People vs Platforms
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I've just been in Miami the last four days, and I think I'm coming around to the idea that this is not a place where serious people can actually exist. Everyone is in nincompoop. Getting anything done is nearly impossible. It's so loud everywhere. Too many people are walking around at two o'clock on a Tuesday in all spandex. That seems nice. That sounds amazing. Yeah. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that?

No. What do you think fucking Elon Musk would say if he saw these people walking around on a Tuesday at 2 p.m. in all spandex? He would say, I can see your balls. And Troy would go, fuck, this guy's a comedy genius. Why did I all of a sudden get put in the Elon Musk booster bucket? Because you've been an Elon Musk booster. That's kind of...

When you said he's a genius and he's funny and hot. I thought you were doing it for strategic reasons because, you know, the private equity overlords love that talk. I'll go. I'll go.

People vs. Algorithms is a show about detecting patterns in media, technology, and culture. I'm Brian Morrissey, writer of the rebooting newsletter and a podcast of the same name. And each week, I'm joined by longtime media executive, investor, and advisor, Troy Young, who writes the People vs. Algorithms newsletter, as well as Alex Schleifer of Universal Entities. This podcast is produced by JSparks, Podhelpless. We're

We're closing out the year with a series of conversations that look at the trends that will define these patterns in media, technology, and culture in the year ahead. Last week, we started with an episode focused on artificial intelligence, and this week, we are looking ahead to what lies in store for platforms, and particularly social platforms, as they are in a time of transition. I

I feel like we're in an in-between period in lots of areas right now. The role of giant tech platforms, not just in relation to media and advertising, but also in our culture and society is obviously changing.

If you think back just a few years ago, consider how different platforms like Facebook and Twitter were viewed. The rise of social media was a great story. I mean, and the story was that it would unite people in ways that were impossible before. And that by bringing people together, great things would happen. Collective action was possible. I remember back in 2008 that the improbable rise in election of Barack Obama was credited in part by his savvy use of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook,

Barack even ended up following me on Twitter. I was one of several thousand people who he did. The revolution in Egypt and elsewhere was also aided by these platforms around 2010, 2011. And yet the tide turned subsequently, you know, from the election of Trump to the spread of disinformation and hate speech and the accompanying thorny issues of content moderation and

All these have come together to cast these platforms in very different light. And now, oftentimes, they seem like they're more tools of control than of liberation. So this week, we look ahead and we discuss what to expect as we sort through the role of platforms and how perhaps they've grown too big and powerful for their and our own good.

So I think of two dates when it comes to sort of the history of digital media and the commercial internet. And they're both around like tech platforms. And one is August 19th, 2004. That's when Google went public. And that's when people understood that paid search was going to dominate the internet. And the other was in January 25th, 2011, when Tahrir Square in Cairo happened and hashtag...

January 25th, trended and was giving credit for toppling the government there. I think both those things, I feel like we're coming to the end of a era of some kinds with the platforms. And I'm not sure what comes next, but Troy, I want to start with you. First of all, do you think we're at an inflection point when it comes to platforms and the role they play? Well, not platforms per se, but what platforms do for us, I think. I think we're at a

inflection point. I mean, you have to maybe take a step back and kind of, I think it'd be useful if just for a minute we mapped the history of these things. Like, what are they and how did we get here? So, just to simplify the history of it, you know, we had the internet and we had pages and we had email. So, we had things you could publish, things that connected what you publish, like links, right? Links are important in this story and email. And

From that, a new type of media started to emerge. What was vitally different between it and old media was it was interactive.

And, you know, many people could create and you could get feedback and it could be optimized and you could measure it or you can measure it and optimize it. Right. And so we started with these pages and then platforms evolved to make it easier to publish pages. And then blogging platforms came along so that anybody could publish pages. Right. And eventually they became more than.

you know, publishing platforms, they became communication platforms. So they started to integrate the function of email. So you had content plus communication, which is a vital part of the story because it's kind of why we are, that's the emergence or the foundation of social networking.

And when communication came along, it necessitated the evolution of some identity. So if you're communicating, we need a file that says this is who you are. And so basically, Facebook privatized essentially identity. They own the biggest pool of information about people, right? And they connected people.

And then there was a stage after that where they started, and it wasn't the first part of this, they started to add content because they had people connecting in their environments and they needed something for them to do. So it became not just about, you know, connecting your network and attention, it became, or about connecting your network, connecting people and communication became also about media.

And once you did that, you know, the machine needed to optimize for your attention. So it started trying to create algorithms that maximized engagement. And that's kind of the genesis of this whole thing. And then at that time, the kind of media game itself shifts from curation to

Which is people thinking about what a package of content ought to be on a front page in a magazine, whatever, to optimization of what people are actually consuming. Which created, you know, there's been enough talk about like the rage machine and all that stuff. But it does certainly create some type of perverse incentive.

And those guys made all the money. So they kept innovating on a horizontal vector, right? A thing that enabled lots of people to create and connect and a place that you could put content because suddenly all these media companies realized that people wouldn't just seek out their content. They needed a place to get audiences, right? And they had the scale, they had the data, right? So in that war or that evolution, horizontal won.

Meaning, which is a platform, a thing that enables lots of other things, right? And it won for lots of reasons because it has superior monetization system, because it had the scale to invest in much more effective technology. And it was a place where you could gather content efficiently from lots of different sources.

And then at that point, I think what happened is publishers started optimizing for platforms. It really created different incentives and behaviors inside of media companies.

So I think of the history of platforms or platforms as a spectrum, and Alex probably helped me out on this, from sort of those that are communication centric to those that are more content centric. Right. So to me, kind of YouTube is a content platform and Snapchat is a communications platform principally.

And they sort of sit along that spectrum and they all kind of mix both, right? Famously, Snapchat wanted to deepen engagement. They added content to it, you know, the Discover tab, all that.

And so, you know, with that, I mean, if you just kind of look back, so this is part of a broad, the story is this is part of a broad evolution in our world of basically turning a whole bunch of different companies into DTC companies, companies that connected direct with consumers. And it wasn't just social networks that connected directly, created platforms, but media companies then needed to connect directly with streaming, right? And commerce came after that.

And all other, many, many other parts of the sort of economy, including financial services, et cetera. And now we are at a point, I just wanted to start there and say, what is a platform? Well, a platform are these enabling technologies that enable broad sets of people to do things around the publishing, creation, consumption of content and connecting with one another. And suddenly something changed.

And so when we look ahead to 2023, I think what we're asking ourselves is what changed and how is that going to play out in what,

emerges next to replace the platforms that we spent so much time on for the last decade. And that's kind of the context I wanted to provide. So, Alex, why don't you come in here with like from your perspective? You're our man on the ground in Silicon Valley. Like what changed? I mean, because a lot of these platforms and the people that run them sort of went from being

the heroes to the villains. But what do you see as having changed? The obvious thing is just the way people feel about these platforms where they used to be really optimistic and excited about the technology and felt really new to be able to connect with friends. But then they did a lot of things around privacy and January 6th and all these types of things that just like diminished those brands. And it didn't feel as cool, I think, especially for young people to

to post things on Facebook or Twitter or then Instagram. And, you know, a lot of them moved to things like TikTok. So I think it's just overall brand equity of what used to be called social networks. Whichever model they used, I think that brand's kind of gone down and there's a lot of talk now about people moving away from social network. I think the thing that happened that was probably more disruptive was the fact that messaging apps became...

A really great way of maintaining smaller, more curated networks. And people started using things like iMessage or WhatsApp to really have these different clusters of people that they talk to. And then social networks became

less pertinent to their day-to-day. Like, you didn't really need to go to something like Facebook to talk to your high school friends because, you know, you might have them in iMessage or WhatsApp and these apps, you know, act more and more like social networks, like telling you when somebody joined, etc. Yeah. And I also think that beyond that, like, the risk and the cost of posting things live that go out into the public became, like, I think just not worth it, right? Yeah.

But isn't it that they just became a drag? I mean, going on Facebook just...

I mean, it's not fun. I mean, and I think that's the big risk with Twitter is like, it's not a really enjoyable experience, at least my view. I guess everyone's experience is different. At least with LinkedIn, it's not a good experience, but you might get some sales off it. One of my favorite social networks right now is that message thread between you, Troy, and I. I agree. I agree. I love it. You know, I think that

Alex made a couple of points. One is that social networking became uncool. The second one was that we don't actually need them to connect us the way we used to because we're so intertwined through a variety of different communication applications and kind of the default is to share your phone number with people that you care about. And texting is really important, group texting. But I think that, you know,

for as many kind of majors and minors that exist, I mean, everybody has their own kind of combination of how they connect with people in different modes and different circumstances and different types of relationships. It's not monolithic anymore. And so it's a kind of fragmented thing. We don't need one telco. And I think that's important. And then I think you have the emergence as well of sort of community enabling platforms. And I think that's what Substack's becoming.

which is a way to create, it's kind of old fashioned in that way. It's like a blog roll, you know, it's, it's, it's ways of an individual saying, this is what I'm interested in and these are my people and this is my content and kind of gather around this fire and we'll share around this fire. And I think that sub sack is surprising me actually in that,

It's much more than managing an email list. It is becoming foundational for community. And, you know, the one thing I thought today, by the way, which is sort of related, is that Substack's, to me, most similar to Shopify. Oh, yeah. I've used that. You must be reading the rebooting. I wrote a whole freaking thing about, like, Substack's Shopify problem. What?

Well, so anyway, you have these, you know, tools that give you more power and control. Ultimately, email is great. People have gone back to it because you control your list. That's really empowering. And I think you're going to see a lot more than that. But you've also seen, I think there was an announcement by Instagram this week that you can now share links or share posts from Instagram inside of your own private Instagram community, which is another manifestation of, I think, the same phenomenon.

So in other words, the thing that I described at the beginning, which was total horizontalization, if that's a word, is now kind of turning into these kind of vertical community clusters. And I think you're going to see more of that in 23. And it's interesting that it kind of harkens back to older models, right? Like newsletters, email, and then Discord is essentially IRC. It's essentially IRC. It's just a safer, I think...

I think what these platforms have figured out is that people want these things, but they just want to be safer. And I think, you know, I think the verge keeps talking about how the, the, you know, what, what, what social networks are selling is essentially a safe place. It's essentially moderation. And what discord said, and you, and, and is saying, Hey, we're creating this high quality safe space to essentially have an IRC conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think that's the interesting thing is, not to get into the Elon Musk thing, but might as well, is I think it said, and it's correct, that content moderation is the product to some degree. And whether he has some grand plan and knew this going in, I think he's starting to discover that content moderation is a very human and messy thing. And the Twitter files that got released...

I didn't read all of them. From what I saw, it was sort of unexpected, not unexpected, expected. And that like, there's a bunch of people grappling with some serious and difficult issues without any easy answer. Like a lot of people like to pop off that it's super simple. You just say free speech.

Because at the end of the day, people don't want to be in a... They talk about the town square. People don't want to be in a schoolyard where they're going to go out and get punched in the balls by the bully. Nobody wants that. Or few people want that. Some people want...

Some people are looking for that combat thing, but... Isn't it kicked in the balls? Oh, no. In France, we punch. Yeah. I thought you punch in the throat, kick in the balls. Oh, no. I kick in the throat and I punch in the balls.

It's a Van Damme situation. But, you know, like I think at the end of the day, that's what these social networks became. And when you look at the Twitter files, I think a lot of it is like, fuck, I don't want... They want the business to survive and be pleasant to use. And, you know, the ones that are doing this at a really high level are Apple saying, you know, we're just going to full-on censor a bunch of shit we don't think people want. And...

You know, I mean, you can choose and it's working for them. But, you know, I think that's what's pushing people into smaller communities. So does that mean we'll just see splintering and actually more filter bubbles, more tight, smaller filter bubbles? But they're not filter bubbles. They're not filter bubbles. The problem with a filter bubble is that it's unbeknownst to you.

You don't see the filter, right? It's not selective. It's just like, you know, you start all of a sudden seeing a certain type of information because you like a certain type of information. This is me saying, you know what? I just want to talk to these people right now. It's much more selective and I think it's much healthier. Discord is, and I, you know, and if you wanted to see how that was working, I think Reddit is a more successful publishing social network than Facebook is because of that.

Won't it be strange if social networks like Reddit and LinkedIn end up being far more durable models than Facebook and what came before? Is your mom on Reddit? Is this a joke? No, I'm just wondering. Is my mom? No, she's not. Not that I know of. You know what would be fun, guys, is to go through...

you know, a short list of social networks and just sort of opine on whether they win or lose on 23 and what happens to them. Yes. Okay. Let's, let's do some winners and losers. That's always fun. Okay. We're going to, I'm going to, I'm going to mix them up and we got to start. I'll start with you, Troy, uh, Elon Musk in 2023. Is he a winner or a loser? It's going to be a tough year for Elon. I think that, that Twitter comes out of this as being, um, uh,

A platform that caters to a different type of person. And I think that he'll... What is that type of person? I'll be on it. I'm that type of person. It's going to get worse before it gets better. I think it remains a hugely important repository of data, as Alex highlighted last week.

I think that Elon risks becoming the pillow guy of social networking. And I think that it becomes a little bit of a kind of, someone's yelling upstairs. Hold on. Just one sec, guys, please. Hey, Jill, can you be quiet? Mom, I'm trying to podcast. I think it becomes the social network for, you know, kind of right-leaning libertarian community.

And I think that's going to take a whole lot of fun from it. Like I've said for a long time, nobody wants to go to a mega party in high school. But Alex, I mean, this is like along the lines of your prediction, right? Like, I mean, shouldn't like these, I mean, these...

The social networks will narrow in their focus and who they're catering to. If you're into that kind of thing, you'll go to Twitter. Yeah, I mean, I think Twitter offers a very unique way of distributing your content. And it's going to be hard to kill Twitter because it's useful. I think Twitter is going to be

okay in some sort of capacity i think elon's brand is going to be seriously damaged even more because he's already showing that he can't stick to his own you know free speech free speech up to absolutism because that creates i think a space that people just don't want to be in but you know i think it's going to become the singer of rocket man doesn't want the rocket man so so sad

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I, I, I feel like Twitter is kind of just, it's going to be, Twitter hasn't really moved in decades. I don't think it's going to move. I think it's kind of static as a business. Hey guys, you know what I did? You know what I did related to that? I did a survey of my own Troy Young private survey of, I call it the Twitter gift guide. And I, I,

Looked at all of the companies advertising on Twitter right now and what they were selling. And I put together a thoughtful list of things that people could buy for the holidays. And Twitter on the ad side has become like the worst of late night TV.

Right. Like it is, I mean, there's, you know, some useful things like the, uh, Lapo flying circular drone. There's a nice tea strainer. There's a little choo choo train that makes domino strings for you, which I liked, but there's, you know, other weird shit on there. Like. The ear cleaning thing. The ear cleaning thing. I saw the USB. I thought the USB camera that you can put inside of different orifices was interesting. Yeah.

There's one thing that cuts, it's called a chicken shredder. Let's talk about Facebook. You know, I think Facebook is a winner in the back half of the year because like nobody's been making fun of the metaverse for a couple months. But what about 2023? That's winning, I think.

When you say Facebook, do you mean meta or do you mean Facebook? We'll say meta because we got to encompass the... I mean, yeah, we'll say meta. Right. Okay. Do you want me to answer that, Brian? No, let's start with Alex. All right. Okay.

I think it's going to look like they're winning because I think the stock and company is probably undervalued and probably has a lot of juice left in it. So maybe as the economy starts kicking up again...

That stock's going to feel like it was a buy in 2022 and people are going to say, you see, it's actually still a good business. I think it's on a decline. I don't see a way out of the fact that their core properties are just becoming seriously uncool and they're not getting maybe the traction that they should. And also, like, I think on the advertising side of things, I do think, you know, the fact that all of these platforms like Netflix and Disney and stuff like that are starting to add

advertising tiers means that there's just going to be less money in the pool. So I don't know. They're kind of like... That I disagree with. I don't think so. I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe. But I think that if you're... There's a big pool to replace in television, Alex. Right. But as behaviors are still like kind of shifting over to mobile and their mobile product on advertising isn't as exciting as it once was because they don't have all the tracking and Apple's not done fucking with them, I think. So...

You know, that's my thought. So I think it remains a loser even though the stock might bump back up. That's my prediction. Fuck, that sounds like Scott Galloway. All right. Ouch. Troy, have at him. Okay, so let's just tighten this up a little. Time for some Troy-splaining. Well, Facebook's the phone book, so it dies slowly. Oh, Rupert Murdoch said that once.

Instagram fucked up because they tried to combine the optimization slash navigational model of friends and photographs with the world and video, and they're completely different.

And I think they just succeeded in confusing the users. And at the same time, it's becoming less and less cool. What a tragedy. The most valuable kind of replacement of lifestyle media in terms of an advertising environment in some place. And a place, quite frankly, that used to be quite pleasurable, I find kind of annoying.

And I think I use, I personally use WhatsApp a lot, particularly with my Euro friends. And I think that, you know, they're probably going to set, they're going to focus in on WhatsApp as an opportunity for innovation, particularly. Wait, what about the metaverse? Isn't the whole company about the metaverse? I was going to get to the metaverse. Well, I mean, if you're putting it last, that says a lot.

I think that, that I think Zuck over a three to five year horizon will be redeemed on the metaverse. Not because suddenly everyone's wearing those horizon, whatever the headsets are called, but because there's an immense amount of innovation that's happening in pure kind of research based innovation that will,

that the company will find value in around how to bring displays and information closer to our body and around AI.

And so I think they're solving problems that they may not have set out explicitly to solve with the hardware that we see today. And there, there'll be, there'll be, you know, real, real value in that. So that's not really a 23 prediction. I think it's going to be really hard to sell that particular product in 23, but there'll be a redeeming moment for him somewhere inside of that huge multi-billion dollar investment.

Yeah. I mean, if the metaverse advancements happen like AI, I feel like a lot of people are going to have to go back and delete a lot of tweets making fun of the metaverse.

Seems to be happening. All right. Let's move on. No way, man. No way. No way. The metaverse will happen the same way, the same reason just video games will become more and more relevant, right? So you've got the Minecrafts and the Roblox and stuff like that. That stuff is happening. It's not the metaverse will happen. It's just we put a name...

on something that is really, really hard to define. But their strategy is fucked. It's fucked. It's not going anywhere. Okay, but it is a definitional issue. I'm reminded of the very short big data era in that a lot of times you just put marketing slogans on things. So is there a scenario where the metaverse, quote-unquote metaverse, succeeds in that basically it's just higher quality...

Video graphics? Like, is that success look like? Here's the issue. They've kind of redefined it. And if you look at what they actually need to do, is that they're essentially saying, we're going to beat...

Apple and Microsoft at OS. We're going to beat Microsoft, Activision, Sony at video games. We're going to beat Epic at creating a space where people want to hang out with in Fortnite. We're going to beat Zoom at becoming the new communication platform. We're going to beat all of these things and it's all going to be in 3D, right? And we're going to... And all of these things need to happen for...

for them to kind of win at that metaverse or, or be kind of a major player. They don't have any of these pieces. They don't have IP. They don't have a creative bone in their body. They don't have an operating system. They don't have a, you know, means of distribution. They have to go through all of these other players to get through to, to the, to the consumer. And they don't have a brand that makes people want to put their shit on their face. They're, they're, they're screwed. There's no way this is like,

They're going to slowly stop doing it. Oh, my God. You called them a winner just a couple minutes ago. It sounds like this is winning. I mean, I think, like I said, I said Facebook is going to look decent because the stock's going to go back up because they're going to stop getting distracted by this unwinnable metaverse thing. I think he also, but Alex, you maybe, I mean, that was a fierce argument.

indictment. But I liked it too. But the, the, uh, it seems to me that AI and the metaverse are, are very intimately related where this kind of continuous rendering of an alternative reality is getting closer, driven by machines, be it visual or tech space. And we're now seeing that there is an emerging inhabitable digital world that's created by computers that provides the foundation for a virtual experience. Yeah.

That's hard. Are we sure people want this? I don't know. This is an assumption, but do people want it? Well, I mean, first of all, this sounds to me like, yes, the technology is a good idea. Now, let's try to create a space that people want to hang out in, right? And if you want a metaverse experience today, today, just hop on

do yourself a favor and hop onto Fortnite. Yes. No, no, it's incredible. I mean, first of all, Fortnite is fun. It's a safe space. Like I don't feel like I get like kind of as much insults thrown at me. Punched in the balls. Yeah. I don't get punched in the balls. I am like Darth Vader is riding some sort of boat with Spider-Man. Why? Like Godzilla is in the background. Like it's, it's insane. And, uh, people are spending millions of dollars on it. And, uh,

You know, there it is, right? Like, what does Facebook have in any sense of the word that is even close to anything like that?

I guess one of the things that I can't help thinking is it's going to be like that Bell Labs moment where Steve Job walked in and said, wait, there's a GUI? You guys made a GUI and you made a mouse? I'll take that and I'll turn it into something that consumers like. And I feel like that kind of baseline research is going to come out of what Meta's doing and someone's going to figure out how to turn it into a better product. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg's a guy who's going to do that? Yeah.

Finger on the pulse of like society. I don't know. No way. I never said Mark Zuckerberg would do it. I said that important technology comes out of there. Did you guys read about the AI? It's sort of like GitHub for the scientific community that came out of Facebook that created a bit of controversy. No. Okay. What is it? Do you want us to find out?

No, there's a guy who writes about AI. Someone asked for show notes last week, by the way. I can dig up the link. By the way, Facebook might have a big role to play in AI and they're spending a lot of money and this might actually be a better place to spend their money. The metaverse stuff is dead in the water. All right, let's go on to number four, which is TikTok. TikTok.

I think TikTok's going to have a big year. I don't think it's going to get banned or any of that stuff. It'll work out the political regulatory issues. Yeah. Troy, you want to start? Yeah, why not? Thanks for asking, Alex. A couple of things. I think TikTok's going to make a streaming product that brings it to your couch. Maybe I'm behind on this, but I haven't seen it.

And I think that TikTok has done an interesting thing. This will give me an opportunity to bridge into the streaming discussion, which is another type of platform. But I don't want Discovery to pollute my HBO experience with a bunch of Discovery reality TV. I just don't want it. I want a pure experience in the interface that shows that have a kind of signal-to-noise ratio that appeals to me.

And once they start dumping a bunch of discovery crap into my Mac's interface, I'm going to be annoyed by it. What occurred to me when I was ranting about that was, wait, wait, wait, I'm going to bring it back. Okay, I'll bring it all the way back to TikTok positive, negative, all that. So the first, the thing that I thought was interesting is TikTok has replaced, I think for a lot of young people, junkie television.

So I think you still take a moment to watch something that's worthy of your time, that's well-crafted and all that stuff. That's, you know, something that we want to have a conversation around. But I think for a lot of just kind of junky reality TV, TikTok is taking that time or is taking that time. And I think that it's so enjoyable to watch that it's not unreasonable to think that they would create an interface where you can

select a bunch of content and watch it sitting back rather than on your phone. So I think that's interesting. I think it's a political hot potato and I think it could go, it's hard to predict how it goes because it's going to take a lot of capital to rescue it. But there's so much like the Republicans are going to use it as

As a, you know, just a thing that they can put pressure on. And so I do think there's a lot of political risk around TikTok, but ultimately someone rescues it. I think YouTube takes more and more share in our world.

And they're the closest in my mind to being able to kind of, with YouTube Shorts, vertical video are the closest to kind of like getting in the wake of what TikTok's created in terms of an appetite for a certain type of content. YouTube is just a juggernaut. It's cable television. It's the biggest library of anything you wanted to know about. And it's also TikTok-like experience. So YouTube's a big winner here.

And yeah, that's what I got for you. Yeah. Alex? So, I mean, I think we'll probably talk about YouTube separately. I agree with Troy. I think, yeah, TikTok, they're going to figure something out about the security stuff. I do think it's going to be

kind of heated around it. But I think people will make something happen. I think they need to figure out what happens when they truly start to monetize it and how does that experience work with short videos. I think they can likely figure it out. The thing that I'm not sure they'll figure out, which YouTube

is incredible at and is maybe sometimes underreported is how they manage creators and paying creators. You know, YouTube has now many years of experience figuring out how to, you know, make people not only stars, but also incredibly wealthy. I don't think you could be a Mr. Beast on TikTok. And so to me, it's,

To me, TikTok is going to win, but it's not going to maybe be the thing that takes over everything like is often predicted. Yeah, because I mean... But I agree with Troy. I agree with Troy. It is kind of the junk TV of this generation. Yeah, but what's interesting about TikTok is that it's pure algorithm. There's no follow model and...

I think the follow model has sort of seen its day to some degree. But I think at some point people, it depends if the platform depends on people having a career on them. Like I think TikTok might be building a thing where you can have a lot of great content, but not a lot of careers. Yeah.

Well, I think it's going to be interesting to see if they become a true platform. And you have to do a ton of different things in order to support creators beyond distribution and monetization. And they're not there yet. But they're doing it at a time when it's a sort of well-established playbook. I mean, they could just copy YouTubes, right? You know what I find, just for a sec, if we could reflect back to the beginning of this conversation.

which is the emergence of the extension of a page model and email into new types of interconnected content creation and just a kind of new hive mind and just a different cultural fabric that we live in now, is back then I would never ever have predicted that something like TikTok would exist.

Only because I just, I think growing up the way I did with kind of mass media, that the idea that the people could create content that's so compelling, like I wouldn't have believed that. Like I thought you had to be a professional to make content. It had to be, you know, a well-financed, drawn out, deliberate kind of undertaking. And when I look at TikTok, I'm just amazed by how compelling the entertainment product is.

for something that's completely distributed and home generated. It's cool, right? It's really interesting. Yeah, I think it just shows that if you give enough tools to enough people and then have an algorithm that's good enough to sift through it, you will always find gold. Yeah. True. So do we want to get into the YouTube as a separate one and Google's

Google overall or no? I think we kind of did YouTube. I wouldn't mind going to two others, Brian, if you think it's... What do we got? Be real? No, I think that Snap and Pinterest are interests to surf by. Oh, fucking Pinterest. Yeah. Troy, let's get on to Pinterest because I did not want to overlook the Pinterest in this discussion because too often Pinterest is overlooked.

I'm not a power user. I'm not a power user. Well, actually, this afternoon, I was updating my Pinterest boards. I think Pinterest is going to really struggle because of AI. Because now I can find... It's just that there's a lot of ways to get imagery, ultimately, that augment or replace it. I mean, and it's hard for me to say that, but it's just maybe that's just kind of my... I don't know. That's my, like, where does AI take us kind of point of view. But...

I'm not a big Pinterest user, but I use like Google images. I use like Matt and I use... Pinterest should be owned by Google. I've always just thought like, why doesn't Google just buy it? Like, it's just, I don't think Pinterest... Because they'll shut it, they'll just buy it and shut it down. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you know, computer generated images aren't going to replace everything, but they're going to replace a lot.

It's going to replace a lot of, you know, like why go get an image when you could just make one? Well, I have a different opinion, but I would love to hear. Brian seemed to be excited about talking about Pinterest. I'm not excited, honestly. I do have a Pinterest board. I haven't updated in quite some time. What's on it? Like white t-shirts and airline headphones? Yeah.

These are not airline headphones. These are skull candy. This is a corporate swag, I think, from some event like four or five years ago. There's no place for bullying here, Troy. No, I don't have anything to say on Pinterest. I don't care about Pinterest.

So it's, it's, it's, I just, I don't, I, I can't, I can't even fake it. I just, I don't really care. And it's not like, all right. Well, I mean, it's Pinterest. Like, it's just, it's, I don't like, it's a nice business and everything like this. I'm sure, et cetera, but it's never, it's never become like important culturally. It's never become important as like a monetization platform. It's fine.

It's fine. I feel more strongly about LinkedIn. But let's, I mean, we should talk about LinkedIn, but I think Pinterest, it's funny, you were talking about AI. Troy, I have a, I think this is, if,

Pinterest will either be killed by AI or will be saved by AI because I do think they have a pretty incredible data set of categorized image and with the human creation added to it, that could mean that they can do something interesting with AI where they can finally say, hey, find me pants that look like this and they can turn it into a commerce play. So,

They're either killed by it or they're saved by it. So maybe it's my ignorance. Explain to me what Pinterest has ever done interesting on a product site. Could you see how I've missed it? Brian, they let you put...

images into a waterfall grid which used to take a lot of work using a wordpress template earlier so okay so i can do that it's like okay all right i think pinterest has taken up enough time it's exciting now what about you know i wouldn't mind throwing it over to let's talk about canva next yeah i wouldn't mind throwing it over to you brian and getting your take on what does 2023 hold for snap snapchat oh god i'm not like a uh no i don't want to do snapchat

I don't have strong feelings about these platform companies. I don't. Okay. Alex? Yeah, I think Snapchat is likely... The problem with Snapchat is that a lot of their audience for anything that isn't just messaging is going to be taken over by TikTok. And so it all depends now if TikTok successfully manages to put more communication into its platform and whether it wants to, then it'll become like...

you know, trouble for Snapchat. I think their overall, because they had, they had kind of metaverse kind of AR ambitions. They don't have the capital to do it.

So they're kind of sitting and waiting to see if somebody else comes in and eats their lunch, right? And so I think they're in trouble. I mean, it's a tough one, isn't it? Because they're just not big enough to compete on the areas that they wanted to compete on. Maybe they go private in 23. They could. I mean, like...

They were doing some interesting things with AR, right? But with all the cuts that they're doing and with the pressure that they're going to be under, I don't see how they continue that. And so then they're just kind of like also RAM. Yeah. Okay. Great. It's a bummer. What do you think, Troy? Bummer for Evan Spiegel. I think, yeah, I like him. I like a lot of the stuff that they've been doing. Yeah.

I like the brand. I like the ethos. I think they have good values. I think that the product is a bit of an albatross. And I think it's awkward to, it's always awkward to take something that's communication centric and make it into something else. And I agree. I think that once your ad model comes under that much pressure, you either start to oversaturate the experience with ads, in which case you

the value proposition deteriorates or you just don't have the money to be something else. And so, I think there's a lot of pressure on that company. It'll be interesting to see how he turns it out. He's a good product guy. So, let's give that one a... TBD? I would say negative, but we'll see. It'd be nice to be surprised. Are we going to move into streaming as well? I thought we're doing an entire episode on streaming. Yeah.

All right. Well, we can only, the only thing I would caveat is Alex and I have a thread that I don't know if you participated in, but you know, the streamers are platforms. There can only be a few, obviously the economics have shifted fundamentally from cable, but one of the interesting experiments in streaming is Netflix in gaming. And I was surprised to see a string of gaming promotions in my feed that

And then I clicked on one and it sent me to the app store. And that was a disappointing experience. But what was more interesting to me is if they did manage to integrate gaming, like I think casual gaming into the Netflix feed, could it take more of my time? Could it reduce churn?

Could it become a replacement for other places where I would spend time? And I think it's an interesting experience. Alex will make the point that the ecosystem is all fucked up and it's really hard for them to deliver the experience in their platform. That is the point that I will make. I think it will depend on whether or not Apple opens up in a meaningful way.

the ability for people to open third-party stores on the platform. Because until then, everything needs to run through the App Store, which is, by the way, the same thing that happens on any platform

game console, right? Like everybody's saying, well, Apple's taking 30%. Well, so is Sony, so is Microsoft, so is Nintendo. You know, you want to be on that platform, you have to pass some sort of, you know, verification and then give them a cut. And

every game company would love to just have their own launcher, right? So on a PC, you install Steam. Steam is a massive company, but you can install the Epic Game Store. You can install other things and these compete. And so everybody loves having their own app store because then they become means of distribution, which is what Epic is doing with their Epic Game Store. Netflix is going to

It's going to be a huge issue because all they're saying is like, look, part of your Netflix subscription is you get free games. Well, if I go on the app store, I can get many free games already. And if I'm on iOS, you know, and I pay for the Apple one subscription, which is where it's all going, I get Apple arcade and I get a bunch of high quality games. So the question is,

What is the value proposition? Is it that Netflix's IP is so powerful that I'd want to play specifically? No, the value proposition is taking an audience into an existing surface area and making it convenient for them to decide to play a game. It's already convenient. Wait, so they're going to make games themselves? So what they're doing now is they're making or purchasing games, right? Yeah.

What do they know about this? They have a gaming studio. They bought gaming studios. They integrate gaming into their feed. Isn't the entire big lesson out of all this with the platforms is maybe they should stay in their lane at some point? The thing is, it depends on how much patience they have, right? The thing is Google

Google tried this and shut it down because it takes years and years to create games and a lot of them just don't hit. Right. So it's, it's expensive. That's why gaming companies do games and like, you know, they don't like all of a sudden become like Netflix. Like I know like Xbox was all, and like, I remember hearing all this stuff and a lot of times I get it makes sense. Like you need to keep growing, growing, growing, growing, but like,

You know, maybe like you just stay in your lane a little bit. I mean, we'll see with TikTok when they try to become like more than just like they're doing really well at what they're doing right now. But who knows if they can do more of it. Sometimes you go into the passing lane, Brian.

That's true, but then you get back to your lane, at least in Europe. In the US, they stay on the – you can hang up. But, Troy, I still don't understand why you feel so optimistic about this as a strategy. Like, what is – like I said, what do they bring to the table that others don't? Okay. Well, I think we should separate –

And this is a little bit probably annoying for you guys, but optimism with my sort of curiosity about unconstrained innovation and what happens when a company goes after something that hasn't been done before and could potentially

uh, really, really changed the economics of that business. Now you've got three, I think you have three folks that are going to win at streaming, right? And all of them,

have something that is more than just... All of them have a bundle. Disney has a bundle. Prime has a bundle. YouTube has a bundle. So wait, you're not counting HBO Max as a winner?

You know, I actually think that they get swallowed up somehow. Oh, they will. They will. What about Roku? Is Roku the Pinterest of this scenario? Roku is a flea. Roku is irrelevant. Roku is ad tech, okay, with a disappearing hardware business. So Disney is going to be a big direct-to-consumer streaming platform. Prime is going to bridge...

you know, delivery, new kinds of services in like healthcare, buying all the shit you want and entertainment. And they're going to start to buy sports rights. YouTube is really strong. YouTube TV is incredible. The YouTube library is a massive moat. And I think YouTube gets stronger. It will be a place that they sell in other, uh, other programming options. It will be a bundle. So Netflix is,

While today is in kind of a really good position in terms of number of subscribers and international expansion is kind of like the one that, you know, they're thinking, well, what can we do next? How do we evolve this? And how do we lock customers in? Because they could have a pretty significant emergent churn problem because they're not a bundle.

And gaming is something that they thought that could, could keep people connected to the service. And it is admittedly a very different mindset and a very different creative challenge. So they then, you know, decided to put a bunch of capital against it and see what happens if they integrate sort of light gaming into their interface. And I think it's an interesting experiment. I understand what Alex is saying, but, uh,

Those guys are super enterprising. And so I kind of, you know me, Brian, I like to cheer for power. You are on the side of power, but it also just seems like a defensive move. I mean, dude, you know, I mean, they're doing it because... You know what? If we want to just all sit around this podcast and all agree on everything, it's fucking boring. I want to try to find other angles sometimes. Okay, fine angle. I just don't...

Let's say I don't disagree at all as to why they'd want to do this. There's a ton of money in it. It seems to be aligned because they're a media company. They know how to handle talent and stuff like that. But the place is littered with companies that thought, yeah, let's get into gaming. And then the second they do that, they realize, shit, this stuff's expensive. There's a lot of failure rate.

The talent pool is different. It brings in the problems of both like being a media company and a tech company. All the worst parts of it is super hard. And so I think that the current... But it's not super hard to do a basic game, Alex. It's actually very easy. But do people play? Well, my mother plays a lot of Solitaire.

Right, but there's a million free solitaires. But not connected to the thing that I log into every day. But I logged into my phone already and that's where the games are. This is what I'm saying. I don't think it's...

I don't think they have a distribution advantage or an IP advantage or they really know how to make games. And so that, you know, they can kind of like, you know, like Microsoft, you could say, well, they have the cloud and they can do streaming. And then they've been doing games for, you know, over, you know, nearly two decades now. They have the PC, they have all the developer tools, they have all this stuff. And even for them, it's incredibly hard to beat Microsoft.

Sony had their own game and they're acquiring or they're trying to acquire Activision. Not everybody talks about Call of Duty, but they're pretty clear that they want Activision because they want King and they want to get into mobile because even they weren't able to get into mobile without these acquisitions because making these hits is really hard. And so, you know, you might say like, well, yes, I can make you a Candy Crush clone in like, you know, two weeks, but it's not going to hit.

You know, it's just not, it's super hard. Okay. All right, let's leave it there. Well, we're not going to solve this, Troy. Well, but I think there's one other important topic on platforms. All right, go ahead. I don't want to steal your sort of moderational thunder, but like, well, all this leads us to looking ahead.

Where do media - media - how does our discussion about platforms impact media? The media that we know, digital media. And I just would - I think that we would make the podcast more complete if we just touched on media a little bit. Okay. Because to me, we're in the middle - someone sent me a thing yesterday that said, "Here's the new media model. It's podcast plus email plus community." Oh, that's me.

Was that me? Well, you didn't send it. Someone else sent it. Yeah. I spent a lot of time optimizing web businesses for that distribution and monetization paradigm. And now when I go, like last night I had dinner with someone who's running, I would say a large media brand that's

late to the, you know, build a big web thing game. And you sit and you think like, what's the roadmap for them? What advice would you give them about where to go when they're not winning at the web?

And should they win at the web? Do they just pour a bunch of money to winning at search, even though, you know, there's a bunch of other companies that are already way out ahead. And we're at this weird time where, you know, web centric media models in 23 are kind of dead.

And, you know, podcast, podcasting, incredibly viable for a few, right? Very low cost to create very compelling medium, but you know, it hard to make money unless you're really, really big, you know, email is the one distribution channel that you can own. So we love that. And it's intimate and all that. And it's simple, but,

But, you know, what did we see in 22, 21, 22? We saw a company called Recurrent go out and say, we can reinvent all these old media brands with affiliate. We saw our friend Neil say that, you know, we have a better monetization system. We can take down this great big old legacy thing and make it work.

And to me, it's an interesting inflection point for media. And I thought you'd have an opinion on that, Brian, because you, after all, are the rebooting. That's true. That's true. I would add a data point. I saw that Dash Meredith's November revenue is down 27%. I mean, obviously, that acquisition is going to be a tough one in 2023. And I mean, I think we're seeing the slow motion growth.

of the page view media complex, right? Those businesses are not as interesting as they were obviously before, but also heading into a downturn

Those structural weaknesses are going to become incredible liabilities. You already see what's going on. The Washington Post is in complete turmoil. That business is not going well. They're going in reverse on subscriptions. Digital ad revenue is down. We haven't even gotten into the teeth of the coming downturn. I think it's going to be a tough year for a lot of media brands.

Yeah, I mean, and I would add to that, Brian, that, you know, we've talked many times about the dependence that web-centric models, every media model has a dependence on some distribution, right? Like, that's just the way it goes. And so, all of those companies are dependent on Google.

So anything that happens that in any way changes the relevance of Google or how Google is ultimately leveraging the link, which is, again, the most important foundational kind of canonical thing in the history of platforms and the web, the link.

The thing that undermines the link undermines media companies. Because people start at Google, and if AI is going to start, or Google is going to start to spit out more well-formed queries that answer your question, responses to queries, then media doesn't get that traffic. And if media doesn't get that traffic, they have to find another way to get it. And they're not going to get it from social.

And many of them are not going to get it from email, certainly not with the kind of yield that they're expecting and the scale that they're expecting from other distribution options. So it's an interesting time. Yeah, it is. All right. Troy, that's a great segue because next week we're going to do people versus media. I don't know if we'll call it people versus media, but we're going to get deep into what to expect next year for digital media. Yeah.

Big thanks to Troy Alex and our podcast editor, Jay Sparks of Pod Help Us. A reminder, please do send me your feedback on the show. You can email me at bmarcy at gmail.com. And to leave the show a rating on Apple and Spotify. And if you're using Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review there. I hope it's nice, and I hope the ratings are five stars. I'm not going to love it.