Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/16 – The War Between The Furries And The NFTs

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

Twitter has followed through on its promise to decentralize and play nice with 3rd party developers. Will the Nvidia/ARM acquisition actually happen? Substack reaches a million subscribers. Apple defends buying Google Ads. And I get my answer about the whole civil war between Crypto and NFT folks and… furries? Sponsors: CometBackup.com promocode: ride FindYourFidelity.com Links: TWITTER MAKES BIG CHANGES FOR DEVS AS IT EYES DECENTRALIZED FUTURE (The Verge) Nvidia’s $40 billion takeover of chip designer Arm faces a UK national security probe (CNBC) Newsletter start-up Substack hits 1m subscribers (Financial Times) Apple Defends Its Ads for Third-Party Apps, Says It Regularly Communicates With Developers and Has Been Running Them for Five Years (MacRumors) Right-clickers vs. the monkey JPG owners (Garbage Day) 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 TechMemebride home for Tuesday, November 16th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter has followed through on its promise to decentralize and play nice with third-party developers.

Will the Nvidia Arm acquisition actually happen? Substack reaches a million subscribers. Apple defends buying Google ads, and I get my answer vis-a-vis the whole civil war between crypto and NFT folks and furries. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter has made its version 2 API. announced in August of 2020, the default API going forward for developers giving third-party apps more freedom as Twitter aims to become more decentralized, quoting the verge.

When Twitter announced API version 2 in August 2020, it seemed like a chance to rebuild not only the infrastructure on which developers build their apps and bots, but Twitter's relationship with the people using its platform as well. API v2 is taking over API v1's job of letting third-party clients access and interact with tweets and letting other developers create bots that do various things across the platform, like introduce people to the weekend or gather analytics for companies. When I talked to Amir Shavat Twitter's developer platform lead about what the official switch to APIV2 means for the platform, he told me that it would make things better for users who wanted third-party Twitter clients. He also revealed that the

change was another step in the company's goal to become a decentralized platform that developers build apps and experiences on top of, making conversations better in ways that Twitter itself couldn't. In its press release, Twitter says it's removing restrictions from its developer policy on how you build with Twitter's core features and limited the number of users you can support through your app. Shavat elaborated on this saying that the new policy will make it clear what's allowed and make it easier for developers to compete with Twitter in ways that the company didn't allow before. This could mean a real impact on how Twitter's users interact with the service, as it gives developers more freedom to build third-party Twitter clients like TweetBot,

Twitterific, or Phenix. While there are unofficial Twitter apps available, the company's relationship with the developers behind those apps has been mixed. Limits on how many users could use a third-party app as well as missing features meant that the de facto way to access Twitter has been by using its official app. This is in contrast to some other social platforms like Reddit, where many users recommend apps made by indie developers like Apollo or Narwal over the official one. When Twitter first announced API V2, it seemed like the company was trying

to be more friendly toward those who were looking to make their own clients. It seems to have panned out for some. TweetBot's latest version uses the new API, and Twitter has recently added API support for newer features like super followers and the ability to tweet with limitations on who can reply, end quote. Remember that big Nvidia acquisition of Arm? Well, I think we need to put that on a death watch, maybe, because the use. UK government has referred NVIDIA's planned arm acquisition to its CMA for a full investigation, carried out over 24 weeks, citing antitrust and national security concerns. Quoting CNBC.

The CMA said it has serious concerns about the deal after it completed the initial phase one probe. The takeover is being scrutinized by regulators around the world, and the chip companies said in August that the deal is now unlikely to be completed before the initial deadline of March 2022. An NVIDIA spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday, quote, We plan on addressing the CMA's initial views on the impact of the transaction on competition, and we will continue to work with the UK government to resolve its concerns, end quote. They added the phase two process will enable us to demonstrate that the transaction will help to accelerate arm

and boost competition and innovation, including in the UK, end quote. Critics are concerned that the merger could restrict access to arms neutral chip designs, and that it could lead to higher prices, less choice, and reduced innovation in the semiconductor industry. But, Nvidia argues that the deal will lead to more innovation and that arm will benefit from increased investment. Last month, the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, launched its own in-depth investigation into the deal, which is also being scrutinized by regulators in the U.S. and China, end quote. Since we've been talking about the economics of the crater economy and specifically newsletters recently, interesting to note this. Substack says it has reached one million paying subscribers across all of its

newsletters for the first time, up from $250,000 in total last December, quoting the Financial Times. Chief Executive and co-founder Chris Best told the FT that his company's fast growth prove that great writing is valuable. What you read matters, he said. Nobody thought this was possible when we first started out, end quote. Substack takes a 10% cut of the revenue writer's make from subscriptions, the company, which is not profitable, would not provide its revenue figures. Top writers on Substack include Anne Helen Peterson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Michael Moore. In the past year, traditional publishers such as The New York Times have lost top talent to Substack, with writers such as Casey Newton and Mark Stein abandoning their jobs at big media companies

to go it alone. But Substack now faces competition in what had previously been a niche market. Facebook in June launched a newsletter product called Bulletin with high-profile writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, while Twitter earlier this year acquired newsletter startup review. The only thing worse than being copied by Twitter and Facebook is not being copied by Twitter and Facebook best said. He added that, quote, Facebook caused a lot of the problems we are trying to solve, end quote, referring to how the company prioritizes page views and advertising revenue over quality news. Social media is focused on maximizing global feeds and attention,

and you end up with bad behaviors, he said. That model doesn't reward great writing, end quote. Leaving Plum Newsroom jobs has not worked out for all writers, and traditional media companies are now trying to poach journalists back through their own newsletters. The New York Times this year pulled some of its newsletters behind a paywall, while the Atlantic magazine this month introduced nine newsletters to paying subscribers. Tech reporter Charlie Worsell had left the New York Times to launch a newsletter on Substack, but this month, he said he was leaving the platform. Quote, multiple pundits suggested that I'd be making at least a million dollars off of sweet, sweet subscriptions. This did not happen, he wrote in a substack post. Over seven months on substack, I made considerably less than I did working at the times, end quote. Worzell has joined the Atlantic. And real quick follow up to yesterday's news, Apple has responded and is defending buying ads for third-party

apps saying they are marked as from the app store, have been live for at least five years, and Apple regularly communicates with devs about this practice and other things, quoting Mac Rumors. Apple now says its ad buying practice has been mischaracterized, and developers are fully aware of the ads it runs on their behalf. Apple indicated that this is no different from retailers running ads for the products they sell and is a very standard business model. Apple is granted conventional legal rights to advertise in this way in the agreements it has with developers. Apple says that the allegation that it is secretly or quietly purchasing ads for developers without their knowledge or consent is an overt mischaracterization. On the contrary, the company says that it regularly engages in conversations with developers about the ads at places, and many developers express their appreciation for the support. Apple says that it is committed to providing developers with the resources they need to be successful on the App Store.

These resources include compilers, testing, and debugging tools, technical support, SDKs, libraries, APIs, and more, but they also include advertising both inside and outside the App Store, end quote. Let's end today with a long read that's a bit of a follow-up. It was last week, I think, that Discord, for the moment at least, backed down from adding crypto wallets to their service after a community-based backlash. I said at the time, is there some beefing going on between communities on the internet that I was unaware of? Well, a lot of you yelled at me like, how could you be so ignorant, Brian? Of course, people are beefing with the crypto people.

Well, look, guilty is charged. I was ignorant of this. When I don't know something, I'm going to tell you I don't know, and I'm not going to lie to you. If I don't know it, I'll say that. So several folks have written about this issue in the interim. Casey Newton, for example, had a great piece, but it's behind his paywall on his newsletter. So instead, I'm going to share from Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day newsletter, since you can read that for free. And I encourage you to do so. I'm going to quote extensively from the piece, but I'm also going to jump around a bit when I do jump. jump around to different sections of the piece, I'm going to add a record scratch sound effect to let you know when I have jumped around. TLDR, it seems like furries are leading some of the NFT resistance, quote, on Friday I wrote about how furries and fandoms are actively trying to put pressure on Discord to stop the platform from adding features like Metamask integration that could help crypto groups. And I came across an excellent Twitter thread from user at

Larsius Prime this morning about how the gaming industry is also having a massive culture war over blockchain-based gaming. He's quoting from the Twitter thread now, quote, People coming from CryptoLand severely underestimate how deep the distrust and disgust coming from traditional game developers can be at Larsius Prime wrote, like friends and colleagues will block you for openly working on these projects. Hiring traditional game devs is going to require hazard pay, end quote. But a Web 3 culture war isn't just happening on Discord or in the gaming industry. It's happening everywhere.

Last week, a Twitter user named at nico.gay downloaded all 10,000 of the lazy lion NFTs, and turned them into a mosaic of right-click. And then, also last week at Crypto Cobain, one of the most popular users in the pocket of the internet largely known as Crypto-Twitter, threatened to start minting NFTs of the avatars of anti-crypto furries that right-click and save people's NFTs. I need to pause here and just acknowledge that I am very aware of how wildly stupid all of this is. But like all things that have ever happened on the internet, just because it's stupid right now, that doesn't mean that it also couldn't snowball into a genuine socio-political movement. Getting to the heart of what is driving this Web3 cultural war

is tricky and changes depending on what groups are involved. As I wrote on Friday, everyone who isn't Mark Zuckerberg seems to agree that his version of a Metaverse is bad, but the Crypto Guys who hate Zuckerberg are also feuding with the furries and fandoms that hate NFTs. I found it's easiest to think of this in Game of Thrones terms. Meta is the White Walkers. Zuckerberg appears to be just as capable of human emotion as the Knight King, at least, and I suppose the Crypto guys would be the Lannisters and the non-crypto users would be the loose alliance of House Stark, the Knights Watch, and the free folk. I mean, furries are definitely the free folk in this analogy.

The best overall articulation I've seen so far of why Web3 is so hated by many online subcultures right now was from at nico.gay, the Twitter user behind the right click mosaic. They explained in a follow-up tweet that they weren't anti-NFT for ecological reasons, quote, the real issue is that they represent an attempt to reimpose artificial scarcity on culture at nico.orgay tweeted, digital scarcity is an anti-human evolution ideology that imposes board game-like rules which serve no purpose than to preserve the game itself, to hide the internal contradictions of capitalism that become painfully obvious in an area of culture that has overcome scarcity, end quote. This to me feels like the main battleground for the next five years

of online development. On one side are people who want to make a lot of money on the internet, like Meta or Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in over 50 crypto startups and launched a $2.2 billion crypto fund last summer. And on the other side, as always, are the various online subcultures and communities and creators and users who really just want to be left alone, allowed to safely and freely make and share whatever they want. There seems to be a growing consensus right now that if blockchain technology was truly useful, the communities and industries that have led the development of the social web for the last 20 years would already be using it. If NFTs were a good way to manage digital assets,

this line of thinking goes, gamers, furries, sex workers, and fandoms would have launched crypto projects years ago. But there are some problems with this. It is true that furries are now the most anti-NFT group on social media, but that doesn't mean that that community and adjacent ones haven't had their own problems with digital scarcity. And also the idea of the online porn industry innovating ahead of the rest of the internet isn't as true as it used to be. What I'm saying here is that this looming culture war between the right-clickers and monkey JPG owners is actually a waste of time. Crypto evangelists think the entire internet should run on their protocol, which makes no sense. But also, there probably are ways for the blockchain to help with some quality

of life improvements for various online communities. At the very least, it could help make online communities more self-sustainable. But while these groups fight for Twitter dunks, big companies like Meta or Andresen Horowitz will be spending more and more money on the crypto industry and will almost assuredly use it to remake the internet in their image. And my fear is that like how Web 2.0 went from a million different brightly colored social apps to essentially three companies and nowhere else to go. Web 3 could end up even more suffocating. But this time around, it's not an internet of free garbage, but an online theme park where everything costs a ticket, end quote. P.S. To follow up on that whole me not knowing things thing, again, if I don't know

something, if you're a longtime listener, then you'll know that I will cop to it and often ask folks to enlighten me. You listen to the show because hopefully I know enough to clue you into what's really going on behind the headlines in the world of tech, not because I'm smarter than anyone, but because it's my job to pay attention. But also, I enjoy doing the show because I love to learn. So if I don't know something, that's not a problem, at least in my mind. It's just an opportunity to learn something. And if I learn it, I try to share it so that you can learn it too. Talk to you tomorrow.