Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) - Fake Review Economies And How Social Networks Win

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Saoud Kalifah of FakeSpot.com joins us to discuss what I guess we could call, the fake review economy. Chris made a compelling case for the new Browser Company browser Arc. I try to find my way to a Brian’s Unified Theory of what makes new social networks succeed. 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. Chris, are you recording? I am recording. I am.

So am. Good to go. Okay, great. Okay, so I will kick it off. Welcome everybody to the tech meme ride home experience for Thursday, July 21st. I am Chris Messina, joined as always by my host, co-host Brian McCullough. And today we're going to cover a couple things. Yeah, go for it.

I was going to say, it's been so long since we've spoken. And I left on vacation on July 1st, and it's July, three weeks later. Wow. Wow. Everyone missed us, I'm sure. Who knew that it was going to be this long since we've done on 11th? Good to be back. Good to hear you again.

Yeah, same, same. And also just to catch everyone up, I mean, part of the absence, of course, was you getting COVID finally and then, you know, have your whole pod come down with it. The whole household, yes. Everybody, actually, today is the first day officially. that all four of us tested negative. So good. There you go. Well, you know, I mean, now that, you know, Biden has, you know, got COVID too.

Of course, the whole world has it and it's all coming back and, you know, everyone in. Make sure to get boosted, et cetera. I recommend to the president, Crusader Kings 3, Zeld a Breath of the Wild. This is sort of quarantining with your son. Yeah, did you lose any daily shows? I don't, maybe once. No, all the shows that I took off were already planned.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. As we were just saying off air, my ability to perform the show has not been great. You don't know that because I can edit, but it's not been ideal. But I was always afraid if I ever got it that maybe I would be unable to do daily shows. But, you know, knock on wood so far, we've survived relatively unlawful. on skates, again, not done much. Yeah, well, I mean, that's good because, I mean, if I were, if my livelihood was a daily show,

I would definitely be concerned about that. So, but anyways, life goes on. So the topic today, I think is a pretty, you know, interesting, juicy one. The, just to kick it off, the story that you talked about was that Facebook, I'm sorry, Amazon has actually sued Facebook, specifically for Facebook groups, because of this, I suppose, army of, I guess, fake or fraudulent reviewers that, I don't know, there's 10,000 groups or 10,000 members. I'm not quite sure which it was, but some large number of people. I think it was 10,000 groups probably.

Yeah, yeah. So 10,000 groups essentially creating kind of coordinated activity, you know, to pump up, you know, items for sale on the Amazon marketplace. And this is, of course, I believe a battle that's been going on for quite some time. and I imagine that Amazon and Facebook probably, you know, had some level of coordination through the years where Amazon, you know, was aware that this type of stuff was going on. But this is clearly an escalation. And so we brought in Saoud because I actually, I hunted his product not too long ago. Well, actually, maybe it was a little while ago. I'm called Fake Spot.

And I won't go too much in depth because I want Sao to actually, like, speak to that product and where it came from. And when he and I first discussed it, I was actually, you know, one, kind of shocked that this tool could exist and that it existed in the Amazon ecosystem, which is its own very interesting, almost like rainforest type place where apps and browser extensions and all sorts of other things kind of exist to combat some of these issues. But I suppose if you sort of peel back the layers and you think about the general experience that someone browsing Amazon has and the degree of trust that they have in that marketplace and the assumption that what is on the Amazon marketplace, and perhaps there's some level of sophistication now, but that those things are vetted or somehow approved by Amazon, I think you'd probably end up a little bit, if not gravely, mistaken. Anyways, so once you introduce yourself, talk a little about your company,

how it came to be where you guys are at now, and we can go from there. Yeah, thank you very much for that introduction, Chris, and Brian. It's a pleasure to be here today. You know, this is a very interesting topic because as we all use the Internet over the years, and I've been on the Internet now, I would say 15 to 16 years since I got online, we have noticed, all of us have noticed the problem of fake information, basically on any type of content that we're looking at. And the fake information Bud bit me when I was in college.

I was shopping on Amazon looking for a supplement, and it was some kind of endurance supplement for running. I run a lot. Hundreds of five-star reviews, one-a-click checkout, got it in two days, looked like someone made it in a garage as a side project. It was basically the tape was falling off, and the pill content had sawdust from a woodworking shop.

So to that point, I've always trusted the reviews on Amazon. I always thought they were very highly informative and very trustworthy. So something changed in this time. This was, I would say, in my final year in college, and Amazon actually just opened up the third-party marketplace. And from Amazon's perspective, this makes a lot of sense. This is the way you scale the business.

This is the way you bring in a lot of participants, and you now have massive network effects working in your favor. So in this case, millions of sellers, tens of millions of consumers buying from those sellers. And that, you know, has created hundreds of billions of dollars of value, a shareholder value. Unfortunately, with a lot of participants in this situation, like in any other facet of the Internet, you have in tandem a lot of fraud. And the analogy here is, I mean, all of us to this day, we still get spam emails. We still get, I've been getting so many fake text messages recently.

I don't know about you guys, but it's been, it's been pretty crazy. It's very strange. Yeah, we don't have to go down there, but I've been getting a lot of very random texts where someone's like, oh, hey, are we going golfing tomorrow or like something else like out of the blue? And I don't know if it's. I've been getting tons this summer too. Yeah. And I'm like, it never closes anything anyways. But yes, there's a lot of that weird stuff going on.

Yeah, I mean, I've been getting some robots. I think we should go into dates together. Well, that might actually be a future of the Metaverse. We'll see. Yeah, it's super strange. But, Chris, you mentioned that Amazon has been doing this back and forth with Facebook. And the origins of fake reviews on their platform pretty much comes down to the third-party sellers that are on the platform. When Amazon was a first-party inventory kind of platform, so first-party is basically Amazon holds the inventory of, like, let's say, Dyson, HP.

and these kinds of companies and sells it straight to the consumer. You buy out and check out, you're actually buying from Amazon, who's just holding those products in their warehouses. When they introduced the third-party marketplace, they allowed for any seller to now have fulfillment by Amazon, and you're buying from Amazon. However, they're just fulfilling the order from the seller that's sending this inventory to their warehouse.

And this introduced basically a Wild West competition where you have all these different sellers competing against each other. And we actually, at Fakespot, before this recording, we actually looked at the complaints that Amazon made for this. I would think that would be very interesting to you.

It's very interesting. I mean, so first and foremost, it's 11,000 defendants, right, that are listed in this complaint. And Amazon specifies a lot of the Facebook groups that these professional review is, this is pretty much a cottage industry today. you can basically earn a living from doing fake reviews today.

Maybe not surprising, but it has become an industry all in its own. And they congregate in these Facebook groups. So you have these crazy posts going on there. Yeah, let me jump in here real quick. Because I don't talk about it a lot, but I've run an e-commerce brand for 25 years. And on the one hand, I'm completely aware that this is table stakes now. there's entire plugins on Shopify for reviews. Reviews are essentially since e-commerce came to the web,

sort of, again, table stakes like you don't just put your product out there. You also want to show, you know, there's Google snippets for reviews. It's baked into the cake of how e-commerce works. Now, having said that, having said that, I'm completely aware that reviews are important for doing e-commerce for 25 years, I'm still shocked or a little skeptical that reviews are that meaningful to a brand success or failure to actual sales.

And yet at the same time, I've done the stories about the crazy reviews for the mattresses, the mattress companies, and Viagra and stuff like that. So I guess my big question is, this is big business. This is the difference between, between an e-commerce brand being successful and not being successful? Yep, I would say so.

So it's very similar to you ranking on the first page on Google. If you're not on the first page on Google, you basically don't exist. And in the same situation, reviews get you to that first page. They get you to the first top five. So, you know, I'll basically explain how I entered this problem. So I mentioned I bought that supplement, had hundreds of, you know, fake reviews, did not know that at that time, spent money on it, got the process, product was very disappointed with this.

And then I looked at all the reviews and reviewer profiles. I realized half of them were either bots. So they were spinning text using Markov chain generators. At that time, Markov chain generators were the way to do. How long ago was that? That was in 2015. Okay. Because one thing that I want to get to and also talk about is how this has evolved and

what level of sophistication there might be, right? So if you imagine 10,000 groups on Facebook where there are people who's literally really like their bread and budget butter is to go in and just kind of like write these reviews. I mean, similar to how there are, I think I either heard or read a story about only fans and like these pimps that essentially kind of automate a lot of the kind of posting on behalf of creators to fans, you know, rather, you know, illicit content or whatever, that this is more or less like a similar type of industry where you're just producing stuff. You don't really have a connection to the ultimate customer or to the marketplace, but it's just kind of, it's

almost like a mechanical Turk type proposition. And one of, one of the first, you know, One of the things that I'm wondering about is, and we can get to this later, because I want you to kind of walk us through this, the evolution of the automation side of this is, you know, once you get into the world of like GPD3 and other types of quite compelling, you know, AI-assisted content, then I would think that this gets to be an even harder and intractable problem. But continue like in 2015 and give us a sense for how it was then and how it's evolved. Yeah. No, that's that's really awesome. We do need to focus on the evolution because it has changed. quite significantly over the years. So back then, they were using Markov chain generators. It's basically a probabilistic way of formulating sentences. But all of us, if we looked at a Markov chain generated sentence, and especially when it's long,

we could tell that something is completely off-based. It's like very similar to those Nigerian prints emails that we get. Or that horse e-books famous Twitter account or whatever, yeah. Yes, pretty much. So at that time, I was like, okay, wait, I can create an AI program maybe using SVM. And at that time, deep learning wasn't the main most popular technology yet because there wasn't so much research as we have in the last couple of years, especially with transformative

based, attention-based models, architectures. I was like, okay, I will release a program basically where you paste in the URL of the product you're looking at on Amazon and it will analyze all the reviews for you. So you don't need to spend hours of your time vetting each reviewer, each profile, each of the reviews and that's how the idea for fake spot started. I bought the domain name from a kid in the Midwest who had a counterstrike clan called FakeSpot. Don't ask me why. And I offered him 150 bucks. I'm sure that was meaningful to him. Probably, yeah. So, you know, he accepted the deal, launched the website, just put it out there.

I wasn't really thinking of, you know, like creating a crazy big company or anything like that. I just wanted something that was really useful for me, my family, my friends. I put it out there. I am a fake spot user to this day. So anytime I shop online, I will never shop without fake spot. So we are free to use. We're basically a browser extension. You install it.

And we will plug in grades as you shop on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and other websites we support. So we will tell you with an A grade that there's a lot of trustworthy reviews that you're looking at. Or an F grade, there's a lot of untrustworthy reviews, and you should tread with caution. We also look at the third-party seller that has been picked by the algorithms. like for example, the algorithms on Amazon, a lot of these sellers may have sold counterfeits in the past or anything like that, and you may not want to end up buying from them. Okay, okay, I want to go deeper on this, on this point in particular, because some of this is very relevant to me and my recent experience, but when you say the algorithm picks a seller, one of the things that I've noticed is that there will be sort of a product category. You know, in my case, this is very specific to me, but I have this, listeners know that I recently, acquired a house. I bought a house. And in the back, there's a plum tree. That's something new.

And anyways, this plum tree has lots of plums. So I decided that I would buy a fruit picking stick, which I didn't even know existed, but apparently does. And anyways, I searched for like fruit picking stick on Amazon. And of course, there were tons of options. And what I discovered was that there was like all these different manufacturer. Now, my assumption is that there's sort of like, you know, several companies or maybe there's just one company. And there's a bunch of brands or fronts for that company that uses these fake reviews or whatever else to, like you said, kind of get on the homepage of Amazon in response to my rather esoteric query. So I guess my question to you might help us to understand a little bit more about the

impact of this, where the way in which objects and items are produced, largely I think in China, creates this opportunity for kind of a bunch of middle people to get in between the maker and then the distribution context, which in this case, of course, would be Amazon. How have you seen that change in evolve over time? And how, like, are there just sort of like really intelligent, I don't know, like product pimps that are really good at kind of manipulating the algorithm? Absolutely. So those product pimps, we call them dropshippers.

And they're the middleman between the factories and the final platform. And they're the bane of existence for consumers, in our opinion. So most of the Shopify stores you see that are not like Jim Shark, Allbirds, Kiels, and these bigger brands, a lot of them are dropshippers. And a lot of the sellers you're buying from that have some kind of influencer backing them, they are also drop shippers. And you can go on YouTube right now and find out tips how to become a drop shipper. You'll see these kids with Lamborghinis showing their bank balance with millions of dollars in their bank just doing drop shipping. Can you just like clarify? This is a really dumb question.

But when you say drop shipper, those are two words that I've heard them before together, but I don't actually functionally know what that means. So it's basically, so these kids launch web stores where they don't even have any of the product or the inventory of the product. Right. No inventory. Right. There's just a front. They got. Yeah.

No inventor, nothing in their warehouse. You would just order something on their website. So they make that order with a factory in China, you through AliExpress, Alibaba. and then they put your address that you put in into their store and they drop ship it to you. So they're not doing anything. They're just setting up and they're the middle. Not it. They're the middle person.

Okay. That's okay. Yep. Cool. Continue. Yeah. So with Amazon specifically, you know, from 2015 until now, there's been every year there's been significant changes on the platform.

But the first sign of the floodgates basically breaking and the levee breaking is when the third party marketplace was opened up for the masses. And in 2015, we start seeing this crazy amount of fraud, crazy amount of fake reviews and all these different categories. And it's usually those categories that you can think of that are really easy to buy on Alibaba, slap a logo on them, and start selling it in the category. But now, how do you compete against everyone else that's doing the same thing? You have to compete by buying fraud, by buying fake reviews, by uploading the most damaging reviews on your competitors' products. So the amount of fraud, you know, it goes beyond just fake reviews. They're doing many other things.

Wait, wait, wait. So, okay. So number one is the game to get the most reviews, like to get, you know, I have 15,000 five-star reviews. Is it quantity? Is that the main thing, number one? It depends on the, so the algorithm utilizes different kind of signals, but they claim that they look at the sentiment of the reviews. They look if it's a verified purchase.

They look at maybe there's also internal feedback that is part of the feedback loop. So if Amazon sees a lot of returns, they will not prioritize it as much. So my point is it's a bit more complicated. But it's also directly tied to the algorithm. So if I'm successful at this review game, I will show up like you're saying at the top of the page in Google, but for Amazon or Shopify, what have you. It's a zero-sum game. Like, if I'm either at the top or I'm not, and that's all about this sort of gaming the algorithms in terms of reviews, quantity, and quality.

Yeah, pretty much. If you have no reviews, you're not going to rank on the top. You can also buy Amazon ads nowadays. So Amazon ads is the fastest growing business if you look at the earnings reports for Amazon. And what a lot of these brands are now doing, they're just buying real estate at the top of the page through these sponsored listings. So it's not just reviews anymore. It's also you can buy out the real estate on the page. Okay, let me ask you this, though.

How much of it is bots? Because, of course, Amazon will say, and I get the emails for Amazon all the time. Like, you bought this, you're a verified purchaser, tell us your experience, et cetera, et cetera. If, number one, is it mostly bots? And then number two, if I'm not a bot, So what specifically Amazon went to Facebook to crack that on is these sort of groups where it's like, hey, come do a fake review for us.

What's my incentive? How much can I make by doing fake reviews for somebody else? It basically depends on how many reviews you can pump for them. So what's happening right now is there are two categories of fake reviews that we've seen over the years. Number one is the bot generated fake reviews, and then the number two category is human generated fake reviews. With the Facebook group specifically, you are seeing a lot of human generated reviews. So in these groups, you will see sellers putting up their product and saying, hey, I'm going to refund you after you buy this product, after you show me a screenshot of you posting this review.

And I'll also PayPal you even, you know, 30% of the price as commission or something like this. There's a lot of stuff happening there. And, you know, in this complaint, they actually have screenshots of someone on Amazon's team discussing this with Jessica Jassy, which is a play on Andy Jassies, the current CEO of me. And Jessica, by the way, is misspelled. It's J-A-S-S-I-C-A. It's funny. You guys should look this up. It looks hilarious.

But basically, she or he or whoever is saying, hey, I'm refunding you 100% on PayPal, but I can give you also a 20% on top of the purchase price. if you leave a review on my listing. So a lot of these people will be seeking out humans because as you're on Amazon's platform, Amazon's platform is pretty good at catching bots generated reviews. However, with a GPT-based technology, that does change. And in Fakespot, we actually, our AI, we are training it on a fake review generator

that is powered by Transformers. Transformer is the technology that GPT uses internally. And we actually use that. an adversarial training, like a game, to get our models to be really good at detecting these bot generator reviews. One thing that I wanted to point out was that I'm actually a user or a fake spot. And I would say I became more of a user just recently as a result of moving into the house and suddenly needing several things. And I was plagued with this very problem, not knowing what were trustworthy reviews and what were not. And I recalled, have you hunted your product?

And I was like, oh, actually, I have a solution for this. So I find it to be like, I mean, one, you know, kind of delightful. I find that it doesn't have absolute coverage of everything, but there is a mechanism by which if you end up on a page where fake spot hasn't actually created reviews, you can press a button and essentially re- is it called review essentially. Reanalyze, thank you. It can actually do a new analysis of whatever the reviews might be. For example, if the analysis might be out of date. on demand, and you have to, like, wait, you know, like 15 seconds, but those 15 seconds can really

save you. And I found that a lot of the sellers that I was directed to by Amazon either, you know, had, you know, a lot of fake reviews or, you know, previously, you know, we're selling counterfeits and whatnot. And so I think that, you know, you think about it from a different perspective. I mean, you have antivirus and you have ad block. This is another form of defense against the type of, if not nefarious, just kind of almost like bacteria type activity that occurs on the internet when you have these marketplaces and when there's money and arbitrage that's going on. So, you know, I do, I do kind of want to understand a little bit more about the nexus. And I don't know to what degree you can speak to this because I think you're looking, well, actually, this is more of a question.

I think you're looking more at kind of behavior and patterns of content and maybe seller reputation maybe implicitly or that you detect and run analysis on. But I want to understand how this collides with a creator economy because clearly there's a move towards, I mean, we're seeing this, you know, just this week where Instagram is is now really becoming essentially the QVC of Gen Z. And, you know, they're moving into a world where it's going to be much, much harder to fake these reviews, you know, granted until, and I know we do have AI that can generate video content off of, you know, selfies and whatnot. But my point is, if you're moving to a world where more people are used to consuming short-form video content

as a way to validate the content or the things that they might buy, how does that kind of fit into, you know, their motivations or why they might prefer kind of a QVC-style approach where there's real people, I mean, maybe it's payola, but, you know, kind of generating these reviews, then text, which is very easy to produce at scale. Yeah. I mean, so it's a very interesting question. So have you guys ever shopped on wish.com? I think maybe once, but for the listeners, why don't you explain it?

The wish.com is basically like those QVC style, very cheap products that you're talking about. And most of the reviews on that website are, from our observation, pretty low quality. We get a lot of users requesting us to support the wish.com, but pretty much when you look at that website, You see that there's a lot of fraud happening there, but they are using textual content. So the game does change when you have something like even an Alexa, right, that can specify, tell you testimonials in audio form, right? So that changes the game. And especially when we're talking about the ARVR worlds in the future, everything changes,

you know, like the hologram aspect of how you look at products and reputation. But I think at the end of day, reputation is still going to be critical. If you lose trust with one influencer, like let's say you bought a product and they said this product is super dope, whatever, you're going to get it and you're going to be super happy. You got the product and let's say it did not work at all and it was super cheap and you're like, wow, this influencer sucks. I'm not going to listen to them anymore. You're going to lose trust and that aspect of trust will never change. I think trust is super important for any transaction as you're shopping online. One thing Amazon has really, I would say, monopolize is their A to Z guarantee.

If you get a bad product, you can just immediately chat with a bot and you can return that product. That's their retroactive basic safety net for all these problems. With influencers, with QVC, with all these Shopify integrations into TikTok and everything we're seeing right now, I would say this is dropshipper heaven. Yeah, I mean, I guess I just, I look at this and I think several things have changed. You know, obviously access to these global markets has changed. the cost of goods, obviously, is going up, but nonetheless, there's so many things that are so cheap. And in many ways, because of their quality is a lot harder to judge through the internet. And like you said, Amazon has this great, you know, A to Z kind of refund process. And so it might

be annoying to you that maybe you bought from a seller that, you know, was not reputable. But in terms of your relationship with Amazon, well, they took care of it. So it's not a problem. Then I guess another question is, on the seller side, what, what, like, are you able to or what are the consequences once you discover these fake reviews? Let me think about this two ways. One, you know, you're detecting fake stuff on Amazon, right? I don't, I don't know, but maybe you're reporting that to Amazon. I don't know what happens to the sellers. Like, can they get banned for life? How good is Amazon's defenses against that? The second part of this question, which is related, is of those 10,000 Facebook groups that are, you know, potentially going to be kicked off of Facebook?

I don't know what's going to happen to them. What happens if Amazon succeeds and those groups are shut down? You know, will they just pop up someplace else? Will, you know, those groups move off to another platform? I mean, obviously the business incentive is still there. So what happens if Amazon succeeds with their suit? Yeah. I mean, so I'll answer the first question and then the second question is a very, very big one. But the first question is when Amazon finds out that seller has engaged in fake review fraud, they will ban the seller, but the system is so easy to sign up and become another fly-by-night seller, you can start doing and rinse and repeat the same cycle over and over. And you see this all the time. Go search on Amazon right now,

put in Bluetooth headphones or, you know, a food picker. I can only imagine. Look at how many of the brand's names have capital letters, right? It's like as if someone just turned on caps lock and smack the keyboard with their wrist. And it's a random garbled up a word. The reason that is so is because these are new sellers. They keep appearing and reappearing all the time. And we keep track of these sellers. So we see them constantly reappearing.

When they get banned of Amazon, they actually go to Walmart. That's something that is very, this is something that is very, very new. Because Walmart, what they're doing right now is they're cloning Amazon's third-party marketplace, which brings in all these problems, but none of the understandings of the problem. So it's, yeah, it is super interesting. The second question in regards to the Facebook groups and can they succeed. I mean, my one, you know, like one sentence answer is Amazon is fight is the battleground is the internet for them. And whether they ban a couple of these Facebook groups, a lot of the Facebook groups we're in for our intelligence gathering, they're all up.

They're all still getting a lot of reviews. They're posting everywhere. They're on telegram. on Twitter, there are certain clandestine hashtags where you can, you know, latch on to and start getting products for free and start writing reviews, just on Twitter. So anywhere people congregate, you will be able to still get these, you know, these review exchange programs. So I would say this is a drop in the bucket for them.

And the problem is going to continue. And as more e-commerce is a part of our life, you know, like as it gobbles up more of the retail, the physical retail, and there's more money to be made, the fraud. is just going to grow in tandem with it. This is why you need solutions like fake spot. You need companies that work in consumers favor. We don't see many companies doing this, which is very disappointing to me, by the way,

because I am a very user-privacy-oriented person, and our whole team is very, you know, we're all passionate about this mission, building technology that brings back trust and transparency to as you shop or browse online. We don't see that anymore. Let me ask a question directly to that, because from the beginning of the web, there were certain things that platforms had to take down or they would be shut the F down.

And I'm thinking of child porn, regular porn, you move into the YouTube era, it's copyrighted content and things like that. And so the systems got very good at taking that stuff down because it's an existential threat to these platforms. is it too cynical to wonder if this problem is not solved because on some level a sale is a sale and it still benefits a platform if a sale goes through? Do you know what I'm saying? As much as maybe Amazon clearly here is trying to shut this down on behalf of their platform. but are they still kind of doing this with one hand type behind their back because a sale is a sale? I mean, a lot of the people they're suing are fake Facebook accounts. So at the end of day, these are the screenshots we're seeing in the complaints.

They're all like I mentioned, Jessica Jassy and some random garbled up words. So it doesn't really do anything. You can still get these fake reviews. But if Amazon focused all their efforts in solving this problem of fraud and fake reviews, let's say that's their only mission as a company. No more, you know, like today we read that they're going to offer health insurance in the future, right? Let's say they just focus on this problem of fraud. It's still going to be a very challenging problem, just based on the volume that they have. However, is it beneficial?

I think Amazon is a great platform. I think you can get whatever you want at any time. However, this problem with reviews is a significant problem. If it doesn't match your expectation based off the understanding of the reviews, it's a huge problem for you. Well, and also at scale, like in the same way that, you know, you could argue, oh, well, Facebook doesn't have the incentives to crack down on the quote-unquote fake news or fake whatever because engagement is engagement and that's how they make their money. But at the same time, I'm not entirely sure that anyone has solved the problem. Like there's nuance. If you see a boob in a picture, you can create a bot to, you know, take that down and things like that. But there's so much nuance to a review. How do you know that something posted is fake? How do you know that a review? It's so much, there's so much gray area. It's harder to do at scale. Like, obviously, your company is designed to combat this. But is it an order of magnitude more difficult problem? than taking down pictures that you don't want and stuff like that?

I would say, so a lot of the technology platform, so any platform that hosts reviews today on the Internet has a problem with fake reviews. That's a bold statement, but it's a statement that has been backed by years of our looking at this space and looking at data. Many platforms are using old-school ways of detecting fraud, like looking at IP addresses, browser fingerprinting, peering.

That doesn't work. These fake review farms from around the world know how to bypass these systems. You need to get better. You need to use the same technology that these platforms are using to monetize their users in catching this fraud. So we're using, you know, GPT level technology to detect the context, the nuances, all these different aspects of the reviews, the reviewer profiles. We're tracking sellers across different platforms. This is something Amazon is not doing. We're doing it.

We can identify sellers across Walmart, eBay, Amazon, and. And this is all to the advantage of the consumer. We're not worried about, you know, making margin. We're not worried about making sales. We're worried about your experience as a consumer, which is a very novel thing, I would say, as a startup. So, I mean, speaking of that, I think this will be maybe the last question. What is your business? I mean, how do you, you know, make money and sustain this?

And, you know, I presume that this is sort of the type of business that, you know, maybe is like, you know, antivirus. It sort of will be around forever just because of the threat. what's always exist. So I guess where, where are you now in your business and where do you see this going? Yeah. So we have, I mean, we have two channels of how we make money. And it's the, the B2C channel is basically what you have the experience that you have. If you go to fakespot.com right now when you analyze something, you're going to see ads appear on the analyzer box and on the report card page. Anytime you click on any of those ads, we're getting, you know, a CPC kind of model. And that basically funds the B2C side. On the B2B. What do you are you evaluating?

the ads that show up there? We are using Google ads and the different networks in those ads, but we're, you know, we have safety keeping on the keywords that appear on the page. We don't allow any of those malicious ads to appear on that page. It's like, it's an interesting problem, right? Like, I mean, because I think the idea of how having incentives aligned is great, but then, of course, you have to make money. And as we're discussing, the way in which you can often make money is through the exploitation

of attention or things like that, right? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's definitely an interesting. an interesting balance that you need to hold as any company does, right? And that's where our B2B channel comes into the play, where we have the technology we've developed, the AI that we've developed, we are willing to license it out to these platforms, to start detecting the fraud on their platforms.

Any review platform can use our technology to currently detect all the fake reviews that are coming in. Got it. So this is more like an API or platform offering. Yeah, and you can go to Rapid API right now. we have our API listed there. You can use our GPT-based pros and cons, which basically summarizes and composes its own understanding of the reviews. It gives you the positives and negatives of product reviews.

Wow. Well, I mean, this is super interesting, and it's one of those things that I think a lot of people just don't think about, especially if they use kind of like the stock experience of Amazon. I can tell you, again, having been a fake spot user, it is, you know, and I pinned a tweet to the space that sort of shows you what a listing looks like that has the review and has kind of like, it's almost like the good housekeeping style stamp of approval where, you know, I'm now looking for these purple labels that say this is excellent or good or whatever before making a purchase. So having that in my arsenal has been good. And again, this is not like meant to be a pitch or anything like that. I reached out to Sao just because I thought this, you know, topic was one that was interesting and that this would be a different angle to sort of get behind. what the headline was talking about. Like, this isn't just about Amazon swing Facebook. This is about activity, once again, that is aggregated and going on on the Facebook platform that

I'm sure Amazon, you know, has been badgering Facebook over to remove and Facebook's efforts have not been sufficient. And so the next step, of course, is to go to a type of war, I guess, through the legal system. And so that's the relevance of this conversation. Pretty much. I mean, you know, Facebook is launching their own marketplace, allowing anyone to list their products and start selling there. If you now search for products on Facebook, you will see like an Amazon style experience for certain products that are listed. Well, I mean, I was going to say, you know, this is, I wonder, you know,

if or when you'll actually have a fake spot for that because there is a ton of stuff. I mean, and my partner actually both, I mean, we've sold a number of things, actually very efficiently through Facebook marketplace. And that is, you know, the Wild West. That is like very much like Craigslist. So there's not really reviews in the same sense, right? because it's a single purchase and a single transaction, but there's a lot of fraud that goes on on that platform.

Let's just say we have a lot of users requesting that and a couple other platforms that you're probably using today. It's definitely an interesting problem. And I see the problem only worsening in the years to come. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's so much money to be made, of course. And, you know, especially if there's no recourse, right?

Like if I ended up getting defrauded on Facebook marketplace, I mean, what recourse do I have? I'm going to, like, you know, call up Facebook. Like, obviously that's not going to have. happen. So yeah. I mean, Facebook is pretty much the middle old man connecting you to that seller. Well, I mean, but they really don't want to be part of that transaction. They're happy to facilitate. They're happy to have payments, you know, run through their system. But otherwise, if anything goes wrong, you know, there is no A to Z guarantee to my knowledge on Facebook

marketplace. Yep. And I also do need to specify because some people are confused about this on social media. Amazon is not suing Facebook. They're suing the admins of these groups. Oh, that is interesting. That wasn't entirely clear. Huh. Yeah, so it looks like they're suing Facebook, but they're not. They're suing these fake accounts like that. I definitely, okay, sorry, this is the last question. But how do you sue a bunch of fake accounts on another platform? Like, how do you actually get to their identity information to get to the person accountable? Well, they're using their profile information and the Facebook group's pages. So they have screenshots of the Facebook pages. And they have screenshots of the Facebook pages. And they, and they, have it listed in the complaints. And they're saying these are 11,000 dough defendants. Wow. Again, I don't even know how a court rules on that and says, you know, all these

does need to go to jail or something or like need to stop doing what they're doing? I mean, nothing is going to come out of this. That I can tell you for a fact. Yeah, a lot of these accounts, I mean, I'm telling you straight up, these accounts are all completely fake. You will never be able to these people ever again. So what's the point? Just to like put people on notice that Amazon is watching? I don't understand. You know, I would say it's Amazon showing the public that they're doing something about it. But there is, you see, there is a bit of a confusion here because people think Amazon is suing Facebook. And that, that PR that came out kind of spins it that way, right?

So I would say it's not really clear until you look at the official paperwork here and you see what's happening behind the scenes. Okay, interesting. Well, this is definitely a story we'll have to pay attention to. And as it develops, perhaps we'll have you back on. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thanks, Seth. By the way, you're welcome to stick around as we shift topics.

By the way, Chris, in the same way that I remember when I founded my first company driving to the post office every day to ship the product by hand to every customer. I also remember emailing every customer in the first year or two and asking for reviews and asking. I literally had to ask and then be like, can I post this on my website? like so that I would hard-coded into a reviews page on the website and stuff like that. But like it was very much bespoke and doing it by hand back in those days. Yeah, but I mean like every like every product that I've received that I get through the Amazon marketplace lately comes with some little, you know, piece of paper or postcard or a little slip that's like, you know, post this review and get, you know, 90 days extended warranty or something else. So the incentives are all there. And I wonder to what degree Amazon, you know, polices that or, you know, you know,

doesn't allow incentives for posting reviews. I mean, it's really tricky. I know, for example, in an adjacent space, Pratotent has become a lot more conservative about what is allowed the types of, you know, they are dealing with their own spam and abuse challenges. And they are very clear that you cannot incentivize either upvotes or commenting or anything like that for this very reason. Obviously, Prataton is a much smaller target, but nonetheless, you know, I think Soud's point

is well taken, that this is something. something that's going to be, you know, anywhere where people can publish content, the risk for fraudulent activity, especially at scale, is going to be significant. And as we get more AI generation tools, it's going to become even easier and more cost effective. You know, like the fact that Dali has come out, right? And it's like $15, whatever, for some number of credits. The number of things that you could, you know, post, you know, with those types of tools and just, it boggles the mind. I mean, again, an adjacent thing, but there were all those AI generated faces that were being used to create LinkedIn profiles and then they would sort of, you know, do these reach

outs and whatever. Like it's, it's, it's, um, we're going to be living in a very, very strange period, uh, where it's going to be very hard to know what is real and what is not. And that is why, you know, authentication becomes so important. Um, but I'm making it accessible, easy, you know, verifiable. Uh, you know, that's why the big guys get bigger. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to kick it to you to do a dealer's choice. Okay. I know what I want to make sure we talk about before we end, but what would you like to talk about next? Oh.

Well, you know, okay, one thing I guess it'll bring up, and this is a thought that I've been having, I suppose, it's in germination mode. So you'll get the raw version now. But I'm hoping to get the folks or some members of the browser company team onto the pod soon. And the browser company is, I believe they're pretty well capitalized. They built a browser called ARC. And there's been a lot of hype around the browser company for some time. But they finally actually have a product that's out in market. And I got to say, I am like blown away.

It's very rare, I think, that I have a product where it sort of takes a position of such a central thing in my life and kind of changes the my assumptions about how that thing operates and how it should operate and what I can do with it. And so specifically, this is a new browser. I've got my career started, you know, building a web browser or launching a web browser. And to come this far and to get a real sense of the freshness and different ideas and different ways of interacting with this space that don't really conflict too heavily with the operating system that it's running in, but also has original ideas about how to interact with the content. I'll try to give you a lot. I'll try to give you. you some high-level, I guess, observations.

One is just that... Go ahead. First of all, because remember, long enough listeners will remember, I publicly switched to Brave. Yes, that's right. And I solicited should I go to Firefox or whatever? But essentially, the only reason I switched to Brave was because I could do everything that I was already doing and just cut Google out of my life, which is my main motivation.

But I've been interested in, first of all, the browser company, I was a, I've always been reading that it was focused on enterprise or whatever. But so what you're about to tell me is that me, Brian, could try their browser and find things in it that would be like, ooh, I didn't know I needed this in my life. Yeah. So I think there's a shortcut to get to the website, which is, I think, arc.net. Yeah, a.c.net. That'll redirect to the browser.company.

And the company is run by, oh, man, I'm going to get this wrong. Josh. I'm trying to remember. Sorry, I'm going to look this up live. Josh Miller, is that right? Okay. Josh Miller is someone, he's Josh M. on Twitter. Maybe he'll just show up here, but maybe not.

He's been around, or at least I've known of him, and sort of followed his work for a very long time. He originally built something I want to say called Bunch. What's it called Bunch? Let's see. Oh, he was director of product for the White House. He was a product manager at Facebook. He branch.

That's what it was called. So I met him in, I don't know, 2000, some period between 2011 and 14. He was the CEO and co-founder of Branch. And what he was trying to do at the time was to reform the way that groups and conversations online happened to be more hospitable and friendly and nice and all the things that we've been talking about for the last like 10 years. And I don't recall if he was, if his company was acquired by Facebook. But anyways, ended up clearly doing a stint at Facebook only for a year and then went

off to the White House. but he is now the CEO and founder of this browser company, which is set on reimagining what a browser can be. And I'll just, again, the high-level stuff is that just the design feels so, like, good. Like, it feels pleasant to be inside. It's such a thoughtful kind of experience. The colors are like, there's like grain that shows up in the background. Anyways, like, this is, you know, whatever.

You're like, whatever designer person, you know, keep talking stupid shit. But it's really nice. And the other features that it has is the ability to do split tabs side by side, which I didn't think I needed until I actually started using it. Now, MacOS has this as well. But I find that going back and forth between things, like I kind of want to do it in the browser. I don't really want to, I don't know, the operating system level just doesn't work that well. It also has this sidebar.

So it moves the tabs from the top over to the left hand side. Now, other browsers have done this in the past. But it combines, it's almost, let me think how to put this. Imagine if you have a, like a tall block of wood that is like a cube, and it's on an axis. So you can spin it on its, on its y axis, all right? Kind of got the visual. Anyways, imagine that these are called spaces. And on each one of the surfaces of that piece of wood would be your list of tabs.

and this spaces area sits on the side, on the left, and you can spin between them, and each of those spaces kind of defines a work area. And it's just like so simple and basic, but it actually really, really, really works. So I don't want to like, you know, channelize everyone and, you know, not be able to provide something to them because I can't, because it's still invite only.

But I got to say, it's really promising. And so anyways, that was one seed into this bigger thought, which was about kind of a set of modern products that are defining the computing experience and redefining that computing experience based on a new set of assumptions that are built into the operating environment that we live in.

And the last time this happened for me was in 2016 when conversational software became kind of like this moment where it was before all the voice assistants had really proliferated as much as they have. And now she who shall not be named, the Amazon voice assistant has something like 300 million, I don't know if it's 300 million users.

I think it's something like that. that recently came out. So it is something that is out there in the ether, and we just kind of expect, you know, there to be these capabilities in the environment. In a similar way, what Chromium and Chrome and Brave and Safari all kind of are stuck in a moment in time about the ways in which browsers work and behave, which literally goes all the way back to 2004. I mean, Firefox in 2004 had the idea of tabs. and yes, you know, there are some subtle improvements, but for the most part, it operates the same way. So the one thing that I'll add, actually, that also makes ARC different is that it has a built-in launcher, kind of like Alfred or Raycast. And Raycast is another one that I want to mention.

That is assuming a different level of, I think, sophistication on the level of the user that didn't exist before. Like, I don't think that you could just hand the ARC browser to just any random person and they'll kind of like get the value of it. You have to be someone who kind of like lives online and understands concepts like Zapier or APIs or you know what I mean. So these are people who are getting really good at digital technology and these are products that are rising to meet that level of sophistication in a way that I think we've been very afraid. Like now when I talk to people who want to launch on product hunt and they tell me about, you know,

how their mom doesn't get it, that the mom test is no longer really really. relevant because there's such a divide between trying to reach that audience that it's almost like you have to think about a completely different vertical or demographic versus there's a market serving the sophisticated users or the power users at this point yeah and that's what I'm starting to see that well first of all that in and of itself the idea it reminds me of superhuman you know this idea which which keep that in mind for a second by the way take it from somebody that has to be told about ad copy all the time. It's a Zapier.

There's Zapier. It's Zapier. Yes. Like Jiffs and gears. So many times. So let me ask you this, because by the way, imagine my workflow every day trying to put the show together and having various tabs. And now I'm doing this segment.

You're going to love this thing. Yeah. So it sounds good. But let me ask you this. Can you see yet what they will charge for? Because isn't that the promise? is that they're going to, what's the thing that they're going to withhold for your subscription? It's, you know, it's one of those things where I got to imagine that this is a subscription

product and you pay to use it. It's, you know, or it'll be, you'll pay to use social features. And so I think this model is actually very interesting. It's sort of like enterprise software, but from a collaboration perspective. And I will bring up Raycast again, because I think it points to this direction. So it's one thing. to have single player mode, right, and to get some benefit from a product and to use it by yourself. Okay, but once you get into the collaboration space, then you need the cloud, then you need the ability to, you know, share and do stuff. That's where having shared spaces and shared browser contexts, I hunted another product a couple, maybe a week, a month or two ago

called Switchboard. And Switchboard is sort of similar or adjacent to another browser product called Mighty. And one of the things that's happening, and I think you've, I don't know if you've talked about this, but it's been in the conversation space lately, that one of the challenges with streaming games is that Apple doesn't like it, right? So you can't stream a game like an Xbox game or something to your iPhone the way that you could with like Stadia or like, which is Google's product, or you couldn't do with, I think maybe if Netflix wants to do streaming games. The idea is that there are those products that will put the browser, and all the hard tasks that is doing into the cloud

so that you essentially do have like a thin, done client where everything actually happens very quickly and very fast. So there are different use cases where that makes a lot of sense. There are cases like this where you're using Figma or you're using Notion or Coda or, you know, arc where having a shared experience is worth paying for because there's probably a company behind that group of people coming together and doing work. in which case it makes sense to pay for that. So if you think about Figma, and actually, okay, this is all making sense to me now.

I'm glad we're having this conversation because this is helping me to realize this. One of the things that I tweeted a little while ago was about how Figma is essentially a web browser built for design. So, you know, the conventional web browser is, of course, a document loading system where you type in the address of a document and it loads and renders the document. Now, of course, we've added lots of capabilities over time, like the ability to fetch other documents and include them in the document that you're viewing. We call those images or movies or even iFrames. But imagine a browser that was built specifically for the purpose of creating design and interacting with the elements of the designs directly through OpenGL or through SVG. That is Figma. Figma literally has tabs and all they did was they hid the URL bar.

But that's why you can load a Figma document in the... the browser because it's just a web page, essentially, right? If you download the native Figma app to your desktop, all it is is a browser that is specially purposed for the process of design. So ARC is going to be specially purposed for, I don't know, the purpose of collaboration, perhaps, the purpose of social browsing, the purpose of things along those lines where you have a high degree of productivity, you have a high degree of collaboration, a high degree of embedded services and software and you'll you know pay one fee perhaps to you know to use it I I don't know exactly but that to me seems like the direction where it's going and that's what

people seem willing to pay for right you can use notion for free but once you want to add team members then you have to start to pay and that's that's the most valuable thing on the internet is going to be how people work and interact together and whether you monetize the action itself or whether you monetize the output of the work that happens through that collaboration and again we talked about at the beginning of the show with the Amher the Amazon marketplace. That's interesting. All right.

Well, you need to get me an invite. Let's see what I can do. Well, we'll see if we can get the group on here. By the way, I just looked up the product designer. It's just a product designer? I would imagine he'd be full time. Dustin Suenos is someone that I also encountered many, many years ago. He's an excellent designer.

He was the head of design at Medium. Actually, around the same time that, I just forgot, Josh was working on branch. And so, you know, Medium was doing a lot of really interesting things from that 2011 to 2015 period. And that's when Dustin was head of design there. And so now he has moved over and he is working on the browser company. So anyways, like I just, I feel like the bench that they've brought together is actually pretty deep. And so I'm just super stoked to see kind of what they, what they come up with.

Okay. How about you? What's your topic? Yeah, me too. Well, actually, you know, coincidentally, this is something that you can help me. think through as well, because I told you offline, this is something that I'm sort of formulating. We did a segment, was it yesterday, about Be Real. Have you had a chance to try Be Real? I downloaded it quite some time ago, and I don't think I'm necessarily in the demographic,

but I'm definitely aware of it. Right, right. This is definitely one of those things where it's maybe not for us, but, and that's fun. But, but, so I did read extensively from Casey Newton's newsletter posts about this. And what it prompted in me, and I'm going to read a little bit from it, and then I'll tell you what I'm thinking about it. And again, this will be literally me thinking out loud and you helping me think it through it.

You know, he was asking, like, why is Be Real successful now all of a sudden, you know, like anybody can start a social network in theory or whether. So what makes something breakthrough? One of his theories was that, one of the sort of playbooks for a social network breaking through is constraints. And he used the example of Twitter's 140 characters, which I kind of don't agree with because Twitter was a different take on social networking, aside from the 140 characters.

It's not, I think, what was interesting about Twitter. But it didn't make me think about, you know, especially like Snapchat and its original ephemorality and the disappearing messages and things like that, although then they pivoted into stories as a whole new concept of how you shared content and things like that. But even like Instagram being just pictures. And so with this guy going in my head, and this is what I want to think out loud with you about, is social networks seem to break through with a gimmick. And I think I kind of said this on the show. But then at some point, it lasts if it can take over some sort of behavior that's more than the gimmicks so that, you know, there was a demographic and probably still a demographic that once Snapchat captured you, that's how you communicated with your friends.

And in a similar way, Snapchat by moving to video and content, like, well, that's where you went to watch things, to, to watch things, to, you know, to distract yourself. And TikTok is all that. TikTok took essentially the consuming of content and media and made it the whole thing, right? And put it like a sort of a social network around that. But I guess my theory is that so you break through by doing something that's a

gimmick that's slightly different than what the dominant paradigm is. but if you don't sort of find some way to capture the lasting sort of need of what social media is, either distraction or communication to friends and families, social graph, essentially. That's why it goes away because it's just the gimmick. The gimmick has to be there to break through, but then you have to then capture something that's more lasting. So I think, yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally.

And I'll build on what you're saying. and I'll also note that Omar from the browser company is now here. If he does want to come up, he's got an open invite. What you're talking about, and I was actually having this conversation, or this conversation, I was having this conversation with myself the other day, which was about wedges. And what you're describing is, I think, a generational wedge. So there are a number of factors that have come together.

And I think it's very hard to predict this, and it's very hard to, like, what's it called? Not materialize and not manipulate, but kind of manufacture. It's very hard to manufacture this type of thing. It sort of happens as a result of many things conspiring in your favor and just kind of pushing and pushing and pushing until, you know, some kind of intuitive thing happens and you break through. So what you're describing is, I think, a generational reaction and rejection once again to the things that I've come before, right? So be real.

And the whole, oh, what's the word? but it's sort of like a trick or a joke. The ruse is not ruse. Anyways, whatever the word is. The gimmick. The gimmick of Be Real is literally, it's a reaction to Instagram and the curation. That's what I'm saying. I think you put these things into a kind of like a matrix of relationships.

And so you have a context where Instagram is becoming a lot more, well, it's always been kind of about peacocking and showing off and, you know, producing. producing great-looking, you know, videos and things like that that are, one, really hard to achieve without a lot of effort. And then you have this, like, faux kind of like, oh, it's nothing. I just kind of like, you know, got out of the shower. Oh, my God, I look gorgeous. It just like happens that way. You're like, that's not real. That's not authentic. This is, like, really boring and whatever. But you're sort of forced as a result of the medium, which is turned into a stage, to perform as though you were an actor on that stage.

Like, the thing that I think is going to be very interesting to see, and I'm going to kind of try to watch myself, although I feel some resistance already, is the degree to which I'm going to start to change if and when I do post on Instagram ever again, like more and more real Z type content, you know, these kind of like jump cut kind of like schizophrenic, you know, pieces of media, because that is what the stage demands of the performers. So just as media and film and theater and all the rest kind of change to adapt to the mediums and what the mediums allow for, you then, you know, if you are not into that form of cinema, for example, you then have to find some other vehicle for expression. And because Be Real, and it's really funny that the mechanism

that they landed on was, one, a random notification sometime during the day, right? So you don't know when it's going to come. So that's sort of a variable reward system. Two, you have to take a photo. You have to respond to the prompt within that amount of time or else you're shown to be late. So it's sort of using a subtle shaming effort. And then it takes a front back kind of photo, right? So it's an enablement or that feature is enabled by the iPhone's ability to take a photo from the front and the back at the same time and then stitch them together. It's, it's interesting that actually Instagram's head of, or Instagram's head today announced the same feature in Instagram. So, of course, once again, they're copying, you know, the thing out

there. But point being that this allows for a demonstrate, like a way to cut through what would otherwise be sort of, you know, a set or a production or, you know, the lighting, right? You see both sides of the thing. So you can't fake it. So that creates a type of intimacy. Now, the thing that I want to say about the wedge is that if you, you know, if you're going to say, you know, you know, you nail the product experience and the inclusion of the technology and the expressiveness of the medium that your kind of generation, and I do mean a generation from typically an age perspective, right, where they haven't had all of their communication needs kind of fulfilled or met or they're not even aware. Like, I mean, how many of these people who are on Be Real ever

heard of Firefox? You know, I mean, maybe, but like, you know, the generations are now kind of splitting off, you now have a chance to then define what media is and how it should feel like for them. And that, I think, is what you're describing as being the opportunity. It's so funny to think about, well, in Casey's piece, he also talks about, he has a very, very, I think, interesting point about how social networks also take off with nostalgia. And I think you framed it in the sense that like any social network that you first join feels like the pure one because your best friends are in there. Well, if it's small enough, it is. Right.

Right. Like Clubhouse had that for like the early start of the pandemic. And I think the clubhouse is such a good, I don't want to say like counter example, but where it was really about the context and the moment and that sense of connection. And to your point, some degree of sentimentality and. nostalgia of coming back together as though it were the early kind of social web, which felt, I think, so comforting as the world was sort of falling apart, you know, through this pandemic moment. But it's also, it's entirely in the same way that like the music always sounds best when you're 14 to 19.

I don't know. I'm finding some great music these days. But I take your point. I take your point. It's universally true that it all, but, but, but I mean, even think of it this way, I can trace for you there was a, there was a geo-city's generation. Yeah. There was a...

Just AOL. Instant Messenger. Right. Instant Messenger. There was a very, very brief Myspace generation. You know, shout out to the people that actually, you know, I mean, Facebook was a reaction to Myspace.

Totally. Facebook was the reaction to Myspace. And then there was, you know, I'm alighting over some, but there was a Tumblr generation. There still is. There's a resurgent Tumblr generation. Exactly. Exactly. And then Instagram was a reaction to, so I feel like, I mean, that's sort of the thing in

the way, that was always the knock about social media when it started is that it always was fad based and they're like, well, you can never build a real lasting business on this. Which actually, that leads me to another point that I wanted to make in regards to, I didn't get to talk about how, what is it, Instagram is going to make every video under a video. Yeah. Into a real. I'm sorry.

A real. A real. Yeah. So they're sort of shoving things. And I did talk about today about how. they're changing the news feed to be more TikToky. This is probably not an insanely brilliant observation, but it occurs to me that Facebook,

if I had founded Facebook, I feel like I would have founded it and felt like there was an idea, a platonic ideal of social networking that I had captured. And clearly Meta, the company, does not feel that way. It occurs to me that all they, they've identified, the only thing of value that they have is the social graph. And they will do any goddamn thing. They will contort themselves

in any way to keep that social graph. And so there is no platonic ideal of what it means to be on any of their platforms. They will evolve it in whatever it takes to keep you connected to the connections that you have and keep coming back. I don't know, again, this is not a brilliant insight, but it's like, that's, I mean, they don't care. And people are complaining, oh, you know, you're ruining what I liked about Instagram. And maybe they will care because maybe they'll chase people away by morphing too much and things like that. But, you know, like, yeah, like I hear you. And I think that this is one of those cases where I think you kind of, you almost got there. You got to the edge of the thing.

thing. And then it's almost like, I do this myself. Like, we're too close to our own experience. So it's hard to get to the other side of it. And then to think about what it is. Because I think you actually said it, which is that the social graph is the thing. And then the question is, what does the social graph demand? And the social graph demands things to do. And so the medium and the media, and I know this is getting all McLuhan, but like, I think it's very important is, is, it's not that it's ephemeral, but it's incidental to the type of connection that occurs. And so if your point is to look at the way in which people connect and to communicate through digital technology, then the way in which you continue to evolve, the ways in which people can communicate,

connect, and interact where the technology is an enabler, as opposed to the thing itself, I think get you closer to the way Facebook approaches content. So the content actually, you know, as much time, effort, and whatever, effort that we put into producing stuff, it is just the shadow of, is that the right word? It's like the chum or the churn, but why are my words not working today? Anyways, my lookup table is all fraud. It needs to be, you know, revised. But point being, content is necessary to keep people coming back. And then it's the interactions that occur around the content that keeps people kind of engaged. And so if Facebook sees, and of course they have the data, I would imagine, that TikTok is becoming much more engaging and that the other

form of content is becoming, you know, it's sort of like moving between hot and cold mediums, you know, to talk about again, McLuhan, where some are participatory and some are passive. So TV is a very passive medium. You sit there and you just consume and then you go yell about it, you know, to your friends. That's sort of like a latent way of interacting. Whereas what, and I think your point about videos on Instagram, Instagram becoming now, you know, canon fodder for other remixes and for being used in other videos, is like a mind-blowing thought because this is what we were trying to achieve with Creative Commons in like 2004. And the world was not quite ready for, you know, sort of a copyright-adjacent world.

And then you have a platform like TikTok comes out where everything is usable by everyone else. And no one has ownership anymore. And it's because the incidental value of each piece of media, has gone to essentially zero because it's so fast to produce new content that you can just replace whatever it was that was so, you know, kind of important to you before. You know what I mean? I do. I want to, I think Saud has raised his hand. So if he wants to jump in here real quick, yeah, jump in. Yeah, I mean, this is a really interesting discussion, but I wanted to ask you a question, Chris, you know, since you're really philosophical about this product.

Sure. And, you know, I think at the rawest level, Facebook or meta, they look at, you know, like dopamine kicks. Like at the rawest level, that's what everything is built upon, whether it's Instagram, whether it's the, you know, they teach you the stuff in Stanford. Yeah, there's a whole course on it. Yeah. So I think, you know, like the wedges that you guys were talking about on TikTok, like TikTok is also exploiting this through being very entertaining in this short form kind of content. And it's, you know, the answer I think to this question is, is how do you exploit humans' dopamine kick?

And that will apply to the metaverse. So my question to you is like, what do you see? Because the browser, the ARC browser, which, you know, I'd love to get an invite too. Omar, listening. You sold me. Oh, that would be something fun to build into the ARC browser, a fake spot. Anyways, continue. Yeah, I think these productive style apps are very different from like social network apps

and all that stuff. These guys are betting on dopamine and these other guys are betting on being productive. So my question too is what do you see right now like going all in into that? Is it the Be Real social network or what are you seeing in this? Even the Web 3 world. Like I don't think they're doing it right right now at this moment. Yeah. You know, it's a really, it's a good point and it's a good, I would consider to call in as opposed to a call out. because I think that once you kind of understand the ways in which all things are trying to subtly manipulate you, and you kind of take it for,

I guess, at face value, that everything wants to change everything else around it. And this is just like literally, I mean, you know, even with like the, JWST,

what is it, the James Webb telescope, whatever, like you look at like the universe kind of pushing lightways and photons through the universe. Like there is a subtle form of manipulative. that is occurring for all things to be seen and felt somehow, even if there's not intention involved. And so when it comes to human experience and human behavior and societies, everything is a

subtle, it's almost like vectors. If you think about sort of like a large vector map and all these arrows pointing in different directions, some of those directions or some of those arrows have greater force than other ones, and some are subtle. The manipulation of, you know, serotonin and dopamine and other types of chemical receptors are kind of a very effective way to manipulate humans to behave in certain ways, like the reward mechanism. Our biology developed to reward us to do things that would actually enhance our survival. And we are being exploited because in the digital world, things that used to be very expensive or very time consuming or resource intensive are actually now very cheap and effective.

You can get, I can have 8,000 girlfriends effectively through the internet by having all these different simultaneous conversations going on. Now, there's no real intimacy. There's no real connection. And I'll probably never, you know, reproduce with any of them. In fact, I know that to be true. But the things that turn me on about other people are still present because that's, you know, how we evolved. So it's less about kind of maybe turning off those mechanisms or barring those types of manipulations in the environment. I think the ultimate kind of outcome is teaching each individual to be more aware of the ways in which they are susceptible, the ways in which they can be manipulated, and then bringing, and I know this is like, oh, woo-woo now, and, you know, I've gone off

the rails, but like becoming more conscious of those types of things. So then you have more opportunities to choose to be manipulated by, let's say, something in the metaverse, and to say, yes, I do want to have this experience and I do want to go down that path. And yes, I really do want that dopamine hit. Or to say, actually, I really need to do this other thing and this other thing is very important to me. And that other thing might be, you know, real intimacy with a, with a real human in the real world, or it might be really having a connection with a friend, or might be going for a walk in nature and forest bathing, whatever it might happen to be. But that requires a level of awareness and kind of self-awareness in order to give yourself

those opportunities to choose. Brian? Speaking of self-awareness, I got to call you up for claiming you can have 8,000 girlfriends. GPD3, you know, I just set it in off, you know? One more thing about this in me, you know, throwing things at you as a product, guru or whatever. What do you think of the idea of Be Real? I think in Casey's piece he says that, or no, it was a garbage day. What's his name? Ryan was arguing that Be Real is sort of the same trend as wordle, the idea that there's a specific time, there's an alert time. And so it gives

the sense of a shared participatory thing. And what do you think about that? Because people have tried that. I mean, and I'm even thinking of what was the trivia, HQ trivia, things like that. The web is so asynchronous still. And in a way, completely participatory in the moment, sharing things in the moment seems to be so anathema to what the web can do. Or am I wrong about that? Like is, no, I think, I think it's about what, what do you, like, I know, like, from a product

perspective, what job are you hiring the internet to do for you today? And for a lot of people, it's finding a moment of connection to other people who are not there with them and engaging in some form of play or some sort of activity, you know, which maybe either is mindless or is a little bit competitive, you know, and it doesn't require you to like sit there and play call of duty for like three hours to kind of, you know, have the full experience. So I think, like, in this case, like you're totally right. And actually, before I started the conversational AI company, or co-founded it, I was thinking about doing a dating app built on this idea where essentially there'd be a set of candidates that would show up on kind of a regular, you know, point of time every day. And you'd have like two or three of them to do sort of like a fast, speed dating kind of video thing with. And the point would be to kind of, you know, evaluate, I don't want to say like evaluate people kind of like in a fast pace, but to bring people. people's like a more authentic expression of self through this time bound essentially appointment dates or appointment dating. Now, there's many of these apps that exist. And so, you know, obviously we move forward with video, you know,

conferencing and people are more comfortable with cameras at the time. It felt like something that was a little bit edgy and that was beyond a lot of people's comfort zones. But yet Tinder, you know, created a stack of cards that you could flip through very easily and just respond to, again, like I said, like whatever was the most aesthetically pleasing to you and leads to a kind of vapid like hookup culture, which, you know, that's fine. And it may, you know, help people to reproduce or something, but not when, you know, birth control is, is now, you know, commonly available and normalized. So setting the side, I guess, like, point being, I do think that there are these moments where you, you break through because you have a concept that connects to a need that people have from a behavioral, interpersonal, social sense.

And then the technology facilitates and assists it, especially when that technology, technology arrives at a point where it is commonly or diffuse, like, through a culture, right? Like, Wordle might not have made sense, you know, in 2005 or six. I mean, maybe. I mean, there were actually word games that were on Twitter back then. But, of course, not many people used Twitter. So you couldn't really get the critical mass where any random person in your office might actually be playing that day. And then when you say the joke about Wordle, like they kind of get it.

You know what I mean? What was the word today? It's sort of like what words with friends also. Yeah. Oh, man. That was such a moment. that are on they're on WhatsApp groups

that all they do is share their I got the word in three today and stuff it is that sort of like a shared experience and like at the same time of day thing I mean it's the same as like streaks on Snapchat right like people will literally go on there and they'll like take a photo of their shoe or whatever

just to show like this kind of ambient intimacy because you know it's it's easy it doesn't take that much work but it means something it's like somebody else thought about me that day and I think for a lot of people that's actually very meaningful. So I think, you know, Saoud made this point about Web3 kind of missing the point. And I would actually kind of very much agree because, you know, one of the things that I wrote is kind of funny. Actually, this is the point that I want to actually make. So I'll sort of come around to

it. You know, you're sort of asking the question about the platonic ideal of a social network, or I suppose a social media, which is built upon, or maybe media that is built upon a social network or something. And like, what does that look like? And is it the feed? You know, and why is it the feed. And I think that what we've missed is that technology has slowly become much more of a fashion or fashionable statement, like fast fashion. And so moving through these apps, these apps have become a lot more disposable and they're not as, you know, pristine as they once were. I mean, even again, what we're talking about with Suud's, you know, fake spot app, there are a lot of, like if you go into, and I was thinking about, I don't know, this would be a really probably boring

show, but interesting nonetheless, like the deep guts of the app store, probably has just like all these dropship kind of products, you know, are. There are these apps that just exist out there that people randomly stumble upon. And for some reason, download and install them. And there's probably lots of fake reviews that kind of, you know, are in that space as well. There's all this validation around it because it's become so cheap and inexpensive to build, like, micro variations on a theme or on a concept. For example, I don't even what I searched for today. But I ended up on this app that lets you, like, play with these 3D avatars and, like, play

with like hairstyles or something. I'm like, who sat down and like built this thing and like launched it and went through the app store review process and all these things and why and who and it just didn't make sense to me. But it just points to how much easier it to become to produce these things and how much they become much more like fashion. So anyways, when it comes back to Web3, my point is about what Steve Jobs said quite some time ago about computers. And specifically I think he was talking about PCs and how I think his quote was something about how there's no sex in them anymore. And to be a technologist and a product designer, that was a rather provocative statement at the time. And certainly someone, you know, when I was not as integrated as I think I'd become,

whereas once I saw the AirPods, I realized that this was a moment where, like, you know, computers could be sexy. Like the AirPods are a type of, like a type of computer, but we don't relate to them in that way. And so in 2016, when I wrote about the AirPods and I said, you know, they're essentially the sex sex, like fuck your ears. Like, the way in which they were marketed were marketed, like cigarettes used to be. And cigarettes used to be sexy. They used to be, you know, there was like this kind of a lure or things along those lines that, you know, weren't applied to computers because computers came out of the office space. They were about productivity, getting things done, about being rational, about being in the mind, about actually denying your body senses. So the products

that tap into, you know, the heart, the mind, like the groin, like different pieces of the body that allow you to be more integrated. I think are really interesting to think about because we tend to think about it purely from a rational perspective. And I think that's where Web3 goes wrong. Web 3 is so rational. It's so about identity. It's so about cryptography. It's so about math.

And most people, most humans, I don't think that they like to live with products or with those experiences that over amplify that side of the human experience. You know, the irony here is web 3 is kind of stuck in Web 1. No, unpack that. It's playing a little more. I mean, cryptography and many of the technology. we see with HGDP, for example, everything that's running on top that we're using on the internet right now, all the protocols that we're using right now for streaming, all of these things think we're built in the 80s. And in the 60s, yeah, even in the 60s and 70s, even machine learning, first neural networks, the perceptron,

those were all made in the 60s and 70s. What's interesting here is Web 3 is taking inspiration from the first early days of the internet and the first early days of technology. But cryptography was a base foundational level. Without cryptography, you can't have transactions online, right? And I think it's a very interesting irony that Web 3, in order for it to grow, it needs to look at Web 1 or Web 0.1. Well, and I mean, this is 100% my, one of my main criticisms of Web 3 is that it is so, we've almost had someone come on and talk about can we do crypto or Web 3 without the religion.

It's such a cause where, well, everything that's been successful in Web 1 and 2 is about hiding the complexity. You're talking about like HTTP and email. All the protocols are hidden and sublimated and made simpler for people. But the people in Web 3 and crypto are so obsessed with the purity of the religion. like the idea is so important that they don't allow themselves to sublimate and make a product dumber for people and be real is almost the same type of thing to a degree in terms of the degree to which it is slimmed down the kind of experience to a daily notification you know front back photo and a time limit on when you can express yourself now how they paint

themselves out of that corner into a full-fledged, you know, business, I don't know. But they have the wedge. And so in a similar way, I think what's interesting about some of the Web3 fundamentals is that they aspire to be kind of like the next generation building blocks. You know, it was interesting, again, kind of like an adjacent space, but thinking about how these things connect. Roblox, I believe yesterday or the day before, has now allowed you to create custom materials, which start to allow you to create Roblox experience, which used to be super blocky and very basic, almost like, you know, kind of 2D, very retro kind of computing experiences now, they're starting to look more like unity.

They're starting to look more like Call of Duty. They're starting to look more like a real metaverse kind of container and context. And so because they have all that behavior, because they're growing up with a generation that has literally used Roblox as their social context on the internet, they can move the goalposts forward kind of gradually and evolve or co-evolve that experience with. them. So I think that's, that's, uh, like an interesting thing to see. And so I think web three aspires to have the same type of generativity occur. But because there's only a small subset of people, I think who are as angry about, I don't know, like, you know, how expensive it is to

build new products and to, you know, have to deal with, oh, having a skin in the game or yeah, or the big platforms own everything. Right, right, right. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It's like, the first principles of Web three are not, um, delighting a customer. they're this crusade. And you can still have the crusade. I said to a company I was investing in recently that I was like, I know what you want to do. You want to start a revolution. Do me a favor.

You can still do the revolution, but first get in the door. You know what I mean? You're not going to get in the door with the pitchfork and the, you know, the flaming stake in your hand. Get in the door. You can still do the. revolution, but you got to get in the door first, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder, um, sorry, there's, I also have discovered that one of my other shed friends, um, which is the, the hashtag that I'm using to document all the animals that are coming to play around my,

uh, shed. So there's a child who apparently lives next door and around this time every night comes out and plays basketball and screams their goddamn head off. Um, in any case, can't hear it. Can't hear it. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. That's good. Um, anyways, I do think, or I wonder, whether that now that there's this interesting and perhaps sustained crypto winter, whether this will allow for a lot of the opportunists to kind of leave the room and for the people who are still there wanting to build and create these building blocks for the next iteration of internet technology, if that now gives them the space to do so. If the profit motive is no longer quite there and a participation motive instead replaces that. I feel like that did happen with like the Web 1.0

kind of web vans and, you know, a lot of the stuff that you've talked about, Brian. And as a result, there's a generation that grows up thinking a little bit differently about ownership or about protocols or about decentralization. I mean, those words, those values were not present when I was working on decentralized social networks in 2007, eight, nine. In fact, actually, it's funny, a month from now, it's going to be the 15th anniversary of the hashtag. So we've kind of like come to this full arc where ideas that were just like a glimmer sort of back then. Now granted, of course, the internet started out as a decentralized system, but then has centralized. This is just a natural respiration process of breathing in and breathing out that I think naturally occurs.

Anyways, we're getting along and our waxing now. Should we do a special episode about that? Are there people you could bring on to talk about that? Oh, that would be a good challenge, actually, for the next month. Yeah. Why don't we, why don't we see? Can we do something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. If there's anything else, I'm going to throw out there that I'm waiting on delivery of my MacBook Air, speaking of Steve Jobs saying there's no sex in computing anymore. That's true. That's true. That was one of the devices that he put some sex into. The friggin' MacBook Air looks sexy as shit, even though I got the one that supposedly has fingerprints all over it. But, you know.

Yeah, but if you don't touch it and you use it with gloves, then it's, yeah, exactly. You're using it wrong. Although, by the way, one of the things that I have done, you know, as I've been open about my reestablishing the foundations of my workflow and things like that is I did go the opposite way. So the Mac Studio souped it up. Most storage I could get, most RAM I could get. But because I never open up my laptop maybe once or twice.

a month now, I got the smallest in terms of storage. I still went up to the 16 gigabytes of RAM just to be on the 6th. You know, I wonder if actually Mighty would be a worthwhile product for you. Like, you know, because again, this is the trend. I think, again, the trend is that people want to have these, you know, sexy, very easy to carry simple devices. Yeah. And yet they don't want to sacrifice the power. And if the power is actually in the cloud, then they don't have to make that compromise. Right. And that's what I'm saying is as as I described. I have made full use of not only the Microsoft Cloud that I pay for every year, but also the I Cloud Cloud that I pay for every year.

So that's the thinking is that if I'm only opening this device once or twice a month or when I have to go on the road to produce the show, I don't need to soup it up as much and everything will be in shared. Also, like it's good enough, right? I mean, like these latest models. Anyway, yeah, so, yeah, I hear you. I'll be interested to get a real world report and to see if it actually meets your needs. Um, the, uh, how have you been, is it, is it Sonic that you use as the IC?

You're still, you're still happy out in the shed with the sonic? I, I am. Um, I actually wired, um, my Ethernet all the way from the box at the other side of the house, all the way into the shed. Um, and so I'm, I'm getting actually, you know, I want to say six or seven hundred megs down and, uh, actually get up, better, um, up, up speeds, like, uh, 800 megs up. Oh, I think you said that. Yeah. know, here's another old man memory and then we can go. But when I, my first apartment out of college, so, you know, like, I've graduated. I still had roommates and stuff or whatever. But so we still wired the Ethernet to each of our rooms in the apartment that we had. So this is 99. And then I remember it was in that first apartment. So maybe this is 2000 or into the summer of 2001 or whatever. When we first. got Wi-Fi. We literally took our computers and walked around the house and we're like, no, wait, there's no wires. And then like we walked out. It was like magic. And the apartment complex. And we're like, look, I can go all the way to the pool.

You made me think of that by wiring the Ethernet out to your shed. I mean, given the experience I had earlier where my internet dropped when we were recording, I was like, never again. So it was worth it. Yeah. I just did the test. Oh, I go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I was going to say I got 556 down and 513 up. So, you know, I'm pretty happy.

It's not a full gig, but it's not bad. Well, I always hear Sonic is amazing, and I wish I could get it here on the East Coast. But, okay, last thing. And maybe this is nothing, but did Twitter recently add noises? They did. Yes, there was a whole little thing about this. Yes. So actually, somebody had reached out to me through DMs.

and wanted to remind me of the story about how the developer of Tweedy, which was, of course, the app that Twitter acquired, which was the original and became the Twitter app, the Twitter native app, had patented the pull to refresh action. This is Lauren Bictor, I believe. And when you pulled it down, of course, the little thing would start spinning, and then it would make a sound when the pull down kind of went back up, sort of like a screen or whatever.

a um those call those things anyways it doesn't matter but yeah so they just refresh their sounds and i've noticed this because now when i'm on twitter and i'm listening to a podcast i'll actually hear those little sounds and i'm like wait what was that what was that but yes they did yes you're not i thought it was me and i was losing my okay no it's like it's it's we always have this and i couldn't hear it no yeah yeah good catch good catch um because we we have a thing um archie the dog has been getting on the counter. So we have a little collar that beeps. You put the little thing on the, and it's the sound is so low. It's one of those things where you know how supposedly when you age, you can't hear sounds in certain registers. And so I can barely hear it, but Max the other day was like,

what's that beeping noise? And I literally couldn't hear it. I was in the same room as it. And I was like, oh, right, because you're probably young enough that you can hear that register. And so I was thinking the same thing was happening to me on Twitter, but in the reverse. No, no. But similar. All right. This has been a great show. So thanks so much for joining us. That was really great.

And thanks everyone else for listening. This is another episode of the TechBeem Ride Home Experience. I believe as long as we don't get COVID again, we'll be back here probably recording next week. But we definitely have something booked for next week that I'm very excited. We do. We do. Yes. All right.

I love everyone. Bye.