The Vergecast - Meta and Reddit prove the social web is over

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss the vibe shift that is happening on social media and the communal internet. Further reading: Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor shown in leaked screenshots Facebook, Fosstodon & The Fediverse Daring Fireball: Not That Kind of 'Open' Daring Fireball: More on Preemptively Blocking Facebook’s Imminent ActivityPub Entry It's September, Forever Mark Zuckerberg agrees to Elon Musk cage match challenge  Reddit removed moderators behind the latest protests before restoring a few of them Reddit says it’s ‘not acceptable’ for communities to go NSFW in protest Google Pixel Tablet review: the dock makes all the difference Apple reportedly has fitness features for the Vision Pro we haven’t seen yet Easily replaceable phone batteries might be back, and I’m here for it Gary Vaynerchuk is 'petrified' of Slack TikTok COO V. Pappas has reportedly quit Microsoft is hiking the price of Xbox Series X and Xbox Game Pass DPReview will live, actually — under new ownership Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk fighting in a cage. The exclusive team covering it. Alex Heath broke this story. Yeah.

That's fine. I'm proud of him. He's a great reporter. Not only did Alex Heath break this story. I think Alex Heath like wielded it into existence. That's the problem, really, is that Alex is goading it into reality. And that's fine. And it appears we can talk about it.

It appears Mark Zucker, Ruckerberg really wants to do this. He should. And I feel that we should be very proud of ourselves as the verge, as the journalistic institution that we have become. And also deeply, extremely ashamed that this is happening on our watch. That feels right. Here's this story. I'm your friend, Nelai.

Alex Kranz is here. I'm your friend who could take Musk in a fight, but probably couldn't take Zuck in a fight. I'm going to let that sit. David Pierce is here. Hi. I have already called Dibbson being the sideline reporter who interviews the fighters between rounds. It's going to be unbelievable. We run a gigantic sports website.

SB Nation's right there. They have a giant combat sports operation. Ariel Hawani is a part of the Vox Media. Wait, we can do it. No, we're going to do it. This is the corporate synergy we've been waiting for. Draft Kings Nation, the SB Nation partnership with Draft Kings is already like running odds on this fight. It's a lot. There's a lot going on here. Here's what I will tell.

We have nothing to do with it, by the way. They're just like doing their thing. It's just very funny. Here's the story as we know it today. Instagram is going to launch some competitor to Twitter. It's called Threats. We've seen screenshots of it from presentations that we're given inside of meta. Their position, and this is what they said at the all hands that Alex Heath reported on,

was people want a competitor or Twitter that is sanely run. That's what they said. The audience of meta employees like clap to this, which is also very funny, given that meta does not have like a sparkling content moderation track. record, but whatever, meta is the company like set up the fake Supreme Court of Content moderation. They're doing it a different way. Elon is, I would say, not doing it that way.

He's running Twitter in a different way. That feels correct. Yeah. It's a very political way to say it. I like that. Yeah. One is a train and the other one is like an out of control haunted car from a horror movie. There are different ways of running a business.

You know? Yeah. Every now and again, someone on decoder is like, I don't know how I make decisions. I get drunk and flip coins until I fall down. And that's one way to run a business. Okay, fine. So now Elon has been tweeting about Zuck, like taunts about this Instagram competitor. This Instagram competitor, we're going to talk about in much more detail in just a second

because it is causing a lot of drama on the sort of federated social networks of the internet. However, someone goaded Elon into tweeting he would like to cage fight Zuck. Wait, can I just interrupt real fast? Not only someone. I'm looking at this tweet thread right now, and it is like the most beautifully Twitter thing of all time. So Mario Nafal, I think is how you pronounce it, tweets it, has lots of followers.

It's like a thing Elon Musk would potentially have seen. Elon responds to a tweet about Instagram threads being a thing. He responds, I'm sure Earth can't wait to be exclusively under Zucks thumb with no other options. At least it will be sane, was worried there for a moment, laugh-crying emoji. And then a person on Twitter who has 68 followers. 68 and a blue check. One assumes and a blue check. No blue check. This is the thing that is my surprising. Elon Musk, check in his unverified replies. I love that for it. Whose username is KW. Markoff 26656 and whose username is KW Markoff at AOL.com. It's very good. Responds, better be careful at Elon Musk. I heard he does the jujitsu now and then nine different laughing emojis. And then to that, Elon Musk responds, I'm up for a

cage match if he is, L.O.L. And that's how this all began. 68 followers. Haunted car. That's all I'm saying. A legend. Zuck responds to this by screenshoting Elon's tweet. Apparently, this is a reference to some famous M.M.A. fighter, and he just puts block text over it that says, send me location. You would think that this story has now reached its cringiest point. Yeah, that's like the cringe level there is. And here's where our friend Alex pours gasoline. on the fire, he reaches out to Meta and says, is this real? Does he actually want to fight Musk? Which is, I would say, just a very funny thing for a reporter to ask, does your billionaire

CEO wish to fight the other billionaire CEO for real? Or is he just taunting him with references to fighting? Like, in the annals of journalism, that's chapter one. Yeah. And there's like, for most people, we assume it's just a taunt because they're very rich, very pasty billionaires. But it is true that Mark Zuckerberg has been training in martial arts. He did like a fight with Rogan and he had made a video of himself training. It's like a whole thing he did. He has competed in tournaments. So meta PR is like it speaks for himself if he wants to fight him. And now everything we have heard is that Zuck is actually serious about this. Yeah. That he is pushing for luminaries of the fight world to somehow get involved. Jake Paul is like, I want to run it on ESS.

SPN Plus, which is just very funny. She's like a fighter too now. Yeah. There's no money being an influencer. We'll talk about the very interesting interview later. But like you can be a famous influencer and then your immediate moves to find something that will make you money. And the next turn of that is social media CEOs pivoting to combat sports. Right.

It's like it's the same thing. It's like there's not a lot of money in social media. Get that pay for view money. You pivot to fighting. You need to collect some actual dollars. Yeah. Anyway, it has this story has gone. from funny Alex Heath joke on the website

to what I would describe is an inescapable and exhausting worldwide phenomenon. People are taking action on this fight that hasn't happened and should not happen. Do you guys remember in 2006, there was this director named Uwe Boll who was known for doing like horrible garbage video game adaptions? And critics hated him.

And he was like, I'm going to fight my critics. And so he invited them all to fight, including like low tax, the founder of something awful and proceeded to beat every single one of them. Like destroyed them. It was this saddest thing in the world. I knew one of the guys and he's like, yeah, I'm going to fight him

and you're like, oh. And that's kind of, I'm kind of worried for Elon for that very reason. Because these guys were all like, well, whatever, he's a film director. I can fight him. And like, no, he's like, he's like, he's like getting a little jacked, was like ready. We'll put the link to Zuck fighting a guy in the show notes.

There's a YouTube video. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting fight. I want to make it very clear. My position is that these men should not fight each other. I don't think that would be good for the world. No. It would be like the most excruciating thing to watch.

And just I think I'd feel like we'd reached the point where we just shut it down. When I say that as my position, nominally, That would be the editorial position of The Verge. But I suspect very strongly that in a sort of mutiny type situation, the editorial position of the Verge is composed by its staff is Let Them Fight. Yeah. And I'm a little worried about that, but we're just going to let them fight. Let them fight.

The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there has already been a meeting at the WWE about how to get Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg into a ring together. Yeah. And if it hasn't, please invite me to that meeting. The last thing I will say about this, and then we should actually talk about the real drama with Instagram threads. The last thing I will say is Elon is the WWE and Zuck is the UFC and those things are not necessarily compatible.

Right. Like that's actually the split here. Yeah. Is Elon, I think, would definitely do the WWE thing. I think Zuck wants to actually punch him in the face. Yeah, that's fair. That feels right. All right.

Let's talk about the actual. We'll see. I'm sorry. I don't know. We do not condone violence. How do you explain like an apologetic curiosity? I think that's right. Like you're just like, you know what?

If that flits across my eyeballs on a TikTok, I'll wait a second before I swipe up. What's pre-gilt? That's the word I'm looking for. Find your chat, GPTs and be like, what's the word for pre-gilt? Send it to me. Okay, we should talk about the real drama. with Instagram threads, which I think is like drama

the verge is designed to cover. So if you like me think that we're reaching a moment for the social web, it appears to be tearing itself apart. We're going to talk about Reddit in the next section.

Reddit has come to one sort of conclusion. Twitter has come to a very different sort of conclusion. Facebook isn't sending anybody traffic anymore. Like that thing, the web of the sort of mid-2010s, has like run its horse. Good. Sure.

No one's getting any like a animal traffic anymore. You know, like it's not, it's not, if we're not doing it. No cute pets traffic. Right. And then you see what's happening in the media. Like BuzzFeed news is shut down and BuzzFeed is pivoting towards. Like that web, that particular web is coming through close. Something else is going to happen.

We have talked on the Vergecast and on the verge a lot about activity pub, about blue sky, about these federated social networks. And now the first big entrant is, it seems imminent in, Instagram threads, which we think is compatible with Activity Pub. Our evidence for this is some good reporting and a little bit of a mention on one slide, but they haven't launched it. We don't know. The existing federated social network, Mastodon and the Fediverse at large, which are run on

Activity Pub, I would say, David, are reacting to this very poorly. Yeah, I think that's right. So one of the weird quirks of the Fedaverse and Mastodon in particular is that it is very proud of itself and sort of insular. It is not famous for being an open group of people excited to welcome new people in from wherever they're coming. There are norms. We've talked about this on the show. There are norms like everybody calls it the bird site and not Twitter. And if you call it Twitter on Macedon, you're like shamed for it. It's just a strange place with a very sort of specific set of like in-crowdy rules. And the assumption is, and I think

correctly so, that if and when Instagram launches threads, this competitor, the codename we've heard is Project 92, that it will instantly be by far the biggest thing on the Fedaverse, right? Like, it stands to reason. Instagram is enormous. You'll be able to take your Instagram handle and turn it into your Fediverse handle in this app that will be compatible with Activity Pub. So in that moment, the Fediverse, this open social web that's powered by Activity Pub, goes from a lot of little pieces with Mastodon being kind of the largest little piece to Instagram and then everybody else.

And there are a lot of people who, on principle, do not want META to be part of this thing. There is just a belief among some people that this would be a bad thing. Meta is a bad company run by bad people who will do bad things for the Fedaverse. They will destroy the open standards. They will ruin everything. And they are fighting absolute tooth and nail to convince every. to not even basically allow meta into this world. I like what's the point of having something be open source and then actively reject

when you have new participants? So technically meta can do this without asking permission, right? Like it can build a thing on activity pub. Terrific. But what is true is if you run, and this is part of the beauty of these systems, actually. Like when it works, what this allows admins to do is say, okay, my version of, my sort of little corner of the Fedaverse is compatible with lots of things, but I get to choose the folks who can't even come into the room, right?

Like, we're all using the same standard, but I'm not going to allow these people over here to be part of my club because, you know, whatever, they suck. They're Nazis, their mean teenage boys. They send nudes, whatever. I just don't want them to be part of it. So you have these tools by which everybody is sort of on the same playing field, but you get to like have your own space if that's a thing that you want. And by and large, I think that's a good thing, right?

And as this has been small, it has basically been like, okay, if you're going to be a good actor operating in good faith, we're all going to be open to each other. And what is now happening is that the largest player by far is perceived by some of these people to not be a good actor acting in good faith. And so what's going to happen if this boils up into anything and we should talk about whether it's going to because I'm suspicious that this is actually anything, it's just going to divide, right? Like, there's going to be two different things powered by the same thing, and it would be like Gmail users not being able to email Outlook users. And that's where this

would land if meta and the rest of the Fedaverse, like, really part ways from each other. Yeah. So I think two things of note here. One, lots of good reasons to not trust meta. 100%. About half of which are directly related to meta itself and its actions and its advertising practices and its content moderation standards and it's general platforming of unsavory character, the whole thing. So that's about half of the reasons to not trust meta, meta itself. The other half of the reasons are like the history of this thing happening before. Microsoft shows up to the web with Internet Explorer and they're like, we love HTTP.

Have you heard of ActiveX? And they just foist a version of the web on top of the web. They had a name for this. It was Embrace, extend, extinguish. They would embrace the standard. They would extend it with proprietary. extensions, and they would extinguish the standard, and they would be in charge of everything. Famously, this got them into so much trouble with the web that the government sued them,

almost broke them up, entered into a massive consent decree that created the internet as we know it, because Microsoft was distracted from mobile, they had to let Google show up. This whole thing happened. I would note right now, and we will not talk about it a lot in this episode, but as we speak, Microsoft is in trial with the FCC about buying Activision. and Addie and Tom are covering that in real time while we're taping. So we'll get to some headlines later from the trial, but we'll cover it in depth on Wednesday's show. Anyhow, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is real.

Microsoft did it to the internet as a whole. Google, in many ways, has done it to the web. Like big players show up to open communities. They establish themselves as big players, and then they take over. My favorite example of this that I think a lot of people remember is messaging services. Remember a million years ago when all the messaging services ran on. similar protocols and you could have an app like Jabber that pulled your MSN messenger and your Yahoo Messenger and your Google messaging all into one app and everything was sort of cross compatible. And then Google just said, never mind, Gchat doesn't run on any of that stuff anymore and it all just instantly broke.

That is embrace extent extinguish. Yeah. That's the job. Very hilariously about that, speaking of the government, my favorite topic, government regulation of the internet, when AOL bought Time Warner, this is a true. thing that happened. When AOL bought Time Warner, the first time, Time Warner killed its host company, which never fails, the government demanded, the Bush administration demanded that AOL make AOL instant messenger interoperable because they perceived it at that time, at that time, back in those days, to be a moat. So if AOL owned the content and AOL owned the sticky messaging

service, no one would switch. Yeah. The Bush administration. Well, and it's like speaking of AOL, when they first went into years, Usenet, too, right? Yeah. Usenet was this big community, a lot of nerds. It was the early internet adopters. They were all loving it. AOL started to provide support for Usenet.

So, like, little 13-year-old me could be like, yeah, I'm going to go have fun. Do you know about the story of Eternal September? I kind of know it. Briefly, he lived it, but I'm like, I was the trash people. I was the ones. You've come a long way. Very small way. Eternal September is one of my favorite phrases of Inner

of internet lingo. So in the early, early 90s, basically how people got access to the internet would be they went to college. Right. And colleges would hand out like tower PCs and Ethernet connections in the norms. You had a fancy college. Well, they wouldn't hand it. They would tell you that you had to buy a tower PC and give you an internet connection

in your dorm. So people would get to college in September and they would sign onto the internet and onto Usenet for the first time on their hardwired internet connection in their door. and they would just wreak havoc on internet forms because they had no idea how to behave. Right. So every September was chaos on the Internet because all the kids would show up to college

and sign on to the Internet for the first time and just act like college students on the Internet. And then the community was big enough and they could see that this was happening. It was like time-boxed enough that they would wrangle the college students back into line and the community to operate until... They teach them.

The next September. September 19th, 1994 would come and a bunch of college students would show up and be idiots on Usenet and they would wrangle them back in line. So every September's chaos. AOL shows up. Says now every AOL user has access to Usenet. And remember, this is like the dominant service rudder. America was online, my friend.

We were online. And they flooded Usenet with like everyone's mom and like all caps yelling and like crazy. And the Usenet community started calling this the September than ever ends. Eternal September, because it was just always September. Every day was new chaos, and the community could no longer wrangle it back into line. It was just escalating chaos. I got kicked out of an X-Files use net during that time because I was like 10 or 11. I didn't know what I was doing.

I wasn't very good. Yeah, you were part of Eternal September. Yeah, I was part of the Eternal September. It was just, What's Up, Nerds? Let's talk. Alex is like, I'm the face of Eternal September. Yeah, it's me. So this, to me, is like one of those moments. So it's a great, Jason Kobler advice has a great article about September forever.

You should go read it. We'll put it in the show notes. This is one of the concepts that has defined, like, Internet communities for generations now, since the early 90s, this concept of Eternal September. You build this tiny little community, and then it hits the scale point of an influx of new users. In the existing moderators, the existing community, the norms disappear because you just can't. constantly enforce them the way you could when it was, you know, however many college students went to college that September. Right.

Now it's everybody all the time. And I think a lot of what Mastodon is responding to is, yep, meta for meta, very valid criticisms there. Yes, embrace, extend, extinguish. But also, oh, shit, our club's about to not be exclusive anymore. See, that's the part where I really think they're being overly dramatic. And I'm so sorry to you Mastodon users. You were with me in the Eternal September.

Like, come on, guys. You're being a little dramatic. I think people on Mastodon might have been the people who experienced the other side of Eternal September. You guys were probably on the other side of it. And you should know better at this point. Because one, it's hard to find things on Mastodon currently. So how likely is it that all of those people coming from Instagram are going to suddenly be descending into all of these Mastodon communities? Really.

Even if you don't block them because a lot of them, it sounds like, are blocking them. And they're not organized the same way at all. Right. So there's that part of it. And two, when things are more accessible, it tends to make things better. Like, I don't know if I would work at the verge and be in this community if I hadn't had that access at a young age. And I certainly didn't have the tools then to access Usenet the way the rest of you guys were accessing it. So, like, I think making things more accessible is always better.

And yes, it does mean that it dilutes these communities. pretty quickly and it does change things, but it often ultimately changes things for the better, even though in this case, meta is the one doing the changing and that creates a whole other set of issues. I really think the fact that it's meta is the thing here. And I think it's the fact that it's meta across kind of all three of the points you just made, Neelai, like even in the case of there are about to be a lot of people coming and sort of disrupting our club, which I think is real, right?

I think Mastodon in particular has this real, like, we are the place that you go to get away from Twitter, right? Like, that's its vibe. And in the same way that Twitter is obsessed with Twitter, like Mastodon is obsessed with Twitter. It really is. And now META is coming in. And A, I would say it is overwhelmingly likely that Instagram's product is going to be a better product than Mastodon. It's going to have a better identity system because it's going to borrow it from Instagram. It's going to have better discovery because that's something that meta is really good at.

It will immediately be the default product for the Fediverse. I wouldn't guarantee that that's going to happen, but I would say that is overwhelmingly likely. That's what's going to happen. That it will instantly be the biggest and best thing on the Fediverse. And so you bring in not just a flood of new people, but a flood of new people coming from Instagram, which has its own set of rules and norms and cultures that, people hate. And I think if Mozilla suddenly brought in, you know, 100 million people on Mozilla. dot social, I think there would be people with feelings, but it would not be this aggressive and

contentious and like knee-jerk. We can't allow these people here. But because it's meta, and I think specifically because it's Instagram and because it's like, you can just imagine what all the like celebrities and influencers and commenters on Instagram will do. Well, I can make that simpler for you. It's a bunch of girls. Right? Like there's a part of this Because it's Instagram A bunch of dude nerds on Mastodon Who figured out how to set up a Mastodon account and like

Did it and like passed all the nerd tests is like we know girls allowed There's a big strong vibe of like when I go into a comic shop And I have to then like Defend my knowledge of comics and usually show them the Superman poster There's a bit like that's the feeling I'm getting here where it's just like, oh, you can't join. And it's like, guys, get over yourself. Like, I don't think all these Instagram influencers are going to be descending on your mastodons and destroying them.

So this is actually... Normal the Tumblr users that are eventually coming and all the other activity pub users. Like, get over it, guys. I think this is the big difference between what's happening now and the Usenet example that we were talking about. Right. Which is Usenet was organized by topic. So I cannot believe I'm explaining Usenet on the Burchcast in 2020. I'm having the best time.

The fact that we are currently embarking on completely resetting the internet is so exciting to me. And I feel like I might be the only one who can see it at all times. We are going back, people. We are in fully everything old is new again territory. And it is deeply entertaining. I forget who it was, but I was listening to somebody a few months ago who said that when we read about this era in the history books, the last 15 years will be a blip on the radar. It would be like one giant false start that we all made towards one way that the internet could work. and then we went right back to the way it was before and kept moving forward.

And I honestly think that's where we're headed. Until this ends 15 years from now and we go right back to a bunch of centralized social networking services. UsNet's still out there. It's still. Yeah. Pendulums swing back and forth, unfortunately. Yeah. They never landed exactly the right spot and stay there.

We haven't figured that out yet. But anyway, so the way Usenet was organized was more or less Reddit. Like Reddit is closer to how Usenet worked. So imagine if every September 10 million absolute. newbies to send it on Reddit, found all the topics they wanted and started going insane, right? Like, that's how that worked. That's not how Twitter works.

That's how Instagram threads is going to work. I think there's still a follow graph there. Like, no one's going to find your, like, Furries Mastodon and be like, I'm in it now. I will. Right. And so the question of defedering is really just a question of whether you want to be connected to meta's version of this at all. Well, that's true.

And it isn't, right? Like, I think one of the interesting things about the way that the Fediverse works is you can have things like tags that actually do work across instances. And there are people out there who have really careful systems for how things get tagged and how we think about topics. And you can sort of be in your own space, but also have access to through things like tags and topics, the other stuff that's out there. It's definitely a smaller part of how it works. But I think because it's still such a like power user tool, there are definitely a lot of people on Macedon who have like curated tag sets that they use and all.

all of a sudden, like, do you remember when this happened on Instagram? All of a sudden, everybody got nuts about the tags to try and game the Explorer page when people are going around. I think that's the kind of thing that people worry about. And it's exactly what you're describing. I think it's definitely less likely than it would be if something like this were to happen to, say, Reddit, like you said. But I do think that risk is real here. That's fair. Well, see, I think this is among the most interesting versions of this to happen, right?

The parallels to lots of other things are there. And what's interesting is that many of those things have played out. Microsoft attempting to colonize the web played itself out. Like from start to finish, we see how that went. And actually a little bit of intervention, a little bit of competition, they were unsuccessful at doing it. And now they're a big baby. And now they just want to own call of duty. Why won't you let them have it?

Gosh. You can see how Google's various attempts to colonize web have been successful and unsuccessful over time. Another great example actually is Apple and open source kind of in a general sense. Like, they showed up with an open source kernel in OS10. Everyone thought they were going to pick Linux. They picked another project. That project does not have a life outside of Apple, right? Like, they just took it and they made it their thing.

They did the same thing with the rendering engine inside of Safari. They took an existing one. They built upon it. Now that Apple dominates that environment, right? But those are all good things. I don't think no one's looking back and saying, man, WebKit really ruined our open source project. Yeah.

Apple adopting Unix really destroyed everything. Yeah. We've just seen that these cycles come and go in various different ways. And I think fundamentally they're not good or bad, but the parallels are there and the negatives are there. And people are like extremely wide open to them. And this one is particularly funny because it is the oldest of them all, right? It's the big service provider dumping users on a pretty closed system or a pretty small system.

And they're having the same reaction as a bunch of people in the 90s had to it. Yeah. I suspect some of them are the same people from the 90s. Yeah. Which is pretty good. I'm going to be on the other side again. Yeah. Because I've got my Mastodon account.

I barely understand how it works. And as soon as the Instagram threads come so long, yeah, I'll give it a go. Because the user experience will likely be a lot easier. Yes. And at this point in my life, I'm not interested in tinkering with that. I've got a whole smart home to tinker with. I don't need to tinker with my social media. So, like, yeah, okay, I want to go experience it this way and see what it's like when you have all of those resources.

You have, like, very good user interface designers and stuff participating in this. Yeah, and we also just don't know what level of interoperability there's going to be. Yeah, it may suck, right? Like, it could just be garbage and it doesn't even touch most of the rest of the rest of. of the Fediverse. And then it's like, well, boy, we sure panicked. Well, so is it you can post and people can follow you, people on a different server can follow your Instagram account. You can follow people from different servers. That seems like the basics. Right. There's a lot of other things you can do. You can build custom

moderation services. That's what Flipboard is doing with Blue Sky and others. You could, they could have it moderate not with Mastodon, but with these Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and Kbin. There's a lot of ways. So there are. From what we understand, Instagram is like starting to have meetings. The meetings are under NDA, which is also extremely contentious in this community. I'll tell you when we go have meetings at these companies, we're journalists. We don't sign the NDAs. I always just look at the iPad they have and I say no.

And then there's a sigh and they go and get me a different badge. In that badge, it's like, don't talk to this person. Don't look at this person. So I get it. Don't sign the NDAs. But I think these conversations are basically meta slash Instagram is trying to be a good participant. And like what they're facing is we don't want you to be here. Yeah, I do think one more sort of broad point I would make is I think one of the things that is a real worry is that the Fedaverse is absolutely not ready for this many people.

I think you could argue that the Fediverse isn't ready to have as many people as it currently has. It's been a really interesting thing to watch both with Twitter folks going to Macedon and with Reddit folks going to things like. Lemmy and Cabin, those products are not done. They're like beta tech projects that everyone who works on them can make you a long list of the things that's wrong with them. And they're now trying to figure out. And it's just complicated and slow work to build one of these things. And then all of a sudden, like, it's not an accident that like nobody was talking about Cabin. And then all of a sudden a lot of Reddit users start looking for somewhere to go. They find it. And even on Kaban's website, it's like, this is alpha software. But people are showing up because they just need

somewhere to go, right? And I think one of the things on this FETI pact that a lot of people are signing, which is this like incredible hot pink website. It's beautiful. One of the very first things that they mention about why this is a thing that you should sign and you should not let META on is about content moderation. And it's partly about content moderation based on the assumption that META is bad at it and won't do it for its own stuff, which will then pollute the rest of the Federer but it's also about the fact that no one has figured this out because this got to scale so fast that most of the content moderation is done by the people who own the specific servers, which is just like a dude in his house for the most part.

And figuring out how to do content moderation at this scale has been tough. Like when I wrote this story about Activity Pub, I think it was a Neil Dash that I was talking to who was like if Instagram shows up and just dumps 30 million people into the Fedaverse, the whole thing is going to collapse. And I think that's a real valid feat. year. Like, Mastodon is by no means a finished product that is ready for this many people to be interacting with it.

Right. That's fair. I just, you know how I feel like it. It's impossible. This is an impossible task. And the thing that they are saying about content moderation is not meta as bad at it. I think meta is exactly as good at it as it wants to be. Yeah.

And it's actually like if you take the politics out of it, meta is very good at it. Mm-hmm. You get to the politics of it, specifically what's, speech, what kinds of speech will and won't be allowed. Meta has made some decisions that I disagree with, that other people disagree with, that many people agree with, disagree with on the other side of the coin. And really what people are reacting to, what almost everyone is always reacting to, is those decisions on the margin.

And so, you know, the position of Mastodon as a collection of people is we wish to be so tolerant that some people are banned, which is really where you come back around to. Like Donald Trump Jr. is not welcome here. It's like a very tolerant position in its own weird, twisted way. Okay. Like meta is going to make a very different kind of determination. And that's the content moderation that they're talking about. Yeah.

Like that I think that's where I'm always the most interested in the Fediverse is lots of different servers can make lots of different decisions. And you're not tied to them forever. Right. You can go somewhere else. You can follow people on different servers or different rules. the market such as it may ever exist is actually making those speech determinations and not the government or one guy, one guy who's delegated to a bunch of lawyers that you never hear about.

Like that's where the mistake has been. I just don't see that that's their real concern, those who are fighting against meta, because like what's the point of the Fediverse where every instance can determine its own content moderation if you don't let people determine their own content moderation. Like I get that it's a big company coming in. I think that's certainly a thing to be fearful of. But like it stands on content moderation isn't because like that's the point of the Fediverse. They get to decide that.

They get to decide that for their users. And all of those 30 million or whoever 10 million, five people that join Instagram threads or whatever it ends up being called. Yeah. You don't have to contribute value to it. Yeah. Right? you're like, this is my club, and you can't just like take the content out of it and put it into your app.

Right. In many ways, you kind of end up right at this weird Reddit situation. Yeah. We're like, my server's content, which is really what my users have contributed to, I will control the boundaries of. Right. I will not let AI scrape it, and I will not let it interact with Mattis product. And I think we're just in for a few years of the internet refiguring out that dynamic. Yeah.

I think that's going to be fun. I'm excited for them. I mean, this is like, again, I think this is why The Verge exists, because covering the stories, A, you have to start with Usenet, which is perfect. And B, it's as much of a technical capability story as it is a how do people behave on the internet as it is a what is Metas product going to be story. And I frankly challenge you to find another group of nerds that will pay attention to it as much as we will. All right. We need to take a break. I need to watch this video of Mark Zuckerberg in Jiu-Tumats one more time.

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And it's done. It's past. It's done. We, you know, there's gadgets to talk about it. Yeah. There's a trial going on. All right. We do need to talk about Reddit though.

Jay Peters has been just owning the Reddit story, top to bottom. It's, he interviewed Steve Huffman. That interview went. It went. Sure did. Haunted car. It's fine. Reddit is, you know, they're staying the course.

They're not backing down in any which way. I would say the protests have got. increasingly hilarious and true Reddit style. At one point, Reddit said this needs to be more democratic. It can't just be the moderators. I think Steve Huffin referred to the moderators as the landed gentry of Reddit, which is very funny. So the moderators started holding votes. Many subredits, including, I think, R.A. Others said, okay, we're only allowing pictures of John Oliver. Our users voted on it. There's nothing he can do. That's what we're doing. I think not just pictures, but sexy pictures of John Oliver. That's a very important part of it.

John Oliver has been like he uploaded a folder of photos for them to use, which is very good. Other subredits allowed not safe for work content, which is very funny. Reddit did not like this at all. Just various other protests. Did you know the female fashion advice subreddit is only doing posts about 1700s fashion now? It's so good. That's very good. Some Reddits have made everybody a moderator in true democracy.

also very good. I don't know this is accomplishing anything because all these people are still using Reddit, right? So going dark is like a direct attack on Reddit because new users, search users can't access the communities. Everyone's going to show up and post pictures of John Oliver. What's Reddit going to do? Enjoy the engagement. I don't know, though. I think people on the internet have learned at this point that just saying we're not going to use this product anymore doesn't work, right?

Like you can't organize traffic killing. But what you can do, and one of the things I think has been very clever is like all of these subreddits categorizing themselves as not safe for work, which means they don't get monetized in the same way. And so that's like there's a direct hit to what Reddit actually cares about, which is its money. These things with John Oliver, like it's you just at the same time Steve Huffman is at Cannes trying to get more advertisers to come on. Reddit is just making a joke of itself as a platform, which in a way, I would actually argue is a much more powerful version of protest, which is to say, like, oh, you think you actually run this platform? Like, hell no, you don't.

We run this platform and you can try and fight us all you want. We're actually in charge of what happens here. And I think, like, to me, that has actually come through, like, loud and clear. Yeah. But does it mean anything at the end of the day? No, and it won't. And all these apps are going to shut down and Reddit is going to go about its business. But it at least it feels like you can feel like you try.

Well, so here's the thing that's really, I think, happening. Reddit is now imposing its power over this community. They sent an email to a bunch of the moderators or the subs that had gone private. The email was a threat. Like, I don't, I'm not going to beat around the bush. It's not in the language of a threat, but the email was, hey, if you want to get rid of the moderators who've chosen to go private or you think they're not doing the job, let us know. and we'll help you get rid of them. And like, that's what, how else should you read this?

If I'm a moderator that is choosing to stay dark, Reddit is emailing my fellow moderators and the users of the subreddits and saying they can get rid of me if I stay the course. Right. And it went even further. In some cases, there was a, there was a thing they were saying to moderators that was essentially by taking your subreddit dark, you're actually violating the terms of the code of conduct on Reddit because you're not being good to your community by not letting people use it, which is a leap.

But then the threat there is that the consequence for not taking care of your community is Reddit will remove you as a moderator and put somebody else in. So they've been making abundantly clear that like play by the rules or we'll just throw you out and find somebody who will in every way they can. Which is, again, they wrote their rules. They're allowed to say you should play by them. But the attitude and the posture here are extremely aggressive. and, you know, if you are communicating, one responsibility you have is to how people feel about how you're communicating.

And so if the moderators are telling us they feel threatened, those are threats. Like, that's just how that works. Right. That's life. And what's so weird about this to me is like Reddit's been around for 18 years. Like, where has this been? Like, at least when Twitter went insane, it was because somebody bought it. Right.

Like, at least something changed. And I think part of what has been so strange for Redditors is this sense that, like, okay, there's a guy in charge who's been on Reddit literally since the beginning. He is a co-founder of the thing. He loves this more than anybody. And all of a sudden, just like on a dime just decides to totally screw over the entire community all at once. And I think like the actions have felt bad, but I think this like total surprise of it all is the worst part of a lot of it for some folks. Because for most people really did come out of nowhere.

It was just like one minute. It was that New York Times story. Like all of a sudden it's just like, oh, Steve Huffman wants to make money. And then everyone at Redd it's like, oh, shit. It's like, oh, shit. Yeah, and just fury. Yeah. Well, and killing the app.

I mean, that's the real thing. Like, the rollout, that's the precipitating factor. But this, we are in control of Reddit, is new. So here's the thing I wanted to bring up. We have been reporting on this left and right. Jay Peters, our team owns a story. He doesn't want to interviewed Huffman. Lots of mods are talking to him.

Lots of Reddit people are talking to him. Like, good journalists, we go to Reddit for comment on all these stories. Reddit is very unhappy. that people are talking to us. They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism.

That's straight up what they're doing. I know this is what they're doing because we have a statement because they told us. Because they told us. Tim Rashmit, who runs comms at Reddit, says their blanket statement is will no longer comment on hearsay

unsubstantiated claims or baseless accusations from the verge. We'll be in touch as corrections are needed. Oh, my God. I've been playing this game a long time. We'll wait for you to make a mistake so then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong is the oldest trick in the book and we're just not going to fall for it. So we're just going to print this statement in every story from here on out. Like, that's the way it's going to go.

And if they want us to get it right, they can tell us what is actually happening. But I will come back to we're going to take the people on the ground. We're going to take the users. We're going to take the moderators. We're going to take the employees every time. And if you think they're wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they're wrong. wrong, but we're not going to stop because you're running like a 1920s press playbook, like, whatever.

Like, we're just going to burn you every time. And it's that attitude. It's this aggressive posture where people are worried and they're coming to reporters and saying, here are our worries. Here's the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened and Reddit's responses, shut up. Yeah. That's what breaks your community.

And like, that story is easy to tell. We don't actually need your help to do it. And I think they're misjudging all of that. Because when Instagram decides to launch its lemmy clone and start that drama, people will just go. When Google decides, crap, we need something like Reddit to exist for search to be good. Here's a Reddit clone that we'll kill in five years. People will go use it. And the danger here is this posture.

I don't care. We'll just print the line. We print the poop emoji from Twitter in every single story. Like, who cares? Right? We're like, this is what we do. This is what you said. We're going to print it.

Your users are going to take a very different message from that than we are. Like, we will just keep doing journalism. And I don't think that anybody quite understands that turn. I think they understand it and they don't care. Straight up. Yeah, I think for them, they view this is a relatively minor problem and something that they can just brute force their way out of. And so they don't care if all of these. Things are going crazy right now because they're hoping, okay, in a month or two, it'll pass and we'll go back.

And hopefully now we'll be able to sell ads because we'll have a much more predictable community that we can more easily monetize. Part of this is taming it and getting out all of the people that would make it more difficult to monetize. This is like Elon firing all of his staff, only its Reddit firing all of its users. Right. And so it's like, okay, we're just going to get rid of all of you who makes it more difficult for us. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's a pitch that they're doing behind. closed doors because that's a pretty compelling one if you're an advertiser and you want to like avoid risk at all costs. Reddit right now is a super, Reddit even before this was super

risky, right? Because they say no not safe for work stuff here and you would still occasionally be like, oh, I didn't need to see that this morning checking Reddit and then get rid of a lot of those people and have a much calmer, easier to sell, easier to control community. And I think that's the point. I think that's probably the plan is that these people will tucker themselves out or they'll leave. I totally agree with that. I don't think it was the plan. I agree with every other part of that. But what seems clear to me now in retrospect is that Reddit thought it could do this relatively easily, that making these changes would cause some pain because it always causes some pain, but that it would get through it relatively quickly, right? And then Christian Seeley, the Apollo developer,

starts making a lot of noise and a lot of people get angry. And this just gets worse and worse. And then I think at some point, Steve Huffman and the executives at Reddit decided the only thing to do is just rip the band-aid off. And then I suspect what it seems like at any rate happened is they basically just decided to like put on a bunch more band-aids and rip those off too. That it was like, okay, this is a moment. We're going to go from rage over one thing to like just get all the rage out now.

Like let's let's have this hard reset with the moderators that. Reddit has had forever. It has had the admins at Reddit and the mods at Reddit have had this contentious relationship forever where the admins wish the mods would run it as a platform more the way the company wants and the mods wish they got more tools to run it the way that they want it. And this is Reddit like absolutely, I think you're right, exerting its authority and saying this is the hard reset. And I think at some point you just have no choice but to fight through it. Like I don't think Reddit wanted it to get this bad, but I think at some point they looked at it. other and said, well, it's going to be this bad anyway.

Like, let's just go to war. Yeah, they can't back down at this point. Yeah, this has never let a crisis go to waste. Yeah. Absolutely. I think you're right, though. They probably didn't intend this, but now that they've got it, they're like, okay, let's lean in, burn it to the ground.

The other way of saying that is that chaos is a ladder. And you really want to find the line between the two. Like, one of them ends with the king being dead. Not the show being good, but the king being dead. Right? it's going to win with the power of stories, you guys. Okay, that's enough Game of Thrones on this episode of The Vergecast. We're going to take a break.

We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some gadgets, do a little lighting around. Wrap this thing up. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you

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bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI. slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. We're back. We're going to clear the air from all this social networking talk until a little bit later. That we got a, it's like a little between courses gadget palette cleanser. A little grapefruit. When I think of a muse bouch, I think of the Google Pixel tablet. The light, refreshing, Google Pixel tablet.

I think Dan would probably agree with you. I think he would agree that it is light. Yeah. I don't know that refreshing. I don't know that we've actually refreshed the Android tablet strategy. But Dan reviewed the Google Pixel tablet this week. That's the pixel tablet that has the dock that makes it look like a giant nest hub. Yeah, it's an Android tablet.

$500 Android tablet. Which we should say is not nothing. Like one of my favorite things about this was talking to Dan through this whole process. He just kept testing the thing and being like Google made an Android tablet that is actually like a kind of good tablet for the first time in a really long time. Is that anything? And we just kind of were like, we spent the whole time he wrote this review and I was editing it with him. It was like, is this anything? Because it is.

It's a good tablet. It's a nice device. It has a nice screen. It has decent speakers. The dock thing seems to be really clever. There's a lot of little details missing in the way that you would expect a first generation product to be missing. Extra docs are too expensive.

It's missing some of the smart display stuff that people might want. But it gets most of the basics right. It has no big ideas about what a tablet should be, which to some extent I love about it. It's not, there's no like heady thesis about tablets being the future of anything. It's literally deliberately just a screen for you to look at. And sometimes you will look at it while you're, holding it and sometimes you will look at it while you're cooking in the kitchen and it's sitting on its stock. That's the whole story. And the thing Dan and I spent a long time talking about was

how you think about $500 in that context, which I'm very curious what you guys think, because I've gone back and forth a million times on whether this thing is a good deal or not. It depends on whether you think it's a tiny portable TV or an iPad. That's how I think about it. So iPads are very cheap. they have really good software ecosystems. Apple will update the software every year on time without fail for like a decade. It's $329.29. There's an ecosystem of cases. If you break an iPad screen, you can walk into any mall kiosk in the world and get a crappy replacement for that screen for not a lot.

Like, right, like the iPad is an ecosystem. And I will just come back to this. And Apple updates the software on that iPad. Apple is going to make iPads next year. Is Google going to make pixel tablets next year? I hope they don't make iPads. It's just amazing if Apple is like, eh, we're doing to Google.

No more iPads. I'm just saying like, if you think about it as a competitor of the iPad, this thing loses left and right. For $500, you can get an iPad error, a superior product to this with a documented history of actual support from the company that makes it. But no doc.

Tim Cook knows they make iPads. As Sundar Pichai, I ever held the pixels. You know, at this point with Google sprawl, they are narrowing it down, but like if you think about a competitor iPad, like just on the merits, that's tough. That's a tough comparison.

And Google has a lot of baggage. If you are like, this is a TV that sits in a dock and shows me like Google photos and sometimes I can turn off the air conditioner with the smart home controls, 500 bucks is actually not so bad. Couldn't you do that with an iPad? There's no iPad dock for a kitchen.

That's fair. Right? Like that's the, if this is a slightly bigger Nest Hub that also happens to run an ecosystem of video playing apps. Yeah, the docks the part, you talked to David, about how there's no big ideas here, but the dock feels not really a big idea. We've seen Lenovo and other people experiment with it,

but it seems like a well-executed version of a very old big idea, and that's kind of exciting to me, because everybody kind of sucks at these docs. Yeah. And this one seems to be good. Yeah, one of my favorite things that Dan told me was that he has a magic keyboard for the iPad. that he literally just uses as a stand for his iPad to just dock it in and out of, which is also a thing that I've done.

And it is the most ludicrously overpriced iPad stand you could possibly imagine. But for all the ecosystem stuff that there is in Apple's world, there actually aren't that many things you can attach to an iPad. It has the little plugs on the bottom, the smart connector stuff, but that hasn't really turned into anything. So we have a 7th-gen iPad that we bought for Max. It was her first iPad. She's on her second iPad now.

Just fling it. She's five. But we still have this one line around. It basically just like got too old. I bought the cheapest one when she was born. And then she got to about three. And I was like, I'm so sorry, kid. Like, you deserve a reasonably fast computer.

So we just had this thing. And what's it there for? It's there to like show photos and I don't know, sometimes be a kitchen TV or whatever. And I went looking for a dock that uses the smart connector on the bottom. And there are zero. Yeah. Zero. There's one. Logitech made it. It was called the Logite Doc. They sold it for like $129 and they stopped making it because it charged too slow and got the iPad hot.

It's also like three inches thick for reasons I never understood. But yeah, it's bad. Is it like a technology thing? Like, no, I think the smart. Apple has claimed the smart connector is open and does not require licenses and like. That can't be true. That does not seem to be the case. Because otherwise Belkin would have 12 dots out there. Yeah. And they have zero. I think the reality is a smart connector might not be that great. Yeah. And there's no way to test it because there's something that runs a smart connector. Or the made-for-i-phone mafia.

Like if anybody tells us the answer, like, they're dead. Yeah. And I would say it's been 10 years of me asking for this story. I've been trying to write a story about the made-for-i-phone program, the MFI program, and what it's like really like for 10 years. It has destroyed reporters. The wreckage, the human wreckage of me asking for a story. about the MFI program is vast. But if you want to tell us about it.

Several Apple employees just showed up outside the studio, as you were saying. It is the most tightly, like, we're going to do a whole episode in H.TMI. And, like, people are like, yeah, we'll talk about that. And it's cutthroat politics. A whole episode at USP. We're like, we want to do a whole episode about MFI, about the lightning connector. And, like, darkness falls. Like, say that again.

It's like, Omerta. Like, it's not happening. But I think the smart connector is wrapped up into that. So that's why there's no docs. There we go. It's basically the answer. I like that plan. Yeah.

That's a good idea. Yeah. But I will say I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a good fancy kitchen TV. I wish this thing didn't cost $500. I think if it was like $3.49, I would have bought one already. That feels right. It's just a smidge out of the range where I can just like feel like it's an obviously good idea right now.

Like I have an iPad and I can just carry it in it out of my kitchen and that basically works fine. So there's no remote for it, right? No. I'm firmly on. You got 10 remotes on the end of your arms, Alex. Yeah, I need so many remotes. You have, like, you're in your kitchen, your hands are dirty. You don't want to, like, dry, like, I want a remote that can get all grubby in my kitchen.

And also then be cleaned. So I don't disease people. Like, throw in the dishwasher? I just like wash it in the sink without electrocuting myself. This is a point in favor of the pit. pixel tablet because Siri is garbage and the pixel tablet is not, or Google Assistant is not garbage. It's very exciting. All right. I found you something called the Slim Seal 5 and 1 universal waterproof remote control. But does it work for the Google pixel tablet? It's just a

stylus you use to touch the pixel tablet. I don't, I don't like it. And I will say that Google's AI search results are like, what are you doing? This is the most useless AI. never mind. Every now and again, I look at what AI can actually produce. I'm like, I'm not worried. That's how you know you're going to be first against the wall. Look, that's the thing about the TV in the kitchen. It's like, it's what everybody wants, is whatever's trying to build.

It's been the pinnacle of technology since the 50s. And everyone's still kind of like looking at their phones. Also, the fact that it's like Android on the back end, I don't think that processor is fast fast nuts and support like fast user switching in a way that would make having actual Android apps in your kitchen, like useful to you, right? Like, if this thing is actually signed into my Google account and just like sitting on the dock in the kitchen, like Android tablets are not swift. It's switching to my wife's account, right, or whatever, right?

And there's just like that piece of it that I think is worried. Why would you need that speed in the kitchen? Oh, because if, at least in my world, if the other people, if it's not instant, it will just never be used, right? If I was like, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get into the, walk into this room. And then to use this huge screen, I want you to push some fiddly buttons and wait. And it takes like 30 seconds.

No. Yeah, but back use my phone. Instantly without question, she'll use her phone. But, Neal, I would remind you again that do you know what the iPad has in terms of multiple users? Nothing. Yeah, true. And that's why Max has had two of them. No, I think, like, this is one of those things that I sincerely hope Google stays.

at this because I think there's a there's a version of this a couple of years from now that's maybe a little cheaper and a little better and fixes some of the little things that are missing like you're talking about and this starts to get really compelling. I have absolutely zero faith that that is going to happen, but I sincerely hope we, like, that I live to see the Google Pixel tablet three. I'm going to like send you a sign print that says I hope Google sticks with this and you can just like hang it above your desk. Remember?

It'll go right next to my Rick. Ostreloat dartboard. Remember when there was like a 27-inch Android tablet that was supposed to be a TV for your kitchen? Like in 2014? Putting a TV in your kitchen is the only dream the tech industry has ever had. They suck so much at it.

They can't figure. Or a computer in your TV. It's the remote. You figure that out, the rest of it will fall into place. Can we run windows on your TV and can that TV live in your kitchen? And everyone's like, you've got bad ideas. No. No, thank you.

Other gadget news, a bunch of vision. Pro stuff is out this week. Apple officially released the SDK to let developers start playing with it. They're going to have open developer beta zones. You airlift into them, you drop out. And then they put a headset on your face and you aren't allowed to test your apps. You have to send an indie. Very complicated process. I really like imagining that they're going to be like planes and like, you know how the oxygen mask drops down? You're going to like sit in your seat and a vision pro is just going to drop down from the ceiling.

Apple has chartered a number of 747s and they will circle the globe letting people. try the headset. Yeah, it's perfect. This is true. It's all right there. The previous section was like an impassioned plea about how we make journalism. This section I'm lying to you and telling that Apple's going to fly developers around the world wearing headsets to build apps.

That's just the virtualists. You never know what's going to happen. But we've seen some apps from this SDK because people have gotten it. They're able to like start building in the simulator. The simulator is very funny because all the apps are in like a fake living room. You just like look at the photos and all the screenshots are like, what if you had a beautiful living room? Do we know whose living room it is?

And that's some Apple living room. The number of beautiful fake living rooms in the Apple campus is off the charts. I was just wondering if it's like based on anyone in particular. Is it Tim Cook's living room? It's too small to be Tim Cook's living room. You know Tim Cook, his living room is like a gigantic expanse of granite. I think he's got the pit. You think he's like, step down with me?

Yeah. All right. Maybe you know. Big fireplace. It's like, welcome, welcome. Come down into my conversation. Step down. with me is Tim Cook's memoir title.

Step down with me. It's amazing. Anyway, so we've seen the apps. The apps are pretty interesting, right? I saw a version of P-Calc. I've seen a few other apps. Some interesting things we've discovered already is the concept of dark mode seems to make no sense in like spatial computing.

Yeah. Then there's two ways to get an app into the simulator. One, you can take an iPad app and go that way. Or you can build it in the Vision Pro SDK. And the iPad apps are just floating iPad apps. I love it.

Here they are. And the Vision Pro apps are like frosted glass, about depth. And it's just very clear that like that's how you should do it. I mean, this is like back to when the iPad first came out and there was a thing you could do where you would just hit the 2X button.

Do you remember this? You could run an iPhone app and you would just hit the 2X and it would blow up to the size of the iPad. You can still do that. That's how the majority of the people are running Instagram on their iPads. Yeah, exactly.

I think the Vision Pro is going to have a long run of being just like that, where it's just going to be like, we took a rectangle, here it is in another place. Do you like this rectangle? Well, this is always back to Apple's initial strategy with anything, which is you like apps, right? Here are some apps. Yep. And they did it with the Mac. Remember, they're like iPad apps, now running your Mac. If you are the person who runs iOS and iPadOS apps on your Mac natively, I would love to hear from you. I was so excited about this concept and I did it once with some like I do it with my air conditioning app that's good do you really imagining how many Apple engineers are implied full time so that you can control your heating and

cooling from your laptop I suspect it's one also you should do that in the home app no it doesn't work it doesn't work with home kit home assistant I'm working through it Medea call me you have to move Alex that's the only answer yeah Move. Other Vision Pro News, the information has a report that they didn't show us everything. There are fitness features, which we have been talking about since we came out. We knew it. It will guide users through yoga and Tai Chi.

So like crummy supernatural. Do a kick. Is that what Tai Chi is, Neelai? Neal, can you just, can you just do some Tai Chi for us right now real quick? Just for a couple minutes. Do a kick. It's also yoga. Wave your arms.

do kicks. Apparently, and let you interact with content on a stationary bike. Is it weird that I'm very excited about that specifically? Like, for some reason, in this very good information report, that was the thing that jumped out to me is like, oh, I would use that. I mean, if they do it well, that would be really cool. Yeah, like I often, the only way I will ever use a treadmill or a stationary bike is if I can also watch a television program, because otherwise, God help me.

And so I'm the guy who, like, brings my iPad to the gym and just sets it up front of me and like watches the league for an hour while I run on the treadmill, or stand on the treadmill and watch the league. And the idea of having a headset, it's kind of like the plane example, right? It's this, it's this very sort of specific episodic thing where I would very much like to not be here. And I can totally see why something like that would make a lot of sense on a stationary bike. I'd be very end of that.

Yeah, but you're still on the bike. The part that sucks is being on the bike. That's the problem. I like resent it. Like I was trying to watch Ted Lassel one day on the stationary bike and I was just like, I'm on this bike. I can be watching this on the couch. It's just right over there.

Stupid moving. Stupid moving. Look, here's what I'm saying. Do a kick. Have you thought about kicking more? Do a gentle kick. I think we all agree that this is one of the killer apps for these devices. I don't know how I feel about riding a stationary bike with a wired battery pack in my pocket.

Yeah. Or mounted to the bike in some way. Getting all hot and sweating. Oh, gross. And then the back, ugh. Gross. Just kick that right off your body. You're definitely not sharing that headset with other people.

Yeah, gross. But you can see that there's an expansive vision for this. I think the fact that that, I mean, we know that they released at WWCs so developers could get into it. The fact that the SDK is out so quickly afterwards and that people will be getting to use it well before it actually launches next year, there is an amount of confidence in this device that I think is fascinating. It's still, the more I think of.

about it. Every time I think about it, I think of that picture of the guy taking a picture of his kids wearing the headset. That's the use case. Yeah, there's a version of this where they're already assuming people are bought into wearing the headset and they're going to do all the things in the headset. And it's like, no, step one. They've got to put on the headset. Like, you got to tell them something amazing is going to happen in that headset before they put it on. Which is why fitness is so powerful. Like, fitness is the reason wearables worked because people will put things on their body to track their health and fitness. I was going to say, it's a lot. I was going to say, it's. It's the reason the meta headset has done one of the reasons. I just started doing Supernatural again. The boxing absolutely kicks my ass every single time. You're like, oh, it's only 10 minutes, whatever. And then you're like, fuck, it's wrecked at the end.

It's great. I love it. Speaking of do a kick, there's kicks in Supernatural boxing. Literally, it's like, I'm going to kick it. It's great. It's perfect. Do that Vision Pro. Yeah.

Well, it sounds like they will. Only you'll get a calming Apple voice. It's going to be great. It's going to be Johnny I want to watch you do Tai Chi. I will buy a Vision Pro if you guarantee me that Johnny Ives voice would be like, do a kick. You want me to wear the headset? I'll wear the headset. That's ridiculous.

But yeah, I think that's where fitness comes in. I think that's where this other stuff comes in. But I think Apple's entire approach to this is like they've skipped the first step of like, why you won't put this on? We'll see. We got a long way to go. More news out of our friends in Europe. They just keep passing laws over there. I love them. God bless them.

So this one is tough. Barbara wrote about this. She's super into it. A new regulation that will say phone batteries have to be easily replaceable. Makes sense. This is like we've covered every twist and turn of the phone battery story. Apple got into a lot of trouble for actually rattling its phones as the batteries got older. A justified reason. Maybe you've got to tell people you're doing it. A lot of trouble for that.

They've launched a battery repair program. They've launched all these repair programs due to regulations around the country and the world. And now we're at actually just from the beginning, you have to make the battery replaceable. Yeah. This has pretty huge implications for our phones are designed. Yes. And we should say it hasn't been passed. It seems very likely it's going to.

The initial vote was I think, let's see, Barbara said, 587 votes in favor, nine against and 20 abstentions. Like, it's a pretty strong majority. But the thing I think is most interesting about this is the phrase that it uses is that portable batteries have to be designed, quote, in such a way that consumers can themselves easily remove and replace them. And the phrase easily remove and replace is in bold. And you can just tell this was so carefully worded so that you can't get out of it by saying, okay, we'll make it easy to go to the Apple store and replace it or a third-party manufacturer. It means no.

A human being needs to be able to open up their phone, remove their battery, and put in a new one. Like that is clearly the outcome they're looking for here. And I think that's really fascinating. Couldn't Apple argue that they can do that now? No. You can't argue that someone could remove the battery from their own. Oh, my God. I love when you pull the adhesive in there.

Yeah. Very slow. The most satisfying thing in the world. It's like the way that phones are designed and structured are the batteries are actually in many cases now like a component of the structure of the phone. Yeah. Okay. Like all that's got to change because now you can just like take it out.

I don't think we're going to go back to plastic tab batteries that pop out when you drop the phone. and you might still have to be able to unscrew the phone. We'll see. It would make the phone thicker. It would make the phone thicker, potentially. Potentially affect waterproofing. It really just depends on like where the connector for the battery is. Is it outside?

Is it exposed or is it still inside the case and you just to unscrew the case? I think if it comes down to you, you can remove two screws in the bottom of your phone, pop up your phone, swap out the battery with a weird little connector that's pretty delicate. And you screw your phone back together. And then they get all the money from everybody bringing it in because they broke the delicate connector. Yeah. Boom. It's easily replaceable. You just suck.

Yeah. I think we're going to hear Apple go to war against this. Yeah. Like they didn't go to war against USBC. You know, they're like, oh, no, we have to use a connector. We designed. Ooh. If you don't know Apple basically designed the USBC connector.

It's like a real thing. Fine. They're like, we don't want to do it, but we get it. We're already put in iPads. this is like you're going to blow up the phone market. Yeah. How many Apple lawyers are currently en route to the EU? 747's full of lawyers in that sense.

Just going, getting over there. All right, let's do a little bit of lightning around. Let's wrap this thing up. Here's my lightning round one. I want to talk about this Gary Vaynerchuk interview on Decoder. So I interviewed Gary Vaynerchukes. We're going to allow you to talk about Decoder because you're using it as your light. David said I'm allowed to do DVD liner notes for Decoder on their chest.

I just wanted to know, though, this is two weeks. weeks in a row that you have talked about this on the Vergecast and I'm outraged. Well, look, I'm the person who's always like, the fish never talk about the water. This is like a phrase that all the time. And I just did it to myself. Because if you have been an ad-supported media for a decade, you are aware that Vayner Media is a gigantic ad agency that basically invented the concept of like social marketing. Like the brands are added again is the thing that Vayner Media like dragged into existence.

Thank you guys. It's not whatever. It is, it's just true. Without Gary Vaynerchuk, the phrase, sir, this is a Wendy's may not exist. And, you know, their clients are like real clients, like Pepsi and TikTok and like huge car companies or like VaynerMedia clients. So this is something I just like, no, because they're they're just, I work in ad supported media. I'm aware of ad agencies. It's a thing.

Our audience does not know this. And I completely forgot that this thing that is just like baked into my job of like, knowing what ad agencies are. It's like, obviously nobody. They know the NFT guy. And I forgot to like say it out loud. Yes, I think, I think is anyone confused about how I feel about NFTs? How do you feel about them? They're dumb. Look, what do you want from me? I think they're dumb. We called them scams for the whole time of NFT summer. Great. The thing I'm interested in is the end of the social web and the fact that being a content creator on a social

platform is a fundamentally tenuous and hard way to earn a living in all the biggest creators in the world, they hit a point of their fame and they pivot to something more stable. Like fighting other people in a cage. Legitimately fighting other

people in a cage. Fake boxing is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. That's weird. We'll stay with the Paul Brothers. Selling prime energy drinks is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. Weird.

There's weird outcomes left and right. You just go down the list. The D'Amillio sisters are selling shoes. I think it's because her dad used to be a shoe guy. But like they've pivoted to, and they're like, we're going to innovate in the footwear space. And you just listen to that sentence. And you're like, but why are you doing that? And it's because it's a more stable business.

And then you see what's happening with a lot of platforms and all the change. And so my interest, oh, I want to go talk to the person who makes the platform's money. So when we talk about Facebook's revenue or TikTok's revenue, it comes from companies advertising on those platforms and an ad agency sit in the middle of those transactions. So Facebook makes money because ad agencies like publicists or whatever spend money on Facebook on behalf of their big clients. VaynerMedia invented a bunch of the stuff. And I just forgot to say it out loud. So I know people are mad at me about this interview and maybe I should have had him arrested. on site. Maybe that's how you feel like Harry Vaynerchuk. But the thing that's interesting to me

is like here's the company and here's a person who mastered that moment. In his view on where it's going, it's super interesting if you think the moment is ending, which I do. He's at Cannes this week, the big ad agency thing in France. And he's giving speeches on stage and like AI. We're going to ruin our creative with AI. That's the part of him that I think you don't see where he talks to his people on the ad agency side. Like I said, I wish I'd reframe this interview. David and I've been talking about it since it came out. Like, oh, I just forgot to say the thing I know.

Yeah. Not everybody thinks about ad agencies as often as I do. I mean, yeah, Gary contains multitudes. He's a complicated dude. I think NFTs suck, by the way. I don't want to be like. And he will say, he does not make a compelling case for NFTs. He makes a compelling case for creating cool collectibles that people want.

Why those need to be digital things on the blockchain? Don't know. Because it's faster and cheaper. Is it? I'm not even sure that's true. It's just worse is the only thing I know for sure. But the one thing I want to say, people should listen to the episode. However you feel about Gary Vee, it's a really interesting episode.

But he says this one thing to you, Neely, that has really stuck out to me. You're basically talking about kind of where to go on platforms. And he is just ruthless about it. He's basically like, I go where the attention is I have no other metrics. I want to be where people are. And you essentially are basically asking about how. how to sort of monetize as an influencer and whether you should worry when one goes away or just go where the attentionist. And he says, that would be like saying running commercials on

Seinfeld is not sustainable. No shit. Once it hasn't got the attention, you have to move on. Like that's just it. Like done. Just ruthless. It's like, I will go where people are. And when people go somewhere else, I don't care where it is, I'll be there too. That's the internet. That's the internet. But it's also, to me, that's why I keep saying, like, the influencers aren't making money. Like being the most famous TikToker is not a great business. It's certainly not like long term sustainable. It'll burn you the hell out. Like all these platforms rewards scale.

I was talking to James Vincent today about just AI and what it's going to do to the web. And what we are talking about is if you are a YouTuber and you make four perfect YouTube videos a year, you're not going to make it. If you make two crappy YouTube videos a day with garish YouTube thumbnails, you're probably. on your way to success. One of those things is going to burn you out. Instantly immediately, like no question. Every YouTuber will tell you it will. Doug DeMurro, one of my favorite YouTubers. What's he pivoting towards? Cars and Bids. What's cars and bids and the big investment in cards and bids allowing him to do right now? Expand the number of hosts on his channel. He's still going to make as many of it is. He's the first person to tell you. But like,

he's spreading out the workload to make the amount of content that YouTube demands of him. That's just a weird place to be. So you listen to Vaynerchuk's approach. he's not trying to monetize the content. He's trying to put ads near attention. And that's the internet. That's how all the platforms are monetized. They are ruthless. And so I just think there's a turn in there where it's like, if you don't know where the money is going, you actually don't, you're not going to have an understanding of how the next platform shift will happen.

Again, I forgot to say this out loud. Wish I had said this all out loud. But that's the impetus of this. And, you know, every day we will strive to be. better. But that's, to me, it's, I really think we're at this, like, crazy moment in the social web. In talking to people who built it involves talking to the marketers who have built it, because they're the money. Like, we, they have been, you know, that what's the saying if the thing, if you're not paying for it, you're the product? Yeah. They're the ones buying the product.

And I, there's just something in there that I think is like, are they ready for this? Is, is that world ready for this too? I'll tell you one other quick story. And then we can move on to next sliding around. This is the longest sliding around entry in history. Those are the CMO of a gigantic financial services company. And we were talking about the whole Bud Light kerfuffle. And the worry is that the Internet has pushed marketers towards ultra-targeted advertising. That's what Internet platforms sell, ultra-target advertising. You're going to make a piece of creative to sell Bud Light.

You're going to find an audience for that creative. Because that has been precisely targeted to them, they are going to be more likely to buy Bud-Light. And then next to them what is constantly happening is total context collapse where like the precisely targeted thing becomes a cultural war issue in some other way. And so just the way that people are thinking about even that, like the main thing you sell targeted advertising is, oh boy, there's danger here that we weren't aware of because of the politics of the country. Yeah. What are you going to do when targeted advertising is no longer the good idea, right? Like is that a Vurchas story? I don't know.

It's boring. It was boring just saying it out loud just now. But like, I'm just like that whole thing, this whole like apparatus of the social internet is straining under the weight. And like I personally think I can do a better job of explaining why I'm interested in talking to people who built it. But when they change and when that money moves, these companies are going to shift like that overnight. To combat sports. The way the platforms work is going to change overnight. They're going to shift to combat sports and everything's going to be fun.

All right. Alex, it's a little lightning around one. Microsoft, who's just a whittle baby. Yeah. They're so ineffectual and they're so small and tiny. They are increasing the price of Xbox GamePass and the Xbox Series X. Not in the United States. It's been in a whole bunch of other places, including the UK.

So naturally, our resident Brit, Tom Warren, wrote all about it. The price is going up a little bit for the Xbox Series X. And then it's about a dollar for Game Pass. It's kind of weird because how they're changing the price. So if you have never subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, you've got to do it before July 6th to, like, avoid the price hike immediately. That's when the price hike goes in for new customers. And then if you're a current customer, you don't have to deal with the price hike until August 13th. And people are kind of upset.

They're a little bummed, but Microsoft has been telegraphing this for a while now. And this is all happening the exact same week that they are going to court with the FTC over whether or not they can acquire active. And part of that fight is that they have to say that they suck and that they should totally be allowed to buy this company because they're terrible and they suck and they're the worst in the world. And so they said that they lost the console wars, which I think is a massive, massive thing to drop into a legal dock. Even if it's like just to win a fight, I feel like that's going to have some lasting impact for the company. Yeah. We'll see what happens in this trial. It's, yeah, it's ongoing.

It's like five days. Today was day one. Tom has been covering all of it. There's a really great stream. You should totally go watch it, read it, because he's just giving minute-by-minute updates. And it's wild. But for the most part, they are really aggressively being like, we suck the most. We're just babies.

Yeah, we've lost the console battle. Yeah. I don't know how this is going to shake out. You know, obviously there's this trial. It'll go one way or another. There's in the UK, the Competition Markets Authority there, as already said, no dice. Yep.

It feels like Microsoft should walk away. It does. It's a little perplexing that they keep going for it because it seems like it's not going to work in a lot of places. And how does that work? Yeah. Do you just stop operating in those countries when they say, no, you can't acquire it here? Like, do you make a ton of little splinter companies?

Yeah. It's just messy. But I think both sides really want this to happen. They want it to happen because they've been on a buying spree for the last few years, buying every single gaming company. So they want it to happen. and then Activision wants it to happen because everybody hates Activision. They would like to stop being Activision.

Yeah. Although they get $3 billion if the deal falls apart. That's true. It's a good spot to be in for Activision either way. I would just remind everyone. I'm not saying this is the same at all. But remember what AT&T was going to buy T-Mobile? Do you remember this?

And everyone stopped it. It's a real thing that happened. And T-Mobile walked away with a breakup fee and then became T-Mobile. And then bought Sprint. Less good. Remember where our nation had four wireless carriers. And now we're down to three in Dish Network. different times.

But a little competition goes a long way. All right, David, what's your landing round? Mine's very quick because both the all just took forever, which is just that the TikTok CEO, V. Pappas, is leaving the company, which is a big deal because they are kind of the American figurehead of TikTok. For a minute, it was Kevin Mayer, who was going to be the American figurehead. That was a hilarious disaster. He basically, like, took one look around the room and was like, never mind.

And so V has been the C-O-O and the CEO, Shu Chu, has been more visible in recent months. But V-Leaving is a big deal. And I think continues to be more and more evidence that TikTok is not going to get its way and be a happy company in the United States for very long. I cannot imagine being the American symbol of TikTok is a particularly fun job. And so I'm not super shocked. But it is yet another bad sign. You're a person watching to see how TikTok fares in the United States. So TikTok CEO showed you, sent an email to the company saying Vipapas was leaving.

And then the spin is, don't worry, we've hired 20-year Disney veteran Zeni Amucha to join the company in the new role of TikTok's chief brand and communications officer. Which is not the same thing. Not very different. And you can, it's like, where is the challenge? The challenge is talking about what TikTok is to a bunch of senators, not operating. TikTok. Rough. Yeah.

We're going to try to get all these people at the Code Conference, by the way, including our friend Steve Hoffman. There you go. He can correct us in person. But I agree with you, David. I think that the signs are ominous, I would say,

are on TikTok right now. Yeah, agreed. The vibes are bad. I don't think Project Texas is going to go. We're about to hit a presidential campaign, and I think this is about to flare up again in a pretty big way. And I suspect, V, among

other people, saw the writing on the wall on that one. One last lightning round, I want to end on a high note. Okay. DP review got purchased by Gear Patrol. Yeah. It's going to live. That's good.

And we love that site. We love the work they do. Very happy about that. Weird behavior from Amazon trying to shut it down before selling it. For what I assume is just like nothing to Gear Patrol, which is happy to take it in the right home for it. But good. It's good. DP review is great.

If you are a camera nerd, it's probably already your favorite website. If you're not a camera nerd, go and you will become a camera nerd. You will. Yeah. I'll get that RICO one day. Yeah. PR3. It's pretty.

It's so pretty. All right. We're going to go and shop for cameras. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Wednesday, like I said, we'll have full coverage of this Microsoft trial that has literally been going on in the background while we're taping. There's a live stream on the site. Tom has been covering it as it goes.

We'll have lots of analysis. That's all happening. Look at the site, Theverge.com, if you don't remember what it is. You're this far into the Verge. com. It's a verge. It's a website. I don't know what you're doing.

Also, we've gotten a number of submissions to our wearables equation. We're going to get into that next week. We're going to lay them all out. We have to do some algebra. So we're going to figure out how to do algebra on this podcast. Just imagine that scene from a beautiful mind. That's going to be us next week. It's great.

I love those submissions if you have them. Vergecast at theverge.com. Email us your wearable equation submissions. It's been fun to read them all. We'll get into the next week. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast.

Bye. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters.

That's it. We'll see you next week.