ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► That's right, it's given me time to, since we're in this no man's land,

00:00:02 ◼   ► given me time to eat this delicious warm apple pie that Erin just brought up that she just made,

00:00:06 ◼   ► because apparently that's what we decide to do when it's a thousand degrees outside.

00:00:09 ◼   ► No eating while podcasting! What do you think you are, John Roderick? No eating while podcasting.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Hey, did you hear anything up until I admitted it? Nope.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Have you yet spilled any apple pie into your iMac?

00:00:19 ◼   ► No. That would be quite an impressive feat, though.

00:00:22 ◼   ► It really would, I mean...

00:00:24 ◼   ► I just feel like eating and podcasting do not mix.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Well, that's what the meat button's for.

00:00:28 ◼   ► [MUSIC]

00:00:29 ◼   ► It feels like we just got off the phone.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Like we just got off of Skype for the last episode.

00:00:33 ◼   ► - It really honestly does.

00:00:35 ◼   ► - Here we are again, two nights later.

00:00:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, 48 hours later, almost to the minute.

00:00:40 ◼   ► - I barely published the last episode.

00:00:42 ◼   ► - So as we record, it is Friday evening, the 22nd of July,

00:00:47 ◼   ► and one of us is skipping town next week,

00:00:49 ◼   ► and so we're recording early

00:00:51 ◼   ► because we're dedicated to you, our listeners,

00:00:53 ◼   ► and don't want you to go any time, or any weeks, I should say,

00:00:56 ◼   ► without a new episode of this accidental of podcasts.

00:01:00 ◼   ► And so we are recording very shortly after the last show

00:01:03 ◼   ► and did not have a lot of time to accumulate follow-up.

00:01:07 ◼   ► That being said, as always, we do have some for you.

00:01:11 ◼   ► Do we wanna dive right in, gentlemen?

00:01:12 ◼   ► - Let's do it.

00:01:13 ◼   ► - Let's start with the dog rental,

00:01:15 ◼   ► which was the namesake for the last episode,

00:01:20 ◼   ► free to play dogs, or was it, yeah, that's right.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Anyway, the internet has written in to correct us and has referred to the true gift to humanity.

00:01:30 ◼   ► That is Snopes.com, which says the title they used was "Pika Q," which I thought was kind

00:01:36 ◼   ► of funny.

00:01:38 ◼   ► They correct us in the story that we told about the animal shelter and the dogs.

00:01:44 ◼   ► To quote from Snopes, "Claim, a shelter rented dogs from embarrassed adult Pokemon Go players

00:01:49 ◼   ► and raked in tons of cash for all their dogs were swiftly adopted.

00:01:53 ◼   ► false. What's true? The Muncie Animal Shelter of Muncie, Indiana enacted a novel Pokemon Go dog

00:01:58 ◼   ► walking program inviting locals to walk shelter dogs during their gaming sessions. What's false?

00:02:03 ◼   ► The shelter didn't charge players $5 an hour per dog to "rent" dogs for--

00:02:08 ◼   ► Well, so it was free to play.

00:02:10 ◼   ► That's a fair point. Rent dogs for walking. They were not rapidly cleared of dogs for adoption,

00:02:16 ◼   ► nor did they make MegaBox off a program designed to harness a gaming phenomenon to get shelter dogs

00:02:20 ◼   ► some time outside. So that was all a bunch of BS for the most part, but it's still an

00:02:26 ◼   ► adorable story and I'm kind of glad we talked about it anyway.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Yeah, so two things on this. First, I intentionally didn't retweet people pointing us to the Snopes

00:02:36 ◼   ► because I wanted to give people like a week to think it's real. Of course, it doesn't

00:02:40 ◼   ► work if we record two days after the previous one. People who aren't listening to the live

00:02:44 ◼   ► stream, I want to give them—I mean, maybe you guys already are cheated, so that's too

00:02:48 ◼   ► bad. I did not.

00:02:49 ◼   ► I didn't have the heart. I want to give people a week to believe.

00:02:52 ◼   ► And like when we prefaced this in the past, in the last show, we were like, you know,

00:02:56 ◼   ► who knows if this is true, it's on the internet, blah blah blah, but it sounds like a good story.

00:02:59 ◼   ► And that's, of course, all the things that are made up on the internet sound like a good story.

00:03:02 ◼   ► That's how they spread. But I like to give people a week to think it was real, because it was a nice, heartwarming story.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And the second, Casey referred to Snopes as like the gift of the internet or whatever.

00:03:12 ◼   ► It used to be a lot more than it is now. The Snopes website is pretty grim.

00:03:17 ◼   ► pretty pretty grim. Like, it is not a nice place to be. I was scrolling through this

00:03:22 ◼   ► story and there's like this picture of maggots at the bottom that's part of one of those

00:03:25 ◼   ► terrible ads and everything is like blinking and moving.

00:03:28 ◼   ► Oh, God, yeah, you're right.

00:03:29 ◼   ► No, it's not a good sign. I don't know what happened to it. You feel like IMDb or whatever.

00:03:35 ◼   ► I mean, IMDb has gotten worse too, but like you think these old sort of things that were

00:03:40 ◼   ► around a long time ago that have value that sort of are category-defining websites should

00:03:44 ◼   ► have found some way to make it work without making their sites more and more gross over

00:03:50 ◼   ► time but alas.

00:03:52 ◼   ► But that's just the web these days. I mean it isn't like Snopes is run by horrible people.

00:03:57 ◼   ► I mean I don't know who runs it but…

00:03:58 ◼   ► It's not just the web these days.

00:04:00 ◼   ► No, it really is.

00:04:01 ◼   ► It isn't. It's just in your cynical view that you think every website is doomed to

00:04:05 ◼   ► this fate but that's not true. There are websites that are not like this. Like I said,

00:04:09 ◼   ► even IMDB which has gotten worse in terms of usability but hasn't become festoon with

00:04:12 ◼   ► ads and viruses and pictures of maggots, and there's a pro version that you can pay for

00:04:17 ◼   ► that gets rid of a lot of that crap, like that's the way you do it. Or Wikipedia. Wikipedia

00:04:20 ◼   ► is not, you know, it doesn't have "Tabooli" or whatever ads at the bottom of it, it's

00:04:25 ◼   ► got what's-his-name's-face coming down asking you for money. But still, it's not, you know,

00:04:29 ◼   ► this is not the ultimate fate of every website. This is the fate of websites that are slowly

00:04:33 ◼   ► circling the drain.

00:04:35 ◼   ► It's very hard to monetize a website in 2016 that doesn't have a very particularly targeted

00:04:41 ◼   ► audience like Snopes in ways that aren't horrible. This is not like a gradual progression that

00:04:49 ◼   ► happened over the last 20 years. This is a very rapid progression that happened over

00:04:53 ◼   ► the last like three years. It's been very recent and very quick with the massive shift

00:05:00 ◼   ► in traffic of like where traffic comes from going all the way into Facebook, a ton of

00:05:07 ◼   ► desktop browsing going away being replaced by either phone browsing or just not browsing

00:05:11 ◼   ► websites and just spending more time on social networks instead. And of course all the, you

00:05:16 ◼   ► know, robo ad networks and all the problems that go along with those like the horrible

00:05:22 ◼   ► ads and the massive fraud problems and I mean it's a tough business now to try to make money

00:05:28 ◼   ► by just having an ad supported website. It's very, very hard. It's nearly impossible for

00:05:33 ◼   ► most sites to do it in a way that they can both afford to have any kind of staff quality

00:05:38 ◼   ► at all and also have a site that is not very focused, you know, audience-wise, so it can't

00:05:44 ◼   ► get very expensive ads and that is not just full of horrible crap like that. I mean, look

00:05:48 ◼   ► around. How many websites do you see that are really in great shape these days that

00:05:54 ◼   ► have a staff of more than like two people? It's really hard to find any.

00:05:58 ◼   ► Yeah, but all the more reason that like the well-known sites have a leg up because they're

00:06:02 ◼   ► They're like, "Where does everybody go for movie stuff, IMDb?"

00:06:05 ◼   ► I mean, Amazon bought them already, so they basically have already been saved by their

00:06:09 ◼   ► plans.

00:06:10 ◼   ► But, you know, it's not impossible.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And if it's going to be more difficult now than it used to be or whatever, the ones that

00:06:17 ◼   ► have the most advantage are the ones that are already established genre-defining categories.

00:06:22 ◼   ► Even Slashdot never got this bad, or isn't this bad now, because I believe it still exists.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Well, yeah, all of Slashdot's trash is in their comments.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Fair point.

00:06:30 ◼   ► So what about like the Sweet Home for example? That's not festooned with terrible ads all

00:06:35 ◼   ► over the place. Now to be fair they are, they appear to be pretty reliant on affiliate,

00:06:39 ◼   ► Amazon affiliate money and Ghostery is reporting what looks at a glance to be 20 different

00:06:45 ◼   ► trackers that they're using on the site.

00:06:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean it is basically a shopping site. So it's different. Like if you're a shopping

00:06:51 ◼   ► site you can make money off of affiliate stuff or offer the profit of things you're directly

00:06:54 ◼   ► selling. It's very different for you know something like Snopes which is like a very

00:06:59 ◼   ► basic content site. You make money off of page views, period. And it is really hard

00:07:05 ◼   ► to get anything good there these days, especially when you are both big and untargeted, like

00:07:11 ◼   ► Snopes is.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Snopes should be no different than Wikipedia, though. Because the same thing, Wikipedia

00:07:15 ◼   ► is general purpose. There's no confined audience. It's extremely broad. It's a simple site

00:07:20 ◼   ► that just contains text. And yet Wikipedia not festooned with ads or viruses.

00:07:24 ◼   ► - Well Wikipedia also, first of all, it is donation funded

00:07:27 ◼   ► by what seems like a pretty large amount of people,

00:07:30 ◼   ► and even then, they still have to put

00:07:31 ◼   ► the giant Jimmy Wales head on top of Wikipedia

00:07:33 ◼   ► in what seems like a very increasing frequency.

00:07:38 ◼   ► But that also, I'm pretty sure that they have

00:07:40 ◼   ► a pretty small staff of actually paid people.

00:07:44 ◼   ► And it probably also went non-profit, right?

00:07:47 ◼   ► - How many people do you think Snopes needs?

00:07:49 ◼   ► I don't think it needs a gigantic staff of people.

00:07:52 ◼   ► I mean, they could leverage volunteers as well.

00:07:54 ◼   ► This is not a site where people have to file seven stories

00:07:58 ◼   ► a day about-- it's not like a gaming site or something.

00:08:00 ◼   ► They are much harder categories than Snopes.

00:08:02 ◼   ► It just feels like a shame that Snopes is exactly

00:08:04 ◼   ► one of those sites that, because it's mostly purely text

00:08:06 ◼   ► and it's a simple site, and it shouldn't require a giant staff

00:08:09 ◼   ► and they're not reviewing cars or sending people

00:08:13 ◼   ► to trade shows or doing anything else that costs a lot of money

00:08:15 ◼   ► up front.

00:08:17 ◼   ► It's just a shame that it is--

00:08:20 ◼   ► because it's still popular.

00:08:21 ◼   ► People still link to Snopes.

00:08:22 ◼   ► I wish it had been replaced by like

00:08:23 ◼   ► a Stack Overflow versus Quora equivalent

00:08:26 ◼   ► where the crappy site gets replaced by the better one.

00:08:28 ◼   ► But instead we all just go to Snopes

00:08:29 ◼   ► and just every time we do it gets worse.

00:08:31 ◼   ► - Well, and you know, it's also possible,

00:08:33 ◼   ► you know, we don't know that the Snopes owner,

00:08:37 ◼   ► who owns Snopes?

00:08:38 ◼   ► Is it some big company or is it just kind of its own thing?

00:08:40 ◼   ► - The maggots own Snopes now.

00:08:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, right.

00:08:42 ◼   ► But like, you know, they could just be really tired

00:08:46 ◼   ► of running it and just maximizing profit for a while too.

00:08:48 ◼   ► Like that is also a possibility here.

00:08:50 ◼   ► But I think it's more likely that they are

00:08:53 ◼   ► at least partially a victim of the problems

00:08:56 ◼   ► that all web publishers face these days,

00:08:58 ◼   ► with trying to get any money out of ads

00:09:00 ◼   ► in an age where almost everybody browses on phones,

00:09:03 ◼   ► almost all traffic comes from Facebook,

00:09:06 ◼   ► and almost nobody clicks on ads on phones, by the way,

00:09:08 ◼   ► so you have to make money in other creepy ways.

00:09:10 ◼   ► And also the ads that you're selling are being sold

00:09:12 ◼   ► by decreasingly few brokers with decreasing prices.

00:09:17 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:09:18 ◼   ► All right, and to bring this back to Pokemon,

00:09:22 ◼   ► Hugh wrote in to say, "Hey, this is the rules.

00:09:25 ◼   ► You gotta get through the follow-up before we move on."

00:09:28 ◼   ► Hugh wrote in to say, "My friend was very excited

00:09:30 ◼   ► to play Pokemon Go with her seven-year-old son.

00:09:32 ◼   ► She excitedly installed it and said,

00:09:34 ◼   ► 'Let's go out and play!'

00:09:35 ◼   ► But he was quick with his rebuttal.

00:09:37 ◼   ► No, mom, Pokemon is for old people."

00:09:40 ◼   ► Sad times.

00:09:42 ◼   ► Just like that, we're all old all over again.

00:09:46 ◼   ► - It's kinda true.

00:09:46 ◼   ► Like, you look outside,

00:09:48 ◼   ► There was a couple stories about this, about Nintendo targeting people in generational

00:09:53 ◼   ► ways.

00:09:54 ◼   ► Like if you played Pokemon as a kid, now you're ready to play it on your smartphone.

00:09:57 ◼   ► Because at the same situation with my family, you realize that if your kid doesn't have

00:10:02 ◼   ► a smartphone, it's very difficult to play Pokemon Go without at least one person with

00:10:06 ◼   ► a smartphone that you can tether to.

00:10:07 ◼   ► But you do have to be on the move with internet access at the same time.

00:10:11 ◼   ► And seven-year-olds don't have a portable device with internet access that they can

00:10:16 ◼   ► walk around the neighborhood with.

00:10:17 ◼   ► They would have to go, I mean they should be going with a parent anyway, but like, when

00:10:21 ◼   ► I look, when I see all those pictures, look at all these people, they're all playing Pokemon

00:10:24 ◼   ► Go, I don't see 50% kids, I don't even see 25% kids, I see maybe like 5% kids and 95%

00:10:32 ◼   ► young adults and adults.

00:10:34 ◼   ► So it is a game for old people.

00:10:36 ◼   ► I don't think Nintendo cares, old people have money, right?

00:10:39 ◼   ► But we'll see, although finally Nintendo was making public statements trying to deflate

00:10:45 ◼   ► his own stock price and I was like,

00:10:46 ◼   ► "Do you realize we don't make that much money from this?

00:10:48 ◼   ► "We get a license fee and the actual money

00:10:50 ◼   ► "goes to this other company?

00:10:52 ◼   ► "It's great that you doubled our stock price,

00:10:54 ◼   ► "but perhaps you don't understand how this works.

00:10:56 ◼   ► "We're not getting as rich as you think we are."

00:10:59 ◼   ► - Delightful.

00:11:01 ◼   ► All right, any other follow-up?

00:11:03 ◼   ► - For 48 hours later, no.

00:11:05 ◼   ► - Actually, we did get one really nice note

00:11:09 ◼   ► from a person named Cap.

00:11:10 ◼   ► Cap said, "Hi, one thing that's great about Apple

00:11:13 ◼   ► "not updating the Mac for ages,

00:11:14 ◼   ► there's never been a better time to buy a Mac secondhand.

00:11:18 ◼   ► A few months ago I managed to pick up a 2011 iMac

00:11:20 ◼   ► with a SSD installed for an absolute bargain,

00:11:23 ◼   ► added a bunch of USB 3 ports via Thunderbolt dongle

00:11:25 ◼   ► and couldn't be happier.

00:11:27 ◼   ► It isn't just that this machine was ridiculously cheap,

00:11:29 ◼   ► I also didn't feel like I'm missing out on anything

00:11:31 ◼   ► besides retina by not getting a new Mac.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And this is, I thought this was a really good point

00:11:35 ◼   ► because like when you see that the entire lineup

00:11:39 ◼   ► in certain families, if not the whole Mac lineup,

00:11:42 ◼   ► has not changed that much in like three years,

00:11:45 ◼   ► that means you can buy a three year old Mac

00:11:47 ◼   ► and it's still pretty competitive

00:11:49 ◼   ► with the brand new ones that are coming out today.

00:11:52 ◼   ► And it's a mixed bag, obviously we'd like things

00:11:55 ◼   ► to be getting better over periods of three years

00:11:58 ◼   ► in the computer industry,

00:11:59 ◼   ► but as long as they're getting better so slowly,

00:12:02 ◼   ► or not at all, then you could pick up

00:12:06 ◼   ► a three year old Mac Pro that's almost out of warranty now

00:12:10 ◼   ► for probably a decent price,

00:12:12 ◼   ► and it's still the same machine being sold new.

00:12:14 ◼   ► More realistically, most people wouldn't be doing that,

00:12:18 ◼   ► most people could get similarly great deals

00:12:20 ◼   ► on like a MacBook Pro.

00:12:22 ◼   ► You can get, the first generation Retina MacBook Pro

00:12:24 ◼   ► is from 2012, that's now four years old,

00:12:27 ◼   ► and it's not that different from the ones

00:12:29 ◼   ► they're selling brand new still today.

00:12:31 ◼   ► Like it isn't that much slower.

00:12:32 ◼   ► You might have to replace the battery if it's worn out,

00:12:36 ◼   ► but these lithium poly batteries don't wear out that quickly.

00:12:40 ◼   ► So you can really get amazing deals

00:12:42 ◼   ► on three to five year old Macs now

00:12:46 ◼   ► that are almost as good as the ones

00:12:47 ◼   ► they are still selling brand new today.

00:12:50 ◼   ► - I have trouble bending my mind in such a way

00:12:52 ◼   ► that this is actually a good thing.

00:12:53 ◼   ► Like I know some people can, you know,

00:12:55 ◼   ► like I'm not missing out, it's not much worse

00:12:57 ◼   ► than what you could buy new, but it is still

00:12:59 ◼   ► a really old and really slow computer.

00:13:02 ◼   ► It just so happens that you can't even buy one

00:13:04 ◼   ► that's that much better, but it doesn't change

00:13:06 ◼   ► like in absolute values, the state of that old machine.

00:13:09 ◼   ► And also, it may not change Apple's deprecation window of like my Mac Pro and a bunch of other

00:13:14 ◼   ► machines don't have support for Mac OS, Sierra and stuff.

00:13:17 ◼   ► I'm not sure that window, Apple's sliding window of dropping old hardware support for

00:13:21 ◼   ► OS's, takes into account the fact that Apple is not making their computers much better.

00:13:25 ◼   ► So I think that window moves along whether Apple releases new Macs or not, which is kind

00:13:30 ◼   ► of sad.

00:13:31 ◼   ► And really, you're right, they're not that much worse than the current ones.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And in some cases, you can find a machine that's a couple years old that has some attributes

00:13:38 ◼   ► that are actually a little bit better than the current machines, but all you're doing

00:13:42 ◼   ► is putting yourself even farther back so that when the new Macs inevitably do come back,

00:13:48 ◼   ► like that gap will suddenly wad because we all presume Apple will continue to produce

00:13:52 ◼   ► Macintoshes in the future at some point.

00:13:56 ◼   ► And when they come out, suddenly the feeling that you have is like, "Oh, this is such

00:14:01 ◼   ► a bargain, it's such a good deal," because the gap between you and the best available

00:14:05 ◼   ► is small, the gap between you and the best available is about to take a giant leap, and

00:14:10 ◼   ► that's not going to feel too good.

00:14:11 ◼   ► So yeah, I can see where this person is coming from, but to my mind and my personality, I

00:14:20 ◼   ► think it's even worse to buy a used one now.

00:14:23 ◼   ► It's kind of like if Apple was rapidly advancing, you could get a used one that is better in

00:14:28 ◼   ► terms of absolute value, just because they're going forward so quickly that you'd end up

00:14:34 ◼   ► with a better machine, but like, (sighs)

00:14:36 ◼   ► I don't know, I think it's bad all around,

00:14:38 ◼   ► but maybe I'm just sad about this.

00:14:40 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, I suppose you could look at it

00:14:43 ◼   ► the most horrible way, which is,

00:14:44 ◼   ► if you buy a brand new machine from Apple today,

00:14:47 ◼   ► you're basically buying a three-year-old machine

00:14:50 ◼   ► for a brand new price.

00:14:52 ◼   ► - Well, that's what I'm saying, like save your money.

00:14:54 ◼   ► Rather than, don't buy a new one, don't buy a used one,

00:14:57 ◼   ► just keep putting money into your little

00:14:59 ◼   ► buy a Mac later fund, so that when they do come out

00:15:01 ◼   ► with new ones, you can get a fancier one.

00:15:03 ◼   ► - Sure, but if you need a Mac now

00:15:05 ◼   ► and you need one for like, I don't know, 700 bucks,

00:15:08 ◼   ► like what do you really,

00:15:09 ◼   ► and especially if the Mac Mini is not going

00:15:12 ◼   ► to suit your needs, which at 700 bucks

00:15:15 ◼   ► it almost certainly won't,

00:15:16 ◼   ► and even with infinite money it might not,

00:15:18 ◼   ► if you really want a laptop,

00:15:19 ◼   ► which almost everybody does these days,

00:15:22 ◼   ► if you have that kind of budget

00:15:23 ◼   ► and a good MacBook or MacBook Pro

00:15:26 ◼   ► is gonna cost you nearly $2,000,

00:15:29 ◼   ► once it's optioned reasonably,

00:15:32 ◼   ► then that's a pretty good option to get a three year old one

00:15:36 ◼   ► for basically get today's Mac

00:15:39 ◼   ► for what it's actually worth today,

00:15:41 ◼   ► which is a three year old one's price.

00:15:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, if I had a business and I absolutely had to buy one

00:15:45 ◼   ► since new employees were coming on board

00:15:47 ◼   ► and we didn't have computers for them,

00:15:49 ◼   ► I might buy the cheapest used one I could possibly get

00:15:51 ◼   ► with the idea that I will buy a new one also

00:15:54 ◼   ► like as soon as they come out.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Because that is probably like,

00:15:58 ◼   ► what's the least amount of money we can spend now

00:15:59 ◼   ► to get a computer on your desk that you can use

00:16:02 ◼   ► while we wait for the new Max to come out,

00:16:04 ◼   ► knowing that as soon as they do,

00:16:06 ◼   ► we're going to resell those used ones

00:16:07 ◼   ► and get a new one for you.

00:16:09 ◼   ► That makes sense to me.

00:16:10 ◼   ► - I mean, you could probably get a used 101

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00:16:15 ◼   ► to upgrade the new one to one terabyte.

00:16:18 ◼   ► - Mm-hmm, yeah, don't remind me.

00:16:20 ◼   ► (laughing)

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00:18:44 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

00:18:44 ◼   ► - I talked a lot about this on a recent episode

00:18:51 ◼   ► of Reconcilable Differences that I think is not out yet,

00:18:53 ◼   ► so I don't really have that much to retread about it here, although honestly I'm not

00:18:58 ◼   ► sure how much overlap there is in the audience between those two shows, so maybe we'll

00:19:00 ◼   ► just say all the same things again in true Marco fashion, where he says he doesn't

00:19:04 ◼   ► have anything to say about a topic and then just says everything over again.

00:19:08 ◼   ► So this topic is Twitter's little verified checkmark that historically people have had.

00:19:15 ◼   ► If you're a super important celebrity and people want to know, like, "Is this the

00:19:18 ◼   ► real Sheryl Crow?" and you look at their little Twitter profile and it shows a little

00:19:22 ◼   ► checkmark and you're like, "Oh, it must be the real one," and not the million parody

00:19:26 ◼   ► impersonation accounts or whatever.

00:19:28 ◼   ► Of which there are many.

00:19:29 ◼   ► How did you land on Sheryl Crow as your example?

00:19:31 ◼   ► Oh, I don't know.

00:19:32 ◼   ► I was trying to think of a celebrity.

00:19:33 ◼   ► Like, who do the kids know these days?

00:19:36 ◼   ► Not Sheryl Crow.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Is Sheryl Crow the most recent celebrity you can come up with?

00:19:39 ◼   ► It's Free Association.

00:19:40 ◼   ► No, it's not the most recent, but like, I mean, I guess I could have gone with Taylor

00:19:43 ◼   ► Swift.

00:19:44 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know what you have.

00:19:46 ◼   ► Anyway, that's what the checkmark has been for historically, and I think we've talked

00:19:50 ◼   ► about this topic before, how it would be much better if that kind of attestation where Twitter

00:19:57 ◼   ► says "yes, we are telling you that this is actually the person you think it is," if that

00:20:02 ◼   ► was available to many more people, because it's not just celebrities that suffer from

00:20:05 ◼   ► accounts that impersonate them and otherwise make their lives miserable by people mistaking

00:20:12 ◼   ► them for somebody else, just for different Unicode characters or capital I instead of

00:20:15 ◼   ► an L or whatever.

00:20:16 ◼   ► whatever. I mean, I don't understand that that much because you can just right-click

00:20:20 ◼   ► on your web browser and fake a screenshot much easier than making a fake Twitter account.

00:20:23 ◼   ► But anyway, the second aspect of this is because it's historically been celebrities that

00:20:29 ◼   ► get to have this checkmark, Twitter has rolled out a series of different views and tools

00:20:35 ◼   ► and filters and features in their official client that are only available to people who

00:20:39 ◼   ► are verified, with the idea being they have so many followers and have so many replies

00:20:42 ◼   ► to go through, they need extra tools to deal with their stuff.

00:20:45 ◼   ► And again, a lot of people who deal with harassment and other problems on Twitter could also use

00:20:51 ◼   ► those tools, but oh, they're not important enough to get verified.

00:20:55 ◼   ► And so I think in our last conversation about this, I was saying, and so I think you two

00:21:00 ◼   ► were agreeing, that verification should be available to everybody, and we understand

00:21:05 ◼   ► that it takes time and possibly money to verify because they need a state ID, or they basically

00:21:10 ◼   ► need to check that you really are you.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And that takes time, and a human being has to do it, and that costs money.

00:21:15 ◼   ► But we're like, "Just charge a fee for it."

00:21:18 ◼   ► If it costs you money, we're not saying to anyone, "You have to give this away for free."

00:21:21 ◼   ► Charge a nominal fee, because pretty much everybody I know who desperately wants to

00:21:25 ◼   ► be verified for a purpose, to get the tools or to deal with harassment or to make sure

00:21:30 ◼   ► that they're not impersonated, would gladly pay a nominal fee.

00:21:35 ◼   ► They'll throw the money at you in two seconds to get the little checkmark that says, "Yes,

00:21:39 ◼   ► I really am who I am."

00:21:40 ◼   ► limited to celebrities, why not open it to everybody?

00:21:43 ◼   ► So in theory, recently, Twitter has changed its rules in the light of the whole Ghostbusters

00:21:48 ◼   ► abuse thing, and one of the stars of Ghostbusters got chased off Twitter by a bunch of terrible

00:21:53 ◼   ► people.

00:21:54 ◼   ► I don't know if that was the impetus behind this move, but timing-wise it sure looks like

00:21:59 ◼   ► it.

00:22:00 ◼   ► Twitter verification is now open to anybody who wants to fill out an application on Twitter's

00:22:04 ◼   ► website.

00:22:05 ◼   ► You fill in a bunch of fields, you have to tell them why you think you should be verified.

00:22:08 ◼   ► If you're a brand or a company, you can check a checkbox for that.

00:22:12 ◼   ► If you're an individual, you tell them, like, "Here's all the places where you

00:22:14 ◼   ► can see who I am.

00:22:15 ◼   ► Here's where I should be verified."

00:22:17 ◼   ► And then it goes into a big black hole and in theory they come back and say, "Yes,

00:22:20 ◼   ► you're verified," or, "No, you're not."

00:22:25 ◼   ► And this comes up specifically as it relates to this show because Marco's been verified

00:22:30 ◼   ► for a long time, right?

00:22:31 ◼   ► Were you verified at the very beginning?

00:22:33 ◼   ► - This is the thing, I got verified like three weeks ago

00:22:37 ◼   ► or something, it was really recent.

00:22:39 ◼   ► - I thought you'd been verified for a long time.

00:22:41 ◼   ► - No, like I started ranting about, there was some,

00:22:45 ◼   ► oh, it was when the, what was that app, Engage,

00:22:48 ◼   ► that app they launched a couple weeks ago

00:22:49 ◼   ► that we were all made fun of?

00:22:50 ◼   ► - Oh, like the celebrity only app to like see

00:22:53 ◼   ► what people are saying about your tweets or whatever.

00:22:56 ◼   ► It's like ego surfing.

00:22:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean anybody could use it, but yeah,

00:22:59 ◼   ► and I actually use it for a few days on my phone

00:23:01 ◼   ► to kind of try out.

00:23:02 ◼   ► But when that launched, I was basically ranting

00:23:05 ◼   ► about how this app gave special privileges

00:23:09 ◼   ► to verified people in the way that,

00:23:11 ◼   ► not as verified people using the app,

00:23:14 ◼   ► but if you were verified, your tweets would show up

00:23:17 ◼   ► in these filtered views higher than non-verified people.

00:23:21 ◼   ► And it was just like yet one more thing that was,

00:23:23 ◼   ► 'cause the verified system has,

00:23:25 ◼   ► having a system like this has lots of problems

00:23:27 ◼   ► and inequalities inherent in it.

00:23:29 ◼   ► It's one thing if it's only for identity verification,

00:23:32 ◼   ► but once you add any other bonus features

00:23:36 ◼   ► or higher statuses, once you attach those

00:23:39 ◼   ► to verified status, it makes this program

00:23:41 ◼   ► something that should be available to everybody,

00:23:43 ◼   ► because then it's like, well, if verified people

00:23:46 ◼   ► get their tweets seen more in certain filters

00:23:49 ◼   ► or get higher priority things or get certain

00:23:50 ◼   ► abuse control filters that other people don't get,

00:23:53 ◼   ► I mean, everybody should be able to be verified,

00:23:56 ◼   ► because then it's a feature segment,

00:23:58 ◼   ► not like a status thing.

00:24:00 ◼   ► And to tie status to also like abuse control features

00:24:05 ◼   ► and relevancy in search lists and stuff,

00:24:07 ◼   ► that's kinda icky, you know?

00:24:10 ◼   ► So I was ranting and raving about that

00:24:12 ◼   ► and a nice person who worked at Twitter submitted me,

00:24:17 ◼   ► but it seemed like that's just been up to the public now,

00:24:19 ◼   ► and that's great, sort of.

00:24:21 ◼   ► It's great in that, okay, well,

00:24:23 ◼   ► now a lot more people can get verified,

00:24:26 ◼   ► but it still is subject to some kind of importance,

00:24:30 ◼   ► judgment on the side of whoever's reviewing his forms.

00:24:35 ◼   ► 'Cause we know, for example, Federico Vittucci got rejected.

00:24:38 ◼   ► - Which is insane, by the way.

00:24:40 ◼   ► - It completely--

00:24:40 ◼   ► - A person who is like, he has his own website,

00:24:44 ◼   ► popular website, it's been around for years.

00:24:47 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It is like,

00:24:48 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say a pillar of the community,

00:24:49 ◼   ► but it's not an obscure place.

00:24:51 ◼   ► He's not an obscure person, and he's not even just

00:24:55 ◼   ► random person who happens to have a blog. This is years and years of working in. He

00:25:01 ◼   ► should be verified under the old pass where Twitter went around to all the websites, all

00:25:06 ◼   ► the tech websites or whatever, and said, "Hey, here you go. Anybody who works for your website

00:25:10 ◼   ► can get a checkmark." He didn't get one then, and the fact that he got rejected now

00:25:14 ◼   ► makes no sense.

00:25:15 ◼   ► Exactly. Yeah, because they always had a lot of rule shifts over time of what kind of people

00:25:23 ◼   ► would get verified. Initially, when it first started, it was basically like people who

00:25:27 ◼   ► had the most followers on Twitter and they kind of like worked their way down the follower

00:25:30 ◼   ► account until they got just above my number of followers and they stopped. And then it

00:25:35 ◼   ► was, "Okay, well now we're just going to do like public figures like celebrities,

00:25:40 ◼   ► politicians, and people who work for the media." And that was kind of loosely defined, the

00:25:45 ◼   ► media. It always meant whatever kind of media I didn't do. So it was like, you know, not

00:25:49 ◼   ► not just bloggers and not podcasters and not app developers,

00:25:53 ◼   ► but if you work for a journalism thing,

00:25:58 ◼   ► however they define that.

00:26:01 ◼   ► These definitions always shifted and were very vague

00:26:03 ◼   ► and really very much based on like,

00:26:06 ◼   ► does some handful of people at Twitter

00:26:08 ◼   ► think you're important this month?

00:26:10 ◼   ► And then it was weird, it was like,

00:26:12 ◼   ► if you worked for, if they declared

00:26:16 ◼   ► a certain website or publication

00:26:17 ◼   ► would be like a verified publication.

00:26:20 ◼   ► Anybody who worked for them would get verified

00:26:22 ◼   ► in this big batch that they would do.

00:26:24 ◼   ► And so you'd have people who wrote one article

00:26:28 ◼   ► for a paper somewhere, they have 400 followers

00:26:32 ◼   ► and they're verified.

00:26:33 ◼   ► And then you have people who have 50,000 followers

00:26:35 ◼   ► who can't get verified.

00:26:36 ◼   ► It was always a weird system.

00:26:39 ◼   ► And it's always been these vaguely defined,

00:26:43 ◼   ► very human judgy kind of clarification.

00:26:48 ◼   ► I know one of our friends reached out about a year ago

00:26:52 ◼   ► to try to get the three of us verified.

00:26:55 ◼   ► And they told, 'cause he knew a guy who knew a guy,

00:26:58 ◼   ► and the response was, "We don't consider podcasters

00:27:01 ◼   ► "to be media personalities at this time."

00:27:04 ◼   ► And YouTubers were getting it, but podcasters weren't.

00:27:07 ◼   ► It's just like, again, it's always been this weird system,

00:27:10 ◼   ► and it's always gonna run me the wrong way,

00:27:12 ◼   ► and that's why I started complaining,

00:27:13 ◼   ► and eventually I complained enough that I got verified.

00:27:15 ◼   ► And I made a joke when I got verified

00:27:16 ◼   ► that now that I got it, in like three weeks,

00:27:19 ◼   ► they're gonna just end the program.

00:27:20 ◼   ► And they didn't, instead they just opened up to everybody,

00:27:23 ◼   ► which I guess is better.

00:27:25 ◼   ► - Well, a couple things on that.

00:27:26 ◼   ► So your complaint was originally,

00:27:28 ◼   ► hey, like you said, it's stupid to tie features

00:27:32 ◼   ► and things that a lot of people could use

00:27:33 ◼   ► to this whole vague status thing, right?

00:27:35 ◼   ► - Exactly.

00:27:36 ◼   ► - And I'm not saying that whoever was to help you

00:27:38 ◼   ► speaks for all of Twitter, but what happened was not,

00:27:42 ◼   ► "Hey, you know, Marco, you have a point.

00:27:44 ◼   ► We should change the way we do things."

00:27:45 ◼   ► Instead, it was, "Hey, you know, Marco,

00:27:47 ◼   ► if we give you a check mark, will you shut up?"

00:27:49 ◼   ► Like, again, I'm not saying that was the intent or whatever,

00:27:52 ◼   ► but like, it basically, the person who did this for you

00:27:56 ◼   ► is not empowered to change Twitter's policy, right?

00:27:58 ◼   ► So they can't, like, it's not the CEO

00:27:59 ◼   ► that did this for you, I'm assuming, right?

00:28:01 ◼   ► So they just tried to do the nicest thing they could

00:28:03 ◼   ► to make you feel better,

00:28:04 ◼   ► which is a good customer service move,

00:28:05 ◼   ► and it's like, "I can't actually solve your problem,

00:28:07 ◼   ► but how about if I do this as a make you feel better?"

00:28:09 ◼   ► And they're like, "You know what,

00:28:10 ◼   ► it kind of does make me feel a little better,

00:28:11 ◼   ► But it didn't do anything to solve the actual problem,

00:28:14 ◼   ► because the person who cared about this

00:28:15 ◼   ► was obviously not the CEO or anyone in position

00:28:18 ◼   ► to solve the problem.

00:28:19 ◼   ► And as for the media things,

00:28:23 ◼   ► to reinforce your point that anybody vaguely associated

00:28:26 ◼   ► with the media thing could get one,

00:28:28 ◼   ► when the Twitter checkmark fairy came to Ars Technica,

00:28:31 ◼   ► it was offered to everybody, including to me.

00:28:34 ◼   ► And I am one of those people who writes

00:28:35 ◼   ► like one article a year.

00:28:36 ◼   ► I didn't have 400 followers, but you know,

00:28:38 ◼   ► I was not a, my contribution to Ars Technica

00:28:41 ◼   ► though they may have been large in size, were few in number.

00:28:45 ◼   ► And I was offered a checkmark.

00:28:47 ◼   ► And I didn't take it because part of the conditions

00:28:49 ◼   ► were you would be getting a checkmark as part of Ars

00:28:51 ◼   ► Technica.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So you had to use your Ars Technica email

00:28:53 ◼   ► to be associated with it.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And I didn't want a checkmark as part of ours,

00:28:56 ◼   ► A, because I didn't feel like I was part of ours,

00:28:57 ◼   ► like I was a freelancer.

00:28:59 ◼   ► I don't have any sort of stake in the company.

00:29:02 ◼   ► I'm not even a full-time employee and never have been.

00:29:05 ◼   ► And B, I didn't want a checkmark as part of Ars Technica.

00:29:08 ◼   ► I, because I'm a giant egomaniac or whatever,

00:29:11 ◼   ► wanted to be recognized for myself.

00:29:13 ◼   ► And if you don't want to recognize,

00:29:14 ◼   ► give me a check mark for being me, then fine.

00:29:16 ◼   ► I don't want one.

00:29:17 ◼   ► Like I don't want to be on Ars Technicus coattails

00:29:19 ◼   ► or whatever.

00:29:20 ◼   ► So for multiple reasons, I turned that one down.

00:29:23 ◼   ► And I figured like, look, well, you know,

00:29:24 ◼   ► if I'm never gonna check mark,

00:29:25 ◼   ► I'm never gonna need a check mark, right?

00:29:28 ◼   ► But this whole thing of like, whatever,

00:29:30 ◼   ► I wish you could find the press release or whatever it was.

00:29:33 ◼   ► Opening it up to everybody,

00:29:34 ◼   ► the application process may be open up to everybody,

00:29:36 ◼   ► but as Vitigi shows,

00:29:38 ◼   ► it's not as if they opened up the check mark to everybody.

00:29:40 ◼   ► not only do they not open it up to everybody,

00:29:42 ◼   ► but their definition doesn't make any sense

00:29:45 ◼   ► because maybe it's a slightly broader definition,

00:29:48 ◼   ► but if Viteeshi doesn't fit under the definition,

00:29:50 ◼   ► then I shouldn't get a check mark either.

00:29:52 ◼   ► And I don't like that because I want a check mark,

00:29:54 ◼   ► and that's why this topic is here.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Because beyond all reason, I want a stupid check mark.

00:29:59 ◼   ► And as I wind about at length on Reconcileable Differences,

00:30:03 ◼   ► I don't need a check mark like the people

00:30:05 ◼   ► who actually need it.

00:30:06 ◼   ► People who are actually the targets of harassment

00:30:08 ◼   ► who need these tools, people who have huge number of accounts

00:30:11 ◼   ► impersonating them.

00:30:13 ◼   ► I mean, Brianna Wu is the poster child for this.

00:30:15 ◼   ► The fact that she doesn't have a check mark around

00:30:17 ◼   ► makes no sense.

00:30:18 ◼   ► She's constantly in touch with Twitter,

00:30:20 ◼   ► sending them hundreds of reports, getting accounts banned,

00:30:22 ◼   ► and no one at the receiving end of this flood of reports

00:30:26 ◼   ► that are abuse of Twitter goes, you

00:30:27 ◼   ► know what might help this person?

00:30:29 ◼   ► Maybe we should make her verified.

00:30:30 ◼   ► And she has a huge number of followers too.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Every criteria that you could possibly

00:30:34 ◼   ► think of for someone who's not a publication or whatever,

00:30:38 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:30:39 ◼   ► So I'm frustrated with these strange rules.

00:30:42 ◼   ► I'm frustrated that even under the strange rules, I still don't have one.

00:30:46 ◼   ► And yes, I did apply.

00:30:47 ◼   ► I applied on Wednesday.

00:30:49 ◼   ► I had to fill in a bio, which I had never filled out on Twitter intentionally, because,

00:30:53 ◼   ► again, it was another 10 minutes of whining about this and reconciling differences.

00:30:57 ◼   ► It's impossible to write a bio that doesn't sound god-awful.

00:31:00 ◼   ► So I just wrote a god-awful bio.

00:31:01 ◼   ► If you go look on twitter.com/saracusa right now, you'll see my god-awful bio.

00:31:06 ◼   ► I had to put a birthday.

00:31:08 ◼   ► I already had a header image.

00:31:10 ◼   ► When I did the application, I was worried that they would get yelled at for my header

00:31:13 ◼   ► image.

00:31:14 ◼   ► My header image is a picture from the video game Journey, which I love and everyone should

00:31:16 ◼   ► play and no one should be spoiled about.

00:31:19 ◼   ► And it's like a wallpaper that you could download from Sony's website, but technically it contains

00:31:24 ◼   ► like copyrighted images or whatever.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Like if you go to the Sony site, it's like, "Hey, if you're just in Journey, come here

00:31:29 ◼   ► and here are wallpapers."

00:31:30 ◼   ► And that's one of the wallpapers, so I assume it's free for me to take and put as my header

00:31:34 ◼   ► image.

00:31:35 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:31:36 ◼   ► Anyway, I filled it out.

00:31:38 ◼   ► I have not heard back from them.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Everyone else is tweeting, "Hey, I entered a thing into the application and I heard back

00:31:43 ◼   ► and I'm verified and I have a checkmark.

00:31:45 ◼   ► All sorts of checkmarks, blue checkmarks are sprouting everywhere."

00:31:47 ◼   ► Honestly, I shouldn't care.

00:31:49 ◼   ► All I should care about is that the people who actually need checkmarks get them.

00:31:53 ◼   ► And by the way, those people still aren't getting them, which I don't understand.

00:31:55 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:31:56 ◼   ► You need one, Jon.

00:31:57 ◼   ► You need one.

00:31:58 ◼   ► Yep.

00:31:59 ◼   ► I'm not getting one either.

00:32:00 ◼   ► This is like the good version of a Wikipedia page, because everyone thinks they want a

00:32:02 ◼   ► on a Wikipedia page, but anyone's heard me talk

00:32:05 ◼   ► about Wikipedia knows I have many problems with Wikipedia.

00:32:08 ◼   ► I don't want a Wikipedia page.

00:32:09 ◼   ► It's a curse more than a blessing.

00:32:10 ◼   ► But a check mark, basically only upside.

00:32:14 ◼   ► And no real downside.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And anyway, I don't have one.

00:32:18 ◼   ► - Let me tell you why you want one.

00:32:19 ◼   ► I mean, 'cause why I want one,

00:32:21 ◼   ► 'cause we're all egomaniacs, first of all.

00:32:23 ◼   ► But you can look at it from the original purpose

00:32:27 ◼   ► of verified, and it's kind of like the lock icon

00:32:30 ◼   ► on an SSL site.

00:32:32 ◼   ► getting a little lock icon in your address bar.

00:32:34 ◼   ► First of all, it's worth questioning,

00:32:36 ◼   ► like is that even effective?

00:32:37 ◼   ► Because we know very much that the lock icon

00:32:40 ◼   ► in address bars has never been very effective

00:32:43 ◼   ► because nobody goes to check it.

00:32:44 ◼   ► And all the web browsers keep updating their designs

00:32:48 ◼   ► to more and more emphasize the security level

00:32:51 ◼   ► of the site that you're on.

00:32:53 ◼   ► Or to put up even crazier and scarier warnings

00:32:56 ◼   ► if something is not quite right.

00:32:58 ◼   ► And yet people still get phished all the time.

00:33:00 ◼   ► ♪ Time for the music ♪

00:33:02 ◼   ► and still enter their stuff in secure forms and everything.

00:33:05 ◼   ► So we know that that kind of warning

00:33:09 ◼   ► doesn't really work for the most part for most people,

00:33:12 ◼   ► 'cause most people just don't think to check

00:33:14 ◼   ► that kind of thing,

00:33:14 ◼   ► or they don't know to check that kind of thing.

00:33:17 ◼   ► And even if they know,

00:33:17 ◼   ► they sometimes forget and just miss it.

00:33:19 ◼   ► Whether it's sort of that original purpose is kind of,

00:33:22 ◼   ► it's not that relevant,

00:33:23 ◼   ► because that original purpose is not a very strong purpose.

00:33:26 ◼   ► What it really is is jewelry.

00:33:29 ◼   ► It is a prize.

00:33:32 ◼   ► It is a sign awarded to you that says, "I am important."

00:33:35 ◼   ► And because it is emphasized everywhere,

00:33:39 ◼   ► you're seeing those big blue check marks

00:33:41 ◼   ► on all these important people in your timeline,

00:33:42 ◼   ► so it is very much a status symbol.

00:33:45 ◼   ► And whether you need or want

00:33:47 ◼   ► the additional filtering features it brings,

00:33:50 ◼   ► you wanna be a special person.

00:33:52 ◼   ► And honestly, when I got it,

00:33:54 ◼   ► I have almost felt like a responsibility

00:33:57 ◼   ► has been granted to me,

00:33:58 ◼   ► and I have to tweet more responsibly now.

00:34:00 ◼   ► It's weird.

00:34:01 ◼   ► - How does one go about tweeting more responsibly?

00:34:04 ◼   ► What are you not tweeting that previously

00:34:06 ◼   ► you would have tweeted?

00:34:07 ◼   ► - It's like getting a BS title at work

00:34:10 ◼   ► to try to make you more responsible.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Like, it has totally worked on me.

00:34:14 ◼   ► Where I'm like, well, I'm representing

00:34:16 ◼   ► this blue check mark now.

00:34:17 ◼   ► I better, you know, it's like how cops around

00:34:20 ◼   ► are supposed to drink at bars in their uniforms.

00:34:23 ◼   ► I kind of feel like I gotta be good for this check mark

00:34:26 ◼   ► and be on better behavior now.

00:34:29 ◼   ► - 'Cause you can't say that it's not really Marco?

00:34:31 ◼   ► That's not really me, that's an impersonator.

00:34:33 ◼   ► - No, it just, it kind of feels like I've been blessed

00:34:35 ◼   ► with this honor that I have to treat well.

00:34:37 ◼   ► I don't know, it's not rational, but that's how it feels.

00:34:40 ◼   ► - Well, for what it's worth, there's an account,

00:34:44 ◼   ► which is @verified, this is an account on Twitter,

00:34:48 ◼   ► that from what I can tell, follows every verified account.

00:34:52 ◼   ► And it follows 190,014 accounts, as we record.

00:34:56 ◼   ► One of those accounts, ladies and gentlemen, is this guy.

00:34:59 ◼   ► 'Cause guess who got his blue check mark a couple days ago?

00:35:02 ◼   ► I did, and man, Jon, does it feel good.

00:35:05 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sorry.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Yeah, it's okay.

00:35:07 ◼   ► It's not bad.

00:35:08 ◼   ► - So the thing that burns me up so much

00:35:09 ◼   ► about your check mark is that you got it six hours

00:35:13 ◼   ► after filling out the application.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Like you fill out the application not too long before I did.

00:35:18 ◼   ► Like basically I didn't fill it out

00:35:19 ◼   ► because I was too busy podcasting with Merlin

00:35:21 ◼   ► while trying to fill it out,

00:35:22 ◼   ► which is why we ended up talking about it.

00:35:25 ◼   ► And so when the show was over, I filled it out.

00:35:27 ◼   ► You filled it out and you said what, six hours later?

00:35:29 ◼   ► You got your check mark?

00:35:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a little after noon on whatever day it was announced, and it was just before

00:35:36 ◼   ► I recorded the latest episode of Analog that I received it.

00:35:41 ◼   ► And so we actually talked—Mike and I talk about this on Analog as well.

00:35:44 ◼   ► But yeah, it was somewhere around six or seven hours.

00:35:48 ◼   ► It's like showing up to like some really popular event just after the whole crowd gets

00:35:52 ◼   ► there.

00:35:53 ◼   ► Like there's a line of five people, then you wait 15 minutes, then there's a line

00:35:55 ◼   ► of 3,000 people.

00:35:56 ◼   ► So now I'm somewhere back in a queue.

00:35:58 ◼   ► I just assume I'm going to get rejected because that would fit perfectly with the

00:36:01 ◼   ► completely arbitrary pattern of not giving Vatici one, rejecting Vatici and just never

00:36:07 ◼   ► responding to Brianna.

00:36:08 ◼   ► Like it fits perfectly with the whole notion that it's just like a hamster in a wheel

00:36:13 ◼   ► over there or some kind of random number generator and no actual human with any kind of judgment

00:36:18 ◼   ► is doing this.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Because honestly, if there was anybody with any kind of judgment doing this, like not

00:36:22 ◼   ► giving verified checkmarks immediately to every single target of Gamergate?

00:36:26 ◼   ► Like I don't understand the meeting where you'd be like, "Should we do anything about

00:36:30 ◼   ► this?

00:36:31 ◼   ► Should we give them a check?"

00:36:32 ◼   ► No, let's just not ever do it for like a year.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Does that sound good, guys?

00:36:36 ◼   ► Okay, good.

00:36:37 ◼   ► Let's break for lunch.

00:36:38 ◼   ► I don't understand the logic.

00:36:39 ◼   ► I don't even understand the neglect.

00:36:40 ◼   ► I don't understand.

00:36:41 ◼   ► And how can it be staffed to such a degree that Casey's wait time is six hours and that

00:36:47 ◼   ► they give him a thumbs up and yet all these other people don't get them?

00:36:51 ◼   ► It doesn't make sense to me.

00:36:53 ◼   ► It doesn't make sense.

00:36:54 ◼   ► We totally recognize that this entire topic and conversation is obnoxious and that I shouldn't

00:36:59 ◼   ► care.

00:37:00 ◼   ► But we do care because they made us care.

00:37:03 ◼   ► They manipulated us into caring with these blue check marks.

00:37:05 ◼   ► There are some legit reasons that a regular person would want this, like people who don't

00:37:10 ◼   ► need it like me.

00:37:11 ◼   ► Like I said, because you get more features that make Twitter nicer to use.

00:37:15 ◼   ► And I think your thing of the lock icon is great.

00:37:17 ◼   ► It's just like, I want my account to seem trustworthy and to people not to think it's

00:37:22 ◼   ► me.

00:37:23 ◼   ► had a few impersonators who I've reported and their accounts have gotten closed and

00:37:26 ◼   ► like whatever like it's not I don't have any any actual issues but it put it this way if

00:37:31 ◼   ► they literally opened it to everybody with 10 bucks I would pay 10 bucks in a second.

00:37:36 ◼   ► Oh yeah I mean like I registered the Overcast account for and I signed up or I filled out

00:37:41 ◼   ► the form roughly the same time you did I think John and I haven't heard back from that either

00:37:45 ◼   ► it's still pending but I did it for for basically that reason of like I wanted the Overcast

00:37:51 ◼   ► Twitter account to appear official, to really make it look like this is a real business

00:37:55 ◼   ► for a real app that matters in the world because it's good enough to get a blue checkmark.

00:38:00 ◼   ► I want people to see that. It helps look more professional.

00:38:04 ◼   ► I mean, we're going to do the same thing for the ATP account. @ATPFM on Twitter, I

00:38:09 ◼   ► want people to know that's the official account of the show, and so a checkmark would

00:38:11 ◼   ► be good to give them the reassurance that they're like, "What was the ATP one?"

00:38:14 ◼   ► Because it's not just @ATP because that's a different one, and you might not be sure.

00:38:18 ◼   ► And again, it's a thing I think should be open to everybody, as in if you have $10,

00:38:23 ◼   ► boom, you've got a checkmark.

00:38:25 ◼   ► Like a mechanical process with no humans involved, except for the verification part, and that's

00:38:29 ◼   ► what you're paying your $10 for.

00:38:30 ◼   ► But the idea of being rejected for verification doesn't make any sense to me.

00:38:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:38:35 ◼   ► Yeah, it is weird.

00:38:37 ◼   ► With that said, in my, what is this, like three or four days of living the sweet, sweet,

00:38:43 ◼   ► sweet blue checkmark lifestyle, I've only noticed two differences so far.

00:38:47 ◼   ► Did you get your gift bag? Yeah, did you see that special present they gave us? Oh yeah,

00:38:52 ◼   ► so good. That one was awesome. Anyway, so if I look at the Twitter website, in the settings area

00:39:01 ◼   ► on the left-hand side where it begins with accounts, security, and privacy, blah blah blah

00:39:05 ◼   ► blah blah blah blah. There's another one which I believe is new, that's notifications timeline.

00:39:11 ◼   ► And I don't recall having seen this before, and it says, "Filter tweets by..." and then

00:39:17 ◼   ► there's a checkbox, only one of them, that says "Quality Filter."

00:39:20 ◼   ► It says, "Quality filtering aims to remove all tweets from your notifications timeline

00:39:24 ◼   ► that contain threats, offensive or abusive language, duplicate content, or assent from

00:39:28 ◼   ► suspicious accounts."

00:39:30 ◼   ► I haven't yet turned that on, just because I don't feel like I really need to, and...

00:39:35 ◼   ► What kind of people might need that feature?

00:39:37 ◼   ► I'm having trouble thinking of any examples.

00:39:39 ◼   ► What?

00:39:40 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:39:41 ◼   ► - Is this not available to everybody?

00:39:42 ◼   ► Yeah, 'cause I got the two accounts open here.

00:39:44 ◼   ► - Well, it might not be available to everybody

00:39:45 ◼   ► because like maybe there's a computational

00:39:47 ◼   ► or like scalability thing or whatever, but--

00:39:49 ◼   ► - Then too bad, fix that.

00:39:50 ◼   ► We have computers now.

00:39:52 ◼   ► Computers do these things quickly.

00:39:55 ◼   ► - I'm trying to think of a scenario where it's reasonable,

00:39:57 ◼   ► but even if you're gonna give it

00:39:58 ◼   ► to a limited set of people, who would you give it to?

00:40:01 ◼   ► Who might you give this thing that's limited?

00:40:02 ◼   ► Say you only have, you know, 500,000 to hand out.

00:40:06 ◼   ► Who would you give it to?

00:40:07 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:40:08 ◼   ► Maybe you would, like you said, divorce it from the verified

00:40:10 ◼   ► and just offer it to people who are constant targets of abuse.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Or no, maybe just not do that.

00:40:15 ◼   ► So yeah, so there's that.

00:40:17 ◼   ► And then it was actually Mike who got verified in a beautiful, wonderful turn of events,

00:40:23 ◼   ► got verified after we recorded Analog.

00:40:26 ◼   ► So I had an entire episode of Analog to lord over him and make fun of him for not being

00:40:30 ◼   ► as cool as I am, which was delightful.

00:40:33 ◼   ► But anyway, he had noticed once he got verified that apparently in the official app, there's

00:40:38 ◼   ► There's a notifications tab, and there's a new entry in the segmented control there.

00:40:45 ◼   ► So he sent me a screenshot, and what he had was all mentions, and I believe he said that

00:40:50 ◼   ► the verified one was new.

00:40:52 ◼   ► So he can look at notifications from everyone, notifications just in terms of mentions, again,

00:40:57 ◼   ► this is the official app, or I guess mentions just from verified people, or perhaps any

00:41:02 ◼   ► sort of notification that's sourced with a verified individual.

00:41:06 ◼   ► And those are the only two differences that I've noticed.

00:41:07 ◼   ► I don't know Marco if you've noticed anything else.

00:41:10 ◼   ► - Well, not really just because I don't use

00:41:13 ◼   ► the official client or the website very often.

00:41:15 ◼   ► - Same here.

00:41:16 ◼   ► - So most of the stuff only is visible in those places.

00:41:19 ◼   ► And honestly that might be like,

00:41:22 ◼   ► if I started getting a lot of abuse again,

00:41:24 ◼   ► there have been periods in the past

00:41:26 ◼   ► where I've gotten all here and there.

00:41:27 ◼   ► I mean nothing like what people like Brianna get.

00:41:29 ◼   ► It's not even close.

00:41:30 ◼   ► But if that kind of thing became a problem for me,

00:41:33 ◼   ► I would very much consider switching to these official apps.

00:41:36 ◼   ► And again, if you're going to make this

00:41:39 ◼   ► like a content filter kind of thing

00:41:41 ◼   ► and an abuse filter kind of thing,

00:41:43 ◼   ► you want as many people as possible

00:41:45 ◼   ► who are legitimate account holders to be verified.

00:41:48 ◼   ► And if you charge a bit of money to be verified,

00:41:50 ◼   ► it really does, it puts a big barrier in front of,

00:41:55 ◼   ► and not necessarily to the point where nobody can pay,

00:41:58 ◼   ► but not a lot of people will pay,

00:42:00 ◼   ► in order to make a bunch of dummy accounts

00:42:02 ◼   ► to troll people with or to harass people with.

00:42:04 ◼   ► but typically, when you pay for an account,

00:42:07 ◼   ► you are less likely to be willing to just throw it away

00:42:11 ◼   ► because you'll lose that money

00:42:12 ◼   ► and you'd have to pay again

00:42:13 ◼   ► if you wanted to come back to the service.

00:42:17 ◼   ► My old friend, the Something Awful Forum

00:42:18 ◼   ► is back from my early internet days.

00:42:21 ◼   ► They had a system there where you had to pay,

00:42:23 ◼   ► I believe it was 10 bucks to register an account

00:42:27 ◼   ► and it was incredibly effective

00:42:30 ◼   ► at keeping out spam and crap

00:42:32 ◼   ► And if anybody got banned, if you broke a rule,

00:42:36 ◼   ► you'd get banned, and you're out 10 bucks.

00:42:39 ◼   ► And if you wanna come back, you gotta pay another 10 bucks.

00:42:41 ◼   ► And it really did make a big difference

00:42:44 ◼   ► in how well that community was run,

00:42:46 ◼   ► and how little crap there really was there

00:42:48 ◼   ► compared to the number of people that were there.

00:42:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, that probably doesn't work for something

00:42:52 ◼   ► that's supposed to be as mass market as Twitter,

00:42:54 ◼   ► which is like, I think they'd have to come up

00:42:56 ◼   ► with a hybrid strategy where they would have to be like,

00:42:59 ◼   ► look, we will give out free checkmarks

00:43:01 ◼   ► everybody who we think deserves them and then we will actually hire or set a policy where

00:43:06 ◼   ► deserves make some sense to somebody in the entire universe and then anybody can get it

00:43:10 ◼   ► if they pay.

00:43:11 ◼   ► Like you need to hire because you don't want it to be like, "Oh."

00:43:14 ◼   ► So few people will pay.

00:43:15 ◼   ► You don't want it to be like only people with this amount of disposable income are

00:43:18 ◼   ► allowed to participate in Twitter because I think Twitter has already established itself

00:43:21 ◼   ► as sort of like everybody can be on Twitter.

00:43:23 ◼   ► It's open to everybody.

00:43:25 ◼   ► It's free.

00:43:27 ◼   ► Maybe that's not sustainable either but it's kind of a shame to take a service with that

00:43:31 ◼   ► broad of appeal, as opposed to something that's like a community like MetaFilter or those

00:43:35 ◼   ► forums you were talking about where it's not going to be everybody.

00:43:37 ◼   ► It's going to be a tiny subset, a very small community.

00:43:40 ◼   ► And even there it's kind of a shame to select only people who can afford to add that money.

00:43:44 ◼   ► But you're right that it is incredibly effective to raise inequality because no one wants to

00:43:51 ◼   ► keep paying money to make sock puppets because it just gets expensive and it doesn't feel

00:43:57 ◼   ► good.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I mean, I guess unfortunately, at the scale Twitter operates, I can imagine people running

00:44:04 ◼   ► Kickstarters to fund the creation of their sock puppet accounts.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Like in the alternate universe where Twitter was always a pay thing, they would just raise

00:44:10 ◼   ► tens of thousands of dollars from horrible people to constantly make it—anyway.

00:44:15 ◼   ► This is, like so many things Twitter does, this is in this weird state where it's not

00:44:19 ◼   ► clear what the new rules are.

00:44:21 ◼   ► It's not clear how long this will last.

00:44:23 ◼   ► As Marco said, who knows?

00:44:24 ◼   ► They could get rid of checkmarks tomorrow and split these features into two different

00:44:28 ◼   ► things, but at least it's some kind of motion on the front.

00:44:31 ◼   ► And by the way, speaking of the checkmark, I use a third-party client because I'm an

00:44:35 ◼   ► old Twitter user.

00:44:36 ◼   ► I'm always surprised when people use the official client, but apparently lots of actual people

00:44:40 ◼   ► do.

00:44:41 ◼   ► Anyway, in my third-party client it has an option for whether it should show the checkmark

00:44:46 ◼   ► overlaid on the little avatars for individual accounts, and I always have that turned off.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Because I didn't like, when I'm going through my timeline, I didn't like the sort of visual

00:44:57 ◼   ► indication that this person was more important and what they had to say was more important.

00:45:01 ◼   ► I mean, if I dig into the account, if I ever have questions about, "Is this really the

00:45:04 ◼   ► celebrity?" I tap on their name and I can see the checkmark. But seeing the checkmark,

00:45:08 ◼   ► mostly because I actually follow a lot of people who have checkmarks who I actually

00:45:11 ◼   ► know, I don't need to constantly be reminded that they all have checkmarks. And I felt

00:45:14 ◼   ► like it was making me pay less attention to the ones that don't have checkmarks, so

00:45:17 ◼   ► I just turned it off on all of them pretty quickly after that feature was available several

00:45:22 ◼   ► years ago. And I would definitely not want to turn it back on.

00:45:24 ◼   ► - Then you aren't seeing our bling.

00:45:27 ◼   ► - I know, believe me, I know.

00:45:30 ◼   ► Honestly, Marco, I thought you had had one for years.

00:45:33 ◼   ► I'd forgotten about that whole little blow up thing.

00:45:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the funny thing is right after I got mine,

00:45:38 ◼   ► Marco and I were talking privately

00:45:40 ◼   ► and we had concluded without a shadow of a doubt,

00:45:43 ◼   ► collectively, that there was zero chance

00:45:46 ◼   ► that you would solicit your own check mark

00:45:48 ◼   ► because you are above that.

00:45:49 ◼   ► And then fast forward like two hours

00:45:51 ◼   ► and you said in the relay slack,

00:45:53 ◼   ► "Oh, I totally asked them and I can't believe I haven't gotten them."

00:45:56 ◼   ► No, I thought you knew this, that we discussed before.

00:45:58 ◼   ► I wanted a checkmark forever.

00:46:00 ◼   ► Well, no, no, no. We knew that you wanted the checkmark.

00:46:02 ◼   ► That wasn't up for grabs.

00:46:03 ◼   ► Yeah, but we also thought that there would be no chance that you would, like, apply.

00:46:06 ◼   ► That I wouldn't apply? No, you have to. You have to apply.

00:46:08 ◼   ► Once they say it's open to everybody, you have to apply.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Like, I just choked down writing that stupid bio.

00:46:12 ◼   ► I'm like, "Ugh, I gotta do it."

00:46:14 ◼   ► Like, in the little box where they say, like, "Tell us why we should verify you,"

00:46:17 ◼   ► I wrote, like, the most craven, like, disgusting, "Here's why I'm an important person" thing.

00:46:23 ◼   ► Like, I'm just like, "This is the strongest argument I have. Here it is. No being coy,

00:46:29 ◼   ► no beating around the bush, this is it." Thank God that's not public.

00:46:32 ◼   ► What am I going to do? Be all shy and demure and say, "Well, probably you shouldn't give it to me,

00:46:39 ◼   ► I'm not that well known." No, I think I should have it. Maybe I should have taken a couple

00:46:43 ◼   ► sentences to say—I mean, I can't even be honest and say, "You should not be giving this to me

00:46:47 ◼   ► before you give it to every single person who's ever been targeted by Gamergate."

00:46:51 ◼   ► But if you start yelling at them and telling them what they should do, also not a good

00:46:54 ◼   ► way to get a checkmark.

00:46:55 ◼   ► So anyway, they're just not responding to my request anyway.

00:46:59 ◼   ► So it's been, what, three days now?

00:47:02 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:47:03 ◼   ► So on analog, on the episode of analog that will be out by the time this episode is out,

00:47:08 ◼   ► John, you're John, Mike and I discussed what we had written.

00:47:12 ◼   ► And it was funny because we took two different approaches on what we wrote to justify our

00:47:17 ◼   ► coolness.

00:47:18 ◼   ► And I agree with you.

00:47:20 ◼   ► I am not a fan of writing that sort of thing.

00:47:22 ◼   ► Oh, look at me, I'm just so important,

00:47:24 ◼   ► and let me tell you all the reasons why.

00:47:26 ◼   ► But what I ended up doing was basically name-dropping

00:47:29 ◼   ► people that I knew and interact with

00:47:32 ◼   ► that are also verified.

00:47:35 ◼   ► - That's not a power move, though.

00:47:37 ◼   ► - My brother-in-law met Barack Obama once.

00:47:38 ◼   ► - Sort of.

00:47:39 ◼   ► - Right, exactly.

00:47:40 ◼   ► I know Marco Armin.

00:47:41 ◼   ► - Well, that was the thing.

00:47:42 ◼   ► So, no, no, I mean, I'm serious.

00:47:44 ◼   ► That was the approach I took was,

00:47:45 ◼   ► hey, I share a podcast with verified user Marco Armin

00:47:48 ◼   ► and John Saracusa.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Well, the fact that he's verified that actually strengthens it.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Right, that's my point.

00:47:55 ◼   ► No, no, no, that was exactly my point.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And I talked about how I'm also on Relay, which also has Jason Snell verified and CGP

00:48:01 ◼   ► Cray verified.

00:48:02 ◼   ► And my podcasts are heard by many thousands of people each week.

00:48:05 ◼   ► That's a pretty good approach.

00:48:06 ◼   ► I mean, obviously it worked, but then again, with this black box, we have no idea why it

00:48:11 ◼   ► worked.

00:48:12 ◼   ► It could have been because the person who decided to check your box listens to ATP.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Boom, Casey List, done.

00:48:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:18 ◼   ► a different approach. Shoot, what did he say he did? I've forgotten now. But whatever it was...

00:48:21 ◼   ► I spelled my name with a Y, which is much cooler than an I.

00:48:24 ◼   ► Oh no, no, that's what it was. He had said, he thought to himself, "Well, why would they have

00:48:29 ◼   ► made this available to everyone?" It must be because they want people to verify their,

00:48:38 ◼   ► you know, their identity. And so Mike was all, "Oh, you know, I'm really concerned that people

00:48:42 ◼   ► that listen to me might not be able to find the real me," you know, in playing the whole,

00:48:46 ◼   ► like parody card. And I'm very poorly paraphrasing what he said. Go listen to that episode of

00:48:52 ◼   ► Analog. But we took two different approaches and, well, I gotta tell you, Mike Bling looks

00:48:56 ◼   ► great. How does he look, Marco?

00:48:58 ◼   ► But he got his too. Mike's approach worked too, right?

00:49:01 ◼   ► Yep.

00:49:02 ◼   ► I mean, Mike totally deserves one too. Like, I mean, it's no question, but like that's

00:49:04 ◼   ► an interesting approach. I mean, like I said, I have had actual impersonators using my avatar

00:49:09 ◼   ► and using variations on my name with different Unicode glyphs and stuff to make a thing like

00:49:13 ◼   ► that has happened to me. Not a lot, but it has happened. He ended up going with that

00:49:16 ◼   ► approach and it working good. Was it, did he have real examples or was it just speculative?

00:49:21 ◼   ► As in, like, I'm afraid this would happen to me one day.

00:49:23 ◼   ► I don't recall. I feel like it was speculative, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

00:49:28 ◼   ► Anyway, you have no idea how annoyed I'm going to be when I get rejected. Because then where

00:49:33 ◼   ► do I go from there? Do I just reapply every six months? Forever?

00:49:37 ◼   ► One month. Yeah, it's one month.

00:49:39 ◼   ► month? I can't... I did save the paragraph of text I wrote in the box just so I don't

00:49:44 ◼   ► have to think it up again, so I'll just paste it in every month. But like, what a lot...

00:49:47 ◼   ► what a distance that is. At a certain point I'm just gonna stop. I'm not gonna be able

00:49:49 ◼   ► to like, to muster the... it just... what is the quote from Jerry Maguire? Why in the

00:49:58 ◼   ► world am I asking you guys? Chat room with Jerry Maguire quote. You're gonna lick it

00:50:03 ◼   ► off now. Have you ever seen that movie? Yes, but forever ago. I actually did see it, but

00:50:08 ◼   ► But I saw it when it was new,

00:50:10 ◼   ► which was a very long time ago.

00:50:11 ◼   ► - All I know is I love looking at my bling

00:50:13 ◼   ► every time it flies by after I tweet.

00:50:15 ◼   ► Mm-mm-mm, looks good.

00:50:16 ◼   ► - For a while, I actually had trouble

00:50:19 ◼   ► recognizing myself on Twitter.

00:50:20 ◼   ► Like, if I'd double-click a tweet

00:50:22 ◼   ► to get the conversation history,

00:50:23 ◼   ► and mine would be at the root,

00:50:25 ◼   ► 'cause I wanted to see which of my tweets

00:50:26 ◼   ► is in response to,

00:50:28 ◼   ► for the first few days, it didn't register visually as me

00:50:33 ◼   ► when I'd see the avatar with the checkmark on it,

00:50:34 ◼   ► 'cause that's not how I look on Twitter.

00:50:37 ◼   ► - All right, here you go.

00:50:38 ◼   ► This is the scene that you guys don't remember, but you should because it's full of quotable

00:50:42 ◼   ► things.

00:50:43 ◼   ► Oh, you're not cutting my Jerry Maguire quote out.

00:50:44 ◼   ► This is gold.

00:50:45 ◼   ► I'm going to cut out like half this topic.

00:50:47 ◼   ► It's so long.

00:50:48 ◼   ► Well, we don't have much on the other end of it, so you know, we need to fill it here.

00:50:53 ◼   ► This is when Jerry's talking to whoever a kubu-ting junior was playing, like the athlete

00:50:57 ◼   ► that he represents.

00:50:58 ◼   ► He's a sports agent.

00:50:59 ◼   ► He said, "I'm out here for you.

00:51:00 ◼   ► You don't know what it's like to be me out here for you.

00:51:03 ◼   ► It's an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you about.

00:51:06 ◼   ► Oh, I blew it.

00:51:07 ◼   ► So close, so close!

00:51:09 ◼   ► Anyway, Up at Dawn, Pride-Swallowing Siege.

00:51:13 ◼   ► It's what I think of as a good description

00:51:15 ◼   ► of reapplying to get Twitter verified every month

00:51:19 ◼   ► because that is a hell of a pride-swallowing siege.

00:51:23 ◼   ► Oh, wow.

00:51:24 ◼   ► - Oh, Jon, I genuinely feel bad for you,

00:51:27 ◼   ► and I really want you to get verified.

00:51:29 ◼   ► - You shouldn't, no one should feel bad for me.

00:51:30 ◼   ► For the love of God, please, no one feel bad for you.

00:51:32 ◼   ► This is the most pathetic thing in the entire,

00:51:34 ◼   ► it's not actually important.

00:51:36 ◼   ► - No, it's not, but it is. - You should not feel bad

00:51:37 ◼   ► You should you should pity me that I care about this at all well

00:51:40 ◼   ► I do that too, but don't cry for John, Argentina

00:51:42 ◼   ► Exactly, you know something from pop culture. Are you quoting like the Madonna remake? No I saw that

00:51:48 ◼   ► Wait, which one we came out like in the 90s Madonna. That's the Madonna. Okay. That's the one I saw. Yeah, sorry

00:51:54 ◼   ► It's fine. At least I saw one of them. I mean come on. Yeah. Yeah. Well anyway

00:51:58 ◼   ► Well, I hope you get your checkmark in no small part because it'll make getting the ATP FM checkmark that much easier because we can

00:52:05 ◼   ► say, "Hey, all three of us."

00:52:06 ◼   ► - Well, it probably won't because apparently

00:52:08 ◼   ► the process is random and Vititi doesn't deserve one

00:52:10 ◼   ► and neither is anyone targeted by Gamergate.

00:52:12 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, this is part of the problem

00:52:14 ◼   ► with any of these human review,

00:52:16 ◼   ► it's just like the App Store where even if you set rules

00:52:20 ◼   ► in place and even if the rules don't change,

00:52:22 ◼   ► which I think for Twitter's verification process

00:52:25 ◼   ► those are two big requirements that probably

00:52:27 ◼   ► have never been met before, but assuming you have

00:52:29 ◼   ► codified rules that don't change much over time,

00:52:34 ◼   ► you still have a team of humans enforcing them.

00:52:36 ◼   ► And like, you know, when Viteaches went through,

00:52:39 ◼   ► it could, it was right after this big rush started,

00:52:42 ◼   ► it could have been a bunch of people

00:52:43 ◼   ► who saw this giant pile behind them

00:52:45 ◼   ► and it was right before lunch

00:52:46 ◼   ► and they were tired and they were grumpy

00:52:48 ◼   ► and they just started saying no, no, no, no to it.

00:52:50 ◼   ► Like, it could be so many things

00:52:52 ◼   ► once you have like humans trying to review

00:52:55 ◼   ► a whole bunch of stuff subjectively.

00:52:57 ◼   ► It's just, these kind of rule systems

00:53:00 ◼   ► will never be consistently enforced

00:53:02 ◼   ► as long as there is that subjective component to it.

00:53:05 ◼   ► That's why they should remove that,

00:53:06 ◼   ► and it should just be like,

00:53:08 ◼   ► do you fit the basic qualifications?

00:53:09 ◼   ► Can you prove your identity with a government issued ID

00:53:12 ◼   ► that we trust, and can you maybe pay a few bucks

00:53:16 ◼   ► for our time since we're gonna do this for a lot of people?

00:53:19 ◼   ► That's it, that should be all it is.

00:53:21 ◼   ► And as soon as you put in judgment calls of,

00:53:24 ◼   ► well, are you important enough?

00:53:26 ◼   ► It's never gonna be consistently enforced.

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00:54:38 ◼   ► - So Marco, we're doing pretty well.

00:54:44 ◼   ► We're about an hour in and we still have one more topic left

00:54:48 ◼   ► and I think we might be able to dodge stupid Tivo

00:54:50 ◼   ► for one more week.

00:54:51 ◼   ► So we gotta stretch this one a lot.

00:54:53 ◼   ► - All right, we'll see what we can do.

00:54:54 ◼   ► - So tell me everything that I could ever possibly

00:54:57 ◼   ► want to know about serial number tracking in forecast.

00:55:01 ◼   ► - Okay, now that you've ruined both product names

00:55:03 ◼   ► of the things I was gonna make.

00:55:04 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:55:06 ◼   ► - Wait, was that not, wait.

00:55:08 ◼   ► - If he was looking in the show notes,

00:55:09 ◼   ► you would know it was called that.

00:55:10 ◼   ► - I know.

00:55:11 ◼   ► - What was the other name?

00:55:12 ◼   ► - Side track. - The audio alignment?

00:55:13 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:14 ◼   ► - He didn't say that, you did, didn't you?

00:55:16 ◼   ► - No, but it's in the show notes and I missed it.

00:55:18 ◼   ► It's fine, it doesn't matter.

00:55:19 ◼   ► - Oh, crap, I'm sorry.

00:55:21 ◼   ► - Don't worry about it.

00:55:21 ◼   ► - Have you not announced forecast?

00:55:23 ◼   ► - I think I kind of mentioned it here and there.

00:55:25 ◼   ► It's also, it's in the ID3 tags of every MP3 I've made

00:55:28 ◼   ► in the last two months.

00:55:29 ◼   ► So it's just sitting right there.

00:55:32 ◼   ► People have asked me on Twitter like,

00:55:33 ◼   ► "Hey, what's this forecast thing?"

00:55:35 ◼   ► So yeah, they figured it out.

00:55:36 ◼   ► - Oh God, I feel like such a turd.

00:55:37 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sorry.

00:55:38 ◼   ► Do we wanna rerecord that?

00:55:39 ◼   ► We can rerecord.

00:55:40 ◼   ► - No, it's fine.

00:55:41 ◼   ► - No, no, no, now you have to explain

00:55:42 ◼   ► the goofy origins of the name

00:55:43 ◼   ► in typical Marco naming fashion.

00:55:46 ◼   ► - I am excellent at naming things.

00:55:48 ◼   ► I don't know what you're talking about.

00:55:50 ◼   ► - Actually, this is perfect

00:55:51 ◼   ► 'cause this will delay TiVo even more.

00:55:52 ◼   ► So please tell me the name about this thing

00:55:54 ◼   ► that I just spilled the beans on?

00:55:56 ◼   ► - Sure, so Forecast is my podcast post-production app

00:56:00 ◼   ► for the Mac.

00:56:01 ◼   ► It basically is an MP3 encoder,

00:56:04 ◼   ► as well as a chapter and metadata editor.

00:56:07 ◼   ► So it allows you to input any audio file,

00:56:11 ◼   ► WAV, AIF, other MP3s, whatever else,

00:56:15 ◼   ► and just edit the metadata on it.

00:56:17 ◼   ► It encodes its MP3 if it isn't an MP3 already.

00:56:19 ◼   ► It uses my parallel version of the lame MP3 encoder,

00:56:22 ◼   ► like I discussed a few episodes back.

00:56:25 ◼   ► I did succeed in making that.

00:56:26 ◼   ► It does work.

00:56:27 ◼   ► The last few episodes of this show have been encoded with it

00:56:29 ◼   ► and nobody noticed, so that's good.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And it also can do things like edit chapters.

00:56:33 ◼   ► And you might have noticed in recent shows

00:56:34 ◼   ► that not only have I been using chapters more

00:56:37 ◼   ► in the encode here,

00:56:39 ◼   ► but also that we've recently gotten,

00:56:42 ◼   ► here and there I've been throwing in some chapter images

00:56:45 ◼   ► where you have a special image showing up at certain times

00:56:48 ◼   ► in certain shows that's topically relevant.

00:56:51 ◼   ► And this is all being done by this app, Forecast.

00:56:54 ◼   ► And the reason I named it Forecast

00:56:55 ◼   ► is because it's what comes before Overcast.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Come on.

00:56:58 ◼   ► I mean--

00:56:59 ◼   ► Oh, no, you got the three things.

00:57:00 ◼   ► So it's the connection to the weather.

00:57:02 ◼   ► So Overcast and Forecast, you forecast the weather.

00:57:04 ◼   ► But you've also-- and then what was the one you just said?

00:57:07 ◼   ► You do it before it appears in Overcast.

00:57:10 ◼   ► And also, this application takes files

00:57:12 ◼   ► and prepares them for Overcast.

00:57:16 ◼   ► Yep.

00:57:17 ◼   ► And Overcast ends in Cast, which is

00:57:20 ◼   ► is because it's about podcasts.

00:57:21 ◼   ► So it's all these different, you know,

00:57:23 ◼   ► all these references and this name forecast, so.

00:57:26 ◼   ► - And also you are the famous creator

00:57:27 ◼   ► of the podcast application Instacast,

00:57:29 ◼   ► as far as I'm concerned, is that right?

00:57:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's, you know, people,

00:57:37 ◼   ► for a while I thought I kind of owned

00:57:39 ◼   ► like the Insta prefix with Instapaper,

00:57:42 ◼   ► and then Instagram came out and the game was over,

00:57:44 ◼   ► because now like everybody just thinks

00:57:46 ◼   ► anything Insta, people think Instagram.

00:57:49 ◼   ► So even if I tried to, and Instacast was a different

00:57:52 ◼   ► podcast app by a different person,

00:57:55 ◼   ► but even if that never existed,

00:57:56 ◼   ► even if I tried to launch a new podcast app

00:57:59 ◼   ► called Instacast, people would think I was ripping off

00:58:02 ◼   ► Instagram's name, not playing off my own name

00:58:05 ◼   ► of my own product from 10 years ago.

00:58:07 ◼   ► So anyway, so my app is called Forecast,

00:58:12 ◼   ► and it's a Mac app, although as far as I know,

00:58:15 ◼   ► there's nothing really about it that would make it,

00:58:17 ◼   ► that would preclude an iOS version in the future if I really thought that it was warranted.

00:58:21 ◼   ► But there's not a whole lot of podcast production happening on iOS these days. So the demand

00:58:26 ◼   ► is mostly on the computer side and probably mostly on the Mac side, if I had to guess,

00:58:30 ◼   ► between Mac and PC. So that's what I'm doing. It's a small project. It's not like a massive

00:58:37 ◼   ► thing. I've been working on it for a few weeks. It's in beta now, a very small private beta,

00:58:42 ◼   ► And I haven't really decided how and when to release it and charge for it.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And I talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar two weeks ago, so we'll link to

00:58:52 ◼   ► that.

00:58:54 ◼   ► Just basically considerations of whether you should even charge money for something like

00:58:58 ◼   ► this or whether it's not even worth the hassle of charging money.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Because charging money brings a certain degree of overhead and of support burden and things

00:59:08 ◼   ► like that.

00:59:09 ◼   ► If it's only gonna make a small amount of money overall

00:59:12 ◼   ► because of small volume of sales,

00:59:15 ◼   ► it's kind of questionable whether that's even worth doing.

00:59:19 ◼   ► The entire run of Bugshot,

00:59:21 ◼   ► when I was charging for it and when I still owned Bugshot,

00:59:27 ◼   ► the entire run of it made something like $3,000.

00:59:30 ◼   ► And $3,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people,

00:59:32 ◼   ► and it was for me at the time as well.

00:59:33 ◼   ► However, it also took a pretty big portion of my summer

00:59:38 ◼   ► to do that and there was an opportunity cost there

00:59:40 ◼   ► like I probably should have been working on Overcast

00:59:43 ◼   ► at the time and instead I made Bugshot

00:59:45 ◼   ► and to have made a relatively small amount of money

00:59:49 ◼   ► over like a year worth of sales,

00:59:52 ◼   ► it probably wasn't worth it in retrospect

00:59:55 ◼   ► and that's why I eventually just decided

00:59:56 ◼   ► to just make it free and just learn from it,

00:59:59 ◼   ► whatever I could learn from having a free app in the store.

01:00:02 ◼   ► So with Forecast, I'm kind of faced with a similar

01:00:05 ◼   ► conclusion or a similar dilemma here

01:00:08 ◼   ► of do I charge for it or not?

01:00:10 ◼   ► And I talked actually a little bit about this last week

01:00:12 ◼   ► when we talked about Sidetrack, my alignment utility

01:00:15 ◼   ► that also exists, although forecast is way more

01:00:18 ◼   ► in a releasable state because it's just a simpler problem.

01:00:21 ◼   ► But anyway, I don't really know

01:00:23 ◼   ► whether I'm going to charge for it or not.

01:00:25 ◼   ► If I'm going to charge for it,

01:00:27 ◼   ► it would probably be like 50 bucks

01:00:29 ◼   ► because anything less than that,

01:00:31 ◼   ► I don't think it would be worth it,

01:00:32 ◼   ► but the problem is like how many people

01:00:34 ◼   ► are gonna pay for a podcast chapter utility.

01:00:37 ◼   ► Now there is a podcast chapter utility

01:00:40 ◼   ► already in the Mac App Store today.

01:00:42 ◼   ► I believe it's called podcast chapters.

01:00:44 ◼   ► It's 20 bucks and as far as I can tell,

01:00:47 ◼   ► it doesn't look at selling in meaningful volume,

01:00:50 ◼   ► which is too bad because I think this is a market

01:00:52 ◼   ► that should be a strong market.

01:00:54 ◼   ► With me going in there saying,

01:00:56 ◼   ► I wanna be able to charge 50 bucks for this,

01:00:58 ◼   ► it's not very promising that there's already one for 20

01:01:01 ◼   ► that appears not to be selling very well.

01:01:03 ◼   ► So I think you gotta figure like,

01:01:05 ◼   ► yeah, I could push it, I could use my brand

01:01:07 ◼   ► and my blue check mark to really sell this thing,

01:01:09 ◼   ► and like, but how many copies am I really gonna sell?

01:01:12 ◼   ► How many people are really making chapterized podcasts

01:01:15 ◼   ► and are willing to pay 50 bucks

01:01:16 ◼   ► for my version of solving this problem?

01:01:19 ◼   ► That number is probably something like 100 people at most,

01:01:23 ◼   ► in the most optimistic projection, 100 people,

01:01:26 ◼   ► probably more like 20 to 30 people,

01:01:30 ◼   ► if I'm really being honest.

01:01:31 ◼   ► it's probably a very small number of people

01:01:34 ◼   ► who actually would buy this thing.

01:01:35 ◼   ► So because it's so small, I'm leaning mostly towards

01:01:40 ◼   ► not even charging money for it,

01:01:43 ◼   ► because it just seems like the overhead of charging money

01:01:47 ◼   ► would not really be worth setting all that up.

01:01:51 ◼   ► That being said, I also have an app called Quitter,

01:01:54 ◼   ► which we plugged poorly last episode.

01:01:57 ◼   ► I also have a Mac app called Quitter,

01:01:59 ◼   ► and it would kind of be an interesting learning experience

01:02:02 ◼   ► to figure out how to charge money for Mac apps

01:02:05 ◼   ► to set up the infrastructure to charge money for Mac apps.

01:02:07 ◼   ► This is all outside the App Store

01:02:09 ◼   ► because the Mac App Store does not really offer anything,

01:02:14 ◼   ► it doesn't offer enough to make it worth the 30% anymore

01:02:18 ◼   ► if it ever did.

01:02:19 ◼   ► Anyway, so big question is do I release this thing

01:02:22 ◼   ► and then do I charge for it

01:02:23 ◼   ► and then if I charge for it, how do I charge for it?

01:02:26 ◼   ► And then the follow-up topic to this,

01:02:28 ◼   ► which is how do I do license management

01:02:31 ◼   ► and piracy prevention, or rather, piracy reduction,

01:02:35 ◼   ► I guess I should say, 'cause I'm a realist here.

01:02:37 ◼   ► I know how these things work.

01:02:39 ◼   ► So what do you think, what should I do here?

01:02:41 ◼   ► - If you weren't gonna charge for it,

01:02:43 ◼   ► which you're slowly convincing me.

01:02:45 ◼   ► Before I was like, you should just charge

01:02:46 ◼   ► a huge amount of money for it

01:02:47 ◼   ► 'cause five people are gonna buy it.

01:02:49 ◼   ► And unfortunately, you're gonna get free copies

01:02:51 ◼   ► of those five people, so really you're gonna sell zero.

01:02:53 ◼   ► But now as you talk about it more,

01:02:55 ◼   ► I'm like, well, if it's gonna be free,

01:02:56 ◼   ► I start to think that not only should it be free, it should be open source.

01:03:00 ◼   ► Because when some annoying corner case of the spec comes out, there's enough nerdy people

01:03:04 ◼   ► that they'll just send you a pull request and why not get the benefits of it being free?

01:03:11 ◼   ► You're not going to get any of the benefits of making any money if you're going to make

01:03:14 ◼   ► it free.

01:03:15 ◼   ► Why not go all the way in the other direction and say, "Not only is this free, this is open

01:03:18 ◼   ► source."

01:03:19 ◼   ► And then also, if you get tired of maintaining it, some other person who's more enthusiastic

01:03:24 ◼   ► about maintaining it could take it over because you just want this tool to exist, which is

01:03:27 ◼   ► why you're making it.

01:03:28 ◼   ► Like you're scratching your own itch here.

01:03:29 ◼   ► Sure.

01:03:30 ◼   ► It's not as if this is your grand plan for world domination, right?

01:03:32 ◼   ► I think you would be fine if someone took it over and kept up with all these, you know,

01:03:37 ◼   ► whenever you get a report like, "Oh, I tried to use your tool and it didn't work on this

01:03:40 ◼   ► particular weird thing encoded with this," like you don't want to deal with that crap.

01:03:44 ◼   ► So I would say free and open source is a good option or closed source and charge a huge

01:03:51 ◼   ► amount of money as a deterrent to keep away the look you lose.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Yeah and then see how it works out.

01:04:01 ◼   ► And if you really do want to figure out like how can people send me money for a Mac application,

01:04:07 ◼   ► like maybe as people were saying in the chat room, maybe make it like a tip jar type of

01:04:11 ◼   ► thing where it's not even like patronage.

01:04:14 ◼   ► It's not even like you're promising that anyone that you're even going to like put that money

01:04:17 ◼   ► into further development of this application.

01:04:19 ◼   ► just like, look, this is free.

01:04:22 ◼   ► If you like it and you wanna say thank you,

01:04:24 ◼   ► put a dollar in this jar, you get nothing for this dollar.

01:04:27 ◼   ► Like it doesn't even guarantee that I'm ever gonna make

01:04:29 ◼   ► another version of this application,

01:04:30 ◼   ► but if you just wanna be a nice person, do that.

01:04:33 ◼   ► And I think that could make as much money

01:04:35 ◼   ► as the one where you charge five people 50 bucks.

01:04:39 ◼   ► - It might, well okay, so let me address these two

01:04:41 ◼   ► separately, 'cause these are two big topics I think.

01:04:43 ◼   ► So first, the open source question.

01:04:46 ◼   ► That is a very, very good question,

01:04:47 ◼   ► and it's an interesting theory of, you know,

01:04:49 ◼   ► should this just be open source?

01:04:50 ◼   ► And I've thought about that for this and Sidetrack.

01:04:53 ◼   ► What I found though, you know,

01:04:54 ◼   ► in just being a person using computers for a while,

01:04:57 ◼   ► and a little bit of direct developer experience,

01:05:00 ◼   ► but mostly just being a user of this stuff,

01:05:02 ◼   ► what I found is that there tends to be

01:05:05 ◼   ► not that much value to entirely open sourced applications,

01:05:10 ◼   ► especially for fairly narrow uses like this.

01:05:13 ◼   ► There is lots of value in open source components

01:05:15 ◼   ► and utility libraries and stuff like that.

01:05:17 ◼   ► There's lots of value there,

01:05:19 ◼   ► but the value of open sourcing the entire app here

01:05:23 ◼   ► is not incredibly great unless there's going to be

01:05:26 ◼   ► a lot of contributors working on it.

01:05:29 ◼   ► And for most apps, that simply doesn't happen.

01:05:31 ◼   ► For most apps, getting a lot of contributors

01:05:34 ◼   ► is like this fantasy that you have

01:05:36 ◼   ► when you think about open sourcing it,

01:05:37 ◼   ► but then if you actually do open source it,

01:05:39 ◼   ► almost nobody contributes,

01:05:41 ◼   ► and you get a handful of pull requests here and there,

01:05:43 ◼   ► and then it just works.

01:05:44 ◼   ► then it's just like, it's like going through resumes,

01:05:46 ◼   ► but people put all this work into it,

01:05:47 ◼   ► and then you have to like, you know,

01:05:49 ◼   ► the ones you want to accept, you gotta like,

01:05:51 ◼   ► you know, make sure they work, you gotta test them

01:05:53 ◼   ► with all of Casey's unit tests, and all this crazy stuff,

01:05:56 ◼   ► and then, and even the ones that work that you wanna add,

01:06:00 ◼   ► it might not have really been in the way

01:06:01 ◼   ► that you would have wanted to do it,

01:06:03 ◼   ► or the code might be messy.

01:06:05 ◼   ► - You gotta let go, when it's open source,

01:06:06 ◼   ► you gotta let go of the thing, and like,

01:06:09 ◼   ► and I think you don't want a whole bunch

01:06:10 ◼   ► of a contributor or something,

01:06:11 ◼   ► I think you just want like two smart people

01:06:12 ◼   ► contributing to it, and that's it.

01:06:14 ◼   ► And all it does is relieve the maintenance burden for you

01:06:17 ◼   ► with the idea that eventually you'll be bored with it

01:06:19 ◼   ► and someone else will just take it over

01:06:21 ◼   ► and then you'll be sending them five line pull requests.

01:06:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I think in reality,

01:06:26 ◼   ► again, that's a great theory.

01:06:28 ◼   ► In reality, that doesn't happen very often.

01:06:30 ◼   ► And also, so when you open source things,

01:06:34 ◼   ► especially a full app like this,

01:06:35 ◼   ► you have the problem of you're generating work for yourself

01:06:39 ◼   ► because you're gonna have to deal with the contributions

01:06:42 ◼   ► and the reports from people and the pull request.

01:06:45 ◼   ► - You don't have to deal with the contribution.

01:06:47 ◼   ► You can just ignore it.

01:06:48 ◼   ► Eventually people will fork it and like,

01:06:50 ◼   ► that's the only-- - Yeah, but then you're a jerk.

01:06:51 ◼   ► - No, it's not.

01:06:52 ◼   ► I feel like that's every open source thing I've ever done

01:06:54 ◼   ► that's been like, look, here it is.

01:06:56 ◼   ► Maybe if I feel like it, I'll look at your pull request,

01:06:58 ◼   ► but if not, 'cause if people are annoyed

01:06:59 ◼   ► that you're not taking the pull request,

01:07:00 ◼   ► they'll just fork it and then they've taken it.

01:07:02 ◼   ► That's the only way you get people to take it over

01:07:04 ◼   ► is you just neglect it and then someone else takes it over

01:07:06 ◼   ► and you're like, oh, good, done.

01:07:10 ◼   ► I'm thinking of it as totally not feeling any social responsibility because this is

01:07:16 ◼   ► a very obscure thing.

01:07:18 ◼   ► It is not a mass market thing.

01:07:20 ◼   ► It's super obscure and it's just kind of your way of having… it's like buying a lottery

01:07:26 ◼   ► ticket for removing a small amount of maintenance from your future, but it really is totally

01:07:30 ◼   ► giving up ownership of it.

01:07:31 ◼   ► So forget about picking a cool name for it and having any ownership or any stake in it

01:07:35 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:07:36 ◼   ► It's just completely open source.

01:07:37 ◼   ► to the far extreme of these possibilities,

01:07:41 ◼   ► which you have never done anything like this,

01:07:43 ◼   ► and the only reason I'm suggesting it in this case

01:07:45 ◼   ► is because this seems like the only time

01:07:48 ◼   ► I would ever recommend it,

01:07:49 ◼   ► because it's so clearly not a thing

01:07:53 ◼   ► that has any potential upside that is significant.

01:07:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I agree with Jon.

01:07:58 ◼   ► Unless you're gonna be charging an absurd amount of money,

01:08:01 ◼   ► which I think in principle you could,

01:08:04 ◼   ► because the kind of people that would use this

01:08:06 ◼   ► probably the kind of people that make a decent amount of money making these shows.

01:08:10 ◼   ► Mmm, that's not necessarily true. It's not necessarily true, but it's certainly

01:08:14 ◼   ► possible. But regardless of that, I think Jon has convinced me, listening to him, that

01:08:21 ◼   ► open sourcing it is probably the best way to go, because the key to open sourcing it

01:08:25 ◼   ► is that you can point at that GitHub repo and just say, "Yep, shrug. It's up to you,

01:08:31 ◼   ► I did my part now. It's up to you and

01:08:33 ◼   ► And then if somebody complains to you that something isn't working you can you are completely absolved of any guilt because it is within

01:08:41 ◼   ► Their power in principle to fix that that's a wonderful theory. That doesn't work in practice

01:08:47 ◼   ► Like it's just it's just a change in attitude. You just say like like I'm not offering you support for this

01:08:54 ◼   ► This is not a product. You didn't pay me anymore

01:08:56 ◼   ► Like if anyone actually complained be like you're getting what you paid for

01:08:59 ◼   ► I'll refund all zero dollars of your money. Like don't even respond to the emails

01:09:03 ◼   ► Don't even look at the things like I'm good at that tons of tons

01:09:05 ◼   ► Those are stuffers like that and I don't think anyone can get mad about it's like plop here it is

01:09:11 ◼   ► And you can continue to edit your thing or like like there is no obligation

01:09:15 ◼   ► I feel and this is you know

01:09:17 ◼   ► This is a topic of some controversy in the open source world people like once you have it open source

01:09:21 ◼   ► You have to like maintain it and deal with progress

01:09:23 ◼   ► No

01:09:23 ◼   ► You don't that my I'm totally of the opinion if you just want to plop a bunch of code down and be like here it is

01:09:28 ◼   ► and never communicate with anyone in the entire world about it ever again.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Just put it under a license.

01:09:33 ◼   ► It's like, "You want it?

01:09:34 ◼   ► Here you go.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Fork it.

01:09:36 ◼   ► Do whatever the hell you want.

01:09:37 ◼   ► You and your friends do whatever you want.

01:09:38 ◼   ► If you don't have the ability to change it, oh well.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Sucks to be you."

01:09:43 ◼   ► But whatever.

01:09:44 ◼   ► I'm a programmer.

01:09:45 ◼   ► I wrote this for my own purposes.

01:09:46 ◼   ► And as a nice aside, I'm going to chuck it out there so other people can mess with it

01:09:49 ◼   ► if they want.

01:09:50 ◼   ► If I'm in the mood and someone sends me a progress, maybe I'll incorporate it, but no

01:09:53 ◼   ► promises.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Maybe I'll never look at it again, which I understand that doesn't feel good to a lot

01:09:57 ◼   ► of people, but to me that feels like one of the beautiful things about open source.

01:10:05 ◼   ► It's kind of like, rather than keeping it to yourself, say we take selling it to other

01:10:12 ◼   ► people off the table, which I don't think it should be off the table, but anyway, say

01:10:15 ◼   ► the alternative was "I wrote this out for myself and I used it myself," and this is

01:10:19 ◼   ► the alternative, don't hide it.

01:10:21 ◼   ► It's like taking all your belongings with you when you die.

01:10:24 ◼   ► As soon as I die, I'd burn every one of the Van Gogh paintings I own because I don't want

01:10:28 ◼   ► anyone else to ever have them.

01:10:29 ◼   ► It's like, I made this thing for myself, but also I want to share it with the world, so

01:10:35 ◼   ► if you want it, here it is.

01:10:37 ◼   ► It is what it is.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Go nuts with it.

01:10:41 ◼   ► And them having it doesn't affect you because it's software.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Like, you can both have it at the same time.

01:10:46 ◼   ► And you can both do whatever you want with it.

01:10:49 ◼   ► Develop it, not develop it, whatever.

01:10:53 ◼   ► And the final thing is, it has all the benefits of being free, because if we look at the iTunes

01:10:57 ◼   ► podcast directory, there are a huge number of podcasts.

01:11:01 ◼   ► If you made a free tool like this, Word would get around among the tons and tons of sort

01:11:05 ◼   ► of like, you know, whatever the bell curve looks like for podcasts in terms of traffic

01:11:10 ◼   ► numbers, the long tail of podcasts that are out there.

01:11:13 ◼   ► There are a lot of podcasts, and I bet a few of them, if they needed a tool that did this,

01:11:18 ◼   ► and Word got out, they're like, "Oh, if you need a tool that does this, the easiest one

01:11:21 ◼   ► is this free Mac app. Click on this thing, download the thing, and use it. Whatever.

01:11:26 ◼   ► You're helping a lot of people do their podcast production, and if those people come looking

01:11:31 ◼   ► for like, "Oh, I found a bug in this program," or whatever, you don't have to respond to

01:11:34 ◼   ► them either because they got a free application off a GitHub page. Maybe they won't even

01:11:38 ◼   ► be downloading it from your page. They'd be downloading it from the seventh or eighth

01:11:41 ◼   ► person who forked it. Who knows?

01:11:43 ◼   ► Well, okay. Those are all reasonable concerns and reasonable points, but I don't think

01:11:48 ◼   ► I'm ready to give up that kind of control.

01:11:50 ◼   ► - I know, I know, I totally know from your personality

01:11:53 ◼   ► you don't wanna do this, but I'm just saying.

01:11:54 ◼   ► - Right, and by open sourcing it,

01:11:56 ◼   ► you close a lot of doors for yourself in the future.

01:11:59 ◼   ► Like, I mean, yes, you open some,

01:12:00 ◼   ► thank you, Richard Stallman,

01:12:02 ◼   ► but you close a lot of doors for yourself of like,

01:12:05 ◼   ► what if I wanted to start charging for it

01:12:06 ◼   ► in the next version, or even just take this version

01:12:10 ◼   ► and start charging for it.

01:12:11 ◼   ► There are a lot of opportunities

01:12:12 ◼   ► that you basically close off by doing that.

01:12:15 ◼   ► Also, open source has a number of problems

01:12:19 ◼   ► in today's world, and I don't know if this was always the case, but it certainly seems

01:12:23 ◼   ► like today this is a big problem, where any kind of open source app now in the world of

01:12:29 ◼   ► app stores will have lots of opportunistic vultures and scammers basically just taking

01:12:36 ◼   ► it, changing the name maybe if you're lucky, and putting it on the app store for money

01:12:40 ◼   ► and trying to make money off of it. This happens to all sorts of open source applications now.

01:12:45 ◼   ► It happens a lot.

01:12:46 ◼   ► - App Review would never allow that.

01:12:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, that's hilarious.

01:12:51 ◼   ► - Put a little icon of Mario on it.

01:12:54 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:12:54 ◼   ► - And call it Minecraft 2.0,

01:12:56 ◼   ► and I'm sure that will go right through App Review.

01:12:59 ◼   ► - Exactly, and so basically, there's a lot of problems

01:13:03 ◼   ► with entire open source applications, that's one of them.

01:13:07 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think I'll open source it.

01:13:11 ◼   ► If I ever decided that I was done working on it

01:13:14 ◼   ► that it was going to be unmaintained,

01:13:16 ◼   ► maybe then I would open source it,

01:13:17 ◼   ► that that would be kind of the classy move to do

01:13:19 ◼   ► if there were no obvious problems by doing that.

01:13:21 ◼   ► But that's, I think I'd keep a closed source

01:13:25 ◼   ► until I figure out what to do with it.

01:13:27 ◼   ► That being said, again, do I really charge for it or not?

01:13:33 ◼   ► I don't know, I mean, ultimately,

01:13:36 ◼   ► the world is better off if it's free,

01:13:38 ◼   ► but I have a hard time justifying working on it if it's free

01:13:42 ◼   ► So I have to kind of balance that like, you know,

01:13:44 ◼   ► is it really, like, 'cause every day I spend working

01:13:47 ◼   ► on this, I'm not improving Overcast.

01:13:50 ◼   ► And I still need to do that too.

01:13:52 ◼   ► And you know, I need to like, this needs to be a project

01:13:56 ◼   ► that I only work on in short bursts so that I can get back

01:13:58 ◼   ► to working on Overcast, which is still providing

01:14:00 ◼   ► the bulk of my software income.

01:14:03 ◼   ► So you know, it's, I don't know, it's a tough balance.

01:14:06 ◼   ► I would love to be in a position where I could start

01:14:08 ◼   ► making real money from podcasting tools,

01:14:11 ◼   ► and have that start being an important enough part

01:14:14 ◼   ► of my business that I could spend more time working on it.

01:14:16 ◼   ► But I think as many people have found

01:14:18 ◼   ► when they try to get into this business,

01:14:20 ◼   ► it's just very hard to make money off of podcasting tools

01:14:22 ◼   ► because even though podcasting is really doing very well

01:14:25 ◼   ► right now, the number of podcast producers

01:14:28 ◼   ► is still fairly small relative to things like blogging

01:14:30 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:14:32 ◼   ► It's still a pretty small number producing podcasts.

01:14:35 ◼   ► And of the ones who produce podcasts,

01:14:37 ◼   ► there are so many different ways to produce them,

01:14:39 ◼   ► so many different tools people prefer to use

01:14:41 ◼   ► can afford to use or need to use in various conditions

01:14:44 ◼   ► that they're working in, that even if you make a tool,

01:14:48 ◼   ► the percentage of the market that will actually choose

01:14:53 ◼   ► to use that tool, especially if it's charged money for,

01:14:57 ◼   ► you're talking about very small numbers of people.

01:15:00 ◼   ► And if you raise the price high enough

01:15:04 ◼   ► to make it worth your time to develop it,

01:15:06 ◼   ► those people wouldn't be able to afford it anymore.

01:15:08 ◼   ► So it's a very hard market to really make money in

01:15:13 ◼   ► directly through direct sales.

01:15:15 ◼   ► Now of course there are other strategies I could use here.

01:15:18 ◼   ► I could give away a whole bunch of great production tools

01:15:20 ◼   ► for free that are all optimized for how Overcast works.

01:15:24 ◼   ► And so this would put me in a position to do things like

01:15:26 ◼   ► add new metadata formats that Overcast could debut

01:15:30 ◼   ► being the first app to read them.

01:15:32 ◼   ► And that would also piss off a lot of people,

01:15:33 ◼   ► but that's an option I could do.

01:15:36 ◼   ► I could just have this thing be something that, you know,

01:15:40 ◼   ► pushes the MP3 chapter format because I love MP3 chapters,

01:15:44 ◼   ► I hate M4A chapters, that's a terrible format.

01:15:47 ◼   ► And this would help push it towards MP3,

01:15:49 ◼   ► which Overcast deals better with,

01:15:51 ◼   ► which everybody deals better with,

01:15:52 ◼   ► it's a much easier format.

01:15:54 ◼   ► It's actually documented, that's a big one right there.

01:15:57 ◼   ► Thanks Apple for never documenting

01:15:58 ◼   ► the original AAC-enhanced format.

01:16:02 ◼   ► Anyway, there's lots of options I have here.

01:16:04 ◼   ► I don't know how interesting this is for all the listeners,

01:16:06 ◼   ► so I guess I can move on from that portion

01:16:08 ◼   ► of whether I charge for it,

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01:17:47 ◼   ► So based on what we know about you and how you don't want to do this open source and

01:17:54 ◼   ► you don't want to get away for free or whatever, but also what you said about the maximum addressable

01:17:59 ◼   ► market for this application being relatively small.

01:18:02 ◼   ► It's making me lean pretty heavily towards the idea

01:18:04 ◼   ► that you do not spend much time trying to prevent piracy.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Because everybody's been discussing

01:18:09 ◼   ► in Slack over the past weeks and has been discussed many times

01:18:12 ◼   ► on the web, especially in the old days,

01:18:13 ◼   ► back before the days of shareware and everything.

01:18:17 ◼   ► You can invest essentially infinite time

01:18:19 ◼   ► in trying to stop piracy.

01:18:20 ◼   ► You will always lose.

01:18:21 ◼   ► It's almost impossible to stop unless you're really

01:18:25 ◼   ► bad to your legitimate users.

01:18:27 ◼   ► And for what?

01:18:28 ◼   ► to get two extra users out of an addressable market of 100.

01:18:32 ◼   ► It's just not worth it.

01:18:33 ◼   ► So not only should you not spend lots of your time

01:18:36 ◼   ► on an application that you know is not gonna make

01:18:37 ◼   ► tons of money, but of the time that you spend,

01:18:41 ◼   ► all that time should be on the actual application.

01:18:44 ◼   ► Very little of it should be on the part

01:18:47 ◼   ► that prevents piracy.

01:18:48 ◼   ► You wanna prevent super casual piracy,

01:18:50 ◼   ► so do basically the simplest thing that will possibly work,

01:18:53 ◼   ► and I would say that's it.

01:18:56 ◼   ► And then just like, you know, you don't want to do nothing because it's so easy to just

01:19:00 ◼   ► do something and that helps.

01:19:02 ◼   ► But and especially if like, as you mentioned, the ambition to be like, this could be a stepping

01:19:06 ◼   ► stone to like, you know, a suite of podcasting tools or an integrated podcast production

01:19:11 ◼   ► application.

01:19:12 ◼   ► Like you have to build your way up to an app like that.

01:19:13 ◼   ► It's very difficult for a single developer with other applications to do that.

01:19:17 ◼   ► Like, but if you are going to build your way up to it, you'd want to build it on a ladder

01:19:21 ◼   ► of small applications that make money and that you learn things from.

01:19:24 ◼   ► that once you do Marco's minimal casual piracy prevention kit, you just reuse that in all

01:19:30 ◼   ► the other apps you do.

01:19:31 ◼   ► And then, you know, it's an infrastructure win.

01:19:35 ◼   ► Like, you do it once, do it to your satisfaction, don't worry about it again, and then try not

01:19:41 ◼   ► to.

01:19:42 ◼   ► Because as programmers, it's fun to get sucked into like, "Oh, I can battle these hackers,

01:19:45 ◼   ► and what if I do this clever thing and that?"

01:19:47 ◼   ► And you're gonna lose, and it's just a rat hole, and no one gives you money for thwarting

01:19:52 ◼   ► hackers.

01:19:53 ◼   ► no one gives you money.

01:19:54 ◼   ► It's the old thing of how many of those people

01:19:56 ◼   ► would have paid if you prevented it.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Do enough to keep the people with a conscience

01:20:02 ◼   ► vaguely honest and then call it a day.

01:20:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's basically my thought here too,

01:20:07 ◼   ► which is if I charge for this,

01:20:09 ◼   ► which again, I'm really leaning mostly towards

01:20:13 ◼   ► keeping it closed source but probably releasing it for free.

01:20:15 ◼   ► But if I do charge for it, ultimately I agree

01:20:18 ◼   ► because I grew up as a PC user

01:20:22 ◼   ► in the late 90s, pirating tons of crap as a stupid teenager.

01:20:26 ◼   ► I know how these things work,

01:20:28 ◼   ► and it's been a while since I've been in that scene,

01:20:30 ◼   ► but I'm pretty sure it basically works the same way now

01:20:33 ◼   ► as it always has.

01:20:34 ◼   ► The easiest case scenario is you share a key,

01:20:37 ◼   ► and even if you start doing key checks,

01:20:39 ◼   ► well then you just hack the binary to bypass the check.

01:20:42 ◼   ► And no matter how obscure,

01:20:43 ◼   ► and you can obfuscate the check,

01:20:45 ◼   ► you can put multiple checks all over the code,

01:20:47 ◼   ► there's all sorts of strategies and techniques you can do,

01:20:50 ◼   ► And ultimately, none of them really work for very long.

01:20:53 ◼   ► And you can look at the gaming market,

01:20:55 ◼   ► the PC gaming market, for all their wonderful tricks

01:20:57 ◼   ► they've tried to do over the years,

01:20:59 ◼   ► and most of which get cracked fairly quickly.

01:21:02 ◼   ► Granted, a big reason those get cracked

01:21:05 ◼   ► is because there's a lot of people

01:21:06 ◼   ► who want them to be cracked.

01:21:07 ◼   ► And if for a very narrow tool like this,

01:21:11 ◼   ► if there's only gonna be like 100 possible customers,

01:21:14 ◼   ► it's very likely that none of those 100 people

01:21:16 ◼   ► are actually professional crackers.

01:21:18 ◼   ► But the reality is that I agree that it's not really

01:21:23 ◼   ► worth spending a lot of time on.

01:21:24 ◼   ► It is worth spending some time on

01:21:26 ◼   ► because a little goes a long way.

01:21:28 ◼   ► If you put in a system where like,

01:21:32 ◼   ► all right, I just bought it and I wanna give it to Casey

01:21:35 ◼   ► and I just, do I email him a copy of my key

01:21:38 ◼   ► and he just enters it and it works?

01:21:40 ◼   ► And then what if he wants to give it to a friend?

01:21:41 ◼   ► Does he just pass along my key too?

01:21:43 ◼   ► Like how does all these things work?

01:21:45 ◼   ► Or in the case where none of us have bought it,

01:21:48 ◼   ► Does he go on whatever the BitTorrent tracker of the month is

01:21:52 ◼   ► and try to download it from there

01:21:54 ◼   ► or download a crack from some big database or something?

01:21:56 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:21:57 ◼   ► It's been a long time since I tried to pirate anything,

01:22:00 ◼   ► or at least anything that wasn't a TV show,

01:22:02 ◼   ► but I assume that's how these things still work,

01:22:05 ◼   ► and you're never gonna win against that.

01:22:06 ◼   ► And so, yeah, it isn't worth a lot of effort.

01:22:09 ◼   ► I am, of course, not naive enough to assume

01:22:14 ◼   ► that every pirated copy is a lost sale

01:22:17 ◼   ► and that if I make it impossible to pirate

01:22:19 ◼   ► on the craziest something that I can,

01:22:22 ◼   ► that I will somehow get all those sales again.

01:22:24 ◼   ► I know that's not how the world works,

01:22:26 ◼   ► but I would build something.

01:22:28 ◼   ► I could do some kind of cryptographic key,

01:22:31 ◼   ► that's pretty easy.

01:22:31 ◼   ► I have a public/private key thing already set up

01:22:33 ◼   ► so I can verify that my server generated a certain string

01:22:37 ◼   ► with a signature and everything,

01:22:38 ◼   ► but this all really seems like

01:22:40 ◼   ► it's probably not necessary at all

01:22:41 ◼   ► because it's probably not worth charging for,

01:22:43 ◼   ► at least for a while.

01:22:44 ◼   ► And maybe someday if I have,

01:22:47 ◼   ► A few years down the road, if I have a suite of tools

01:22:50 ◼   ► that I can release together as one suite,

01:22:52 ◼   ► and maybe charge 50 or 100 bucks for that,

01:22:56 ◼   ► maybe that becomes more compelling,

01:22:57 ◼   ► and maybe I charge then,

01:22:59 ◼   ► but I just don't see charging for this now

01:23:02 ◼   ► in a way that would be really worth the trouble,

01:23:05 ◼   ► because I think at most, I might make a couple thousand

01:23:10 ◼   ► dollars over the course of a year,

01:23:12 ◼   ► and I know that sounds like a lot of money to some people,

01:23:15 ◼   ► But if I have to have this entire support system in place to make that, it's probably

01:23:21 ◼   ► not worth it.

01:23:22 ◼   ► You know, as I'm thinking about it and listening to you talk, the only reason I can see not

01:23:31 ◼   ► to open source it on the assumption that it's free, which is what it sounds like you're

01:23:35 ◼   ► kind of backing your way into, the only reason I can see not to open source it is if you

01:23:39 ◼   ► wanted to eventually sell it down the road.

01:23:42 ◼   ► that's a weak argument to begin with but if you make it free there's still a

01:23:48 ◼   ► support burden it may not be quite as obnoxious as a paid app but you still

01:23:54 ◼   ► have a support burden whereas if you open source it it should absolve you of

01:23:58 ◼   ► any support burden I guarantee you it doesn't I guarantee it well but that's

01:24:02 ◼   ► all in you right I think the free it's a free one absolves you of support too

01:24:06 ◼   ► because if it's free like I don't think the open source gets rid of support like

01:24:09 ◼   ► Like, what the open source does is, I was just saying, like, if people do send you patches,

01:24:13 ◼   ► you don't have to accept those.

01:24:14 ◼   ► But if you give a free app, too, there's no support button there.

01:24:18 ◼   ► It's like, it's a free app.

01:24:19 ◼   ► Like, this is what I'm using right now.

01:24:21 ◼   ► I happen to put a link up on my website.

01:24:22 ◼   ► You feel free to download it and use it, but you get nothing from me.

01:24:25 ◼   ► I don't owe you anything.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Again, I will refund your entire zero dollars that you paid for it.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Well, but when, if it's open source, then you can say, "Well, go fix it yourself," which

01:24:33 ◼   ► is obnoxious, but...

01:24:34 ◼   ► No, you can't actually, you can't actually say that.

01:24:37 ◼   ► You should never actually say that.

01:24:38 ◼   ► And you can't say that because nobody who complains

01:24:40 ◼   ► knows how to fix it.

01:24:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, like, I am a programmer.

01:24:44 ◼   ► I use lots of open source libraries and stuff and things,

01:24:47 ◼   ► and I hardly ever fix bugs in them.

01:24:49 ◼   ► I just, if I find a problem with one,

01:24:51 ◼   ► I either work around it or I stop using it, usually.

01:24:53 ◼   ► Because usually it's a deeper problem

01:24:56 ◼   ► that I don't feel qualified to fix

01:24:58 ◼   ► or don't wanna spend the time to get familiar enough

01:25:00 ◼   ► with the code base to fix correctly.

01:25:02 ◼   ► I mean, like, how many podcast producers

01:25:05 ◼   ► are also Mac programmers?

01:25:07 ◼   ► Some of them are, but probably not a lot of them.

01:25:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's a fair point.

01:25:11 ◼   ► I really feel like if you have a free app,

01:25:16 ◼   ► you will definitely, a free closed source app,

01:25:20 ◼   ► you will definitely get support requests and complaints.

01:25:24 ◼   ► And if it were me anyway,

01:25:27 ◼   ► I would feel a lot more compulsion to address those

01:25:32 ◼   ► because I'm the only person on the planet

01:25:34 ◼   ► who can address them,

01:25:36 ◼   ► as opposed to if this thing was on GitHub,

01:25:38 ◼   ► which admittedly the people who are emailing

01:25:40 ◼   ► may not have the capability of fixing the problem.

01:25:42 ◼   ► But at least there's some other human being out there

01:25:46 ◼   ► that might be able to.

01:25:47 ◼   ► And that's how I would rest easy at night,

01:25:49 ◼   ► is knowing, look, I'm not helping all these people

01:25:51 ◼   ► that are whining about what does or does not work,

01:25:55 ◼   ► but I'm also not standing in the way of them

01:25:58 ◼   ► figuring out a way to fix it.

01:26:00 ◼   ► - Because any future designs on podcast production products,

01:26:04 ◼   ► which clearly he has though,

01:26:05 ◼   ► All you'd be doing is giving Head Start to your future competitors, essentially.

01:26:09 ◼   ► Someone could just pick up that code and say, "I'm going to use this as the basis of my

01:26:11 ◼   ► competing suite."

01:26:12 ◼   ► And that's not a good plan if that's here.

01:26:15 ◼   ► If you even plan to do that, but like, "I might do that," like Marco said, "I want to

01:26:20 ◼   ► leave that option open."

01:26:23 ◼   ► And getting back to the serial number thing, I think the most important feature of the

01:26:27 ◼   ► anti-piracy thing, other than the fact that it exists at all as a non-zero barrier, is

01:26:33 ◼   ► that it not annoy honest people.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And that is the part where most of these systems fall down.

01:26:40 ◼   ► Because really, we're like, it's again, it's so tempting to judge your anti-piracy system

01:26:45 ◼   ► on how well it prevents piracy, but your anti-piracy system should be judged on how little it annoys

01:26:51 ◼   ► people who are not pirates.

01:26:52 ◼   ► And that's really hard to do.

01:26:55 ◼   ► Mostly in terms of restraint, you have to back off and not be like, "But if I can't

01:26:59 ◼   ► contact the server to verify the code, I shouldn't launch, right?"

01:27:01 ◼   ► It's like, no, no, you gotta just let go.

01:27:05 ◼   ► Just think about the honest user

01:27:07 ◼   ► and how you never want to be in their face.

01:27:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, no, I mean, because I am me,

01:27:13 ◼   ► I have brainstormed all sorts of crazy ways

01:27:15 ◼   ► that I could do this.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Of course, I'm thinking about doing a passwordless

01:27:19 ◼   ► email lock in, 'cause that's what I do.

01:27:22 ◼   ► - We already beta tested that.

01:27:25 ◼   ► The focus group is not good.

01:27:27 ◼   ► - I still don't have a problem with it.

01:27:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's because maybe your emails

01:27:31 ◼   ► likely show up in time and you're not sitting there

01:27:32 ◼   ► hitting refresh on your email client going,

01:27:34 ◼   ► (imitates

01:27:35 ◼   ► cursing Marco every time.

01:27:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, so anyway, those of us with really

01:27:39 ◼   ► email clients love these kinds of systems.

01:27:42 ◼   ► - It's not the client, it's your damn server.

01:27:44 ◼   ► It's stuck in a queue somewhere trying to get out of your ISP.

01:27:46 ◼   ► - It's not my server, it's your client.

01:27:48 ◼   ► - This is why you don't use the Gmail web app, kids.

01:27:50 ◼   ► - This is why you don't use Gmail, kids.

01:27:52 ◼   ► - Gmail's fine.

01:27:53 ◼   ► - Gmail gets mails like instantly.

01:27:55 ◼   ► - Except for yours, apparently.

01:27:57 ◼   ► - No, no, some websites, third party websites

01:28:00 ◼   ► that are not Googles, I go and I do like reset my password.

01:28:03 ◼   ► I click the reset my password link

01:28:06 ◼   ► and like before the mouse button is up,

01:28:09 ◼   ► it arrives in the other browser window in Gmail.

01:28:12 ◼   ► And when I see that, I realize it's not Gmail

01:28:14 ◼   ► that's not checking my mail fast enough.

01:28:16 ◼   ► It's something else.

01:28:17 ◼   ► Whether it's internet traffic,

01:28:19 ◼   ► email as a store and forward system,

01:28:20 ◼   ► many things can go wrong.

01:28:21 ◼   ► - It's not that, it's gray listing.

01:28:24 ◼   ► It's always gray, if there's ever a delay

01:28:26 ◼   ► in email arriving in 2016, it's gray listing.

01:28:29 ◼   ► It is not like, oh, the postfix queue is full.

01:28:32 ◼   ► No, we are so far past that point these days.

01:28:36 ◼   ► So for those of you who aren't familiar,

01:28:37 ◼   ► gray listing is a type of spam prevention technique

01:28:40 ◼   ► where basically the theory is that spam servers

01:28:45 ◼   ► have to go through this massive list

01:28:47 ◼   ► and don't have time to retry and wait around

01:28:50 ◼   ► if the server says I'm busy, try again later.

01:28:53 ◼   ► So the idea, but a well-behaving mail sending server,

01:28:57 ◼   ► If the destination server says,

01:28:59 ◼   ► "Sorry, I'm busy, try again later,"

01:29:01 ◼   ► it'll actually hold onto that message for a while,

01:29:03 ◼   ► like a week, and it'll just try every hour, whatever.

01:29:07 ◼   ► It'll try again after certain short intervals

01:29:10 ◼   ► and then followed by long intervals.

01:29:11 ◼   ► Anyway, it doesn't matter.

01:29:12 ◼   ► So a spam provision technique that a lot of places do

01:29:16 ◼   ► is upon the first time you get email from a certain sender,

01:29:20 ◼   ► so you don't already know that they're legit,

01:29:22 ◼   ► you just tell them, "Oh, you know what?

01:29:24 ◼   ► "I'm busy right now, wait a bit."

01:29:25 ◼   ► And the theory is that the spammers will just move on

01:29:28 ◼   ► because the spam bots don't have enough memory

01:29:30 ◼   ► to keep track of all those things and try again later.

01:29:33 ◼   ► And then, but legit servers will try again later

01:29:36 ◼   ► and it'll get through.

01:29:37 ◼   ► And that's why so often the first email you get

01:29:40 ◼   ► from a certain service or whatever else

01:29:42 ◼   ► will be delayed by like an hour.

01:29:44 ◼   ► That's what's happening.

01:29:45 ◼   ► It is not any other reason, it is that.

01:29:47 ◼   ► It is great listening.

01:29:47 ◼   ► - But it's not, the first email from your servers

01:29:49 ◼   ► that gets delayed, it's random.

01:29:51 ◼   ► And it's not an hour, it's like 60 seconds,

01:29:54 ◼   ► but it seems like a long 60 seconds