The Vergecast - Reddit vs. Reddit: the latest on the fight for the platform

Episode Date: June 16, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Jay Peters discuss all the news about the API changes infuriating Redditors, as well as takeaways from Jay's interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Later on the show: will the Apple Vision Pro replace the TV? Further reading: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit ‘was never designed to support third-party apps’ Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’ How Reddit set itself up for a fall Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts The Apple Vision Pro might be a TV, but it won’t replace the TV Steve Jobs Showing off Macintosh to Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf in 1984 ~ Vintage Everyday In the bid to grow at all costs, Instant Pot is cooking itself and has filed for bankruptcy Live Nation-Ticketmaster to disclose full ticket prices upfront  Twitter sued for $250 million by music publishers over ‘massive’ copyright infringement The Meater smart meat thermometer now supports the iPhone Dynamic Island and Live Activities. Instagram’s status update now includes what song you’re listening to It’s not just you: Steam suddenly looks nice 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 Verchast, the flagship podcast of Open API Access for third-party apps. On this episode of the show, we go deep into React. That would be incredible if we just did a whole show on React. We should do a whole show and React. Anyway, I'm your friend, Neely. David Pierce is here.

Neal, a thing that is true is that there is a whole series pitch that includes an episode on React. So don't, don't you worry. It's coming. Very good. Alex Cranz is here. I can safely say I don't want to be on that episode. Yeah, Alice is like Rust for Life. I don't know what these words mean, and I hope people get very mad at me.

I've learned that's the secret to online engagement. Can we make bumper stickers that say Rust for Life? I feel like we tell a lot of those. I want to be clear. I don't know what these words mean. Jay Peters is here. Hey, Jay. Hey, I also cannot tell you what Rust is.

I buy the sticker, though. We can Google it. The problem is that we'd Google it and get a result from a Reddit forum that is down. And that's really the show today. So we have a lot to talk about it. We got to talk about the Vision Pro. We got a lightning round coming up, but the story of the week, which Jay in particular has owned top to bottom, is what is going on at Reddit. I will tell you the listener now, Jay, five minutes ago was on the phone with Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman.

And what I think we can only describe is a somewhat contentious interview. Steve Huffman does not want third-party apps. He does not care for them, it appears. No, it shouldn't be a surprise if you find out. followed his AMA last week where he also said that he wants apps to pay the fees or go away. But in my interview with him, he kept that same line and believes very strongly that third-party app should pay up or go away. So there's a lot going on with this story. On Wednesday, we had Christian Seelig, the developer of Apollo, a third-party app.

We should have got the developer and user side of what's happening with Reddit. It's important to talk about the Reddit side of what's going on with Reddit. Jay, walk us through what's been happening at the company. So at the highest level, this all comes down to API changes that were announced in April, which the company at the time positioned as a way to monetize their data that had been used to train AI and large language learning models. CEO Steve Hoffman gave a big interview to the New York Times to this effect. At the time, though, we didn't know how this might affect third-party developers.

And at the end of May, third-party developers learned how it, affect them. And it turns out the cost would be, for the vast majority of them, very, very, very high to the point where now we know that some of the biggest apps are going to have to shut down, and users are really unhappy about that. And the company's perspective on this is kind of muddled, right? It started out as we're mad at chat GPT and Google for scraping Reddit for all these years and using the train large language models. And it's ended with, and we hate this third party app that's developed by one guy in Canada. Well, so actually, I think it might be useful to back up even one tick further than that. Because I think the thing that has been true about Reddit for a long time is it is the best source of information on the internet.

Right. It's sort of a truism of people who love the internet that if you want useful information about a product, you append Reddit to your Google search because that's where all the good product information is. It's where all the good conversation is happening. It's where all of the good stuff is, right? Like Google's a mess. We've been writing a lot about the disaster that is SEO.

Reddit is wonderful. And the thing is Reddit has never for one second figured out how to build a business out of this. So it has just like floated along as this like lovely internet place that has an alien is a logo. And then recently has decided, okay, we want to be a public company. We want to be an ongoing business concern that makes money. And so they have spent the last couple of years really trying to find ways to be a successful business that could be a public business.

And that really turned again when ChatGPT became huge. And it was like, okay, it's very clear that Reddit's data is valuable, not just to people on the internet, but to all of these companies who are building these AI models. And I feel like it started right at that moment to like, okay, our data is literally valuable in a monetary way. And we have to figure out how to squeeze more money out of it than we ever have before. And that's like it's 15 years of work that they didn't do that is all kind of coming back right now. So I think that's right. They need to make money. They want to go public.

They've been talking about it. This idea that other big companies are going to scrape their site and use that to generate outsize AI profits is. got to be annoying them. They're just screwing up how they are talking about this. More than anything, Steve Huffman in particular seems determined to just tell the users of Reddit what's going to happen. And I'm just reading the transcript of your interview, Jay. It comes through in text. What was it like in person? It was contentious, is what you said, is the best way to put it. I wondered after seeing the AMA and seeing the company's response to this. I wondered, if it was coming from the top.

Like, I couldn't think of why else Reddit, which has previously been, I feel like, very responsive to its community, willing to listen, make adjustments as needed. That's not the case here. Steve Huffman believes very much in this business decision to charge more for its API. And he is gonna go through with it, hell or high water,

because I'm not 100% sure at the end of the day why he wants to do that, But I think it's the combination of making money from these AI companies and to run out these third-party apps that he believes have built businesses that are in competition with Reddit itself. I get it. So this is like a – David hates it when I talk about decoder on the verge chat. But this is like a decoder trope is that two things that look the same on the Internet, often one of them is much more valuable than the other, right? So accessing Reddit through Reddit makes much more money for Reddit than accessing Reddit through Apollo. And so if you're just looking at Reddit and he says this in your interview, if you type Reddit into the app store and Apollo comes up and you pick Apollo over the Reddit app, you are making less money for Reddit.

So I understand that, right, that framing that these things are in competition. These experiences are in competition, and one of them generates more revenue for Reddit than the other. I don't know, and I'm wondering if you got this sense when you're talking to him, if the API pricing actually equalizes that, or it just gets rid of the competition? My sense is gets rid of is the latter. Unfortunately, that's what I think it is. The pricing seems so high for the developers who make these really beloved apps, and Reddit has just shown. They're not going to give an inch on any sort of negotiation or giving them more time to follow the policies or even like a lower price that I really think Reddit wants to get rid of these competing apps so that users have to go onto the website or the official Reddit app. And Reddit can hopefully find ways to better monetize those users from there.

So I want to read the audience this quote from Steve Huffin to Jay real quick because I think it really puts a lot into perspective. the vast majority of uses of the API, not third party apps, the other 98% of them make tools, bots, and enhancements to Reddit. That's what the API is for. It was never designed to support third party apps. And then Huffman goes on to say he let it exist and that he should take the blame for those apps existing because, quote, I was the guy arguing for that for a long time. There's an inherent tension in those statements, right?

I was the guy arguing for third-party apps to exist. Also, the API was never designed to allow these apps to exist. Did he explain that tension at all to you? I mean, I'm still coming off the high of it all, but... We really did. We're like, Jay, pick up the phone and tell us exactly what happened. Yeah. I mean, I don't remember him speaking to that,

which tells me this change was pretty sudden. And especially when we hear folks like the Apollo for Reddit developer, Christian Seleague, when he had heard in January that the API is not going to change, I believe his quote was from Reddit was, it won't change for years. And then all of a sudden it's going through this monumental shift says that something over the past six months changed within Reddit, even though this is something that Steve told me that they've been talking about doing something like this for a very, very long time. They actually have made a choice about it and they gave everybody a month and a half to figure

at out or two and a half months. But ultimately they didn't even get that long because I think, and you point this out in a lot of the coverage you've been doing is that they made this announcement in April without saying prices. And what we've heard from a bunch of developers overwhelmingly is like, yeah, that sort of makes sense, right? Like you've been giving us free data for a very long time. It makes sense that at some point you're going to have to charge us for us. But then what Reddit was telling them was we're going to do this in a same way. It's going to make sense. And then Reddit comes out with this gigantic price at the end of May with a 30-day deadline, which is essentially nothing. Like, there's really, there's not a lot of meaningful moves you can make in a 30-day window.

And based on that, I don't know how you come out of this thinking anything other than they're just trying to kill the big third-party apps. Because they've got, like, it's not hard to model that out and figure out that's what's going on here. And Steve went out of his way a bunch of times to say, we're working with those who still want to work with us. A lot of the stuff that's on the platform is still going to be on the platform. And it's like, okay, but that's not the stuff you're describing as a competitor to Reddit. And what you're doing here is you are swiftly killing all of the things that you perceived to be a competitor to Reddit. I thought what was really interesting in your conversation there, Jay, was how actively hostile he was, not just to those

developers, but to the users themselves. It really feels like the shift. And maybe it's because they figured out large language models and they can go and they can monetize that. But it really feels like there's a shift at Reddit where they no longer view the users as customers, but as something in the way of what their actual profit is. Like this whole conversation he had with you, he was just, he was talking about how the users are the ones that are shutting up other users, they're getting rid of dissent, they're not letting their true people of Reddit speak out, and this is just a tiny minority. And that just seems like incredibly hostile and cruel to your user base, many of which are mods who are certainly the most dedicated members of the team,

or of the community. What I feel like might be what the company is trying to stress test here is how much do people love Reddit even if these third-party apps go away? And I think for so many of us, Reddit has become a habit, it's become a site that we check on a regular basis. And will the power users of the Reddit apps, which I have to suspect are ultimately a minority of the users of the platform, do they move over? Or will they continue to be very vocal and want to be able to access Reddit in places that are not the official apps? That's what we're going to be able to access Reddit. That's what the protests this week have been about, and we'll have to see if Reddit will respond to that or if they're going to continue to stick to the party line. And based on a conversation with Steve Huffman, I think it's going to be the latter.

I think the confusion I continue to have with this, and maybe you can give some insight. He repeatedly says it's costing them $10 million a year in infrastructure and costs to support these apps, which make them very little money to no money. and he views it as almost their stealing Reddit profit and stuff like that. So $10 million, which for a company like Reddit is a lot, but also should not be a whole lot for a company that large. And he's willing to go to war with his most vocal, most active users over $10 million. Steve Huffman last week, he said in the AMA that we are not profitable is something that he said. And I think, based on my conversation with him, I think he's really trying to turn. the business into a profitable business as soon as possible. And one very clear line item for that

appears to be this $10 million infrastructure costs to maintain these apps that he is okay losing, perhaps at the expense of people being really, really, really mad at him so that the company can find better business footing. You know, we'll see if that pans out. But, you know, it's funny, now I'm rooting for the Reddit IPO just so he can get public financial data on the company. Oh, I know. We just don't know the answer to that question. Alex, I think the one thing I would add to that is it's not just the $10 million, but it's the opportunity cost of all the people who use apps like Apollo,

who are by definition going to be like power users of the platform who are not using the Reddit app. So not only are you paying to keep Apollo alive, you're losing all of the money that you would get from all of the people who use Apollo. But the thing that confuses me there is that's a mobile-only app, which means it's affecting their mobile traffic. Reddit has its own app, which by all intents and purposes sucks. Yeah, like I use Apollo because the Reddit app sucks.

Yes. Right. The thing they should have done is spend $10 million to buy Apollo. Right. And that's the thing that I just, I keep getting confused on. I'm like, why are you like, we want to kill the good products and foist the shitty product on everybody

and then be like confused when everybody's mad that we're foisting the shitty product on them? Again, part of the interview, and part of what prompted Reddit to speak today. They have not been speaking a lot. They put out a fact sheet. Their claim is like, this isn't such a big deal. Jay, you want to run us through some of the numbers there?

So with this fact sheet, the main thing that they have on the fact sheet is that more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open. And this is what is technically day four of the protests that started in earnest on Monday. And what Reddit is trying to say here is that Reddit wants to be open. It does not want to be protesting. The many quote unquote normal people want to be using Reddit talking in their communities in this fact sheet. They had a few examples of like the Denver Nuggets subreddit is where people hung out when the Nuggets won the NBA championship because this is not what's included in the fact NBA was closed because it was protesting these changes.

And so I think Reddit is trying to counter the idea that the entire platform is in revolt, which is not necessarily a characterization I agree with when you go on to the R-all subreddit, which I did during the interview with Steve Huffman. And at that time, four of the top five posts were images all about the blackout. In support of the blackout. Yeah, it's in support of the blackout. I just have to say they call out the subredits that are open here. So it's Denver Nuggets, Dark Souls, not the onion.

And then the last one, they're like, our Taylor Swift is open. And it's like, you are playing with the hottest fire that burns on the planet right now. Why would you come at Taylor Swift? She just broke Ticketmaster by herself. Yeah. Well, what's missing from that statement is that this subreddit went dark on June 12th in protest of the changes. I believe it opened up on the 14th. which many subreddits did because that was the original attention of the protest was June 12th to 14th.

But I just thought that was an interesting piece of missing context from the fact sheet. What I can't figure out is what point Reddit thinks they're making there. Because I do think it's true that there are a lot of people, even on the blacked out subreddits, who would like them to be open, right? That it is, this is, this was designed to be a problem for everybody. It's designed to prove a point. And the only way you prove a point is by causing trouble. Right. But what I don't get is, A, by saying a thousand of our top 5,000 subreddits are dark is actually like a pretty large number, I would argue. Yeah, it's a thousand subreddits are dark. That's the math. Of the top 5,000, right? Like, that's a big number in one protest against an API change. Like, good God.

But even beyond that, I think there's this thing that Reddit is trying to do that to some extent I'm sympathetic for, because I think if, if you're, If you're Steve Huffman, you know better than anybody that giving into Reddit is like the stupidest thing you can do because once they've defeated you, they will ruin your life forever. And I think that's probably true. But on the other hand, there's just no part of this in which he sounds sympathetic to the people on Reddit and what they actually want. He just seems to be like holding his nose and saying, we have investors to appease, screw the rest of you. I don't know. Is that, am I overstating that, Jay? Like, did you get any sense that the guy, like, wants Reddit to be successful and happy?

To clarify that question. There's Reddit the business successful and happy, and there's Reddit the community successful and happy. Fair. I guess I mean the community, yeah. And I think what Reddit always talks about and what Steve even said to you was a reminder that Reddit is a platform run by the community. And then everything else he said seemed very community hostile to me. I just think he's okay to take the heat. Like, he has made this decision.

he is fine with the blowback, and he's just going to stick to it. So let's come back around to large language models, because that's where he started, and then David, I think, correctly pulled us out of that. But this is like what most people are putting together, what we have put together,

is Reddit sees a bunch of big companies using Reddit's user data to train large language models, and they're going to go and be even richer companies. And Reddit's, I think, somewhat rightfully annoyed by that, right? And then somehow they're taking it out of these, like, independent app developers. Did you ask him, are you talking to Google and Open AI? I feel like the Reddit-Google relationship is a very complex one.

Google needs Reddit, and Reddit kind of doesn't need Google, but also needs Google. And now it's going to even weirder as Google trains data. I did ask what the AI company's response is to this, and he mostly just said that we're talking to them. We're having conversations with them. I tried asking one or two different ways, and he didn't really get into specifics. So I don't know what those conversations look like. I don't know if OpenAI is like, yep, we're going to pay this. I don't know if Google says, yeah, we're going to pay this.

And we haven't heard anything from those big companies saying that they are going to pay these fees either. Well, how much of that is a red herring for the other big thing that's happening with Reddit, which is they want to do an IPO, right? Like there's rumors of a planned IPO. They filed confidentially at the end or end of 2021. And you'll notice that's a year and a half since they filed confidentially. It's been a long time. It sounds like based on my interview that that's something Reddit still wants to go through with.

But Steve Huffman didn't really give me any sort of timeline. And so I don't know if it's like the goal is once this transition is done that they really start to move forward with that. Is it, do they see if the AI companies spend a lot of? of money on them that gives them a really great revenue stream. I'm not quite sure how that's all going to shake out. Because if you go like Galaxy Brain, it's like, okay, the reason they're killing, like I think he's pretty clear on it, the reason they're killing the API, the reason they're killing third-party apps is because that's taking money away from them. And they want that money. And they would probably really need that money for their IPO and to like make it successful.

They want to show that they've got users. They want to show that they're driving ads. And so this is a quick, fast, easy way for them to do that while also they're off negotiating their LLMs. Does that seem, did I go to GalaxyGrain? I mean, I think it's hard to get a really clear picture of what Reddit wants to do here besides shut down this API, make sure that no third-party app developers are making any money and potentially monetize their data for AI training models. And I think safe costs at the end of the day. you know, Steve Fuffman talked about that $10 million infrastructure cost, which...

They're not profitable. And they're not profitable. So they got to figure out, if they want to IPO and look good for investors, I think they really have to try and put their business on as solid footing as they possibly can. And I think what's interesting there is you say their business, it's becoming increasingly clear. Their business is not the communities. Like, and that's something that they said over and over again was, you know, our communities

are like, our business is our community. We love our communities. It's so important to us. It's the driving force of Reddit. And it's like, well, no, it's not if you're willing to piss off this much of the community. Right? Like, ultimately, that's not your business. That's not your priority.

We were talking about this earlier today in a meeting that Reddit has such good data on the individual communities that, like, it should be able to build a strong business that's not, that's also maybe not super hostile or, like, overly, like, annoying because there's lots of really focused communities. who care about really specific stuff. That seems like really easy to target ads to, in my opinion. But clearly they want to make this broader statement about you need to be on our version of the app and not somebody else's. Yeah. I'm just reading through this interview. And at one point, Huffman says to you, I did my AMA.

I took my beating. That's a, that's in here. Wow. Well, let me remind you about that AMA. He answered 14 questions. Nobody said when he was done, I had to ask Reddit and they had to tell me that and I had to post it in the AMA for people to find out that the AMA was over. So yes, he took the beating, but for a guy who probably knows how AMA decorum is supposed to be, I don't know if he did the best job there. I'm just like reading this interview right now.

And what I'm getting from it over and over again is a sense that Steve Hoffman thinks other people are getting more value. out of Reddit than Reddit the business is getting out of Reddit. And what I don't see here and what I haven't really heard from the company in this 18-month run-up to an IPO is how Reddit's going to get more value out of Reddit. That is just weird to me, right? We see this value that apps like Apollo are getting. And he's got a line in the transcript that's like 95% of them like Apollo uses our logo. They take our data for free and resell it to users making 100% margin and they use that and that's competitive. Okay, sure, I understand that.

You should charge a fee to Apollo to regain your margin. Maybe that fee will be too high. But that's just a business conversation, right? You show up to the third-party developers and you say, look, this is, we need to get some margin back from you using our data. Here's how much we think we need to get. We realize that we've allowed you to do this for free for a long time. Let's walk down the road to the right answer.

You can come or go, but you'll feel like you're at the table. There's, we need to go yell at Google, and stability AI and open AI, whoever else to make sure not scraping the site. That's all just recovering the money. I haven't yet heard an idea for like, and we're going to make more money with X. And there's just a break there that I think is really important.

Well, what I think is interesting there is this pricing, at least for like, let's say Reddit wanted to build a robust third-party app ecosystem, it doesn't feel like this pricing is a way to do that. Yeah. I mean, again, I think what we keep coming back to is that's not what they want. They want people to use the API to build tools that enhance the core Reddit experience, which they will then monetize. Jay, you've been on this, like, crazy.

I encourage everyone to go read all of Jay's reporting this week. Read this interview. It is important to hear what Reddit and Steve Huffman are saying in their own words. So read that. I think we're just reacting the fact. that Jay just had this experience, which is quite a lot. But go read it. I mean, take in what they're saying. Jay, what do you think happens next here? I've been asked that a few times this week, and I'm very sad to say that after the interview, my opinion hasn't changed. And I think the app

shut down on June 30th, and I think Reddit keeps going. And I think the users stay really mad. But until Reddit responds in some way to these protests, which it really hasn't, and the protests have lost a little bit of steam, at least at this point we talk on Thursday evening, I don't know that Red is going to budge. And it makes me sad to say that it feels like Reddit might quote unquote win here, but they're so strong in their conviction to get rid of these apps, move forward with the API changes, and maybe monetize from the AI companies that I think they're just going to go forward. I wonder, I brought up in the same meeting Jay was talking about, I brought up the example of eBay, which has weathered many, many storms.

eBay famously just had some executives arrested for having a prominent critic of eBay stalked. This is a real thing that has gone down to eBay world. You just don't hear about it because eBay, and they've just turned into a thing on the internet that happens. They like mailed them a pig's head, I think. It was a pig mask, Alex, a bloody pig mask. Sorry, sorry. But it's just eBay. It's just like it's in the background of the internet.

It's not important. We don't talk about it the way they. We used to talk about Facebook or Google or whatever. We used to talk about Yahoo that way. AOL continues to just putter along for some reason. Like, is this the moment that Reddit goes down that path instead of being on the path it was on? That's the open question to me. Right.

Your users hate you so much, but they don't really have anywhere else to go. Are we sure Reddit's not already in that position? No. I think what the protests have made clear is that Reddit is like the glue of the internet that When stuff is happening and it's not like Twitter stuff, politics stuff, it's Reddit that creates most of the content and a vibrancy. That's why people append the word Reddit to search. From a community perspective, absolutely. Reddit is incredibly important.

And I think it's only become more so as people have run away from Facebook and Twitter. Like Reddit has benefited from a lot of that. And Reddit as a company has figured out how to make more money over the last couple of years. I just found an article I was looking for that basically Reddit as of a year or so ago, Reddit and Pinterest were about the same size. And Pinterest was making about three times as much money as Reddit, just to put some of the numbers in perspective. And Pinterest is famously under monetized and not doing a great job. You know, they've offered us the CEO of Pinterest for code.

And I'm going to be like, what are you doing? What happens there? That's my plan. You have a mall. Why is it not making more money? And like Pinterest is not doing a good job. and it makes three times as much money as Reddit. But I think to me, like, the eBay thing is like, eBay is still chugging along.

A lot of people buy and sell stuff on eBay, but eBay is not sort of vibrant in the same way, which I guess is your point. But to me, it's like, Reddit has always been kind of a third-rate social media company. And it seems. It is, though. Less and less likely all the time that it's going to be more than a third-rate social media company. Like, Reddit consolidated forums, all the forums that existed in the world. They still are out there. But Reddit became the new kind of hub of forums and ease.

place to search. And I think because the majority of people don't actually use forums, but it's been able to, like, escape by and be quiet. And now they're having what's essentially, it sounds like a labor protest in many regards. And it certainly looks like one. It looks like if you look at what's happening there and the messaging and the actions and compare that to what's happening with the strike in Hollywood, it's very similar. And now they're just saying, oh, actually, like the money matters. You guys don't matter. You're, you're, the forums, like, we keep you up for nice to these, but like, we got to make money at the end of the day, and we're going to do that.

And if some of you leave, that's fine. I think it was very telling that he consistently was speaking up about how all of the people who are very vocal are keeping the majority of people quiet and not allowing them to speak up and not allowing them to have access to all of their beloved Reddit's. Classic management tactic, Alex. Right. Like, it's just like, okay, yeah, you're just trying to get everybody mad at the protesters. when you're the one who started it, like, you jacked up the API prices.

Again, I just, the thing that strikes me about that is, is the, you know, the only capitalists on the verge staff. It's fine. Check up the prices. That's a business negotiation. Great. Doing it with a hammer is like not great. Yeah. I think that's what's confusing.

What's kind of baffled me here is like, he's turned this into something that's very much mimics a labor protest when it never had to be something that mimics a labor protest. when it never had to be something that mimics a labor protest. Right. And I think that is like the third rail of Reddit. And that's really where my eBay comparison came from, right? Or Etsy. Like there was a time when Etsy sellers being mad at Etsy had like cultural cachet. Like it would break.

We've covered moments like that. And now it's just a, it's just on the marketplace. It looks more like eBay than not, right? It lost its definition. That's, I think the danger for Reddit is like these actions. people need to care about you a lot to be this mad at you. Yeah. Once you break that, then you might as well just be anything else.

And I think the people on Reddit for a long time felt like they were loved back by the company. Even when it was messy, there's been many fights between the users and the mods and the mods and the admins. But Jay, like, Steve is like an OG Redditor. I mean, he is the OG Reddor. That's what I'm saying. He should be one of the people who understands this community the best. And I wonder if part of the reason this community feels so betrayed is because it's not like they hired some like, you know, corporate raider to come in and extract some money. Like they didn't make a private equity deal.

It's like it's the guy they believed in who built this thing that they trust who is now the one upending it on them. And I wonder if that's part of the reason this feels bad to people. Steve said something to me to start the interview before I'd ask any questions. He talked about how my favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they're really these living. organisms created by their citizens, and I think Reddit is very much the same. He said, we're a platform and a tech company on one hand, but on the other, it's a living organism, this democratic living organism created by its users. And I would agree with that sentiment. Like, he clearly

understands that the platform should be. He just also doesn't really care for them right now. Well, he doesn't care for a specific segment. And that's, look, the comparison there is Mark Zuckerberg, right? He's like, I don't know, I'm going to do some stuff. that everyone hates, get over it. Famously with Newsfeed. But they've come back to this. Facebook in particular has come back to that moment over and over and over again. We rolled out news feed.

Everyone was mad at us to members of Congress. Look, we rolled out newsfeed, everyone's mad at us, and they got over it, and they realized they loved it anyway. And like, that's like part of the founding myth of Facebook is that moment. And I think Steve Hoffman is the founder of Reddit. He understands his platform. He understands his company. And I think he's running a lot of that.

playbook are feeling a lot of that vibe. And I'm not sure it's the same moment or the same problem in or even the same political skills as Mark Zuckerberg. I disagree. I think he's running Elon Musk's playbook of like, I'm coming in. I'm going to do what I'm going to do. Suck it up. I'm not sure that I see a lot of daylight between the Elon Musk Twitter playbook than

Mark Zuckerberg. I'm the God King of Facebook playbook and the Steve Hoffman. I'm the founder CEO of Reddit playbook. That's fair. But one of them was like actively successful and happened almost 20 years ago. And the other one happened last year. And is like in flux. And I think there's a direct line from from how he treated that community and was totally fine with kicking with people leaving and what's happening here.

Where again, we're seeing him be like, yeah, I don't care if you leave. The people who are going to stay are going to stay because they love our community. I guess what I'm saying is if you believe that Reddit is a city, the thing that you are is the main. of that city, right? You're not the dictator of that city. And that's the term where you are also a politician and where Zuckerberg was actually good at, historically, his being the politician at the top of Facebook, loved, hated, admired, feared, whatever, he knows he has to play that role. And he does it. To whatever amount of success you believe he does it, he knows he has to do it and he does it. And he has Adam Messeri doing it for Instagram, right? That's why Instagram changes a button.

from green to blue. Adam's out making a video being like, we made the button blue. Here's all the reasons we made the blue. And everyone yells at him. He's like, if you don't like blue, maybe next week we'll change it, but probably not. Right. Like there's an amount of communication and presence for these leaders. Elon, whatever you think of what it's going on with Elon, you cannot deny his constant presence. Yeah. He's out there shaking, kissing every baby on the forehead. No, he's not kissing the baby. He's talking. He's talking. on the babies, they're stupid. He's like, why aren't you making me money, baby? Make more money, baby. Jay, before we let you go, can I ask you a Reddit drama question? I've been trying to figure out

what is going on with all of these subreddits who are claiming that they're being forced open and mods are being removed and there's like all this intra subreddit drama. What is going on? Can you explain this to me? This is like my favorite sub-drama and I can't figure out what's going on. So, maybe on Tuesday earlier this week, there were claims that subreddit, uh, subredits, that had, were private in protest, had been forcibly reopened by the Reddit admins because reasons. And the ones I'm aware of were claimed were advice animals and Tumblr, which my understanding is those are pretty big subreddits. But it's been hard to track who says what about which person doing which thing. And it has also been very confusing to me. Reddit, to its credit, said,

in the fact sheet today, we are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally opening communities. So Reddit says they're not doing the thing. That's some Reddit users say what they're doing. Because the conspiracy theories on both of those have been rampant. People saying like Steve is editing people's answers to his questions. Like it's been out of control in the last few days. Steve has edited in the past. He's been busted doing that actually. But I think I would I would suspect he's not doing that in this case, but he's also people have not been very happy with him recently. He's living his life To be fair, if I had unilateral control of

Reddit, I would probably do a lot of dumb things too I want you to know that I edit every comment on the Virch.com every single day. There's a reason every comment ends with Nealai is so smart. A little macro I've got going at text expander script. Now we know. Yeah, I always wonder. At the end of the day, it's like it's my meditation. We thought it was just our community.

Yeah, turns out. Jay has been doing absolutely killer work on the story. Go read all the stuff, read the stream. I suspect it's going to keep going until June 30th. So we've got much more to come. Thanks, Jay. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back with more Bridgecast. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce,

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You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication and when every message counts,

sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerley's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on.

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He has been killing it on the Reddit reporting this week, along with Mia. It's just been amazing to watch. In many ways, this is what The Verge was made for, along with the story that I'm going to get into in the lightning around. We've hit our peak. What did computers make us do? Is the question the verge was here to answer? Weird Reddit drama is one answer. And then something else.

But this segment is just titled Cranes has feelings. I have a lot of feelings. So you wrote two stories this week. One of them actually connects to Decoder this week. It's about private equity. Another one is at the Vision Pro and the TV. Actually, Kranz, both you and David had John Gruber dunks this week, which I think is a record. Did we? That's exciting.

Yeah. So Cranes wrote the Apple Vision Pro might be a TV, but it won't replace the TV. And John is a friend, so it's fine. This is what, like, blogging is meant to be. Yeah. And he was like, this shoe might not be a shoe, but it'll replace shoes. It's like a great tweet from John. And then David, you wrote, all phones should be flip phones. And John wrote, no, they shouldn't.

Effectively, he is like, what are you talking about? So good, this is what you want. Actually, John and I have been talking about this thing. Like, he is blogging a lot more lately. Uh-huh. And we rebuilt our entire site to allow us to blog more. And, like, the death of Twitter and the end of the social web and all this Reddit. So it's all, like, mixing and matching the same thing.

But it has resulted in us all writing up more and, like, having conversations across our sites. Yeah, the internet should have more fights on their own websites. Yes. It's great. I love it. It's way more fun than Twitter. Yeah, it's exactly what I want. But that means Cranz, you are now compelled to defend your Applevision pro takes.

take, and then David, I want you to defend your flip-tone take. Okay, we can go back to that. Let's start with Division Pro. I think we continue to just consider what happened to us a couple weeks ago at WWDC. Have you noticed, by the way, that there has been this run of people over the last couple of days kind of re-evaluating? It's like everybody does that, like, re-review six months later. This is the, like, eight days after I experienced Division Pro, how do I feel?

And it's just a lot of people like processing emotions about gadgets, which is very funny. It's been a really interesting week of like re-coverage of that 30 minutes people spent wearing the Vision Pro. I am this close to mandating that every story we write about the Vision Pro have a screenshot of Apple's video, just a frame grab of Apple's video where the father is taking a photo of his kids playing. And so they're playing and he's next to them in that set. And I'm just like, we should put this in every story we write about this product. Constantly remind people. Just bring people back to the essential nature of wearing this around other people. Which is kind of Cranes's point, right?

Which is cranes' point. Yeah, it leads right into it, which is this is not really what TVs are for. Talk about it. Yeah, yeah. So basically, we had a big fight in Slack largely because Gruber had this great piece about how he was still thinking about this thing and how great it was as a TV and how they were going to sell a lot of units because it. It is like a TV. And I was like, okay, that's true. I agree with him.

It's like a TV. I agree with David. It's like a TV. But it's not going to actually replace the TV because TVs are communal by nature. Even though most of us probably don't watch TV with other people all the time, they're still relatively communal things. And this thing is very isolating and expensive. And TVs are cheap.

And there's a lot of conversations about how, oh, this thing is going to be really incredible because you're going to be able to watch NBA games from court side. And like, we can't even get NBA games. games in 4K. Where are we going to be getting 3D NBA court side? Like, let's come on, guys. So it really was like thinking about how we've seen TV and stuff transform over the last couple of years and how that media is slow to respond. And the same thing is going to happen with this product. Even though we do have this commitment from Disney and everything, this feels a lot more like 3D TV than it does 4K TV. And even 4K TV has been really struggled to adopt and get content out

there. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this piece, Alex, since you and Richard and like half our staff were fighting about this in Slack. And the thing that I've come around to is I kind of think that this eyesight feature ends up being like culturally and technologically the single most important thing about the Vision Pro. Because like one of the things that happens, at least in my life all the time, is I sit on the couch and my wife sits next to me on the couch and we both look at our phones. And we don't talk to each other. We're both doing our own thing. but we're in the same space and there's something to that. And I think part of what feels so isolating to me about some of these headsets is like,

if I were to sit there and put on my quest two and start playing a game, like I have in a very real way gone somewhere else, right, in the sense that like I can hear her less. I can't see her as well. She can't see me as well. She doesn't know what I'm doing. That's just like the dynamic changes even if I'm sitting next to you with my headset on versus I'm sitting against to you looking at my phone.

And eyesight, particular, this feature where you can see someone's eyes through the headset when they're doing something. And we don't know exactly how this is going to work with content. Can I watch a movie and have eyesight on? I genuinely don't know that we know the answer to that. I think the answer is no. I think eyesight only happens when you are talking to someone outside the headset. But even that is messy, right? Because one of the things we got in the demo is this idea that like I can be watching a movie and you start talking to me and you sort of fade in. Like do my eyes fade in as that is happening? Yeah, I think this is why we weren't demoed it.

I don't think they figured all those moments out yet. That's fair. Because the basics of it are very simple. They take a picture of your eyes and they show them on a screen. I don't think I say it's going to fix the fundamental isolation problem, though. Because the fundamental isolation problem is you're sitting next to your wife. In this world, you both have spent $3,500 minimum on these headsets. You're both sitting on your couch next to each other, wearing them.

You can look and you can talk to each other. But, you know, if you're looking at something on your phone, you're like, this is stupid, you can, like, show it. You can just look at it and be like, honey, look how stupid this is and hold it up to her face. And this you can't do that. The classic phone interaction. When I think about people who love each other, it's like, look how stupid this is. But you can't really interact in that same way that you do when you're just, like, sitting on the couch watching TV and on your phone or something. And I think that the fact that you can't interact that way, that isolation is going to restrict

use cases a little more. Well, spin that out all the way to the ideal hardware. I keep coming back to the idea that the Vision Pro, as it was announced, is a simulator of what Apple really wants to. Which is AR glasses. Okay. So now we're both wearing AR glasses.

There isn't a dumb battery pack in our pockets. We've solved enormous technical challenges. No virtual eyeballs on front of... Right. We're both just wearing a pair of bands. And we're sitting next to each other and something dumb happens and I need to show to you. Like, there's still a problem there.

Like, friction, I agree with you. It's like psychological and emotional friction. I mean, practically, I'm looking at a virtual object on my display, and I want to show it to you on your display. And I've got to get two different computers to agree on that. Right? Okay. Hey, look at this.

Is no longer me holding you a pile of atoms. It's no longer me showing you a pile of atoms. It's me trying to send you a bunch of bits. And that is just harder. Like, historically, it's harder. I don't know. Like, are we going to get to a point where we've solved all of the technical problems to make AR glasses? But, like, air drop isn't good enough that I can just, like, nod my head towards you and you see the thing that I'm looking at.

Like, that doesn't sound to me like the hardest problem of all of these to solve. Here's what I'm going to guarantee, without a doubt, that the nod your head to air drop a thing, 95% successful. Like, how long did it take bump? Yeah, exactly. One decade before you could wave your phones at each other. And even like, fine. I'm not saying it won't work or won't mostly work. I'm saying that the problem of there's something on my screen that I want to put on your screen

has bedeviled computers since the history of computers. And like, mostly it works fine. But it's never the same as we're both just looking at a screen together. And it's even harder when you're just. trying to sync audio and video across those screens at extremely high bit rates in 3D with surround sound. Like, what? Like, isn't it just easier to use our eyes and ears the way that we have them?

You know what this makes me think of when, I believe it was when our Netflix show is coming out, you know, Disclosure, The Verge Manor show with Netflix. We all got on, like, Netflix's sharing platform to watch something together. Do you guys remember this? And as it turned out, anyone who joined this thing could control it. So every single person that joins just instinctively pressed play to make it play. But actually what they did was pause it. So we got like 100 people playing and pausing this thing.

And so maybe you're right. Maybe we're never going to be good at this. Well, and Apple has share play. Like they have begun to build the infrastructure they need to solve these problems. I'm not saying they're not working on it. I'm not saying they won't be 95%. successful, I'm just saying even if you spin it out to it's just a pair of wireframe Steve Jobs glasses, you have solved some of the most challenging physics and engineering problems in the history of computing. It's so like, all right, I got a I got a Bluetooth some shit to you.

Yeah. Like there's just something there that, okay, we've put up an expensive screen in the room and we're going to perceive it together. It will just forever be superior. Yeah. A TV is always going to be superior for that reason, right? Like, you're always just going to be able to turn on a TV. It's a solved technology. It's way, way, way, way, way cheaper.

And I think that's really crucial when we talk about this. We talk about like, because essentially I'm the ideal user for the Vision Pro, right? I live alone. I love TV. I love content consumption. Yeah, having a 105-inch 4K beautiful. display in my home at all times, always in front of my eyeballs, sounds like the best thing in the world. But it also sounds like the worst thing in the world. It sounds just deeply unappealing.

It's like it's expensive. And it is that isolation factor is there. And for me personally, I can't, I wouldn't be able to get over the fact that like I'm just sitting in my house and a huge, like, not huge, sitting in a fairly large apartment by myself, completely isolated. This is, The Steve Jobs dream, a huge house devoid of furniture, and somehow there's just Macintoshes everywhere. Just everywhere. Have you seen that? There's a photo.

Sean Lennon, John Lennon's kid got a Mac in the 80s for his ninth birthday, and there's a photo of Steve Jobs on the ground with Andy Warhol, and he's like showing him how to use this nine-year-old's Mac. This is like what everybody wants, right? Yeah. Now just imagine that Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol were wearing headsets at a nine-year-old. birthday party, and he was like, look at my headset. Yeah.

It's, it's dumb. I think it's, it's kind of stupid. And somebody, somebody after I wrote that piece immediately hit me up and was like, thank you. I don't think this is going to replace it because every time I use my husband's headset, I have to then wipe off like my face that's on the headset. And there's always like that, that intimate kind of grossness that headsets demand. Oh, dude, I use somebody else's laptop, and I'm like, get this garbage away from me.

Most people have natural scrolling turned on. It's disaster. And now you're going to put it on your face. Yeah. Which is much more sensitive. By the way, people have asked us this. As far as I can tell, there's no profiles on the Vision Pro. So it's just one person.

It's one person. And there were hints that there would be a guest mode. But there would be no user accounts, which seems like an enormous miss for the first version of this product. Really? I think it's the opposite. Like, this is like a win for people who want a reason to not get it. this to their children. Like, this is a, I think, I think this is a really good thing for Apple to launch on, like,

the third version of this. I'm not at all surprised. This doesn't have family sharing stuff on it yet. I mean, if they want everybody to have a headset because everybody's going to be living in this AR future where you're wearing face computers all the time, then, yeah, you don't necessarily want profiles because face computers are just harder to share with other people naturally. So it's like, no, we discourage you.

Everyone go spend $3,500. Get your entire family out. Yeah. Tell your mom to buy an iPhone, right? Like, that's the Tim Cook line. But you know what this makes me think of is the, there's been this sort of long philosophical debate in tech about like, is the future that you sort of have the one screen that rules them all, right? Whether it's like your iPhone that the world revolves around or in this case, like a headset that the world revolves around, or is the future that like everything around you is connected and has a display. And it's, and what you have is like a wearable or whatever that sort of is. imbues that with your preferences and information. And so, like, I can walk up to any screen on earth and just, like, tap it with my thumb. And it will know that it's me and become my computer until I walk away. Like, that's one vision of the future. The vision pro is the exact opposite of that vision, right?

Where now the thing I have on my face controls literally the world around me, which I find fascinating. And Apple has always kind of been on the side of, like, your device rules the world as opposed to, like, every device can be your device. It's like the Chrome OS Vision is the every device can be your device, right? You just log in with your username and password to Google and boom, you have a Chromebook. Any Chromebook is your Chromebook. And it's really interesting to see the Vision Pro be like the very end of that, right? Where it's like you don't have a TV that you have information on. The information lives here.

There's nothing else in the world that you need. I don't think there's an answer for that. I think that's going to be the persistent problem because the two things are so fundamentally at odds and privacy is sitting right there in the middle, right? Like your security and privacy are right there. And I think that's always going to be up to an individual and how much of that they want to give away. Some people are going to be like, yeah, I'm happy to live in this world. I don't want anyone to ever know what I'm watching.

This sounds great. And a lot of people like myself are going to be like, no, I want some privacy. And then there are other people who are going to be like, yeah, I like leave every window open, lights blazing, look in my house kind of deal. And those people are making millions in subscription fees. I love them. Wait, so, but it's just like at the core of that, the problems are still the same. It's really interesting. If you drill into it, right?

You're in your living room. You still need to put sensors and everything. You still need to put networking chips and everything. You still need to put control logic in everything. It's just kind of like where does the interface live? So I look at my thermostat, and the thermostat could just be a computer with a display and an interface and a whole bunch of stuff I got to learn. Or the Vision Pro could say, you. you're looking at a place where a thermostat should be,

we'll put up some thermostat controls, but there still needs to be a bunch of stuff on the other end of that experience that controls the furnace and knows how hot it is in the house. You look at an area where a TV should be, you still have to, like, have streaming services. And I think you run into the other situation,

and this is coming, again, from someone who lives by themselves, has a whole home kidded out as a smart home. People still come over to my house, They like, I still have people over. That's your first mistake. Yeah, that's the first mistake. Beyond the walls of the Z wave alliance, you shall not pass. But people visit.

And then if they want to do things like, like one of my friends, I didn't know this, I had forgotten. I set it up. So anytime I took the dog for a walk after dark, it would turn all the lights off to save electricity. I forgot that. And she was like, okay, I'll stay in your house watching TV while you go walk your dog. And then like a minute later, she was just like texting me being like, I'm in complete darkness and everything's off. What do I do? And I think the vision pro

exacerbates that problem, right? Somebody comes over to your house and they're like, can we watch TV? They're like, well, kind of. No, but they have their own vision pro. Theoretically, they have their own vision pro, but realistically, no. Like, that level of adoption is so far down the line.

It took us how many decades to like adopt, fully adopt TV? Right. And then the privacy problems are even worse, right? Right. So, again, even if you solve it, it's just a paraglass. Everybody's got their glasses on.

And you've got to come to your house and connect to your network and get control of your devices and blah. And it's like, oh, it's actually a little bit better for the computers to be like physically air-gapped a little bit. Yeah. That's not the right word. But you know what I mean? It's like you can't actually control this unless you're touching it is a meaningful layer of security. Yeah. Yeah.

You don't want the guy who's coming over to install your fridge to be like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to go adjust the thermostat. Like you watch him do that in real life. You'd be like, dude, what are you doing? But the Vision Pro, he could just be like reaching out. Or maybe, or we live in like a horrible world of like sharing passwords for augmented reality devices. It's coming. It's coming in the... They're going to have to solve the bump problem, right?

They're going to have to figure out how they air drop it. Again, if you're the sort of analyst out there who writes Apple fanfic, there are some of them, what you're doing is you're saying, okay, Apple's the beginnings of all of these technology. are getting made. Right? So the contact sharing with bump, share play, this, that. All these little branded Apple features

will coalesce into an amazing AR experience. Yeah. Maybe. But right now, that is fan fiction. And that's fine. Fan fiction has led to a number of things in this society.

50 shades of gray. It started off as fan fiction. Maybe one day, your Apple fan fiction will turn it into reality. I can't. I can't predict the future. But I know that it's not now, and I know that those problems are real.

Here's the thing I really want to get into. And I don't know the answer to this. I've been noodling on it. I'm just going to put out a call for submissions. Okay. I keep talking about this formula for things that you wear, where it's like the amount of time it's on your body versus the amount of time you fiddle with it

has to be lower than the amount of value it gives you. And I think the vision, is going to make it clear that it has to be like the most utility ever. Yeah. Right? Like a watch, a pair of glasses on your face is extremely useful. Right? Like if I didn't wear my glasses, I couldn't see.

So I want them on my face all the time and I will deal with cleaning them and generally being worried about the zombie apocalypse. Like if there's a zombie apocalypse, like I'm done. We're boned. I'm like, these glasses are the most important things in the world. I will hold both of your hands and lead you to safety. Don't worry. It'll be fine. It's like, find the 2020s and we're going to build our society around.

But, like, they're really useful. So you deal with the amount of care you have to put into them. My smartwatch, Apple has generally increased the amount of utility and I deal with charging it every night. The Vision Pro is like, it lasts for two hours in a battery. You have to wear it on your face all the time to get any value out of it at all. And it delivers something. And I just feel like we should write out that equation.

I've done it in all kinds of different ways. I'm open to submissions. Like, let us know, like write to us and let us know what you think that equation is. Because I think as we come closer to, like, reviewing the Vision Pro and the next quest and all this stuff, it will truly help us, like, figure out if these things are going to be the future or if they're just like a weird side quest. Yeah, I think, A, vergecast at the verge.com, send us an email. Send us a formula.

We will find the best ones and we will give you credit for it. It's something like time on body times fiddliness equals value. It's something like that. You have to add the dillweed factor in there too. It just be like times how stupid do you look in this? Yeah. But I think this goes back to me for like the more I think about it, the more Apple's like fundamental whiff on the Vision Pro was how was the storytelling.

And it's it's the guy at the birthday party. It's the woman doing laundry. It's like Mark Zuckerberg had that good zinger where he. He was like, all the pictures of this are someone sitting alone in their couch. Like, I think that's true. And I think what's going to be true about the Vision Pro is that it's going to be very cool for very specific episodic things, right? Like, Chris Grant said this on the Virgin Cast a while ago.

Like, VR is great for things you do for a short period of time and then you take the headset off. And I think if Apple had said that or like shown us versions of that where like here are things you can do in this that are cool, this is not a lifestyle product yet. And Apple would never say that. but they could have told stories about it differently because it's not a lifestyle product. And it's a really long way from being a lifestyle product. But the idea that I would put this on, do something in it for a couple of hours, and then take it off and go about being like a regular person in the real world again, I think is much more compelling than this idea of like you are going to wear this headset while you do laundry and go to birthday parties for the rest of your life.

But this is what I mean about it's a simulator. They showed us what they want it to be and they built like a hardware simulator of what it can be. Right, but they still told everybody that this is what it was. Like, I think the big problem with Apple and the messaging, and I think you're totally right, David. It is, they did bad storytelling here. The story was, we have a vision of the future. Here's your first taste of it. And instead, they're like, here is the future.

Now you can have it. And that's just wrong. We did it already. Yeah. Like, no, you didn't. To be fair, and I have criticized the Apple Watch launch more than anyone, I think. I would point out that they announced the digital crown as an input device on par with multi-touch and the mouse and the click reel. But what they didn't show you is they didn't show you pictures of somebody sitting there at their kids' birthday party, like using the phone as a watch as a viewfinder.

Right, but they showed us supermodels running through Africa with a first generation Apple Watch, which we got in. It was a completely foolish. I run through Africa every day with my watch. They showed us that thing where people were sitting heartbeats to each other, which by the way, I accidentally did to Joanna Stern the other day. And she's like, what are you doing? She's like, are you sending me your heartbeat right? Yeah, that's like, that's way too intimate.

That's like, I wouldn't do that to anybody. I didn't even know it was still there. I just pushed the wrong button in I message. Anyhow, the point I'm making is, even with the Apple Watch, they did the thing that Apple is that Apple is prone to doing right now, which is they sort of remix the greatest hits of their product launches. They say one more thing. They told you about a new input method.

they tell you that everything else is garbage. It's a script, right? And they can kind of mad-libs the announcement. And I think here the jump is so vast that that script kind of let them down. In a way that the Apple Watch followed the script, and, you know, computers had to get slightly better for the Apple Watch to start working.

And then they totally rebooted the interface. It was Gen 3 or Gen 4, Series 3 or Series 4. And, you know, then they figured out how to turn the screen on all the time. And it got faster. And, like, it just caught up to where they were going always. This is, like, what are they going to catch up to? Well, and also, the Apple Watch was not as huge.

Like, revisionists might say it was successful. It was not hugely successful when it first started. There was a lot of criticism of it. Like, that was that script creaking under the load and having to wait three, four years before the watch really worked. Like, my first watch, I called by Great Regret. But what I'm saying is, like, the path from the beginning to the end of the four. fourth year. It was clear. Right. Even when they totally rebooted the interface, it was like, all right, we threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, we threw out with sticks, we're going to hide

all this other stuff, right? We're going to simplify this down. This is like, here's a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. No one can tell you. Like, it was fairly obvious, I think, with a watch that notifications and health features were the things that were the most interesting. It was never obvious that sending a heartbeat to people would be the thing that would sell Apple watches. But they needed to fill out the idea of the product. Well, just see, like, your point with your piece, Alex, is what they have showed most compellingly is it's a TV. Yeah.

Right. And all the other stuff is like, eh, you got a headset on your face. But ultimately, this is a very, very nice TV. Well, so if you do the math, their math on this is a nice TV and it might be worth it, is not so off. A nice, a nice big OLED TV is going to cost you more than $2,000. So 65 inch. But this is like much bigger than that.

at, right? So a 75-inch, 85-inch OLED TV, depending on the sales and the time of the year and whether it's a super old, who knows. It's going to cost you more than $2,000. Right. A nice, atmost sound system to pair with it will probably cost you around $1,000. And that's a cheap one. That's like a refurbished one with a receiver and speaker wires. Right. If you go like the Sonosrat, it's going to cost you way more than $500.

Just the arc alone is $700. Okay, like we got there. We got to the price of a Vision Pro. But it's also, but then you have a Vision Pro. You don't have a TV and a nice sound system that you can plug your console into. Well, and I think that's a different person necessarily. Because I think what this is for is for those people who don't want to have that one big home theater system, right? Like those people are going to go do that all the time. Hey, guys, I love you.

You're my people. You're wonderful. I know they're here and I want to acknowledge them. Yeah. You guys all, you two, you and them all read the same publications on your iPad. together. But, but, like, that's one kind of person. I think this, this felt like it was more intended for everybody else. And everybody else is going to spend $600 on a TCL, maybe a hundred bucks on a Vizio soundbar after they keep saying it sucks and they go to the verge.com and

Google Best Soundbar. And they're like, oh, okay, I'll get a Vizio. And, and so they're going to spend, like, a grant. How do you convince them to go spend $3,500? TV. TV. manufacturers have been struggling with this for a while now. They all keep pushing the biggest, fanciest TVs, but the TVs that actually sell, that actually move, are the cheap TVs. I think that price gap is going to be a problem for Apple, and it'll definitely come down to price, right? Like, like, this is $3,500, but there's going to eventually be a vision, Nick's the Pro, and it'll probably be like $1,500 or something. And you're still going to be struggling with that, okay, I could spend this and have a really good set for me personally, or I could have something that, like, is much more

flexible and can do a lot more. And I think that's where they're going to struggle. But they don't have to, they don't, they're not trying to displace the TV market right now. Like, right. But that's what they're going to have to compete with because that's what they've made. They've made like a competitor to the TV. Right. I think we're both saying the same thing, which is in the end, no one is going to cross shop this with TVs. Yeah. But in the end, the value proposition is look at this TV. So that's a, there's a disconnect there that somehow, some way will get resolved and I think probably what resolves it is time and determination from Apple to make this a product that works. Yeah. And I think the stakes for it would be so much lower if it were $500, right? If this is

like a thing you could buy that was sort of purely additive to your TV and you watched it when it was just you, but when it wasn't just you, you put it down and you watch TV with whoever else is in the room. But if $3,500, the value prop is just so different that like I think Apple is going to lose that fight for a while here. Yeah, a $500 one, every single college dorm would be filled with them. It would be the most popular thing. There's a long way to go between this product as it exists in $500. Oh, yeah, we're not getting there.

Just the displays alone. Yeah, yeah. This thing costs $3,500 because it has to, yeah. All right, we should take a break. Kranz, you also wrote about the instant pot in what happened in private equity. And I just want to point out they're bankrupt. They got purchased by a big private equity firm. that did some private equity stuff and after bankrupt.

Yep. This was a pretty simple business. They made instant pots, and then once a year they sold them to the pots, would everyone's parents bought them an instant pot? Like, it wasn't a complicated business. The connection I want to make is Cranes wrote a piece about how the search for endless growth tanked this company, which happens over and over again. And then just by coincidence, this week's decoder, is Brendan Ballou, who's a federal

prosecutor who wrote a book called Plunder about how private equity is destroying American markets, and you should just go listen to it and then consider the instant plan. It's a very good episode. As everyone knows, I hate Decoder and refuse to listen to it, but it's a good episode of Decoder. We'll allow it. I have never been more surprised. Like, Sooner up a try's on Decoder, everyone's like, good job. I'm like, here's a federal prosecutor who wrote a wonky book about antitrust in private equity,

and everyone's like, this is the episode. Okay. I know we've cultivated an audience of nerds, and even to me, sometimes it's surprising what people are nerdy about. Before we take a break, I just have one question, which is, Alex, were you as sad as you seemed writing this story about the Instant Pot? You seem very sad about the Instant Pot. I was just bummed. I'm always bummed when private equity, like, kill something that's cool. Stop doing that private equity, but they won't because they love profit.

I do love my Instant Pot. Well, they're not, the bank isn't taking it away. kicking down our doors. We're claiming all our instant pots. This is why you should buy things that don't rely on cloud services because the bank can take that away. That's true. That's true. Always on my mind.

All right, we got to take a break. We'll come back. We had a little lightning round and we'll wrap this 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

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David has picked one for me, and in retaliation, I've picked two more from myself. But David, why don't you begin? really played myself on this one. The good news is mine's very quick so we can leave two or three hours for your several. Mine is that Instagram added a feature to its status update thing in the app that will now show what song you're listening to. And I just want to give real genuine kudos to the Instagram team and meta as a whole

for doing its damnedest to bring back the away message. Yep. I have been saying the away message and status things need to come back for years. I believe in it with my whole heart. I wish this were like an open standard that worked everywhere and I could like change my Slack status. It would also change my Instagram status. Like that'd be rad. But this rules.

This is aim away messages coming back via Instagram. And I just I just want to applaud Instagram. I think they do a lot of bonkers things and it's mostly a bad app. But notes and the whole status feature is very good. So congratulations to Instagram. Well, they're doing that and they added broadcast today. Instagram is quickly turning into the everything app. Yes.

Eat it, Twitter. Like you can just see. where it's going. It's kind of neat, but it's also, boy, you open Instagram and a lot of things are happening. I think Instagram is really quickly heading down a path of being like the everything social app because like Facebook is an entertainment platform slash dying. WhatsApp is only ever going to make money by helping you chat with businesses. So they're leaning really hard into like shopping. They're doing some social stuff. But Instagram is like, especially if the, their Twitter competitor threads sort of attaches to Instagram in an interesting, useful way. Like, this becomes

the place you share stuff with your friends. That is what they are going for in a really big way. And I think it's going to be really interesting to watch. Yeah. All right. My first one is one David assigned here, which is actually really cool. Taylor Swift exists. Her fans exist. The ticketing catastrophe happened. That led to a series of hearings, Live Nation slash Ticketmaster, along with a bunch of other ticketing companies and Airbnb. So Live Nation Seatgeek, Dice, and Airbnb. It's so funny to me that Airbnb is part of this. Well, you know why, but they have announced that they will no longer have hidden fees. They're going to disclose the total price while you're shopping. And this is like a classic, right, a threat of regulation. Like Taylor Swift fans were so upset that the

government was like, what if we regulate these companies? And they're like, what if we just do what you want don't regulate us? And Airbnb is in the mix because people are so pissed about cleaning fees. Yep. So Airbnb also sees the writing on the wall. And so all these companies are going to be more transparent about their pricing, which is wholly a good thing. I think it might be better if there's more actual competition in the space. But I will take whatever crumbs of transparent pricing we can get. Yeah, they're going to take this to be a huge victory. But what this actually is just they know that they can charge whatever they want. So instead of hiding the fees, they're going to tell you about the fees. But if you want to go see Taylor Swift's Ares tour, you are still going to

pay the dumb, enormous monopoly-riddled fees because you have to. So, like, this is, we have not solved our problem, but we've solved this much of the problem. Let me read you. I mean, it's called the breakup ticketmaster coalition. I don't think this quote's going to be surprising. Here's what the breakup ticket master coalition said about this announcement. Live Nation Ticketmaster's announcement today is a half-hearted attempt to ward off a lubing DOJ investigation into addressing the real issue.

It's monopoly power over live events. Yeah. That's, uh, Taylor Swift was written that better. What the breakup ticket master coalition would say. Also, do you actually want the fees broken out? Like any, every time the fees get broken out, I just get really annoyed about the fees. Because then I'm like, why am I paying all these fees? Yeah.

I don't want to see. I want like, I would rather not know it all and just be like, why is the. But then you pay them. Yeah, I still have to pay it either way. But one way I can be like, you know what, maybe this flight really did cost $1,000. And I don't need to know about like the $100 gas tax fee that got passed on to me. that Delta could have paid for themselves. They do that to make you mad at the government.

Yeah, they're trying to make me, but instead it just makes me mad at the company. And like, I just want to not be mad, besides the price itself. I have bad news for you about the current state of American markets. You're going to be mad. All right, Kranz, what's your lightning round?

Something I'm not mad about is steam has, steam looks nice. Like, it's looked pretty nice versions of it, but you know how sometimes you're using steam and you go to a tab and you're like, oh, my God, what's happened here? They've started to, like, make it a little more cohesive. Everything's running together. There's a new Notes app, which is a lot of fun.

And Sean Hollister, like, absolutely adores it. And I cannot wait to, like, start using it on my Steam deck. And it's just, it's just like, it's a nice thing. Something I'm not mad at. There you go. Yeah, something I didn't want to rage at. I want to do something positive. I regret to inform you there's a $100 gas tax for the next thing update.

Okay, my, I got two. more, but they'll be really fast. One, Twitter, I got to work copyright a lot into a Vergecast somehow. Twitter is being sued for $250 million by the music publishers of America because they just don't pay any licensing fees for music. It's hilarious, hilarious problem for Twitter to be in. This is like the most solved problem for the major platforms. These are just deals they all can take because the companies know that music on these platforms is a lucrative marketing channel. for them. Whoops.

Well, and my favorite part of this is the other things that Twitter decided not to pay for this week, which were like it's Google Cloud Bill apparently. And that's become a whole thing. They're getting evicted from an office in Colorado because they stopped paying rent. Like Twitter's new biz dev strategy is just like don't pay any of our bills and see what happens. And it's a move. It is a move. Yeah.

It certainly worked for some people. I would just say that the don't pay the music industry move is. not one that traditionally works that well for anyone. Fair. Including the music industry. Metallicas. Yeah. Just going to come collect on you.

They want their money and they're going to get it. Okay. And here's my last one. I want to end on a high note. This is the most important software update of all time. The meter smart meat thermometer has gotten a software update. M-E-A-T-E-R. That's very important.

It's very good. It's owned by Traeger. This is a big deal when they acquired it last year. It now supports the dynamic island in live activities. on iOS. What does it do? You're smoking a brisket. You just glance at your phone.

It'll tell you the internal and the ambient temperature right there. And maybe I actually have very little success getting this to work. It will calculate the time remaining. Our computers get at math. Who knows?

You got a wrap in brown paper. It's all good. My favorite thing about this is this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard and also for sure the best use of the dynamic island that anyone has discovered since the dynamic. Think about the amount

of engineering that has had to occur for this to happen, right? The meter people had to make a thermometer with a wireless chip in it that could survive the heat of a grill and work. And actually has two different thermometers in it. That's just a feat of like miniaturization in packaging. All in and of itself. Apple had to make the iPhone. Can you imagine if the meat guys had been working on the visual? Pro.

Yeah. I imagine it every day. Can you imagine you look at your grill and it like, it just shows you a bunch of grill information? This is the future. This is why you want the glasses. That's what you want it. Yeah.

My wife says that whenever we're, whenever I'm operating the smoker, she's like, the only words you say to me are temperatures. She's like, how are you? And I'm like, 207. And she's like, what are you talking? I don't care. And then the other day when I had the wildfire smoke and we were running the air purifiers in the house, she's like, I finally understand because I just want to tell you.

what number the air purifiers are out all day. And then she started calling them the smoke machines, which was a perfect name for an air purport. That's about right. Yeah. Wildfire smoke event. Anyhow, those need to get updated for the dynamic island as well. I just want to tell you,

the meter smart thermometer has been updated to support the dynamic island on the iPhone. Is the sentence that the verge was created to publish. A number of concepts in that sentence that normal people don't give a shit about is so high. But you, my people, you're here for me. Also, I want to thank Dave Lee for tipping me into that story because that's why we have readers.

They know you. All right, that's it. Thanks to you, our nerds, for being with us. One story I want to call out. Mia wrote about Google, about the storefronts on Google and how they're like SEO disasters. It's part of our ongoing coverage of like the world Google has made in this time of change. It seems like a good time to look at what we built before we tear up. all done, built something new. Go read that story. It's really good. And we have lots

more Google coverage to come. Okay, that's it. David, what's Wednesday's episode? Next Wednesday, we're going to talk to Jan Tui about a bunch of smart home stuff. This week was Smart Home Week on the version.com. Like a lot of really great stories. I learned a ton about all of people's weird, insane smart home setups, including yours, Kranz. But we talked to Jen about basically like where to start and how smartphones should work, or smart homes should work, rather. And then we're going to talk to Josh Jezah about a thing he's been working on for a long time that I can't tell you about yet, but it is really cool. And it's coming next week. Very exciting.

All right. That's it. That's our rest. That's our rest. 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, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.