Better Offline - The Streisand Effect with Mike Masnick

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Mike Masnick, CEO and Founder of Techdirt, inventor of the Streisand effect, and member of the board of Bluesky to...well...talk about quite literally that. A banger episode. https://www.techdirt.com/user/mmasnick/ https://bsky.app/profile/mmasnick.bsky.social --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/zitron.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am, of course, your host, Ed Zitron.

I remain punished and hated forever. Today I'm joined by Mike Maznick. He's the CEO and founder of TechDirt, inventor of the Streisand Defect, and now a board member of the social network Blue Sky. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, happy to be here. So let's start with the Streisand Defect. Why don't you tell the story of how you coined that?

Just walk us through that one. Because now that I've heard about it, it's all I can think about. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's sort of, there's two elements to the founding story, one of which is what caused the term to be that and then me eventually naming it. The first was just the, you know, I was amazed by this story of Barbara Streisand suing this guy. I always forget his name, Ken something, who was doing this project. He was a, you know, he had been a fairly successful tech guy, but he was very interested in conservation. And so he was like renting a helicopter every few months.

and flying along the west coast of the United States and taking a photograph every bit of the way. And his idea was to continue to do that every few years and track the erosion of the west coast of the United States. Okay. Yeah, kind of an interesting project. You know, this is pre-Google Maps, pre-satellite, easy access to satellite imagery,

all this kind of stuff. And he created this website, and it's still online, and it is incredibly old-fashioned, where you could go picture to picture. You couldn't, you know, no map, like modern mapping software where you could slide along. You could go picture to picture along the way. And it had this ability for people to leave their own annotations.

And somebody found Barbara Streisand's house in Malibu and commented on it that this is Barbara Streisand. The Streisand estate, I believe, was the phrase that was put on it. And somebody, a Streisand lawyer found it. and threatened him and then sued him for this. And the story that caught my attention, at least, was that what came out in the court documents was before the lawsuit, that image had been viewed,

I believe it was eight times, two of which were from IP addresses associated with the law firm that was representing Barbara Streisand. So at most six people had seen the photo prior to this lawsuit. And in the immediate aftermath, hundreds of thousands of people saw the photo. And he eventually won the lawsuit.

In fact, Streisand had to pay for his legal fees. And I had written about it at the time and just thought this crazy story. But I kept seeing other examples of that kind of thing where people would, you know, try and get something taken down offline and the end result would be way more attention paid to it. And so there was a story that actually happened,

I think it was almost two years after the original Streisand lawsuit and everything in which there was a site which also might still be online and also might be very outdated called urinal.net. Which is where I get my posts. Yes, yes. Well, it's, you know, this is the early internet where anyone would create anything online. Yeah. And they would post photos of urinals.

And they were very specific and very clear that urinals only, no people, no body parts, just urinals from around the world, and they had pages of different ones. And there was some hotel or something, or I can't remember, somebody got very mad that a urinal from their property was shown and sent a legal threat letter. And so I wrote about that,

and in doing so said, you know, there should be a term for this situation where someone, you know, where something is not getting attention and someone sends a takedown, and suddenly that draws all this attention to the thing that they would, wanted gone. And then I just jokingly said, why do we call it the Streisand effect and linked back to

my story about the Streisand photo. And then somehow, I have no idea how that caught on. I didn't do much. I mean, I may have mentioned it again a few times, but people picked up on it and it took on a life of its own and most of which I had nothing to do with. And I think it's ironic that despite the term's fame, it has not brought more attention to the actual providence of the term. Yeah. But now it has. Now we have the better offline, not even remotely exclusive. You've probably told this story, dinner parties for years. I may have told it a few times, yes. It's a great story, though. So talking about old websites, TechDur, so it's come up on 30 years

of running this site. Yeah. What has changed? Because the design hasn't. I don't know if they say that negatively. I actually love the fact that it loads properly. There's not like some insane eye frame situation. Yeah. My phone isn't 700 degrees because I'm looking at it. Well, yes. Well, the site has changed a few times, but it has not changed in a long time. So this is probably the third generation of Tector, but I think it hasn't really changed much since probably 2006, 2007.

It's probably the last time we did a major overhaul of the look and feel of the site. Yeah, I mean, look, I wanted to write. about the technology industry and what was going on. And I was very interested in it. And I started when I was in business school. And just originally I started writing. I was old school. I was writing an email newsletter before email newsletters were.

Crazy idea. The rage. And then I thought like, you know, newsletters, who reads newsletters? I got to turn this into a website. And so I turned. Oh, so we're clear, it was entirely email based. There was no web front. Yeah.

Oh, man. started. When it started in 1997, it was entirely an email thing. And then I turned into a website about six months after the email. And originally it was just hosting the copies of the email newsletter. And then I started to build it out. And then what caught my attention in early around sometime in 1998, I first saw Slashdot. And this is, we, we, before the word blog existed, and I was like, oh, this format and this setup is really cool. I wonder if I could do that and turn the website into that. And so I used slash code 0.3.

This was before they had released an official slash code, but they still offered it up. What do you mean a slash code for those of us don't know like me? Slash code was their software that they used to, that was slash dot. It was, they decided to release, you know, they, God, what's his name? Rob Malda was the guy who created Slashdot. And he, you know, released the code. He had written, you know, one of the first sort of blogging type software products. And it was very messy.

And it took me and less me, but more a friend of mine who was willing to get in and deal with the mess of code, which was not easy. took us two or three months to figure out how to actually get it to set up. And then suddenly, like, I could blog. And suddenly I could write easily every day rather than what I was doing originally, which was like hand-coding HTML files and FTPing them to the server. And this was before you could just spin up easy blogs like on host the Gator and the like. Like none of that stuff existed. Again, the word blog didn't even exist.

Where did you host it? So I'm not going to say, actually, I had found, I was. I found a hosting company, and I still do some work with that hosting company. And we used to advertise. I mean, it can be found if people are looking. But because we occasionally, and we're no longer, Techters no longer hosted with them. But we still host some other stuff with them because they've been amazing partners. And I just found them completely randomly through probably searching Yahoo and found a random little tiny hosting company.

But because we sometimes receive very angry legal threats, and sometimes those legal threats try and go upstream, our partner hosting company was receiving too many legal threats and said, hey, could you not mention that you host with us? Could you, could you? A little stric end effect. No, that's not. Yeah, I mean, it's not. But, I mean, and they're like great, great guys, a very small company, a tiny, tiny company. And that's who you should work with. Yeah.

For the smallly ones, I used to work with a very small domain hosting company then got bought by a big one and then it became sheer tourmost immediately. I'm not going to name them as their remarkable integers too. And so, yeah, but this was not, you know, they were great. And in fact, like, you know, as I said, like, we still use them for certain projects. And I trust those guys to be absolutely amazing. But, but yeah, so we just found a small hosting company. And they were the original host of TechTurt for a very long time. Right.

And so, but yeah, and eventually the word blog came about afterwards, and I resisted calling Tector to blog for a really long time and then eventually kind of realized like, you know, it is. Did you finish business school? I did finish business school. I have an MBA. And I, so I, because I started when I was in business school, I got my MBA. I moved out to California and I started working for, well, I, I. interned at Intel and did my big tech at the time company experience for a little bit. I went to an e-commerce startup that was very big for about a week and a half, and I joined like a week

after that. And so got to ride the e-commerce startup down, a very big slope downward, constantly downward for about a year. during the, this was pre the burst of the dot-com bubble. So what year, is? I was there from 98 to 99. Oh, prime. The good years. Yeah, except for us, right?

So, I mean, part of the issue was we saw one of our competitors, you know, go public based on, you know, I don't know, you know, nonsense and a PowerPoint presentation. It was before Sorbonne-Zogsley, right? Yeah, yeah, this was pretty Sarban-Zogsley. And so, you know, we decided that we had to go public too. And we had bankers, like we had bankers and consultants and all this nonsense. And they looked at what we had and they said, you know, you can't go public. Like, that's how bad our situation was. Everybody was going public with zero revenue.

And we couldn't. That is. We had problems. You might say that. So after that, did you go pro with tech dirt? Did you go full time? So I quit. There was a couple of reasons why I don't need to go into all the history there, but I eventually, you know, did a nice little quitting. And I, I sort of cast around and I sort of was thinking of doing another startup myself. And then like a whole bunch of people were like, but the whole time, even when I was at this company, you know, I was working on tech turret on the side. And it was just sort of like, especially as everything was going terrible at that company, it was kind of my release where I can. write about all this shit that's going down.

It's quite literally what I did in the start of my newsletter was because I was depressed due to professional and personal things. I was like, I need to do something else. Yeah, totally. And so, like, that's what I was doing. And then I was like casting about for an idea. I was working with some friends. And I was like, maybe we should do a startup and we were talking about different ideas.

And then a couple people were like, dude, you seem to really like doing this writing thing. And like, tech turd is, you know, it seems good. And like, maybe you could turn that into a company. And so, you know, so yeah, so a few months later sort of said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to commit to this full time. And was it just you for a while or how long? Yeah. Well, I mean, the history is like, there was someone else there in the very early years who sort of was helping me out. and we were trying to get it.

He was not full-time. We were trying to get him to the point that it was full-time. And that never worked out. And then, but soon after that, brought on basically, you know, basically a small group of people who were, you know, referred to as co-founders now and sort of helped me out, helping me sort of build it out. And how many people have you got now?

We are very small. We are now for poor people. Cool. And one of those is Carl Bode as well. Yeah. The goat. Yeah. Boadie.

His last name is about us. Bodey. Sorry. Oh, Carl's going to kick my ass. No, no. It's fine. In the quote tweets. He is used to it.

But yeah. So Carl, Carl's been writing for us for a long time. I had him, I had him write for us at one point. I think he did me. a favor, I mean, where I either it was, I can't remember if either I got married or I had paternity leave and I needed someone to help write. And he came in for a couple weeks. And then, yeah, later on when

we were able to bring him on. So how are you feeling about the tech media? Because I say this with, the reason I brought you on is to also publicly say, you're fucking awesome and tech hurts, right? And I've been reading it for my entire career, and it feels like one of the only outlets that has not changed tonally. Yeah. Like you've kept, you've been consistently, I think you're one of the other people who gets called like acerbic, like I do, which I always get pissed off with, which I guess doesn't help.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I get, I don't know. I mean, it's kind of weird. Like, I actually don't care too much what people think about me or say about it. Me neither. So, like, none of that has ever concerned me that much.

But yeah, you know, I don't know. Caustic, I think, is a term that's been used. Fighty. Yeah. But it doesn't feel like you're fighting. It feels like you just are pissed off that people aren't more consistent and honest and up front with stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just like, you know, I have opinions. And this is a chance to express that I'm not going to hold back. And, you know, it's like, I don't know. I feel like a lot of people, you know, I mean, obviously, like, if you're working for, like, a big media company, there are, you know, there are limits put on kind of what you can say. But also it feels like a lot of people who sort of get into writing also, you know, they kind of do it to then, like, move into a role. Like, they want to get hired by, I don't know, CNN, NBC or something like that. And that was like never my goal. So like, I never had this concern that like, oh, you know, like, well, if I write this, nobody's ever going to hire. And me because I'm not trying to get hired that way. So that was never, you know, never a concern of mine. But it feels totally like you at least had a mission, though. Yeah, sure. I've always been trying to get held of what that is in the best way. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I don't know.

I mean, I have at some point, I need to dig up and find like, and I know I sent this to Carl and other people who brought on new writers, I had sort of like an editorial, like, here's our mission, right? Here's what we're trying to do. But it's, it's like 20 years old at this point. And I haven't looked at it. And I don't even know where I would find it. But like, you know, my take on it was always like, the key thing for me with tech dirt is I actually, and this is where like, potentially, I don't know if I disagree with you, but or you might disagree with me. Whereas like, I am weirdly optimistic about technology. I actually do think technology is like a generally good driving force. And like, I actually fully agree, by the way. Okay. And like innovation has all this amazing

opportunity that I would love to see realized. Thank you. So like my focus is on like anything that gets in the way of it. And so like, I want to be really careful here because like there's like the Mark Andreessen view, like, who says something that sounds kind of like what I'm saying here, right? But he's not, he's not, he's not an optimist. He mentions Nick Land. Yeah. That's not, the dark enlightenment guys are not optimists.

Right. And so his whole thing is like, you know, this accelerationist approach to like technology and innovation. And my take on it is more like, I want to see all of these, like, all of the good stuff that technology enables to become reality. I would like to see it sooner because I only have so long to live. And the more of it that I can see and the more of it that will be available to my kids and, and, you know, everybody else, I think would be good.

But that, you know, there are ways to do that right and there are ways to do it better and to take a long-term view of how do we actually make the world better with these kinds of innovations. And so I think, you know, poorly executed innovation is bad and, and leads to problems. And so where I get upset is sort of, and, you know, what sets me off on various rants is like, you know, efforts that get in the way of good innovation, right? So it's not, like, like, the Andresen viewpoint is like anything that gets in the way of any innovation is, is a problem and, you know, and also I don't, the thing is I fully agree with you. Like, I regularly get told I'm a cynic or a pessimist. I don't like this stuff. I love the computer. Yeah. It's the only reason I'm a

person. Like I, like, I'm like the drill crying tweet, but about the internet. Like my job, my friend, loved ones, lovers, crying and internet. And it's, now get the fuck out of my office, which is the quote from the drill, I'm not saying this to Mike. But it's like, I agree with you. It's, these things may seem like we're deeply interrogating them and attacking them, but it's like these things are in the way of cool stuff happening. Yes. Centralization, monopolization, shitty regulations that stop actual innovation happening. Yes. Are the things that will stop cool stuff happening. Yes.

And I think too regularly people kind of conflate that with hating. But it's like you should hate the stuff that gets in the way of the cool stuff. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Then yes, that is very much my view of these things. I mean, I would love to see more cool stuff. So stuff that gets in the way of that, I find problematic.

Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to? The idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. 844-844-Eyheart. Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going.

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And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals. At our level, at this scale, like being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports.

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And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. So my many complainers and haters, they hate me so much. They tell me I never like anything. But I want to talk about Blue Sky. Okay. Who joined the board of. Yes. So how did that actually come about?

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I don't know how much you know about the history of blue sky itself. I think it would be good to tell the listeners. Sure. So I, and I have some association with it, though it's sort of semi-random, which was that, you know, when this goes back to like, I think it was like, I had looked this up fairly recently. So I don't hold me to the dates. But I think it was around like 2014 or so was when there was suddenly some controversies. around the way that Twitter and Reddit

were handling certain content moderation controversies. And there was basically like really bad, shitty content on both of those platforms. And there was a big debate over whether or not those companies should step in and take down that content and whether or not that was an attack on free speech or blah, blah, blah. You know, we've heard all the debates.

But that was really the first one that really boiled through was around 2014. And I, among the other things that I believe in, you know, strongly is like, free speech is a very important concept to me. And again, like, I always feel like now I need to caveat that because most people who say that they support free speech don't really. They support saying the N word. Yeah. Like that is their big goal. Yeah.

It's, yeah, it's very frustrating to me. I support actual free speech. Yes. And that includes, you know, the right of private platforms to say, we don't want to associate with you. That is a right of association, which is considered a one part of the right of free speech. But at the same time, I do appreciate, again, like the power of the Internet itself to be this platform of enabling more good speech. Some bad speech, obviously, but also an awful lot of really, really good speech. And I am very, very concerned about an overreaction where in an attempt to stop the bad speech, which again is very much there, that we throw out a whole bunch of really good and important speech.

Can you give an example just to, because this is a thorny topic, I think it's going to have. Yeah, sure. I mean, obviously, like, you know, Me Too, Black Lives Matter, you know, these kinds of things came about because of the internet. The Arab Spring is another one where the internet was incredibly powerful in having these voices be able to speak out and to form groups and organize and talk to each other that really was not particularly possible prior to the internet being there and enabling that kind of speech. And I worry when we talk about stopping certain kinds of speech that.

that would enable people to stop these other kinds of good speech. And so that was sort of like larger issue. I'm sort of thinking about like, how do we protect, you know, the ability for people to speak out, to speak truth to power in certain cases, where it is really important, also protect the right of private, you know, services to say, I don't want to associate with this content, not be forced to host. you know, Nazi content, for example, or hateful content.

How do we sort of balance those things? And because I'm old and because I'm from, you know, I existed on the internet in the 90s, and I was like, I felt like the internet was kind of different back then. And so I just started thinking through these things and I said, well, you know, wait, how did we get to this world in which, you know, I grew up pre-World Wide Web on Usenet and IRC, all of these, you know. I was a polarist man. If you remember polaris, I don't think I...

It was a great side client, had colors and shit. It was beautiful. Okay. I don't even remember what IRC client I used. Oh, never forget it. But, you know, and I used gopher before the web existed. Like, I don't know if you remember Gofer. I don't know, gopher.

I'm looking it up now. Okay. It was sort of like a text-based, you know, menu systems. Oh, food protocol. Jesus. Yes. Yeah. So I would get the weather every morning by gophering to a server and finding out what the weather was.

So I was like, we had all these things and they were all protocol based and then anyone could build, right? So you used a different IRC client than I did. Anyone could build on it because it was all a protocol and anyone could build. And I was like, wait, you know, the world changed somewhere in the last 20 years. And now we have all of these services that are wholly owned corporations and they obviously have their own interests. And that doesn't seem like a great world. So I wrote a blog post that just kind of suggested like, hey, you know, why aren't these things built on protocols? Why are they all wholly owned corporations? Because that's where it seems like a whole bunch of the problems come in.

And then these aren't interoperable portals in general. Yeah. Right. I mean, it's like because like, you know, once, you know, I was kind of thinking, I was thinking back to Usenet, honestly, where it's like, yeah, you know, you had bad, terrible. people on Usenet. Such match. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, depending on where you go, it's kind of risky. But you also had like kill files and you had different Usenet servers that would ban different groups, different, uh, I mean, some of the early gaming groups I was in. Yeah. Like I was playing UO. Yeah. I mean, there, there was all sorts of stuff. And but like you had methods of dealing with it, but it was like community based. It wasn't like, you know, the president of Usenet has to decide which, which things are allowed and which are not. But like, like, you had. But like, like, you know, you had. But, like, like as a community, we can sort of figure out, or through individuals, like with kill files and stuff, like, you could say, like, I'm, I don't, look, I never want to hear from Ed again, right? So, like, I'm going to make sure, make sure that I never have to deal with him. And so, you know, and I was like, that was like a better world, whereas now, like, everything

because, like, Reddit is fully in control of Reddit and Twitter is fully in control of Twitter, we're in this world where we are totally dependent on the decisions that they make. and, you know, like, yes, there is, like, one decider. And so, like, in some cases, maybe that is useful. But, you know, on the whole, it feels like a less great world because the incentives that they have are also, you know, not always aligned with the users. And certainly not aligned with, like, you know, what might be best for different users. It's always going to be a single view.

And usually it's like what is going to be the, the, biggest profit, you know, for us. And so, so I wrote this piece sort of like theorizing, like what would it look like if we had a more interoperable, you know, protocol-based world for these kinds of services? And then I'd written a few more things about it. And at some point in like 2018, the Knight Institute of Columbia asked if I would write a paper kind of outlining that idea. And that made me really sit down and sort of think through it more systematically. And And I wrote this paper called Protocols, not Platforms, which I was, you know, went back and forth with them on editing. There were two folks at the Knight Institute who were really, really good, like amazing editors, like really challenged everything I wrote.

And I was just like, but how would this work? Like, why would that, you know, and really made me, you know, work hard at getting that paper right. And they published that in 2019. And it got a little bit of attention early on. And then it sort of died out. And then Jack Dorsey found the paper. And I kind of think I know how he did it. I'm not entirely sure.

And he reached out. And he was just like, hey, I read your paper. And I think we want to do that with Twitter. And so to take one step back, like my thought in writing that paper, to create that world. So I was sort of arguing that this world is a better world where it is decentralized. And so every major platform would have a protocol

that could be connected to the other. Or yeah. I mean, there are a few different ways that it could be done. But basically I was like, what can we do to like take away the power of like a Mark Zuckerberg or, you know,

a Sergey Brin or whatever to like control a huge portion of the internet? was kind of the underlying thinking, but still have the benefits of these services, right? Like there are good things, but the problem comes in when, you know, one, you're sort of stuck there, right? You know, if you, you know, like the example, and I use this in the paper and it comes up a lot,

is like the email example where, you know, compared to like Facebook, right? If I leave Facebook, and I mostly have, but, you know, when I leave Facebook, that means my family that uses Facebook, my cousins, my aunts and uncles that all stay in touch through Facebook, I no longer know what's going on with them because I don't want to deal with Facebook anymore. But email, like if I don't like my email provider, I can find a new email provider and I don't

lose touch with everyone that I email because I can just import my address book over. I said, you know, why can't we make all of the internet services that we like more like the email example and less like the Facebook example, where if I leave, I can still stay in touch with people. Where's the incentive for the platforms to do this? So, yeah. So if you read the Protocols Not Platform's paper, you see, like, I tried to come up with a bunch of incentives to effectively convince the companies to recognize that there are potential

benefits. Yes, obviously they are losing control. But my main pitch to them, and this is the one that just, Jack seemed to buy was, um, you also don't get blamed for everything anymore. And so whether or not that is a, a good thing or not, it's just like, because I, you know, and the down, just so that I'm clear, the downside is for them would be that they can no longer trap you there. But in return, right, you're not totally at fault. There's a, well, basically, you know, it's like when, you know, so this is not, again, not a perfect

but it's like you think of email email and spam right so everyone's sort of like trying to deal with spam but at no point are they're like calling the CEO of email to testify before Congress because there's spam everywhere right right sort of recognize that it is a collective action issue and it's a collective problem that everyone has to try to work on in different ways and you had early on at least you had different people sort of creating different spam fighting tools and the discussion was was over that like how do we how do we better handle those things rather than you know you mr. CEO of email have to fix this I think where I'm a little confused yeah but forgive me for this is that how does this deal with like trolls and spam and all that if they have less responsibility than who does so if there was a

yeah is this is this is this I guess federated is this what you're suggesting like the kind of or is this forgive forgive my ignorance no no no it's not it's it's a little bit complex to to wrap your head around. It's complex for me to wrap my head around it. And so it's fine. It's important. It's good to ask questions. No.

So my thinking was that what happens is if it's, and I didn't think of it as federated as in like Mastodon, right? I mean, we can get into like specific debates about the actual like technical infrastructure and how it's built. I don't think that's as important. The idea more was that if it is not wholly controlled by one company, those companies can still have a responsibility

in terms of keeping their part of it clean in order to keep users. Because now the way I looked at it was, you know, if, you know, so imagine a world in which there are lots of Twitters. And this is kind of the way I was thinking about that could all interoperate and communicate across each other. if Jack Dorsey, you know, at that time, still running Twitter, does something really stupid or enables too many Nazis to be too Naziful, then people will leave, right? Right.

Because there's now easy exit under this kind of system. And therefore, he has incentives to actually keep things clean. Now, this is the part that some people get upset about, which is like, if it is a protocol, then you could still have, you know, Nazi Twitter, which is kind of what we have now. You can just say Twitter now. Yeah, or X, right? So, and, you know, but in that world, I think they can be much more isolated. Now, this is partly theoretical in my belief.

But also, you would be building a site on top of a protocol. It would use the protocol. Thus, you would be visiting a site. Right. So you would still be using a site. But you would have, one, you would have more control yourself because you could bring in your own algorithms or other people's algorithms.

Or so, you know, other, you know. And use that to cordon off the Nazis rather than both of them. To cordon off the Nazis. But again, like, you know, there are different layers here in terms of the stack in terms of who's doing which part of it. But you could still have room for a company like a Twitter, or now a blue sky,

that has some moderation features. And if people really dislike the way that they're moderating, they could build their own. Remember the same protocol with the same users, with the same accounts. Right, exactly. And that's what Blue Sky is really doing. Like, Blue Sky is on top of a protocol,

or is it a protocol itself? No, so Blue Sky is on top of a protocol, the AT protocol or AT protocol. And so, you know, what happened was that Jack decided that Twitter would do this. he was somewhat convinced by my paper and decided that he would, he would hire a small team of engineers, give them some money, and have them go and build a protocol with the idea being that Twitter would adopt

that protocol eventually. And so that was the plan that he sort of set in motion in late 2019. And he, you know, he announced it on Twitter and he gave a shout out to my paper, but I had no official anything. I had spoken to him after he read the paper. I had a couple conversations with him,

and I got an alert the night before he sent out that thread saying he was going to do it. He was going to announce it. But I had no role or any association with it. And then, well, COVID happened, which I think probably threw off timelines. But Twitter folks got a bunch of people who were interested in decentralized social media together

in an online sort of, you know, chat space using Matrix, which is another decentralized protocol. And, you know, they basically talked about ideas for a really long time. And it took Twitter really very, way too long, you know, basically another year and a half until they finally decided they were going to hire somebody to lead the Blue Sky Project. And then that took a while. And they eventually hired Jay Graber. But again, Jay, very smartly, said, this should. needs to be separate. It can't be a part

of Twitter. It needs to be independent from Twitter. Because otherwise someone could buy it and then ruin it. Destroy it. Yeah. We wouldn't want that to happen. Yeah, so pretty prescient on her part. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy. Not quite. Unhumor me with

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podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So, if you've ever supported me, or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right what you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. And so how did you end up on the board then? Yeah, so I was also in the thread and like a hundred people mentioned me. So, I mean, I have no qualifications. I post a lot.

I don't really know stuff. So, I mean, it's unfair. You got it, but still. Yeah. So, I mean, basically, I mean, I had known Jay. I'd known Jay from before all of this, actually. I had met with her kind of around when the protocols and platforms. This is Jay Graber, the CEO.

Jay Graber, who's the CEO. I had met with her kind of when the paper came out through a mutual friend. She had read the paper and liked it and we had lunch. and just very quickly, like, I realized, like, she, she internalizes, she understood it better than I did. And she understood my paper better than I did. And I wrote it. And that was like, I was like, wow, this is, that's impressive. That rocks. As far as the CEO, CEO of a website actually knowing how it works. I'm not even being sarcastic here. No, I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was really eye opening. And this is obviously before, you know, blue sky existed. And then so she, you know, you know, once Twitter announced, Blue Sky, she had made it clear to them that she really wanted to run it. And Jack and Twitter, like, really took a lot of time to actually realize that, like, she should run it.

And, like, they interviewed a lot of other people. They actually, again, I had no official association. I never got paid. I never, you know, had no contract or anything. But they actually had me interview people who might run the Blue Sky Project at one point. That's really cool. Yeah. I was, I was just kind of, they just asked me.

And I said, sure. then I gave him feedback, and I recommended that they hired Jay. Though there were really good other people. And so there was a board of people setting up Blue Sky, just so that people know, the organization. So there was a board of people. It was, yeah, it was mostly Twitter people. There were a few outsiders, but it was mostly like senior executives at Twitter. And they were still at Twitter at the time, and then they left?

And no. Oh, in terms of the people they interviewed? Yeah, none of the people they interviewed were at Twitter. Sorry, all the people that they interviewed, I'm sorry, the people who were doing, like, the interviewing were Twitter people. Right, right, right. And a couple outside people like me and a few others. That's really cool, though. Yeah.

And then they, and there were, it was actually some really impressive candidates. And, like, I was like, I was kind of blown away about, like, how many smart people were thinking through? How do you actually build a decentralized social media protocol? And then eventually they hired Jay and she started and she set it up. as an independent operation and then built out the company. And the originally had, so the board was herself, Jeremy Miller, who is still on the board and was, has a lot of experience in decentralized protocols and standards. And then Jack was the third board member.

and in the midst of all of this as well then Elon came along obviously I think your listeners know what happened might have heard of him yeah and and everything he's the zip two founder if you haven't yes it's funny if you go way back in the tech turret archives I have a post about zip two where I called him I called him Elton musk at the time which I've never corrected And so, yeah, Jack was on the board. But somewhere around this time, when Elon took over, Jack discovered Noster, which is this other decentralized social media protocol. And he became really, really interested in it. And this is actually about the last time I spoke with Jack where he was like, oh, you should check out Noster.

like it is everything that your paper, you know, that your paper described. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. And I was like, but what about blue sky? Like, aren't you doing blue sky? Yeah, aren't you on the board of that? You're on the board. And he's like, yeah, he's like, they're too slow. Noster is going to move much faster.

Okay, buddy. Yeah. How's Nostra doing? Yeah. So, like, I checked it out. I actually do think there are some really cool things about Nostr. Oh, I'm sure. And, like, technically, it's a really,

really interesting setup that he's right that it does enable like a lot of like really some some really cool things can be done by a noster and it is interesting because both the the technological underpinnings of both noster and the the at protocol which is what blue sky is based on both really come out of this other decentralized protocol called secure scuttlebutt which we're not going to get into and what that is and what happened to it but so both of them take some of the technological thinkings from the same, same core idea. And that's actually kind of interesting. And, you know, if you get into the technical weeds, it's kind of neat how there are some similarities there. But he got really focused on it, mainly because it was like so lightweight and

so simple that people could build on it very quickly, whereas blue sky was was taking more time. But part of the reason why blue sky was taking more time and part of the reason why I've always been really impressed by Jay is that her approach to all of this is like, people, like some people care about decentralization. Most people don't. And if you're going to build a thing that works, like the fact that it is a decentralized protocol underneath shouldn't, it shouldn't matter to most users.

They need to build just a good service up front. Like that's the most important thing. And so, you know, Jay's very, very conscientious of that and thoughtful of that. And so anyway, so that all happened. Jack was still on the board. and then at some point he was doing an interview and was sort of confronted about something and he was like, oh, I'm quitting the board.

And so he quit the board and suddenly there was an empty seat on the blue sky board. And then, yes, lots of names were thrown out in big threads on blue sky of potential replacements. Very unfair. But, I mean, I have,

I had been in sort of regular contact with Jay, you know, ever since Blue Sky started. And there were different points where different things popped up. And she had reached out to me for thoughts and advice. And I'd had a few phone calls with her, you know, over the time. And so basically, like, I think we, she had reached out because she wanted some advice on something. And again, this is all totally informal. I had no official relationship or anything. And we started talking. And I tossed out the idea. I was like, I know Jack left. If you want me to help find you someone else, I am willing to, like, evaluate other people,

but also, like, if you're interested in potentially having me be that person, I'm also interested in that. And so that's basically what I said. And we continue that conversation over the course of about two months. And I spoke to Jeremy, who's the other board member and some other folks as well. and then eventually, you know, they offered me that spot. Cool. That's the basic story. So to wrap us up, I will ask you the question I love to ask people, which is, why should we have hope right now?

Because there's so much, there's so much to press. I'm not talking about politics. I'm just talking about within the tech industry, there's so much shit, there's so much grim shit. What gives you hope right now? Yeah. I mean, honestly, I mean, stuff like, like blue sky. And I will broaden that to say like all of the attempts at building new decentralized systems, I find super exciting and encouraging because it's showing that we can build that world where it's like we can look at, you know, the success of social media as a concept is really interesting and it's cool. Like it has allowed so many people to connect.

And yes, there are all sorts of downsides. Like, again, not denying what we know are the downsides of social media. But like the number of important friendships and, you know, business contacts and relationships that I've built through social media and this concept of people being able to communicate with each other so easily is such a powerful thing that I think a lot of people take for granted. And yes, what happened was that all sort of got locked. in these inshittified silos from these, you know, giant companies run by often terrible people. And, you know, with very misguided incentives. The thing that I am really enthusiastic about with decentralized social media is that we have a chance to do it again and we have a chance to hopefully do it better.

And this is something that I didn't really talk about when I, in my thinking on the paper. And this is something that comes up. And I think it is worth addressing is that some people say, well, blue sky. is a company, it is venture funded, you know, it's got to go down that same route of incitification. And that is a fear. And I sort of view part of my role on the board as being like, stopping the incitification and sort of representing the best, you know, the best position of the community. But, you know, one of the thing, again, another thing that has impressed me about Blue Sky and Jay is that they have within their mission, this idea that,

the feature company is a potential adversary, right? Everybody knows what happened with Twitter. Right. And so they are building the protocol to be resistant to that. That doesn't mean it won't happen, but it is being done in a way that is much more difficult for them to insidify. And again, like, I go back to the email example where, you know, most people have a Gmail account. Like, lots of people use Gmail. And some people can argue, like, Gmail's not great.

But I don't think Gmail has been as inshittified as other systems because the incentives. Because it's built on email. Because it's built on basic email protocols, SMTP and whatnot. And so if they make it really horrible, if they were really like there were concerns, you know, early on, oh, Google's going to spy on all your email and do advertising off of it and all this kind of stuff, they, you know, they sometimes make experiments in that way. they get, you know, smack down and stuff because as soon as they go down this path of really making it horrible, it's so much, you know, it just opens up the opportunity for somebody to step

in and say, well, it's easy. Like, you can switch. You don't lose contact with anyone, right? It's hard to leave Facebook. It's easier to leave Gmail. And so the incentive structure then is for Google not to fuck up Gmail. That's not to say, you know, Gmail has its problems. But it's, I think it's less inshittified than other services. Whereas, and Blue Sky and the way they're designing Blue Sky and AT Protocol, it is designed to make it, you know, really difficult for future Blue Sky to insidify the service. Because if they do, all of the pieces are set up that somebody else can come in

and create, you know, new Blue Sky, Green Sky, whatever, whatever you want to call it, that everybody can just shift to with the push of a button. and Blue Sky loses everything that they have as a company. And so the real challenge now is like, can we build a sustainable business and service on that without making it awful for the users and the community on that service? But we've built in this sort of commitment mechanism, which is if we try and do things that is exploiting our users,

which is like that's where the incitification curve starts. You know, you reach this point where instead of providing value, we now have to extract them. You've trapped them now they can not be. Right. And so, you know, with Blue Sky, the whole point is like, we're setting it up as, you know, not me, them, but, you know, I'm on the board. You're watching. I'm watching. They're setting it up in a way that they're setting, you know, a trap for themselves that says, if we try and start extracting value in a way that is awful to people, they can leave and they can destroy our business.

and therefore we can't do that. We have to build a service that is good for the community and that provides value for the community rather than is extracting value from the community. And so that, you know, who knows if it'll work? It is, you know, this is, a lot of this is theoretical, but, you know, I think everything that they've done so far has been in that right, you know, they make mistakes.

Everybody makes mistakes. But I think they're moving in the right direction with it. And that has me really, really optimistic because wouldn't it be great if we could have like all of these benefits that we're talking about without, you know, without the awfulness and without, you know, it all being dependent on some billionaire who's, you know, trying to buy up an island in Hawaii or whatever. Okay. So maybe I have one more question. Okay. What is the mechanism to stop blue sky and shitifying then? Yeah. I mean, it's basically the fact that anyone can, can,

every, every part of blue sky itself can be recreated elsewhere while still allowing you to communicate with people on blue sky. Right. So it is possible to entirely remove yourself from blue sky and still communicate with anyone else on blue sky. Huh. And so. That's how it should be. Yes. Right.

And so, you know, if blue sky insidifies and does bad stuff, then somebody else is going to come along and say, like, I don't like this. Like, you know, so just for example, right, you know, if they decide to, you know, start inserting, you know, terrible ads everywhere or whatever. then it's like somebody comes along and says, well, I'm going to build the infrastructure that is blue sky without the ads. And they would have access to all the posts or the users. And Blue Sky can't do anything to stop that.

That's really cool. That is a better future. But Blue Sky can keep users by not being shit. Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, there is the challenge of like, you know,

it still is a company. It is a public benefit company. So we are allowed as a board like, you know, the fiduciary duty is to, to a wider set of stakeholders, including the community, not just the investors. And we can do that legally because of the public benefit corporation. But like, we have this technical infrastructure that says, you know, we basically shoot ourselves in the foot if we make it shit for the community.

And, you know, now the trick is like, can you build a real sustainable business on top of that by actually providing value? And that's, you know, that's hopefully the next stage of what the company is working on. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you? So, well, thanks for having me. This was a really fun conversation. I wasn't sure where it was going to go, but that was good. That's the better of flying experience. And yeah, so I am obviously on blue sky. M. Maznick at at m Maznick. It's at m Maznick.combe, b-sky.com. It's my account there. It's easy to find me on blue sky. Obviously at Techdirt. And those are the main thing.

So if you want to read my articles, read them on TechDirt. If you want to see me, you know, ranting about this or that at any point, find me on Blue Sky. Thanks so much. And you will now get the soon-to-be-updated better offline links following this. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattersowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I-com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-Slas Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolzoneMedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on. A Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know.

Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds.

I was having trouble stopping the muscle. So great. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what I'm saying. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor the 4th. You might have seen the skits, my basketball and college football journey, or my career in sports media.

Well, now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifers Show. This is a place for raw, unfilled conversations with athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. So let's get to it. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok.

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