Don’t Cry for John, Argentina
Casey:
that's right it's giving me time to uh since we're in the snowman's land give me time to eat this delicious warm apple pie that erin just brought up that she just made because apparently that's what we decide to do when it's a thousand degrees outside no eating while podcasting what do you think you are john roderick no eating while podcasting hey did you hear anything up until i admitted it nope have have you yet spilled any apple pie into your imac no that would be quite an impressive uh feat though it really would i mean i just feel like eating and podcasting do not mix well that's what meat buttons for
Marco:
It feels like we just got off the phone, like we just got off of Skype for the last episode.
Casey:
It really honestly does.
Casey:
Here we are again, two nights later.
Casey:
Yeah, 48 hours later, almost to the minute.
Casey:
I barely published the last episode.
Casey:
So as we record, it is Friday evening, the 22nd of July.
Casey:
And one of us is skipping town next week.
Casey:
And so we're recording early because we're dedicated to you, our listeners, and don't want you to go anytime or any weeks, I should say, without...
Casey:
a new episode of this accidental of podcasts.
Casey:
And so we are recording very shortly after the last show and did not have a lot of time to accumulate follow-up.
Casey:
That being said, as always, we do have some for you.
Casey:
Do we want to dive right in, gentlemen?
Casey:
Let's do it.
Casey:
Let's start with the dog rental, which was the namesake for the last episode.
Casey:
Free to play dogs.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right.
Casey:
Anyway, the Internet is written in to correct us and is referred to the true gift to humanity.
Casey:
That is Snopes.com, which says the title they used was Pika Q.
Casey:
which I thought was kind of funny.
Casey:
They correct us in the story that we told about the animal shelter and the dogs to quote from Snopes claim a shelter rented dogs for embarrassed adult Pokemon go players and rent raked in tons of cash for all their dogs were swiftly adopted.
Casey:
Mostly false.
Casey:
What's true.
Casey:
The Muncie animal shelter of Muncie, Indiana enacted a novel Pokemon go dog walking program, inviting locals to walk shelter dogs during their gaming sessions.
Casey:
what's false the shelter didn't charge players five dollars an hour per dog to scare quote rent dogs well so it was free to play that's the fair point rent dogs for walking uh they were not rent uh rapidly cleared of dogs for adoption nor did they make megabucks off a program designed to harness a gaming phenomenon to get shelter dogs some time outside so um that was all a bunch of bs for the most part but it's still an adorable story and i'm i'm kind of glad we talked about it anyway
John:
Yeah, so two things on this.
John:
First, I intentionally didn't retweet people pointing us to the Snopes because I wanted to give people like a week to think it's real.
John:
Unfortunately, it doesn't work if we record two days after the previous one.
John:
People who aren't listening to the live stream, I want to give them... I mean, maybe you guys already RT'd it, so that's too bad.
John:
I did not.
John:
I didn't have the heart.
John:
I want to give people a week to believe.
John:
And when we prefaced this in the last show, we were like, you know...
John:
Who knows if this is true?
John:
It's on the Internet, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it sounds like a good story.
John:
And that's, of course, all the things that are made up on the Internet sound like a good story.
John:
That's how they spread.
John:
But I like to give people a week to think it was real because it was a nice, heartwarming story.
John:
And the second, Casey referred to Snopes as like the gift of the Internet or whatever.
John:
It used to be a lot more than it is now.
John:
The Snopes website is pretty grim.
John:
pretty pretty grim like it is not a nice place to be i was scrolling through this story and there's like this picture of maggots at the bottom that's part of one of those terrible ads and everything is like blinking oh god yeah you're right no it's not it's not a good side i don't know what happened to it you feel like like uh imdb or what i mean imdb has gotten worse too but like you think these old sort of
John:
Things that were around a long time ago that have value, that sort of are category-defining websites, should have found some way to make it work without making their sites more and more gross over time.
John:
But alas.
Marco:
But that's just the web these days.
Marco:
I mean, it isn't like Snopes is run by horrible people.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know who runs it.
Marco:
It's not just the web these days.
Marco:
No, it really is.
John:
It isn't.
John:
It's just in your cynical view that you think every website is doomed to this fate.
John:
But that's not true.
John:
There are websites that are not like this.
John:
Like I said, even IMDB, which has gotten worse in terms of usability, but hasn't become festooned with ads and viruses and pictures of maggots.
John:
And there's a pro version that you can pay for that gets rid of a lot of that crap.
John:
Like, that's the way you do it.
John:
Or Wikipedia.
John:
Wikipedia is not...
John:
It doesn't have tabbouleh or whatever ads at the bottom of it.
John:
It's got what's-his-name's-face coming down asking you for money.
John:
But still, this is not the ultimate fate of every website.
John:
This is the fate of websites that are slowly circling the drain.
Marco:
It's very hard to monetize a website in 2016...
Marco:
that doesn't have a very particularly targeted audience like Snopes in ways that aren't horrible.
Marco:
This is not like a gradual progression that happened over the last 20 years.
Marco:
This is a very rapid progression that happened over the last three years.
Marco:
It's been very recent and very quick with the massive shift in traffic
Marco:
of where traffic comes from, going all the way into Facebook, a ton of desktop browsing going away, being replaced by either phone browsing or just not browsing websites and just spending more time on social networks instead.
Marco:
And of course, all the robo ad networks and all the...
Marco:
Problems that go along with those, like the horrible ads and the massive fraud problems.
Marco:
I mean, it's a tough business now to try to make money by just having an ad-supported website.
Marco:
It's very, very hard.
Marco:
It's nearly impossible for most sites...
Marco:
to do it in a way that they can both afford to have any kind of staff quality at all and also have a site that is not very focused audience-wise so it can't get very expensive ads and that is not just full of horrible crap like that.
Marco:
Look around.
Marco:
How many websites do you see that are really in great shape these days that have a staff of more than two people?
Marco:
It's really hard to find any.
John:
Yeah, but all the more reason that like the well-known sites have a leg up because they're like, where does everybody go for movie stuff?
John:
IMDb.
John:
I mean, Amazon bought them already, so they basically have already been saved by their plans.
John:
But, you know, it's not impossible.
John:
And if it's going to be more difficult now than it used to be or whatever, the ones that have the most advantage are the ones that are already established genre defining categories.
John:
Even Slashdot never got this bad.
John:
Or isn't this bad now?
John:
Because I believe it still exists.
Marco:
Well, yeah, all of SlashRots trashes in their comments.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
So what about like the Sweet Home, for example?
Casey:
That's not festooned with terrible ads all over the place.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, they appear to be pretty reliant on Amazon affiliate money.
Casey:
And Ghostry is reporting what looks at a glance to be 20 different trackers that they're using on the site.
Marco:
I mean, it is basically a shopping site.
Marco:
So it's different.
Marco:
Like, if you're a shopping site, you can make money off of affiliate stuff or off of the profit of things you're directly selling.
Marco:
It's very different for, you know, something like Snopes, which is like a very basic content site.
Marco:
You know, you make money off of page views, period.
Marco:
And it is really hard to get anything good there these days.
Marco:
Especially when you are both big and untargeted, like Snopes is.
John:
Snopes should be no different than Wikipedia, though.
John:
Because it's the same thing.
John:
Wikipedia is general purpose.
John:
There's no confined audience.
John:
It's extremely broad.
John:
It's a simple site that just contains text.
John:
And yet Wikipedia not festooned with ads or viruses.
Marco:
well wikipedia also you know first of all it is donation funded by a what seems like a pretty large amount of people and even then they still have to put the giant jimmy wales head on top of the on top wikipedia in what seems like a very increasing frequency uh but that also i'm pretty sure that they have a pretty small staff of actually paid people um and are they probably also went on profit right how many people do you think snopes needs
John:
I don't think it needs a gigantic staff of people.
John:
I mean, they could leverage volunteers.
John:
This is not a site where people have to file seven stories a day.
John:
It's not like a gaming site or something.
John:
There are much harder categories than Snopes.
John:
It just feels like a shame that Snopes is exactly one of those sites that because it's mostly purely text and it's a simple site and it shouldn't require a giant staff and they're not, you know, reviewing cars or sending people to trade shows or doing anything else that costs a lot of money up front.
John:
it you know it's just a shame that it is like and and because it's still popular people still link to snopes i wish it had been replaced by like a stack overflow versus quora equivalent where the crappy site gets replaced by the better one but instead we all just go to snopes and it just every time we do it gets worse
Marco:
It's also possible... We don't know that the Snopes owner... Who owns Snopes?
Marco:
Is it some big company or is it just kind of its own thing?
Marco:
The maggots own Snopes now.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
But they could just be really tired of running it and just maximizing profit for a while too.
Marco:
That is also a possibility here.
Marco:
But I think it's more likely that they are at least partially a victim of the problems that all web publishers face these days with trying to get any money out of ads...
Marco:
Thank you.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And to bring this back to Pokemon, he wrote in to say, hey, this is the rules.
Casey:
You got to get through the follow up before we move on.
Casey:
He wrote in to say, my friend was very excited to play Pokemon Go with her seven year old son.
Casey:
She excitedly installed it and said, let's go out and play.
Casey:
But he was quick with his rebuttal.
Casey:
No, mom.
Casey:
Pokemon is for old people.
John:
sad times just like that we're all old all over again it's kind of true like uh you look outside there was a couple stories about this about uh nintendo targeting uh people in in generational ways like if you played pokemon as a kid now you're ready to play it on your smartphone because
John:
At the same situation with my family, you realize that if your kid doesn't have a smartphone, it's very difficult to play Pokemon Go without at least one person with a smartphone that you can tether to, because you do have to be on the move with internet access at the same time.
John:
And seven-year-olds don't have a device, a portable device with internet access that they can walk around the neighborhood with.
John:
They would have to go, I mean, they should be going with a parent anyway, but like...
John:
When I look, when I see all those pictures, look at all these people, they're all playing Pokemon Go.
John:
I don't see 50% kids.
John:
I don't even see 25% kids.
John:
I see maybe like 5% kids and 95% young adults and adults.
John:
So it is a game for old people.
John:
I don't think Nintendo cares.
John:
Old people have money, right?
John:
But...
John:
we'll see although they're finally nintendo is making public statements trying to deflate his own stock price now like do you realize we don't make that much money from this like we get a license fee and the actual money goes to this other company like please it's great that you doubled our stock price but perhaps you don't understand how this works we're not getting uh as rich as you think we are
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Any other follow-up?
John:
For 28 hours later, no.
Marco:
Actually, we did get one really nice note from a person named Cap.
Marco:
Cap said, Hi, one thing that's great about Apple not updating the Mac for ages, there's never been a better time to buy a Mac secondhand.
Marco:
A few months ago, I managed to pick up a 2011 iMac with a SSD installed for an absolute bargain, added a bunch of USB 3.0 ports via Thunderbolt dongle, and couldn't be happier.
Marco:
It isn't just that this machine was ridiculously cheap.
Marco:
I also didn't feel like I'm missing out on anything besides Retina by not getting a new Mac.
Marco:
And this is I thought this was a really good point because like when you see that the entire lineup in certain in certain families, if not the whole Mac lineup has not changed that much in like three years.
Marco:
That means you can buy a three year old Mac and it's still pretty competitive with the with the brand new ones that are coming out today.
Marco:
And, you know, it's a mixed bag.
Marco:
Obviously, we'd like things to be getting better over periods of three years in the computer industry.
Marco:
But as long as they're getting better so slowly or not at all, then, you know, like you could pick up like a three-year-old Mac Pro that's almost out of warranty now for probably a decent price.
Marco:
And it's still the same machine being sold new.
Marco:
More realistically, most people wouldn't be doing that.
Marco:
Most people could get similarly great deals on a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
The first generation Retina MacBook Pro is from 2012.
Marco:
That's now four years old.
Marco:
And it's not that different from the ones they're selling brand new still today.
Marco:
It isn't that much slower.
Marco:
You might have to replace the battery if it's worn out.
Marco:
But these lithium-ion batteries don't wear out that quickly.
Marco:
Uh, so like you can really get amazing deals on like three to five year old max now that are almost as good as the ones they are still selling brand new today.
John:
I have trouble bending my mind in such a way that this is actually a good thing.
John:
Like I know some people can, you know, like I'm not missing out as it's not much worse than what you could buy new, but it is still.
John:
a really old and really slow computer just so happens that you can't even buy one that's that much better but it doesn't change like an absolute values the state of that old machine and also it may not change like apple's sort of deprecation window of like you know like my mac pro and a bunch of other machines don't have support for mac os sierra and stuff i'm not sure that window apple's sort of sliding window of dropping old hardware support for os's takes into account the fact that apple is not making their computers
John:
So I think that window moves along whether Apple releases new Macs or not, which is kind of sad.
John:
And really, you're right.
John:
They're not that much worse than the current ones.
John:
And in some cases, you can find a machine that's a couple years old that has some attributes that are actually a little bit better than the current machines.
John:
But...
John:
All you're doing is putting yourself even farther back so that when the new Macs inevitably do come back, like the gap will suddenly what?
John:
Because we all presume Apple will continue to produce Macintoshes in the future at some point.
John:
And when they come out.
John:
suddenly that you know the the the feeling that you have it's like oh this is such a bargain it's such a good deal because the gap between you and the best available is small the gap between you and the best available is about to take a giant leap and that's not going to feel too good so uh yeah it i can i can see where this person is coming from but my to my mind and my personality i think it's even worse to buy a used one now um
John:
It's kind of like if Apple was rapidly advancing, you could get a used one that is better in terms of absolute value just because they're going forward so quickly that you'd end up with a better machine.
John:
But like, I think it's bad all around, but maybe I'm just sad about this.
Marco:
I suppose you could look at it the most horrible way, which is if you buy a brand new machine from Apple today, you're basically buying a three-year-old machine for a brand new price.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Save your money.
John:
Don't buy a new one.
John:
Don't buy a used one.
John:
Just keep putting money into your little buy a Mac later fund so that when they do come out with new ones, you can get a fancier one.
Marco:
Sure, but if you need a Mac now and you need one for, I don't know, $700, especially if the Mac Mini is not going to suit your needs, which at $700, it almost certainly won't.
Marco:
And even with infinite money, it might not.
Marco:
If you really want a laptop, which almost everybody does these days, if you have that kind of budget and a good MacBook or MacBook Pro is going to cost you nearly $2,000 once it's optioned reasonably...
Marco:
then that's a pretty good option to, you know, get a three-year-old one for, you know, basically, you know, get today's Mac for what it's actually worth today, which is a three-year-old one's price.
John:
Yeah, if I had a business and I absolutely had to buy one because, like, new employees were coming on board and we didn't have computers for them,
John:
I might buy the cheapest used one I could possibly get with the idea that I will buy a new one also as soon as they come out.
John:
Because that is probably like, what's the least amount of money we can spend now to get a computer on your desk that you can use while we wait for the new Macs to come out, knowing that as soon as they do, we're going to resell those used ones and get a new one for you.
John:
That makes sense to me.
Marco:
I mean, you could probably get a used 101 for the same price it'll cost to upgrade the new one to one terabyte.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's trunkclub.com slash ATP.
Marco:
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John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
How did you land on Sheryl Crow as your example?
John:
Oh, I don't know.
John:
I was trying to think of a celebrity.
John:
Like, who do the kids know these days?
Casey:
Not Sheryl Crow.
John:
Is Sheryl Crow the most recent celebrity you can come up with?
John:
It's free association.
John:
No, it's not the most recent.
John:
But, like, I mean, I guess I could have gone with Taylor Swift.
John:
I mean, I don't know what you have.
John:
Anyway, that's what the checkmark has been for historically.
John:
And I think we've talked about this topic before, how...
John:
It would be much better if that kind of attestation where Twitter says, yes, we are telling you that this is actually the person you think it is, if that was available to many more people, because it's not just celebrities that suffer from accounts that impersonate them.
John:
Otherwise, make their lives miserable by people mistaking them for somebody else.
John:
Just put like different Unicode characters or capital I instead of an L or like whatever.
John:
I mean, I don't understand that that much because you can just right click on your web browser and fake a screenshot much easier than making a fake Twitter account.
John:
But anyway, the second aspect of this is because because it has historically been celebrities that get to have this checkmark.
John:
Twitter has rolled out a series of like different views and tools and filters and features in their official client that are only available to people who are verified with the idea being they have so many followers and have so many replies to go through they need extra tools to deal with their stuff and again
John:
A lot of people who deal with harassment and other problems on Twitter could also use those tools, but, oh, they're not important enough to get verified.
John:
And so I think in our last conversation about this, I was saying, and so I think you two were agreeing that, like, verification...
John:
should be available to everybody.
John:
And we understand that it takes time and possibly money to verify because they like look at your, they need like a state ID or they basically need to check that you really are you.
John:
And that takes time and a human being has to do it.
John:
And that costs money.
John:
But we're like, just charge a fee for it.
John:
If it costs you money, we're not saying Twitter, you have to give this away for free.
John:
Charge a nominal fee because pretty much everybody I know who desperately wants to be verified for actual, for a purpose, you know, to get the tools or to deal with harassment or to make sure that they're not impersonated.
John:
would gladly pay a nominal fee.
John:
I mean, they'll throw the money at you in two seconds to get the little checkmark that says, yes, I really am who I am.
John:
Why is this limited to celebrities?
John:
Why not open it to everybody?
John:
So in theory, recently, Twitter has changed its rules in the light of the whole Ghostbusters abuse thing.
John:
One of the stars of Ghostbusters got chased off Twitter by a bunch of terrible people.
John:
I don't know if that was the impetus behind this move, but timing-wise, it sure looks like it.
John:
Twitter verification is now open to anybody who wants to fill out an application on Twitter's website.
John:
You fill in a bunch of fields.
John:
You have to tell them why you think you should be verified.
John:
If you're a brand or a company, you can check a checkbox for that.
John:
If you're an individual, you tell them, like, here's all the places where you can see who I am.
John:
Here's why I should be verified.
John:
And then it goes into a big black hole.
John:
And in theory, they come back and say, yes, you're verified or no, you're not.
John:
and this comes up specifically as it relates to this show because marco marco's verified for a long time right you were were you verified like the very beginning this is the thing i was i i got verified like three weeks ago or something it was it was really recent i thought you've been verified for a long time no like i i started ranting about there was some when oh it was when the uh when what was that app engage with that app they launched a couple weeks ago that we were on my phone of
John:
Oh, like the celebrity-only app to see what people are saying about your tweets or whatever.
John:
It's like ego-surfing.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, anybody could use it.
Marco:
And I actually used it for a few days on my phone to kind of try it out.
Marco:
But when that launched, I was basically ranting about how this app gave special privileges to verified people in the way that...
Marco:
Not as verified people using the app, but if you were verified, your tweets would show up in these filtered views higher than non-verified people.
Marco:
And it was just like yet one more thing that was – because the verified system has – having a system like this has lots of problems and inequalities inherent in it.
Marco:
It's one thing if it's only for identity verification.
Marco:
But once you add any other bonus features or higher statuses, once you attach those to verified status, it makes this program something that should be available to everybody.
Marco:
Because then it's like, well...
Marco:
you know if verified people get their tweets seen more in certain filters or get higher priority things or get certain abuse control filters that that other people don't get i mean everybody should be able to be verified that because then that's then it's a feature segment not like a a status thing and and tie status to also like abuse control features and relevancy in searches and stuff is that's kind of that's kind of icky you know so
Marco:
I was ranting and raving about that, and a nice person who worked at Twitter submitted me, but it seems like that's just been up to the public now, and that's great, sort of.
Marco:
It's great in that, okay, well, now a lot more people can get verified, but it still is subject to some kind of, like...
John:
importance judgment on on the side of whoever's reviewing these forms um because we know like for example uh federico vatici got rejected which is insane by the way it completely a person who is like he has his own website a popular website's been around for years yeah it's like i'm not gonna say a pillar of the community but it's not an obscure place he's not an obscure person and he's not even like just
John:
Like a random person who happens to have a blog like this is years and years of working in like if he doesn't he should be verified under the old pass where Twitter went around to all the websites that like all like the tech websites or whatever and say, hey, here you go.
John:
Anybody who works your website can get a checkmark.
John:
He didn't get one then, and the fact that he got rejected now makes no sense.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
They had a lot of rule shifts over time of what kind of people would get verified.
Marco:
Initially, when it first started, it was basically people who had the most followers on Twitter, and they worked their way down the follower count until they got just above my number of followers, and they stopped.
Marco:
And then they said...
Marco:
And then it was, okay, well, now we're just going to do public figures, celebrities, politicians, and people who work for the media.
Marco:
And that was kind of loosely defined, the media.
Marco:
It always meant whatever kind of media I didn't do.
Marco:
So it was not just bloggers, and not podcasters, and not app developers.
Marco:
But if you work for a journalism organization,
Marco:
thing, however they define that.
Marco:
These definitions always shifted and were very vague and really very much based on does some handful of people at Twitter think you're important this month?
Marco:
It was weird.
Marco:
If they declared a certain website or publication to be a verifiable publication,
Marco:
anybody who worked for them would get verified in, like, this big batch that they would do.
Marco:
And so, like, you'd have people who, like, wrote one article for, like, a paper somewhere.
Marco:
They have, like, 400 followers, and they're verified.
Marco:
And then you have people who have, like, 50,000 followers who can't get verified.
Marco:
It was always a weird system.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It's always been these kind of like vaguely defined, very like human judgy kind of clarification.
Marco:
I know like one of our friends reached out about a year ago to try to get the three of us verified.
Marco:
And they told him because he knew a guy who knew a guy.
Marco:
And the response was, we don't consider podcasters to be media personalities at this time.
Marco:
And YouTubers were getting it.
Marco:
But podcasters weren't.
Marco:
It's just like, again, it's always been this weird system.
Marco:
And it's always going to rub me the wrong way.
Marco:
And that's why I started complaining.
Marco:
And eventually, I complained enough that I got verified.
Marco:
And I made a joke when I got verified that now that I got it, in like three weeks, they're going to just end the program.
Marco:
And they didn't.
Marco:
Instead, they just opened it to everybody, which I guess is better.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Well, a couple things on that.
John:
So your complaint was originally, hey, like you said, it's stupid to tie features and things that a lot of people could use to this whole vague status thing, right?
John:
Exactly.
John:
And I'm not saying that whoever was to help you speaks for all of Twitter, but what happened was not...
John:
hey you know marco you have a point we should change the way we do things instead it was hey you know marco if we give you a check mark will you shut up like i'm not again i'm not saying that's the yes that was the intent or whatever but like it it basically the person who did this view is not empowered to change twitter's policy right so they can't like it's not the ceo that did this for you i'm assuming right um so they just tried to do the nicest thing they could to make you feel better which is a good customer service move and it's like i can't actually solve your problem but
John:
How about if I do this, does it make you feel better?
John:
And like, you know what?
John:
It kind of does make me feel a little better, but it didn't do anything to solve the actual problem because the person who cared about this was obviously not the CEO or anyone in a position to solve the problem.
John:
Um,
John:
And as for the media things, to reinforce your point that anybody vaguely associated with the media thing can get one.
John:
When the Twitter checkmark fairy came to Ars Technica, it was offered to everybody, including to me.
John:
And I am one of those people who writes like one article a year.
John:
I didn't have 400 followers.
John:
But, you know, I was not a my contribution to Ars Technica, though they may have been large in size, were few in number.
John:
And I was offered a checkmark, and I didn't take it because part of the conditions were you would be getting a checkmark as part of Ars Technica, so you had to use your Ars Technica email to be associated with it, and I didn't want a checkmark as part of Ars, A, because I didn't feel like I was part of Ars, like I was a freelancer.
John:
I don't have any sort of stake in the company.
John:
I'm not even a full-time employee.
John:
I never have been, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And B, I didn't want a checkmark as part of Ars Technica.
John:
I, because I'm a giant egomaniac or whatever, wanted to be recognized for myself.
John:
And if you don't want to recognize, give me a checkmark for being me, then fine.
John:
I don't want one.
John:
Like, I don't want to be on Ars Technica's coattails or whatever.
John:
So for multiple reasons, I turned that one down.
John:
And I figured, like, look, well, you know, I'm never getting a checkmark.
John:
I'm never getting a checkmark, right?
John:
But this whole thing of, like, whatever, I wish you could find the press release or whatever it was.
John:
opening it up to everybody the application process may be open up to everybody but as vatici shows it's not as if they opened up the check mark to everybody not only do they not open it up to everybody but their definition doesn't make any sense because it's maybe it's a slightly broader definition but if vatici doesn't fit under the definition then i shouldn't get a check mark either um and i don't like that because i want a check mark and that's why this is because beyond all reason i want a stupid check mark
John:
and as i wind about at length on reconcilable differences i don't need a check mark like the people who actually need it people who are actually the targets of harassment who need these tools people who have huge number of accounts impersonating them and just i mean brianna woo is the the poster child for this like the fact that she doesn't have a check mark around makes no sense she's constantly in touch with twitter sending them hundreds of reports getting accounts banned and no one at the receiving end of this flood of like reports of abuse of twitter goes
John:
you know what might help this person?
John:
Maybe we should make her verified.
John:
And she has a huge number of followers too.
John:
Like every criteria that you could possibly think of, like for someone who's like not a publication or whatever, it doesn't make any sense.
John:
So I'm frustrated with these strange rules.
John:
I'm frustrated that even under the strange rules, I still don't have one.
John:
And yes, I did apply.
John:
I applied on Wednesday.
John:
I had to fill in a bio, which I had never filled out on Twitter intentionally because, again, it was another 10 minutes of whining about this and reconcilable differences.
John:
It's impossible to write a bio that doesn't sound god-awful.
John:
So I just wrote a god-awful bio.
John:
If you go look on Twitter.com slash Syracuse right now, you'll see my god-awful bio.
John:
I had to put a birthday.
John:
I already had a header image.
John:
And when I did the application, I was worried that they would get yelled at for my header image.
John:
My header image is a picture from the video game journey, which I love and everyone should play and no one should be spoiled about.
John:
And it's like a wallpaper that you could download from Sony's website, but technically it contains like...
John:
copyrighted images or whatever like i mean if you go to the sony site it's like hey if you're just in journey come here and here are wallpapers and that's one of the wallpapers so i assume it's free for me to take and put as my header image i don't even know anyway i filled it out i have not heard back from them everyone else is tweeting hey i entered a thing into the application and i heard back and i'm verified and i have a check mark all sorts of check marks blue check marks are sprouting everywhere and honestly i shouldn't care all i should care about is that the people who actually need check marks get them
John:
And by the way, those people still aren't getting them, which I don't understand.
John:
But anyway, you need one, John.
John:
You need one.
John:
Yep.
John:
I'm not getting one either.
John:
This is like the good version of a Wikipedia page because everyone thinks they want a Wikipedia page.
John:
But anyone's heard me talk about Wikipedia knows I have many problems with Wikipedia.
John:
I don't want a Wikipedia page.
John:
It's a curse more than a blessing.
John:
But but a checkmark.
John:
It's basically only upside and no real downside.
John:
And anyway, I don't have one.
Marco:
Let me tell you why you want one.
Marco:
I mean, because like, you know why I want one, you know, because we're all egomaniacs, first of all.
Marco:
But like you can look at it from like the original purpose of verified.
Marco:
And it's kind of like the lock icon on an SSL site, you know, like getting a little lock icon in your address bar.
Marco:
Time for me!
Marco:
And still enter their stuff into insecure forms and everything.
Marco:
So we know that that kind of warning doesn't really work for the most part for most people.
Marco:
Because most people just don't think to check that kind of thing.
Marco:
Or they don't know to check that kind of thing.
Marco:
And even if they know, they sometimes forget and just miss it.
Marco:
Whether it serves that original purpose is kind of... It's not that relevant.
Marco:
Because that original purpose is not a very strong purpose.
Marco:
What it really is, is...
Marco:
It is a prize.
Marco:
It is a sign awarded to you that says, I am important.
Marco:
And because it is emphasized everywhere, you're seeing those big blue check marks on all these important people in your timeline.
Marco:
So it is very much a status symbol.
Marco:
And whether you need or want the additional filtering features it brings...
Marco:
you want to be a special person and honestly when i got it i have almost felt like a responsibility has been granted to me and i have to like tweet more responsibly now it's weird like it's how does one go about tweeting more responsibly what are you not tweeting that previously you would have tweeted it's it's like getting like a like a bs title at work to try to like make you more responsible like it has totally worked on me where like i'm like well you know i'm like representing this blue check mark now i i better you know
Marco:
You know, it's like how like cops are supposed to like, you know, drink at bars in their uniforms.
Marco:
And I kind of I kind of feel like, you know, I got like, you know, be good for this checkmark and beyond beyond better behavior now.
Marco:
Because you can't say that it's not really Marco.
Marco:
That's not really me.
Marco:
That's an impersonator.
Marco:
No, it just it kind of feels like I've been blessed with this honor that I have to like treat well.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's it's not rational, but that's how it feels.
Casey:
Well, for what it's worth, there's an account, which is at verified.
Casey:
This is an account on Twitter that, from what I can tell, follows every verified account.
Casey:
And it follows 190,014 accounts as we record.
Casey:
One of those accounts, ladies and gentlemen, is this guy.
Casey:
Because guess who got his blue checkmark a couple days ago?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
And man, John, does it feel good.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Yeah, it's okay.
Casey:
It's not bad.
John:
The thing that burns me up so much about your checkmark is that you got it six hours after filling out the application.
John:
You filled out the application not too long before I did.
John:
Basically, I didn't fill it out because I was too busy podcasting with Merlin while trying to fill it out, which is why we ended up talking about it.
John:
And so when the show was over, I filled it out.
John:
You filled it out and you said, what, six hours later you got your checkmark?
Casey:
Yeah, it was a little after noon on whatever day it was announced.
Casey:
And it was just before I recorded the latest episode of Analog that I received it.
Casey:
And so we actually talked, Mike and I talk about this on Analog as well.
Casey:
But yeah, it was somewhere around six or seven hours.
John:
It's like showing up to, like, some really popular event just after the whole crowd gets there.
John:
Like, there's a line of five people, and then you wait 15 minutes, and then there's a line of 3,000 people.
John:
So now I'm somewhere back in a queue.
John:
I just assume I'm going to get rejected because that would fit perfectly with the completely arbitrary pattern of, like, not giving Fatici want, rejecting Fatici and just never responding to Brianna.
John:
Like...
John:
fits perfectly with with the the whole notion that is just like a hamster in a wheel over there or some kind of random number generator and no actual human with any kind of judgment is doing this because honestly if there was anybody with any kind of judgment doing this like not giving verified check marks immediately to every single target of gamer gate like i don't understand the meeting where you'd be like should we do anything about this and should we give them check no let's just not ever do it for like a year does that sound good guys okay good let's break for lunch
John:
Like, I don't understand the logic.
John:
I don't even understand the neglect.
John:
I don't understand.
John:
And how can it be staffed to such a degree that Casey's wait time is six hours and that they give him a thumbs up and yet all these other people don't get them?
John:
It doesn't make sense to me.
It doesn't make sense.
John:
anyway i totally recognize that this entire topic conversation is obnoxious and that i shouldn't care but we do care because they made us care they manipulated us into caring with these blue check marks yeah there are some some legit reasons that that a regular person would want this like people who don't need it like me like i said because you get you get more features that make twitter nicer to use and i think your thing of the lock icon is great it's just like
John:
I want my account to seem trustworthy and to people not to think it's me.
John:
And I have had a few impersonators who I've reported and their accounts have gotten closed.
John:
And it's like, whatever.
John:
I don't have any actual issues.
John:
But put it this way.
John:
If they literally opened it to everybody with $10, I would pay $10 in a second.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I registered the Overcast account for it.
Marco:
And I signed up or I filled out the form roughly the same time you did, I think, John.
Marco:
And I haven't heard back from that either.
Marco:
It's still pending.
Marco:
But I did it for basically that reason of I wanted the Overcast Twitter account to appear official, to really make it look like this is a real business for a real app that matters in the world because it's good enough to get a blue checkmark.
Marco:
I want people to see that.
Marco:
It helps look more professional.
John:
I mean, we're going to do the same thing for the ATP account, ATP FM on Twitter.
John:
I want people to know that's the official account of the show.
John:
And so a checkmark would be good to give them the reassurance that they're like, what was the ATP one?
John:
Because it's not just at ATP because that's a different one and you might not be sure.
John:
And again, like it's a thing I think should be open to everybody as in if you have $10, boom, you've got a checkmark.
John:
Like a mechanical process with no humans involved except for the verification part.
John:
And that's what you're paying your $10 for.
John:
But like the idea of being rejected for verification doesn't make any sense to me.
Casey:
Yeah, it is weird.
Casey:
With that said, in my three or four days of living the sweet, sweet, sweet blue checkmark lifestyle, I've only noticed two differences so far.
Marco:
Did you get your gift bag?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Did you see that special present they gave us?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
That was impressive.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
That one was awesome.
Casey:
Anyway, so if I look at the Twitter website in the settings area on the left-hand side where it begins with accounts, security and privacy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
There's another one which I believe is new.
Casey:
That's notifications timeline.
Casey:
And I don't recall having seen this before.
Casey:
And it says filter tweets by and then there's a checkbox and only one of them that says quality filter.
Casey:
It says quality filtering aims to remove all tweets from your notifications timeline that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content or sent from suspicious accounts.
Casey:
I haven't yet turned that on just because I don't feel like I really need to.
John:
And what kind of people might need that feature?
John:
I'm having trouble thinking of any examples.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Why is this not available to everybody?
Marco:
Yeah, because I got the two accounts open here.
John:
Well, it might not be available to everybody because, like, maybe there's a computational or, like, scalability thing or whatever.
John:
Then too bad.
John:
Fix that.
John:
We have computers now.
John:
Computers do these things quick.
John:
i'm trying to think of a scenario where it's reasonable but even if you're going to give it to limited set of people who would you give it to who might you give this thing that's limited say you only have you know 500 000 to hand out who would you give it to i don't know maybe you would like you said divorce it from the verified and just offer it to people who are constant targets of abuse or no maybe just not do that
Casey:
So yeah, so there's that.
Casey:
And then it was actually Mike who got verified in a beautiful, wonderful turn of events got verified after we recorded Analog.
Casey:
So I had an entire episode of Analog to lord over him and make fun of him for not being as cool as I am, which was delightful.
Casey:
But anyway, he had noticed once he got verified that apparently in the official app, there's a notifications tab and there's a new entry in the segmented control there.
Casey:
So he sent me a screenshot and what he had was all mentions.
Casey:
And I believe he said that the verified one was new.
Casey:
So he can look at notifications from everyone.
Casey:
Notifications just in terms of mentions.
Casey:
Again, this is the official app.
Casey:
Or, I guess, mentions just from verified people or perhaps any sort of notification that's sourced with a verified individual.
Casey:
And those are the only two differences that I've noticed.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, if you've noticed anything else.
Marco:
Well, not really just because I don't use the official client or the website very often.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Same here.
Marco:
So most of the stuff only is visible in those places.
Marco:
And honestly, that might be like, you know, if I started getting a lot of abuse again, you know, there have been periods in the past where I've gotten all here and there.
Marco:
I mean, nothing like what people like Brianna get.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
But, you know, if that kind of thing became a problem for me, I would very much consider switching to these official apps.
Marco:
And again, if you're going to make this like a content filter kind of thing and an abuse filter kind of thing,
Marco:
You want as many people as possible who are legitimate account holders to be verified.
Marco:
And if you charge a bit of money to be verified, it really does... It puts a big barrier in front of... And not necessarily to the point where nobody can pay, but not a lot of people will pay...
Marco:
in order to make a bunch of dummy accounts to troll people with or to harass people with.
Marco:
Typically, when you pay for an account, you are less likely to be willing to just throw it away because you'll lose that money and you'd have to pay again if you wanted to come back to the service.
Marco:
My old friend the Something Awful Forums back from my early internet days, they had a system there where you had to pay, I believe it was $10 to register an account.
Marco:
And it was incredibly effective at keeping out spam and crap.
Marco:
And if anybody got banned, you know, if you broke a rule, you get banned and like you're out 10 bucks.
Marco:
And if you want to come back, you got to pay another 10 bucks.
Marco:
And it really did make a big difference in how well that community was run and how little crap there really was there compared to the number of people that were there.
John:
That probably doesn't work for something that's supposed to be as mass market as Twitter, which is like, I think they'd have to come up with a hybrid strategy where they would have to be like, look, we will give out free check marks to everybody who we think deserves them, and then we will actually hire or set a policy where deserves makes some sense to somebody in the entire universe, and then anybody can get it if they pay.
John:
You need to hire, because you don't want it to be like, oh, so few people will pay.
John:
You don't want it to be like,
John:
Only people with this amount of disposable income are allowed to participate in Twitter because I think Twitter has already established itself as sort of like everybody can be on Twitter.
John:
It's open to everybody.
John:
It's free.
John:
Maybe that's not sustainable either, but it's kind of a shame to take a service with that broad of appeal as opposed to something that's like a community like Metafilter or those forums you were talking about where it's not going to be everybody.
John:
It's going to be a tiny subset, a very small community.
John:
And even there, it's kind of a shame to select only people who can afford to add that money.
John:
But you're right that it is incredibly effective to raising the quality because no one wants to keep paying money to make sock puppets because it just...
John:
it gets expensive and it doesn't feel good um i mean i guess unfortunately at the scale twitter operates i can imagine people like running kickstarters to fund the creation of their sock puppet accounts like in the alternate universe where twitter was always a pay thing they would just raise tens of thousands of dollars from horrible people to constantly make it and you know anyway
John:
this is like so many things twitter does this is in this weird state where it's not clear uh what the new rules are it's not clear how long this will last as marco said who knows they could get rid of check marks tomorrow and and split these features into two different things um but at least it's some kind of motion on the front and by the way speaking of the check mark i i use a third-party client because i'm an old twitter user um i i'm always surprised when people use the official client but apparently lots of actual people do anyway and my third-party client it has an option
John:
for whether it should show the checkmark overlaid on the little avatars for individual accounts.
John:
And I always have that turned off.
John:
Because I didn't like, when I'm going through my timeline, I didn't like the visual indication that this person was more important and what they had to say was more important.
John:
I mean, if I dig into the account, if I ever have questions about, is this really the celebrity?
John:
I tap on their name and I can see the checkmark.
John:
But seeing the checkmark, mostly because I actually follow a lot of people who have checkmarks who actually know, I don't need to constantly be reminded that they all have checkmarks.
John:
And I felt like it was making me pay less attention to the ones that don't have checkmarks.
John:
So I just turned it off on all of them, you know, pretty quickly after that feature was available several years ago.
John:
And I would definitely not want to turn it back on.
Marco:
Then you aren't seeing our bling.
John:
I know.
John:
Believe me, I know.
John:
Honestly, Marco, I thought you had had one for years.
John:
I'd forgotten about that whole little blow-up thing.
Casey:
Yeah, and the funny thing is, right after I got mine, Marco and I were talking privately, and we had concluded without a shadow of a doubt, collectively, that there was zero chance that you would solicit your own checkmark because you are above that.
Casey:
And then fast forward like two hours, and you said in the Relay Slack, oh, I totally asked them, and I can't believe I haven't gotten it.
John:
No, I thought you knew that we discussed it before.
John:
I wanted a checkmark forever.
Casey:
Well, no, no, no.
Casey:
We knew that you wanted the checkmark.
Casey:
That wasn't up for grabs.
Marco:
Yeah, but we also thought that there would be no chance that you would, like, apply.
John:
That I wouldn't apply?
John:
No, you have to apply.
John:
Once they say it's open to everybody, you have to apply.
John:
Like, I just choked down writing that stupid bio.
John:
I'm like, ugh, gotta do it.
John:
Like, in a little box where they say, like, tell us why we should verify you, I wrote, like, the most craven, like, disgusting, here's why I'm an important person thing.
John:
Like, I'm just, I'm like, this is the strongest argument I have.
John:
here it is i'm not no no being coy no beating around the bush this is it thank god that's not public but like what am i gonna do be like all shy and demurrent like well probably you shouldn't give it to me i'm not that well known like no i think i should have it like i maybe i should have taken a couple sentences to say i mean i can't even be honest and say you should not be giving this to me before you give it to every single person who's ever been targeted by gamergate like it's it but if you if you start yelling at them and telling what they should do also not a good way to get a check mark so
John:
Anyway, they're just not responding to my request anyway.
John:
So it's been, what, three days now?
John:
Whatever.
Casey:
So on the episode of Analog that will be out by the time this episode is out, Mike and I discussed what we had written.
Casey:
And it was funny because we took two different approaches on what we wrote to justify our coolness.
Casey:
And I agree with you.
Casey:
I am not a fan of writing that sort of thing about, oh, look at me.
Casey:
I'm just so important.
Casey:
And let me tell you all the reasons why.
Casey:
But what I ended up doing is basically name dropping people that I knew and interact with that are also verified.
Casey:
That's not a power move, though.
Casey:
My brother-in-law met Barack Obama once.
Casey:
Sort of.
Casey:
I know Mark Harmon.
John:
Well, that was the thing.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
I mean, I'm serious.
Casey:
That was the approach I took was, you know, hey, I share a podcast with verified user Marco Armin and John Saracusa.
John:
Well, the fact that he's verified, that actually strengthens it.
John:
Right.
Casey:
That's my point.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
That was exactly my point.
Casey:
And I talked about how I'm also on Relay, which also has Jason Snell verified and CGP Cray verified.
Casey:
And my podcasts are heard by many thousands of people each week.
John:
That's a pretty good approach.
John:
I mean, obviously it worked.
John:
But then again, like with this black box, we have no idea why it worked.
John:
It could have been because the person who decided to check your box listens to ADP.
John:
Boom.
John:
Casey List.
John:
Done.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And Mike took a different approach.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
What did he say he did?
Casey:
I've forgotten now.
John:
But whatever it was... I spelled my name with a Y, which is much cooler than an I. Oh, no, no.
Casey:
That's what it was.
Casey:
He had said... He thought to himself, well, why would they have made this available to everyone?
Casey:
It must be because they're they want people to verify their, you know, their identity.
Casey:
And so Mike was all, oh, you know, I'm really concerned that people that listen to me might not be able to find the real me, you know, and in playing the whole like parody card.
Casey:
And I'm very poorly paraphrasing what he said.
Casey:
Go listen, go listen to that episode analog.
Casey:
But we took two different approaches.
Casey:
And well, I got to tell you, my bling looks great.
Casey:
How does yours look, Marco?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But he got his, too.
John:
Mike's approach worked, too, right?
John:
Yep.
John:
I mean, Mike totally deserves one, too.
John:
I mean, it's no question.
John:
But that's an interesting approach.
John:
I mean, like I said, I have had actual impersonators using my avatar and using variations on my name with different Unicode glyphs and stuff to make a thing like that has happened to me.
John:
Not a lot, but it has happened.
John:
He ended up going with that approach and it working.
John:
Did he have real examples or was it just speculative?
John:
I'm afraid this could happen to me one day.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
I feel like it was speculative, but I'm not 100% sure about that.
John:
Anyway, you have no idea how annoyed I'm going to be when I get rejected.
John:
Because then where do I go from there?
John:
Do I just reapply every six months?
John:
Forever?
Casey:
One month.
Casey:
Yeah, it's one month.
John:
Every month?
John:
I can't... I did save the paragraph of text I wrote in the box just so I don't have to think it up again.
John:
So I'll just paste it in every month.
John:
But what an existence that is.
John:
At a certain point, I'm just going to stop.
John:
I'm not going to be able to muster the...
John:
it just what is the quote from jerry mcguire i know why why in the world am i asking you guys chat room jerry mcguire quote you're gonna look it up now have you either one of you seen that movie yes but forever ago yeah i actually did see it but i saw it like when it was new which was a very long time ago all i know is i i love looking at my bling every time it flies by after i tweet looks good
Marco:
For a while, I actually had trouble recognizing myself on Twitter.
Marco:
If I double-click a tweet to get the conversation history and mine would be at the root because I wanted to see which of my tweets this is in response to.
Marco:
For the first few days, it didn't register visually as me when I'd see the avatar with the checkmark on it because that's not how I look on Twitter.
John:
all right here you go this is the scene that you guys don't remember but you should because it's full of quotable things oh you're not cutting my uh jerry mcguire quote out this is gold i gotta cut out like half this topic it's so long well you but we don't have much on the other end of it so you know we need to fill it here
John:
This is when Jerry's talking to whoever was playing like the athlete that he represents.
John:
He's a sports agent.
John:
I'm out here for you.
John:
You don't know what it's like to be me out here for you.
John:
It's an up at dawn pride swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about.
John:
Oh, I blew it.
John:
I was so close.
John:
So close.
John:
Anyway, up at dawn pride swallowing siege is what I think of as a good description of reapplying to get Twitter verified every month because that is a hell of a pride swallowing siege.
John:
oh wow oh john i i genuinely feel bad for you and uh i really want you to get verified no one should feel bad for me for the love of god no one please no one feel bad for me this is the most pathetic thing in the entire it's not actually important no you should not feel bad for me you should you should pity me that i care about this at all well i'd do that too but don't cry for john argentina exactly you know you know something from pop culture are you quoting like the madonna remake
Marco:
no i saw uh wait which one came out like in the 90s madonna that's the madonna okay that's the one i saw yeah sorry it's fine at least i saw one of them i mean come on yeah yeah yeah well anyway um well i hope you get your check mark in no small part because it'll make getting the atpfm check mark that much easier because we can say hey all three of us and it probably won't because apparently the process is random and vatici doesn't deserve one neither is anyone targeted by gamergate
Marco:
Well, I mean, this is part of the problem with any of these human review... It's just like the App Store, where even if you set rules in place, and even if the rules don't change, which I think for Twitter's verification process, those are two big requirements that probably have never been met before.
Marco:
But assuming you have codified rules that don't change much over time...
Marco:
You still have a team of humans enforcing them.
Marco:
And, like, you know, when Veticis went through, it was right after this big rush started.
Marco:
It could have been a bunch of people who saw this giant pile behind them, and it was right before lunch, and they were tired, and they were grumpy, and they just started saying, no, no, no, no, no.
Marco:
Like, it could be so many things once you'd have, like...
Marco:
humans trying to review a whole bunch of stuff subjectively it's it's just these kind of rule systems will never be consistently enforced as long as there is that subjective component to it that's why this that's why they should remove that and it should just be like do you fit the basic qualifications you know can you prove your identity with like you know a government issued id that we trust and can you you know maybe pay a few bucks for our time since you since you know we're gonna do this for a lot of people
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Like, that should be all it is.
Marco:
And as soon as you put in judgment calls of, well, are you important enough?
Marco:
It's never going to be consistently enforced.
Marco:
We're also sponsored tonight by Hover.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So Marco, we're doing pretty well.
Casey:
We're about an hour in and we still have one more topic left.
Casey:
And I think we might be able to dodge stupid TiVo for one more week.
Casey:
So we got to stretch this one a lot.
Marco:
All right, we'll see what we can do.
Casey:
So tell me everything that I could ever possibly want to know about serial number tracking and forecast.
Marco:
okay now that you've ruined both product names are the things i was going to make um wait was that not wait if he's looking at the show notes you would know it was called that but what was the other what was the other name uh the sidetrack alignment yeah you he didn't say that you did didn't you no but it's in the show notes and i missed it so it's fine it doesn't matter oh crap i'm sorry don't worry about it have you not announced forecast
Marco:
i've been i kind of mentioned here and there it's also it's it's in the id3 tags of every mp3 i've made in the last two months so it's it's just sitting right there people have asked me on twitter like hey what's this forecast thing so yeah god i feel such a turd oh i'm sorry do we want to rerecord that we can rerecord no it's fine now you have to explain the goofy origins of the name and typical uh marco naming fashion
John:
I am excellent at naming things.
John:
I don't know what you're talking about.
Casey:
Actually, this is perfect because this will delay TiVo even more.
Casey:
So please, tell me the name about this thing that I just spilled the beans on.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
So Forecast is my podcast post-production app for the Mac.
Marco:
It basically is an MP3 encoder as well as a chapter and metadata editor.
Marco:
So it allows you to...
Marco:
input any audio file wave aif you know other mp3s whatever else and just edit the metadata on it it encodes its mp3 if it isn't mp3 already uh it uses my parallel uh version of the lame mp3 encoder like i discussed a few episodes back um i i did succeed in making that it does work
Marco:
The last few episodes of this show have been encoded with it and nobody noticed, so that's good.
Marco:
And it also can do things like edit chapters.
Marco:
And you might have noticed in recent shows that not only have I been using chapters more in the encode here, but also that we've recently gotten here and there, I've been throwing in some chapter images.
Marco:
uh where you have a special a special image for showing up at certain times in certain shows uh that's topically relevant and this is all being done by this app forecast uh and the reason i named it forecast is because it's what comes before overcast come on i mean oh no you got the three things so it's the connection to the weather so overcast and forecast you forecast the weather
John:
yeah but you've also and then what was the one you just said you've got the uh you do it before it appears in overcast uh-huh and also this application takes files and prepares them for overcast yep and overcast ends in cast which is because it's about podcasts so it's all these different you know all these references in this name forecast so and also you are the famous creator of the podcast application instacast as far as i'm is that right
Marco:
I... Yeah, that's... You know, people... For a while, I thought I kind of owned the Insta prefix with Instapaper.
Marco:
And then Instagram came out, and the game was over.
Marco:
Because now, everybody just thinks anything Insta, people think Instagram.
Marco:
So even if I tried to... And Instacast was a different podcast app by a different person.
Marco:
But even if that never existed, even if I tried to launch a new podcast app called Instacast...
Marco:
people would think i was ripping off instagram's name not not playing off my own name of my own product from from you know 10 years ago so anyway uh so my app is called forecast and it's a mac app although as far as i as far as i know there's nothing really about it that would make it that would preclude an ios version in the future if i really thought that it was warranted
Marco:
But there's not a whole lot of podcast production happening on iOS these days.
Marco:
So the demand is mostly on the computer side and probably mostly on the Mac side, if I had to guess, between Mac and PC.
Marco:
So that's what I'm doing.
Marco:
It's a small project.
Marco:
It's not like a massive thing.
Marco:
I've been working on it for a few weeks.
Marco:
It's in beta now, a very small private beta, and I haven't really decided how and when to release it and charge for it.
Marco:
And I talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar two weeks ago, so we'll link to that.
Marco:
Just basically considerations of whether you should even charge money for something like this, or whether it's not even worth the hassle of...
Marco:
charging money because like charging money brings a certain degree of overhead and and of support burden and things like that and and if it's only going to make a small amount of money overall because of you know small volume of sales it's kind of questionable like you know whether that's even worth doing you know like you know the the entire run of bug shot uh i i blogged you know when i when i was charging for it and when i still own bug shot um the entire run of it made something like three thousand dollars
Marco:
And $3,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people.
Marco:
And it was for me at the time as well.
Marco:
However, it also took a pretty big portion of my summer to do that.
Marco:
And there was an opportunity cost.
Marco:
They were like, I probably should have been working on Overcast at the time.
Marco:
And instead, I made Bugshot.
Marco:
And to have made a relatively small amount of money over a year worth of sales...
Marco:
it probably wasn't worth it in retrospect.
Marco:
And that's why I eventually decided to just make it free and just learn from it whatever I could learn from having a free app in the store.
Marco:
So with Forecast, I'm kind of faced with a similar dilemma here.
Marco:
of do I charge for it or not?
Marco:
And I talked actually a little bit about this last week when we talked about Sidetrack, my alignment utility that also exists.
Marco:
Although Forecast is way more in a releasable state because it's just a simpler problem.
Marco:
But anyway, I don't really know whether I'm going to charge for it or not.
Marco:
if i'm going to charge for it it would probably be like 50 bucks because anything less than that i don't think it'd be worth it but the problem is like how many people are going to pay for a podcast chapter utility now there is a podcast chapter utility already in the mac app store today i believe it's called podcast chapters it's 20 bucks and as far as i can tell it doesn't look at selling in in meaningful volume
Marco:
which is too bad because i think this is a market that that should be a strong market with me going in there saying i want to be able to charge 50 bucks for this uh it's not very promising that there's already one for 20 that appears not to be selling very well so i think you know you got to figure like yeah you know i could push it i could you know use my brand and my blue check mark to really sell this thing and like but how many copies am i really going to sell how many people are really making chapter eyes podcasts and are willing to pay 50 bucks for my version of solving this problem
Marco:
That number is probably something like 100 people at most in the most optimistic projection, 100 people, probably more like 20 to 30 people, if I'm really being honest.
Marco:
It's probably a very small number of people who actually would buy this thing.
Marco:
So because it's so small, I'm leaning mostly towards not even charging money for it because it just seems like the overhead of charging money would not really be worth setting all that up.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
I also have an app called Quitter, which we plugged poorly last episode.
Marco:
I also have a Mac app called Quitter.
Marco:
And it would kind of be an interesting learning experience to figure out how to charge money for Mac apps, to set up the infrastructure to charge money for Mac apps.
Marco:
This is all outside the App Store because the Mac App Store does not really offer anything.
Marco:
It doesn't offer enough to make it worth the 30% anymore, if it ever did.
Marco:
uh anyway so big question is do i release this thing and then do i charge for it and then if i charge for it how do i charge for it and then the uh the follow-up topic to this which is uh how do i do license management and piracy prevention or rather piracy reduction i guess i should say because i'm a realist here i know how these things work so what do you what do you think what should i do here
John:
if you weren't going to charge for it which you're slowly convincing me before i was like you should just charge a huge amount of money for it because five people are going to buy it um and unfortunately you're going to give free copies of those five people so really you're going to sell zero right but as you talk about it more i'm like well if it's going to be free i start to think that like not only should it be free it should be open source because when some annoying corner case of the spec comes out there's enough nerdy people that they'll just you know
John:
send you a pull request, and why not get the benefits of it being free?
John:
You're not going to get any of the benefits of making any money if you're going to make it free.
John:
Why not go all the way in the other direction and say, not only is this free, this is open source.
John:
And then also, if you get tired of maintaining it,
John:
some other person who's more enthusiastic about maintaining it could take it over because you just want this tool to exist which is why you're making it like you're scratching your own itch here sure it's not as if this is your grand plan for world domination right i think you would be fine if someone took it over and kept up with all these you know whenever you get a report like oh i tried to use your tool and didn't work on this particular weird thing encoded with this like you don't want to deal with that crap
John:
Um, so I would say free and open source is a good option or close source and charge a huge amount of money as a deterrent to keep away the lucky lose.
John:
Uh, yeah.
John:
And then see how it works out.
John:
And, and if you really do want to figure out like how, how can people send me money for a Mac application?
Um,
John:
like maybe as people were saying in the chat room maybe make it like a tip jar type of thing where it's not even like patronage it's not even like you're promising that anyone that you're even going to like put that money into further development this application it's just like look this is free if you like it and you want to say thank you
John:
Put a dollar in this jar.
John:
You get nothing for this dollar.
John:
It doesn't even guarantee that I'm ever going to make another version of this application.
John:
But if you just want to be a nice person, do that.
John:
And I think that could make as much money as the one where you charge five people 50 bucks.
Marco:
It might.
Marco:
Well, okay.
Marco:
So let me address these two separately because these are two big topics, I think.
Marco:
So first, the open source question.
Marco:
That is a very, very good question.
Marco:
And it's an interesting theory of, you know, should this just be open source?
Marco:
And I've thought about that for this and sidetrack.
Marco:
What I found, though, in just being a person using computers for a while and a little bit of direct developer experience, but mostly just being a user of this stuff, what I found is that there tends to be not that much value to entirely open-sourced applications, especially for fairly narrow uses like this.
Marco:
There is lots of value in open-source components and utility libraries and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's lots of value there.
Marco:
But the value of open-sourcing the entire app here...
Marco:
is is not incredibly great unless there's going to be a lot of contributors working on it and for most apps that simply doesn't happen uh from you know most apps getting a lot of contributors is like is like this this fantasy that you have when you think about open sourcing it but then if you actually do open source it almost nobody contributes and you get a handful of pull requests here and there and then then it just work then it's just like then it's like going through resumes but people put all this work into it and then you have to like
Marco:
The ones you want to accept, you've got to make sure they work.
Marco:
You've got to test them with all of Casey's unit tests and all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
And even the ones that work that you want to add, it might not really have been in the way that you would have wanted to do it, or the code might be messy.
John:
You've got to let go.
John:
When it's open source, you've got to let go of the thing.
John:
And I think you don't want a whole bunch of contributors.
John:
I think you just want two smart people contributing to it, and that's it.
John:
And all it does is like relieve the maintenance burden for you with the idea that eventually you'll be bored with it and someone else will just take it over.
John:
And then you'll be sending them five line pull requests.
Marco:
Yeah, but I mean, I think in reality, again, that's a great theory.
Marco:
In reality, that doesn't happen very often.
Marco:
And also, when you open source things, especially a full app like this, you have the problem of you're generating work for yourself because you're going to have to deal with the contributions and the reports from people and the pull requests.
John:
You don't have to deal with the contributions.
John:
You can just ignore it.
John:
Eventually, people will fork it.
John:
Yeah, but then you're a jerk.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
I feel like that's
John:
every open source thing i've ever done it's been like look here it is maybe if i feel like it i'll look at your pull request but if not like because if people are annoyed that you're not taking the pull request they'll just fork it and then like they've taken over that's the only way you get people to take it over is you just neglect it and then someone else takes it over and you're like oh good done um like i i'm thinking of it as totally
John:
like not feeling any social responsibility because this is a very obscure thing yes like it is not a mass market thing it's super obscure and it's just it's just kind of your way of having like it's like buying a lottery ticket for removing a small amount of maintenance for your future but it really is totally giving up ownership of it so forget about like picking a cool name for it and having any ownership or any stake in it whatever it's just like completely open source like it's it's the far extreme of these these possibilities which
John:
You have never done anything like this, and the only reason I'm suggesting it in this case is because this seems like the only time I would ever recommend it, because it's so clearly not a thing that has any potential upside that is significant.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with John.
Casey:
Unless you're going to be charging an absurd amount of money, which I think in principle you could because the kind of people that would use this are probably the kind of people that make a decent amount of money making these shows.
Casey:
That's not necessarily true.
Casey:
It's not necessarily true, but it's certainly possible.
Casey:
But regardless of that, I think John has convinced me listening to him that open sourcing it is probably the best way to go because the key to open sourcing it is that you can point at that GitHub repo and just say, yep, shrug.
Casey:
It's up to you, man.
Casey:
I did my part.
Casey:
Now it's up to you.
Casey:
And then if somebody complains to you that something isn't working, you are completely absolved of any guilt because it is within...
Casey:
their power in principle to fix it.
Marco:
That's a wonderful theory.
Marco:
That doesn't work in practice that way.
John:
It does.
John:
It's just a change in attitude.
John:
You just say, I'm not offering you support for this.
John:
This is not a product.
John:
You didn't pay me anymore.
John:
If anyone actually complained, be like, you're getting what you paid for.
John:
I'll refund all zero dollars of your money.
John:
Don't even respond to the emails.
John:
Don't even look at the things.
John:
I'm good at that.
John:
Tons of stuff is like that.
John:
I don't think anyone can get mad about it.
John:
It's like,
John:
plop here it is and you can continue to edit your thing or like like there is no obligation i feel and this is you know this is a topic of some controversy in the open source world people like once you have an open source you have to like maintain it and deal with progress no you don't that i'm totally of the opinion if you just want to plop a bunch of code down and be like here it is and never never communicate with anyone in the entire world about it ever again just put it under a license it's like you
John:
You want it?
John:
Here you go.
John:
Fork it.
John:
Do whatever the hell you want.
John:
You and your friends, do whatever you want.
John:
If you don't have the ability to change it, oh well.
John:
Sucks to be you.
John:
But whatever.
John:
I'm a programmer.
John:
I wrote this for my own purposes.
John:
And as a nice aside, I'm going to chuck it out there so other people can mess with it if they want.
John:
If I'm in the mood and someone sends me a program, maybe I'll incorporate it, but no promises.
John:
Maybe I'll never look at it again, which...
John:
I understand like that doesn't feel good to a lot of people and doesn't.
John:
But like to me, that feels like one of the beautiful things about open source, like that you that it's kind of like rather than sort of keeping it to yourself, like say we take the selling it to other people off the table, which I don't think it should be off the table.
John:
But anyway, say the alternative was like, I wrote this out for myself and I use it myself.
John:
And this is the alternative of, like, don't hide it.
John:
It's like taking all your belongings with you when you die, right?
John:
Like, you know, as soon as I died, burn every one of the Van Gogh paintings I own because I don't want anyone else to ever have them.
John:
It's like I made this thing for myself, but also I want to share it with the world.
John:
So if you want it, here it is.
John:
It is what it is.
John:
Uh...
John:
go nuts with it and them having it doesn't affect you because it's software like you can both have it at the same time um and you can both do whatever you want with it uh develop it not develop it whatever um and the final thing is like it has all the benefits of being free because like if we look at the itunes podcast directory there are a huge number of podcasts
John:
if you made a free tool like this word would get around among the tons and tons of sort of like uh you know like whatever the bell curve looks like for podcasts in terms of traffic numbers the long tail of podcasts that that are out there there are a lot of podcasts and i bet uh a few of them if they needed a tool to do this and word got out like oh if you need a tool that does this the easiest one is this free mac app click on this thing download the thing and use it
John:
whatever you're like you're helping a lot of people do their podcast production and if those people come looking for like oh i found a bug in this program or whatever you don't have to respond to them either because they got a free application off like a github page like maybe they won't even be downloading it from your page they'd be downloading it from the seventh or eighth person who forked it who knows
Marco:
Well, okay.
Marco:
And those are all reasonable concerns and reasonable points.
Marco:
But I don't think I'm ready to give up that kind of control.
Marco:
I know.
John:
I know.
John:
I totally know from your personality you don't want to do this.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And by open sourcing it, you close a lot of doors for yourself in the future.
Marco:
Like, I mean, yes, you open some.
Marco:
Thank you, Richard Stallman.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You close a lot of doors for yourself of like, what if I wanted to start charging for it in the next version?
Marco:
Or even just take this version and start charging for it.
Marco:
There are a lot of opportunities that you basically close off by doing that.
Marco:
Also, open source has a number of problems in today's world.
Marco:
And I don't know if this was always the case, but it certainly seems like today this is a big problem.
Marco:
Where any kind of open source app now...
Marco:
in the world of app stores, will have lots of opportunistic vultures and scammers basically just taking it, changing the name maybe, if you're lucky, and putting it on the app store for money and trying to make money off of it.
Marco:
This happens to all sorts of open source applications now.
Marco:
It happens a lot.
John:
AppReview would never allow that.
John:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
That's hilarious.
John:
Put a little icon of Mario on it.
John:
Exactly.
John:
And call it Minecraft 2.0, and I'm sure that will go right through AppReview.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so basically, there's a lot of problems with entire open source applications.
Marco:
That's one of them.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think I'll open source it.
Marco:
If I ever decided that I was done working on it and that it was going to be unmaintained, maybe then I would open source it.
Marco:
That would be kind of the classy move to do if there were no obvious problems by doing that.
Marco:
But I think I'd keep it closed source until I figured out what to do with it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
that being said you know again like do i really charge for it or not i don't know i mean ultimately the world is better off if it's free but i have a hard time justifying working on it if it's free so i have to kind of balance that like you know is it really like because every day i spend working on this i'm not improving overcast and i still need to do that too and you know i need to like this this needs to be
Marco:
A project that I only work on in short bursts so that I can get back to working on Overcast, which is still providing the bulk of my software income.
Marco:
So, you know, it's, I don't know, it's a tough balance.
Marco:
I would love to be in a position where I could start making real money from podcasting tools and
Marco:
And have that start being an important enough part of my business that I could spend more time working on it.
Marco:
But I think as many people have found when they try to get into this business, it's just very hard to make money off of podcasting tools.
Marco:
Because even though podcasting is really doing very well right now, the number of podcast producers is still fairly small relative to things like blogging and stuff like that.
Marco:
it's still a pretty small number producing podcasts and of the ones who produce podcasts there are so many different ways to produce them so many different tools people prefer to use or can afford to use or need to use in various conditions that they're working in that even if you make a tool the the percentage of the market that will actually choose to use that tool especially if it's if it's charged charge money for it like you're talking about very small numbers of people and
Marco:
And if you raise the price high enough to make it worth your time to develop it, those people wouldn't be able to afford it anymore.
Marco:
So it's a very hard market to really make money in directly through direct sales.
Marco:
Now, of course, there are other strategies I could use here.
Marco:
I could give away a whole bunch of great production tools for free that are all optimized for how Overcast works.
Marco:
And so this would put me in a position to do things like add new metadata formats that Overcast could debut being the first app to read them.
Marco:
And that would also piss off a lot of people.
Marco:
But that's an option I could do.
Marco:
I could just have this thing be something that pushes the MP3 chapter format because I love MP3 chapters.
Marco:
I hate M4A chapters.
Marco:
That's a terrible format.
Marco:
And this would help push it towards MP3, which Overcast deals better with, which everybody deals better with.
Marco:
It's a much easier format.
Marco:
uh it's it's actually documented that's big one right there uh thanks apple for not never documenting the original uh m4 aac enhanced format uh anyway there's lots of options i have here i don't know how interesting this is for all the listeners so i guess i guess i can move on from that portion of you know whether i release it and whether i charge for it uh and then we can move on to discussing piracy fun but first
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Harry's.
Marco:
Go to harrys.com slash ATP to get $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
You know how razor companies keep putting out new models and raising their already high prices?
Marco:
Well, our friends over at Harry's don't believe in upcharging.
Marco:
They just made a bunch of improvements to their razors and blades, and they're keeping prices exactly the same.
Marco:
So it's still just $2 per blade cartridge compared to the $4 or more you will pay at the drugstore for the big brands.
Marco:
Harry's five-blade razor cartridges now include a softer flex hinge for a more comfortable glide, a trimmer blade for hard-to-reach places, a lubricating strip, and a textured handle for more control when it's wet.
Marco:
Harry's was founded by two friends to offer people a great shave at a fair price.
Marco:
This is for both men and women.
Marco:
By owning the factory in Germany where they make their blades, Harry's can produce high-quality razors themselves and sell them online for half the price of drugstore brands.
Marco:
Really, half the price.
Marco:
Two bucks per blade cartridge for Harry's blades, or less if you buy them in bulk.
Marco:
Quality is 100% guaranteed, always.
Marco:
If you don't love your shave, Harry's will fully refund your money.
Marco:
So get the starter set today.
Marco:
The starter set is an amazing deal.
Marco:
You get a weighted razor handle of your choice, moisturizing shave cream, three precision-engineered five-blade cartridges, and a travel cover, all for just $15.
Marco:
And for limited time only, there's a special offer for fans of the show where you can get it for even less because you go to harrys.com slash ATP and you get $5 off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's just $10, the starter set.
Marco:
It's an amazing deal.
Marco:
Go to harrys.com slash ATP right now to claim your offer.
Marco:
That's harrys.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
John:
So based on what we know about you and how you don't want to do this open source and you don't want to get away for free or whatever, but also what you said about the maximum addressable market for this application being relatively small, it's making me lean pretty heavily towards the idea that you not spend much time trying to prevent piracy.
John:
Because I've been discussing in Slack over the past weeks and has been discussed many times on the web, especially in the old days, back before, you know, in the days of shareware and everything.
John:
You can invest essentially infinite time in trying to stop piracy.
John:
You will always lose.
John:
It's almost impossible to stop unless you're really bad to your legitimate users.
John:
And for what?
John:
To get two extra users out of an addressable market of 100.
John:
It's just not worth it.
John:
So not only should you not spend lots of your time on an application that you know is not going to make tons of money, but of the time that you spend, all that time should be on the actual application.
John:
Very little of it should be
John:
on the part that you know prevents piracy just you want to prevent super casual piracy so do basically the simplest thing that will possibly work and uh and i would say that's it and then just like you know you don't want to do nothing because it's so easy to just do something and that helps um but and especially if like as you mentioned the ambition to be like
John:
this could be a stepping stone to a suite of podcasting tools or an integrated podcast production application.
John:
You have to build your way up to an app like that.
John:
It's very difficult for a single developer with other applications to do that.
John:
But if you are going to build your way up to it,
John:
You'd want to build it on a ladder of small applications that make money and that you learn things from.
John:
And that once you do like Marco's minimal casual piracy prevention kit, you just reuse that in all the other apps you do.
John:
And then, you know, there's there's a it's an infrastructure win.
John:
Like you do it once, do it to your satisfaction.
John:
Don't worry about it again.
John:
uh and then try not to because as programmers it's fun to get sucked into like oh i can battle these hackers and what if i do this clever thing and that and like you're gonna lose and it's just a rat hole and no one gives you money for thwarting hackers like literally no one gives you money like it's the old thing of like how many of those people would have paid uh if you prevented it like do enough to keep the people with a conscience vaguely honest and then call it a day
Marco:
Yeah, that's I mean, that's basically my thought here, too, which is if I charge for this, which again, I'm really leaning mostly towards keeping a closed source, but probably releasing it for free.
Marco:
But if I do charge for it, ultimately, I agree because, you know, I grew up as as a PC user and in the late 90s pirating tons of crap as a stupid teenager.
Marco:
I know how these things work.
Marco:
And it's been a while since I've been in that scene, but I'm pretty sure it basically works the same way now as it always has.
Marco:
The easiest case scenario is you share a key.
Marco:
And even if you start doing like key checks, well, then you just hack the binary to bypass the check.
Marco:
And no matter how obscure and you can obfuscate the check, you can put multiple checks all over the code.
Marco:
There's all sorts of strategies and techniques you can do.
Marco:
and ultimately none of them really work for very long um and you can look at the gaming market the pc gaming market for all their wonderful tricks they've tried to do over the years and most of which get cracked fairly quickly you know granted a big reason those get cracked is because there's a lot of people who want them to be cracked and if for a very narrow tool like this if there's only going to be like 100 possible customers like you
Marco:
You know, it's very likely that none of those hundred people are actually like professional crackers.
Marco:
But, you know, the reality is that I agree that it's not really worth spending a lot of time on.
Marco:
It is worth spending some time on because a little goes a long way.
Marco:
If you put in a system where like, all right, I just bought it and I want to give it to Casey.
Marco:
And I just, you know, do I email him a copy of my key and he just enters it and it works?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then what if he wants to go to a friend?
Marco:
Does he just pass along my key to like, you know, how does all these things work?
Marco:
Or in the case where none of us have bought it, you know, does he go on whatever the BitTorrent tracker of the month is and try to download it from there or download a crack from some, you know, big database or something?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's been a long time since I tried to pirate anything, but or at least anything that wasn't a TV show.
Marco:
But I assume that's how these things still work.
Marco:
And you're never going to win against that.
Marco:
And so, yeah, it isn't worth a lot of effort.
Marco:
And I am, of course, not naive enough to assume that every pirated copy is a lost sale and that if I make it impossible to pirate on the craziest something that I can...
Marco:
that I will somehow get all those sales again.
Marco:
I know that's not how the world works.
Marco:
But I would build something.
Marco:
I could do some kind of cryptographic key.
Marco:
That's pretty easy.
Marco:
I have a public-private key thing already set up.
Marco:
I can verify that my server generated a certain string with a signature and everything.
Marco:
This all really seems like it's probably not necessary at all because it's probably not worth charging for, at least for a while.
Marco:
And maybe someday if I have, you know, a few years down the road, if I have like a suite of tools that I can release together as like one suite, I maybe charge 50 or 100 bucks for that.
Marco:
maybe that becomes more compelling and maybe I've charged then.
Marco:
But I just don't see charging for this now in a way that would be really worth the trouble.
Marco:
Because I think at most, I might make a couple thousand dollars over the course of like a year.
Marco:
And I know that sounds like a lot of money to some people, but if I have to have this entire support system in place to make that, it's probably not worth it.
Casey:
You know, as I'm thinking about it and listening to you talk, the only reason I can see not to open source it on the assumption that it's free, which is what it sounds like you're kind of backing your way into.
Casey:
The only reason I can see not to open source it is if you wanted to eventually sell it down the road.
Casey:
And that's a weak argument to begin with.
Casey:
But if you make it free, there's still a support burden.
Casey:
It may not be quite as obnoxious as a paid app, but you still have a support burden.
Casey:
Whereas if you open source it, it should absolve you of any support burden.
Marco:
I guarantee you it doesn't.
Marco:
I guarantee it.
Casey:
Well, but that's all in you, right?
John:
I think the free one absolves you of support, too.
John:
Because if it's free, like, I don't think the open source gets rid of the support.
John:
Like, what the open source does is, I was just saying, like, if people do send you patches, you don't have to accept those.
John:
But if you give a free app, too, there's no support button there.
John:
It's like, it's a free app.
John:
Like, this is what I'm using right now.
John:
I happen to put a link up on my website.
John:
You feel free to download it and use it.
John:
But you get nothing from me.
John:
I don't owe you anything.
John:
Again, I will refund your entire zero dollars that you paid for it.
Marco:
well but when if it's open source then you can say well go fix it yourself which is obnoxious but no you can't actually you can't actually say that you should never actually say that and you can't say that because nobody who complains knows how to fix it yeah i mean like i am a programmer i use lots of open source libraries and stuff and things and i hardly ever fix bugs in them i just if i find a problem with one i either work around it or i stop using it usually
Marco:
Because usually it's a deeper problem that I don't feel qualified to fix or don't want to spend the time to get familiar enough with the code base to fix correctly.
Marco:
I mean, like, how many podcast producers are also Mac programmers?
Marco:
Some of them are, but probably not a lot of them.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Casey:
I really feel like if you have a free app, you will definitely get a free closed source app.
Casey:
You will definitely get support requests and complaints.
Casey:
And if it were me anyway, I would feel a lot more compulsion to address those because I'm the only person on the planet who can address them.
Casey:
As opposed to if this thing was on GitHub, which admittedly the people who are emailing may not have the capability of fixing the problem.
Casey:
But at least there's some other human being out there that might be able to.
Casey:
And that's how I would rest easy at night is knowing, look, I'm not helping all these people that are whining about what does or does not work.
Casey:
But I'm also not standing in the way of them figuring out a way to fix it.
John:
because any future designs on on podcast production products which clearly he has though all you've been doing is giving head start to your competitors to your future competitors essentially like someone could just pick up that code and say i'm going to use this as the basis of my competing suite and that's that's not a good plan if that's here if you even not even plan to do that but like i might do that like like marco said i want to leave that option open uh so yeah and getting back to the serial number thing i think the most
John:
important feature of the anti-piracy thing other than the fact that it exists at all as a you know a non-zero barrier is that it not annoy honest people and that is the pump the part where most of these systems fall down because really we're like it's again it's so tempting to be to judge your anti-piracy system on how well it prevents piracy but your anti-piracy system should be judged on how little it annoys
John:
uh people who are not pirates and that's really hard to do uh and you really mostly in terms of restraint you have to like back off and not be like but but but but if i can't contact the server to verify the code i shouldn't launch right it's like no no you gotta you know just let go just think think about the honest user and how you never want to be in their face
Marco:
Yeah, no, I mean, because I am me, I have brainstormed all sorts of crazy ways that I could do this.
Marco:
Of course, I'm thinking about doing a passwordless email login, because that's what I do.
John:
We already beta tested that the focus group is not good.
Casey:
I still don't have a problem with it.
John:
Yeah, that's because maybe your emails actually show up in time and you're not sitting there hitting refresh on your email client going cursing Marco every time.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, those of us with real email clients love these kind of systems.
John:
It's not the client.
John:
It's your damn server.
John:
It's stuck in a queue somewhere trying to get out of your ISP.
John:
on my server it's your client this is why you don't use the gmail web app kids this is why you don't use gmail kids oh gmail's fine oh gmail gets mail gmail gets mails like instantly except for yours apparently some no no some websites third-party websites that are not google's i go and i do like reset my password i click the reset my password link and like before the mouse button is up
John:
It arrives in the other browser window in Gmail.
John:
And when I see that, I realize it's not Gmail that's not checking my mail fast enough.
John:
It's something else.
John:
Whether it's internet traffic, email is a store and forward system.
John:
Many things can go wrong.
John:
It's not that.
Marco:
It's gray listing.
Marco:
If there's ever a delay in email arriving in 2016, it's graylisting.
Marco:
It is not like, oh, the postfix queue is full.
Marco:
No!
Marco:
We are so far past that point these days.
Marco:
So for those of you who aren't familiar, graylisting is a type of spam prevention technique where basically the theory is that spam servers have to go through this massive list and don't have time to retry and wait around if the server says, I'm busy trying again later.
Marco:
But a well-behaving mail-sending server, if the destination server says, sorry, I'm busy trying again later, it'll actually hold on to that message for a while, like a week.
Marco:
And it'll just try every hour or whatever.
Marco:
It'll try again after certain short intervals and then followed by long intervals.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
So a spam prevention technique that a lot of people, that a lot of places do is upon like the first time you get email from, from a certain sender.
Marco:
So you don't already know that they're legit.
Marco:
You, you just tell them, Oh, you know what?
Marco:
I'm busy right now.
Marco:
Wait a bit.
Marco:
And the theory is that the spammers will just move on because they're the spam bots don't have enough memory to keep track of all those things and try again later.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
uh and then but but legit servers will try again later and it'll get through and that's why so often the first email you get from a certain service or whatever else will be delayed by like an hour that's that's what's happening it is not any other reason it is that it's great listening but it's not the first email from your servers that gets delayed it's random and it's not an hour it's like
Marco:
60 seconds but it seems like a long 60 seconds when i'm sitting there waiting for it to arrive well no it's it's kind of it's up to usually well okay i see you're saying it where in your in your case it's not that long but yeah because like it's i think it's kind of up to the client as to like up to the sender as to when they try again but i think i think a common practice is about an hour or something like that but
John:
Anyway, it's kind of like the orders of magnitude in terms of instantaneous is less than the speed and not waiting is less than 100 milliseconds.
John:
And there's certain orders of magnitude of 10 milliseconds, 100 milliseconds, one second of when does attention wander?
John:
When do you feel like you can go off and do other things?
John:
When do you feel like you're waiting on it?
Yeah.
John:
going from one having a password and having it autofill and clicking the button is in a different order of magnitude than having to go to get an email like even before you get into the idea of like having to find a link to click on or whatever or copy and paste something or whatever it is you may have to do it is just a whole other order of magnitude in terms of responsiveness of like how long does it take me to log into this site and what other things does it involve so not a fan
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Trunk Club, and Harry's.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
It's accidental.
John:
did you see all the articles uh like like oh passwords the end of the password passwords are over like they're all the just i i don't know i even click on those articles anymore because all they're talking about is like oh a password let's log in this it's like this you know hellscape where reset my password is the only way you can log into anything essentially
Marco:
Well, but I mean, honestly, first of all, that is not that bad.
Marco:
I've done it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Second of all, that is kind of the reality of how a lot of people log into things anyway, because a lot of people.
Marco:
I know, but it's not it's not a good reality.
Marco:
Like it's a bad reality.
Marco:
I don't want that reality.
Marco:
Agreed.
Marco:
But a lot of people like just always forget their password to everything.
Marco:
And they just click that link almost every time they log in.
John:
i know but anyway you still need a password for your email like you eventually get down to a one password situation and then hey why not just use one password so here's a question what if what if my key system was a web login and what if it was basically like in the app it would have like email and password no no can can you not make a client-side application that does not have a server component you do not need a server component for it
John:
he's just like i want to write php damn it i know it's a mac app but like there's such a huge huge win to just giving people a binary and then they never touch your servers like it scales much better than you having to babysit servers well but that but that does not do anything about key sharing which is probably the biggest form of casual piracy no no but i'm saying like if it's free like if it's free application i just want to see you ship a free a free like quitter quitter i guess you did it there's no server component to quitter right yeah it's just free but but you're just dying to do something in php like i can have a login page
Marco:
I like PHP.
Marco:
I love all the backslashes and the namespaces.
Marco:
No, I'm just kidding.
Marco:
I still haven't used a single namespace because I hate the backslash.
Casey:
You quickly got over Windows, then, huh?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, oh, I could talk about that briefly if you want.
Marco:
If we don't have an after show, it doesn't have to do with TiVo.
Marco:
um so yeah basically i i i asked on twitter so tiff wants to play um a certain game that's only available on uh xbox one yeah xbox one and windows you asked on twitter that's how you're gonna start the story so what's the real start of the story
John:
real story is i was asked because i'm a person who you know who plays games on max hey i want to play inside how should i do it and i told you the answer two days pass and then you post on twitter hey can anyone tell me how i can play inside as if we had never talked as if the discussion never took place as if what i had to say was just garbage and obviously not trustworthy because what do i know having actually played inside on a mac
John:
You had this conversation with me or Tiff?
John:
Oh, one of you two.
John:
You're the same person.
John:
You live in the same house.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
Oh, no, they are not.
John:
Wait a minute.
John:
We are two different people.
John:
She was like, can you convince Marco to do this?
John:
I'm like, you can convince Marco.
John:
He's your husband.
John:
I bet you have some influence in that area.
Marco:
So wait, so before I tell you what I did, what should I have done?
Marco:
So my options are basically like, should I attempt to go through the hassle of making a boot camp partition?
Marco:
And of course, you know, then having to install, first having to get Windows, having to install Windows, and then having to run Windows.
Marco:
Or should we just buy an Xbox One?
Marco:
Because they're actually not that expensive these days.
John:
The answer, the surrounding context of this is that a bunch of people who are on the incomparable have played inside.
John:
And it's the whole reason I wanted to play.
John:
It was like they've already played it and they wanted to have a podcast about it.
John:
And if you want to be on the podcast, you have to have played it.
John:
And at this point, there was no implied schedule of like when we were going to do this thing.
John:
But the point is they had just played it like three or four people had played it.
John:
So there was a possibility that, hey, three or four people played it.
John:
It could have gone up on the schedule for like next week's show.
John:
And so time was kind of of the essence here.
John:
And in that scenario, in the context of which it was asked, hey, a bunch of people played inside.
John:
I want to play it, too.
John:
I only have a Mac.
John:
The answer, the obvious answer is boot camp, because it's not just an investment for this game, because you can play lots of things in boot camp.
John:
There are lots of games that are only available for Windows.
John:
And
John:
It's really easy to do and I know you have tons of spare hard drives laying around and it gets you the game the fastest with the most bang for your buck.
John:
Now, the Windows thing is an issue, but had you followed up with me on that, I would have told you the same thing everyone on Twitter did, which you can get a free trial.
John:
does the free trial matter for a game?
John:
It takes three hours to play.
John:
Who cares?
John:
A 90 day, 30 day free trial of windows.
John:
Like this is the fastest way to go from zero to, I have played inside, uh, with minimal, especially if you're not the one who has to install bootcamp, just make, make you do it.
John:
Like Tiff just makes you do it and it's fine.
John:
Uh, but even if you have to do it yourself, like I did before you even got to the point where you asked the same question on Twitter to get the same answers from other people, I had finished the game already.
John:
I had installed, I had installed bootcamp, played the game, finished it.
John:
Like it is not that bad.
John:
Um,
John:
and now i actually have i actually have a had a legitimate copy of windows 7 from back in the day so now i have a more up-to-date boot camp perdition and by the way yes my 2008 mac pro played inside just fine at native res of course so casey what do you think i should have done oh you absolutely without a shadow of a doubt by the expo
John:
because that is the most marco solution to this problem but no but you don't know like the the backstory in the xbox one is there's two new ones coming out the a better version of the current one and then a much more powerful one a year later so this is kind of the wrong time to buy an xbox one as well how much is the xbox one you can get them on you can get on amazon for about 250 bucks you absolutely buy the xbox one and then if you want to try to sell it for 100 bucks later
John:
You're not going to be able to sell that Xbox One once the new ones come out.
Marco:
So here is my dilemma, basically.
Marco:
The Xbox is the lower effort, slightly more money version than just buying Windows or whatever else.
Casey:
Which is the Marco version.
Casey:
That is the Marco version.
Marco:
Yeah, probably, right?
Marco:
However, and if it was a PS4 and it didn't already have a PS4, I might have done that.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
Our house is full of game consoles that we've played very briefly.
Marco:
And then you just sit around for the next seven years collecting dust under the TV.
Marco:
And I don't want another console.
Marco:
Because if you look at these two options, after we're done with this, whether it's a Windows partition or an external Windows drive or whatever, or this game system...
Marco:
What am I stuck with afterwards in the house?
Marco:
Like, what is going to collect dust in the house afterwards?
Marco:
If it's a boot camp partition, nothing.
Marco:
Or at worst, an external disk of some kind.
Marco:
If it's the game system, which admittedly is easier, I have this giant box sitting around and these controllers and these plugs and these adapters and all this crap.
Marco:
i like i have game systems we have a ps3 in the closet that i hardly ever played uh we have a ps4 that we've played that tiff played i think two games on so far uh and you know vr stuff is going to come out and make all these systems irrelevant anyway well let's not go crazy here
Marco:
We have a 360 that I bought back in 2008 or something that has very rarely actually... We've used it in bursts here or there, like Tiff would play a certain game on it or I'd play a certain game on it, but for the most part, it didn't get a lot of use.
Marco:
Before that, we had a Wii that didn't get a lot of use because, like everyone else's Wii, we tried it, had fun for a month and then never played it again.
Marco:
you know somewhere we have a we fit balance board where the same the same fate happened i mean so like i have all these like giant plastic game systems all over the place trying to figure out what the hell to do with them you can't really sell them they're not really worth enough to justify like their shipping weight once they're used and old and so like i was like what what the heck do i do so and also the xbox one in the current generation
Marco:
just seems like the loser system.
Marco:
And I apologize for anybody who has one, but it just seems like I have so often in my life made the wrong choice on a format war or a game console generation or something.
Marco:
I've so often chosen the losing side and then been stuck with this losing hardware and having all the problems that go along with that.
Marco:
And so I try to avoid that as much as I can these days because I've done it so many times.
Marco:
Like I bought a DVD plus R drive.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Marco:
So I try to avoid that.
Marco:
And the Xbox One just seems like it has so definitively lost this generation.
Marco:
And, you know, some generations are closer than others.
Marco:
This one seems like it's not close.
John:
Well, the Xbox One, that's the reason you don't want to buy it now, because it is poised to win the .5 generation that they're both doing.
John:
Like, so, in the revised versions, not the Xbox that is essentially the same Xbox One, but smaller and, like, quieter.
John:
Right, it's coming out, like, in a week?
John:
Yeah, whatever.
John:
Not that one.
John:
Like, that's fine.
John:
That's just, like, what they normally do.
John:
But the one after that, which will be competing with the new, new PS4...
John:
they will both be more powerful consoles the new more powerful xbox one will be much more powerful than the new more powerful playstation 4 so it'll be an inversion of the current scenario where the playstation 4 is slightly more powerful this will this will widen the gap in the opposite direction will that be enough to make the xbox one do better in this generation
John:
probably not especially since they'll have to make the games play on the xbox one too but uh it's all it means is that this is the wrong time to buy an xbox one essentially unless there's a whole bunch of games that you know you want to play but more importantly and this whole big thing that you've this that you've gone through the most salient fact here is while you've been worrying about this tiff has not been playing inside and
John:
you could be done already it's a three-hour game you could have been done like all this hemming and hawing is like pointless and it's like oh you're not stuck with much in steam not only you're not stuck with much if you make like a boot camp petition that is an asset she will not delete it there are tons of games on steam that are only available on windows when they have steam sales she'll buy something for three bucks and get a day's worth of fun out of it and that's a good deal like you won't be like and i know you have hard drives hanging you don't have to buy a hard drive like you have them there
Marco:
this you should have already done this i feel like you're failing as a husband and probably as a father adam is disappointed in you too let's be honest so here's the other the other side of this the rationale on the boot camp side is i find windows dirty like i don't like windows i i was there for so long i i fled and i don't want to go back and i have i have occasionally maintained a boot camp partition on my own computer on my on my own mac and
Marco:
um very occasionally and the last time was a very long time ago because every time i do it i regret having done it because i just i realize how much i hate windows and how much i actually don't like gaming very much anymore anyway but tiff tiff does play games so you know so i wanted to i want to do something for her so i but her computer has like no free space because she has tons of photos on it because she's a photographer so tons of photos on there there's no free space in the built-in drive
Marco:
I eventually learned that, oh, you can actually do boot camp on external drives these days.
Marco:
I didn't realize that until fairly recently.
Marco:
That solves a lot of these problems because then I don't feel like I have this dirty Windows partition sitting around junking up my Mac all the time because I can just unplug the drive and put it in a drawer and then it's gone.
Marco:
so uh i didn't but i also didn't want to put it on a spinning disc because those are huge and ugly and loud and i actually don't have any two and a half inch pin discs i only have three and a half inch ones that i could devote to it and that would be even larger and even louder and even hotter and slow and i don't think i even have any three and a half inch enclosures this is a lot of excuses i installed it on a big spinning 3.5 inch disc and you know what i already played the game
Marco:
Good.
John:
And I hate Windows.
John:
I guarantee I hate Windows more than you.
John:
Guarantee.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so instead of doing any of those options, I had to buy something, of course, because I like buying things.
Marco:
I went on Amazon and I bought one of those little Samsung T3 external SSDs.
John:
Oh, of course you did.
Marco:
Yeah, because...
Marco:
they're great overall like they're fantastic little ssds and i didn't have any other ssds that were large enough i had like an old really tiny one but none that were large enough so i just bought the 250 gig one for like 80 bucks on amazon a few days ago it arrived yesterday i installed it all this morning i followed the stack overflow instructions on like how to do an external windows first you have to like
Marco:
load up vmware load up load up windows in that use the disk image tool and whatever you know automated install tools or whatever to do all this stuff to make it configurable on the actual drive then install windows in the actual drive using these other windows installation from your vmware it's like all this crap like all right i'll put all this crap in my laptop to configure all this because i don't want this cluttering up my desktop so
Marco:
I don't want a VMware installation.
Marco:
I'm never going to use that.
Marco:
It's just going to cause problems for me.
Marco:
So just put it all on my laptop.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
So then I configured it all and now it works.
Marco:
And as of this morning, we have now this bootable little Samsung SSD, this little USB SSD that we can plug into either of our computers.
Marco:
Whenever a game comes along that we want to play, and we can just play it.
Marco:
I installed Steam, and our account for Steam is already set up, and I already bought and downloaded inside.
Marco:
It's all ready to go, so Tiff can now play inside by plugging this into a computer and rebooting.
Marco:
And then when we're done, we can unplug it and put it in a drawer.
Marco:
And if I really need a disk for external use, if I'm going on a trip or something, I can just bring this disk, and we have a disk.
Marco:
And afterwards, I don't have this giant game console collecting dust.
Marco:
I have this useful little external drive.
John:
So I'm reminded of what Tiff told me when I was telling her that she should speed you along to get this done several days earlier instead of asking on Twitter and doing all this other stuff and not listening to the things that I already told you.
John:
You told her, not me.
John:
She told you too.
John:
You live together.
John:
Anyway, do you know what she told me?
John:
She said, this is what Marco does.
John:
You just have to let it run its course.
John:
This is what she said.
John:
You just have to let it run its course.
John:
Spoken like a woman who knows what she's dealing with.
Marco:
No one knows me better than her.
John:
So it has run its course.
John:
You have acquired a new toy.
John:
You have read web pages about how to do something techie.
John:
And now you're happy because you don't have an Xbox in the house.
John:
And you both have the capability to play Steam games.
John:
I just can't wait for you to be fighting over this.
John:
I guess you could just clone it at that point.
John:
But then you had to look up Windows disk cloning tools.
Marco:
I guarantee you there will never be a time when Tiff and I both at the same time want to play the same Windows game.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
John:
You should both play inside.
John:
It's fun.
John:
Although, yeah, you can just watch our play.
John:
It'll be fine for you.
Casey:
That's all I'm going to want to do.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I just, I cannot believe you spent this much time on this.
Casey:
What is it you're supposed to be doing on Overcast that you're refusing to do or avoiding doing with such passion that you're writing Mac apps and installing Windows?
Casey:
A new Watch app.
John:
Oh.
John:
From scratch for WatchOS 3.
John:
That's what I have to be doing.
John:
Because you skipped a generation like Apple and their Macs.
Marco:
Yeah, because the generation sucked.
Marco:
Show me any WatchOS 2 developer who's like, I'm glad I did that.
John:
I can't think of any.
John:
Underscore is glad.
John:
Is he?
John:
Because now he has the experience.
John:
Now he can do watch apps in his sleep.
John:
He sneezes and a watch app comes out.