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[Music] foreign [Music] people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast
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we're your hosts I'm Marquez I'm Andrew and I'm David this week we've got a bit of a variety pack a grab bag if you will
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but it's some fun stuff so first we got to talk about a new cheap EV that looks like a pretty promising competitor also
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a tech company that a lot of us know and love we're gonna say goodbye to um also we're going to talk a little about social media and how things are happening with Reddit and twitch and
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these two companies just can't stop making the right choice over and over again so we're going to talk about how great they've been lately controversial
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yeah and then we've got a bunch of other stuff but first of all let's talk about this Volvo ex30 kind of just popped up
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out of nowhere I wasn't really expecting it yeah miles just posted it in autofoc in our like one of our slack channels
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yeah and I was like I didn't think of it and then I was like wait a minute is this like 35k yeah I was like a word
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Volvo cool because that so Volvo for those of you who don't know owns the pole star brand so whenever we see a new
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pole star that's sort of part of Volvo group this is a common thing with car companies uh so I didn't expect because
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Volvos are typically pretty high-end I didn't expect a new electric Volvo to be inexpensive uh but the headline reads 35 000 Volvo ex30 is a high-tech
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sophisticated EV for urban drivers it's not out yet but if you see the pictures and the the sort of spec as it's
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revealed uh for those who don't know the ex30 is like a small crossover from Volvo it's
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not as big as the XC 40 or the XE 50 or the bigger versions that they have it's pretty small I looked up what I think are the dimensions and it's like just a
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bit smaller than like a Subaru Crosstrek if you know what that is which is pretty much just a hatchback Impreza lifted so
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we need a bunch of other we need a bunch of car brand equivalents because all the super people are nodding like ah yes of course I get it but I'm like the
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Crosstrek is probably like one of the most popular crossovers like in the US it is stupidly possible okay I'll throw
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in I'll throw in Kia ev6 and I'll throw in Genesis gv60 yeah similar size things I can't confirm because I don't know the exact measurements of that but I looked a lot
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of Crosstrek measurements I think it's smaller smaller the model a small model it's small it is a small yeah SUV but
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it's still higher off the ground you know than a car they're saying 275 miles of range on the single motor variant and
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uh about 35 000 starting price that's crazy 0 to 60 in three and a half seconds oh that's the dual motor so they're gonna also make a dual motor version of this that's a little more peppy and a little less range barely
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though 265 miles versus 275 like that's not a bad trade-off I couldn't figure out what the price on that was because when you go to their site and click Reserve rather than picking one it just
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shows two drop downs and if for whatever reason it wasn't letting me choose one I can only assume the dual motor is gonna
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be a little more expensive yeah what would we guess like 40 it might be there I just missed it I is making me pick a
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dealership yeah I picked the dealership and then I went to that and then it like let's go Inglewood then I was just
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clicking on two different ones and so single motor extended range I see 35 000 MSRP so I don't know exactly what the
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price of the all-wheel drive version is um the weird thing is that there's two drop downs that just show the details
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their specs but you can't pick the one you want and it it just continues to say thirty five thousand dollars yeah which
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is I mean common you typically get EV manufacturers touting their starting price and then you option your way up to
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something else but it's cool to see something starting at 30 something thousand dollars and this says these
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single the rear-wheel drive version is 0 to 60 and 5.1 yeah cool so it's still great for I mean still great for a 35
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000 car I won't say great for an electric car but like it's gonna be way peppier than any 35 000 car yeah it's a
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good Baseline I also really like Volvos in general like I really like pole stars and I think I mean Volvos obviously have
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like a very similar design aesthetic these look fantastic yeah I've loved the Volvo SUVs that are coming out and this
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looks just like that just smaller like the really cool kind of like sideways T headlights that like come into the front
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of the car they have the completely flat Grille which is the Volvo logo and like a diagonal pattern yep it's a good
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looking car do we know if it uses Android auto or um if I was guessing because I can't see
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in the spec I would guess yes it looks like it has Android auto or Android automotive yeah in the photos but when I
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search Android nothing comes up when we had the xc40 recharge which is another electric Volvo SUV they were very happy
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to point out all the Android automotive stuff and that seems to be the thing that they're going with with yeah Volvo
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stuff yeah whole star also uses it even though they're also adopting carplay I think yeah yeah not bad apparently
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they're also releasing a cross-country version of this in 2024 which says it's uh geared towards Outdoor Adventures
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with more ground clearance skid plates on the front and rear and the side and back panels on the bumper the small Hood
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mounted Swedish flag is the cherry on top and it looks like it just has like Hood mounted Swedish flag it's cool it looks like it has way bigger Wheels I
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think people who just curb their wheels all the time should get this one instead just drive it like normal this is kind
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of interesting like Subaru is also doing this now yeah they're making the Wilderness version of the Outback and the Forester which does all this gives
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you worse gas mileage because like your bigger Wheels you have like a heavier skid I was gonna say I think I'd rather
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have this than a Subaru 270 miles of range versus a full gas tank well it's the soltera range oh
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Subaru EV yeah yeah a thousand times over yeah I'm talking about like but like I see all these people driving the
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Wilderness on the road all the time and like trust me I wanted it like every bone in my body was like that looks sick
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yeah I like to go outside once in a while and that would look cool but like it's mostly commuting on 78 and then I'm
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just getting worse gas mileage out of it that's true so that's that's good to know good to see I also have you guys
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seen the Prius uh reviews like blowing up yeah you kind of predicted that it would dude because like the I I made a
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review for those who don't know I we were talking about how sick the new Prius kind of looks and we're like is it
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sick like is it actually a kind of a nice car now and so we got it and we reviewed it uh and it is confirmed a
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pretty fun car and so I ended up making the video talking about how it's a hybrid but it's a nice like stop Gap in
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between because a lot of people believe it or not are just not ready for an EV yet there's a lot of places where the
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infrastructure doesn't make sense yet but if you have a short-ish commute you can use the Prius Prime which is a
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plug-in hybrid as an EV and a backup gas tank just had a little backup gas tank so it's a nice looking Prius backup guess just a little backup 400 miles of range on on gas uh but it
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has solar panels on the roof as an option which we're gaining in as sunny day four miles a day four miles adding
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four miles a day to your range which is better than trickling away your range you know you'll never have a dead battery if you leave it in the sun that's true uh what if you don't drive
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it for like three days does that mean 12 miles yeah in if it's a sunny day and you leave it in a place I get sun all
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day what's the maximum capacity about 40 to 45 miles of electrical it's not bad because I only live like 11 miles away from here so you could you could conceivably use it as a fully electric
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car yeah 11 miles of driving like actual driving yeah you could you could actually leave it out if I only get four
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miles a day then it's like but if you well let's say you start with 44 yeah you don't drive it on the weekend so you
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start with 44 miles of range you drive to work you end up let's say with 30. you drive back you end up with 10. I'm
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being conservative then you it was in the sun all day so maybe you actually end up with 15. yeah and then you have
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to plug it in so you will have to plug it in but you you can use it as a full EV and never use the gas if I had
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anywhere to plug it in I would do that but I can't yeah and then you know go on a road trip one day you just use those gas car yeah I
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like what Toyota's doing with their Prime because like the prime line seems to be just their like better plug-in
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hybrids because they have a RAV4 Prime that's similar it's like about 40 miles of range on a battery that also has gas
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so I believe the prime specifically means plug-in hybrid yeah and then they have like regular hybrids that are not yeah they have a ton they have a hybrid
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of like every single car they make and then they have the plug-in hybrid of I think only the Prius and the RAV4 okay I
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wanted the RAV4 Prime very badly um but when I was buying my car the only ones I could find were like 60k and at
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that point that's the price of a full year yeah that's always the X Factor is like anytime you talk about the price of a car you always have to go but can you
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get it for that price yeah is there like a huge dealer markup right now it's probably not as bad now I still think
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the RAV4 Prime is awesome I wish they would just make an EV of it Toyota come on you're doing great with these things
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but like come on Step It Up EV stuff more all right one one quick little news article here that kind of isn't even really news but but blue the company everyone knows and loves from like the
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blue yeti the Blue Snowball ever created content probably owned one of these if you
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created content like six to seven years ago it was like the cheapest best microphones that you could get this is a
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fun fact a long time ago I used to be really into like series and like playlists of videos and I started a
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series called like YouTube gear where I was gonna review specifically gear that I thought was great for YouTube and I
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probably only did like two or three of these before I stopped but I'm pretty sure the first one I ever made was reviewing the Blue Yeti snowball Yeti or
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snowball I think it was a snowball because I use that mic a lot of snowball yet yeah and that thing was
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it was like 99 bucks and it was just a great Plug and Play USB mic that you could recommend to anyone gaming
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streaming screen recording anything you need a mic for that can be on camera right in front of you that was iconic if
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you've like tried to start streaming you probably owned a snowball or a Yeti um and so blue the company is going away
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but that's just because Logitech bought them a while ago and Logitech to integrate it into their Logitech G brand
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which is like their gaming specific brand um wow the blue Snowballs will cost forty dollars
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still a great deal yep that's awesome it'll probably they'll probably be even cheaper because now they're not gonna
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say blue they're gonna say Logitech on it instead oh but the ones that still say blue will be like collectors items if you get a renewed one it's only 20
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bucks that's wild best mic great audio price Plug and Play Simple so it'll probably all be exactly the same just with Logitech branding on anymore but it still feels like a sad day when the Blue
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Yeti is I know some people hate them but it's iconic yeah yeah shout out to the blackout Edition they made an all matte black yeah yeah that's kind of weird that Logitech isn't just keeping the
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brand because I feel like it's got like a big cult following blue yeah blue has an interesting set of things they basically just make microphones yeah and they have these like bottle these like
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high-end XLR mics too that I eventually started messing with no ranges there's like the 50 snowball to the like three
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thousand dollars like XLR microphone yeah yeah so there was a healthy range of people to like get into mics for the
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first time and then experiment with like features and high-end audio range stuff
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so I thought that brand was pretty strong I guess you know Logitech wants their own brand to be pretty strong so
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they'll bleed those into their own products but yeah that was interesting rip blue rip blue ripperoni ripperoni
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all right can we talk about twitch controversy which when I first wrote this down then they like totally
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backtracked the day after so but I still want to talk about it very quickly okay yeah so twitch
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um you know Beacon of good ideas you know never it seems like they can't miss they can't miss has never angered any
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creators um I feel like I have to bring this up because I've talked about like the streaming Wars a thousand times on this
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podcast that I'm always trying to like kind of see where it's happening um so twitch basically made a statement a
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couple weeks ago about how for creators on the platform in order to kind of like embed sponsored logos into their stream they have to be smaller than three percent of the entire since a
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screen real estate three percent and when people started doing mock-ups of this we're talking like really small
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very very I can't even picture three percent exactly sounds small it was like a totally ridiculous out of nowhere
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change that they wanted to make and you know streamers livelihoods are pretty much baked into these sponsored streams
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I mean like all creators kind of have sponsored Integrations that is a large large portion of their revenue and this
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is coming after not too long ago them taking the revenue split of subscriptions and like dicing it real
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real hard yeah so they come out with this and then I was gonna talk a little bit about how ridiculous this was
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because universally everyone was there was backlash about it within 24 hours they released a statement that said yesterday we released new branded content guidelines that impacted your
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ability to work with sponsors to increase your income from streaming these guidelines are bad for you and bad for twitch and we're removing them
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immediately yes possibly that sounds like they also fired the person who wrote yeah
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wow like I mean that's like the next day it was literally in the release it says
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yesterday we released this and that was it was bad for twitch um that's crazy good to know I feel like
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this is just another blip in the twitch radar of like I've talked a bunch about why I'm surprised YouTube doesn't feel
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like it's fighting twitch harder for a live streaming platform I'm used to it felt like it did this just is more I'm
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more and more because a lot of Partners threaten to leave twitch over this immediately like very very big streamers
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oh on YouTube is the obvious next choice I mean yeah that's why YouTube doesn't have to fight twitch exactly I I'm now
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100 in this whole like mindset of YouTube doesn't care anymore because they know twitch is going to destroy itself they just five years yeah like
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YouTube is so YouTube makes a lot of money and YouTube is so stable that twitch is sort of like flailing as the
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second place obvious streaming thing where like they're being attacked from both sides if you're uh if you're twitch
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you have this small upstart streaming services threatening to eat your lunch and then you have the looming like how
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do we become bigger than YouTube in streaming over the top yeah I would I would argue twitch is the number one
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streaming platform and then what metric by people who when you want to watch a live stream or you're going to Twitch it's just because like it's focused around it it's the discoverability is better
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I wanna I think everyone would argue twitch is the number one streaming platform on the internet I would say there's probably more concurrent streams going on on Twitch 100 I think inside
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those streams there's more viewers per stream I would say so too so I think that's probably true I mean especially
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in the way when you think of streaming creators definitely I always think of twitch but also like whenever there's a
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new tech event whenever there's a new Apple stream whenever there's a new SpaceX launch whenever there's a new car
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launch it's always YouTube let's let's call it then the like Creator live stream for sure like twitch would love all of the live streaming pie but like that I I can't ignore that like there's
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I watch a SpaceX launch that have like a million concurrent viewers or something crazy just weird things happen
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um but also yeah like you want to be able to offer creators as much as possible but you also need to make money to exist and those are like almost opposing when you're twitching or trying
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to grow it's not like Amazon knows them or anything yeah they do have Amazon money so like but you can you know
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they're they're screwing that Amazon money up because they already cut so much of the revenue split between them
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so hard I I still potentially I would like to see the numbers but like there are those million stream Tesla things
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but then there's also xqc and Hassan and stuff on Twitch who have like two to four hundred thousand people watching them eight hours a day every
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day stuff like that so like I still think the numbers might be bigger on Twitch but I don't think YouTube is
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worried at all because they have numbers like that and then they also know Twitches inevitably probably going
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twitch apparently has 140 million monthly active users um YouTube they don't split it out into which ones are those are live streaming yeah that's the issue because YouTube it
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says 2.1 billion and I'm like but what percentage of that is livestream very different so it's hard to yeah like by
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the Numbers Instagram might have just as many live streaming as YouTube and twitch but I have no idea
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that's the problem yeah I think I think YouTube's going to take over the Creator space the
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individual Creator live streaming space eventually from twitch there's places like State coming up but they're just a
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total mess and uh yeah there's something anything will happen with that there's some other weird ones but like yeah if
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Microsoft can't figure it out with Microsoft money and Amazon's switching up with Amazon money uh you don't even
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remember it was called I forgot the name Microsoft made one and then they get Ninja to go to it and shroud and it had
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a moment and then oh my God I forgot about this you remember okay ninja like a bazillion dollars it was called mixer how did Ninja each made close to 30
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million I think and then it just shut down within like within their contract so they literally got to get paid and
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break their contract and go back like a crazy reunion this is like the live golf
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PGA Tour thing this is like you took your money and then you just came right back yeah it's totally fine sorry that's
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a reference you guys don't even worry about it I'm sure some will understand I sort of kept up with that over the
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weekend yeah yeah oh the live stuff the live stuff that's for that's for the waveform golf podcast the waveform
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here's a little quick a quick summary the PGA Tour has been the biggest golf league in the world
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PGA exactly professional golfers association and then uh very quickly a bunch of Saudi investment firms with a lot of money decided they wanted to sort of improve their image by sponsoring a
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new golf tour so they paid a lot of money to a bunch of high-end golfers to leave the PGA Tour to start up this new tour they successfully did it they ran it for a little bit some of the biggest
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PGA Tour golfers stood loyal to the PGA Tour and turned down three four five six
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seven hundred million dollar deals uh a year later out of nowhere random announcement we're merging okay but here's the worst part about that is that the CEO of PGA was telling all the
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players stand by like it's bad to like go play for the Saudis you're shaming though he
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was shaming them he was saying like you've got to stick with us like we're like this we got values
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and then he convinced them to not leave and then he just sold the gun and now the values aren't so important it was like negotiating behind their backs like how messed up how backstabbed would you
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feel if you turned out dude if you turned out like 700 million dollars and then you had no option anyway and it was
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like now we're the same company and now all the dudes who did take the two 300 million dollars are coming back like hey what's up guys yeah I was going we're
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gonna play some golf this weekend while we're talking about random Sports messy coming to MLS baby what happened all I
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see is like he went to Miami yeah he's going to enter Miami and the only quote that I saw was like I saw that my teammates would have to take a pay cut
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to pay me a billion dollars and I didn't like that so basically but it's more so that Apple's giving him a cut of their streaming Revenue basically supposedly
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we don't know I don't think we know for real Apple's got that kind of money they have a they have uh
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yeah they did a two billion dollar deal with Apple TV and the MLS to do MLS season pass and then they signed Messi which is like a big reason to watch the
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MLS so numbers yeah you all make fun of me for Taylor Swift's resale tickets the
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tickets going for any game Messi's gonna pay in that play I know it's like five thousand dollars I know I'm trying to get one so if anyone knows just saying
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messy Taylor Swift fair I'm going to entertainers Taylor Swift I'm going to the Dota 2 International finals this year so how much were those two paid five grand for a ticket and now
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they're like oh seven dollars you just have to be super toxic and then you get in for free yeah wow okay I hope they
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just invite people for free no yeah that's twitch man twitch twitch is doing stuff which
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Rumble where do we put them in the in the tier list because I know YouTube is s tier and people always roast me for
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saying that but let's Okay I also think the reason people roast you for that is it's like I didn't say they're Flawless
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no no no no and I don't think anyone thinks you said that either I think it's just like so the social media tier list
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is like am I talking about social media where I post like my personal stuff and follow other personal people okay just
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like social media social media as a Creator wanting to make a living for sure I think if you say as a Creator
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it's Undisputed it's the highest no no doubt I don't know nothing below it tick tock you don't make money at your ankles it doesn't matter 35 bucks for a million I went to a dinner last night with some
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people who are all over Tick Tock and they just kept repeating this like they were like repeating this catchphrase of
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this tick tocker from like Hong Kong or something and they're like oh he's so famous he's so famous I'm like okay but like how is
00:21:42
this making him any money whatsoever he's probably trying to drive as many people as possible off of tick tock to
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make money he's a tailor a tailor yeah he does like he tailor suits and stuff that probably makes more money in the
00:21:54
video I thought he was a Thrifty [Laughter] you want to make money on the internet like doing things on the internet like there's nothing better than YouTube facts let's
00:22:08
take a quick break we got to talk about another company making lots of great decisions be right back trivia whoa of
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course we skipped it last week and now my brain melted out of my ears okay yeah so aha update on the score Marquez has 19. Andrew has 16. David has
00:22:30
20. first question that's right I feel like blue microphones has been around forever but obviously that's not true
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what year was the company founded hmm think on it hmm I always like these questions because it's always way earlier than I thought yeah but Adam said that's not true they haven't been around forever but
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they've been around for some amount of time we just don't know that amount and we'll have to think
00:22:55
about that wait so Adam say that again you always felt like they had been around forever I feel like blue
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microphones has been around forever but obviously that isn't true why obviously because I've never found it at some
00:23:07
point they were founded they weren't around forever yeah like literally they were not around like King Arthur in the
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castle was using his Bloom snowball for 49 on the first 49 shekels yeah Adam was
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near the tree exactly the dinosaurs and there's like a T-Rex and like a Blue Yeti hanging from a brontosaurus like Adam goes to to take the Apple but he
00:23:30
accidents the earth was formed and it spins around its core of molten blue anyway okay we're gonna think about this the answers will be at the end but we'll
00:23:43
be right back the earthquare is a snowball [Music] all right welcome back uh I meant to ask you guys because I've seen sort of murmurings about it a
00:24:02
little bit I assume there's like a little bit of stuff going on what's going on with Reddit right now
00:24:08
anything I should know about my couple that's how I feel that's how I felt for like four days at this point yeah sorry if we scared you in your car right now
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um there is I anger I almost wonder there's like there's a long timeline of things yeah going on here yeah do you think the best wave I so yesterday when I sat down to write that outline of this
00:24:31
I was like I'm just gonna write an outline like a tldr of it and then we can follow it it was three it's three
00:24:36
pages so wow we have a lot to talk about yeah is the easiest way for me to just start doing it and like interject at any point possible with a question or a comment or anything I have my
00:24:47
understanding of what I believe Reddit is and I think that that's a good foundation start it what do you believe I think Reddit is one of the most popular sites on the Internet it's a
00:24:58
bunch of user generated content and links basically people are uh posting links and writing content and then they
00:25:06
are in individual communities called subreddits where where people in those communities upvote and downvote bring
00:25:11
stuff to the top talk about it it's a common place to find news to find stories to find products to find
00:25:18
information our videos get posted to Reddit all the time and I believe that's actually some of the most valuable
00:25:24
useful feedback that I've gotten sometimes is you get to see comments from people who have never seen the
00:25:30
videos before so Reddit is a site where you find stuff like that I see it as a forum of forums so we used to have individ individualized forums all over the Internet like you'd go to this
00:25:42
website called geek Hack That I Used to use for mechanical keyboard stuff back in like 2011. but then eventually the r
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slash mechanical keyboard subreddit just way overtook it because it can be a centralized place where you can find all
00:25:55
of the forums that you would want to participate and then aggregate them into one your home page yeah so like imagine
00:26:01
if all the different forums you used to be a part of also if you don't know what a form is you missed the Golden Age of
00:26:07
the internet it was a weird place consumers probably did but so yeah so then like you can be subscribed to 10
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different forums and now they're aggregated on your front page and you can be like oh yeah maybe I should like
00:26:19
I should check the thing about mechanical keyboards today because this post looks super interesting yeah I also like almost think of Reddit as kind of
00:26:26
you said information we talk all the time about Googling things with just Reddit at the end it almost feels like
00:26:31
the way better conversational version of like Yahoo answers or quora because you're getting actual people who are
00:26:37
answering and a lot of the times they'll be like an Ask Reddit question they're like people who have done this or people who are actual doctors in this very
00:26:43
specific field then someone will be like yes I'm a doctor in this very specific field and here's like a bunch of really
00:26:48
specific information and you can reply to those so people can then like talk about that information even
00:26:55
further so it's not just like here's an answer this is the best answer here's an answer and here's why everyone conversation also is conversation yeah
00:27:01
for whenever there's a new Dota 2 patch because people just go off it's just fun
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it talks about what they're fun yeah there's a lot of specific communities I mean I'm in the ultimate frisbee subreddit I'm in the uh man like certain
00:27:13
car car brands will have subreddits where like a new software update for Tesla comes out and then everyone who uses it will post what they found and
00:27:19
figure stuff out in the Tesla Motors subreddit uh I did an AMA in just the AMA subreddit people just ask people
00:27:26
with interesting experiences anything and then there's a whole threaded conversation with that person so yeah there's a lot a lot going on it's great
00:27:32
now I have a question for all of you except Adam um what when you use Reddit on your
00:27:38
phone how do you use it yes what app do you use so typically I use relay for Reddit which is a third party app uh beautiful UI great UI and and sorting
00:27:49
and everything just works really well Android only Android only relay for Reddit what do you use on your iPhone I
00:27:56
typically don't open Reddit on my iPhone but I will either Google something with the word Reddit at the end or I will
00:28:01
stumble across a Reddit link and just open it in Safari and it's just yeah yeah so on the annoying thing about
00:28:07
opening a Reddit link though in your browser is that it's like please use the official app please use the official app and you like can't read more comments
00:28:13
unless you yeah um I use relay for edit whenever I'm on an Android phone and I use Apollo for
00:28:18
Reddit on when I'm from on an iPhone yeah I use um something it's just called rif now which I learned pretty recently
00:28:26
it was called reddit is fun but I think since they were using the term Reddit in there maybe there are some reasons for that oh yeah they did actually make
00:28:33
everyone get rid of having read at the beginning so now it's Apollo reader I think or something like that and relay it was relay for Reddit yeah Reddit relay or sure yeah wait why don't
00:28:45
we let Adam answer because he uses the official app and I don't want to listen to the official Reddit app baby although
00:28:51
as a like a month ago or a month and a half ago I started using the Apollo Reddit app and then all this stuff
00:28:57
happened oh really great timing Adam perfect timing what happens okay so okay read it yes decided to make some changes to their API
00:29:08
they're going to start charging man I'm already lost in my notes here but anyways they're going to start charging
00:29:14
people for usage of their API because up until now all of these third-party apps that we've been talking about
00:29:21
um we're using their API for free and just a little further back there Reddit didn't used to have their own app
00:29:27
yeah I've been using Reddit as fun for probably 10 years at this point only a couple years ago was when the
00:29:33
official Reddit app became an official app they bought Alien Blue yeah and they bought a third-party app which is a
00:29:39
third-party app on iOS so when they bought it and they turned it to the official app changed the color scheme
00:29:44
and made it available on Android really quickly for people that don't know can you explain what an API is it's an application programming interface it's
00:29:50
basically a way for that website to access that all that website's information yeah and so like a plugin
00:29:57
that you use basically in all of our apps every single thing that you do content goes uses the API to contact
00:30:04
Reddit and then send back something and like that is an upvote is an API call oh
00:30:10
like a comment is an API call posting something as a call reading your DMs is it called like at least one call every
00:30:16
single anything that you do that officially interfaces with the actual website servers is an API call yeah yeah
00:30:23
so like we have third-party apps on Twitter that have a similar thing where yeah we used to we don't anymore we could make parallels with this okay
00:30:37
yeah you would you would like to retweet something and that's an API call you had a limited
00:30:42
number of those okay cool yeah um so and so I'm gonna go through I just wanted to like point that out there that like
00:30:47
Reddit is insanely popular Reddit obviously because mobile phones have become so popular we use the internet on
00:30:53
mobile so much like you have to give part credit to these third-party apps and helping make Reddit so popular
00:30:59
because yeah they literally didn't have one like people had to make them in order to have a good experience on
00:31:04
mobile yeah they didn't have an official app until a couple years ago yeah it was like very recently all third party apps like a mobile website I guess and it was
00:31:12
garbage yeah yeah it's the website's not the I love how simple the website is and I still use old.reddit.com yeah
00:31:18
everybody should yeah um but like that in a web pages okay it's just white with text across it yeah it's good it's the wrong one to use the right idea
00:31:30
okay so red is going to start charging for API usage they're going to be charging 24 cents per 1000 API calls
00:31:38
like we said before or an API call is like literally every single time you interface voting down voting like
00:31:44
absolutely basic thing yeah so if you make a Reddit app and you have a user a single user that makes a thousand Reddit calls then you will owe Reddit 24 cents correct so if you have a lot of users
00:31:56
making a lot of API calls you will owe Reddit a lot of money yes okay yeah um and it's really hard to judge the like
00:32:03
the the multitude of what 24 cents per thousand API calls is because that seems pretty cheap but like you have to start getting into the the side of these third-party app developers so a lot of
00:32:13
the information we're going to talk about today is from Christian C League he's the guy I think I'm pronouncing that right selling yeah I think you are
00:32:20
right he's the guy who runs Apollo we actually funnily enough met him at WWDC very briefly really after the whole keynote mentioned Apollo like a hundred times and I was like oh this is a rough
00:32:32
week to be mentioning yeah because all of it just got announced before yeah um and he's come out with some incredible
00:32:38
information a really long run through of kind of this whole story of how reddit's been
00:32:43
communicating with them and charging because I I want to go over it feels like there's a lot of things that Reddit is doing poorly right now that's led to
00:32:51
this really big backlash um and let's kind of go over try and go over all of it okay okay all right so let's let's go over the story this might get a little messy because there's stuff
00:33:02
kind of all over the place also not messy the soccer player which I know this is just gonna get it's gonna be a little all over the place but I want to
00:33:08
start this out with in January so a lot of these third-party app developers they're they're close with
00:33:15
Reddit like they talk to them all the time they said usually Reddit is pretty good at at least mentioning if a change
00:33:20
to the API is coming that might break something in their app in that sense they're good at communicating a lot of
00:33:26
other senses with new features they want and stuff they're pretty poor at communicating is the general overview of what these developers have said it's
00:33:32
tough not a lot of companies have third-party apps that they work well with so yeah and that's another reason
00:33:37
why like most of these companies and Christian very specifically said that like they totally understand getting charged for this in fact he said he thought it was weird that for so long they never
00:33:50
got charged like it's still their website yeah they're creating a better experience for it yeah they do think
00:33:57
they should be charged and he was talking with Reddit in January I believe towards the end of January and they said we have no plans to change the API at least not in 2023 maybe years to come
00:34:08
after that but if we do it'll be for improvements so that's in January in April is when they make the first
00:34:13
call to people that they are going to start charging for apis and that's when Christian and a lot of other developers
00:34:19
say like we get it totally understand like we do think we should be charging for it we are making money off of this
00:34:24
like we're using your website it's kind of the uh what's the the remora fish for the shark of Apple yeah yep totally
00:34:32
totally reasonable and I kind of just perked up he's like oh yeah I understand and then correct me if I'm wrong but they basically use Twitter as an example
00:34:45
of like yeah we will be charging but don't worry we know there's a ton of backlash with Twitter and how much they're charging people like we don't expecting it to be that they said it'll be based in reality yeah so I might be
00:34:57
wrong about this Twitter thing but what I understand is that Twitter also has an API that you can use it's just that they
00:35:04
make the API call costs so ridiculously high that it's sort of like yeah we totally have an API that you can use but like no one could possibly ever afford it also that's part of the reason why
00:35:15
all the third party Twitter apps had to shut down I thought they just banned third-party apps I think that they might have officially banned it eventually but
00:35:22
I I do you remember the token thing that you used to have to deal with yeah you would have a limited amount of tokens
00:35:27
that you could basically limited the number of users that you could have so if you had a third party Twitter app
00:35:33
with a million users it was capped and then once you reach that number of users a new person would try to sign up and
00:35:40
sign in through the app and it wouldn't work they'd have to start a new listing on the Play Store for a new version of
00:35:46
the app so I was using this old one Flamingo because I got a token and I was in and they ran out and they just didn't
00:35:52
refresh and it was an old app no one could use unless they had it a long time ago yeah but now they're just banned you
00:35:58
still can use the Twitter API yes I don't know for a third party app probably not for a third-party app oh
00:36:04
okay but use it for a research or use it to like scrape data to do a project or whatever but you can't make a new
00:36:11
Twitter app yeah and they're also charging 12 000 to 42 000 a month for that information sure and like lots of them just outright ban third like they're you YouTube bands that you can't
00:36:22
make another YouTube app another third party app for YouTube or Instagram or anything but YouTube and Twitter also
00:36:27
had apps when they they made their own apps they didn't like fully rely on other apps to be made to like make them as popular as they are today yeah um okay so after they said they would not
00:36:39
they they announced the API change they said it will be pricing based in reality unlike things like Twitter like Twitter
00:36:45
yeah and then also didn't give them a price at that point so this is in April yeah they said we'll get back to you in
00:36:51
two to four weeks with the price six weeks later that's when they come out with the 24 cents or 24 cents per
00:36:58
thousand API calls and then that's when all of the developers started getting together being like this seems absurd yeah Christian did the quick math it would cost him over 20 million
00:37:11
dollars a year based on what they're claiming based on how many people they're using the app yeah it's about
00:37:17
seven billion API calls a month so it's over two million dollars a month okay yeah
00:37:23
and then oh a month a month two million a month okay over 20 million a year got it yeah that's ridiculous and these changes will be starting the the billing cycle will start on July 1st you know we
00:37:36
earn the herdy day yeah and and the actual bill will come August first so it's not like the bill comes right then
00:37:41
but that's still a very very very short amount of time just for example remember
00:37:47
I know you remember this remember when Apple bought dark sky I don't know what you're talking about about what the dark sky oh dark sky yeah yeah so when they
00:37:54
did that and a lot of people were using Dark Skies API Apple gave them 18 months
00:37:59
to find a solution and after that 18 months they decided to give them another year yeah so that's how long Apple gave
00:38:06
dark sky API users to change this Reddit is giving these people about 30 days 30
00:38:12
days which is for like every third party Reddit app yes and then do you want to explain why that's such a pain like there's a reason why for some people that's it's
00:38:23
I'll say the obvious answer and you can say why it's a problem I guess so like the obvious answer is oh we'll calculate
00:38:28
how much each user would use charge based on how much those users would be right so like if you think one user is
00:38:34
probably costing you one to three dollars a month you know you have to also put in like apple Play Store like
00:38:40
App Store Play Store taxes on that just charge them per month for how much it would be for that boom our app now costs
00:38:46
six dollars a month just to use it at all that sounds easy the biggest issue that Christian said he was facing was
00:38:52
that a lot of people on Apollo like Apollo has different pricing structures there's a free structure which most
00:38:58
people use but there are a lot of pro users and the pro users you can either pay I think you can either pay per year
00:39:05
or you can pay monthly I believe so yeah um but there are a lot of users that just pay per year because he gave them
00:39:11
like a discount if you paid per year and it was like 12 bucks a year or something right it's like 12 or 20 a year right so
00:39:17
he was like you know if I didn't have these yearly users I could just put a thing in the app that says I'm so sorry
00:39:23
if you're gonna keep using Apollo you have to start doing a subscription um beyond the fact that you know an
00:39:30
average user cost him two dollars and fifty cents a month there are power users that cost seven dollars and fifty
00:39:36
cents a month right and so he would have to like work out his pricing structure so that it like kind of includes those
00:39:42
power users as well as the lower end users and uh but the biggest problem here is that
00:39:48
all of those yearly subscribers that paid 12 maybe last month they just subscribed for an entire year right yeah so kind of best case scenario is that
00:39:59
you're gonna have a number of users whose yearly subscription expires next month the month after that the month
00:40:05
after that the month after that but that means that just for July or just for August his bill would be
00:40:13
about fifty thousand dollars because the amount of people that subscribed for a year 11 months ago
00:40:20
you would have to pay for all of those people and that's about fifty thousand dollars with that many people yeah not
00:40:25
quite the bill but basically the money you would have to eat because those people the whole year he owes those
00:40:31
people their years of subscriptions they paid for already right yeah so there's a feature in these app stores or wherever
00:40:38
you're using where you can either charge people every single month or you can charge them a lump sum for an entire
00:40:44
year and maybe incentivize give them a little discount but maybe they would have quit after six months so you got more money out of them this happens a
00:40:51
lot more I feel like on the iPhone because people realize iPhone users have more money and spend more money on apps
00:40:56
and stuff so a lot of iPhone users will be given the opportunity to pay for a year of a subscription at a slight
00:41:03
discount yeah now they have so many people who have paid for an entire year and suddenly are going to cost way more
00:41:11
money yeah because they're gonna still use API calls and he's just gonna have to eat the cost of all the API calls so
00:41:17
he said the first month is going to cost him about 50 Grand and the second month would cost him maybe 45 Grand the third
00:41:23
month would cost him maybe 40 Grand eventually that would run out but that's still like hundreds of thousands of
00:41:30
dollars yeah all together stuff he believes that he owes to the people because they already paid for it like
00:41:35
you deserve that service like they they it is totally fair for them to think they deserve this verse right even
00:41:41
though things changed very quickly and that's another reason why this like telling you nothing's going to happen
00:41:47
four months later going completely against what they said and then also six weeks after that charging a price that is like completely Bonkers I don't have the exact numbers
00:42:00
on here but like I think one thing that was really interesting he mentioned was Reddit has a very a limit of APL call
00:42:06
Api calls a like user is allowed to make per day and it was something like I don't remember the exact number it was in the thousands and his average user is making around 300 and they called that
00:42:20
inefficient and he was like this is a weird thing with like you told me I could borrow your uh your Model S right
00:42:27
you said I'm going I'm going away for the day you can use it just don't drive over 100 miles and I get back and I
00:42:35
drove three miles and you're like oh that's weird David rent borrowed it last week and he only drove one mile it's
00:42:41
like why am I comparing myself to David driving yeah I drove more than David but you don't drive on over a hundred yeah
00:42:47
you set a limit for me I'm nowhere near that limit but then you're gonna like compare me to these other apps or
00:42:53
drivers so Christian was like if I had more time like a couple more months I could maybe reduce the amount of API
00:42:58
calls that are called by like pre-loading Pages or or things but I just don't have enough time and also like that's not gonna make a huge difference well you also have the time then for the people who had already paid
00:43:09
their year-long subscription to get closer and closer to the end of that I mean if you think about the dark sky API if they had given them a year to make
00:43:16
this transition he can end giving the year-long subscriptions now start charging the reasonable prices that will
00:43:22
actually pay for this and then not just eat hundreds of thousands of dollars I mean like and you'd still honor the
00:43:28
people who you gave the year long exactly thing too yeah okay so in this process when they were communicating and
00:43:36
this first came out Steve Huffman the CEO of Reddit um if you're on Reddit and I've ever seen someone named spez
00:43:41
comment he is like the head he's the CEO but like a lot of people just see him as kind of like the head moderator on the
00:43:46
website he had a call with Christian who they were talking about the new charges
00:43:53
Christian mentioned how like based on what they're going to be charges for APR I calls and his average calls it would
00:44:00
cost them over 20 million dollars so he what he he says he made a joke uh along the lines of I'm going to like if you were telling me that Apollo for Reddit
00:44:10
is going to cost you over 20 million dollars like why don't you just cut me a check for 10 million dollars because
00:44:16
Apollo's weigh and make Apollo quiet because it's very noisy compared to what you're saying Steve Huffman I think this
00:44:24
is partially due to some connection issues because he made him repeat it a few times but took that as a threat
00:44:29
made Christian kind of uh restate what he said and then immediately realizes it wasn't a threat that was a misunderstanding in the phone call says I'm so sorry I misunderstood you I
00:44:41
thought you were threatening us we've had some bad calls with some other people but like we I thought you were trying to threaten them they both like
00:44:47
laugh it off because it just seems like a misunderstanding then directly after that there's an internal meeting with
00:44:53
Reddit and Steve Huffman tells people in the internal meeting Apollo is threatening us and trying to
00:44:59
coerce us and kind of is like using him as the escape to go to make third-party app developers like the bad guy you know
00:45:06
this gets to Christian luckily he had recorded the whole call leaks the call because he's at this
00:45:12
point you have this huge company and people inside this company now using you as a scapegoat for something you didn't
00:45:17
say very obviously and releases the call and proves that he's yeah not doing that
00:45:22
yeah basically he said like the reason that you want to start charging us is because you have an opportunity cost the
00:45:29
amount of users that you could be using on your official app right and say that opportunity cost is 20 million a year if
00:45:37
you cut because it cost me about 20 million a year based on your current API cost so that means the cost of Apollo to
00:45:46
you the opportunity cost of US existing to you is 20 million a year so if you just cut me a check right now for 10 million I will shut the app down like it sucks because I love running this
00:45:57
community I love having this app I love interacting with the people who use it um but he said you know you can quite a
00:46:03
you can quiet us down or you can make us go away quietly because or you didn't say you can because that's what Steve
00:46:09
Huffman thought he said yeah he said you could quiet us down because but by that he meant we have a very noisy app in
00:46:16
terms of API calls being noisy because there's a lot of API calls because yeah seven billion API calls a month so he
00:46:24
misinterpreted him but he was like are you threatening us and on the call uh Christian's like no no no I'm literally
00:46:31
I'm saying a noisy API call and he immediately goes oh I'm so sorry I completely misinterpreted you I thought
00:46:38
that was a threat and he's like definitely not a threat at all and I'm so sorry that you interpreted it that way it seemed fine and then if you
00:46:45
listen to the cut and then you listen to that call he leaked the call and then immediately spazz just goes and tells everybody
00:46:50
he's threatening us like telling us it's not gonna let us go quiet I think Christian got like a post on Mastodon
00:46:56
like can you confirm the uh you threatening Reddit like based on this internal these internal meaning notes on
00:47:03
that like we were all told and he was like no no that is not at all what happened
00:47:09
um so he releases that we actually met him at WWDC like I mentioned that was on a Tuesday and he still felt semi-hopeful I think and then by that Thursday so this is almost a week ago
00:47:21
um Apollo reddit is fun and sync which I've not used but apparently it's very popular all said they're shutting down
00:47:27
on June 30th um apparently it seems like this pricing not just that the pricing and the back
00:47:34
pay they would have to make because of all the people with year-long subscriptions or like longer
00:47:39
subscriptions and stuff like that is just too much for them to be able to handle because these are these are multi
00:47:45
is Apollo only two people running it it's just two people it's just two Christian and he hires an independent
00:47:50
web developer and that's it well he has like a guy running his server engineer yeah yeah so it's not a lot of people
00:47:57
um and that happens if you are on Reddit you probably have recognized the last couple days about 7 000 different subreddits have gotten dark in protest I
00:48:07
just click Reddit all the time on my phone my reddit is fun app I had to take it off because I was going to it so much but I did notice on like Monday I
00:48:14
clicked on it and I was scrolling I was like man all these posts are from the same subreddit this is like really
00:48:20
really weird and it's because every single subreddit I'm a part of except for one is participating in the blackout
00:48:25
yeah so it's almost explain the blackout though yeah pretty much subreddits are the way they're blacking
00:48:31
out is by going private we did this with MKBHD subreddit it was initially supposed to be for two days a lot of them are struggling it we also didn't
00:48:38
say that like basically everyone on Reddit is very angry about this yeah there's there's
00:48:45
same background Christian made like a whole really long post about it that we read and then spez also did an AMA which
00:48:52
people assumed were going to be to talk about the API changes and he basically didn't address anything that was just
00:48:58
dumb that's just dumb he only replied to 14 people and like none of the answers were about any of this
00:49:05
um and so all of the mods on all of the subreddits have basically band together to do a blackout yeah so and in that
00:49:12
blackout they're all you set it to private we did this with MKBHD one and then basically users can't just look at
00:49:19
those subreddits so like anyone who's even in it can't see it anymore nope okay and if you're a moderator you can
00:49:25
see it but that means nothing I actually believe even our videos we all know our videos right they're just straight up
00:49:31
shutting down indefinitely indefinitely until this maybe changes well yeah that's if it does but it should probably
00:49:37
so a lot of them are they were doing it for two days um in that ama that I feel like the
00:49:42
initial threat of the um the blackout is what kind of sparked the API changes AMA even though you know
00:49:49
maybe they should have done that to be a little more transparent a little earlier um so the AMA gets posted spez comes in
00:49:56
answers for about 40 minutes worth of questions to the point where it was very obvious that they were all almost all of
00:50:02
the answers were copy and pasted because he posted one comment that had a little it was like a colon and then the
00:50:09
response to it so it's very obviously copied from a document outside of it as the dumbest part of all this okay yeah okay okay I feel like I'm filled in or I guess I have most of the the history
00:50:22
leading up to where we're at where we're at so the blackout you're you guys are probably listening to this on Friday
00:50:28
um possibly later the blackout was originally supposed to be Monday to Wednesday uh but that two-day period was
00:50:35
before the AMA happened and before this had gotten like a lot of media coverage and a lot of noise uh now after the AMA and after this has just gotten bigger
00:50:45
and bigger and bigger there are a lot of subreddits that are are advocating to just shut down indefinitely until
00:50:51
something changes and part of that is because first of all he had a couple like also just bad responses in his AMA
00:50:58
he he very quickly mentioned something about Christian and kind of doubled Downs on Christian threatening him again
00:51:05
um and about leaking a private phone call which the reason he leaked is to defend himself yeah um and then he makes
00:51:10
another like really snarky comment about third-party app developers um somebody asked how do you address the
00:51:16
concerns of people who feel Reddit has become increasingly profit driven and less focused on community engagement
00:51:22
this is a Reddit is also supposed to IPO later this year so I think that's a very obvious reason why a lot of this is
00:51:28
happening his response is we'll continue to be profit driven until profit arrives unlike some third-party apps we are not
00:51:34
profitable so kind of just like a shot at third party apps making money okay yeah I I think that's like this weird
00:51:42
like we are not profitable but are also this like evaluated multi-million dollar like giant website I just don't like
00:51:49
that like we're not profitable obviously you are making plenty of money at this place um so so that happens but then during the blackout an internal memo leaks of
00:52:02
uh Steve Huffman writing to Reddit saying like pretty much along the lines of like don't worry we'll make it through this this is just a small blip on our radar it will all pass which is
00:52:12
like if you're getting protested the last thing you should do is like poke The Beehive and be like you mean nothing
00:52:18
to me so now all the subreddits are basically not all of them but a lot of these ones that are participating in the
00:52:23
blackout are spanning it to indefinitely yeah and trying to make this last a little longer so things could possibly
00:52:30
change by the time you hear this but I mean a big possibility is that Reddit will just go full like overt control and
00:52:38
just take over the most popular subreddits and kick out the current Community moderators and just install
00:52:44
them again and just install their own moderators because at the end of the day he's not wrong
00:52:52
that he says this will probably blo that this will blow over most likely but it's just like when you had these third-party
00:52:59
apps that helped you grow as a company this massively because you just didn't have an app on mobile which mobile is
00:53:05
like the most trafficked you know form of accessing the website and then you just not even like having a
00:53:12
conversation with the third party apps or figuring out a way to make it work for everybody or even offering to buy them out just like
00:53:18
30 days notice pay us a ton of money that is unsustainable or else yeah it's just kind of like a terrible way to act to your community especially because Reddit a lot of people don't know this
00:53:30
but like Reddit is moderated by people who just random people who don't get paid like the mechanical keyboard
00:53:36
subreddit is just like moderated by people who are really into mechanical keyboards our videos is volunteer moderating which isn't the biggest
00:53:42
subreddits on the website are volunteer moderators so even if they do unlock these with their own moderators like
00:53:47
they don't have the power to be able to actually moderate these subreddits unless they find new volunteers but yeah
00:53:53
you've upset a lot of the community at this point and yeah it's going to be harder for sure I'm sorry we've you've
00:53:59
tried to talk like eight different times so I think I yeah no I think I'm getting
00:54:07
I'm getting like twitch vibes from Reddit which is funny so Reddit is weird and I I'll now that I have all this information I feel like I'm kind of digesting that
00:54:19
it's obviously a scummy move to like just sort of boot all third party apps because you're not making any money from
00:54:25
them and they're making money from you so that's sort of like the high level version of why they don't want them to exist anymore
00:54:31
but also Reddit has always been interesting to me because so many of the communities on Reddit
00:54:37
uh are super vibrant and active but sometimes it's easy to think that that is all of the people in the community that cares about the thing when it's a surprisingly small fraction so I'll try
00:54:53
to give an example of like I could use Sony phones I could use like any like our Android even would just go
00:55:00
like all right this random LG phone came out and we all as a community love this
00:55:05
phone and so we're all going to talk about how much we love this phone but we are a tiny fraction of like the total Mark the world and we have a hard time
00:55:18
seeing that not everyone feels the same way even though this community is very much vibrant about this one thing I have
00:55:25
a good example real quick to help you prove that point is we had a there was a video once I remember it was the top of
00:55:31
our Android and it was the top of our Android like ever at that point like one of the highest upvoted our Android posts
00:55:37
ever we looked at the traffic coming from Reddit who watched that video and is less than one percent of the total
00:55:43
views yeah so yes I totally agree that this is not inductive of all the people in that community and how they think but it still is a very good aggregator of places of people who like to have a
00:55:56
little more conversation than a YouTube comment it's a good window into the 10 of the most interested people in any topic yeah which is what makes it so cool yeah that's why I read it is dope
00:56:07
yeah but also 90 of Reddit users are normal people just lurking around not doing too many API calls not leaving any
00:56:17
comments they still are everything uploading a few things every time you click comments every time you click a link every time you click into a summary
00:56:23
that still is quite a few APS but I would imagine the bell curve of what it looks like to be a Reddit user is of uh
00:56:30
a lot of people not making many at all and then a really really big curve towards the power user end where there's
00:56:36
people who are using Reddit the most and have a bunch of communities to subscribe to and commenting and upvoting and doing
00:56:42
all a whole bunch more activities and so I wonder I mean I I'm pretty sure Reddit sees third-party apps is like a
00:56:49
tiny blip that they just we'll get rid of those things uh and I just looked it up actually just to see the Reddit
00:56:54
official app has 100 million downloads on the Play Store the relay app has a million uh I looked up some other third-party apps they had far far fewer so it's like
00:57:05
uh let's see sync for Reddit 100 000 downloads boost for Reddit a million downloads so Reddit trying to be this giant site which is one of the biggest
00:57:16
sites on the internet and represents like normies is in this like internal fight with itself because what makes it
00:57:22
special is the people who care the most and engage the most but what makes them big is all those other people but you
00:57:30
know what's interesting is social media overall has this thing called the 99 1 rule where ninety percent of the people
00:57:37
are lurkers nine percent participate a little bit and only one percent participate like actually make most of
00:57:44
them make the wheel spin yes yeah like we are the one percent of YouTube that actually makes content right and if you
00:57:50
did some like imagine YouTube did have some stupid decision to like make being a Creator awful on the site mathematically they're only upsetting one percent of the users whatever screw
00:58:02
those one percent of people but those are the people those are the people that make it what it is make it work and so
00:58:07
the 99 of the people are like whatever I didn't care about the future anyway but now all the stuff you love on the site is gone it's gone so that's kind of
00:58:14
what's happening with Reddit which is the one percent of people who actually make the subreddit it's the people
00:58:19
you're pissing off and who make the content and who contribute and who moderate and who do all this work and we're doing it for free and even the
00:58:26
people who are making third-party apps for better experiences for Reddit that is a relatively small number of people
00:58:31
that they think that they can just discard because it's a small number of high proportion but now the 99 of people
00:58:37
who are using Reddit are locking in and just being like everything's blacked out like what's I
00:58:43
can't this sucks so you read it made that like we need to make more money decision to like get rid of the third
00:58:49
party apps but that is the perfect wrong thing to do yeah especially with something like Reddit yeah especially with Reddit and it's crazy and it also just feels like such
00:59:01
poor Community there's examples of poor communication going on through this also apparently a lot of moderator
00:59:06
communities have been asking for specific tools I believe a lot of them find a lot of these tools in some of
00:59:12
these third-party apps to help better moderate and again like Reddit is a website where you can post pretty much
00:59:17
any things like moderation is key to not essentially getting totally shut down and these people are volunteers so like
00:59:24
again you're exactly what you said again dumb Marquez freaking figuring out the best way to explain a thing that David and I have spent a last week talking about and he hears about it for 30 minutes and explains it better than we
00:59:36
do but just like yeah you're you're making the people who make the entire site run mad and not want to use it
00:59:43
anymore and that's going to make your giant user base have an awful awful experience yeah so
00:59:49
Freda thinks the blackout will pass I don't know if that's as accurate as they think yeah and even if it does Pat like
00:59:56
it probably will pass because people want to use Reddit that's the whole point we want to use Reddit but like
01:00:02
damn that's like the perfect right you know what internet power users have in common what they all hold grudges really
01:00:08
well really that's really well that's true you should see some of our Android comments anytime I said something wrong
01:00:14
about a Sony phone those guys jumped in on that something that's kind of like acute to this is like everyone got mad
01:00:20
about Twitter when Elon was messing with Twitter but no one has really fully moved over to any of the other apps like they moved a lot of the power Twitter users over to Blue Sky but they didn't
01:00:31
stop posting on Twitter yeah nice they're now posting on Blue Sky but most of them are still posting on Twitter too
01:00:37
Twitter is definitely more like it's run in its own stuff pretty easily and like
01:00:43
you kind of anyone can kind of pop off on Twitter and like they made it paid for it's kind of weird like I don't like it as much but I still use it Twitter is
01:00:51
also so simple there were never really any advanced tools you could build for Twitter it's not like there were some crazy tools where like oh I don't have
01:00:57
Flamingo anymore I can't like post the way I used to like it's still mostly the same and now it's at the whim of like we
01:01:04
can screw this up a whole lot and people still have to use the first party app but yeah Reddit is different in that
01:01:10
there are like huge amounts of tools and UI and sorting and things that you could do in a third-party app that I mean I
01:01:16
don't even use the first party Reddit app but based on all the blackouts seems like it's probably not good if the first party Reddit app was really really good
01:01:22
do you think all this blackout would have still happened and all this protests against the third party apps would have still happened
01:01:27
I think so ultimately I think the biggest issues here aren't just like one thing it's just about like how these third-party Reddit apps who have dedicated fans are like treated and and
01:01:37
what they were given to try and comply it just feels like a total breakdown of communication essentially remember they
01:01:44
essentially a lot I can only assume lied by telling them nothing is going to change in January oh we're gonna charge
01:01:50
but not that much and then the way they went about it was terrible awful and then giving you such a short amount of
01:01:56
time to make those changes it sounds like if they gave an actual price based in reality and then turned it up over to
01:02:02
like giving you a year to comply or six months to comply with this I bet sync reddit is fun and Apollo would have
01:02:09
figured out how to do things and and we've mentioned here before like I would be will I don't pay for reddit is fun
01:02:16
but I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two for a third party app because that's just what they have to do in order to survive yeah I think the experience is
01:02:23
better on that than the normal the default app I hate the default app um so I'll be be willing to do that but
01:02:28
you put back people into a corner where they're not going to be able to survive to that point and now they have to die
01:02:34
which is awful if they gave them a year then Christian could have let people's yearly thing expire and he wouldn't he
01:02:40
could just tell people now like by the way I can't offer a yearly subscription anymore and this is going to have to go
01:02:47
paid because but you know I kind of understand that and let's move on through that but it seems like Reddit
01:02:52
just if they are actually trying to IPO this year this is probably why they rushed it out the door well or you think
01:02:58
about are they trying to make their app the most popular are these actual which I already did by far it is by far
01:03:04
already do they want even more people on there so then when they show the numbers for IPO that's kind of what it feels
01:03:10
like I was about to say like it feels like does it feel like Elon secretly is also now running Reddit where it's like
01:03:16
we need to just cut all expenses as fast as possible and that's kind of what happens when you're like oh we need an
01:03:21
IPO we need to make our numbers and our books yeah the Twitter worth is totally skyrocketing and that seems like a great
01:03:26
way that that was also like we have a lot of bills to pay so is anything costing us money yes stop doing that and is
01:03:32
anything making us money let's maximize that or Reddit is like oh third-party apps
01:03:38
yeah we could we could just get rid of those and then everyone will have to use our app and see more ads okay yeah let's do that boom yeah not not the greatest
01:03:46
it feels like there's a lot of ways they could have went about this that wouldn't piss off so many people like you mentioned are the most important people
01:03:51
on the website yeah yeah because if they're so worried about not making the ad Revenue because they can serve ads
01:03:56
within their app charging for the API is basically a way to make up for that ad Revenue you know they could just do that
01:04:02
they could also Christian did mention that Reddit just doesn't offer an API call to bake their ads into a
01:04:08
third-party Reddit app that's just something they've never done so none of them have ever gotten the opportunity to even possibly make Reddit some money
01:04:14
like yeah offer that and then the third party apps will let us pay money to not see those ads yeah yeah
01:04:21
it seems crazy but I do want to say like there's so much behind this I'm actually
01:04:26
pretty proud of how calm we stayed during that um but uh I'm going to link uh we will
01:04:33
link in the show notes um Christian's post on the Apollo subreddit um that subreddit is still open because almost
01:04:38
everything about it that is actual information based on everything that's happening um Christian also did an amazing interview with Quinn from snazzy
01:04:45
Labs nice that's on there and they also he also did an interview with the Verge a lot of this information we're getting for him because he's been the most open
01:04:51
during all of this but it seems like all of the Reddit third party app developers are pretty close with each other so I
01:04:56
think they're all sharing a very very similar viewpoint on all of this yeah yeah um not all third party apps are
01:05:02
shutting down it seems like some I think I think relay actually is going to stay alive because they I I guess have made
01:05:09
it into a way with maybe not as many users or just no overtime payment like that so where they can just charge money now and it'll make up for it I think that the person that runs that said that
01:05:19
that's something that that they might do but oh my decision okay yeah hopefully something like that happens but we'll
01:05:25
post all that in the show notes um anything else anyone else has to say I just want to say [ __ ] Steve Hoffman I'll see Hoffman [ __ ] Steve Hoffman but also
01:05:36
Apollo's a great app but Christian makes an app called pixel Pals which is adorable and I highly recommend we've
01:05:43
talked about this yeah on it actually so he makes the app Remember When Dynamic Island came out and you could get the
01:05:48
app where these like little animals would play on the dynamic Island oh yeah that sounds it's so pretty sick you know
01:05:56
in Apollo the pixel pals are baked in yeah you can just turn a setting on where they're hanging out on your
01:06:01
Dynamic Island while you're using I love that you pull up Apollo and it says red is killing third-party applications and
01:06:08
itself yeah that's the top post on our picks like that's wild and it's pinned but
01:06:13
yeah anyway the pixel Pals yeah they're really cute they hang out on your Dynamic Island I don't have a dynamic Island but they still hang out on my
01:06:19
lock screen yeah it's really cute so he makes a third-party app now called pixel Pals that you can use and you can buy
01:06:25
different animals and stuff he said he's making a decent amount of money from that so he's not like terrified I hope he's being a decent amount because he's
01:06:30
gonna have to refund everyone now that he's shutting down the app everywhere because through that the App Store you
01:06:36
can just request a refund since you didn't get the full Year's worth of stuff so he's going to get screwed a lot of refunds yeah that
01:06:42
stinks anyway trivia yeah all right bam question number two Andrew David real proud of you for wrapping that up um thank you Alexis Ohanian is one of
01:06:56
the co-founders of Reddit can you name the other two Founders and you get one point per founder nope
01:07:07
I read this on Wikipedia a couple days ago you read it on Reddit no one can you read it already no I'm Wikipedia
01:07:13
Wikipedia did you forget it no on Wikipedia um be right back I don't remember [Music]
01:07:30
all right nerds we're back so uh YouTube has changed their eligibility requirements for creators to be able to be partners and make money they call it lowering the requirements I have some
01:07:41
mixed opinions on this you should write it to it yeah uh most people would probably agree let's say let's say
01:07:48
they're required yeah the old ones were and what the new requirements okay yeah so the old requirements were having 1
01:07:55
000 plus subscribers and either 4 000 watch hours in the past year or 10 million shorts views in the past 90 days which was tacked on as soon as shorts were made pretty recently which makes
01:08:08
sense so if you just this just having both makes it harder to like spam bot your way to uh making money so if you
01:08:15
just like signed up yesterday and spam botted your way to a thousand subscribers you also need to get people to watch your stuff yeah or if you just
01:08:22
bought your way into getting a lot of views but nobody subscribed yeah it's obviously you're a bot so that made sense I will say 4 000 watch hours is
01:08:28
not that hard to do because a watch hour one watch hour is from one user yeah if
01:08:33
you get if you make a let's super simplify you make a 10 no that's not simple okay you make a 15 minute video that gets four views that's
01:08:47
one watch hour yeah if you get sixteen thousand views that's four thousand watch hours yeah yeah so not not super hard because that's just like the minimum requirement to become a
01:08:58
partner new requirements uh 500 subscribers instead of a thousand okay slower better lower
01:09:05
[Music] three public uploads in the last 90 days and either 3 000 watch hours in the last
01:09:14
year or three million shorts views in the last 90 days that's definitively a lower
01:09:19
requirement well it's a lower requirement okay okay it's a lower requirement by a thousand
01:09:26
watch hours uh it is a little requirement by 500 subscribers half yeah uh however and for shorts before you get
01:09:34
into that yeah shorts is like wildly less three million short season last 90 days versus 10 million yeah that's 70
01:09:40
sounds like a million like what yeah that's that doesn't seem much more in reality at all uh okay my thing and I
01:09:48
think that most people will disagree with me so I'm willing to be the devil's advocate here okay
01:09:53
um I already have a neutral view on this okay great yeah we got all three going on here so the three public uploads in
01:10:00
the last 90 days is what I mostly take issue with interesting um because there are multiple YouTubers that I watch that only publish a video like every two one
01:10:11
video like every two months and if because their videos are really long really well researched that kind of
01:10:17
stuff and they have like patreons that will like you know pay them every month because they're yeah they're only
01:10:22
publishing every two months but their videos are insane and the patreon sort of helps like keep them afloat because they're not publishing enough to have
01:10:28
that be their main source of Revenue there's huge ones too Mark Rober Simone yetch Michael Reeves yeah they're like
01:10:33
eight months in between videos right like markovers once a month yeah oh is he yeah okay so okay but say he was
01:10:40
slightly less than once a month so he missed the mark by like a day then he couldn't become a partner and
01:10:46
start making money if he if he started his channel like this I know you only have to do it once this is what it comes
01:10:51
down to because this is so I guess the eligibility requirements are really just at the very beginning is why it's so uh
01:11:00
it almost doesn't matter like if you are only making 4 000 watch hours and whatever 10 million shorts views you were either going to make five dollars or six dollars like it's the fact that
01:11:12
you were in versus you weren't in means you either make five dollars or zero so yeah the requirements changed but like
01:11:19
the threshold just moved a little bit in the gray area of zero dollars or five dollars but I think in order to like
01:11:25
start building up a channel uh you you do have to make more than three videos in 90 days I have a question yeah could you like make that
01:11:37
one video that took you two months publish it and then just publish two videos that are one minute long being
01:11:42
like hey I'm just doing this to get my thing to get in the partner program yes and then delete them and okay well I
01:11:48
mean you can put them up apply get accepted and then delete them yeah okay you know yeah in that case then yeah
01:11:54
maybe I would do that yeah maybe I'd do that I feel like my like in between this is like I totally understand that if you
01:12:01
like Mark I said you only have to do this once so if you're at that point where you're like you made a video and
01:12:07
it's doing really well you made a second video and because it's it's watch hours in the past year so then you just have
01:12:12
to hit this like 90 day streak of three public uploads so like maybe you've hit 500 subscribers and 3 000 watch hours like just for three months make some
01:12:23
videos that are maybe not to your full magnitude of what a video is Andrew it's to do it once just at the beginning everybody will understand go back to one every six months every single person will understand I'm just trying to help
01:12:35
myself cope because it has been um you're in the 14 months YouTube video I know I am but still I I do think though it is I know it's a I wrote that in here like how much money are you
01:12:47
really making at 3 000 watch hours like not very much there is there is a a time
01:12:52
period of like when you get eligible then they need to approve you and you get into the monetization and it does it
01:12:58
is it like a day or does it take like a couple weeks to get that all set okay I couldn't tell you today it's probably it's much shorter than I did it but yeah
01:13:05
it's definitely nice it's pretty quick for me okay I do think there's like that potential like if you're starting to see some momentum on your channel and then
01:13:11
maybe you are posting quite a bit and now with half the subscribers and a thousand less watch hours maybe you hit
01:13:18
that monetization get it all signed up like you have that potential where that next video does pop off or like your
01:13:24
videos are starting to pop off because of the momentum and now you're just a little sooner getting into that monetization and it's adding up a little
01:13:31
quicker and ultimately it's still probably gonna be a pretty minuscule amount of money but like it is nice to
01:13:37
get there yeah if it was at some like life-changing number where because you keep you don't get like kicked out the
01:13:43
second you stop uploading like you're still in so at the very beginning like I just looked
01:13:48
it up three three million views on a short for our Channel which is pretty good shorts uh 179 so oh you might miss out on 179 dollars
01:14:01
if you didn't get in yeah and you just make another video and then you're in yeah for sure uh I also have a we do
01:14:08
public uploads count as shorts straws count yeah oh my God you make three shorts you make three shorts for short
01:14:14
videos or whatever yeah make one video that gets it and then make two regular public uploads yeah I think so it does just say three public uploads and it's
01:14:20
counting shorts yeah I didn't realize that I didn't realize that either YouTube YouTube action has
01:14:26
changed no I can but I also want to say um it makes sense for them to half the amount of subscribers you need because
01:14:32
over the last couple of years YouTube has de-prioritized subscribers so much because their algorithm has gotten so
01:14:38
good that videos can just blow the heck up from people that have like a thousand
01:14:44
subs and get they can get multiple millions of views it's just because the algorithm is so good at serving good
01:14:50
content now yeah subscribers are really now just like a nice bonus like if you just strictly algorithmically speaking Yeah the advantage to having subscribers is those people ideally watch your video
01:15:04
quickly at the beginning and then sort of like heat soak the information about the video to the algorithm so that it knows how it will perform when they start recommending it so at the beginning when you first upload
01:15:14
YouTube's not recommending it and they're sort of like waiting for it to populate a little bit so they go oh I
01:15:20
think it'll respond well with this group and then and start recommending it yeah if you have a lot of subscribers YouTube knows very quickly who it will work well
01:15:27
with and can start recommending it very quickly yeah that's the benefit I got served a video yesterday from some girl
01:15:32
who made a video called like how to live a happy life and it's like a four minute video of her just kind of like talking
01:15:38
in front of a camera being like I got rid of social media and now I'm feeling better and blah blah blah and she has
01:15:43
she had 17 subscribers and the video I had 2.3 million views Jesus that's actually impressive and it was her only it was her only video too I would be very pissed if that was me I couldn't have hit this a little later
01:15:57
2.3 million subscribers to only get 17 subscribers is actually it's very impressive it's crazy wow but it was her only video too so it's possible that people were just like come here there's
01:16:08
no history yeah if I saw a channel it had its first upload got 2 million views I would be like I need to subscribe to
01:16:13
see what this person did yeah like strange parts that's what happened to him yeah his first video got like 10 million views but building an iPhone in
01:16:19
China from Spirit oh yes oh yeah so many views and it was like his first upload incredible yeah I think this ultimately
01:16:27
just looks good for YouTube also because there's so many people who want to start who want to make YouTube videos and like
01:16:33
maybe a thousand subscribers he's a little unobtainable so explain that we're debating This and like we look over the fence and twitch is like
01:16:39
burning down everything over there like YouTube's just chilling Reddit is literally on fire yeah well YouTube
01:16:46
changed stuff a little bit yeah yeah so made it easier for people to make money yeah I definitely think that YouTube
01:16:52
wants to start enticing people to like keep making YouTube videos like they are pushing shorts a lot but there's like a
01:16:59
barrier right now it's like being able to actually make money on YouTube and I think they're trying to get people to be like no it's not that hard and now that
01:17:05
there's all these cameras out they like there's that new Sony camera that it has a uh it has a
01:17:12
what is it called it's not depth of field mode it's blurry background mode which is a button you press that
01:17:18
literally just lowers the aperture nice it's called blurry background everyone that's like when we talked a long time
01:17:25
ago about how cell phones and portrait mode are making people not understand that
01:17:30
it's just they just call them dslrs or mirrorless cameras have portrait mode so this is now literally yeah the Sony camera it's for it's for people that they just want to democratize making
01:17:42
content so much that yeah there's so many people consuming content and there's not enough
01:17:47
people making content so they're just people like they're just like you can make a video about anything just like
01:17:52
use blurry background mode or serve it to people just use the tools we make them after looking through all the footage from our WWDC blog which also
01:18:01
subscribe to the studio it's been just straight the heat lately and we have a great video we're gonna record right
01:18:06
after this I'm excited for but Alice should make a channel because I just watched I have I think I'm gonna have to make an uh like director's cut version
01:18:13
of that Vlog eventually because the amount of Ella's Clips in there that are just pure gold we did not have time for
01:18:19
obscene the man is a Content machine he is a machine he needs like a 24-hour live stream
01:18:25
which is a strap to his back at all times but not on Twitch but not on Twitch or Reddit
01:18:30
sick all right well that that's pretty much our time we uh we could talk forever about how normal people see
01:18:37
worry backgrounds as Pro but I will I will cut myself off from that rant right now and just not even get into it uh but
01:18:44
that's it for this week there will of course be a lot more updates on pretty much all the stuff we've talked about including whatever happens with Reddit
01:18:50
whatever happens with Volvo's 35 000 EV uh and so we'll keep you guys posted on that but the show notes are filled with the stuff that's most useful right now so check that out either way until the
01:19:01
next one thanks for watching thanks for listening catch you later peace trivia trivia trivia no no I actually thought you were
01:19:13
screwing with us I don't even remember wait you guys both leaned in a little bit I was like that's too much engagement for a normal outro I actually
01:19:21
also forgot about the trivia if it makes you feel yes I am never forget about this it's because Ellis isn't here and
01:19:26
we don't have his crazy questions that burn in your brain yeah okay so I I was just trying to get out because I know I
01:19:31
don't know any of the answers trivia okay question number one I don't know yeah it's fine what year was blue microphones founded Lord is this um the
01:19:52
highest without going close without going over closest without going over closes out going over
01:19:58
you guys whatever closest without going over without going over without going over I don't like Price is
01:20:10
Right rules me neither I like prices right which is used don't like the rules I like Delta rules
01:20:15
that requires too much math it does it's just a difference that's a lot slip and
01:20:20
read what do you got yeah all right over I said 1969. or 2009 I wrote 1992. whoa It was 95 but David's closest they
01:20:36
came out in 95 95 1995. Dave it's just the closest period Yeah Yeah by all mathematics do you have like their first uh product I do not baby boss the
01:20:49
snowball I'm assuming for you because it was 25 years because it was created when the Earth was
01:20:56
created honestly I should have put zero BC second question can besides Alexis Ohanian can you name the other two Reddit Founders one point per founder and I
01:21:10
will accept just first name as well oh gosh I read this on Wikipedia yeah writing games that feel Foundry
01:21:22
John Mohammed Sean just the most common names yeah just pick the most common name
01:21:28
Jesus David for sure David's number six I believe is it really it's the I think it's the sixth most common male name on the planet wow all right flip him and read what do you got you know number one
01:21:44
do you want to read is there two names Marcos what do you got I said Chris and Evan but you can put two names there's two there's two of them for each one I only know one of them so I wrote
01:21:59
one as [ __ ] and two as Steve Huffman oh do I get double points for that no okay correct wait was Steve Huffman
01:22:06
right yes okay cool so you both get one point the other founder was Aaron Schwartz yeah I
01:22:14
wouldn't have got that yeah they pitched they went to Y combinator and pitched a different idea together first before
01:22:20
they made Reddit I believe I was looking this up yeah during all of this research but I did not remember Aaron every
01:22:26
startup Evergreen with twitch too trivia question how many gills does a shark have 16. wait like gills counts as both sides of their neck on each side on each side
01:22:38
seven eight sixteen those really interesting answers thanks for watching wait what is this
01:22:46
thanks for listening it's actually it depends on the type of shark oh my God six six seven and eight are all correct
01:22:51
really yeah sharks can have up to seven external Gale openings but most species have five oh five sorry five six and
01:22:58
seven are correct uh anyway thanks for watching thanks for listening okay what about trivia in the next one I'm in a Time loop I gotta get out of here give you the time
01:23:10
loop again waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Reverend we're partnering with the VOX media podcast Network and our intro after music is
01:23:16
from vein Sill [Music] y