Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/25 – The Blue Checkmarks Are Returning To Twitter

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Twitter is revving the little blue checkmark engine back up, but it will work slightly differently than before. Stripe is either already impossibly big, or not nearly as big as it should be, depending on your point of view. Are you ready to speculate about the next generation of Apple Silicon chips? And, uniquely for this week, the week… end longreads suggestions. Sponsors: VistaPrint.com/techmeme Tovala.com for $200 off the oven! Links: Twitter to relaunch account verifications in early 2021, asks for feedback on policy (TechCrunch) Payments Startup Stripe in Talks for Funding at $70 Billion Valuation or More (Bloomberg) MacBook Pro 16-inch M1X chip just leaked — and it's game over for Intel (Tom's Guide) Kuo: iPhone 12 demand strong, new form factor Apple Watch and MacBooks in late 2021 (9to5Mac) Ethereum 2.0’s Genesis Day Is Officially Set for Dec. 1 (Coindesk) Week-end Longread Suggestions: Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon? (NYTimes Magazine) Hollywood’s ‘We’re Not in Kansas Anymore’ Moment (NYTimes) How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism (The New Yorker) Substack got lucky, and so did Margins (Margins) Why a Paid Newsletter Won't Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That's Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator (Hunter Walk) If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (Anil Dash) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Wednesday, November 25th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter is revving the little blue checkmark engine backup, but it will work slightly differently than before. Stripe is either already impossibly big or not nearly as big as it should be, depending on your point of view.

Are you ready to speculate about the next generation of Apple Silicon chips? And uniquely for this week, the week end, long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter says it is bringing account verifications back. But if you're coveting one of those blue check marks like I am, you might want to note that it's going to work slightly differently this time, because Twitter's going to do verification in one of six categories when they spin this up again in early 2021. Quoting TechCrunch. Under the policy, Twitter will initially verify six types of accounts, including those belonging to government officials, companies and brands, and nonprofit organizations, news, entertainment, sports, and activists, organizers, and other influential individuals. The number of categories could expand in time.

Twitter's verification system, which provides a blue checkmark to designate accounts belonging to public figures, was paused in 2017 as the company tried to address confusion over what it meant to be verified. The company today shared a draft of its new verification policy in order to gain public feedback. The policy details more specifically which accounts can be verified and introduces additional guidelines that could limit some accounts from receiving the blue badge. For example, Twitter says the accounts must be, quote, notable and active, and the badge won't be

awarded to any accounts with incomplete profiles. Twitter will also deny or remove verification badges from otherwise qualified individuals if their accounts are found to be in repeated violation of the Twitter rules. The company additionally admitted it had verified accounts over the years, which should not be, as based on those guidelines. To correct this, Twitter will begin to automatically remove badges from accounts that are inactive or have incomplete profiles to help it streamline its work going forward. The policy also lays out specifics about how it will determine whether an account in a supported category will qualify. For example, news organizations will have to adhere to professional standards for journalism and independent or freelance journalists will need to provide

at least three bylines in qualifying organizations published in the last six months. Entertainers will need to be able to point to credits on their IMDB page or to references and verify news publications, government officials will need to show a public reference on an official government website, party website, or multiple references by news media. Sports figures will have to appear on team websites, rosters, or in sports data services like sport radar. There are a few other ways to be verified in these categories, too, end quote. I kind of find it fascinating that Twitter still finds verifying accounts to be useful for them. As John Worth tweeted, quote, this is interesting, but it still does not really answer, what is verification for, end quote.

And some suggestions are already flooding in from Tweeps. As the Tier Zoo tweeted, YouTubers, Twitch streamers, and other content creators are some of the most frequently impersonated Twitter users, and for some reason, they're also rarely verified. Please take this survey and tell Twitter that digital content creators need the badge, end quote. And as Trevor Branch tweeted, quote, Hey Twitter, if you want to stand up for facts in reality, how about adding scientists and doctors as a category for verified accounts? Interesting raise rumor from someone we are already familiar with. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Stripe is in early funding talks with investors that would value it between $70 and $100 billion. Stripe was last valued at $36 billion back in just April.

The company has benefited during the pandemic with more shoppers turning to eat. e-commerce. It's gone on offense during the downturn this year, starting a card issuing service for U.S. clients and agreeing to acquire a Nigerian startup to expand in Africa. Stripe is already well capitalized, but a new round of financing could help it continue to scale as a private company. In April, the San Francisco-based company raised $600 million from investors, including Andreson Horowitz and Sequoia Capital at a valuation of $36 billion. The business has raised almost $2 billion since it started about a decade ago, according to Pitchbook data. Other stripe backers include General Catalysts, Founders Fund, and Kosovo Ventures, end quote.

Note that a $70 billion valuation would make Stripe worth more than Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but as Robert Stevens tweeted, quote, the only people not surprised developers who use Stripe. As Richard Burton tweeted, PayPal is worth $240 billion. Shopify is worth $120 billion. Stripe is worth way more than $70 billion, in my opinion, end quote. More Mac chip stuff for you. Folks are still putting the M1 chip through its paces, but that's not stopping other folks

from anticipating the next flavor of Apple Silicon. Tom's guide thinks it'll be called the M1X chip, destined for a 16-inch MacBook Pro sometime next year. And according to their leaker, here are the details. It'll have 12 cores, 8 performance cores, and 4 high-efficiency cores. It'll be coming to a MacBook Pro 16-inch unveiling as a press. release, and according to the source who used the prototype, if you think the M1 is fast, you haven't seen M1X, quote. According to Atleaks Apple Pro, which has a good track record with this sort of thing,

the M1X is set to debut in a 16-inch MacBook Pro sometime next year. Considering the 16-inch MacBook Pro is the flagship MacBook right now, it makes sense that Apple would use it to launch an even better chip set, especially if it really is this much faster than the M-1 chip in the 13-inch MacBook Pro. And if the details about the number of cores are true, then this really is set out to be one hell of a chip. Just for reference, the current M1 chip only has eight cores in total with four high performance and four efficiency cores inside. Eight performance cores is going to be a site to see, assuming Apple can keep the power requirements at manageable levels. The only questions we have are whether the M1X name will stick and when it might arrive. After all, if it's really got double the number of performance cores, Apple may want to pick a name that reflects the boost and power.

As for when it will be released, it could be any time between now and early next year, especially if there's only going to be a press release and no big launch event, end quote. But our good friend Minshi Kuo says that he has a good idea when this new Apple Silicon is coming. He says Apple will introduce redesigned MacBooks with new Apple Silicon in the second half of 2021. Note, he said, redesigned MacBooks. He also thinks this could come alongside an Apple Watch with a redesigned form factor, quote. For the Apple Watch, customer response to Apple Watch series 6 and Apple Watch SE has reportedly been strong. Quo says to expect, quote, innovative health management

functions and improved form factor design with new models of Apple Watch coming next year. Reception to Apple's first arm max has also been better than expected, according to Quo. The analyst reiterates his previous predictions that Apple will introduce new Apple Silicon Max with all new form factor and industrial design in the second half of 2021. However, it is is less positive news for AirPods. Quo says AirPods shipments are lower than originally estimated, with Quo now forecasting a 5 to 10% decline in year-over-year sales for the next six-month period. Another contributing factor is that Quo now expects the launch of AirPods 3 to be delayed from early 2021 to the April-June timeframe, end quote.

I mentioned this before, that Ethereum was nearing a so-called Genesis Day, the first of four migration phases to the new Ethereum 2.0 blockchain, well, the first of these has indeed been set for December 1st next week, after enough funds were secured for the project on Monday, quoting CoinDesk. All of Ethereum 2.0's primary implementations have agreed upon the same Genesis state route of the new blockchain or its precise origins in the code. I would say we are comfortably halfway through the overall effort to make ETH2 feature complete, Drake told CoinDesk over direct message. The research, which lasted years, is largely done,

and the Phase Zero genesis is definitely a significant implementation milestone. Phase Zero lays the heavy-duty foundations, signatures, Merclissation networking, eth-one deposits, randomness, point of sale, etc. Many of the upcoming hard forks will layer relatively thin infrastructure on top of these foundations, end quote. As for the rest of the bootstrapping phases, Drake said the second to last one, the full merging of Ethereum 1.0's blockchain and ecosystem of tokens and applications into Ethereum 2.0 will require, quote, significant engineering and will be very coordination heavy, end quote. When asked for a rough date for Ethereum 2.0's launch, Drake told CoinDesk that he has been at times both too optimistic

and too pessimistic, so his target should be taken with a huge grain of salt. That said, Drake anticipates that Ethereum 2.0 could be feature ready by mid-20203. Ether's price ran up in anticipation of the upgrade and is currently resting. just above $600, end quote. By the way, I haven't had a chance to mention this, but if you haven't checked on the price of Bitcoin lately, maybe do that because it's getting pretty close to its all-time high. So this will be the final show of the week for reasons which I will explain at the end of this episode.

But since it is going to be the end of the week for us, for our purposes, that must mean it's time for the week and long-read suggestions. First up, the New York Times Magazine takes a look at Shopify and asks if it can beat Amazon at its own game without becoming Amazon. They also highlighted an angle to Shopify's success that I hadn't considered, quote. The story of Shopify's rise, then, is in many ways a reaction to Amazon's. It's about a new generation of e-commerce merchants who won a shot at securing control by going out on their own. If the key to Amazon's success has been to put the customer first, for Shopify, the key has been to put the merchant first. after Warby Parker kicked off the direct-to-consumer phenomenon in 2010, Shopify has,

by removing the technical barriers to entry in e-commerce played an outsized role in fueling a boom that has since produced indie favorites like Jim Shark, Brooklinen, and Allbirds. Now that companies like Shopify have turned software into a commodity, what distinguishes you isn't whether you can write code, but whether you have something to say in an audience to say it, too. The roles of creator and influencer, which began as ambiguous, relatively fringe sidegigs, have become aspirational career paths. 86% of Gen Z and millennials recently surveyed said they would post-sponsored content for money, and 54% said they would become social media influencers.

Influencers, in turn, have realized that it's more lucrative and meaningful to promote their own products rather than someone else's. With Shopify celebrities like Kylie Jenner can leverage their pre-existing audiences on Instagram or Snapchat into billion-dollar e-commerce businesses seemingly overnight, end quote. Yeah, more on this in the coming weeks and months, but the real and true power of the influencer and creator economy is something that I am belatedly coming to get religion about. Next, we've been covering the whole rise of streaming as pretty much no longer just the future of Hollywood, but now the only game plan in town. I missed highlighting the fact that Wonder Woman 1984 will be debuting on HBO Max the same day. It quote-unquote debuts and theaters.

I very much think that we might look back on this moment in time, as the moment when the entertainment industry changed forever. And the New York Times tends to agree, quote, in explaining why WarnerMedia had decided to release the much-anticipated Big Budget Wonder Woman 1984 simultaneously in theaters and on the streaming service HBO Max on Christmas Day, the company's chief executive Jason Killar invoked the classic Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz. We're not in Kansas anymore, Mr. Collar said in a statement. No longer, he said, would a film's success be judged solely by the box office revenue it generates in

theaters. Instead, it would be measured partly by the number of HBO Max subscribers it is able to attract. And just like Dorothy entering the Technicolor world of Oz, Hollywood feels as if it's stepping into a new era, one with streaming at the center, end quote. This week's New Yorker takes a look at the state of venture capital and doesn't like what it sees, quote, venture capitalists began telling Jeremy Nooner that making piddly investments in his company wasn't worth their time. Moreover, if they funded his startup Next Space, a WeWork competitor, they might be excluded from buying into WeWorks someday. To Nooner, this seemed nuts. He was building a solid business, but the VCs wanted fantasy. All we needed was $5 million a year in revenues and we would have made money for everyone, he told me.

That's enough to earn a living and buy a house and put your kids through school, but no one wanted something that just made a healthy living. They all wanted to find the next Zuckerberg, end quote. Nooner was frustrated, but he wasn't surprised. He knew that American history was filled with entrepreneurs like P.T. Barnum, Walt Disney, and Charles Ponzi, self-promoters whose audaciousness created new industries and vast riches, and who occasionally ended up in jail. What Nooner hadn't realized was that some venture capitalists had become co-conspirators with such hype artists, handing them millions of dollars and encouraging their worst tendencies in the hope that one lucky wager would more than offset many bad bets. In six years, Nooner opened nine next-space locations,

far east of Chicago. But I was so burnt out by everyone saying I was a failure just because I didn't want to dominate the globe, he said. In 2014, Nuna resigned and Nex Space began closing its sights. It was heartbreaking, he said. VCs seem like these quiet, boring guys who are good at math encourage you to dream big and have private planes. You know who else is quiet, good at math, and has private planes? Drug cartels, end quote. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about we work and especially benchmark capital in this story. In fact, basically, wework and benchmark are the through line through this entire piece. And it includes this interesting nugget about how benchmarks somehow managed to eke out a thousand X return on its we work investment, even though

you would have thought that was an investment that went south. Still poking around the substack story, I guess I really am on the creator economy beat all of a sudden. Interesting analysis from friends of the show and early substack adopters, the guys over at the margins, Kandaruk analyzes substack from the inside as a substack creator himself and says this, quote, The challenge and the opportunity of substack are that it is by design an internet company that uses open and freely available internet technologies. It is such a thin layer that it is barely there for both sides, making it immediately replaceable and extremely invaluable. The company pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to big names to get its name across and acquire

mindshare in a market where switching costs are zero. But those barriers that it needs to erect are the same ones that will make the experience less native to the technologies it is built on, and the spirit of openness and decentralization it embodies. RSS did not die because of Google Reader's demise, but Google Reader's dominance made it easy to kill. A substack inbox that owns all the newsletter could pose similar risks, end quote. Meanwhile, on Substack 1.0, if you will, aka Medium. Another friend of the podcast, Hunter Walk, says that having a paid newsletter won't be enough for most writers, and that's fine, because he's imagining a creator economy future that he's calling the multi-skew creator, quote, the biggest impact of someone like Casey Newton

unbundling himself from Vox is that he is now an entrepreneur with a product called Casey. His beachhead may very well be a paid newsletter. It's very good, by the way, but the newsletter is just one skew. Maybe the skew he cares most about, maybe even the skew that makes him the most money. But it doesn't have to be the only skew. There could be a podcast skew, a speaking fee skew, a book deal skew, a consulting skew, a guest columnist skew, and so on. And if he does several of those over the next few years, it won't be about the success or failure of substack for him, but a mix of creative, economic, and lifestyle goals, end quote. And finally, I don't remember the rabbit hole that sent me back to this classic blog post from Anil Dash this week. And yes, it's very much from the

blog era, but it has a lesson in here that is something every entrepreneur and product designer needs to internalize. It's an evergreen lesson from the very title of the piece itself. If your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. Substitute community app or platform for website in that sentence, and you'll get the idea, quote, How many times have you seen a website say, we're not responsible for the content of our comments? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation. Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are.

When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other and you're the person who made it possible, that's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids, and people who make communities on the web have to moderate them, end quote. So yes, here in the U.S., Thanksgiving is tomorrow, so even though I'm not hustling to get out of town today, as per usual, even though we're not going anywhere this year,

I will still be taking tomorrow and Friday off. So I will talk to you again on Monday. Please enjoy your holiday if you're here in the U.S. And be safe, everyone, if you're enjoying your holiday. I will be playing Hyrule Warriors with Penny basically every day and also reading Book 4 of the Stormlight Archive since it just came out a week ago. I think I shared with you all when I discovered that series late last year.

I would never argue that it's great, but it's very, very good comfort food. I've not looked so forward to a book release in many years. If you like your fantasy fiction, big and dumb, with magical swords and magical castles above the clouds and magic systems that allow characters to fly once they've said their oaths, allowing them to ingest Stormlight, the very power that comes from the Eversstorm that rages across the planet, then yeah. The Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy series for you. Talk to y'all on Monday.