome to the end of the computer age.
John:
john try to bring us back if you please and tell us about tiktok and why it's ending oh no the one part i didn't put in the show notes is the part i always forget uh so i'm gonna wing it intel has this strategy that they call tiktok where they uh they make a new micro architecture and then the next round of chips that they offer for sale uh is uh i screwed it up already but yeah
Casey:
Since 2007, Intel has been operating on a staggered release schedule that alternates manufacturing process shrinks, ticks, with major microarchitectural changes, TOCs.
John:
Yeah, but you don't help me know which is the which.
Casey:
Sometimes they just do a shrink.
John:
That would be a tick.
John:
And sometimes they change the microarchitecture.
John:
That's a TOC.
John:
All right.
John:
There you have it.
Casey:
How am I the voice of reason between the three of us?
Casey:
What is going on?
John:
They picked a bad naming scheme.
John:
The point is they alternate.
John:
And so this has been sort of regular schedule.
John:
What it meant was that every other round of chips, you would get a new process size.
John:
So you'd have 32 nanometer chips, another set of 32 nanometer chips, and then you'd go to the next size smaller, which I think was 28, or they skipped to 22.
John:
Anyway...
John:
We've had 14 nanometer chips for two generations now.
John:
And so in theory, the next round of chips should be on their next process size, which is supposed to be 10.
John:
But Intel has basically said the next round of chips will not be 10 nanometer.
John:
there'll be a third round of 14 nanometer chips, basically because their 10 nanometer manufacturing process is not ready yet.
Marco:
So, well, and also it's worth pointing out that the 14 nanometer process is just barely coming online now.
Marco:
Like it, it was also like that.
Marco:
Whatever one was saying was the broad ball delay.
Marco:
much of that or maybe all that i don't know much of that was the process the 14 nanometer process being so delayed and so they had a they had a huge delay just trying to get this at it was about a year late or a year and a half late right yeah and so this is like getting out ahead of the next one by saying we're not going to do what we did but be like oh we're kind of on schedule but things are kind of late and they'll come out or whatever it's like look it's just 10 nanometers is not going to be ready
John:
But we're also not going to delay having a new line of chips.
John:
We are going to make one more round of chips on 14 nanometers.
John:
And they had to come up with a new name for them, apparently, doing the names of these things.
John:
It was going to be Skylake, and then it was going to be followed by Cannon Lake.
John:
So in between them, the third line of 14 nanometer things is going to be K-A-B-Y Lake.
John:
Anyone want to take a swing at that?
John:
K-B?
John:
It's pronounced hover.
John:
K-B-K-A-B-Y.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm sure it's probably KB.
John:
Anyway, that's what they're going to call the third round of 14 nanometer chips, which is pretty weird.
John:
As we've discussed on previous shows, Moore's law can't continue forever because there, as far as modern science knows, there is a minimum size that things can be.
John:
We were always trying to smash them up into smaller and smaller pieces to find out what can be smaller.
John:
But the rules of physics change in crazy ways when you get really small.
John:
So we were not going to double the number of things we can fit in a unit of space every 18 months forever and ever.
John:
This does not mean the end of Moore's Law.
John:
It just definitely needs to slow down.
John:
I think I'm fine with that.
John:
I like the fact that Intel is owning up to this.
John:
rather than just saying oh it might be a little bit late because then it just you know they're gonna end up shifting a whole year over and i'm glad that they're gonna do another round of 14 nanometer chips rather than just delaying uh forever and ever until 10 nanometers ready so well but i mean they basically did that with haswell i know and it was bad wasn't it
Marco:
Yeah, well, I'm using one now.
Marco:
Right now, if you've bought a Mac in the last couple years, you've gotten Haswell unless you bought one of the 2015 revisions of only the Retina MacBook 13, the MacBook Air, or the MacBook 1.
Marco:
The 15 is still using Haswell.
Marco:
The iMac is still using Haswell.
Marco:
The Mac Pro is using the Pentium Pro.
Marco:
I mean, everything is delayed and old because this one was so, so delayed.
Marco:
Getting to 14 was so delayed.
Marco:
And so what Intel did in the last year and a half, while Broadwell was being delayed, they released a kind of like 1.5 version of Haswell.
Marco:
It's the same core, but they just gave us higher-binned, higher-clocked parts just to kind of tide us over and tide over their partners, like Apple, who are trying to sell computers around these things and trying to make private decisions around these things.
Marco:
That's why I'm using a 4 gigahertz computer right now, because Haswell didn't start out at 4 gigahertz, and I'm sure Apple's margins on the 4 gigahertz chips are not that great because of the various binning and yield issues that are typical of the business.
Marco:
But they had to give us some kind of minor increase, like, all right, take what we have, raise the clocks as much as we can without shrinking the process, and we'll do something.
Marco:
We'll give people something new to tie them over while we work out our next revision's delays.
Marco:
So they already did a third revision, kind of, with Haswell.
Marco:
So what they're basically saying here is that this is going to happen again.
Marco:
This time we're just warning you in advance.
John:
And they're giving it a new name, and I don't think much is known about this new line of chips.
John:
Like, will it just be, like you said, just, you know, the higher-binned versions of the other things with maybe a couple of little errors fixing them or something?
John:
Or will it be, you know, like, will they bump the GPU for it?
John:
Like, will this actually be a significant new line of chips?
John:
It seems like that by giving it a new name, a new lake name, that it's not just going to be like a 1.5, but it's certainly not going to be a new architecture, a talk, right guys?
John:
It's not going to be a new architecture, I guess.
John:
They're saving that for, I don't know.
John:
It's confusing.
John:
Although, like, the relationship between Intel's roadmap and what Apple releases, in some ways it seems like it's tied tightly together where you're like, oh, the Apple can't release the machines because Intel doesn't have the chips ready.
John:
But in other respects, they're totally unrelated.
John:
See the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Well, no, that's not entirely true.
Marco:
The Mac Pro is very related, but it's related to the Xeon roadmap.
Marco:
I know, but aren't they already behind an entire year on Xeon chips?
Marco:
They are, but the last revision of Xeons was a little bit questionable.
Marco:
The problem that I saw when looking at what you would do with the Haswell chips, on the Xeons, Intel sells most of these things in servers.
Marco:
And the server business is very different from the desktop workstation business that the Mac Pro sits in.
Marco:
And on servers, what you generally want with the market demands is more and more cores, even if each core isn't as fast.
Marco:
And so that's why you have most of the Xeon lineup, at least the high ones that sell nicely and have nice profit margins.
Marco:
and have all the pci express lanes and everything most of those optimize for core count and have a clock speed of like two gigahertz you know so you're getting like relatively low clock speeds very high core counts the mac pro it's it uses a very small number of these chips it offers three or four of them four of them and they're they're like the highest clocked versions they can get at each core count basically without blowing the thermals it seems so
Marco:
When they moved from the previous ones, which was Sandy Bridge EP, I think, into Haswell EP... When Haswell EP came out, sorry.
Marco:
This is the generation that they've skipped.
Marco:
There really was not much of a gain to be had in the areas that the Mac Pro actually sells chips from.
Marco:
Like, in those parts...
Marco:
The core counts went up slightly.
Marco:
You could get a 10 core and a 14 core.
Marco:
There was a small core count upgrade, but all the clock speeds went down or stayed the same, and power was a little bit weird.
Marco:
It was not a great update.
Marco:
That might have been why Apple seemingly hasn't and seemingly won't use those.
Marco:
um i don't know but um it also you know the mac pro also has skipped generations before this won't be the first time and so it might also just be partly that that it wasn't a major upgrade from intel and partly apple doesn't care that strongly about upgrading these on on a on a frequent basis
John:
I don't know.
John:
Back in the good old days when a new chip came out, everybody put it in their machines because you had to because there was competitive pressure too.
John:
And for the most part, that was a pretty good thing.
John:
Even if these were not a big upgrade over the old ones, especially on a thing like the Mac Pro, like, oh, more cores, who cares?
John:
But like, isn't that what people are buying this for?
John:
Like the super parallel tasks where two extra cores would be a significant difference, right?
John:
Like of all the machines that are actually going to care that you have, you know, 12 versus 10 cores, the Mac Pro is the one.
John:
The tipster is saying that they didn't have any good GPU options, so they would have had to bump the CPU without the GPU.
John:
But anyway, Apple historically has not liked to play that game, and they're like, well, unless we have an impressive new machine, we're not just going to give you new CPUs.
John:
Except, I guess, in the laptops where they'll do that with the Haswell 1.5s?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know if they've ever skipped a major laptop CPU generation until now where they appear to be skipping quad-core Broadwells and going right to Skylake.
Marco:
And this is a weird situation with the timing of those things.
Marco:
I don't think they've ever skipped one before that.
Casey:
So what does this mean if, hypothetically, you have two copies of, I think it's a late 2011 high-res Antiglare 15-inch MacBook Pro, and there is not a singular, there is not one Retina Mac in your entire household, and you're thinking you're going to hold on for the next major MacBook Pro revision, or, well, I shouldn't say major, but, you know, the next big chipset.
Casey:
Last I heard, that was theoretically coming this fall.
Casey:
Does any of this change that?
Marco:
No, because what they're saying is that the generation of chips that we're moving into, the 14 nanometer, like, this is what started with Broadwell this past spring with the MacBook 1 and then the Airs and then later on the 13.
Marco:
That generation is the 14 nanometer one.
Marco:
And that's, like, we are just in the infancy of that.
Marco:
And we're going to be at 14 for a while, is what we're saying.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Which is fine, because Skylake is apparently, you know, a big deal.
John:
It gets some nice power savings.
John:
Like, I don't think it's the end of the world.
John:
And it's not, you know...
John:
If you're waiting for a new line of Macs to buy when the Skylake Macs come out, they ought to be pretty nice machines.
John:
So that's not a big deal.
John:
It's just the next year and the year after, I don't know what the strategy is for.
John:
I mean, if it's just going to be three years of 14 nanometer chips.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, we've had, what, two and a half years of Haswells.
Marco:
And, you know, it hasn't been great.
Marco:
Like, we've been kind of stalled at performance for a long time.
Marco:
But they're still good chips.
Marco:
I mean, like, this iMac, this 4 gigahertz 4 core iMac that I have is amazing.
Marco:
Like, it is...
Marco:
by far the best computer I've ever owned.
Marco:
And by far... Not by far.
Marco:
It's one of the fastest.
Marco:
I did briefly have the six-core cylinder Mac Pro, and that was faster in parallel tasks, but this actually beats it in single-threaded, which is another problem the Xeon line has, that the consumer desktop chips, because they are newer in their core revision, usually beat the Mac Pro Xeons in single-threaded tasks.
Marco:
which is embarrassing for the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Anyway, I don't think this is going to be that bad of a thing.
Marco:
I think it's going to be really just a continuation of what we've seen for the last few years.
Marco:
Just now, again, now they're just making it official.
Marco:
Now they're admitting up front and warning us up front, okay, this is what's going to happen again, and we'll see what we can do about it.
Casey:
On a final note, I should point out, lest my father, the ex-IBMer, give me hell about it, that IBM is actually at seven nanometers.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Not really.
John:
They're just demoing.
John:
It's like a tech demo.
John:
Like, look what we can do in the lab when it crosses no object.
John:
Try shipping millions of those things every quarter.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But I just wanted to point it out because obviously other people are making progress in this arena.
Casey:
But just like you both said, I mean, that's not producing millions of them.
Casey:
That's making one in a lab.
John:
At great expense with very exotic materials.
John:
What element are they using?
John:
Expensive stuff.
John:
In summary, it's going to be expensive.
John:
Well, no, it's the same.
John:
I remember back in the PowerPC days, they had similar type of things.
John:
Companies that would say, we can make a chip at amazing speeds.
John:
It was probably like 1 gigahertz or 2 gigahertz back then.
John:
But we were at like 300 megahertz.
John:
Like, wow, how can you make something that fast?
John:
We use these exotic materials and it just...
John:
You could do lots of things for enough money, right?
John:
But if it's going to cost $10,000 per chip or whatever, that doesn't make a difference.
John:
It's not viable.
John:
You have to make it into something that could be manufactured cheaply, and then you've got something.
John:
That's Intel's whole thing.
John:
They're going to do a shrink, and suddenly the cost of all their chips aren't going to triple.
Marco:
The first computer magazine issue I ever bought from a newsstand had a cover that was advertising 100 megahertz because this was a big deal in 1993 or something.
Marco:
And it was it was a deck alpha chip that had been announced that could hit 100 megahertz.
Marco:
And I was very disappointed to learn that.
Casey:
I vividly remember having a really intense argument with a, I think he's a second cousin of mine, I don't know, a relative of mine, who was in college at the time and I was in like middle school or something like that.
Casey:
And he had, if memory serves, he had, I want to say it was like a gigabyte of storage across probably like six hard drives because it was that long ago.
Casey:
And I remember arguing with him, there is no power.
Casey:
possible way a human being could use a gigabyte of storage it's just not possible what could you possibly put over a gigabyte of storage because back then you were storing like you know pages or like word documents it wasn't it wasn't like anything big it was like you didn't have like these podcast apps downloading his audio leaving the temp files around on your discs well done well done but yeah it's it's wild how things change in any case why don't you tell us about one last thing that's awesome and then we have one more thing to talk about
Marco:
Our final sponsor this week is MailRoute.
Marco:
Once again, MailRoute.
Marco:
Go to mailroute.net slash ATP.
Marco:
You've heard from me over the years that I don't use Gmail.
Marco:
I use regular IMAP hosts because I don't like proprietary email systems and I don't like web mail.
Marco:
I just want something that will work with regular mail apps that I can get them anywhere on any platform and I don't have to be tied to somebody's web interface I don't like or somebody's terrible IMAP gateway Gmail.
Marco:
So anyway, and one of the problems when you try to host mail somewhere other than Gmail somewhere else or you try to host it yourself if you're on your own server or if you have a business and you have to administer their email server, one of the big problems with doing this is spam filtering.
Marco:
Spam filtering is so complex these days, it's so advanced, that really doing it right requires a dedicated service that specializes in that, like a cloud service that can combine wisdom from all sorts of things and not just be one installation.
Marco:
A simple Bayesian filter is not enough these days.
Marco:
So MailRoute is a professional spam and virus filtering service.
Marco:
So what you do is you point your domain MX record at them.
Marco:
So they become your official email host to the world.
Marco:
Then you give them the address of your real MX record, your real server.
Marco:
And so they act as a proxy, as a middleman between the internet and you.
Marco:
And they shield you from all the crap people try to send you that's spam and viruses.
Marco:
I admit, when I first heard about it, I was skeptical.
Marco:
I thought, you know, how well could it really work compared to the customizable spam filtering and stuff that Fastmail had that I'd been using for years before that.
Marco:
And it works so well that when I was using other things, I would still get spam.
Marco:
I'd get maybe three to five spam messages a day.
Marco:
And I thought that was about as good as it can get, really.
Marco:
And then I switched to MailRoute, I don't know, maybe six months ago, something like that.
Marco:
It is so good that I had received one spam message one day last week, and that was noteworthy because I just hadn't seen one in weeks or months.
Marco:
MailRoute is so good, you literally go from whatever amount of spam you're getting, you go to zero most of the time.
Marco:
It becomes a very rare occurrence to see spam actually get delivered into your inbox.
Marco:
It is that good.
Marco:
And it isn't so aggressive that they're constantly throwing away legitimate mail either.
Marco:
anything that's kind of on on the the border where they're not quite sure if it's spam they put in the quarantine section for like a week or two or something and then they email you a summary of just like the just the subject lines of those things and you can you can just give a quick little glance down that list every day every week or whatever and you can see all right you know what that one that was legitimate let that through all the rest of these forget about it those are all spam
Marco:
So it's very, very easy to make sure you don't have false positives for too long and to train it not to do that anymore for whatever spammy things that you get emails for.
Marco:
But the spam filtering is just shockingly good.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
I don't think I will ever go without it now.
Marco:
I can very, very highly recommend it.
Marco:
Over the years, I recommended people go to IMAP posts.
Marco:
I recommended Fastmail a lot specifically.
Marco:
I will say now, I very, very highly recommend putting MailRoute in front of your IMAP post.
Marco:
It is really good.
Marco:
And from what I hear from Gmail people, it sounds like it's actually better than Gmail spam filtering.
Marco:
And I know a lot of Gmail people think it can't get better.
Marco:
But if you're ever seeing spam, it can get better.
Marco:
That's basically it.
Marco:
So MailRoute really is amazing.
Marco:
I very highly recommend MailRoute.
Marco:
If you have your own domain name or if you host email or if you have your own post, put mail route in front of your mail.
Marco:
Trust me, it is that good.
Marco:
They're not paying me to say that.
Marco:
They're paying me to say this other script that I'm mostly ignoring because I'm telling you something better, which is I use it and I love it and I can tell you firsthand it works for me.
Marco:
Nobody can buy me saying that.
Marco:
I'm telling you that because it's true.
Marco:
Anyway, back to their script.
Marco:
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Marco:
And if you use that link, mailroute.net slash ATP, you will also get 10% off for the lifetime of your account.
Marco:
Not 10% off for your first purchase, not 10% off once, 10% off for the lifetime of your account.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to mailroute.
Marco:
mailroute.net slash ATP.
Casey:
So, lately, there's been a humongous kerfuffle with Reddit.
Casey:
I have to admit, I don't really ever use Reddit.
Casey:
I think I may have mentioned on the show in the past, I don't know if it ever made it to the final version, but...
Casey:
The only time I ever really used Reddit was when I needed to acquire things after one of my favorite websites got shut down.
Casey:
And I used Reddit here and there for that.
Casey:
But I don't use it for discussions.
Casey:
I don't use it for really anything else.
Casey:
And I guess there was a real big... There was a lot of agita with regard to their now ex-CEO, Alan Powell.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Did I get that right?
Casey:
I believe so.
Yeah.
Casey:
And I can't pass judgment as to whether or not she was good at her job because I don't really use Reddit.
Casey:
But it seemed like a lot of people came out of the woodwork to try to get her out of the CEO position.
Casey:
And it seemed like from an outsider's perspective, the whole of Reddit tried to kind of...
Casey:
hoist her out of the chair, if you will.
Casey:
And the only real concrete information I've gotten about this is from Hello Internet.
Casey:
And I just listened, I think it was today, actually, to their latest episode.
Casey:
We'll have a link in the show notes where they talk about this.
Casey:
And CGP Grey seems to be a pretty big Reddit user and a pretty big Reddit fan.
Casey:
Whereas Brady Hare and the other host seems to have a much more similar perspective to myself or I should say I have a more similar perspective to him in that it all seems really gross to me from the outside.
Casey:
And it all seems like it seems like a kind of crummy corner of the Internet.
Casey:
But I'm probably judging unfairly because I'm only hearing about the crummiest parts of this corner of the Internet.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So, I don't know.
Casey:
John, do you use Reddit at all?
Casey:
Do you have any thoughts on this?
John:
I do.
John:
I think it's worth explaining what Reddit is, broadly speaking, because if people don't use it, like...
John:
I don't think the name tells you anything about it, and you could get confused about what the heck goes on there.
John:
It is, in the grand scheme of things, it's a website where people go to have little communities.
John:
You make a subreddit about whatever topic you're interested in talking about, and there people can share links with each other, and they can comment on the links, and they can also vote on each other's comments.
John:
That's basically what it boils down to.
John:
You've probably heard of lots of sites like this, where you can make a little sub-community, you have an account, and
John:
uh you can share information with each other in links and comments and then the things that you share other people can comment on and then everyone gets to vote on the things that you say and it seems like all right well whatever but you know we've had web bolton boards we had uh you know dig and hacker news and like a million other sites that are like this reddit is one of those sites it was one of the ones that kind of caught on it's very large very popular
John:
there are subreddits for everything you could possibly imagine from technologies to cats to alligators to knitting to everything you can imagine it seems like you know everything's like whatever it's it's like content asked owns them now i'm not sure if they ever made money they have difficult trying to come up with a monetization banner but they got a tremendous amount of traffic and it's a place where people go
John:
everything else about it like is sort of problems of their own making because if the setting aside how do you make money like we talk about that to death okay you got a lot of traffic you get a lot of users you got a lot of eyeballs or whatever figured how to monetize them stuff like that the decision reddit is faced with uh is a decision that many sites that are very popular are faced with and almost every site i can think of off the top of my head makes better decisions about this which is since anyone can come and make an account and anyone can come can make a little subgroup or whatever about whatever topic they want
John:
Do you have some kind of policy, terms and conditions, code of conduct, something saying what are you allowed to do and say and what kind of groups are you allowed to have on this site?
John:
And for the life of me, I can't think of another...
John:
website that doesn't have something like that certainly twitter does uh and twitter you know we always complain about the harassment on twitter and stuff like that at least they have a policy right reddit's big thing was like no man free speech anybody can come here and make a subreddit about anything and like we should be allowed to say what like anyone anytime when someone brings up free speech on the internet i just i
John:
I don't think I've seen an example of it being correct.
John:
Maybe it's because they don't hang out on constitutional law boards.
John:
Maybe that's the place where it's great.
John:
What people really mean is I'm allowed to say whatever I want on someone else's website because free speech, right?
John:
So Reddit, the people who run Reddit, fancy themselves as like, we're not just a website.
John:
We are the internet and we are completely neutral and...
John:
Even though we're a privately held company that pays money to someone to run our servers and pays employees to write the software for them and does all this stuff.
John:
Really, we are just a giant level playing field for everybody to come and do it.
John:
And therefore, we don't want to have pretty much any controls over what you're allowed to do, what you're allowed to say, what kind of groups you're allowed to have.
John:
all everything is welcome all people all ideas all behavior as long as i guess you don't hack us and and destroy our servers or something like that because that would be bad but anything beyond that like if you're just using our site if you are typing words into a box and clicking buttons anything you do is a-okay with us
John:
And a lot of the controversy with the new CEO came in because she decided that some things are not okay.
John:
They were going to have some sort of barriers and rules about, oh, okay, well, you can't just type any words you want into this box.
John:
You can't have communities surrounding anything you want because we don't want those type of people using our website.
John:
We don't want them to be part of our quote-unquote community.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You were saying, Casey, like, oh, it seems like an icky place or whatever.
John:
There is no Reddit community.
John:
Reddit is gigantic.
John:
Reddit has people who are just obsessed with cute cat pictures.
John:
Right.
John:
And then Reddit has people who were just, you know, showing what is it, pictures of fat people to make fun of them or whatever, or like racist bulletin boards or, you know.
John:
like every possible vile idea you can imagine the whole idea is like oh this is this is a place where we can go and we're allowed to use these people's website and put our information in their database servers and send requests to their web servers and it's all free speech man we can do whatever we want and reddit trying to add some kind of controls of like okay well there's certain things we don't want to be on something.reddit.com like there's certain things we don't want so if you want to do that go someplace else and do it
John:
the reddit community such as it is like the people who believe in free speech are like you can't stop us from putting words into your servers that's our that's our birthright reddit is about free speech um and it's just so depressing to me to see and by the way they're backsliding on that now they're like oh that that ceo is gone and and the new person in here i don't know all the backstory of this but the new person is actually one of the early people on reddit is like actually we want we want you allowed to be do anything you want
John:
except for these very few things that we narrowly define as being bad.
John:
I don't understand what the sort of the mental barrier here is that people are running the site, putting their foot down and saying, this is okay, and this is not.
John:
They somehow feel like by doing that, they're crushing freedom under their jackboot.
John:
Like, you just run reddit.com.
John:
It's a website on the internet where people type words into boxes and put them into database servers that you run.
John:
Like, that doesn't define free speech.
John:
So I find it incredibly frustrating to see...
John:
Like all this posturing and all this anger also misdirected.
John:
And the only thing I put in the show notes about this is two tweets from Laurie Voss, who I think that I think sum up this this entire thing.
John:
She says the tragedy of all online community spaces is that the goals of inclusive and safe are at the extreme mutually exclusive goals.
John:
So what she's saying is like.
John:
Do you want to have a place where everybody is welcome?
John:
Oh, we are an inclusive site.
John:
Anyone can come to Reddit.
John:
Anyone can make a subreddit.
John:
Like, it's good to be inclusive.
John:
Everyone likes inclusive, right?
John:
We don't tell you you can't come here because your eyes are the wrong color or because you speak the wrong language or, you know, you're into the wrong, you like dogs instead of cats.
John:
We're an inclusive site, right?
John:
but also safe.
John:
What does safe mean, right?
John:
Her next tweet, at some point, you have to exclude someone.
John:
You get to pick if it's the people feeling unsafe or the people making them feel unsafe.
John:
So at some point, you have to exclude somebody because if you let everybody come in, people come in and do terrible things.
John:
So you have to, at a certain point, exclude somebody.
John:
Who do you want to exclude?
John:
Do you want to exclude the people who don't feel safe because there's a bulletin board about how to rape women and that kind of makes the women on Reddit not feel very good?
John:
You know, they are somehow associated with the same website where this board exists?
John:
Or do you want the people who are making the let me tell you how to rape women subreddit, do you want to make them leave?
John:
You have to exclude somebody because if you let everybody in, some people are not going to feel safe or comfortable or welcome in this community.
John:
These two tweets basically sum it up.
John:
And incredibly, every time I read anything from these Reddit people, they make the decision of like, what we really want is for the people to be able to make the rape boards.
John:
Like, you know, not the specific examples.
John:
I don't know if they ban them or whatever.
John:
Some people are...
John:
made to feel uncomfortable by what pretty much anyone would say is vile, terrible ideas and behavior.
John:
And it's like, well, they need to be allowed to do that because we are the government of the United States and we must allow them the freedom to put their words into our database servers.
John:
Therefore, free speech.
John:
Sorry, I just got to let him do that.
John:
it's just it boggles my mind it makes me angry and frustrated mostly because there is a lot of good stuff on reddit because again the people who are making the cute cat pictures those cat pictures are really cute they're not bothering anybody right and uh and the thing is i think i saw a graph somewhere trying to show like the overlap between the various boards there is some surprising overlap but it's sometimes not so surprising overlap like you know
John:
how many people are member of the white supremacy board but also member of the cute cat pictures board okay how about members of the white supremacy board and members of the men's rights board all right and you start to see a little bit more members of gamergate and members of the young nazis of america board like you know like it's not 100 overlap but i don't i would love to see a graph of like
John:
Are the cat people really just cat people?
John:
Or so many people love cats that an equal number of neo-Nazis are in the cat boards as are in every other board.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I think that it is a ridiculous thing that the people running Reddit can't seem to get a handle on the idea that they get to choose what kind of people get to put words into their database servers.
John:
And they seem...
John:
are incapable of making any sort of common sense decision about what should be allowed to happen on reddit or maybe they're just totally for like we they're maybe they're anarchists maybe they say we want to run a bunch of servers and we want to let everyone say anything go for it and like there you go that's that's what you're gonna do but that's why people keep talking like the downfall of reddit and everything because i think most people who use reddit had an idea that the people who ran reddit
John:
had similar standards to them about what is and isn't sort of decent and acceptable and if the people who run reddit want to let everybody do everything the rest of the people i have to think are just going to slowly fade away because no one wants to be associated with a site like that like a very small number of you're just going to turn into you know 4chan or 8chan right like if if you let everybody in eventually everybody leaves except for the most terrible people and congratulations you know reddit you are running a site filled with the most terrible people
John:
Feel free to do that.
John:
Feel free to let them all type in text boxes to each other.
John:
I hope you feel good about the new site you've built because that's what you're effectively creating by allowing anybody to do everything.
Marco:
I don't have much to say on Reddit because I don't know anything about Reddit.
Marco:
And every time I have visited it for something, either trying to find information on something or following a link there, every visit to it has made me never want to visit it again.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
Literally, I'm not exaggerating.
Marco:
Every time I'm like, oh, this is terrible.
Marco:
And I know, academically, I know there are good parts of it.
Marco:
I've never stumbled upon those, really.
John:
I never read a good Ask Me Anything or I Am A Thing.
Marco:
Those are usually really hard to navigate.
Marco:
First of all, I hate nested comments.
Marco:
I was an old forum nerd back in the day, so I know the problems with both nested comments and also flat threads.
Marco:
They both have dysfunction, just different dysfunction.
Marco:
So, you know, I...
Marco:
I'm very familiar with the challenges in both the community monitoring and regulation and also the technical side of how community software online, how this community style thing is built and how things are enforced.
Marco:
It's a very hard problem.
Marco:
Not to mention my time at Tumblr, we saw a lot of things not quite the same level as what Reddit is dealing with, but a lot of kind of related problems of...
Marco:
Things like, you know, like every, every couple of days we'd get a phone call from like a high school principal or like some kind of like, you know, middle of nowhere police department or something complaining about something that some kids had about some other kid on Tumblr and wanting us to take it down.
Marco:
And like when you, you have to deal with stuff like that when you're a community site, it's dealing with community stuff is just really messy.
Marco:
It's, it's very difficult and it's very, very messy for all the reasons you just said, John, like
Marco:
there's a lot of these decisions that there is no good option you just have to choose between two bad options and a lot of things you know like like what i was saying with my cell download stuff earlier like a lot of these things like you know you you just have to pick the lesser of two evils and no matter what you pick it's going to have big downsides for someone or it's going to disincentivize good stuff or incentivize bad stuff and
John:
But we're not even at the hard questions.
John:
There are the type of things like, am I allowed to threaten to rape somebody on Reddit?
John:
And the Reddit CEO is like, well, I'll allow it.
John:
Technically, it's not a threat of violence.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I mean, we're not talking about the people getting into a heated argument and should they be allowed to call each other jerks and sort of, oh, ad hominem attacks are not allowed.
John:
That's in the gray area.
John:
It's difficult to figure out or whatever.
John:
We're talking about just like straight up, like, you know...
John:
racism sexism real threats of violence and just and and seriously like the the new ceo is like on the board going responding to people i'm not sure if that you're not sure like that's i guess that's what that's the kind of community you again i'm not saying he shouldn't be allowed to do this feel free to make this kind of community but if he's like waffling like these are the tough decisions boy should we allow rape threats or is that against the rule i guess we have to allow it i don't want that guy's speech to be impinged because i am the government of the united states of america
Marco:
Well, and I think, first of all, we should definitely say that the last episode of Hello Internet and the last two episodes of Rocket covered this probably way better than we can because those are people who know a lot more about Reddit than we do.
Marco:
And so they really did a very good job of that.
Marco:
So listen to those if you want more of the inside stuff about, like,
Marco:
What specific challenges that the CEO of Reddit faces and why Ellen Powell might have been good or bad for that.
Marco:
Anyway, but it seems like one of the big pressures they have now is...
Marco:
business.
Marco:
They make some money and they have this corporate owner and they have a board of directors and they want more money because the money they make is not really commensurate with the amount of traffic they get.
Marco:
They should be making a lot more.
John:
But is this what you would do to make more money?
John:
Wouldn't you try to go mainstream?
Marco:
Well, that's the thing.
Marco:
Let me tell you another story from my past that's long and boring.
Marco:
The reason I'm telling it is because it's actually about the same coffee shop as the last long and boring story.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Here we go.
Marco:
So this coffee shop in my hometown, Cup of Joe in Bexley, Ohio, while I was there, they had a big problem where middle schoolers discovered it.
Marco:
And so it was always packed full of 12-year-olds who were just kind of loitering around, hardly buying anything, but just taking up all the seats and hanging around outside and kind of standing around smoking.
Marco:
It was just not a great scene.
Marco:
And it kind of...
Marco:
drove other customers away because who wants to hang out around a bunch of delinquent middle schoolers who are bored and loitering and not doing anything and smoking.
Marco:
And so one summer, they banned them.
Marco:
I don't know how.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter how.
Marco:
They banned all the middle schoolers.
Marco:
They implemented some kind of minimum age thing or you had to be with a parent or whatever.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Somehow they banned them.
Marco:
And for a while, the place was empty.
Marco:
And I knew the manager at the time and I asked him, how was this going?
Marco:
And he said, they were making more money than ever.
Marco:
because even though it wasn't getting the volume it got before, it was getting more of the profitable customers, the older people, the college students who were there studying and buying drinks all day, the people who would come in the morning and come in the evenings who were just buying stuff, drinking it, and leaving, and making...
Marco:
Cycling the tables more often, not putting off other people like when they when they come in there.
Marco:
And I don't know how they resolve that.
Marco:
I left, but they I was very surprised at the time and looking back on it, I shouldn't be that that worked so well for them.
Marco:
And Reddit, I think, faces not that different of a dilemma here where it's like if they want to become more mainstream, if they want to become more attractive to advertisers and therefore more profitable, if they want the value of their ads to go up, if they want the number of advertisers to go up,
Marco:
I think they have to get rid of all this garbage.
Marco:
They have to get rid of all this anarchist slash libertarian free speech crazy people who are really just aggressive, hateful people for a lot of them.
Marco:
Not all of them, obviously, but many of them are these just very aggressive, hateful people who feel entitled to have their words all over the place.
Marco:
I think you can't have both ways.
Marco:
You can't have that garbage on your site that is highly offensive, legally questionable.
Marco:
No advertiser wants to be associated with that.
John:
and also make more money with advertising like you have to pick one or the other and it seems like they're trying to hide this the most objectionable stuff like okay a lot of people are offended by this but we'll like we won't run ads against it so we're technically not making money off of it and everyone's like well you're just subsidizing with the other stuff and we'll put it off in the corner and they'll stay by themselves and it's like why why are you bending over backwards to make sure that these people have a place to share hate with each other
John:
like never mind like that it's not just oh we're just letting them put their words into our database like if you want to go out to like the the sort of secondary effects of allowing a place for people to reinforce each other's hateful ideas and recruit new people and like oh no incitement to violence that's against the reddit guidelines yeah i'm sure that will work exactly as intended when you get a bunch of hateful people talking to each other constantly over and over again and sharing
John:
hateful pictures and videos and all sorts of terrible things there i'm sure nothing bad will come out of that it'll just be positive like as long as they stay within the terms and conditions no it's so ridiculous it's so it's so asinine and again if that's the site they want to run go for it but if their job is to make money for like for their parent company this is not the way to do it and using your middle school coffee shop example it's as if at a certain point all the non-middle schoolers left
John:
and all that was left was middle school students, and you realize, well, now we have to cater to them because they're our only customers.
John:
Like, not that Reddit is at this point, but it's like, if you suddenly turn into, well, I guess we have to become a dance club or something, right?
John:
Because everyone else is gone, right?
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Reddit is not at that point, not even close to it, but like,
John:
If you just keep going down this path, I think I feel like the regular people will leave and you'll just be left with like we are a community of hate speech bulletin boards because these people have no place else to go.
John:
It's like it's like 8chan or, you know, 4chan to a lesser extent, you know.
John:
that's not the kind of business you want to run it's not that's not a growth market that's not a lot of people with a lot of spending power you if you want money you want to go mainstream and it just seems like the reddit ceo is trying to preserve like this ideal like we provide a forum for people to openly share ideas and like that's sort of a high-minded ideal of reddit but the consequences of it are not going to be good for reddit's bottom line
John:
or for the popularity of Reddit, or for Reddit's reputation, or for his reputation, or just anything really.
John:
It just seems like all downside.
John:
And again, go ahead.
John:
If that's what the company wants to do, feel free to pursue that path.
John:
But I don't see it turning into anything good for anyone involved.
Marco:
So this probably doesn't mean anything for the purpose of our discussion, and I probably shouldn't take it as a sign of me being right or wrong about this, but that coffee shop closed last fall.
Marco:
Coffee shops close all the time.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
It sounded like the building they were in sold to get knocked down and built something bigger.
John:
Yeah, but I don't know.
John:
That's part of the whole ideal of sort of the...
John:
Someone in the chat room said there really is a Reddit community.
John:
I think there's a stereotype of a typical Reddit user that's perhaps somewhat accurate, but I think there are a lot of people, like all three of us, who don't go to Reddit unless someone links to it.
John:
And when we link to it, we look at the funny cat gif, and then we move on with our lives, right?
John:
But are we Reddit users?
John:
Are we part of the community?
John:
We're not part of the community, but it's a popular site.
John:
People link you to it.
John:
You end up there.
John:
You look at something, and then you go someplace else.
John:
I think a lot of their traffic is from things like that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe they know the breakdowns.
John:
I don't know if most of their traffic comes from people just posting hate to each other and over and over again or getting in big arguments and 17-level indented comment threads attached to things.
John:
Maybe that is where their stuff comes from.
John:
I just...
John:
It just seems to me it's a bad decision.
John:
I think less of the people who run Reddit every time I hear one of the decisions or see them in this sort of like laurially nuanced discussions as they try to parse what should and shouldn't be acceptable behavior on Reddit and just reveal themselves to have no understanding of other people's experiences.
John:
And, you know, it's...
John:
again i'm sure that all the specific examples i cited in this podcast are not accurate feel free to wander ready yourself and try to find out what these people's opinions are but every time i see anything from them every time i go to reddit and see these discussions with the with the uh the the new leadership behind reddit i just think like i was excited when the ellen pow came in and started making changes like really straightforward sensible changes get rid of the hate groups and it was like oh you can't get rid of the hate groups what do you
John:
like and it's just i don't again i don't know the details i don't know why she was pushed out i know i'm sure she was subject to the same harassment that every woman gets who opens her mouth and says anything ever let alone is the ceo of a company is in charge of a bunch of little man children who are just angry about everything especially like that company like i i can't imagine a more hostile
John:
well maybe there are some but that's like that was definitely on the on the more hostile side yeah and i don't know if she she yeah you know i have no idea what her story but all i know is that the few things i heard announced come out of her leadership seemed like good ideas and then was backlash against them i felt depressed about and then when she was kicked out i got even more depressed and then seeing the views of the new ceo who was apparently one of the founders it's just like no they're not getting it so anyway reddit is reddit is really not for me um and furthermore i think
John:
If Reddit's goals are to be a place that continues to have a lot of traffic and that makes a lot of money, that the current strategy they're pursuing doesn't make any sense to me.
Casey:
I think the other thing that I find fascinating about all this, which I kind of hinted at earlier, is how a group of users of a website can seemingly have so much influence that they can cause the chief executive officer of a company to be fired, dismissed, quit, whatever.
Casey:
That's just...
Casey:
That's just weird to me that even a couple hundred thousand people – I think I'd heard that there were a couple hundred thousand signatures on this petition, this online petition, which isn't even really signatures, but whatever – that that many people came together to decide –
Casey:
to try to oust a CEO, man, woman, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
That's just insane to me that the users of a website, none of whom I think are paying the website any money, seem to think that they can have that kind of influence.
Casey:
And in numbers, seem to have that kind of influence.
Casey:
And I think a lot of this started, if I understand things correctly, because
Casey:
a really beloved moderator was dismissed or something like that.
Marco:
I guess the person who did the... This is kind of like... This is really about ethics in gaming journalism.
Marco:
It's like... That was not really the reason.
Marco:
That was what ignited a lot of the argument.
Marco:
But it was really a lot of other pressures, I think.
Marco:
That's what it sounds like.
Marco:
And especially because even that is just like the game journalism BS line...
Marco:
even that official storyline is questionable because she didn't fire that moderator the male co-founder did i didn't realize that yeah this whole thing's a mess anyway it's getting into details of it is is just a rat hole you know there's no there's no good to come of diving into the details of it because that's not really what the argument was about and what it comes down to is if if a whole bunch of users were were calling for someone's head and that resulted in her getting what i call quit fired uh which is you know she was
Marco:
She was forced to quit.
Marco:
That was not, oh, I think I'm just done now, coincidentally, this week.
Marco:
No, she was quit-fired.
Marco:
It's cool.
Marco:
Happens to the best of us.
Marco:
But that wouldn't have happened if just some angry users who are hateful, horrible people, if just they had a problem with her.
Marco:
The reason that happened, I think you can read into who they appointed instead.
Marco:
This other co-founder who's been gone for a while, who has these very much libertarian, anything-goes viewpoints.
Marco:
If the board appointed him as the new CEO, that means that the members of the board and the people who have control and equity and influence of the company, a good portion of them want this anything-goes attitude to stay.
Marco:
It's not enough that a whole bunch of users complained.
Marco:
If only these users were getting angry, and these users are people who are not particularly credible, who you don't really want to cater to if you can help it, that wouldn't have been enough to get her out.
Marco:
This only gave the people in power a motivating reason to get her out now, because she was pushing in a direction that, not that the users didn't want, that they didn't want, that the power holders did not want.
Marco:
And they put in a guy who is the complete opposite in this area.
Marco:
In this area, you know, like trying to keep things tame and under control or beam where everything goes.
Marco:
So obviously, the people who own and control the company want it to be the other way.
John:
Yeah, I think it's... I mean, the CEO situation, again, I don't think the details are important.
John:
It's just basically like a vote of no confidence.
John:
It was a vote of no confidence from the most vocal users with the whole petition thing.
John:
And apparently a vote of no confidence from the board.
John:
It just seems like...
John:
You know, you came in, you started to make some bold changes, but in the end, we are not behind you.
John:
This is the board saying this.
John:
In the end, we do not support your decisions enough to let you see this through.
John:
And we're changing course and you're out.
John:
Right.
John:
That's what it comes down to.
John:
It's like it's.
John:
If you're going to be the leader of a company, you either actually have to have absolute power, in which case you can weather any storm and do what you want to do, or if there are people who are bosses of you, and from their perspective, they don't have confidence that the changes you're going to make are good, and they're hearing a lot of noise from the users, and the most vocal users are...
John:
are saying with their actions and their words that they don't like what you're doing either.
John:
You can imagine a board that's nervous about a company.
John:
It's like, oh, we have this thing.
John:
We think it can be good.
John:
This person comes in, makes a bunch of changes, and then all I hear is a bunch of noise and bad things.
John:
Change course, change course.
John:
And then the new course, like some people in the chat room are saying, this new CEO is going to get rid of the bad even more than she could.
John:
That's possible because it's kind of like, you know, only Nixon can go to China.
John:
Like, in Reddit, only a man can make changes.
John:
Because people will only accept, like, the same exact words come out of this guy's mouth.
John:
And everyone's like, oh, that's interesting.
John:
I'd like to hear more of your ideas.
John:
And as she says it, it's like, you are destroying our freedom.
John:
Like, so it's...
John:
I just go back to this thing.
John:
What kind of community do these people want Reddit to be?
John:
Who do they want to be in this community?
John:
And what do they want it to be like?
John:
What do they want the experience of Reddit to be like?
John:
Same thing for the Twitter people.
John:
What do you want the experience of Twitter to be like?
John:
I mean...
John:
The Twitter CEO at least came out and said we are terrible about dealing with harassment.
John:
Do you want Twitter to be a place where you go?
John:
And if you are any type of group that's typically harassed, you're going to get harassed and you have no recourse.
John:
Twitter is trying to make that better by having the tools to report people, not require.
John:
You know, I think originally way back in the day on Twitter, if you reported someone for harassment, you had to inform the person that you were informing on them like it was part of the process.
John:
Like they would send them an email and say, hey, just so you know, this person reported you for harassment or something like that.
John:
It was just a crazy setup made by people who didn't understand the dynamics of harassment.
John:
Anyway, like I said, Reddit, they can do what they want.
John:
But when I hear everything I hear coming out of this company.
John:
So far as making me like now I'm at the point where I'm almost like questioning whether I want to tap links to what I know is probably good content that I'll enjoy, like the interviews or, you know, funny cat pictures and stuff like that.
John:
And now I feel like by tapping this link, am I supporting?
John:
an organization that is trying to uh you know make a home for people who i think should not have a home let's put it this way i wouldn't give these people a home on a website that i ran these people give them a home on the website that they run which is fine but do i want to support that with my clicks and whatever ads i'm going to load by tapping that that's that's the point where i am with the reddit i'm thinking that and i've never thought that about twitter maybe it's because
John:
Like, I don't feel like I'm viewing ads in Twitter because I'm using a third-party client or whatever.
John:
But at this point with the Reddit links, I don't even know, like, even in my casual usage if I'm going to continue to do it.
Marco:
You can just install an ad blocker.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Lynda.com, Hover, and MailRoute.
Casey:
We will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
Check my cast so long.
John:
i don't see i don't have that bro i've gone to good content but just like boy everything i read about it every time i dive into these threads i'm like that screenshot can't be real this is obviously photoshopped and i'll go to the actual site and find the actual comment i'm like this guy this is the guy who's in charge now there's not like someone impersonating him the site hasn't been hacked like these are the real words out of these people's mouths like not you know it's basically saying not a place i want to hang out or be associated with
Casey:
Yeah, it's probably going to sound weird, but I get really turned off by Reddit because I know a few people.
Casey:
I know certainly plenty of people online that use Reddit.
Casey:
I know a handful of people in real life that use Reddit.
Casey:
And it's kind of creepy to me how people who take Reddit really seriously seem to think that in one of you said this earlier, the entirety of the Internet happens because of Reddit.
Casey:
Like anything that's good on the Internet, it's because of Reddit, according to these people.
Casey:
And that's just I don't know.
Casey:
It's almost like a cult.
Casey:
And I don't I don't mean that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm sure someone's going to be offended by that.
Casey:
And I don't mean it to be offensive.
Casey:
It's just it's the that's the closest analogy I can think of is that, oh, man, you don't understand.
Casey:
Reddit is where the Internet happens, man.
Casey:
It's because of us.
Casey:
That's why, you know, all this cool stuff.
Casey:
And, you know, every gift that's ever been on the Internet.
Casey:
That's because of us, man.
Casey:
There's no place else to get gifts.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And it's just I don't know.
Casey:
It's just it's creepy to me.
Casey:
And and that I find that to be a real turnoff.
Casey:
And admittedly, I'm very ignorant when it comes to Reddit.
Casey:
Like you guys have said, you know, I kind of I'll browse over to something typically like an IMA or an AMA.
Casey:
And then I'll leave.
Casey:
And that's that.
Casey:
But God, it just seems so weird and creepy and cultish to me that I've never wanted to invest any real time in it.
Casey:
And now with what with their tacit, if not explicit support of all these hate groups, I just, no, thank you.
Casey:
Not for me.
John:
There is something to that.
John:
You get enough people together who are enthusiastic about sharing things with each other and they make these little communities.
John:
That is what makes the internet great.
John:
But you have to realize that when you reach a certain level of popularity, percentage-wise, you will never get a certain subset of people who...
John:
Exhibit what most of us would consider to be bad behavior, that they're abusive to people.
John:
They do obnoxious things like griefing and trolling.
John:
They make your site worse.
John:
And so most sites have at least an attempt to come up, especially if this is the whole thing, it's just a big community, come up with a set of rules to try to contain that.
John:
And the perverse thing about Reddit is like, no, our philosophy is we don't do that.
John:
That's the whole thing, man.
John:
Just anything goes, you know.
John:
Again, anything goes except you can't hack us.
John:
We don't like that.
John:
That is antisocial.
John:
But anything else, anything goes.
John:
Type anywhere.
John:
It's like...
John:
And that's how every community dies.
John:
Back in the Usenet days, you'd see entire newsgroups go south because a set of bad people would come in.
John:
They'd make everyone miserable because you can't stop them from posting in the newsgroup.
John:
You add them to your kill files, but it would just be like, you know, there's eventually...
John:
people okay fine this group is yours we'll leave and we'll go start a different group this this belongs to you now you can talk about whatever you want here uh and we'll go elsewhere and that that i think is the dynamic if you if you have a very popular community you have to have some kind of rules to control things otherwise you will inevitably only be left with the worst of the worst because there are some set of people who are going to be obnoxious and other people don't want to be around obnoxious people and eventually all you're left with are obnoxious people
Marco:
This whole mess of what it takes to maintain a community site and all the garbage you have to deal with as the platform owner.
Marco:
I saw a lot of this at Tumblr.
Marco:
I've seen a lot in the past with sites I've been a part of.
Marco:
It has made me never want to make something that includes hosting user-published content ever again.
Marco:
Someday I might forget that I'm saying this and do it anyway.
Marco:
But some features I've overcast that I have considered doing are some related things like, Oh, maybe it'd be cool to make a podcast CMS and host a podcast for people like the Tumblr for podcasts kind of thing.
Marco:
and uh then i think oh well then i have to deal with all this crap i have to deal with oh well someone's gonna post you know a hate podcast and i gotta i gotta hear from some police officers and then take it down and deal with them you know arguing with me and it's like i don't like i don't want to have to deal with any of that it's so much and even simple things like user reviews of of podcasts i never want to do that for so many reasons and this is one of them like there's so many things like
Marco:
I don't want to have to deal with... The position I take is much like some of the design decisions Nintendo has made with online gameplay.
Marco:
It's like you don't really give people away to be horrible so you don't have to deal with it.
Marco:
That's generally my goal.
Marco:
Just make products that don't involve people publishing stuff on something you own and you having to deal with the ramifications.
John:
It's hard work.
John:
And volume-wise, you've got a problem.
John:
But I'm boggled by the easy decisions.
John:
I feel like if you did a podcast hosting thing and someone put up KKK Weekly, I would feel like, no, boom, out.
John:
And why do you get to cut off?
John:
Because my company gets to pick what I want.
John:
And it's like, oh, slippery slope.
John:
Don't try to put your podcast on Marco because he censors you.
John:
i honestly think that nobody would be like because marco got rid of the kkk podcast we should not we should not put our podcast on his site because he's obviously like the whole slippery slope central thing like most people will be like all right well duh like why would he want that there well you know it's like well he was gonna ban that what else is he gonna ban what a baby doesn't like vegetarians like i'm a vegetarian podcast really are you really afraid of that like
John:
I feel like that is your job as someone who starts or runs a company to say, yes, I am imposing my values on the private company that I own.
John:
Like, yes, that's what I'm doing.
John:
I am not the U.S.
John:
government.
John:
If I don't want vegetarians, I can ban them.
John:
And then they can say, don't go to Marco's podcast site because he banned that vegetarian podcast and he's a censor.
John:
All right, well, fine.
John:
Then that is up to you, Marco, to decide what are you going to ban and what are you going to... But I honestly think if you ban the KKK podcast, nobody who you care about is going to say, well, I'm not going to go there because you banned that KKK podcast.
John:
Well, you know, then go someplace else.
John:
I'm not the only private internet in the world that will store your text in my database, right?
John:
Make your own site.
John:
Go somewhere else.
John:
Like...
John:
obviously you get down to the hard decisions all right well what if you're a staunch democrat do you want republican podcasts or whatever oh don't go there because that's like you you build the community through your decisions if you didn't allow republican podcasts and only a lot of democrat ones guess what you'd have an entire site filled with democrat and left-leaning sites is that the thing you wanted to build if it's not then you made a bad decision if it is congratulations you are the world's biggest collector of a you know left-leaning political podcast in the
John:
You design your own community by deciding what you want to let in and what you don't want to let in.
John:
And not making any decision is a very big decision in and of itself.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I just don't know.
Marco:
I find it depressing.
Marco:
The biggest problem is that Reddit is this big public online community that seems, from the little I know about it, it seems to have...
John:
by design and intentionally incredibly light moderation and i've never seen an online community that had very light to know moderation where that worked out well it just doesn't work it's not i think they have i think they have heavy moderation but just within the groups and if you don't like it start your own subreddit and then you can be the moderator and then you get to decide the rules like that is that's the whole system it's like you can make your own little cabal
John:
And have whatever rules you want.
Marco:
Right, but then... So the site as a whole doesn't practice heavy moderation because you can just create your own hate area over here.
John:
That's why people think of it as the internet.
John:
Like, oh, it's not... No, Reddit is the internet.
John:
Like, yeah, within your subreddit, you can have rules and you can have mods and you can say, in this post, you can only... In this subreddit, you can only post things in Pig Latin.
John:
If you post anything not in Pig Latin, you'll be banned and we'll vote you down.
John:
Like, fine, whatever you want.
John:
But that's like... They have perfect control, but...
Marco:
the whole of reddit you're telling me i can't start my own subreddit censorship reddit is the internet no it's not yeah that's that's what i'm talking like you know in general there is seemingly little to no moderation of the entire reddit community it is you know yes within subreddits you can moderate but there you know so the community at large has very little and like that like you know we've seen i've i've saw so many times in the past community like
Marco:
One of my best online community experiences was the time I spent on the Something Awful forums.
Marco:
And I know it sounds stupid now to a lot of people, but when I was there, I don't know what it's like now, but when I was there in the early 2000s, very heavily, I basically lived there.
Marco:
That was my internet.
Marco:
It was insanely well run because it was very tightly moderated and there was a paywall to get in.
Marco:
And so you didn't have problems of spam.
Marco:
You didn't have people being total jerks because if they were, they'd get banned and they'd lose their $10.
Marco:
And if they wanted to come back in, they'd have to pay $10 again.
Marco:
So it was incredibly healthy.
Marco:
I know it sounds crazy to people who know of something awful on a surface level, but it was an incredibly well-running community because it had very distinct rules and they were enforced very, very well most of the time.
Marco:
And so you didn't have this kind of like rush of craziness from the public and just hate everywhere constantly.
Marco:
It was very well run.
Marco:
And I was a member of other communities before and after that that were way, way less well run.
Marco:
Twitter being a good example.
Marco:
I mean, Twitter is not quite the same thing, but it has many of the same challenges.
Marco:
And there are many, many problems.
Marco:
Once you start removing layers of moderation and involvement by moderators, and you start permitting more and more things and having fewer and fewer filters, it deteriorates very, very quickly into all these things that people hate about Reddit.
John:
I think the Ars Technica comments are a good example because they are also kind of like, we don't want to stop anybody from saying whatever they want to say, so on and so forth.
John:
But they have guidelines that seem unenforceable.
John:
They basically have like, don't insult other people, like no ad hominem attacks, right?
John:
That's like, oh, that's totally unenforceable.
John:
How can you have a board where people argue over, you know, Mac versus PC or argue about Scientology or argue about global warming and enforce that?
John:
It's impossible to enforce.
John:
People are going to call each other jerks, right?
John:
uh they do it with human beings human beings look at things and say is this person just saying something that the only purpose is to put this other person down doesn't add anything to the argument like then you can i mean this is even before they had downvoting like the moderators would come in and moderate a particular comment by a particular person and then they would
John:
complain about it and they would fight over it and it's just a tremendous amount of work but having those people in there constantly trying to make those decisions about are are you violating our posting guidelines because the posting guidelines were just so like it's seemingly unenforceable certainly not machine enforceable and people can just make new accounts and so on and so forth but they you know they had a few things over there one
John:
Having an account with a lot of posts and a long registration date was seen as something like valuable, like you had reputation based on how long you'd been there and how many posts you'd made and so on and so forth.
John:
Again, this is even before voting.
John:
So people didn't want to just abandon their account and start a new one.
John:
And that meant that essentially the equivalent of Twitter eggs were like kind of a, you know.
John:
an indicator that maybe someone is just here to cause problems if they have like one post and it was they registered their account today or whatever even though registering the account was free stuff like that but just having those moderators in there trying to do trying and basically failing because this you know you can't place a community this large but just trying to do it knowing that
John:
If you say something too obnoxious, like it's kind of like, you know, speeding.
John:
If you go 70 miles an hour, maybe fine.
John:
But if you go 300 miles an hour, someone's going to find you and stop you eventually.
John:
Right.
John:
People would.
John:
And so people get moderated.
John:
People get banned.
John:
People make new accounts.
John:
Those new accounts get banned.
John:
It's just a constant battle.
John:
Like, I just feel like having people in there trying to do something.
John:
the right thing the right thing according to you know it lets you know what does Ars Technica think is the right thing to do Ars Technica thinks the right thing to do is to not be insulting to each other that's I mean it's not again not a high bar people can still say some pretty terrible things within the limits of the guidelines but it lets you know is this a site where I'm going to come on and people are going to tell me to kill myself immediately
John:
No, because that person eventually will get, you know, their post will disappear and now they have down voting and that account will get banned.
John:
And like there are people fighting on the side of the users, so to speak.
John:
There are people there trying to moderate.
John:
And as unsuccessful as it may be, it sends a signal about the site.
John:
Like the site sort of has a personality.
John:
And the personality is this bad thing that most people think is bad.
John:
This site also believes is bad and is trying to do something about even though it's really hard.