Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/16 - YouTube's Algorithms Continue To Suck Out Loud

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

YouTube’s algorithms are abhorrent in a new way, details on the next Playstation console, Google makes nice with developers, and three interesting sides to the TikTok story. Sponsors: EveryKey.com 20% off with promocode RIDE20 Mealime App Links: YouTube shows 9/11 link on live videos of unrelated Notre Dame fire (The Verge) EXCLUSIVE: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM SONY'S NEXT-GEN PLAYSTATION (Wired) 15 MONTHS OF FRESH HELL INSIDE FACEBOOK (Wired) Next major macOS version will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, Books app gets major redesign (9to5Mac) Improving the update process with your feedback (Android Developer's Blog) AT&T sells Hulu stake, valuing the video streaming company at $15 billion (CNBC) Short video app TikTok extends reach in global markets, sees in-app purchases surge more than 200 per cent (South China Morning Post) TikTok downloads ordered to be blocked on iOS and Android in India over porn and other illegal content (TechCrunch) TikTok sensation Lil Nas X rewrites the rules of country music (Axios) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Tuesday, April 16th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, YouTube's algorithms are abhorrent in a new way. Details on the next PlayStation console. Google makes nice with developers and three interesting sides to the TikTok story. Here's what you missed today

in the world of tech. Yesterday during the live streaming video coverage of the tragic Notre Dame fire, if you watched on YouTube underneath the video you saw, a panel linking to an article about the 9-11 attacks on New York City in 2001, an article from Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, this is not me trying to find a tech angle to a big story. There's a real point to be made here. The panel below the video was there because it's part of YouTube's fact-checking efforts to fight misinformation and conspiracy theories on the platform.

So, of course, there is no small amount of irony here that the thing that YouTube has implemented to fight misinformation could have, in the early hours of a major news event when no one knew the cause of the fire, could have led people to jump to the conclusion that this was a terrorist incident like 9-11 was. Quote, these panels are triggered algorithmically and our systems sometimes make the wrong call, a YouTube spokesperson said. As Ryan Broderick said on Twitter, quote, I'm not sure there's a better metaphor for the state of the tech industry right now than an American social platform slapping an algorithm

generically generated related article about an American terror attack on a live stream about a completely unrelated French news story, end quote. And Casey Newton tweeted, quote, it's also a powerful symbol of the degree to which YouTube is not actually under YouTube's control, end quote. I know you all are bracing for a rant, but I promise I will try to keep this brief. Yes, editors. For F's sake, people, editors. Yes, it will cost you money. It will cost you time and effort to find good people and keep them on the clock around the clock, but you've got to do it, or you've got to get out of the news game, or the live events game, or something. There's a reason why, for centuries now, every newsroom in the country has actual live humans

staffed around the clock to make the call on news events around the clock. I've said before, and I'll say it again, the math, the algorithms, all that stuff. They work great on calculating ad auctions, on taking down copyrighted content, on driving up engagement. But when it comes to human stuff, the math is not as good as humans. When it comes to humanity, you need human judgment, not algorithms, full stop. The problem is, though, this isn't just about money. All of these platforms are increasingly hiring humans, as we've discussed, to adjudicate tricky issues that pop up on their platforms. But they still want to throw the math and the algorithms at every problem because that's what they know.

because that's the only thing that they can think of to make any of this work at scale. It's not just money. All of these platforms don't want to admit that they need human curation because they know human curation can't work at scale. And if they admit that, if they admit that unfortunate truth, then they have to admit that the internet can't work at scale. They have to admit that their platforms themselves can't work at scale. Not really, not 100% of the time, not when it actually matters, especially when it

comes to the trickiest of problems. Humanity. The math works when it's math. The math fails when it's people. The tech platforms don't want to admit that this is true even to themselves. And that basically sums up one of tech's biggest problems at the moment. Again, full stop. Wired has an exclusive first look at Sony's next generation PlayStation console. Well, not the console itself, but some of the details about the console. It will apparently be backward compatible.

It will apparently support 8K graphics with ray tracing. It will apparently have an SSD for faster performance, but it won't apparently be coming this year. The CPU is based on the third generation of AMD's Risenline and contains eight cores of the company's new 7 nanometer Zen2 microarchitecture. The GPU, a custom variant of radion's Navi family, will support ray tracing, a technique that models the travel of light to simulate complex interactions. in 3D environments. While ray tracing is a staple of Hollywood visual effects and is beginning to worm its way into $10,000 high-end processors, no game console has been able to manage it yet, end quote.

Sony's new console, whatever it will be called and whenever it appears will apparently also feature advances in 3D audio that will hopefully allow you to better sense where stuff is happening in your gaming environment. But that SSD drive might be the real game change. no more waiting minutes for cutscenes to spool up, no more watching interstitial screens while stuff loads in the background. Quoting again,

at the moment Sony won't cop to exact details about the SSD, who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIE 4.0 standard, but Serney claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. And that's not all. The raw read speed is important, Serney says, but so are the details of the input-output mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro, and then I put in an SSD that costs as much as the PlayStation 4

Pro. It might be one-third faster, end quote, as opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast travel demo, end quote. That Sarni mentioned in that quote is Mark Sarni, lead system architect for the coming Sony system. If game development or gaming in general is your bag, check the list. link to this article for lots more juicy details. Also worth reading today a huge new profile of what it was like internally at Facebook over the last 15 months, as well, basically everything

we've been talking about on this show concerning Facebook over the last 13 months unfolded. This is the Wired cover story of the month. Wired spoke with 65 current and former employees, and, well, just read it. There's no new scandal revealed in here or anything like that, but it paints a picture of a seeming mountain of interlocking issues that have been rumbling under the surface at Facebook for years and have basically all come to a head concurrently. If you want more background about the departure of, say, the WhatsApp founders

and the Instagram founders, it's in there. If you want the behind the scenes of what it was like when the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit, it's in there. Two choice quotes. when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and Facebook took five days to even respond to it, even internally, Facebook employees were like, what's happening? Quote, we had hundreds of reporters flooding our inboxes and we had nothing to tell them, a member of the Facebook communications team told Wired.

I remember walking to one of the cafeterias and overhearing other Facebookers say, why aren't we saying anything? Why is nothing happening? End quote. And the Instagram founders wondered if there was a concerted effort to make their lives miserable in order to encourage them to leave. Quote, friends of Sistram and Krieger said the strife was wearing on the founders too. According to someone who heard the conversation, Sistram openly wondered whether Zuckerberg was treating him the way Donald Trump was treating Jeff Sessions,

making life miserable in hopes that he'd quit without having to be fired. Instagram's managers also believed that Facebook was being miserly about their budget. In past years, they had been able to almost double their number of engineers. In the summer of 2018, they were told that their growth rate would drop to less than half of that, end quote. Again, if you want some of the juicy details about some of the things we've long suspected when on inside Facebook, this is your story. Over at 9 to 5 Mac, Guillermo has been killing it lately with Apple Scoops. You might remember that last week, Guillermo tipped us to the next version of MacOS getting standalone music, podcast, and TV apps. Now his sources are reporting that Apple is including a system-wide dark world.

mode feature in iOS 13. And that's not all. MacOS 10.15 will have a desktop extension that will allow users to send any window of any app to an external display, even an iPad. Quote, the new feature called Sidecar internally can be accessed via a simple menu. This new menu will be opened by hovering over the green maximize button in a Mac app window for a split second. The menu will have options for making the window full screen, tiling, and moving to external displays, including the users' iPads and external displays connected to the Mac. Selecting one of the display options moves the current window to the selected external display or iPad in full screen. Users with an iPad that supports Apple Pencil will also be able to draw with the

pencil on iPad when it's being used as an external display for the Mac, effectively turning the iPad into a Wacom-like tablet. Engineers are also working on options that will allow Windows to be easily snapped to one side of the screen, similar to a feature that. that already exists on Windows." Google has outlined new Android developer relations policies, saying it will take more time to review apps by developers that don't have a track record with Google yet. In short, if you're a brand new developer,

expect them to do more thorough checks before putting your app live. In theory, though, if this isn't your first rodeo, then you might get fast-tracked a bit. This is all part of an effort to reduce the amount of malware and just poorly designed apps in the Android and Google Play ecosystem. them. But at the same time, Google is trying to make its developer relationship more transparent

and communicative. This comes in the wake of strained developer relations after changes to the call and SMS permissions, which forced a lot of apps to be massively rewritten, and controversies about developer account suspensions. Lots of developers feel their accounts have run afoul of Google's rules for unjust reasons, quoting 9 to 5 Google. To counter this, Google shared the statistic that over 99% of their suspensions are valid, and that appealing such a decision is always allowed. They also assured developers that every case is handled by a team member not through automation. That being the case, the Google Play team is going to communicate the reasoning behind their decisions more clearly, and will be hiring additional members, both of which should make for

better relations with Android developers, end quote. Hulu has apparently repurchased AT&T's 9.5% stake in Hulu for 1.4 3,000. billion dollars. Now this is interesting because it implies Hulu is valued at $15 billion in total, but it's also interesting in the streaming video wars context because remember Hulu is owned by a consortium of media companies, of which now the only remaining players standing are Comcast and Disney. Fox was previously an owner as well, but Disney just swallowed Fox. So Disney now owns 66% of Hulu and Comcast 33%. In his charged newsletter Owen Williams explains,

quote, Will Hulu continue to get access to shows from Comcast, AT&T's new video empire and other networks, or will the streaming service players view it as a threat alongside Disney Plus? It certainly seems like Hulu may become a pawn in the streaming wars that others use against Disney as it pulls its own content from all but Disney Plus later this year.

Hulu was one of the last cross-network streaming platforms in the game other than Netflix. Consumer streaming looks to be fragmenting into walled gardens of content in the near future, and that isn't a benefit to you, dear viewer, end quote. TikTok continues its ascendancy, according to Censor Tower. The short video app attracted 188 million new users worldwide during just Q1 of 2019. That's 188 million new users in one quarter, fueled by a whopping 88.6 million new users in one quarter, fueled by a whopping 88.6 million new users in India alone.

But this news comes on the same day that the Indian government has apparently asked Apple and Google to take TikTok down from their app stores after a court ordered the app be banned in India. Why? Quoting TechCrunch. The country's main digital communications regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, ordered both Apple and Google to remove the app from its app

stores per a request from High Court in Madras after the latter investigated and determined that the app, which has hundreds of millions of users, including minors, was encouraging pornography and other illicit content. A source in India, however, tells us that the app is still available in both stores currently, end quote. TikTok is arguing that it is merely a platform and thus not responsible for what people post there. The Indian Supreme Court, however, in addition to prohibiting downloads, also directed the ministry to bar media companies from broadcasting any videos made or posted on TikTok. And let's close today with a different story about TikTok making waves, or at least a TikTok star making waves. Little Nas X is a rapper. In early 2019, his song Old Town

Road started to get popular. If you haven't heard it, it's a bit of a a rap and country music hybrid. It's actually a pretty good song. The popularity of the song got boosted by a viral meme on TikTok. Remember that challenges and karaoke performances are popular on TikTok, and the meme in question was called the Yeehaw Challenge. The Yeha challenge proved so popular that it boosted Old Town Road to the top of Billboard's hot country charts last month. Then the country music establishment pushed back saying the song shouldn't be considered country. Goldboard removed the song from the country charts telling Rolling Stone, quote, while Old Town Road incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, it does not

embrace enough elements of today's country music to chart in its current version, end quote. That seems a bit fishy to some folks, because country and genre hybrid songs have been popular on country charts lately. An EDM country hybrid song from BB Rexha and Florida Georgia Line called meant to be hit the top of the charts last year and Tim McGraw had a hit with Nellie recently. Well, Lil Nas X re-released the song with Billy Ray Cyrus lending vocals and now the song has hit number one on the Billboard Top 100 charts. Quote, I love the song the first time I heard it. Country music fans decide what they like. Not critics or anyone else, Cyrus said in a press release.

Waylon Jennings once told me every once in a while the industry outlaws someone because they're different. Country music fans don't need to be defined by critics, end quote. I saw this story on Axios, and of course, in their adorable house style, they summed it up like this. Quote, the big picture. Little Nas X's quick rise to fame is another example of ways that burgeoning social media and gaming apps are creating new sensations overnight. The now famous floss dance was popularized by Fortnite. Little Nas X's song came up through TikTok.

Sean Mendez turned his vine popularity into stardom. Dozens of other young singers from Justin Bieber to Carly Ray Jepson became famous from YouTube, end quote. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The podcast subreddit is Our Slash Ride Home. and check out our new podcast, the primary ride home. Talk to you tomorrow.