articles
- Find a book you’d like to listen to
- Ask Spotify to send you an email
- Open that email and click a link through to a website
- Check out through the website
- Go back to the app
-
Ben Thompson covered Netflix’s predicament and move to ads well. Check out his POV on Stratechery. ↩︎
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I had the first four seasons of Futurama on DVD when I was growing up. I watched them so much that I eventually watched them with the director’s comedy on, just for something new. It was a mix of directors, producers, writers and actors. And they were hilarious. I watched them so many times that I remember jokes from the commentary more than jokes from the show itself. ↩︎
- None of that is great and it all coalesces into a rich molasses of financial despair
- I really have no idea about how people are using TikTok now
-
Same thing when I ask Google. ↩︎
-
Siri also doesn’t know what time it is in Kosovo – a “partially recognised state in Southeast Europe,” having declared independence from Serbia in 2008. ↩︎
- Accounts are moderated differently depending on how popular (and lucrative) they are
- Moderators are told to give accounts multiple warnings for illegal content before they’re banned
- OnlyFans are “failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in explicit videos”
- Mods have found illegal content including “bestiality involving dogs and the use of spy cams, guns, knives and drugs”
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This isn’t to say the Biden Administration is faultless or that they’ve handled things well. Far from it. ↩︎
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That’s a sweeping statement and countless people will remember that successive governments failed miserably here. But, for so many issues, it’s the general vibe that counts. That’s why political actors spend so much time trying to set the terms of reference for public debates: it let’s them set the tone of things. And media coverage is one part of that. That’s why so many politicians bang out about “tax relief”, for example. If the media always frames tax cuts as “tax relief”, you start assuming that taxation is something you need relief from, so it’s bad, without quite realising it. ↩︎
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n=1, yadda yadda yadda. ↩︎
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To be fair, I’m probably in the minority of iPhone users here. But I’m guessing it’s also a minority of people who use the App Store as their main way to discover apps. My reckon: most people have a couple of apps they use all the time and they’re likely social media apps, utilities, or things they were recommended by friends. The App Store is just where they go to download them. ↩︎
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I also try and limit my exposure to Google but that’s a newer objection compared to my persnickety taste in apps. ↩︎
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Part of it isn’t their fault. No matter how many great new features they announce at WWDC, sooner or later, they all become normal. They’ll be the background hum of iOS and background hums are never cool. ↩︎
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I’d argue that fan fiction communities have a lot of the benefits of Web 2.0 and have generally been much more open to marginalised people. The big ones have also evolved well and figured out how to moderate their platforms. ↩︎
- Claiming that the App Store is necessary to keep customers safe
- Failing to staff their app review team well
Will the admins of Mastodon be liable for defamation posted on their servers?
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.
An ungodly collection of emoji, ascii and text meme templates
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.)
Audiobooks will be a real challenge for Spotify (plus: one good, free alternative for audiobooks)
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:
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.
Oak is a great free meditation app (plus another great option)
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.
Fixing Netflix: livestreaming could make them cool again
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.
People love TikTok for news and money advice but TikTok doesn't love them back
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:
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.
Siri doesn’t know what time it is in Palestine (but it’s fine with Israel)
Ask Siri what time it is in Palestine. Doesn’t work. Ask Siri what time it is in Israel, and it’ll tell you the time in Jerusalem, no problem.
Maybe it’s a city thing. Ask Siri what the time is in Bethlehem and see if it knows. Doesn’t seem to work.
Try Jerusalem – Siri nails it, of course. Can’t help you with East Jerusalem, though, which is generally recognised as being part of Palestine.
Mindful Traveller tries a few Palestinian cities on TikTok. No luck. I tried them here in Australia. Same result.1
Let’s try some other small countries. Brunei is tiny – smaller than Palestine – and Siri knows the time there. Cyprus? Got it. Samoa? All good.2 Whatever database Siri is using doesn’t go by size (which, to be fair, would be weird).
Update: After some more playing around, it looks like Siri doesn’t know many, if any, “disputed territories”. Nick Heer noted as much on Twitter and it reaffirms what I mentioned in footnote two.
So it looks like whatever database Siri is pulling from for country info has its limits. In this particular instance – Palestine/Israel – it’s reinforcing Israel is what you can politely call a heated and violent struggle. Defaults, as ever, matter.
Weather is weird, too: if you ask Siri what the weather is in Israel, it’ll tell you the temperature in Jerusalem. If you ask it about Palestine, you’ll be told “there’s no weather information”.
Ask it about a Palestinian city – say, Bethlehem, you’ll get an answer using data from The Weather Channel. But it won’t say “Bethlehem, Palestine” the way it says the weather in “Jerusalem, Israel” or “Tel Avis-Yafo, Israel”.
Palestine just doesn’t exist.
Regardless of your stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, this functionally erases an entire people.
Another small reason to dislike Mark Zuckerberg
I don’t go looking for reasons to dislike people. Sometimes they just come to you.
Joanne McNeil has a brief aside about Mark Zuckerberg in her book Lurking:
On his own social network, in its early years, [Zuckerberg] responded to the profile topic “Favourite Books” with “I don’t read.”
As if running the company that enables genocide isn’t enough.
OnlyFans drops sexually explicit content after censoring from MasterCard, VISA, and banks
Update: Tim Stokely, OnlyFan’s founder and CEO, clarified that the platform was going to bans sexual content because of their banking partners (and not MasterCard or VISA).
That said, MasterCard and VISA have “recently clamped down on the use of their cards to pay for sexual content… follow[ing] pressure from organizations that broadly oppose sex work and pornography.”
Now, though, OnlyFans has said they now won’t ban porn. Sploosh.
OnlyFans has built a successful platform on the back of one thing: porn. Sex workers of all stripes have found ways to make a living. It’s been “celebrated as an ethical business model that gives workers financial autonomy and safety” by some, a good side hustle for others, and a disappointment by yet more.
But, no longer:
Video sharing site OnlyFans, best known for its creators’ adult videos and photos, will prohibit sexually explicit content starting October 1st. First reported by Bloomberg, the company says it is making the changes because of pressure from its banking and payment provider partners, though a BBC investigation found that the company had been lenient on creators who had posted illegal content.
The BBC report is worth checking over but, in brief:
The article has more info and worth a read. OnlyFans seems to have real, undeniable structural issues.
Here’s the thing: every social media platform does. Facebook has a massive child porn problem, for example, and countless moderation issues. And yet payment outfits aren’t backing out of their business.
It speaks to the disproportionate power the likes of Visa and MasterCard have have over content (when they choose to exercise it, which, thankfully is rare).
Here’s Jim Waterson for The Guardian:
Payment processing companies increasingly control what material pornography sites are able to host. Last December, Visa and Mastercard briefly banned payments to websites owned by online pornography giant MindGeek, following reports it was hosting “revenge porn” uploaded without the consent of those involved. The financial businesses only backtracked when MindGeek deleted tens of millions of unverified videos from its sites such as PornHub.
“Payment processors as moral arbiters” isn’t quite a future I expected (and it may not get the attention it deserves – most articles refer to “pressure” from payment outfits rather than, say, censorship).
I’m not here to mount a defence against things like revenge porn and, all told, I think PornHub deleting unverified videos was a good thing. And, based on the BBC’s reporting, OnlyFans needs to improve their moderation practices a great deal.
But, the reality is, banks and finance groups are wiping out a platform that helped sex workers ply their trade in a relatively safe environment. This will push many of them into more fraught, more dangerous positions.
Meanwhile, the organisations that make their living drowning people in debt are acting as moral bell-weathers and censors. What a world.
How the media covers Afghanistan matters (and it’s not great)
How the media covers any given issue matters. The coverage helps shapes how people understand what’s happening and what the limits and bounds of what’s possible (or acceptable).
That’s especially true of long-running issues. The coverage, over time, not only shapes how people understand it now – it informs all the assumptions that underlie the “now”. All those things you’ve now forgotten.
That applies to Afghanistan (and the War on Terror writ large). And the media coverage of the US’s “work” in Afghanistan right now isn’t great.
As Judd Legum explains in Popular Information, a lot of the people who justified the US (failed) intervention over the past 20 years are now trotting themselves out to score political points against Biden.
Here’s Legum on a piece from The Washington Post:
The lead quote comes from former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta who said Biden’s decision to withdraw reflects the fact that Biden “didn’t really spend much time on the issue” and the Biden administration was simply “crossing their fingers and hoping chaos would not result.”
But is Panetta a credible voice on how policies will play out in Afghanistan? In a November 2011 interview with Charlie Rose, Panetta said that the military campaign in Afghanistan had “seriously weakened the Taliban” and now the Afghan people were “able to control their own fate.” He said that the development of the Afghan army and police force was “on target” and they were “doing the job.”
This was a consistent refrain during Panetta’s tenure as Secretary of Defense. “[W]e are moving in the right direction, and we are winning this very tough conflict here in Afghanistan,” Panetta said in December 2011.
Legum is an example of a journalist doing it right: he explains Panetta’s history and the context in which his present comments sit. The Washington Post didn’t. They just let him state his case and that’s it. They failed their readers.1
But Panetta’s comments, and those from people like him, aren’t so much about Biden as they are an attempt to exonerate himself from the multitude of failures they oversaw. Because the situation in Afghanistan right now, and many of the horrors that will likely occur, are (in part) the result of those failures and those of the US’s allies. And if the media lets the likes of Panetta pull walk themselves out of the narrative, that’s how people will remember it.2
Of course, it’s the Afghan people who are caught up in all this political posturing. They’re suffering because this occupation, this war has never been about them. Successive governments failed them and now, as the US leaves the country and the Taliban takes over, the Biden Government is failing them all over again.
Derek Davidson covers it well:
But you shouldn’t for a second suppose that the people who cheer-led endless war and occupation in Afghanistan ever did so out of concern for the Afghan people. If the United States were really concerned for the Afghan people it wouldn’t have spent well over a decade ignoring the evidence that its nation building efforts were failing. If the United States were really concerned for the Afghan people it wouldn’t have at best tolerated and at worst indulged Afghanistan’s lawless regional warlords, often looking the other way as many of them committed unspeakable atrocities. If the United States were really concerned for the Afghan people it would have spent the past few years evacuating those Afghan nationals who worked for the US military and other Western organizations and are at risk of Taliban reprisal, instead of using legalese about visas and vetting to mask a fundamentally racist national view of refugees and then racing to slap together a half-assed evacuation program at the last minute. Even now the Biden administration is looking for third countries to save these people instead of dropping the immigration artifice and just letting them come here. So let’s not pretend now that it was All About The Afghan people.
Media outlets the world over helped governments sell the war in Afghanistan in the first place and, now, they’re helping those same governments wash their hands of everything they did. They need to do better.
Does Uber charge you more if your phone battery is low?
Another one for the “that’s genius but absolutely get outta here” category if it’s true:
What I learned is that if you’re battery level is below 20% Uber and Lyft will purposely hike up the prices because they believe you’ll be desperate enough to take it since you’re battery levels are low
That’s from Sarah on Twitter. They followed up with a screenshot.
This classic “hard to verify, company will always deny it, but it feels likely” situation. Comes down to your vibe on Uber, Lyft, and the like.
Personally, it wouldn’t surprise me if ride-sharing apps do charge you more if your battery is low. Back in 2016, Keith Chen – Uber’s Head of Economic Research at the time – told NPR that users were more likely to pay surge pricing if their phone’s battery was low.
Chen “promises the company doesn’t use that information to set prices,” of course. But that was 2016.
Maybe Uber has since changed their policies to exploit this quirk of human behaviour. They’ve got to make a profit somehow. Or it could be confirmation bias: use Uber enough and you might collect enough instances where prices seem higher and your battery is low.
Wouldn’t surprise me though. It’s just the vibe of the thing.
Apple’s developer relations woes
Apple has a developer relations issue. Here’s Marco Arment diagnosing the problem in a single sentence:
Without our apps, the iPhone has little value to most of its customers today.
Apple doesn’t act like it. Nor do they acknowledge that developers work to find audiences for their apps.
Apples need more than a core
To state the obvious: both the iPhone and iOS are great by themselves and as a platform upon which you can do great things. But platforms need to be built upon.
To Apple, the iPhone/iOS combo is the draw and people only use the App Store to find apps, through a combination of the Store’s recommendations and people browsing. Apple controls all the ins, all the outs.
Arment begs to differ. I’d say he’s right. So let’s look at my phone.1
An orchard of others
Of the 57 apps on my phone, only two are App Store recommendations (one of which I’ll delete after writing this sentence). Then there’s Apple’s preinstalled apps, services like Music, four games from Apple Arcade, and Shortcuts (which is basically my Reddit client at this point).
All of the others came from websites like MacStories, podcasters like Merlin Mann, talkative developers like Arment. That’s how I found my favourite games and all the apps I use every day. They’re ingrained in my life and they define my experience of iOS.2
Sure, Apple make the iPhone. But a collection of small developers, all of whom I discovered though the Apple blog and pod community, helped make my iPhone.
I mightn’t have returned to and then stayed in the Apple ecosystem where it not for them.
Devoid Android
I’ve bounced around Android phones for a while but never stuck with one as my main phone for long. I struggle to find apps I like using.3 Meanwhile, it’s apps that brought me to iPhones and apps that keep me there.
I got my first iPhone in large part because Flight Control looked cool. I left Android because I couldn’t find a Twitter client as good as Tweetbot or a calendar app as nice as Fantastical on Android and I won’t go back because there isn’t a RSS app like Reeder, a podcast app like Castro, or a to-do app like OmniFocus.
Take those apps away and, all of a sudden, my iPhone becomes a lot more disposable. It’s a good phone by itself, but developers add the spark that makes it’s hard to leave.4
This isn’t Apple’s party
Apple supplied a nice venue for a party and now they want credit for everyone having a great time – even though other people provided the food, drinks, music, dance floor, conversation, and decor.
Apple didn’t even hang the bunting. But they still act like its their party and theirs alone. And it’s not like they’re particularly gracious hosts, even if they do have great taste in venues.
Misinformation and the missing piece
Everyone is vulnerable to misinformation. We’ve all, at some point, believed something untrue. And it can be surprisingly hard to shake that belief.
Elitsa Dermendzhiyska explored why for Aeon. Part of the problem is “the continued influence effect”. Basically, it helps explain why people can keep on believing a falsehood after it’s been debunked. The misinformation lingers and shapes our decisions long into the future.
The issue, Dermendzhiyska explains, is that we tend to take other people on face value. We act in good faith and assume others will do the same. Then there’s the fact that life is hard: there’s too much going on to interrogate everything.
That helps explain why we can believe something that isn’t true in the first place. But the difficulty in debunking that mistruth goes beyond that:
One of the most common explanations for the continued influence effect puts it down to a gap in our mental model, or the story we tell ourselves about what happened. If the myth fits the ‘logic’ of events, its retraction leaves a hole, and the cogs of the story no longer click into place… If we aren’t to lose coherence, it makes sense to hold on to both the actual fact and the fitting falsehood – but keep them separate, compartmentalised, so that they don’t clash. This might be why, as studies show, we could be well aware of the truth, yet still allow the myth to creep in elsewhere and corrupt tangential judgments.
Our minds are impressive things but they can often latch onto simplicity. We love stories; stories are how we understand the world. So it can be hard to give up a story that, on the surface, makes sense to you. (It’s also why a series of facts can’t compete with a well-told mistruth.)
This idea – that people will reject a correction or a retraction of a falsehood if it leaves a whole in your understanding – becomes even more complex when you look at the way information is shared online.
Context collapse strikes again
A post on Facebook or a message in a WhatsApp group can totally decontextualise a story, emphasising the “hole” in a stories logic left by a correction. A headline explaining why something was wrong just tells you that it’s wrong – it doesn’t explain why and, really, a whole lot of people won’t bother finding out.
Information is shared in drips and drabs and highlights and grabs. That doesn’t fill the context gap so someone who believes a mistruth is left trying to reconcile a story that no longer makes sense to them. And that’s if they’re prepared to change their mind at all. If not, they can just say “pfft” and move on.
Combine this with the other explanations for misinformation explored by Dermendzhiyska, chief among them repetition (wherein a mistruth is repeated so often it feels true because it’s familiar), and you have a pernicious problem. And that’s without people who actively want you to believe something that isn’t true.
Get a bell and start yelling “shame”
It’s a lot. But trying to understand the psychology behind the problem can help. But there are alternatives.
Here’s Dermendzhiyska again:
Perhaps we ought to worry less about fixing people’s false beliefs and focus more on shifting those social norms that make it OK to create, spread, share and tolerate misinformation.
Social norms are a powerful thing. They shape our lives on a fundamental level. It also highlights our role, as individuals, in fixing this problem. Dermendzhiyska quotes biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in her piece and it’s apt:
Everything is what it is because it got that way.
That means we can change it too.
Missing blogs is missing people in the machine
There’s a great line in Bojack Horseman where Wanda Pierce looks back at her relationship with the toxic Bojack and the warning signs she missed:
When you look at someone through rose-coloured glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
The same thing applies to nostalgia. People have been waxing lyrical about Web 2.0 and blogging, casting both in a golden light befitting a “Golden Age”. The wonderful Tressie McMillan Cottom spoke about it with Ezra Klein on his show:
There was a humanity there for good or for bad. Humanity is messy, but there was a sense that those ideas were attached to people, and there were things driving those people, there’s a reason they had chosen to be in that space before it all became about chasing an audience in a platform and turning that into influencer and translating that into that — before all that happened, the professionalization of it all. And that’s what I think we’re missing when we become nostalgic for that web 2.0. I think it’s the people in the machine.
But that nostalgia, McMillan Cottom points out, misses a lot. She explains that it was a horrible time for young queer people, for example, and that the more narrow spaces of the web – which certainly describes a series of disconnected blogs, written by people sharing and quoting each other’s work – created “little safe pockets of space… where it was still very okay to be homophobic” (among other things).
And so what we were usually really nostalgic for is a time when we didn’t have to think so much about who was missing in the room, who wasn’t at the table.
The table is busier than ever and that can be overwhelming or confronting. But the discussion is wider and, really, that can be a great way to learn.
The benefits of quiet
That scale, however, helps drive nostalgia for a place that’s a bit quieter. Here’s how McMillan Cottom puts it:
At the same time, I’m like, yeah. I also laugh and go, I really miss having a blog… It’s me being nostalgic for having a place where I could put thoughts that didn’t fit into any other discourse or genre, and I wanted a space where I could talk to people who were actually interacting like real people. They weren’t acting like bots, or trolls, or whatever your internet persona is.
As a reader, that’s what I miss. I wasn’t writing in the Web 2.0 age of the internet and I only started reading in the tail end. I got the survivors.
But I’ve been reading those survivors for a while now and, you know, that’s something I value. I only know about McMillan Cottom’s chat with Klein because of a post on Jason Kottke’s blog. Not only did I only learn about it because I follow Kottke’s site, my understanding and interpretation of it is mediated through my relationship with his site. It’s context.
You don’t get that with social media platforms (not as well, at least). The feed itself is the context. Things like blogs are a context unto themselves and they can lead to a richer relationship, both with the work and the person behind it.
That’s a preference thing, really. You can undoubtedly get the same thing elsewhere – people have built friendships on Twitter, people feel immensely close to their favourite creators on YouTube – but Web 3.0 hasn’t recreated the same something that reading a blog can create over time. Podcasts come close but it’s still not the same. It’s the reading that’s the thing for me.
Blogs, at their best, have a similar effect as a memoir. They differ in content, sure, but both are a mediated, curated slice of someone’s life or interests. They’re both a sustained glimpse into someone’s world – a few hundred pages for a memoir, potentially years for a blog – that make you feel as though you know someone. Why they’ve chosen the headline they have, how they describe something, the people and places they’ve chosen to link away too. That’s something particular.
I want people to read my blog, is what I’m saying
It doesn’t deserve romanticising, of course. McMillan Cottom points out some real flaws. The spaces made by blogs can be destructive. But they can be made well.1
I agree with McMillan Cottom – the nostalgia for blogs and Web 2.0 is about “the people in the machine”. Now that there are more people at the table then ever before, it’d be great to get to know those people better.
Because that’s what blogs are about, for me. The act of seeing people and the potential, in turn, to be seen. Not through rose-coloured glasses or golden light. Just seeing.
Languishing in the feed
It’s a weird feeling, when you just kind of realise that your default state has been “bleh” for so long you can’t remember when it wasn’t. It’s not bad, per say. Not out-and-out worrying. You’re just a little bit down, a little bit flat. Just bleh.
There’s a state of being in between being at your best (or even just pretty alright) and depression: languishing. It’s you at your most meh.
Adam Grant wrote about it for the New York Times:
Languishing is… the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.
It’s a dull fatigue or slow, barely perceptible lack of drive. No pep, no zazz. It mightn’t even be noticeable. It’s the background malaise of life.
Flow right
Grant provides one possible “antidote to languishing”: flow.
Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away.
You know that magical sense of timelessness when you’re just lost in what you’re doing? That’s flow.
But there’s a danger here, too. There are a lot of things that evoke a sense of flow that aren’t the best places to be. Social media feeds, for example, are designed to create a sense of flow so you stay in app for as long as possible. Free-to-play games are the same. They’re filled with little hooks and tricks that keep you absorbed and flowing because that’s how they make money.
At a time when social media platforms are awash with nihilism- or radicalisation-inducing content, they mightn’t be the best places to get your flow on. Those are worst-case scenarios, of course. And they don’t come about all at once.
But, like a good flow state, the road to some truly dark places on social happen with a series of small steps. Each a little bit more intriguing or challenging or provocative.
Even if you don’t end up in a thicket of extreme political content, spending too long on any social platform can drag you in bramble-patch of blandness that reinforces the sense of languishing you set out to avoid.
But it’s easy
The challenge: things like social media are your easiest option when you want to fall into something. It mightn’t even be deliberate – it’s just an association you’ve picked up without realising.
James Clear talks about this in his book Atomic habits:
The less energy a habit requires, the more likely it is to occur. Look at any behavior that fills up much of your life and you’ll see that it can be performed with very low levels of motivation. Habits like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time because they can be performed almost without effort. They are remarkably convenient.
The goal, he argues, isn’t the habit itself: it’s whatever feeling the habit provides. “Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit,” he says. “Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm.”
We tend towards the easiest obstacle to overcome. If the goal is find a quick spark to fight of a nameless sense of ennui, you might want to do something profound or meaningful but, chances are, your life isn’t designed to make that a simple task. So you tilt towards the easiest way to fight the woe. Often, you know, your content feed of choice.
Again, this doesn’t have to be a conscious choice. You know content holes, no matter your poison, create a sense of flow. The habit is there, built up by years of practice. That pathway in your brain is well trod.
Maybe this doesn’t seem like a problem. What’s an hour or so on social, in a mobile game, binging a show? As a conscious choice, sure, whatever. But as a response to something as amorphous and draining as languishing, it sets you up for failure.
Some choices set up your entire day. Clear calls them “decisive moments”:
Decisive moments set the options available to your future self. For instance, walking into a restaurant is a decisive moment because it determines what you’ll be eating for lunch. Technically, you are in control of what you order, but in a larger sense, you can only order an item if it is on the menu. If you walk into a steakhouse, you can get a sirloin or a rib eye, but not sushi. Your options are constrained by what’s available. They are shaped by the first choice.
Put another way, Clear argues that “the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.” When it comes to something as important as your mental health, you want to make those choices as helpful as possible.
It doesn’t have to be a big change. It might be better if it’s not, really. You want it to be easy. Something that gets you flowing right. Anything’s better than being bleh.
WWDC ‘21 Wishlist
I’m not a picky nor demanding Apple user. The wants I have are minor when they’re not courageous. So, while some people have a mountainous list of suggestions for Apple, I have but a few dreams and wishes.
That said, while I may present them humbly, I’ll still expect them to be delivered to the letter. I’ll be in the subreddit if they’re not.
Buzz me when I need to recharge my AirPods case
Give me a friendly notification when my AirPods case is at 20% battery. Yes, there’s a widget for battery levels. But the case doesn’t appear there very often. Just give me a notification.
Any hint, whatsoever, that the Apple TV hardware has a future
And, no, those rumours of a TV, HomePod, camera combo don’t count.
I’m an unabashed Apple TV hardware apologist and I want the little box to have a future. It’s simple, it’s effect, and just straight up prefer it over the alternatives. Plus, like, I just bought all of Deadwood from Apple.
Whether it’s a hardware refresh or just a new remote, hook me up, Apple.
Update: Looks like I got my wish. Updated hardware (a spec bump, but okay) and a new Siri Remote. Good times.
More cool stuff in more countries
Expand your new Maps format and things like sending people money over iMessage to more countries. Or just Australia. That’s fine. I accept that I live in a less-than-key market but, you know, let me dream for a day.
Baked-in VPN
I’m tired of waiting for Mozilla VPN to launch in Australia. So bake a VPN service into your devices, Apple.
This won’t happen. China, for one, would have a conniption. And there’s something to be said for having a VPN that isn’t provided by a company that’s all about the walled garden. But it’d be simple and it’d match up well to all of Apple’s moves on privacy.
Try again with Apple News+
They might get it right eventually.
A Keychain app
The service is there and it’s not all that elegant. Just sherlock 1Password already (if you’re prepared to launch Keychain apps on Windows and Android, that is).
Option to default to alphabetical view in the App Library
I don’t care for your automatic folder options in the App Library and I don’t care to see them.
Normalise volume across different apps and sources
Every now and then, the volume of whatever I’m watching or listening to will just explode. The reason: usually ads. And it’s awful. This, realistically, is an app problem and it’s on developers to actually care about and fix. But it’d be nice if it could happen on an operating system level.
Literally any improvements to the App Store that acknowledge the myriad of fair grievances developers have
They may as well.
Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, valued at $2.6 billion (or half
Another day, another story about the success of NFTs. This one’s about Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot: they’ve raised $305 million in new funding, bringing them up to a valuation of $2.6 billion. They could almost buy half of the New York Knicks with that money. We’re on our way to ridding ourselves of James Dolan, y’all.
Looks like they’re only getting more popular, as well. Here’s Kellen Browning for the New York Times:
Top Shot has exploded in popularity, part of a larger frenzy for cryptocurrencies and NFTs that has driven up the value of Bitcoin and led to head-turning bids for digital artwork. There have been more than three million Top Shot transactions, Dapper Labs said, generating $500 million in sales. The company makes money through the sale of the digital moments and also collects a cut whenever a moment is resold.
Dapper’s new investors include a few NBA stars as well, “including Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Kyle Lowry and Klay Thompson”. I might get involved if they release a Klay Thompson toaster moment.
In some ways, it’s nice to feel vindicated about my prediction for NFTs. In other, more important ways, every article about NFTs being a hit should mention how astonishingly bad they are for the environment.
It’d be interesting to know how much Dapper contributes to the problem: a lot of the furore is about Ethereum, and Dapper use their own crypto system called Flow. Haven’t seen much of anything about that, carbon wise, but it should be less energy hungry than Ethereum.
Why does the Apple TV still exist?
You may have heard that people enjoy television. Apple have dabbled in the space for quite some time, what with the Apple TV streaming box, the Apple TV app, and the Apple TV+ streaming service. That’s a lot of TV.
The first piece of that, though, the Apple TV box hasn’t seen a lot of love in recent years. It used to be the only way to access parts two and three of Apple’s offering but, now, the app and streaming service are hitting other television sets and boxes.
So Jason Snell asked why the Apple TV box even exists:
I don’t know where the Apple TV hardware is going, but it can’t stand still. It either needs to evolve into something else, or die. And it might need to die anyway.
One quick thing: I don’t think anyone who owns an Apple TV, right now, is in a great position to say why it still exists. If you bought one recently, maybe. But most others? Nope. There’s a difference between “Why do you still use and/or like this thing?” and “Is this thing a viable product in the market today?” The answer to the second question, when you’re looking at the Apple TV, is “… Nah”.
The answer to the first question, for me, is “I like it, is all.” And there’s one reason for that: I’m an unabashed Apple TV apologist.
Snell rattles off a list of its advantages – even if he cruelly, callously casts off the TV’s screensavers as an afterthought – and they don’t justify the little box’s premium price point (which hasn’t dropped in three years and it was expensive to start with). It’s a competitive marketplace for this kind of device and, yeah, Apple’s offering doesn’t distinguish itself or justify the expense. It’s just nice.
But it is nice.
If my Apple TV 4K packed it in today, I’d buy a new one. Options are limited here in Australia and I’m not sold on Chromecasts or Fire Sticks.1 Asking Siri to jump through videos is just that good. The screensavers are incredible. tvOS, neglected as it is, is smooth. Then there are the services: Music and Fitness+ have their hooks in me.
There’s something to be said for paying a bit extra, if you can afford it, for an experience you just plain like. The OS is quick and easy to navigate. App icons animate with faux-depth when you wiggle them around. It’s fun: making the Settings icon shimmy is a nice way to fiddle when you’re thinking about what to watch. Apple is particularly good at adding small sparks of joy to their products and they’re the kinds of things that make a product, even a neglected one like Apple TV, harder to give up. People will remember how you make them feel before they remember what you do, after all.2
None of that makes the Apple TV a particularly good product right here, right now (especially at its price point). It’s in dire need of an update, if that factors into Apple’s plans, or a price drop to stay competitive.
Chances are, the box isn’t a big part of Apple’s plans. They’ll more success, and more product lock-in, by getting things like AirPlay and their services (TV+, Fitness, Music) on other streaming boxes rather than relying on their own. An Apple TV box is a better experience if you’ve bought shows and movies from the iTunes Store but that doesn’t scale as well as getting your services everywhere else.
But I like the Apple TV. I’d get a new one if mine died and I’d love to see an updated version of the little box that could.
Like I said: I’m an apologist.
App Store scams and Apple’s priorities
It’s hard to feel good about the App Store when Apple removes perfectly fine apps for not using their payment system while scam apps run amok. It makes you question their priorities a bit.
WatchChat Alex spent three years building a successful Apple Watch app, only to have his business destroyed by fake apps stealing his work to scam people. Apple, meanwhile, haven’t done much to stop it.
I have spent the last four years of my life working on my very successful app only to have it ruined by scam apps with very obvious fake reviews as well as false advertising claims that Apple does not take action against. I can literally prove they are fake but Apple refuses to take action for undisclosed reasons, allowing thousands of more people getting scammed by these apps day by day.
Alex story follows that of Kosta Eleftherious, who shared his battle with another Apple Watch related scam:
The App Store has a big problem 👇 You: an honest developer, working hard to improve your IAP conversions. Your competitor: a $2M/year scam running rampant
There are more, of course.
Meanwhile, apps have been knocked back from the App Store because they didn’t include Apple system for in-app payments (among various other reasons, some good and some baffling).
Apple seem to be doing two things at once:
Scam apps are a problem in and of themselves: they rob people of money. Apple’s failure to catch them speaks to a bigger problem. They’ll dock apps quickly if, for example, don’t include their in-app payment system (from which they take a 30% cut) but they, for whatever reason, haven’t taken action on scam apps that rake in a whole lot money for fraudulent developers and, of course, Apple.
There’s a lot we can’t know here. We don’t know how many scam apps get taken down quickly and we don’t know how many never make it through the review process. Maybe we only ever see 1% of those submitted to the store.
But we can only assess what we see and, right now, less than a year out from a brouhaha over apps not using Apple’s in-app payment system there’s another tussle over their inability to take down scam apps that are making them a lot of money.
Taken one after another, it’s starts to paint a picture, you know?
Will people still pay for news without President Trump?
Donald Trump wasn’t good for much but he was great for the news. The New York Times, for example, saw a 300% uptick in digital subscriptions once Trump became President. There’s a good reason for that, which we’ll get into below. (Hint: it’s the same thing that drives engagement on social media.)
Trump isn’t the only reason places like the New York Times have seen an uptick in readers and subscribers: they’ve built their entire operating model around getting subscriptions and its paid off. But Trump’s presidency, and the burning need people felt to know about it, helped.
Can media outlets maintain that need without him? Chris Cermak, Monocle’s news editor, asked as much about The Washington Post on The Late Edition of the Monocle 24 podcast:
Will [reporting on the Biden administration] attract readers in the same way [as Donald Trump]? Will that maintain this positive feeling that liberals have, for that matter, about The Washington Post? Will they continue to read or will they go back to being more apolitical now that Donald Trump is out of office?
You can ask the same of the New York Times and any of the liberal and left-of-centre publications that saw a surge of readership – or even just a clear sense of purpose – under the Trump administration.
Audiences love a villain. They simplify things. Why pay for news? So you know what he’s doing. Why donate to this cause? To help stop him.
Conservatives and the far-right have always been good at this kind of thing. They manufacture enemies, tiny paper demons folded from lists of your nightmares, to stand against and to rally their base around. It’s how Trump got himself elected: he invented opponents to push over. Fox News do the same thing.
It’s not exclusive to the conservative side of politics, of course: über-engaged people on social media, across the political spectrum, are amazing at finding enemies to rally around. Some of them are real, some of them are only real under the tawdry veneer of a newsfeed but they all inspire a share and a whole lot of something. You never want to find yourself as the main character of Twitter, after all.
Media outlets made a whole lot of hay out of Antagonist Trump. He was an main character big enough and important enough to inspire real, tangible action. His show was worth a subscription. Now, though? Biden isn’t as compelling.
Really, Trump’s tenure as president was an audition for outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post. Are they worth the money to people now that Biden has arrived? Have people learned to value the news as a product? Is the habit engrained? Will people just forget they’re subscribed? Is inertia enough?
There are real woes and troubles that are worth knowing about: coronavirus, China’s continued rise as a global superpower, climate change, to name a few. But none of them have really inspired the passion required to throw a few dollars at a paywall in the past.
They’re not characters. And people love a character.