Hello, and welcome to the VergeCast. The flagship podcast of the Verge Radio Network. There's only one podcast. I'm still not over-controlled sleeping over.
Still think about it. But anyway, this is the VergeCast. The flagship podcast of the Verge multi-channel media experience. I'm Eli Patel, I'm the editor in chief of the Verge.
I'm joined by a kind of an OG crew today. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Deeter Bone is here.
Hello. How's it going, Eli? It's going. Yeah, I was putting together a rundown.
It was a lot of news this week, and all of it was of medium size. I was unable to help you with the rundown because I was yelling at Samsung, which I think we should talk about later. Yeah. So there was big tech news.
We'll get to it in the middle. Travis Kalnek has resigned as a CEO. I mean, that's a huge news. Caitlin and I talked for a while here at Coming Up on the Show.
She had a big dive into Tumblr. Tumblr is my own by Verizon. That has lots of changes coming up for Tumblr. But I don't want to start with the heavy stuff.
I want to start with some good uplifting podcast. So Deeter. Oh, and I want to point out, I don't think we're going to get to it. But Dan went to China.
Dan Seifer went to China and wrote a huge feature on the OnePlus 5. And we reviewed the OnePlus 5. Paul, you were just saying you enjoyed the press conference. Yeah.
So what happened? Allegally, autoplayed on our website. And we're very mad about that. It's the worst.
Yeah. I just want to assure everybody that that's against our ad policy. That has been looked into. Yeah.
But that's what you need to know about. Wow. That's a frequent visitor of the Birds Like Colored. It's the OnePlus 5 press conference.
And there's a lot of things that happened. There was a dog. There was Emily Rutsky, who explained how the cameras worked. But my favorite part was the headphone troll.
They showed the bottom of the phone. And they showed it with a USB C plug and speaker grills. And they're like, we couldn't do a headphone jack. It was so important.
We're so focused on every design, detail, and so many iterations. We wanted the most streamlined slick phone or whatever. There's no headphone jack. The future is wireless.
And they got two minutes into this. And then they were like, just kidding. Of course there's a headphone jack. And the image literally changes.
And it shows where they actually have a jack. So they photoshopped their own phone. So I'm very happy with that. That's great.
I'll take it. I feel like Android, the essential phone is the last high-profile Android phone with a headphone jack. You can't count whatever nonsense HCC is doing. No, there's Moto.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, man. But like, isn't it?
It's not all of them. No, right. The Z play has one, but the standard Z does not. Oh, why Z if not to play?
You said. Confidently, as though it was a phrase. I will say, I mean, you've noticed, I'm not living the dongle life anymore. Yeah, it's true.
You got AirPods, what are you doing? I got cheap Bluetooth headphones on Amazon. I got cheap wired headphones on Amazon. Lightning.
No. For my to use with my laptop, which still doesn't have a lightning plug, if you'll recall. And then I got my lightning AirPods. If I forget to charge my Bluetooth headphones.
What you have? Oh, the lightning earbuds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. The lightning earbuds that still, they're like messed up in one ear.
Yeah, yeah. The set's not bad. So I basically have three pairs of headphones to get through a day, definitely. I was talking to somebody last night who told me that they hate AirPods for music, but love them for phone calls, even though they're fully aware that they look completely insane, because they're just walking around talking, like loudly to no one.
They sound great. They do seem to be like the ideal thing. I just don't like the idea of spending that much money on headphones. Yeah.
That don't sound amazing. Yeah. Anyhow, dear, you had an adventure. You went to a thing.
You saw Scott Forestall this week? Yeah. I went to the Computer History Museum, which is in Mountain View, California. If you have never gone, you should go.
It is awesome. I recommend you go with my dad, who used all the computers in the computer that you can tell you all about it. He's available for a small fee, actually I have to add. But they do these events.
And they've been doing for the 10-year anniversary, like little things of people who worked on the iPhone. And so the big deal was Scott Forestall, who has not talked about Apple basically at all since he left five years ago. 2012, that's right. If you don't remember, or you weren't around, or you're too young, because you're a teen.
Back then, there was this thing called Apple Maps, and it was awful. It was as bad a piece of software as Apple has ever shipped, I think. And they took off Google Maps. They put on Apple Maps.
It was terrible. Everyone got real, real mad. People drove into lakes. Just everything was terrible.
Apple fanboys, am I right? The great thing about that was that the screenshots of their fake 3D photograph. Yeah. It looked like these natural disasters.
It was just perfectly illustrated. So he got ousted in the fallout of that. Well, he laughed, but he got ousted. Because one of the reasons was he refused to sign the apology letter about Apple Maps.
And so he left. Johnny I took over a design, and Federico took over the other stuff. And he just went away and started producing Broadway plays, which is the thing that you could do. And so before Forestall came on, there were three other engineers that I told him using stories about developing the iPhone.
Nothing that was like, oh my god, I had no idea. All slight variations on stories that we've heard before. And then Forestall came on and didn't actually tell us anything new either. But what was interesting is his version of events is Steve Jobs' version of events that Steve Jobs told at the Code Conference, which is Steve and I were hanging out.
And Steve said, you know what? We should make a tablet. He told the story that Steve had a friend of his wife's friends, husband, worked for Microsoft. And it was just a huge asshole.
And Steve would have to hang out with this guy. And this guy would try to rub Steve's face in Microsoft's tablet strategy. And he would just come home and call up. Scott Forestall would be like, this is bullshit.
I hate this guy. We should make a tablet. I love that story. I love that story for any number of reasons.
Not least of which is the moment in time when your significant other makes you hang out with somebody you ate. And then that person is like, I'm better than Apple. That's just a fantastic story. He also told, the story that he had never told before was apparently he got this insane virus and was throwing up every day and then every twice a day and then eight times a day and then down to every 15 minutes.
Just in the hospital, couldn't stop puking. Doctors couldn't fix it. Was going to die. I lost like 50 pounds.
Steve called him every day. And at the end of months of this, Steve calls him up at 11 o'clock at night. And he's like, I've got the best acupuncturist in the world and I'm going to bring her to you. And she's going to fix you.
And Forestall is like, sure, I don't care. Whatever, anything to stop this, I want it. Sure. And it seems like they don't let me in.
They won't like that I've got this acupuncturist coming. I'll just dedicate a wing. And then she'll be able to talk. And he claims the acupuncturist healed him in like two days.
I think there's a significant, we had Brian Merchant do a special episode this year last week. His book is about something 10 years. And there's going to be a lot of stories coming out. I think that sort of who's on the side of the accepted existing canon and who's trying to fill in the blanks, is that there's just going to be ever more and more of that over time.
I think it's really fascinating. But the important thing, or the thing that struck me the most about watching Forestall is if the guy talks like he's on the keynote stage, he's very personable. He's affable. He makes funny jokes.
He knows how to tell a story. He knows how to hold your attention. The knock on Forestall was always like, oh, you're just trying to be a little many Steve Jobs. But he does have that kind of, or some portion of that sort of natural charisma.
So he's really impressive. I'm not deeply certain that we don't have him in the tech industry. I won't go that far. I'm not saying he's a genius of all things.
But it would have been cool to see that kind of personality up on stage talking about products. And we just don't do that anymore. Don't have any more doing that. He said he's not working on anything.
Yeah. I think he's happy making plays. Yeah. And swimming in the ocean, spearing fish, and giving attack by sharks.
Yeah. I mean, it would also have been interesting to see Apple with super aggressive products. People, they have good product people. They make good products.
But if you had one knock on Apple, it's that Steve Jobs was, he had this huge team of executives who were all fighting. They didn't like each other. But he held them together because he was Steve Jobs. And then obviously, when he is gone, they all started fighting.
And Tim Cook, his instinct was to make the fighting go away by pushing all these people out. And I think that is to Apple's detriment in some things. They're not as aggressive inside of the product because they don't have that internal competition. But speaking of bad products, let's talk about Bixby.
So Bixby is out in beta for the S8. Have you ever seen Bixby? Have you tried it? I have not flipped the switch on the preview for me yet.
So I haven't actually personally tried it. But I literally just walked out of a demo an hour ago of it. And I can tell you a little bit about it. Let me just give you Samsung's line.
Samsung doesn't believe, especially now that this is in a preview, that you should be thinking about this as a head-to-head competitor of Siri and Google Assistant and Alexa and Cortana. They think it's an intelligent interface. It's a new kind of interface, more than it is trying to be smarter than Siri. So it's not so much about grabbing stuff from the web and interacting directly with services.
It's about if you want to do something on your phone, you can just ask for it and it will do the thing on your phone. I personally think that's very confusing because it also does a little bit of that other standard assistant stuff, just not as well. But you can do a stuff with Pixby. Hey, Pixby, find all my pictures from New York last month and put them in an album and share that album with my mom.
And it will jump through those steps automatically by magically hitting the buttons on the interface, on the back end, and then do that thing. So the goal is if you would have to hunt around and tap crap on your phone to do it, you can just ask for it now at Pixby. And just to be clear, the new thing that's rolling out is doing it with your voice. Right, that's the thing that's in preview for however long it's going to be in preview.
But yeah, Chris Welch tried it and we've got a hands-on up with it and it's definitely a beta. Yeah, it's still a beta. You know what I noticed? And I don't want to say I'm saying Apple have diverged quite a bit, but he swatched the video and Welch asked for the weather and shows in the weather.
And that screen looks exactly like Siri showing you the weather. And there's no reason for it. You don't have to use the same blue gradient. It doesn't have to look exactly like Apple's thing.
And it still does. And it's just like why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot like this? Like there's literally infinite ways to design a display of weather. What would be interesting to me is if I ask a buddy to do something for me, I'll probably just say no, do it yourself.
If I ask someone for information, he'll probably give it to me or say I know someone who knows or I'll search for it on the web. Could you have a stack of assistants? You talk to Bixby and Bixby's like, I don't know. I'll ask Alexa.
I ask this question. And they're like, it sort of goes to Google already. But what about the assistant? Because they don't have skills Alexa has yet.
It only is with apps on the phone. I don't have a very simple handful of them plus Samsung stuff. But I would love a world where just like you said, hey Bixby, ask Google to do this thing and it's like, I don't have to find. I hate that guy.
A little bit of other Samsung news, which is interesting to me, because it's not a brand name you thought they were going to be into. Galaxy Note 8, portly arriving in August. That's like a, are they just assuming that everyone thought it was the 7 that was bad? Right?
That's a big move to come back out with this brand that literally exploded. I think it's just as likely that people thought it was galaxy as the people thought it was note that people thought it was 7. Yeah. So any combination of those things was dangerous.
It's just, I don't know. What's the value of the Note brand? You can name it anything else. Super valuable in Korea.
And people love it over there. I mean, people loved it here before it started to take it. If they named it something else but offered the same product, they would see them like. And they won't get the local news headline that's like Samsung is back with the Galaxy Note 8.
This time it won't. You can't do that. They're going to get that headline no matter what. They release another phone to the stylist in it.
They're going to get it. I don't think the local news is like, no, it's the one with the stylist. We got to run the exploding package. No, they'll do it.
But then they'll have to say, but they change the name. Like if they just, if they just like grit their teeth, muscle through it and release another note and accept the local news of the thing, I get the thinking. Have I ever told you how much I hate the local news? When I think of bad, sloppy coverage, my instinct is to talk about it.
When we were launching Verge Science, we were watching all the videos where they got up and we're talking about it. And Liz was like, dude, you keep on just dissing the local news. And all of their science coverage. I would say I had a bank that loaned me some money.
And at one point, the bank did something really bad. And then they mailed me. If you think you're part of this class auction, you should let us know and things like that. And then a few months later, the bank's like, hey, we got a new name now.
It's like, oh, you did something really bad, dude. The reason Xfinity as a brand name exists is because Comcast, I know, five, six years ago, realized that their brand name was so bad that they were just going to start selling Xfinity. I don't know that it worked for me. The reason they renamed Charter and Time Warner Cable Spectrum, is they were like, no one will ever know.
Everyone knows. If I got the mailer for a phios, like it wasn't a guy showing up at my house, this is inside knowledge for people who've listened to past episodes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we deep. It's a promotion, $80 for TV, phone, and internet.
It's gigabit. Verizon's definition's gigabit, by the way, is 800 megabits per second. It's like, yeah, it's not even close. It's not even like 950.
It's all the way up on this without it. It's like, yeah, that's literally the fastest. It's like a two-year contract. I'm probably not going to do it, just like people know.
Yeah, it's just like, like, rising people know right now. A couple of Amazon echoey things. I actually reviewed a dash wand, which is their new little lever. Yeah, I just opened it up yesterday.
It is, I would describe it as a spectacularly boring product. Yeah, if you glue that to your shirt, it's basically Star Trek. Yeah, and people can walk up to you and just beat the barcode stand vertically on your chest. So here's what I think is interesting about it.
This is actually a third generation of this hardware. So there was the original dash with just a barcode scanner. Then they put up the second generation, the middle of the smaller, added a button and voice. And it used a weird proprietary voice thing.
Now, it's a third generation, and really what they've done is swapped out the weird proprietary voice thing for Alexa, which makes sense. They're giving it away for free. Well, it's 20 bucks, but you get credit. Yeah, no, no, no, no.
It's 20 bucks. It's 20 bucks to your prime member. And then you immediately get a $20 credit to Amazon. OK.
So it's directly free. And then you get three months of Amazon Fresh Grocery Delivery for free, which is usually the most important. So they're paying you take it in the end if you use the grocery bar. I think we've talked a lot on this show about Amazon is just going to start giving active devices away for free.
So this is the first stab at it. It's eliminated at camp. It can't play music. It can't sit timers.
There's a whole bunch of stuff I can't do. It can't sit timers. It cannot, which is weird because it's like for cooking. Yeah.
That's the thing I used to say for the most timers. But it can control your smart home stuff. So you're like, put it by your bed. You can wake up in the morning and hold a wand to your mouth and be like, lights.
And it's really good at, like, I'm not playing bar cards and adding the hands on cart. Here's the thing I noticed that was it occurred to me that we don't think of any other system like this because you have to push the button to engage it and it's designed specifically for shopping. You don't have to use verbs. Like you can just hold it up and be like, grapes.
And then I'll like buy grapes. So instead of saying, Alexa, would you please buy grapes? Right. Like, and you don't need to say please and thank you to Alexa.
All kinds of people do. My sister has basically told her kids to say please because she doesn't want them to write the robots to enslave us because of the lack of courtesy. But because you're not at all speaking in senses, it doesn't even, the instinct to be fake polite to the robot is gone and it's wild. Like, immediately I noticed like, I'm being very rude right now.
I'm just walking around my house, shouting nouns. It's like seeing if they will be shipped to me. So I mean, the weird thing about it is it's primarily the design of scan things you have. Yeah.
So like, I was like, should I have this? And I was like, wait, I have all of these things. So it sticks on the fridge. Deater points out to me that it is wild that you can get a best in class AI assistant for free now.
That's Amazon's big secret. They're just going to start, I think, the dot, which is 50 bucks, but regular discounted to 40. And this thing, no one else is competing at that bottom of the market, which is where the disruption happens. Like, Casey wrote a piece for us this morning about how Nancy making the smart speaker, anybody wants, like the home pod is the closest thing to it, but it only supports Apple music.
So it's obviously very limited. And the comments are just people saying just buy an Echo Dot and plug it into some good speakers and you get the thing that you want. That to me is that's the real story of the Dash wand is they're just saturating the market with free versions of this, such that when you start to buy your smart home ecosystem, it's a no-brainer to pick the Alexa one instead of the home kit, whatever. Another piece of news, Echo shows coming soon and the flood of press releases about are coming.
And the thing that they promised was that you'd be able to just talk to it and display smart home devices. So there's already a bunch of smart home cameras that you can just talk to it. And that's not like huge news. It's not a reason to buy it.
But it's just one more. There's like ecosystem pieces for Alexa that literally no one else has. And Google sort of has it, but your TV has to be on. Well, you do just have to be on.
Your TV doesn't have to be on. You just have to have HDMIC enabled so that the Chromecast will activate. Yeah. The Chromecast that's built into my video wakes my TV up.
Well, sure, because both of them. But you have to, your TV has to be right. Right. It's not like a default.
I think the Echo shows. Although I will say Chromecast has been doing this thing. I haven't changed my networks configuration at all. I just Chromecast something from my phone, from the official YouTube app.
And it plays for like 20 minutes. And then all of a sudden it flashes like, sorry, we forgot what we were doing. Yeah. The message is literally something like that.
And it's like, hey, I'm grateful for the convenience that Chromecast allows me. And I'm not going to build my real setup, like my core of how I get entertainment around Chromecast if it's going to do this all the time. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the Chromecast flakiness is just there.
Yeah. They need to build into the home app, the cast app, they renamed it. It's the home app. Home app.
They just need to build controls into that app. They're like, well, they're there sometimes. The reason I can't use Chromecast and we just always end up bailing and going back to the Apple TV, talk about this before. It's one, we want to pick up, we're watching together instead of just me looking at my phone.
And two, the controls in like the notification area on Android or, you know, it's on iPhone and weird spot and to disappear. And it is very, very difficult to figure out from app to app how to turn on closed captioning. And we're just, we're old people that turn on closed captioning on certain shows. I'm all in on closed captioning.
Don't understand British accents. Like, did you try to watch the crown? It was impossible. I think the era for students.
Wait, here's a pitch. You watch closed captioning for British shows? Yeah, of course. Like, almost shows.
I think you have to for a great British baking show. You can usually pull that one off. Here's what I'm saying. Prestige, the era of Prestige TV is enabled by closed captioning.
That's my pitch to you. Yep. Now, are you kidding? People mumble a lot more premiere.
Prestige TV is all about quiet, slow mumbles. You just turn on the captions. I want to live in a world where the original version of the Batman movie with Bane in it is released. Here's the thing.
I misunderstand people all the time. I have a hard time understanding people and I'm a mumbler. Yeah. So I know I'm part of the problem.
So it breaks my version. If I know what everybody's saying. Like, this is way too much unlike reality. I watch the new train spotting.
I didn't understand the tenth of the word said in that Scottish accent. But I wonder what it was. The shows are where everybody's talking really quietly and like mumbly. It's like that asshole that talks really quietly when you know that they don't have to, but it forces you to lean in and pay attention and actually command of the room by speaking really quietly because everybody has to shut up to listen to them.
That's the crown. That's the whole show. You have to pay attention to me. I'm like, what if I want to get up?
Okay, fine. I'm listening. You just have to like lean in and stare at it and focus. It's really annoying.
Sometimes you just want some crap on. Yeah. Then the crappet shows and it's the crown. All right.
Here's what's going to happen. This was a light chat segment of the Verge Chats this week. Just some stuff coming on. We lit with dessert.
Yeah. And now we're going to go into the heavy stuff. So I'm going to read an ad. We're going to run.
I talked to Caitlin Tiffany. She doesn't like it when I call her superstar reporter. So I didn't at the beginning of the segment, but I'm telling you now. She's a star quarter on the Verge.
I'm going to say that's a very important core. Go to Norton.com slash a Verge Chats. You say $30 if you preorder before July 1st. That is Norton.com slash Verge Chats.
The thing you're looking for, by the way, is, oh, it's not about to be a Decco Eadron. It's, um, I go see Eadron. Yeah. Yeah.
Spiky. Spiky Circle. Okay. Now anyway, let's listen to Caitlin.
We'll be right back. So hey, I have Caitlin Tiffany here. Oh, I was going to say star reporter, but I don't like making any of this in the jump. A reporter.
One of the actors, like one of Diamond doesn't. That's not true. Anyway, so you, I'm going to say one here. I used to work for a company called AOL.
That company is brought by Verizon. Yes. That company that bought Yahoo. Yahoo owns a company called Tumblr, which they bought for a billion dollars.
Isn't that worth like $10 cents? They literally wrote down a value of Tumblr for a million dollars, like twice. I think it's worth like $280 million now as of last year. Yeah.
So an emerging AOL in Yahoo and do this thing called Oath, which we have made fun of on the Verge Chats many, many times. Tumblr will now be part of Oath, which is very confusing for everyone. Tumblr is really important to people. You cover Tumblr a lot.
Yeah. Just describe what it, like I'm not like a huge Tumblr. Just describe the import of Tumblr to, like, particularly on people. Okay.
So there is an old episode of What's Tech called What's Tumblr, which people can listen to when they're wearing that. I guess like, so the side of Tumblr that I've covered is more like the culture side, the fandom side. I think they've done a really good job of a lot of years. It's becoming like the official home of fandom on the internet.
So it's important to people who want to participate in a community that's not toxic, like the ones that you might find on Reddit. And I think like a big reason for that is just like the basic structure of this site is very like to participate. You have to do a value add, like to be in a conversation. You have to reblog something and add something to it that's like cool or interesting or funny enough that someone's going to reblog what you said.
It's not like just an open comment thread. So I think the reason it's important to a lot of people is that it still produces a lot of culture and it does so in a way that's not horrifying, which is vanishingly rare on the internet. It is. Tumblr's run by a guy named David Carpe founded it in 2014 and 15 of our Chastles.
There's no week cover of the hell of the net neutrality. We're covering the hell of net neutrality again now in 2017. But in 14 and 15, Carpe was a big fighter for net neutrality. I actually attended like a secret meeting at Tumblr headquarters.
It's a ridiculous story where they told me what their big plans to rally the New York tech scene around that neutrality were. All the people who ran that meeting are gone from Tumblr now. David Carpe is still there and now it's part of Verizon. You just did a bunch reporting about how Verizon appears to be changing what's happening inside of Tumblr.
Yeah. So I guess in the first place, this story was one that's pretty obvious. Verizon is a huge ISP. Verizon hates net neutrality.
I mean, well, they try to twist the words. But we need 45 minutes with a net neutrality explainer and then we can have a conversation. It's so bad. But it's fairly obvious that their political aims are directly at all to each other.
So basically asking people what's going on, why don't you talk about net neutrality even more? They're like, we're not allowed to. It's pretty obvious. So I think a lot of people at Tumblr that I spoke to are nervous about it because one of the main draws of working there is that emphasis on community and they do a lot of political stuff.
And David Carpe has a huge public partnership with Planned Parenthood. He's on their board. They talk about stuff that's even sensitive, like gun control. I know they were really on the travel ban thing.
They were really vocal about that. So I think it's worrisome to people even if they aren't personally invested in net neutrality, like having that taken off the table is kind of like, well, what is Tumblr now? We're not allowed to talk publicly about the things that we care about. But you talked to employees.
What were they saying to you? I've actually said that they have kind of asked in a reasonable hands meeting, like what's going on? Why aren't we participating? There's a big day of action coming up and Tumblr is the only notable New York City company from the 2014 coalition that's not participating.
So they've asked and this Yahoo VP who's been promoted so that David Carpe is reporting to him directly. It's kind of like, I don't know. It's not my problem. It's about my pay grade.
The best race to hear from your boss. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the whole tone of that conversation was really disconcerting to people.
One person I spoke to, I didn't quote this in the story because it really wasn't relevant. This executive said Facebook is a failure. And basically argued that Tumblr's content is so valuable, which I agree is valuable, but the Tumblr's content is so valuable that it should be a player on a much larger sale than it is. And he joked that they should be replacing cable TV, which I don't really understand that at all.
Especially if it's built on fanhums. Yeah. They require the TV. Yeah.
And then one of the engineers he works there told us basically that David Carpe said in a weekly meeting with the engineering team because he's basically a product person. So he meets with them and that would be his closest group there. He's not allowed to talk about the neutrality in public anymore. Which makes sense.
Verizon really is the dual track of what Verizon is doing. So they're advocating against net neutrality over here. And they're buying basically all these web pages. That's what buying nothing to post.
That's what buying, well, AO about the thing to post. And they bought this tangled web. And they bought Yahoo, which has tons of web pages. And they want to put ads on all those web pages.
That's Verizon's media business model. It just doesn't seem like, like you said, the story's really obvious on its face. You got bought by a big company. They pay your paycheck.
Your personal policies don't line up the company's policies. So you're just going to be a little bit nervous if you run around saying that your party organization is going to change. But I think there's a lot in your story about Tumblr being a company or an organization, I guess, now. It's not a company anymore.
It's about that company. Is it a version company? It's very confusing. But to say that this group of people has a shared set of values and those values feel under attack by Verizon.
Like, is there a sense that they can change it? Is it just over? Like, what was your sense of the course of action here? Well, I've got the sense that people were still hopeful.
I think David Carp is really a beloved figure. I think he has a pretty good public persona. But I think within the company, there's a lot of loyalty to him. I think people believe that he wants to do the right thing.
I don't know if it's naive to think that he's suddenly going to be like, whatever. I don't care. I'm going to talk about neutrality all the time. I don't know if that's realistic.
But I think I got the sense that there's still a lot of people there who consider Tumblr more of a community than a company, which sounds like a BS line. But I think there's some merit to it just based on the way that David Carp has run Tumblr. I don't think he's ever somebody who wanted Tumblr to be a huge company. And that's probably part of the reason that it didn't make any money.
And has purportedly slowly been dying. But I'm not a sense I'm a little bit teenage or it still exists for now. So that's something. Is it the same?
Have there been big product changes to Tumblr over the course of the time that you used it? I don't think so. I know they're always going back and forth. And we were just talking about one of these changes yesterday on how to make...
Tumblr used to have this reputation of it's all porn, no matter what you do, you're going to keep porn. So they've fiddled a lot with adjustments as far as how to get rid of NFW content or how to not have it pop up on people by the price. And they just made a change where you have to be logged in to see sensitive content, which I think has not gone over well from what we've been seeing. But no, to be fair, no platform ever makes a change that goes over well.
That's true. Yeah. I don't think Tumblr has had that many huge product changes. The app used to be terrible.
People hated the app for a long time. It seems like it's gotten better. I think they've got to get a lot of resources to the app. It used to be the only place on the internet with Git.
And that's kind of gotten away from them as their trademark. But I would say, yeah, I know, Tumblr was the same one saying, I can't remember anything that was notably different when I was in high school, derping around on Tumblr and then now when I go home from work and derp around on Twitter. Perfect. The reason I ask is you quoted a blog post in a piece that I think was a protective purgatory of Yahoo.
So Marissa Meyer, who just has not a great reputation with XZ Yahoo employees, Yahoo employees. He spent a billion dollars on this company. She bought a million other companies. She installed the CEO of a company called Fleury over at Tumblr, which is crazy if you think about their relative value in the world.
It just, he bought Tumblr and he bought this weird app analytics company and he's like, that's weird. But it just seemed like they didn't know what to do next. She bought it and she had no idea what to do next. So it just got to be by itself.
And people weren't paying attention to it. And now it feels like Verizon's paying a little bit more attention or too much attention. That means change is coming and that feels terrifying. Yeah.
From what I heard speaking to people about this story, Yahoo had done some things to Tumblr that didn't go over well. They changed the sign in process. So you had to have a Yahoo account to sign in. Everyone's going to this.
Yeah. And then Jerry spoke to it, took two years and implemented it and David Carp was fighting it the whole time. And it was a terrible disaster and they had to abandon it months after putting it on the site. And I guess there's a hiring freeze there also, especially in the engineering department.
And he basically said things break all the time. Yahoo didn't care. Yahoo just kind of was letting Tumblr rot. So I don't know if negligence is necessarily better than a strong hand.
I think it completely remains to be seen what Verizon even plans to do with Tumblr. I don't know if they don't just tell it. But whatever. I don't know what they want to do with it.
I have advocated it by Tumblr. It didn't go anywhere. Usually it replies to my emails at this company. No one replied to that email.
I don't think we could get an idea. I think the question is, is the future of Tumblr more like Craig's list, which is happy abandoned where it continues to putter along and it's just always going to be that thing? Or are they going to try to make it Facebook? And the argument for trying to make it Facebook is actually quite strong.
The biggest apps in the world are all based on communities. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. It's not media people programming stuff and putting it on your home screen. It's like you tapping into networks and communities.
You can see the argument. We could probably get an app on your home screen if we just make Tumblr bigger. But that changes its central character. Yeah.
I think the problem with trying to scale Tumblr in that way is that Tumblr is the opaque by nature. You don't see people's follower accounts. You don't see how people are interacting with each other outside of individual posting your dashboard. It's very hard to get a sense of what's going on on Tumblr unless you really invest a ton of time in it.
The communities are pretty insular. I would be surprised if Verizon tried to do something big with Tumblr without making follower accounts public or something like that. It's really hard to see through Tumblr. It's very dense.
Right. But those are the changes that you have to make that change the essential nature of Tumblr. Yeah, exactly. I think it would be...
I hope it just... It comes from... Yeah, I would just... Or like V-Bolitin or whatever.
Like all the nasty forms of words are just like powers, weird forms of the Internet. I mean, I think it just got to hang out. That'd be nice for me personally. Or, as it starts layering all the plans on it.
Yeah. I don't know if this is coming through. I don't trust Verizon at all. I think their plan to do with this huge collection of scale is...
I don't think it's rooted in a notion that they need to make great things. I think it's rooted in a notion that they just need to get big and put ads on the Internet that ruthlessly track you. Which is why they, for example, supported a bill to cancel data privacy. Like, if you think about what AT&T is doing, and I'm not some great lover of AT&T, but AT&T is buying Time Warner.
They're trying to get HBO. They're trying to get Game of Thrones. They're trying to play at the prestige level of content, if that's a phrase. Comcast, which disclosure, chunks of this company.
Well, NBC Universal. Their version of prestige is basically gluing minions to everything. They're happy about it. Right.
But they're operating on that level. They're literally universal. It's the same thing. Verizon is buying dead web properties to try to get scale.
I think it's just a very different attitude. I think it's dangerous for some of these beloved things. Yeah. Well, Tumblr is also like, you need to Tumblr more so than I think Facebook or Twitter or even Reddit is that people actually make stuff to put on Tumblr.
It's all real user-created content. It's not just dumb tweets. And using that, I don't know. Sorry, Twitter.
If you jack. I mean, people make art. People put their art on Tumblr. People put their people share their music on Tumblr.
Yeah. Like using that to make money for a huge I think. That I feel like it's a little weirder. It's a little more, it feels like insidious to me.
The way that people have, and that's not unique to Verizon or even Tumblr fandom, but that people love exploiting people for the things that they love. Like movie studios have people design Snapchat filters for free now because they'll do it because they love Star Wars so much. They'll do anything. Coming up with a strategy to make tons of money off of the stuff that teenagers are doing for free on the internet is a pretty broad trend.
It's unfortunate. So what happens next? What happens next for Tumblr? I don't know.
Someone tell me. Someone hop in my tent. Yeah. We have secure drops.
You can go to the pitch page of the Virgin and get all the best. What's your Twitter? K-I-T underscore tippany. Okay.
Well, I want Caitlin to pursue this story because I think ultimately what happens to all of the things that Verizon bought with Yahoo and AOL is going to be very interesting. And it's going to, Verizon's a huge company. You can't ignore them. There are huge swaths of the country where they're your only choice for ISP.
It's not your frailty thing regardless of whether you've heard our 45 minute experience. By the way, it's a great episode of What's Deck, What's Night with Reality. It's happening, right? The train's coming and Verizon's going to be a major player here and it's going to affect a bunch of properties that I think people take for granted.
So we've been talking about Tumblr this whole time. Verizon now owns Yahoo Fantasy football, which is like a crazy thing for an ISP to own. They own Yahoo News. They own a news organization.
So there's just so much that they have and they're going to try to figure out how to make it more valuable than they probably pay for it. And that means changes coming. So here are any of the stuff particularly Tumblr, you know what we're going to do with Caitlin. She's on it.
Thanks, Caitlin. Caitlin's great. It's not any reality thing. It's just a little fact.
So all of the ISPs claim that they need to reverse Title 2 because it's hurting their investment. But this week, Jay Z announces a new album, 444, and it's a sprint exclusive. And to get that sprinting exclusive, sprint bought 33% of the title, which just implies it has enough extra money lying around. I've been reading a book about economics.
And when you have a scarce resource, no. He almost got there, right? The idea would be that you see a higher return on alternative investments because you don't see as high of a return as you would want on the infrastructure. That is the argument.
I'm just saying I can read books. I almost got there. They take away. No, it's a fair argument.
It's just funny that they're all like, we can't. But hey, we show a Jay Z record. We bought a lot of those. We bought a record company.
Shouldn't sprint be spending its money on its network? Shouldn't you first have a competitive network? Are they really like, when was the last time you really not think? I feel like these weird tie-ins with carriers were things that were happening pre-iPhone.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All over the place. These weird branded exclusive. I mean, you could buy an ESPN phone.
It was stupid stuff. But this one is to me, it's like, our network is bad. But do you like Jay Z? You'll deal with it.
That's a weird. Anyway, that's not the point. Okay, we got to talk about Uber. We just have to.
So I'm sure if you're paying attention to any news, because this is like front page. New York Times is sending breaking news alerts about this. Travis Connick and Uber have had a monstrously bad run. Andy Hawkins, the registered pressure reporter, just looks exhausted because his entire life is dominated by bad news coming out of Uber.