Tomorrow - Episode 90: Casey Newton, Unedited

Episode Date: April 18, 2017

This weak Josh sits down with Casey Newton, a senior editor and Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, to discusss social media issues like weather or no t we should be aloud to edit typos in tweets. (Josh says know on principal since the jury is sitll out on teh affects that could hav.) Teh pear also touch on there interest in current events like the rize of shitlords and edgelords, crimes committed on Facebook life, an the problems with plaforms that use instant artickles. In teh spirit of episod e 90, we didnt waist any thyme editing this. So bare with us and emjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm your host, Joshua Tupokki. Today on the podcast we discuss shit lords, mastodon, and murder. But first, a word from our sponsors. USA is passionate about what they do ensuring the financial security of the military community and their families. As an employer, USA creates conditions for employees to succeed. USA is hiring for customer service reps, designers, developers, insurance, banking, and more. Visit them online and see over 200 jobs available. It's an organization that provides opportunities for you to collaborate, create, and lead.

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while supporting millions of users. And all of that is a lot. That's just like a huge amount of stuff. Go to couchbase.com slash tomorrow to learn more. That's couchbase.com slash tomorrow. Alright, my guest today is a fantastic writer, a wonderful man, a guy with a tremendous head of hair, and really just a down to earth cool dude. I'm of course talking about the Virges Senior Editor and Silicon Valley Editor, Kasey Newton.

Kasey, thank you for being here. Josh, it is an absolute pleasure. Kasey, we haven't talked in a long time, but I've been following you on all of the platforms. I see you on Instagram. I see you on Instagram. I see you on my, do I, wait, do I follow you on Instagram? I think I do. I think I still do. Maybe I don't.

I don't know. I purged recently, not that long ago I purged. Did some purging, but I don't feel like you were part of the purge. But if you were, my apologies, you're a wonderful guy anyhow. No Facebook, Twitter, and you've been doing a lot of writing lately. I've been doing a lot of writing. It's primarily what I'm paid to do. And I try to honor the commitments I have to my players.

But specifically, wow, what a formal way of putting it. But specifically, I'm just here putting the words on the screen in accordance with my contractual obligation No, but but recently you've written a couple of things that are very hot button issue tackling very hot button issues Yeah, and I'm just trying to figure out which one I want to talk about first I should say Casey I should preface this for anybody who doesn't know Casey and I used to work together just full disclosure Yeah, and more than that I would say Josh to kind of a crazy chance on me back in the day

and got me to the verge, which was and is my favorite website. And so I'll be forever grateful. I'm going to pretend that you didn't say that the outline was your fair website. And I'm pretending to be still. But you did say that. Yeah. No, no, no, that's fine. But that's true.

But you know, wasn't that crazy of, I didn't think it was that crazy. You were very talented, smart writer. And I thought, what a great get if we can get Casey Newton to come and write for us. So it has proven to be a very good decision on everybody's part. Anyhow, but Casey, so you have obviously cover Silicon Valley. You're running around out there, you're schmoozing and then destroying. Schmoozing destroy. Is that your program, I believe? That's the plan. Yeah, sort of lure people into a false sense of security and then and then destroy their lives and their families. So anyhow, so you written a couple things recently

today or sorry last night on Easter Sunday. Yeah. You guys published this thing about Facebook incident articles. Was it yesterday? It was, right? It was. We wanted the kids to have something to read while they were unwrapping their candy. You know, like if there's one thing that people like to do on Easter, it's read about Facebook

incident articles and it's and they're failure to catch catch on with the with the publishing industry. Can you talk a little bit about the impetus for that article and sort of give everybody an overview of what you're talking about, what's going on out there? Yeah, sure. So just about two years ago, Facebook did something that kind of scared and excited everyone, which is that it started to host publishers content for the first time. So instead of having to visit a link, you could now just click on a post inside of Facebook and it would keep you inside of Facebook and Facebook would let publishers sell the ads

if they wanted to so the publishers could keep making money, but they would no longer be going to the publishers websites on which they'd spent lots of time and money trying to make them good. And so this product, instant articles, kind of concentrated all of publisher's hopes and fears about the future of journalism into a single place. And for two years, we've wondered, is this going to save journalism or is it going to be the end of it? And people really did talk about it and these kind of apocalyptic terms. And so I spent the past few weeks talking to publishers, talking to people inside Facebook, outside Facebook, people who used to work at Facebook and wrote a piece that

basically says on one hand these never really became the, it never really became the, either the savior or the murderer of journalism. They just kind of had this middling performance, but as Facebook was building them, they were also building the things that would ultimately undermine them, such as video features, live video, ephemeral stories, and the net result of all of it is that whatever you think of instant articles journalism is arguably less important to Facebook now than a number has been. Yeah, well, it's interesting because I do remember a couple of years ago when all this started

and I have, you know, I have mixed emotions about instant articles. On the one hand, I feel like they homogenize and dumb down all of what the internet is. And then on the other hand, they are a little bit faster. And so my time is precious. And I can't be waiting like an extra two milliseconds for a page to load. But they, but it's interesting. A few years ago, there was this talk of, and I think you even site John Herman wrote something I think for the all.

It could have been for BuzzFeed, but I think it was for the all. But correct me if I'm wrong about the sort of coming news apocalypse that we're brought about somewhat because of those things like an instant article. And the apocalypse did not happen. Can we just be clear on that? There has been no instant article driven news apocalypse. I mean, there's an apocalypse. Don't get me wrong.

But yeah. Well, the apocalypse is that instead of focusing on writing and reporting, that was the thing that you did until, let's say, 2013, now you also have to have a video production team. You have to have a live video production team. And eventually, you're probably going to have to have an ephemeral stories team. And so no longer can you just focus on the writing and reporting, you need to be able to produce content across

all manner of formats. And by the way, those formats are going to change every six months. And that seems to be the new reality of journalism. As Facebook changes its mind or changes its strategy or sees a shiny object in the offing that it wants to go towards. I think it's interesting. I've heard people in the industry talk about how they need to be able to rapidly fire large

groups of people and rehire new groups of people because of how quickly these platforms are changing strategies, which is, you know, apocalyptic in a way. I mean, it is a crazy way to operate but I think it's like a very non-linear. Which I think is probably how all apocalypses are. There is some linear. You can kind of trace the steps and then at some point like you don't know where the next Horseman Is coming from yeah You got one horse become it from this direction another horse become it from that direction and then wham apocalypse Well, I think think about it this way Josh like so I come from the world of newspapers That's how I got my start in the world of journalism and if you worked at newspapers until like let's say

start in the world of journalism. And if you worked at newspapers until like, let's say 1980, the way that you distributed news hadn't changed in your lifetime, right? You wrote things down, they were printed out on printing presses, and they showed up on people's doorsteps in the morning. Yeah. By the way, you could say TV was sort of in there, but not for like-

Not for like- So those formats came along. Yeah. But it wasn't like TV was never seen as a fundamental threat to. Yeah, like newspaper journalism itself, right? It was. Yeah. If you wrote a story, if you were like a writer for a newspaper, there was really one, or like a, it was like a newspaper or magazine because there's really only one mechanism to like get that into the world. Right. And then I mean, you are right that eventually they try to do

some convergence things where you're a newspaper reporter, but you also go on TV every once in a while. But this stuff happened over very slow timescales, relatively speaking, right? And today, if you're a reporter, like working at a big digital property, look at the things that you were expected to do. You're working across all of these formats. Like, what are the chances that you're really good at writing and being on video? And this all could like. They're low. KC, I'm going to tell you I've seen it. They're very low. Yeah, they're kind of low odds, right? Yeah.

Look, I don't want to sound like I'm just moaning and complaining about how hard it is to be a journalist in 2017. It it still beats working for a living. But when you look at the kind of nightmare news cycle that we've all been living through since, you know, let's say November 9th, and you look at kind of some of the failures around journalism during that time, the rise of fake news, you know, I don't think you have to be a total Cassandra

to worry about where your journalism is coming from, how it's getting to you, and how you're making sure that it is of high quality. These things actually do seem to me to be of real importance to the future of the Republic. So that's the spirit that I'm trying to investigate this stuff in, trying to understand,

if you are a publisher these days, and you need to build some kind of sustainable business, how do you do it so that you aren't having to just tear up all the blueprints every six months? And the answer is right now no one knows. Right, well, I do think there is, you know, this idea, this chasing of a certain kind of audience or a certain amount of audience.

I mean, I think a lot of this is driven by this, you know, and I've talked about this a ton, I'm sure you've heard me talk about it, see me right about it, seen me write about it. But this idea that like, okay, what if your audience, it's a 50 million person, it's 100 million people, it's like, you sort of get lost in this idea that you're trying to reach every person.

Facebook is like, hey, we have this new Facebook live platform, it's really exciting. You may go like, oh, fuck, yeah, I need to get on that. I can reach more people that way with my message. And it's sort of like one of the, it's like you got these two, this twofold issue, right? One is, okay, yes, the platforms are shifting all the time, but then it's also like no one's really entirely sure where the appropriate audiences for their story, their publication, their message, whatever.

And so you have everybody kind of firing everything all at once, which I think has created that perfect environment for like the Mike's Cernavitches or the Alex Joneses of the world to be like, yeah, we're news too, why not? You know, like no, and you don't really know what's going on here, it's noisy, there's a lot of stuff happening, there's a lot of different formats,

like how come my Cernavitches periscope, yeah, that's news. But also nobody knows what anybody wants. Like where we even sure Facebook Live video, which is a whole other topic we should discuss due to the things that have happened over the last 24 hours of Facebook Live. But is that what we should all be doing

and watching and experiencing? Is it a more shitty version of reality television Is that what we should all be doing and watching and experiencing? Is that it? Is it a more shitty version of reality television with way worse angles? Is that the future of entertainment? I don't know. I don't know. Also, is news entertainment? There's two questions I think you're asking at the same time.

One is which of those things do you do if you want to have a good business? Two is which of those things do you do if you want to have a really high quality editorial product? Hopefully, eventually, we figure out how to do both of those things at the same time. I think for a lot of big publishers, all of the pressure right now is to just build scale at all costs and try to maintain whatever level of quality they can. But we know typically the more things you try, the more mediocre everything gets. So for me, I think a lot about how do you maintain the level of quality when you're doing what

you're doing? And it's super hard. It's also super hard. I mean, it's hard to just write a good story. Even if you don't do anything else, to go get a good story and make sure all if you don't do anything else, right? Like, to go get a good story and make sure all your facts are straight and to put it in a, to put it in language that is, that really helps to other people to understand it. That in and of itself is a whole job, right?

Like, that's an actual town. And then like to go like, all right, well, what's the snapchat? You know, how do we do this for snapchat or whatever? It's like, you're in a, I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about or explore other ways of telling stories. So I think that's actually really valuable. And it's something that I feel very strongly about. But it's also like, you know, it's your point if it's, if you're going for like all of this sort of like unknown audience and you're going for scale and you want to try all these different platforms out and you're trying to do stories that are have value. It's, even the New York Times has trouble doing

it, right? Like even the largest institutions have trouble doing it. And I feel like it just created such a, we're also unmoored at this point. Like everything feels, no one really knows what the right thing is. So there's like a tremendous amount of hand-ringing. There's a lot of hand-ringing, but we should also say there's a lot of upside two, right? The reason that everyone gets excited about Facebook live video and that happens is because it's a land grab opportunity.

All of a sudden, the biggest platform in the whole world says, hey, come along, try out some stuff, and we're going to give you wink, wink, priority access to 1.6 billion people or however many it is. That's an incredible opportunity if you're a publisher, and arguably that's an opportunity you've been waiting to have your entire existence as a publisher. So there is a lot of opportunity in these things, but you know, something that I sort of try to get out in my story is however large this opportunity has been, it doesn't really seem like any publishers

are getting ahead in a massive way, right? But there's so much competition that everyone is just kind of like running to stay in place. Yeah, it seems to me like also, there are sporadic successes on Facebook and successes that I don't, I can't fully understand or choose not to contemplate to deeply like where I'm like,

oh, this guy's making weird. Like they're just like taking MSNBC videos and putting different text over top of them and then I'm like, oh, this person has 14 million followers on Facebook. And like a lot of people are getting information from this person. It's like, this can't be good. But it's, but it's also like you see a lot of, of, of well, hey, you know, who does really well on Facebook is the New York Times. And CNN does pretty well on Facebook. And you know, there's brands that you're just like,

okay, those are the brands that do well in other places, so they, that maps to the Facebook universe. You know, I just think it's, I think it's, it's, it's sad and also telling that there was so, so much fear and, and consternation around instant articles and the truth about instant articles is that they're they really are flat in terms of they're not a they're not a motivator or a mover when it comes to like successive business right like. No I mean not one of the major publisher is reported that instant articles made them more money than traditional links to their mobile website. So in just about every case, this was an actual money losing proposition. What about what about audience? What about audience? And it also doesn't seem like they've been able to meaningfully grow everyone's audience

for a couple of reasons. One is there's just a lot more competition, right? New publishers sign up on Facebook every day and readers have a finite amount of attention. But then, too, Facebook is promoting other formats over these instant articles. So last year, they announced that they were going to prioritize shares from your friends and family over links shared by publishers. They've been doing this video initiative. And then last month, they introduce stories, their Snapchat clone into the main app. So it's like in every turn, even if instant articles are successful, Facebook is undermining

them in other ways. This is crazy to me. The stories thing is fucking bonkers. I see, I mean, they put one into WhatsApp. They took it out though, didn't they? They actually removed it or have... Well, I think it's still there, but they just added text-based statuses back after people complained.

It's insane. Like, with Instagram, it makes a lot of sense. Like, when they introduced stories to Instagram, I was like, I don't know. And then I was like, oh, wait, this is like Snapchat for the elderly. Instagram's very popular, but Snapchat is now.

No, I know that. Well, they just surpassed Snapchat in users, right? And I think it's, well, I mean, it's a perfect Trojan horse. I mean, it's like you're in the app for photos. This is like just a hop-skip and a jump away from photos. And it's implemented in a really totally, like, fluid way. Like, like the integration, I will say this,

the integration of stories in Instagram feels very natural. And it felt natural at the beginning. I was like, oh yeah, okay, there's some circles appearing, check them out. But it's crazy. They put the shit in Facebook too. And now it's like, I opened Facebook, and by the way, the Facebook, my Facebook stories are barren. I mean, I don't see anybody using it. And I think it's a real testament to one, I mean, Facebook's like desire to try to just check every possible box, but also their lack of visibility into, I feel like like in terms of product direction,

it's like, what is the strategy? It's like try everything all at once. Like it seems very, very strange to me that they would, they already are having huge success with it on Instagram. Why try to take away that success and move it to Facebook? I don't. They argue and I think their data shows that the audiences don't overlap as much as we think they do because, you know, all of us are on Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat

and so it's weird to see the same thing everywhere. But, you know, they look at their numbers and there are places in the world where Instagram isn't widely used and so Facebook might be the first place that you see stories. I actually think that if stories is going to catch on with you know people in their 50s and 60s let's say it's going to be in Facebook and it's not going to be an Instagram. So I sort of get why they did it. I see Facebook as being very much like Microsoft, where it's kind of like they had this one crazy good business idea and it gives them enough room to just kind of see what else is successful

and then go out and either buy it or copy it. I feel like Facebook has definitely become, it is feels not current. Like in a way that's distinct. I have to say, when I look at Facebook, I get more bummed out by reading Facebook than anything else on my phone. Like, I mean, there's something about the, and admittedly of course it's the people that I follow

or the people that I'm friends with. I just feel like the tone of conversation and the types of things that you see people sharing now and the types of things you see people talking about are distinctly unfun. That's the best way I can put it. I agree. I spend like, I'm going to say a third of all of my waking hours like criticizing Twitter like, if you look at my written output, at the end of the day, Twitter still delights

me every day. You know, fault of their own, I just follow great people, but it makes me laugh, it makes me think, I feel smarter after I've read it, right? I do not feel that way about Facebook. It's like, it's like, it's like Twitter. The one thing I'll say about Twitter, and I think Twitter has failed, I mean, even recent product changes, this thing with the at, the way they've changed, adding people, is like really bad and looks terrible and it's hard to follow. But the one thing that's I think true about Twitter is that it is highly ephemeral.

I mean, it's much more ephemeral than Facebook is and it is much less like mired in the kind of, I mean, admittedly they have created a giant comment thread with Twitter, but the comment thread moves so quickly and there are so many conversations happening at once that you tend to kind of get lost in the wave. Whereas like Facebook, you can easily get mired. Like if you open the comment thread where it's like a thousand comments, you're like, oh holy shit, like it's going down in here.

Like this is like an internet comment thread for real. It's like, you know, it's like a Reddit situation going on in there. And so, and that immediately kind of like stops you in your tracks. I mean, even Instagram, they've kind of kept the comments away from the content enough that you get a little like blush of them, but you don't have to, you don't end up like mired in them. And I think that there's, anyhow, I mean, this is now I'm just bitching, but like, it's

weird because Twitter has so many problems. And actually, like, I I wanna segue to talking about Twitter for a second, and I think we should take a break. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, Casey, and then we're gonna be right back, and we're gonna talk about the internet, we're gonna talk about social networks, and we're gonna talk about murder,

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If you're running an e-commerce business, whiplash is your virtual warehouse. You send your products to a whiplash facility so that when the orders come in, whiplash packs and ships them just like you would with tender, loving care. But faster and cheaper, leave a logistical hassle of order fulfillment to them

and save money on shipping costs while you do it. Holiday sales shouldn't be stressful. Next time you need to get whiplash, they've got facilities in Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and London. And right now listeners to this podcast can get a hundred dollar credit when signing up at getwiplash.com slash tomorrow. We're back with Casey Newton, the wonderful and lovely and fantastic and intelligent and charming senior editor and writer at theverge.com website I've heard of and checked out a couple of times. So Casey, we were just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but we started to kind of go into a Twitter conversation. So you wrote this thing, was it last week? You're ready? Yeah.

The sorts of things recently. It was like the case for editing on Twitter. That's right. The case for editing tweets. Yeah, can you give me a little elevator pitch on your concept? Yeah, so I am someone who is prone to making the occasional typo on Twitter and other places where I write. And you've probably noticed on every other text box that you've ever typed into, say for maybe SMS, you make a mistake, you click a button, you fix your mistake, you republish it, and we all move on.

On Twitter, this has never been possible. And so you have this routine occurrence where someone tweets something really funny with a mispelled word or they've left out a word right or maybe they use the wrong word and they look kind of terrible and maybe if they could just change one word it would look a little bit better. And so my question has been why can't we just for the love of God edit tweets and people come back in the all the time in the yell and they say, case scene number one, just delete it and retweet it, what's the big deal? Or they say, this is an edge case, no one really cares about it. Or they say, this would be literally impossible from a product standpoint,

because Twitter is a unique snowflake in all the world of tech products and you could never possibly allow the tech that is on Twitter to be edited. And I came in and said, this is all BS, let's just straighten this out and let us edit tweets. And so I try to make that case. And what is your theory here that tweets are just forever editable? Uh, so listen, among us pro editors, there are two camps.

There are those that think that they should be editable forever, and there are those that think you should have a window like a slack gives you one minute. I actually don't have super strong feelings about this. I would say any tweet I've ever wanted to edit. I've definitely noticed within one hour, if Twitter said we'll let you edit within five or ten minutes, I would be fine with that too. I also suspect that in practice you could let people edit tweets forever and nothing really catastrophic would happen. Do you think that, I

mean, doesn't this present a problem where people just will endlessly edit inflammatory tweets? Yeah, so here's my proposed solution. I mean, number one, everyone just sort of assumes that every Twitter user is a horrible hooligan and that the minute their one tweet goes viral, they're immediately going to try to get everyone who liked it to look like they secretly love Hitler, which I suspect will not actually happen

more than a handful of times, but here's how I think you account for that. If you're just looking at the tweet on the timeline, you see the aggregate number of retweets and likes. If you click into it though, you'll see the retweets and likes that belong with sort of each version of the tweet. So if the tweet that went viral is a picture of a puppy, you see, okay, that got 10,000 likes and retweets. And then you see the newer version above it viral is a picture of a puppy, you see, okay, that got 10,000

likes and reach tweets. And then you see the newer version above it that's, you know, a picture of our president. And that has, you know, five likes and three reach tweets. So, you know, you can sort of preserve people's personal brands while still allowing editable tweets. It sounds like we're over complicating. Here's what I think. I think that select partners should have the ability to edit tweets like publishers, publishers,

for instance, like the outliers, no, not just verified, because that's too loose, because they have really fucked up their verified situation. I'm suggesting the certain partners, brands, publishers, I mean, here's a good one. Like you're a publisher, you put a tweet out, you like forgot a piece of punctuation, you know, some exclamation mark,

or you misspelled a word. It's like, it's a pain in the ass, and it's bad for business to have to delete that and then redo the tweet. It's like, it just is like, in for a normal person, I don't think the stakes are very high. I mean, like for me, for Josh Topolsky, it's like, it is annoying when I have a typo

or it is annoying when the link is broken, but I don't feel like it really harms, I don't feel like it's that big of a deal. If people who follow me aren't gonna be interested to check out the tweet if I have to redo it or something, you know? Sure, it's not a big deal. It's a big deal.

It's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. It's a big deal. It's not a big deal. It's a big deal. It's not a big deal. And yet it was built by Slack and it was built by Tumblr. And it was built by Facebook. But they're so, okay, let's go down the list here, okay? It's all just text blocks.

No, no, no, no, let's break it down. We're all just talking about text blocks. Wrong, don't simplify it. Don't let them off the hook, okay. Slack, that's a group chat application for collaboration between teams, okay? Of course, you make a typo or you put the wrong link in, or you meant to paste one picture,

but you paste it the other, those are things you should be able to change. You're collaborating with your coworkers or your friends, okay, that's thing number one. Tumblr, I don't even know what you're talking about. That's like a blogging platform. I mean, Tumblr is like a miniature version of WordPress. I mean, if I wanted to run the outline on Tumblr,

I couldn't do it, but I could do a really bad, shitty version of the outline on Tumblr. You know what I mean? Like, it could be like the outline light, but it would still be some version of a blog. So I think Tumblr doesn't even get to be, you have drafts and you can do fucking embeds and that's not even in the same vicinity.

Facebook is a cesspool. We can't even get into that. But I will say one thing about Facebook. I think if you can allow editing, you gotta allow longer posts, okay? Just make sense. People are writing long, you know, thousand words, screeds about how great Donald Trump is

and how, thank God we didn't elect Hillary because she's a criminal and lock her up, et cetera. You know, 1100 words of lock her up. And I think that it makes sense that you're gonna need to edit that. But I think with Twitter, it's like, dude, you got 140 characters, you got your shot. You know, take your shot, okay?

Don't miss it. This is just such an old testament way of approaching software design. It's like you get your shot if you fucked up, fuck you. You're right. That's right. I don't get it. Like software should be forgiving.

Like we should not always have to accommodate software. Software should accommodate us. Twitter is not. We're going to have typos. Twitter is not software. Twitter is a way of life. And also I should say that Twitter is a really like a state of mind and I'll also say the Twitter's

changing the world I don't know if you've heard Jack Dorsey talk about this but it's one tweet at a time it's changing the world and there's nothing else like it on earth so you really can't compare it to anything else and I will say that I agree that brands and publishers should be able to edit tweets I think that regular humans those are the only people that shouldn't publishers should be able to edit tweets. I think that regular humans shouldn't edit human beings should have to suffer with their bad tweets. And I'm by the way, as speaking as a human being, okay? As a human being who makes mistakes.

I'm telling you that that's absolutely not. I've proven it. I'm telling you that you listen, it sucks. You know, you do a typo, but I think that you would unleash a very dark timeline on Twitter, literally and figuratively. Darker than our current timeline, I say let's do it. Oh, yeah, okay. Let me give you an example.

You know, Sernavitch is harassing some woman on Twitter and then she's like, Sernavitch is harassing me. Next thing you know, you look at his tweet and it's like, he's like, I like you. I think you're really cool. Great job on that story. But what do you think that ended up? Like they do on Facebook.

Yes, there's obviously has to be an audit trail. You have to be able to see prior versions of tweets. Oh, you think Twitter has the technology to do that. You're crazy. You think they can do it like that? You can delete any tweet. Like this is what I don't get. You can already delete any tweet.

So everyone's like, we must preserve the historical historical record like these people would prevent us from being able to delete our tweets if they could I feel like I like that idea I like that idea I I'm gonna cover that book all physically like it right is Ryan is so mad about this no we should definitely look I Twitter is a bad system that's why that's why everyone's going to to uh master on master on that's why everyone's going to, to, uh, Mastodon. Mastodon. That's why we're all on mastodon right now.

Unfortunately for mastodon, there's one flaw in their fucking plan, which is, there's 6,000 different mastodon instances. And nobody knows who's on what fucking network, can we talk about mastodon for a second? Because it was one of the dumbest, one of the worst and dumbest. It's like, imagine Twitter, I'm like, I'm listening. Imagine a better Twitter. I'm like, I'm listening. Imagine a better Twitter.

I'm like, you've got me like a better Twitter where you can write more than 140 characters. I'm like, I like this and we keep out all the trolls. Sounds good to me. Oh, there's just one thing. There's 6,000 instances and you can't get on all of them and you can't have the same name and somebody can take your name on one of them

and there's no way to know what's going on in the other instances and also nobody gives a shit about it and it's only for nerds. Okay, so I will circululate to all of that and yet for a Twitter replacement built by 123 year old in Germany, not that bad. Three words. Peach is it. Peach is the Twitter replacement we've been waiting for. They just need to fix it. Well, I don't even know what's going on with peach. It's like been completely abandoned. But like if you did, if you could to fix, well, I don't even know what's going on with Peach. It's like been completely abandoned. But like if you could, if you could, I'm sorry,

like Peach guys, give me a Peach. I will take care of it. I will turn it into a real social network. Call me up. I will turn Peach into the social network that you almost made it. How many instances will there be? There'll be a one fucking, there'll be one fucking instance.

You log on to peach.cocool, which is their website. And you jam, look, Peach is the coolest, Peach is the best. I don't know why Peach hasn't been embraced by the masses because it's the only true social network that matters in my opinion. The Peach is the L.O. War of going to Peach. Now, L.O. is bullshit.

L.O. is fucking like a wannabe tumbler, okay? Peach is it. That's what Peach is at. Yeah. Anyhow, but I think I have to, I sort of have to agree with you, I guess, Casey, ultimately, which is like. That's good.

Which is like. More than I was hoping for. I think, yes, some people should be able to edit tweets. No, all people should not be able to edit tweets, but also, I guess I kind of don't care at the end of the day. The more I think about the more. Yeah, everyone tells me that, no, here's the thing, Josh, everybody tells me they don't care about this

and then talks to me about it for 20 minutes. So, for people not caring about it, I sure hear a lot about it. It's like the great, it's like one of the great, like unsolvable philosophical debates of our time. It's like, no one can ever arrive at the right answer, but it's a lot of fun to, it's like a dorm room freshman dorm situation.

Right, the colors, I see the colors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The exact, like the Twitter should Twitter have edits is the literally like, is my blue your blue? And I think that this debate could go on for a very long time without any. I mean, what does Jack say? Jack one to have 10,000 word tweets? Okay, good question. Here's okay. Well, the 10,000 word tweet that that's another story for I think another time, but I will say

I asked Jack about editable tweets last June and without giving anything away, he said You know, it's very complicated and that's all that he would say. But then, a lot of money. Yeah, he can't do it. They can't do it. They don't have the tech. He was having some sort of argument with somebody on not like a heated argument,

which was like discussing something with somebody. And he said the wrong thing. And then he tweets, where's that edit tweets button? Sort of like winking at the idea. So I actually think Jack is on board with this. I think he agrees with me. Oh yeah, Jack would love to erase. Jack would love to erase some of the things he said.

I'm sure Jack would love to go back and talk. It could be. It's redo some of his statements. I'm sure that would give him an endless amount of joy. Let me ask you a question, Casey. I feel like you'll have some insight into this. Yeah. What do we get into about these Nazis on Twitter? Oh, can we fucking get rid of them?

I mean, just do that. I mean, this is like an easy thing. How about that? How about how about Jack? Jack could do that. How can he doesn't do it? I mean, I was, I was, you know, talking earlier about how Twitter was rebuilt by 123 world in Germany and yet that 23 year old found the time to explicitly ban Nazis on his, uh his massard on instance. Well, there's only 400 people on mass. There's only 400 people on massard right now. So it's easy to ban Nazis when like you can get really. Yeah, yeah.

You know, the 200 guys who are definitely Nazis. But now what happens when it's like 20 million people? 200 million people. No, fair enough. Fair enough. No, no, no, it is a challenge and it's something that they should do. So I mean, like what do you want me to say like obviously they should bandatism from the platform? Do you think it's true? What about freedom of speech my man?

You know, where do you draw the line? You know? I Mean speaking of a freshman dorm room arguments. Yeah, what is freedom? I think about it Can we even have freedom in it in a capitalist society? I don't know. I Mean there is there was an idea that kind of bubbled up during some of this discussion that there are certain kinds of speech that if you To clear them to be permissible wind up kind of corrupting the whole system and that like you can you know That if you insist on giving Nazis a platform and they use it to destroy the whole system and that like you can, you know, that if you insist on giving Nazis a platform and they use it to destroy the whole system, then what was the value of your free speech to begin with?

Kind of like a mayor. I'm not making this. Kind of like the United States right now, interesting. Well, I mean, yeah. Are they destroying the system? Definitely. But here's, you know, to that point, I think actually this is something I think about all the time.

Like, we're talking about can they make editable tweets or whatever, it's like, it's like, even basic good moderation tools seem to be out of the reach of, now I will say they have some filter, whatever it does. I don't know what it is, I turned it on. I'm like, it's like filter bad people. And I definitely see way fewer horrible people in my timeline now, like it's way more chill.

And not in the Nazis hate me, because I'm Jewish, and also outspoken. But the one thing that's interesting is, I thought, like, here's a good idea. Okay, if somebody starts harassing you on Twitter, like what happens is like a guy like, well, Milo, he's been removed, and a lot of these other guys have been actually removed

from the service. But like, they have these like swarms of followers, right? Who are like doing their bidding? So one of the things that would have been really easy, I feel like for Twitter to have done at some point was to say, block everyone who follows this person who I don't follow, right? Which is to say like, if I follow Chris Hayes,

which I do, and Chris Hayes follows David Duke because he needs to, you know, find out what David Duke is saying because it's important to his MSNBC broadcast. Then you wouldn't, you wouldn't block, if I blocked people who follow David Duke, you wouldn't block Chris Hayes, but you would block all the fucking idiots who follow David Duke and think he's cool, you know? And are also swarming on users being racist and sexist and everything else. So it's like, why don't they implement things like that where it's like, give users some ...

Well, there's no shortage of common sense ideas that would reduce abuse on Twitter. This is the first year that Twitter has actually implemented some of them. So keyword muting, for example, is like, maybe I never want to hear the N word again. Let me just type that into a box on Twitter and now I never have to see it in my mentions. See, I have every, I have every, every, every, every years. I have every word but the N word muted. That's just, it's a nonstop. So your timeline is.

It's a nonstop torrent of shit is what's happening. No, no, but yeah, the keyword muting is a step in the right direction, but there just seems to be this like, you know, you're talking about like these technical challenges and I feel like, I feel like what no one wants to tell us about Twitter is that it's actually like built kind of badly and it's hard to do things on the platform.

I've heard, I'm willing to tell you that. Okay, I've heard whisper. I I'm willing to tell you that. Okay, I've heard whispers. I'm absolutely willing to tell you that. That, that like basically the technology is actually kind of fucked up. And doing big things is hard for them. They couldn't even handle redesigning at replies.

I'm very nervous that like, and that like isn't about the technology. That's just visual. That's just, yeah, I was just gonna say that's just UI stuff that I don't trust them on. I don't even remember what they used to look like. I just can't remember a time past them being horrible. Remember the like, when it wasn't like a line,

like they all grouped together. Oh, remember when they had the blue line, they called that the, the whip. No, there was all that stuff that, there was all that stuff that Dick, the Dick did. The Dick bar. What was the Dick bar? What was the Dick bar? What was the dick bar?

What was the dick bar? Can you try with a brand? The dick bar was an advertisement that as you scrolled down the timeline, we kind of pop up above the tweets. It was like a promoted tweet that would pop up and people called it the dick bar. It was like a pop over. It was like a Twitter pop over, basically. Yeah.

But what do they call the line? People hated that line when it came out, the blue line. I think, I mean, it wasn't just a line. I don't remember there being a secret name for it. Is it still there? I'm looking right now. Yeah, it's a group of supplies like that. I'm just trying to check it out.

Let me see. I mean, Twitter really is, it really has not matured. I mean, does anybody remember the first version? Oh, yeah, the lines are there. And the line continues to work as a service despite everything they do. Well, it's because they had one good idea, which is like this nonstop real-time feed

of 140 character messages is actually really an interesting. It's like just bite-size blast of information, which turns out are really bad for humanity, by the way. But, I mean, let's be honest, you get a lot of utility out of Casey because you're a journalist and you follow a lot of interesting people and you also probably parse, you know, you look at, you see a tweet, you maybe before retweeting, you might follow the link and check out to see if it's like from the Washington Examiner or not or Washington Times or whatever the fucking fake Washington newspaper is. Yeah.

But a lot of people don't. A lot of people are just like retweet, which is why that edit function could be so terribly dangerous and you don't even realize it. Because one day it could be like, one day it could be like, I love Bernie. And then the next day that tweet could become, I love Donald Trump. And it would be, it would have been just a imagine the chaos that would ensue. And then you would have turned out that that was the same exact person

and who had equal sentiment for both. And there was nothing wrong with either one of those tweets. And any rails at any rate. Okay, so let's talk quickly about the Facebook live situation that just cropped up. Sorry, I know we're talking about social a lot. I know you've got a lot of other things that you wanted to talk about. But unfortunately, we're trapped in this world,

and we have to live inside of it. So there was essentially a guy who did who committed a murder live on Facebook. I've been sort of avoiding details on this story, not details like about the story itself, but I am very concerned about winding up watching the video because I don't as a rule like to watch people be murdered. And can you talk a little bit about Facebook's reaction

to this, their response, and maybe a little bit about their responsibility in situations like this, given their platform and the size of it. Yeah, I mean, dude, I have to say, like, I felt really gross and cynical today because I saw tweets actually about this happening yesterday and didn't really even bother to follow the story because there have been so many other heinous crimes live streamed even just over the past year. There was a rape that was broadcast on Periscope. There was a employee of a TV news station who broadcast himself murdering his colleagues,

right? So like this stuff happens and it's not just Facebook's live streaming platform and in some gross terrifying way, it seems to be a feature of any live video platform. As people are going to do the worst possible thing with it. And so the question becomes, what do you do about it? And what Facebook said just a couple hours ago is, listen, it took us about two hours to get this thing off the internet, and we think we can get it off faster. Yeah, I mean, on that, though. But what else can we do?

Like, if you're going to let everyone just broadcast live to the world, people are going to do horrible things. So then it just really becomes a question that, guess moderation and can you train a machine to understand what a murder looks like. Right. And what is the, what do you think the answer is? No. I mean, they've trained machines to know what sex looks like. So that's a start. Murderer, I think, can take more forums than even the rich and exciting variety of ways that we have sex. So it might be harder to kind of capture all of the ways. But I expect we will see progress there over time. Yeah. I mean, I'll stick instead. You know, this horrible person

who committed a murder on Facebook Live did not have a million followers, right? It wasn't like this was a major event Although, you know, the nature of the world is such that I would not be surprised if someday somebody with a big following did commit a murder and People will watch in real time and it will be horrible. I mean, I think that you know But it's also like, it's not just murder, right? It's any manner of this stuff where it's like, as we, you know, as we kind of break down these walls between entertainment and information and reality

and fiction and it's like, you know, you do start to see, like, I think what's more disturbing about the fact that someone did it is the idea that, is this kind of, I have this like just terrible sense that this will become less and less of a problem for people, you know, and that in some way we may end up encouraging it. I mean, I look at Trump and I look at, I look at the bad behavior

that we see publicly that's so clearly not acceptable. Hate crimes and hate speech. I mean, this is of course coming from the guy who is literally the fucking president, but people around him now feel this total empowerment about saying what they want, doing what they want, acting how they want. And you see the thin, very permeable wall between what we all agree on is acceptable and

what becomes acceptable as our attitudes change and as society changes. And it's like, I'm not saying we're gonna be in like the running man suddenly, like anytime soon, although we do have a very running man backdrop to reality right now. But it is like this sort of thing. And also you're great at the running man I've seen. I am one of the best running man performers,

Vogueing and then running man, those are my two main dances that I perform when given the opportunity. But yeah, but it's just like, I just worry about the lack of self-control. I mean, I think this is to me as the social media problem and a lot of the stuff we're talking about on Twitter and a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about

with Facebook, not so much the new stuff, but just like, you know, where we, there's a line where it doesn't, it isn't about the product anymore, right? It's not about Facebook, it's about like how we are, about human beings. And- No, totally.

And like, think about how long this has been predicted though, right? I mean, there's a famous case of somebody who was murdered on live TV, like a city council broadcast. And I wanna say it was the 70s, like I learned about it in journalism school, like the late 90s Yeah, you look at natural born killers kind of forecasting this this world We sort of all sense it and I think we don't really know what to do about it

I mean I would point out that as horrible as these crimes are they are also exceedingly rare. I hope they remain that way. Yeah, Well, I mean, there's more, certainly more of them now than, I mean, feels like this is a trend, right? Yeah. Like to your point about the other crimes that have happened on, like, live, on live social media, you know, I don't think, I don't think it's an, I don't think it's inescapable. I mean, I think there is a certain amount of inescapable nests to the idea that someone is going to take advantage

of these platforms in kind of a bad way. But I don't know that it's unavoidable for us to get better at what we choose to share. And I feel like that's something that people have not done a tremendous amount of work on. And I feel like that another generation is people have not done a tremendous amount of work on. And I feel like that another generation is gonna do a lot of work on it. I feel like the generation that came to this stuff

knew like that where we were like, oh wow, we never had this before, now we do. Kind of our self control is very bad. But I feel like the generation that comes after this like last decade or a couple of decades of kind of like the internet boom and the social media boom is gonna be much smarter, much better at like what they actually choose.

And this is already evidenced in like, you know, with Snapchat and with like the way that, I mean, we've all read and talked about like, I mean, in the world where most of our posts are deleted by default is great, particularly if you're under 21. Like, I hope that is the way that the stuff evolves. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, do I have hope for the future?

I think we're in a very grim time, but I think that ultimately, you know, it's always the young people's job to pick up, to clean up the mass that they're, that the, the elder, the elders have made for them. I mean, we're certainly living we're certainly living in that right now. I mean, we've got like a 70 year old president who has completely retrograde concept of society and like who's going to fix it? It's not going to be fucking 60 year old, you know, voters in Wisconsin. I mean, maybe we'll be it's going to be the two of us. And people much younger than us. The tad, the tadpoles that are out there right now, the, the young Pepe's that are

going to grow into full grown Pepe's and reclaim. This is my number one grave about the Nazis. They stole Pepe from me, which you, do you, do you regularly have it in using Pepe? Not, not, not regularly, but I did enjoy some Pepe memes like there was a Pepe that yeah So somebody made a Pepe of my avatar on Twitter, which is like which is really wonderful like Like it's one of the best things that I'd ever seen But then this was and this is before the Nazi stuff But then there's also this great Pepe that's like, William Shakespeare Pepe that I saw like one of my favorite tweets of all time.

It's like, it just says when she texts you back and it's with the William Shakespeare Pepe and it just doesn't make any sense at all. It just is like, it has no relevance or relationship to reality whatsoever, but it just works in some special way. Anyhow, yeah, you know, I'm so excited to pick this off today. Well, I'm so excited because today I learned that there's such a thing as Pepe Hipsterism and that you can actually say I was into Pepe before the Nazis.

I was. Cultural capital. I was. No, I think you deserve a lot of credit for that. I do. I mean, I was, you know, there was a time when it was innocent, you know, he was an innocent guy, an innocent frog. And now these fucking, this is actually my least favorite thing about these fucking

Richard Spencer's of the world. It's like you stealing our good haircuts, you're fucking, you know, I can't wear a vest anymore now. And you got, and you got Pepe. But by the way, those guys are like wildly unsophisticated and unstylished in a million different ways. I'm not feeling too bad about it. But like, it is annoying.

Like the appropriation of like normal things to like the okay symbol apparently is a Nazi hand sign. I don't know if you're aware of this. It's like dude. Oh, that's new to me. It's dude, okay. Yeah, it's white power. It's a W and a P apparently.

Yeah, you didn't realize that Ryan. I'm showing Ryan right now. I see it. Do you see it now? No, but this is what I'm fucking talking about. It's like, can we just have the okay symbol? Like you're going to turn that into a sig hyal like I don't understand. They took that killer mustache.

I know right that the best mustache style ever. Those cool helmets, the swathika. I was, right, that the best mustache style ever. Those cool helmets. The swastika. I was, good luck. How dare they. Let me give you a life hack. And this is what I say to people who complain that we gave stole the rainbow.

You can also use the rainbow. You know, I don't think I was holding the rainbow. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think you've got this, I can do it. I can do it. I don't think, yeah, I don't think I'm holding the rainbow. No, no, no, no, no, no. I think I think you've got this, I can't. I can't, I don't think, yeah. I don't think the swastika and the rainbow have the same kind of crossover appeal that you're imagining.

Okay, let's maybe say the swastika's off limits, but I think the okay symbol, you can still use without too much trouble. That's what they said about Pepe. Yeah, right. Yeah, you can still use Pepe. Next thing you know, I'm in the Ku Klux Klan. Unbeknownst to me.

How'd I get here? What happened? And yeah, Casey, before we go, and I do think we have to wrap up because we spent like 25 minutes just trying to get set up for this podcast. But I'm all your fault. I just want to say all Casey's fault. But you said you've got some Westworld theories. You know, we do a podcast here called Out West, which will be starting and revving up again

for season two. But you said you have some Westworld theories and I'd like to hear something about them if you don't mind sharing them. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I think Bernard is a host. So I don't know if that's something you guys have considered, but I wanted to put it out there.

Have you ever seen the show? Have you seen that? Have you seen the show? I did. And actually, the Out West made me so much more excited to watch every single episode. I actually have no fan theories. I'm the least creative person in the world when it comes to that stuff. Just like tuning in every week to listen to the insanity being on school, it was my favorite

part of the show. I'm actually super mad that it's not coming back until 2018 because I want to hear you and John and Adrian just say insane things about the show. I, I, one of the most fun experiences I've ever had in life was, was doing that show. And also learning that I was right about Samurai world. And, sorry, spoiler alert, Samurai world is a thing. But like, I, you know, they had like Laura like secretly record me watching it. Yeah, because I hadn't seen it. We are actually launching the outline the night of the, the final episode, which as you

can imagine was, was fucking crazy. And so I didn't watch it till like 24 hours later. I had to watch it. I was so tired, but I was like, I got to watch it. But at any rate, yeah, Bernard, he might be a host. I don't know. I mean, the jury is out. We may not we may discover it in season two Or we may not and you know, I'm looking forward to unpacking those mysteries. All right, anything else that we missed that we should talk about Casey

Anything coming up that you want to talk about any exciting events in the future any any pieces you're working on that you want to promote Nothing really to promote except that so Facebook has its developer conference this week, F8, which is required me to go to San Jose. So if you're interested in more Facebook related news, you can always follow me on Twitter at Casey Newton and I will keep you posted of their latest changes to human civilization. Casey Newton on Twitter, you can find him on theverge.com. What happened to Palmer Lucky? He's out, huh?

He's gone from Facebook. Yeah, Palmer is going to make Pepe billboards in his spare time. He's creating the perfect virtual reality environment to hang out with Pepe. Yes. I guess I should mention that he really did fund Pepe billboards and that's one of the

main reasons why he's no longer an actress. Yeah. So here's the thing. I know Palmer a little bit. I mean, not to, you say, were friends or anything, but I knew him a little bit. You know, we would chat once in a while. And this is, by the way, a humble brag because it's insane that he seemed like a very nice guy, very nice guy,

very chill dude, who was kind of a nerd just trying to make virtual reality happen. I consider him to be like a real pioneer in virtual reality and imagine my disappointment. I mean, we were like on the Oculus, like when we, I mean, we saw the duct tape version of it in our trailer. Right.

Were you there? Were you there the first time? I don't think we were legends. Yeah, and they brought it in and we were all like losing our fucking minds. I changed like in my whole perception of reality. So it's very disappointing to hear that like he's some kind of like edge lord, like shit posting about with Pepe memes and stuff like it's. We live in a very bizarre and upsetting time and I wish that there was some way we could bring everything back down to. Sanity. You know is there a difference between a shit lord and an edge lord by the way i think it edge lord is like a cool of what a shit lord calls himself.

It's like i'm an edge lord but now you're shit lord i mean shit poster edge lord edge lord shit lord like I'm an edge lord, but now you're a shit lord. I mean, it's like shit poster, edge lord, edge lord, shit lord. Like I'm not really, I'm not really sure where the crossover happens. I mean, edge lord is a really perfect whoever came up with edge lord. Like whoever invented that on the internet. I don't care who they are. That person is a genius of a language genius and should be given a Pulitzer. I think edge lord should be the name of the next Lord album. Anyhow, Casey is a great, it was great having you on the podcast. It was great being had. I really, I really know I really did enjoy this and we should do this more often, man. This is a lot of fun.

Next time you'll get a real mic. I love it. Casey, as we should say, is FaceTiming right now into this podcast. So you can thank Apple, Incorporated, for this great audio quality. It's a good piece of tech right there. It's a good tech, which you love. You love tech and gadgets. Love tech. It's fine.

He doesn't really fight. He's like Casey, like, you know, so many people, the Virgil, like, you know, are like gadget fucking experts. But Casey is not, in like Casey's he detects from a completely different angle. I just only care about software, it's true. And so it's like, we're like plugging a mic and he's like, I don't know, there's a thing here.

I'm like a mixing board. He's like, I guess anyhow. Anyhow, Casey, thank you so much for doing this. It was a ton of fun. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I screamed a lot during this. That's good. In a good way.

Yeah. And you have to come back and maybe after F8, fate, and you can do a report on what you saw there. Let's do it. OK, cool. Thanks so much, man. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week with more tomorrow. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best.

Though, unfortunately, your family is on one instance of mastodon, and you're on a different instance of mastodon. And so it's really kind of impossible to know how they're doing at this point.