Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - Silicon Valley Cleans Up Its Act

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Everyone says they’re cleaning up their act: Twitter, Facebook, Uber. The Crypto kids crash New York while Coinbase cozies up to Wall Street. The Surface Hub 2 looks pretty sweet, and we might soon be shooting Wikipedia pages to the moon. Stories from: @lorengrush  Tweets: @AaronKlein, @marcoarment, @ballmatthew Links:At NYC’s Big Crypto Conference, the Lamborghinis Are Rented and Protests Are Staged (Bloomberg)Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2 is designed for an office of the future (The Verge)Tweetstorm about Netflix and "originals" (Matthew Ball)This nonprofit plans to send millions of Wikipedia pages to the Moon — printed on tiny metal sheets (The Verge) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, May 15th, 2018. Today, everybody says they're cleaning up their act. Twitter, Facebook, Uber.

The Crypto Kids crash New York while Coinbase coesies up to Wall Street. The Surface Hub, too, looks pretty sweet, and we might soon be shooting Wikipedia pages to the moon. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So today was the day, seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley, wanted to announce that they were cleaning up their act or wanted to report to us to what extent they were being successful in cleaning up their act. Let's start with Twitter. For years, people have been begging Twitter to do something, anything, to stop people from behaving badly

on the social network. People suggested everything from straight up banning bad actors to, you know, finding some way to algorithmically limit the impact of bad actors. Well, this afternoon, Twitter finally announced some major steps toward the latter, saying that it will now use thousands of behavioral signals to determine which users are being jerks on Twitter. If it determines that you're being a jerk, your tweets will soon be seen less often. It's as simple as that.

Among the signals Twitter will be using two police jerks. If you tweet at large numbers of accounts you don't actually follow, then you might be a Twitter jerk, and Twitter will algorithmically mute you. If you've created many accounts from a single IP address, you might be a Twitter jerk. If your account is closely related to others that are regularly behaving jerkily,

you might be a Twitter jerk. If you're regularly blocked by people on Twitter, you might just be a jerk full stop. Anyway, Twitter promises that from now on its algorithms will notice these things and start hiding your tweets in conversations and search results. Note that these are not bans. These are just algorithmic shushings.

Slate's Will Aramis called it Twitter purgatory, which Twitter was decidedly not a fan of. Quote, that kind of makes me cringe, a Twitter spokesperson told Aramis. And a key point to realize is that if you're being muted, you might not even know it. Twitter says that it is working on ways to notify people and allow them to get back on the light side of the force through good behavior. good behavior, but those steps weren't announced today. In a brief statement, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said, quote, a lot of our past action has been content-based, and we have been shifting more and more toward conduct and behaviors on the system, end quote.

Twitter did point out that fewer than 1% of Twitter accounts make up the majority of the reports of abuse on the network. So again, one simple way to fix things would be to just ban that 1% you would think. but that's why they don't pay me the big bucks, I guess. And let's be thankful that we've got what we've got. Twitter said that in testing the new system, it found that it resulted in a significant drop in abuse reports. As you would imagine, this news about Twitter got a lot of attention on Twitter.

Quite a few of you made a similar joke, so I'm going to let Ryan Mack's tweet stand for the many. Quote, Twitter is going to try to limit the number of bad tweets you encounter. So Twitter is shutting down? Facebook continues its efforts to be more transparent and proactive about its community policing efforts. And to that end, the company today released its first quarterly community standards enforcement report. Among the headlines, in the first quarter of this year, Facebook took action on 837 million pieces of spam, moderated 2.5 million incidents of hate speech, 1.9 million pieces of terrorist propaganda,

3.4 million examples of graphic violence and 21 million incidents of nudity and sexual activity. The really jaw-dropping number was that in just the last three months, Facebook terminated 583 million fake accounts. It said that it took down 694 million fake accounts in the final quarter of last year. Facebook said that the majority of fake accounts are disabled within minutes of registration. This is in addition to the millions of fake account attempts we prevent daily from ever registering with Facebook. Overall, we estimate that around three to four percent of the active Facebook accounts on the site during this time period were still fake, end quote.

In a blog post, Guy Rosen, Facebook's VP of Product Management, wrote, quote, We believe that increased transparency tends to lead to increased accountability and responsibility over time. And publishing this information will push us to improve more quickly, too. This is the same data we use to measure our progress internally, and you can now see it to judge our progress for yourselves. We look forward to your feedback. Yesterday, I mentioned the changes that Uber has been making to recast itself as user-friendly. More of that today, as the company announced, it will no longer require mandatory arbitration for individual claims of sexual assault or harassment by writers, drivers, drivers, or employees. Uber's long-standing policy

was that if such incidents occurred, as a part of Uber's terms of service, disputes had to be settled by arbitration, which had the effect of keeping the incidents out of the legal system. Victims will now have the choice of mediation, arbitration, or open court, and will no longer be required to sign a confidentiality agreement. Uber says this change is intended to allow victims to share their stories openly while pursuing just legal remedy. A couple of caveats. This change only affects individual claims and not class action lawsuits, and the terms of any settlement will still remain

confidential. Uber has also committed to releasing a report on the number of sexual harassment and assault incidents that have occurred via its services, but no official date on the release of that data has been announced. On Twitter, Uber CEO Dara Khosahahi said, quote, we took an important step forward in our commitment to safety and transparency today, and it will make us a better company. the lights on. I've seen them on the subway wearing their lanyards. I haven't been in Midtown yet this week, so I haven't seen any of their rented Lamborghinis. But several outlets have

pieces up profiling the big consensus crypto conference that Coin Desk is throwing this week in New York City. And since I have been to crypto conferences very early on, I guess it's gratifying to know that the spirit of juvenile hijinks and collegiate anarchism is alive and well in the crypto community. Some things never change. As Bloomberg describes, a crypto startup named Genesis Mining staged a mock protest outside a consensus event, hiring actors to play the role of bankers who were protesting the fact that crypto had taken away all of their investment banking jobs. But the pieces also describe how much these sorts of things have grown in the five years or so since I attended one. There are apparently 100 plus corporate sponsors at Consensus.

Among them the likes of IBM, SAP, and Microsoft. And among the speakers, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, FedEx's Fred Smith, and Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard. Snoop Dog is even staging a concert. The only celebrities I saw five years ago were the Shiba Inus that people brought. It was the height of the doge coin madness. Apparently 8,000 people paid upwards of $3,000 for tickets to this year's consensus. if any of you are listening to this episode and you're at Consensus right now,

hit me up with a picture on Twitter. There still might be segments of the crypto world that truly believe they're all about disrupting Wall Street and putting bankers out of business. But increasingly, the larger crypto space is cozying up to Wall Street to the point of turning banks into actual paying clients. Crypto Exchange Coinbase today announced Coinbase Custody, a service for the safekeeping of cryptocurrency via a chain of custody and secure storage of crypto assets. The new custodianship services will be aimed at large institutional investors instead of the individual traders that Coinbase has found such success with so far.

Coinbase is even launching a Coinbase Prime service that will cater to even larger investors like sovereign wealth funds. As Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said on the Coinbase website, over 100 hedge funds have been created in the past year exclusively to trade digital currency. By some estimates, there is $10 billion of institutional money waiting on the sidelines to invest in digital currency today, end quote. Coinbase, at least, is willing to go after some of that old world money sitting on the sidelines. So, yes, there's no short of irony here that the technology that was supposed to supplant big financial institutions is increasingly not only being embraced and co-opted by those institutions, but is also, also getting into bed with them and eagerly.

As user B-Town snarked on Hacker News, quote, it's almost like capital tends to concentrate in the absence of regulated financial markets or something. And as Aaron Klein said on Twitter, referring to the concept of Coinbase custody, quote, so basically it's a centralized place to keep your decentralized currency, end quote. As we spoke about last Friday, Aaron, the alternative is literally a bunker underground. You might have forgotten that the Surface Hub even existed. I know I did. I mean, we know that Microsoft makes the surface line of computers,

but did you remember their Surface Hub, the table-sized device that was designed for several people to work collaboratively on all at once? The original Surface Hub shipped in 2016 and had 55-inch and 84-inch display options. But today, Microsoft pre-announced a 50.5-inch Surface Hub 2, essentially a supersized tablet that has greater than 4K resolution, a 3 to 2 aspect ratio, all sorts of touch and pen input goodness, and oh, it can rotate to portrait mode.

That might not sound super cool, but seriously, you need to see the videos of this thing in action. I have a link in the show notes. I don't know what I would do with one of these, but I know I want one, or several, or at least I want to work in an office that has some of these bad boys. The Surface Hub 2 won't be available until next year, but that's why Microsoft is pre-announcing them now. Businesses tend to order things like this in advance. Here's how the Verge describes the new device, quote. The Surface Hub 2 is designed to be flexible and lightweight so workers can move it throughout an office,

although Microsoft isn't detailing the exact dimensions or weight today. Microsoft is also working with Steelcase to produce stands and wall mounts for the Surface Hub 2, and you'll even be able to mount four of them together on a wall and have them linked as multiple monitors. Microsoft is calling this tiling, and it allows users to display different content side by side, end quote. It doesn't feel like the original Surface Hub set the world on fire or anything,

but Microsoft has said it sold them to more than 5,000 businesses and that half of the Fortune 100 companies now employ them. As Marco Arment said on Twitter, maybe this crazy idea from Microsoft won't take off. We say the same thing every time, Surface, Pro, Studio. But an ever-growing set of people love them, eventually one of them will take off. Yesterday at Moffat-Nathanson's Media and Communications Summit here in New York City, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said that his company's spending on original content this year would be $8 billion,

and that around 85% of its content spending this year will go towards creating original content. Netflix plans to have around 1,000 originals in its library by the end of 2018, and fully 470 of those will launch between now and the end of the year. Serendos said that Netflix's focus on creating its own original content is driven by the more favorable economics of going it alone as opposed to licensing content from Hollywood Studios. And to hear Sarandos tell it, Netflix is very much in the driver's seat these days. The creators we're talking to, they watch Netflix. and they want to be on our network, Sarando said. Quote, It's a great time to be a producer, that's for sure.

The way we can secure shows is having a great reputation with talent, having a brand people want to be associated with, and a good track record of delivering. One tiny caveat here on Twitter, Matthew Ball, the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios, quibbled a bit with the definition of the term originals. I've linked to his tweet storm in the show notes so you can see his argument,

But the facts remain the same. Netflix knows the path to true lasting independence is to own its own catalog and it's willing to spend whatever it takes to get there. Finally, today, The Verge is reporting on a tiny nonprofit that is hoping to preserve human culture by sending millions of Wikipedia entries to the moon. The Ark Foundation was formed in 2015

and its goal is to cede the solar system with archives of humanity's collected knowledge and culture so that later generations of possibly humans, possibly other, would be able to run across them. The Ark Foundation is beginning by printing Wikipedia entries on tiny miniaturized sheets of metal. The square sheets of metal sort of resemble etched microfiche, but in a medium nickel, actually,

that theoretically can last for millennia and are tiny enough that millions of pages can be stored in packages the size of six. CDs. The idea would be you could read the pages with your run-of-the-mill optical microscope. The Ark Foundation plans to use the services of a startup called Astrobiotic, that is developing a suite of robots that can take payloads to the lunar surface. So, once the government gives the go-ahead, the idea is to shoot a whole bunch of these packets of Wikipedia entries to the moon, to sit around and gather moon dust. If the project happens, it would represent

the first commercial mission to the moon. Earlier this year, the Ark Foundation had a payload containing Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, hitch a ride with the Tesla Roadster that Elon Musk and SpaceX launched into orbit. Ark co-founder Nova Spivak told the Verge, quote, We thought of this project to archive human civilization around the solar system to create a permanent off-site backup of all our cultural achievements. So our knowledge, our art, our languages, our history, all the stuff the human mind has produced. We want many copies in many places, so it increases the likelihood these archives will survive and be found in the distant future.

That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And come back tomorrow so we can do this all again.