Hey CZ

Lawmakers and politicians are getting more and more interested in what’s said on social media and who can get sued for what. That will pose some interesting (and intimidating) problems if social platforms get smaller and more decentralised.

Speaking of Cam Wilson, he shared raised the question on Twitter:

Here’s a fun thought:

When you join Mastodon, you sign up for an instance (or server) hosted by someone, not dissimilar to signing up for an email server.

If you defame someone in Australia – is that host considered the publisher of your comment and therefore liable?

He went on to reference a recent High Court ruling in Australia that decided that the admins of individual Facebook pages and groups could be held responsible for defamatory comments posted by others.

Never post, never comment

The ruling was messy. Someone wanted to sue some big Australian media outlets for comments made on their Facebook pages.

The media outlets pushed back, arguing they weren’t responsible for the comments.

Here’s a report from Elizabeth Byrne, high court reporter for the ABC, back in September 2021:

The High Court rejected the argument that, to be a publisher, an outlet must know of the relevant defamatory matter and intend to convey it.

The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments.

Once the ruling dropped, the admins of other pages and groups started to worry. James Purtill, a tech reporter for the ABC, covered it:

The High Court indicated anyone who invites or encourages third-party comments on any social media platform would be seen as the publisher of those comments.

That case focuses on media outlets, but the ruling may extend to administrators of community groups, Dr Bosland says.

[…]

In fact, the ruling extends not only to administrators of community groups, but to the ordinary members in those groups too.

Suing Google for fun and profit

Meanwhile, in June 2022, the Australian Federal Court ordered Google to pay over $700,000 to the then New South Wales deputy premier John Barilaro because of YouTube videos published by Jordan Shanks (aka FriendlyJordies). Defamation laws come for us all.

The court found that Google hadn’t taken “responsibility for its conduct as a publisher,” according to a report from Paige Cockburn. Her article continued:

Google initially pleaded a series of defences, including honest opinion and qualified privilege, which Justice Rares called “obviously hopeless”.

Eventually the company dropped all its defences.

For his part in things (you know, making the videos), Barilaro had to pay $100,000 in costs as part of a settlement deal in November 2021.

Mastodo’h

And that’s just in Australia. Ignore all the “Aussies are all laid-back larrikins who love a laugh” national brand building. We’re a litigious, reactionary bunch (who are also pretty funny).

Elsewhere, lawmakers in Texas decided to “restrict the ability of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to moderate content on their platforms” (which is kind of the opposite problem, in some ways). In Russia, the Kremlin will jail you for up to 15 years for posting “fake” info on social.

Different countries, different contexts. But it all speaks to the malleability of how publishing and protected speech is defined.

Take authoritarian leaders out of it: if Facebook and Google can’t protect themselves from political and legal overreach, what power does any random individual hosting a Mastodon server have?

Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like have the benefit of scale. They have the money, resources and legal teams to go to war against rulings they think unfair. (Well, maybe Twitter doesn’t at the moment. They seem busy.)

Your friendly neighbourhood Mastodon admin doesn’t. And neither will other smaller, more intimate decentralised platforms that may pop up in the future.

They’ll just need to… hope no-one really cares about your little community enough to sue it into the ground.

Take the work out of expressing any thought, ever, with this handy-dandy list of text, emoji and ascii meme templates.

Nathan Allebach, doing the lord’s dirty work, has spent years gathering Twitter’s myriad memes) – like a hunter-gatherer forging for berries and mushrooms, delicately picking each new variety for documentation, some noxious, some delicious, some invasive.

There are some real classics in there. I’m partial to

┓┏┓┏┓┃ 
┛┗┛┗┛┃＼○／ 
┓┏┓┏┓┃ /     (x)
┛┗┛┗┛┃ノ) 
┓┏┓┏┓┃         
┛┗┛┗┛┃  
┓┏┓┏┓┃          
┛┗┛┗┛┃  
┓┏┓┏┓┃          
┃┃┃┃┃┃ 
┻┻┻┻┻┻

myself. It just has some chutzpah, you know?

Scrolling through the templates, though, really highlights just how many of them are elaborate ways to share banalities. We’ve spent a lot of energy, as a society, coming up with fun ways to say not all that much.

That sounds snippy but I don’t think it’s bad thing. People bond over sharing relatable, personal things. Those things are often pretty mundane. They’re little. And, to quote the single best Simpsons guest character (Hank Scorpio, obviously), “it’s the little things that make up life”.

We may as well have fun talking about them.

(To just complicate my point a little bit: those templates are often used to talk about bigger things, too. And there’s power in using the same formats for big and little things. You can sneak some pretty heavy stuff into people’s consciousness if you wrap it into a friendly format.)

Spotify have jumped into the audiobook pool and, look, I’m not feeling confident for them.

Ben Thompson summarised the challenge [$] well:

The good thing about music is that it is widely popular, which means that there is much more money to be made from increasing the customer base than there is in maximizing the average revenue per customer. A relatively small number of readers, though, buy a disproportionate number of books: offering them a subscription would dramatically decrease how much they spend on books, and I can imagine that publishing executives were skeptical that Spotify could provide enough new users to offset the loss in revenue. Thus the same old pay-per-title model.

Spotify want to be your singular home for audio. And, as Thompson goes onto explain, they “showed with podcasts is that they can grow the pie” by finding more listeners for aural delights.

But most podcasts on Spotify are free, so “there was no barrier to Spotify subscribers in giving them a try”. People will have to buy audiobooks. That’s a problem.

And that’s before factoring in the unintuitive and user-hostile payment system Apple will force Spotify to use to sell books. Here are the steps you’ll need to take to buy someone via the app:

1. Find a book you’d like to listen to
2. Ask Spotify to send you an email
3. Open that email and click a link through to a website
4. Check out through the website
5. Go back to the app

See, Apple eat 30% of any sale using their in-app purchase system. That’d obliterate the margins on any book sale, making the whole system useless. And Apple won’t let apps use their own in-app options so you get this baroque sales two-step.

The audiobook business model is just… weird

Here’s the thing: I should be a dream customer for audiobooks.

I love books. I buy a lot of them. I love podcasts. I listen to a lot of them. But I’ve never gotten into audiobooks. I just find the business model off-putting.

You subscribe to Kobo or Audible and get one book free a month. But you still have to buy any other book. So what’s the subscription for? And why aren’t there more audiobook/ebook combo deals?

I’m sure it’s fine in practice. There’s just too much competition in audio and ebooks are wildly cheaper that their audio brethren.

But there’s an alternative that’s starting to work for me.

Free audiobooks are the way to go

Here’s the thing about services that give you books: libraries have been nailing it for years.

Sure, like most public services, they’ve been slow to adapt to online platforms. But they’ve gotten a lot better over the years.

If you like ebooks and audiobooks, download Libby. Join your local library service. Add your library card to Libby.

Bang. Start borrowing and downloading books, audio or otherwise. (Also magazines: Libby is great for them.)

I have access to the catalogues of three different library services on my phone. They’re adding more audiobooks all the time.

You have fewer options than on platforms like Kobo or Audible but the price is right. Give it a shot.

And, you know, support your local library. They’ve been in this game for a long time and they do a world of good for the communities around them.

Tim Minchin, in his beautiful Christmas song ‘White wine in the sun’, has a lovely verse about old ideas:

I don’t go in for ancient wisdom
I don’t believe just ‘cause ideas are tenacious
It means that they’re worthy

And he’s right. Some old ideas are more about controlling bodies than helping people. But some old ideas – those rare few – have persisted through time because they’re, well, very fucking helpful.

Meditation and mindfulness are among those few. Sometimes wrapped in mysticism, sometimes packaged with hustle culture, often smooshed full of irony-free commercialisation but, at their core, helpful. Simply helpful.

But, like a lot of helpful things, they’re hard to understand and inexplicably tough to practice. 

Sit and breath and attune yourself to the moment. It’s not as easy as it reads.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that. Some of them are even free.

An aside about the big guns

You can’t talk about mindfulness apps without mentioning the likes of Headspace or Calm. It’s the law.

They’re phenomenally popular - Calm even has a TV show.  But they’re not for everyone. And they’re expensive.

I like Headspace. I’ve used it; I’ve even paid for it. It has some great courses: the beginners track is helpful, the advanced classes build well and the thematic options (like ‘relationships’ and ‘creativity’) take the foundational principles of mindfulness and apply them in a clear way.

But it’s not necessary. It’s not even the best, or easiest, way to learn about meditation and mindfulness. 

Maybe, like me, you feel a need to spend money on something before you pursue it with gusto. If so, I’d recommend picking up The miracle of mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh instead of  buying a month of Headspace (or any other meditation app).

(We’ll talk about Hanh more in a bit. Remember the name.)

The book covers the basic principles of meditation and includes a few mantras you can run through while focusing on your breath. I’ve used one of them for years and it’s always been helpful:

Breathing in, I calm my body
Breathing out, I smile
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful

After a few cycles, I move to this:

Calm
Smile
Present
Wonderful

It helps if you actually smile. Nothing huge. Just a cheeky little half smile.

I haven’t said much about Calm because, well, I’m not a fan. I bounce off its layout every time I download the app. But the same principles apply: guided meditations, courses, price tag. It just has a bunch of celebrity voice overs as well.

Oak is a fantastic app

I love Oak. I used it for about a year before deciding to try something new.

Josh Centers reminded me of it with his article on Tidbits. He captures the app’s simplicity well:

Once you’ve configured everything the way you want it—Oak remembers your choices for next time—tap Begin Meditation, and you’re off. There’s nothing more to it, nor should there be.

Oak has the right amount of options for a meditation app: a few. There’s guided meditation (one for mindfulness, one for love & kindness), unguided timers and a couple of nice bells to mark the time.

There are also a few different breathing exercises. I loved these. I’m not sure if the ‘energising’ intervals really got me amped up and ready to face the day but, hey, it was nice to do.

Oak has some stat counting, if you’re into that sort of thing. Sessions completed, daily streaks. Not my jam, but they’re there.

Centers wrote a more thorough overview. Check it out if you want to know more. 

Here’s the gist: Oak is a great, simple meditation app. It won’t bombard you with option or primary colours. It won’t charge you $100 a year for the promise of a more measured life.

It’s just a good app. Sometimes, that’s enough.

Plum Village: another great option

Plum Village is the app I landed on after leaving Oak behind. It’s a bit more complicated options-wise, and it’s not the most intuitive, but it’s great.

It’s an extension of the Plum Village Monastery, which was established by Thich Nhat Hanh (a Vietnamese buddhist monk) and Chân Không (a Vietnamese buddhist nun). That makes it one of the few meditation apps that’s actually developed by buddhists (alongside The Centre for Applied Ethics).

Wild, I know.

It’s filled with guided mediations from practicing monks. There’s a section for newcomers, of course. And there are some fantastic sessions covering topics ranging from the ‘wonders of life’ to ‘impermanence’ to ‘connecting with our ancestors, aspiration and joy’.

There’s even a one hour long video called ‘Contemplating the lotus pond’. It’s delightful.

There are a few downsides, of course. 

The app can be tricky to navigate. I often forget what’s in the section called ‘Short meditations’ versus ‘Plum Village essentials’ versus ‘Deep relaxation’. And the menu icons that distinguish between ‘Resources’ (a book glyph), ‘Talks’ (a sun behind a cloud) and ‘Extras’ (a singing bowl) aren’t the most helpful. 

Then there’s the audio quality. It’s varied. Sometimes fine, sometimes echoy, sometimes grainy. But it’s all manageable. 

The sessions themselves are fantastic. And you know they come as a result of years of practice and consideration.

And, best of all, the app knows what it’s here for. Here’s the last thought on the app’s website: ‘Use it, until you don’t need it anymore.’

That’s the goal. Peace is within, after all.

Bad news is, generally speaking, bad news.

Unless you work in Netflix’s PR team, of course. The streaming service recently lost about a million subscribers but, hey, they were expecting to lose two million. Chalk that one up as a W.¹

Brad Esposito summed it up well in his newsletter:

Let me tell you something about bad news: Most of us can identify it like a plague… Bad news is bad news. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise should be treated with care and caution, like an alleycat purring on a fencepost. The starving and the weak will do dangerous things to keep on living, and there is nothing more starving and desperate than a living, breathing, corporation. It could have been worse, they’ll tell you, and you’d be a fool to listen. This is the game: content. And if people don’t care about it, you’re losing.

And, yeah, people don’t care about Netflix anymore. You can only make so much dross before people move on. Esposito argues that Netflix has failed to live up to its own transformative potential and now a murder of competitors are coming for its audience.

“I can hear the faint and dull rhythm of the PirateBay on the horizon” he says, although he has some some ideas on how to fix the “generally uncool empire”. They’re all worth reading. One in particular has me ruminating, though: livestreaming.

Live and let livestream

There’s something intoxicating about live. Things can just happen and when it hits - it hits hard.

Sport is the obvious example, but it’s not necessarily the games themselves that stick. From “Shaq, we’re on live” to Kevin Harlan calling a streaker during an NFL game to… whatever happens on Inside the NBA, it’s the chance that something unexpected may happen that matters.

And not many people are really making places for the unexpected. Netflix could.

As Esposito explains, “Twitch remains the only platform still pitched as an outright livestream service” despite a few others giving it the ol' college try. Esposito continues:

There is clear appetite for this form of content, and it is currently being monetised by the most ham-fisted among us: a series of deliberately irritating pre-roll advertisements and an occasional pop-up, too. YouTube hates itself but is honest enough to capitalise on where the money is.

Netflix doesn’t have to worry about that. The money’s already there and so are the subscribers. They can build an ecosystem around themselves.

Netflix needs the stick

I don’t watch many things anymore, but I’ve probably watched 50+ hours of Seagull play Apex Legends in the past month. If he makes any merch, I’d probably buy it. If he makes any other content, I’ll give it a look.

There’s a reason “that’s my streamer” (and variations thereof) are a meme in Twitch chats. Seagull’s my streamer; he’s the guy I watch.

Streamers are sticky. Netflix could use a bit more stick.

They already have the content: hours upon hours of stuff to watch. It’s not even uncharted territory: the “MasterChef meta” was a big thing on Twitch a little while ago as big streamers like HasanAbi steamed themselves watching the reality show, doing numbers in the process.

I mean, Netflix is already doing it. Just on YouTube. I Like To Watch with Trixie & Katya is just two magnetic drag queens reacting to everything from Resident Evil to Legally Blonde to Feel Good. And it gets millions of views. On YouTube.

Imagine a world where you have streamers on Netflix, steaming and reacting to Netflix shows in real time. There’s potential.

You get the streams themselves, sure. But then there are the clips – quick grabs of highly shareable moments. I’m never going to watch the latest mid-tier Ryan Reynolds action vehicle but if a clip of someone losing their mind over a scene or two? Sure, I’ll give it a look. If I see enough of them, maybe I’ll even load up a stream. See what the deal is.

Hell, throw some cash at Reynolds and do a watch party with him. Do it for some cult classics as well. I’d watch the heck out of the cast of Bojack Horseman commentating over the show. Director’s commentary DVDs are ready for a return.²

Livestreaming is transformative. All of a sudden, you have a cadre of streamers, all chasing something to watch. And Netflix has a vault. The right people could take everything that’s a bit middling, a bit bleh, a bit weird and turn it into the thing.

Why couldn’t any old show be the meta for a while? Why wouldn’t people watching old musicals in a hot tub bring in some viewers?

Throw in some microtransactions (so people can support their favourite streamers, of course), live chat, easy ways to export clips and you’ve got something interesting. You’ve got countless ways to repurpose content and drive conversation.

You start building communities around your shows. And communities are sticky.

But Netflix wants the prestige

Netflix probably won’t do livestreams. A lot of people would end up dunking on their shows and, as fun as that would be, I can’t see Netflix wanting that.

Netflix wants you to love and respect them. That’s me psychoanalysing a massive corporation, sure, but it feels like a safe bet. You don’t court Hollywood, an industry possibly even more self-celebratory than the tech industry, if you don’t want to be loved. You don’t chase Academy Awards if you don’t want to be respected. And you don’t release a book about your management style if you don’t think you’re special.

Letting people livestream your shows means making those shows not-the-point. It means making yourself not-the-point.

It’s hard to see Netflix doing that. Even if, by becoming painfully uncool, they’re not the point anyway.

Four new surveys about TikTok have dropped and they can be summed up thusly: 🙃

Survey 1: TikTok is the fastest growing news source for adults in the UK (people are suspicious of its credibility though).

Survey 2: TikTok is one of Gen Z’s most trusted sources of financial advice.

Survey 3: TikTok is annilahating our financial happiness.

It’s very 🙃, if 🙃 was the editor of a scandalous tabloid who shilled NFTs, with desk drawer full of aftermarket citalopram.

And since, according to survey 4: 40% of young adults are spending money on things they can share on TikTok instead of, you know, bills.

🙃 shading towards a dawning realisation that things have gone awry.

Two things:

1. None of that is great and it all coalesces into a rich molasses of financial despair
2. I really have no idea about how people are using TikTok now

Feeding the feed

When I think TikTok, I think about the For You feed. It’s a ceaseless stream of videos (and ads), gifted to you by an esoteric algorithm. I’ve poked around the app’s search and trending sections but they seemed like 90% guff to me. (I’m very much not the target audience.)

It never occurred to me that people would willingly head over to TikTok’s search and look for news or financial advice. But what do I know?

According to Prabhakar Raghavan, the senior Vice President of Google’s Knowledge & Information division, “almost 40% of young people” use TikTok and Instagram when they’re looking for things to do. It stands to reason that people would search for other things as well.

Still, a lot of it would have to be from the For You feed. If people engage with financial vids on TikTok, the app will feed them more and more. #FinTok is a beast: vids tagged with #StockTok have more than a billion views and #PersonalFinance has seen over 4 billion views.

There’s going to be some good advice in there. But for every person explaining how, say, mortgages work there’s going to be a whole lot more people pushing crypto garbage or other low-rent financial nonsense.

And then there’s all the existential pressure that contributes to people blowing money on outlandish things for the feed instead of looking after themselves.

Bad news for people who love good news

That all applies to the news, as well. The whims and pecularities of an algorithm favour the sensational more than the reasonable.

Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sheera Frenkel covered the situation well for the New York Times:

“What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”

But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago.

TikTok was flooded by videos that were “impossible to authenticate and substantiate”.

That’s partly by design. The format of TikTok – self-contained videos that bleed into one another – makes it hard to watch something, stop, take stock and consider what you’ve heard.

You just scroll to the next video. You watch enough about any given topic and you end up with a gestalt of a feeling of a vibe. You end up feeling like you’re pretty informed because you watched a lot of different things but they’re all insubstantial and you’re taking a lot on trust.

It gets back to the problem Ms. Hernandez ran into with the Ukraine videos. They felt more authentic, more real, but they were neither. The feeling was right but the facts? Not so much.

There’s a lot of good info on TikTok, sure. It’s all about who you end up seeing in your feed. But, since the default feed is a recommendation engine based things you’ve engaged with, it’s not the easiest platform to curate.

It’s about the vibe. And, based on those four new surveys, the vibe isn’t great.