Musk & Zuck Go Head to Head, Vying to Rule Global Online Discussion (with Katie Notopoulos & Tom Dotan)

Hey, it's Eric Newcomer, welcome to the Newcomer podcast, or maybe it's dead cat this week. We've got Tom Dutton, our old co-host back on the show, a little bit like old times. We also invited Katie Nautopolis, the former Buzzfeed reporter who has been posting up in the storm on threads and we got into the war between Elon Musk's Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg's new threads app which has been taking off and we dig into the future of the real-time battle royale forum for worldwide discussion and where threads fits into it. It was a fun, lighthearted episode about the state of a key consumer company and then at the tail end, we talked a little bit about Tom's reporting at the journal and the downturn in tech. Give it a listen. Hey, everybody, welcome to, I think this is a dead cat episode, right? We have the Newcomer podcast as we've been calling him more recently, lots of brand confusion going on. Tom Dutton, who have been in the podcast to go work at the Wall Street Journal, is back, apparently his editors think it's now safe for him to make an appearance, Tom. It took a couple of months, but I had to get clearance from high-level masthead people to appear, but I'm here. I've been given strict instructions. Yeah. I had been he off story under your belt, they're like, all right, he's in the cult enough. I'm indoctrinated enough that I'm coming here as a representative of the journal and not as a defective member of dead cat, yeah, that's right. And then we've got Katie Natopoulos, ex Buzzfeed, right? Also recently, I think announced, she stepped down as editor in chief of threads. She's been long-running for the history of this short-lived social media site, Bit, pretending to be the editor in chief of threads, Katie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. But Eric, unfortunately, I was personally fired by Mark Zuckerberg, I didn't resign. Was that like via DM, like Fred DM, or does he call you? Where does he go about firing people? He's been good at it this year. There's been lots of firings at Meta, but I don't think I addressed this. In my bit, I said I was going to a meeting with him. I don't think I specified in person or over Zoom, but I guess because I'm on the East Coast, he's in San Francisco, I guess it must have been a Zoom firing. Probably Hawaii, but yeah. We had a huddle before the podcast started about whether we would do this as a sincere bit and decided us left for the threads. Obviously, like the news story here is Facebook, Meta, whatever we're calling them has come on this scene super strong with this Twitter competitor. Tom, have you spent any time with it? I've done two threads so far. If Katie was trying to be the editor in chief of threads, I was trying to be the cat-turned two of threads. I posted that they have been shadow banning me and ghost banning me, and I'm not getting the engagements that I previously had seen on my threads. Everybody took it seriously and said, if there's something wrong here and then Alex Heath suggested that I had a profile photo, that's why I'm not getting the engagement I expected. I've not done well on threads so far, but I am on it. You were never large on Twitter in the first place, so if anything, this is your chance to... Yeah, I was not my medium. I'm not Katie in the top of this, or newcomer for that matter. I never succeeded really on Twitter, but I don't think threads is going all that much better for me. It's not like this is a fresh page, although I do have my name because I was stuck with my stupid 2010 or whatever Twitter name, City of the Town, and then because it chooses your Instagram handle. The City of the Town is an LA reference in your San Francisco. You have a house in San Francisco. I don't even want to explain. I don't even want to explain what the reference is, but anyway... It is a LA, right? No, it's not. It's from the Bay Area. It's the reference. I don't know that. It's fine. Well, either way. But it pulls your Instagram name for your threads handle, I believe, and a lot of people have kind of bullshit Instagram handles too, so there are people that I think were unexpectedly stuck with that as their threads name. What is yours? It's just cadence. I have the one upside to having a really hard to spell unusual last name is that I never have competition on any platform for getting my real name. I don't have to be captured too. I can be just captured. Yeah. I've been... That's beautiful. ...and did the other Eric Newcomer. He lives in Manhattan. He's sort of tech adjacent. I've been over to his house for a pure taste scene. Oh, it's even that. Oh, yeah. We at least socialize. I've been like, I think twice now. Now we're just... Yeah. So it's a hysterical dinner party where I have to explain to people. My name is also Eric Newcomer. Anyway, I want to sort of get like the vibe of threads. And later on in the episode we can talk about the real like Twitter threads war. You had a funny tweet about... Or sorry, they're not tweets. What are... They're posts? I think they're posts. So what... Yeah. The official Instagram account gave a dictionary that I think you would call a conversation a thread. Like, I was reading some interesting threads that Eric was talking about, but an individual post is called a post. And then instead of a retweet, it's a repost. What did you think was going on there? I found this super strange that they were dictating like what language they want people to do. I couldn't tell if they were worried people were going to start using like tweet and they didn't want to encourage people to just like embrace. I sort of took it as that that was literally people were asking that people were like, what do we call them? Do we call them? Because they're not tweets. Do we call them retweets? You know, what do we call them? Do we call them? Which case scenario was... I feel like a lot of people were joking about you would call them threats, which is probably not what they want. Right. So I think it was this kind of a like... I have people who are having too much fun with wordplay, which I'm generally against, but there's a lot of like, you know, your followers or your thread count type tweets. Right. So there's a lot of like, you know, people keep comparing it to like, you know, a new summer camp where, you know, everybody started joking and like trying to come up with like the lingo that will rule the platform. Yeah. And I also think it's really worth remembering that like, I mean, obviously it's been a lot more people than they even anticipated signing up. Like I think it's 70 million or something, but like most of these people are not on Twitter. Most of them don't know anything about that. Most of them are not comparing it to Twitter. So it's like complete normies. It's like 16 year olds in Brazil, right? Like they're not thinking about like, do we call it a retweet? Like, they're kind of like, oh, a new platform. What is this? Is this part of Instagram? Like tell me what to do here. I think that like, it's such a big, sprawling user base that, you know, that's why it's so like basic, you know? Explain to me though the case for why people that have never liked Twitter would suddenly join a Twitter copycat and find use in it because Twitter has been around for a while. Like clearly, the mechanics and design of that social media app are not broadly appealing to more than whatever 200, 300 million users. So why now are they expecting people in Brazil that have shunned Twitter for, you know, the first decade of its existence more are suddenly going to be like, oh, thread because I can use my Instagram handle and like auto sign up easily is suddenly a compelling experience. So I don't know exactly this, but I have a large suspicion. So I had like, as an eager person to test out this new app, like I had done the thing where you could like preorder it on iTunes so it would like load immediately at like at exactly 7 p.m. when it like was ready to be downloaded or whatever because I was excited to do that because I was following technology news and knew there was a new app coming out. But I am assuming that for most people, like I don't think most people like heard about the app and then went to the app store to go looking for it. I assume that most people opened Instagram and got a prompt saying click to the new threads experience that they basically it signed people up right from inside the Instagram app. So, you know, so it's all just like anyone who opened Instagram yesterday was sort of pushed into a funnel to join the app. And so they might have been like, I don't know what's this sure. I don't know. I like Instagram. I'll do the thing. Yeah. And like Facebook Instagram matter whatever they can always do that. They could launch any app they wanted, put a prompt in one of their, you know, billion plus user apps and push a not insignificant percentage of them to just sign up. It doesn't matter what it is. And they have, but those have always kind of like flopped, right? Like this is unique in that like it is day three. Oh. Yeah. And it's not good. We're going to get into our predictions about what will happen. So think about that. But yeah, they have tried, you know, what I mean, that reals is like successful, but TikTok is certainly like way ahead. There have been other standalone apps. What was it like? Is like slingshot or something? Yeah. Like what? Yeah. Like paper. Wasn't that like rip offs of, you know, Snapchat and stuff. Then they eventually, you know, made stories, which were successful. But those were products within an existing app. Right. I feel like it's been rare that they actually put their whole metacy into forcing people on to another, actually downloading a full separate app in a way that they're like a couple of things. It does feel like the contempt for Elon Musk, especially among like reporters and sort of the left and sort of the blue checks, the old blue checks, you know, I feel like that revolt in the sort of hunger for that crowd myself included to like find a new, not like I'm some huge account, but to find a new home. Motivate this. And then, which is of course hysterical because those same blue checks over the last five years, hates up hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. That was like a theme of dead cat. Like I feel like a lot of early dead cat was all about like the anti Facebook and was sort of like the corrective. It's a core belief of the blue checks. I mean, that's what animal just started totally forgotten. It's all mood. I don't know. Well, yeah, I think it's a lot of like the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? Clearly. Clearly. But the diagnosis, I mean, so it's that it's obviously sort of Instagram's power to get Instagram people there. And then it's also the people who are like, you got to get on a platform early and try and build followers. So I feel like it's like those three crowds like trying to coexist like the social media managers who need to build up their accounts in case this is the next big thing, the rebellion from Twitter and then these sort of beautiful Instagram people who are getting sort of like told that this is a piece of the app. I have another theory there too, because it is, when you sign up for the app, the feed is all for now is purely like algorithmic and it sucks in a lot of like people you don't follow. So it's just, it's a ton of celebrities like the people who are like the most famous people on Instagram, like literally just who has the most, you know, it's like, Jay Lowe and Shakira and like Gordon Ramsay, like celebrities that aren't even necessarily the ones that you're like most interested in, I don't know, I'm interested in those celebrities I guess. But it's just like huge followers. And I do think there's a thing too where a lot of those celebrities are excited to be on there and posting and for now they are like Paris Hilton is posting and, you know, all these sort of celebrities, it's a little bit cringy to watch because they're not quote unquote good at it. But I do think that there's a segment of these like traditional celebrities who had a lot of success on Instagram that never really figured out how to like transfer that over to TikTok, which is slightly more allergic to like a movie star post, you know, it's like the Kardashians aren't big on TikTok, you know, but they work really well on Instagram, not on TikTok. And I think that there's probably a lot of enthusiasm from those big celebrities who have not found TikTok's success and are sort of clinging on to Instagram relevancy because they know it's important for their careers to have a big social media following. And so they're probably excited to get on to this. And then, you know, fans and regular people are excited because they see all of a sudden celebrities which haven't posted to Twitter in years, like celebrities have left Twitter a long time ago. I mean, out of most areas, Mark Zuckerberg, I forget which one said that they would have sort of a chronological feed and sort of a follower feed, which would be key to sort of creating some of the stuff that media likes, which is like news stuff and also just being able to follow like niche interests without being just in this normie sort of fray. I don't know. What are people's views on like, I don't know, the algorithmic feed? Like, I think the average person does want an algorithmic feed, right? I think so too. I think there's a reason that they've continued to have an algorithmic feed on Instagram for years is because like test after test after test, oh, he shows that that's what people actually want. I think what he was saying is like that, you know, I mean, there's like a ton of really seeming basic features that aren't on there. There's no DMing. There's no like services bad, right? Yeah. I don't think so. I think you can only search for people. You can't search for like, like words. It's so it sounds like they will add more stuff, including probably, I'm guessing it would be kind of like how you could toggle between, you know, even on Twitter, like for you versus following is probably what it would be like. That would be my guess. Yeah. I mean, that seems to be like a logical thing. I will say that like having used it for over a day and following some more people that are people I actually want to follow, my feed has the celebrities have sort of calm down. That's a little bit like the algorithm is sort of part of the reason you're on this podcast is for a second, like, you know, four out of like seven of the things that my feed were you at one moment, you know, it's like, I mean, I posted this, but it, you know, it does feel like it swings from like brands to people you just followed to like models, like one second to the next where it's like, it almost feels like there's somebody like sitting there with a dial trying to figure out what's on it. Yeah. They have no idea what they're doing right now in terms of what's going to work. So I'm sure they've got a bunch of engineers just crazily moving sliders around trying to see like, oh, Nautopolis, Nautopolis is big. Give more Nautopolis. They're like, no, no, they don't like it. They hate it. Back off. We're losing people that Paris Hilton. I mean, what I did, like in that first day, especially like in the morning when it was like, you know, really no one knew what was going on and people were just logging on for the first time, I sort of realized that there was this rare opportunity where like you could post incessantly and like because essentially people's feeds were quasi blank and also largely filled with like celebrities or, you know, the Betches account, like things like that, that like it would be really annoying if I did that on like Twitter, like that is not an acceptable behavior. It would be viewed as annoying, but somehow in this like rare moment, I feel like I was able to kind of do that and like get away with it a little bit. But I was also like, I was doing a bit like I was like pretending that I was the best. That's the best. It's like, oh, I'm posting too much because that's the character I'm writing who's shameless. Yeah. I was pretending to be the editor in chief of threads. So I would be like, you know, retweeting or reposting Gary Vee, you know, who's kind of like, I roll, right? They took down one of your posts or are you right? Yes. What did you say without looking at in front of me? Someone asked me, you know, as editor in chief, and it was like a little bit of a mixed bag. We're like, I think most of my friends knew I was kidding. But like clearly, like also some people who didn't know me from Twitter, which at first was like most of the people, you know, that I knew or whatever, some people didn't. And they were like, they believed it. And that was like a little bit funny because that was also, in my opinion, posting things were kind of obvious. Right. Well, that's like a huge feature. That was always the thing on Twitter, you know, and I've gotten in fights with people about this where it's like, you know, the in group 40% gets us to the joke, but 60% of people maybe don't. And it gets traffic in part because of the confusion, but then the sort of in group gets to laugh at the rubes who should obviously get it. And like, it's just, it's like a recurring joke at this point on this type of social network. Anyway. So that was, that was kind of what was happening. So some people were taking it seriously and someone said, are you going to ban the Nazis? And like, there's a legitimate question, right, because like, this has been an ongoing issue with social platforms that, you know, how they are addressing moderation issues. And I wrote back something like threads is, you know, we want respectful and inclusive conversation here at threads. And so we respect people's choice to lead a Nazi lifestyle. So we are inclusive and like, heart emoji, and there's your answer. I mean, what's so great about a post like that is that you know, Katie, that not low level people had to have a discussion about whether or not to delete this and how this reflecting poorly on the brand. I would even venture to guess it went all the way up to Zuck at this point, not that there was an emergency meeting held, but like, you know, these decisions at the early stages are very sensitive. And there were policy people that had to come down and have discussions about your ship posting. And that's not something you will probably get to have happen again for a while. I know. Did they tell you? Do you have his ability into this? A high level executive message to me and was like, do you have any idea how many questions I've had to answer whether or not you actually work here? Yeah. Yeah. I did, I did ask Instagram of Adam Messeri wanted to come on the podcast with you, but he declined. It's probably for the why, so yeah, I mean, she was Katie, not newcomer. No, yeah. I'm blaming her, you know, again, yeah, we would have bummed top. No, I mean, there's so much to get into on the moderation and I want to talk about Twitter or Verzy on Musk. But this sort of like will it succeed? I think we'll help. I'm curious where we're all on the spectrum of success because obviously, you know, sub-stack had notes. There was blue sky. They're all these mastered on things like we, you know, and we all lived during the pandemic where like Clubhouse, which is a different type of app, but people were very convinced that that would be the next thing. And we've lived through these periods where there's sort of desperation, especially among the social media or the Twitter addicted for like a new one and just to keep it going. So there's obviously this sort of start up energy that exists that has to play out to see. Where are you both on, you know, is this going to be bigger than Twitter? Is this going to be the Uber to Twitter's lift in a year? I predict yes. Tom. Twitter in its current state, like not max Twitter, like not Twitter when it was at its peak in terms of users. Like Twitter is the company today. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's such a low bar. Yeah. That's such a low bar. I mean, I haven't read the latest leaks on how many users, but I'm assuming it's really plummeted throughout the. I already. I agree. I mean, so we all agree that threads is like Coke to Pepsi or like at least if not, does anyone think like Twitter is like going to be more like a true social level where it's not even seen as a sort of pure mainstream social platform or I don't know. I mean, I do think that if threads continues to succeed and have lots of users and lots of celebrities or whatever, like I do think that, I mean, like there's going to be people who cling to Twitter because there's lots of things that Twitter can offer that threads can't like, you can't really be like anonymous. It's something. I don't know. There's also like people who really care about their large followings that existed on Twitter that they like can't bring over. There was just Adam Miserie had just like threaded and posted about how like that they're not really going to imagine this as a place for news and that they sort of see it as like. Right. And so I think that like, I mean, I know why they don't want to do that, right? Like news and politics like sucks for the platform to deal with. Like, it's a bad business to be in. So like Twitter may still have an edge there. One thing they've come out of the gate with is they, you know, they were very like we're going to be nice. Like I think a part of the complaint about Elon among many is just that he's been sort of like mean spirited and sort of encouraged a mean crowd. So you know, Metac can just say, oh, this is going to be the nice platform. And you know, to them, I think nice also includes like not that sort of mean news media sort of sensibility, you know what I mean? So I'm curious what you guys think about that. And also there's this like broader question I think in my mind, which is just like, do you think fundamentally like sort of the personality, like these narrative questions, like the actual behavior of Elon Musk, the positioning of like Facebook in terms of being nice and what they're going to include. Do you think that is really that determinant here? Or do you take more of the view that like product rules everything? It's sort of the Instagram connection and that it's really sort of the tech hookups that matter more than these like big like personality type narratives. I think that it's like a little bit of both. I think that the reason that threads will be successful is because it's the product and it's Instagram. And most people don't know that Facebook owns Instagram still. So I don't think that people are really the average person who's going to sign up for threads in this, you know, probably by the weekend will be 100 million people or whatever is like is really thinking hard about like zuck versus Elon. On the other hand, the reason that people are fleeing Twitter is because of Elon. And on Twitter, everyone's aware of who he is and whether or not they like him. I would love to see data on the percentage of the conversation that is about Elon. Because it does feel like if you're on Twitter, it's just like there's a ton of Elon stuff, like it'd be hard to imagine just like you saw to it that's the case, right? I mean, there are other stories. Yeah, yeah, he was worried when his posts didn't get. He was his own cat turd. I mean, what's funny here is like if you look at the history of Facebook copycat features, they're usually in response to like existential threats or perceived existential threats, right? I mean, stories is the most obvious example. And if you talk to like the Snapchat people, they'll say that like what stories really did to Instagram wasn't so much like kill Snapchat is that it stopped people from fleeing Instagram or Facebook to Snapchat. Like it stemmed the tide of people leaving it and that's all it needed to do. In second order effects, like it probably slowed down its growth, but with tweets slowed down. Yeah, Snapchat's growth. But with this, like Twitter is obviously not a threat. This was not done for any reason other than like Zuck was like, it's sort of sad. We don't have like a billion person like global like forum and like Twitter's had its chance for like a long time and now we're going to try. Yeah, but it's also there's it's just clearly I actually think Katie, you've talked about this before, there's just certain limitations to the text-based medium that it's just not going to get. I mean, pictures are more fun. They're more globally appealing. Anyone can kind of absorb the enjoyment through a picture or more so than like the language and the miscommunications and all this shit that comes with text. And I just don't think at this point, however many years since the dawn of Twitter, this format is suddenly going to reach a billion people or appeal to a billion people. It's just not there's no product fix for it is what it is. And we're also probably past the era of billion person social media networks anyway like TikTok. I mean, like I'm not I'm no like social media reporter. I'm not even a great thinker about this topic, but like it's clear that we're in an era of like diffusion and social like more niche social media experiences that are going to appeal to certain subgroups that want to experiencing through this way. And so the idea that like this many years after the dawning of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram leading into the product is suddenly going to create all of the fixes that these companies weren't able to do before. And now there's a billion people that want to use it. It's just like it's it's not going to happen. And that's an unfair bar. Like I think for this is just opportunistic, you know, like they just kind of flick this thing off over a couple of weeks and it's already got 70 million users like that's already success for them. Don't you think? I think one narrative that has been underplayed so far is just that the sort of TikTok algorithmic sorting could work well in like a Twitter case, right? Because they're so bite sized that if you're really learning smartly what people want using sort of machine learning and AI, you know, you could without necessarily relying on their followers delivered to them what they want not necessarily with real time news, but at least like over time like what what types of jokes they find funny. And so I do think starting with this algorithmic feed gives them a lot more opportunity and just sort of the sophistication of a Facebook to actually play in sort of the smart sorting in a way that Twitter has never really been capable of it. And then I'm more bullish that, you know, there's the market here, especially with Facebook's like global reach that that it could get to sort of, you know, 500 million plus certainly I don't know Katie. What do you think? It's the difference between like words and pictures, right? Like I do think there is a limit on how many people want to write text posts. I don't know about you guys, but like my like real friends, like my normal friends, like none of them are on Twitter and like they never were like and they describe this happiness and contentment they feel. Right. I mean like and some of them may have like a lot of them like a various, you know, signed up sometime between like, you know, 2009 and 2012 or something and then like read a couple posts, but like didn't find that much value in it, never had to desire to write tweets, but they're all on Instagram and some of them posts, some of them don't really post. But I think for a lot of people, they're like, I don't have like an opinion about a thing that I'm going to write, but like I want to share a picture of my dog, you know, like that just like feels more normal. I do think there is like a limit to like how much a text based thing can like explode. But I also think that I can see how it sort of lives nicely as like it exists alongside Instagram because Instagram is sort of like lacking in like text stuff, which is why for a long time, a lot of the biggest meme accounts on Instagram, which were hugely followed, like the fuck cherry kind of stuff. We're just screenshots of tweets because people do want like funny, I'm using jokes. And so those are all on Twitter so they would consume them on Instagram. So like it makes sense that there's some connection and marriage between the two. I mean, the irony of course is like, what if there was like a platform where you could like write text posts and post pictures and like that's just Facebook, which like no one wads anymore. Right. I mean, there is always this undercurrent of like people just want to move to the new thing. And like, is there just sort of appetite to sort of start a new and have something new that's cool? If Facebook wants to stay on top, it just needs to keep sort of shifting, you know, offering new places, new new ways to sort of build the norms early. Another key factor that shouldn't be overlooked is that it's always most successful to launch this kind of app in the summertime because that's when kids are out of school and it's like all teenagers. It's the real of 23. Right. Exactly. Like this would not have worked if they launched it in March. Like during final season, like it works because it's like the teenagers are allowed to use their phones at 11 a.m. when they're normally not. And that's like a huge amount of who's on these apps is like young people who normally would be in school. And so like it's right now, it's like a perfect, the timing of this could have been better, whether or not like that will totally sustain, you know, through the fall is, you know, I imagine obviously it will slow down. But I don't see it going away like a clubhouse necessarily. Yeah. And also Facebook can keep this thing up and running with not a lot of work, right? Like if this thing tops out, like it'll probably get to, and then it'll, and then it'll, you know, lose users and it'll maybe get down to like 50, 60, 70. I think it's already at 70, but you know, these people will, will a trick. So like it'll get to that number. And Facebook can keep us up and running. It's probably a low cost thing to, you know, keep operating with your cloud computing costs. And maybe it has some like side order effects as like an ad platform. But for Facebook, it can just be like a hobby of a hobby. And it won't be that hard for them to keep it up and running. And that's perfectly successful. And if it hurts, Elon and like whatever, you know, Silicon Valley dick measuring contest that's going on right now, like great, all the more for it. Facebook stock, you know, the stock market does not think this is a huge product. It's up like 3.1%, basically over the last five days. So there's definitely a shrug from investors. I don't know. I'm, because it's not a great business Twitter was never a good business. So if you build a smaller version of Twitter, what, you know, they're interested in like the long-term effects of, you know, Instagram's growth. And they're doing well right now, right? Like Facebook or Meta's been like on an upward swing this year because basically the, they've sucked up as like the ads have moved away from the bigger media companies like Buzz Feed. And you know, float almost entirely into digital media, you know, the big social media platforms, they've seen huge, you know, tailwind effects from that. And so that's interesting to investors, whether or not they build a semi-successful competitor to a dying social media platform like Twitter, like who gives a shit? It's totally irrelevant to investors. I mean, it's the same story Twitter has been trying to sell. It's like home of elite culture, it's taste makers, you know, it decides, you know, it's where apparently that's not a good business. Succession of the world. Yeah, I know. I guess Twitter couldn't make it work. These things fit together. We can do them one by one or several, I feel like there's the like the free speech fight and sort of like what we actually think will happen in terms of the importance of these like global platforms, you know, like Katie, you've already been censored. Like Instagram did famously have like a pretty heavy hand, right? With it, you know, like they're very particular on the level of nudity and pretty harsh in terms of how they censor people. And it's not, you know, Instagram never really saw itself as like this sort of free speech, like Mecca, you know what I mean. And then after that, let's talk about the sort of Zuck versus Elon, the whole thing. But it fits into their personas and sort of this, I don't know, I guess to put a point on it. Are you worried that there's a lot of especially media enthusiasm for threads right now? And then we're going to wake up one day and it's going to be super sensorious, like anti news. And like suddenly the press is going to find themselves back on this side of like free speech and say like, Hey, like Katie's making like a very obvious joke about like Nazis and we should allow some like level of sophistication. What's your view on how we're going to view threads politically like three months from now? I think that like for the average user, they want a nice clean environment. They don't want the assholes and the baddies and the paid blue check types on there. They don't like those people. Those people are mean, they're nasty, you know, they're riffraff or whatever. So like the sanitized Instagram experience is good for most people. Exactly. I mean, that's, I've been beating my head on the Twitter thing, right? Elon has said when he was acquiring Twitter that he wanted to represent like the middle 90%. But the norming middle loves censorship, right? That was the whole sort of like video game reviews. You know, there were Democrats. There were Republicans. Everybody was for like rating things. And it's the far fringes that are like, let's have a wild west, you know? And so Twitter, Elon clearly preferred the sort of wild west, but like, yeah, I agree the vast middle is sort of like happy to not really think about speech policies. Right. Because I think the most people aren't in a general sense that interested in the kind of things that are getting censored anyways. And what they really want is they don't want to deal with assholes. They don't want harassment. They don't want like random people showing up and saying mean things to them. They don't want to, you know, and I think that that Elon Musk version of Twitter was certainly an interesting experiment in expanding the definition of what free speech on a platform should look like, you know, I think to different opinions of how successful, yeah, I don't know. I mean, like, I do think they're like ultimately like, yeah, oh, no, are we all just going to be back on like a meta platform? Like, we forgot. We hate meta. It's evil. But I think that like, you know, compared to how bad this other thing, you know, that we all are sort of like flocking back to like, well, there's this nice safe experience where no one is like mean and nasty. And I'm not going to see like, you know, some Maga hat types. I mean, meta are professionals at this. You know, they do know how to run a social media company. They do sort of think about it. They certainly have done, they've messed up and prioritized growth sometimes above sort of caution. But yeah, Tom, what's your view? I never have much to say on like the censorship aspect of these platforms. I think it won't really matter until it reaches some level of significant scale and influence in the broader media where we're like, oh, my God, look at all the Nazis that are, you know, coming together on threads right now to disseminate harmful information and, and you're not worried about oversensorship or you're not worried about undersensorship. I'm just not worried about either. No one really knows how to use these platforms yet and what the specific audience that will come to threads ultimately will look like. So yes, Facebook clearly knows how to turn the dial more towards censorship and pull things down. And they're obviously more worried about their broader brand as a company than they are about the success and the direction of free speech on threads. So if they start to see that this becomes the like proud boy's watering hole, then yeah, they'll fucking tank all of those things without a second thought about it. So no, this is not going to be the Elon Musk hour version of things. I'm kind of interested, but Katie, have you spent much time on spaces in the last couple of months? I've heard that that is like a pretty horrifying place of racist conversations and we use underground conversations. It's sort of, it's funny because like you can go on there and see what like, you know, most people like the top space of what the moment is or whatever. And it's usually like weird people you've never heard of and often about like crypto or like hustle or that kind of stuff. I mean, I was just thinking that I think I think I think my censorship and like I kind of agree, like the like, you know, fighting over that, you know, one inch of line about can I say this word or not is like sort of irrelevant almost in the US because like all the really like horrible stuff that has happened as a result of like Facebook or whatever is in other countries where there's much lower moderation because maybe they don't have that many like contractors that speak the local language. And so, you know, there's all this crazy stuff that happens that, you know, there's a genocide because they forgot to moderate in this small country somewhere else, especially in other threads is not it's US only for now. And that's partly they can't be in Europe because of the EU GDPR stuff. But I mean, I wonder too if it's that they are going to be very cautious with rolling out globally because the moderation outside of the US is like so much harder and that's where the real problems are seems like people are going to be able to get access. I feel like people are definitely tweeting it's like, I'm in Europe right now. I have it. It'll be like the age gating where it's like, you're not supposed to, you know, suck is like a very key part of the early threads experience and he's not an interesting poster. He never really has been. I mean, I know that, you know, hardcore poster is like Katie and people who really know how to do this stuff have been critical with Elon for being pretty cringe. And if you look at someone like say Donald Trump who's like so good, you know, Elon really isn't very funny and you know, there's a lot of, you know, crying emojis that to speak a deeper insecurity over there. But Zuck is much worse. Like if you're early experience with threads is seeing Zuck kind of in and out of stuff, they've got to turn that dial down a lot because he's not, this is not his medium at all. I wonder what's going to happen with that. I mean, there is something weird going on with Zuck in general. Like, I mean, I think you did want to talk about the whole like the martial arts thing. Like there's a little bit of a like midlife crisis element going on. That's always, I mean, there was that, you know, the barbecue meme. Like he's wanted to sort of be a sort of character. But he's rarely rejected by the broader public that happens. But the new thing is good for the platform. They want it to be friendly to Normie is like in some ways I feel like his replies mostly serve the function of pay attention to the thing I'm replying to. And even if he's sort of like pretty meh, it like draws attention to that thing because it's the CEO of the platform. And I just don't think we want another world where like it's the CEO of the company that we're thinking about constantly when we're on the platform. You know, I yeah. And that would be a nightmare. I mean, that's part of what's made Twitter so terrible recently. Right. Is that Elon love Twitter so much that he needed to buy it? Whereas that's clearly not the case with Zuck here. Right. I'm interested in the midlife crisis conversation if that's where this is headed with Zuck right now. I don't read it. I don't know. You guys. You don't think it was. I mean, I think that it's like, I guess not, maybe not midlife crisis, but you know, I mean, like there's been some weird new things, right? Like all of a sudden, I mean, he's done these things of like, he's had odd fascinations with new hobbies every year or whatever, but now like being really into martial arts is like, feels kind of like, final form of like, I don't know. It's weird. Well, it's the first one I've seen from him that, you know, is very much driven by, like there's no broader marketing push that clearly it's a part of because if you look at like the previous ones, there was like, I'm going to kill my own meat, which was, I don't maybe there's some environmentalism behind that or connection to, you know, people who don't have insane. Like, you know, he was doing that at the time that he was becoming a hyper billionaire. And so maybe he felt trying to connect to with the layman and then his learning Chinese for a year. I mean, that one's pretty pretty, you know, not a lot of stuff. I'm going to visit every state and that was kind of like, yes, and it was around an election cycle. That's what everybody was saying. He was going to run for president, which was like absurd in hindsight. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember actually. There was like a book club at some point. So he clearly didn't have a lot of good ideas that year. But this one is the first one that seems, first of all, that I could see it happening for a good number of years. And, you know, he's really putting himself out there on this one, right? I mean, he's, you know, fundamentally, I think, especially as reporters, we should be cheering for these people to be out there. I mean, it's good. Like, I mean, it's insane how much they can gobble up sort of people's intentions. I want more like, you know, public figures to sort of live semi-transparent lives. I don't know. You disagree or do you think the lives are so fake that it's like, there's no public service here because we're not getting sort of a real glimpse of that? No, I don't think it's fake. I mean, like, in so far as that, like, I think you can all agree, like, it's like a weird guy, right? Right. And like, the social networking. Like, not only that, but like, he's been so rich for so long being like, I have a human hobby now is like, you know, like, I think the funniest thing is, like, there was that video of him doing it. I like, I can't remember what martial art is. Is it jujitsu that he does? But like, he's doing it in like, you know, like a high school gym or whatever, like, it's like, clearly, like, the weird, like, rinky dink. Well, my favorite thing is the New York Times had this subplot in one of their stories where there's like, Zuck got, like, choked out and then like, they, like, vociferously denied that. They're like, absolutely not, like, yeah, Mark, like, wrote an email, you know, they're like, no, I never got choked out, you know, well, their initial source on the choked out was the ref in that match. And I didn't realize this, but his determination that Zuck had been choked out was that he was in some sort of, like, triangle arm bar or some sort of jujitsu hold. And he began snoring. And I guess that's an indication that you've been choked out, which, look, I'm not like a martial arts watcher, but if that's a real thing that, like, if you're down, you just start snoring. Yeah. That's fascinating because like, there didn't, their denial had to be, he wasn't snoring. He was, he was effortful grunting. Yeah. They had like a release specific phrase, but it was, I think it was like one of the first times that, like, Zuck had, like, commented directly on a story about him to the times in, like, years or something. Yeah. What one person snore is another person's effortful grunting. Who knows? Yeah. But so, you know, there wasn't video. He has this whole thing now where, like, he and Elon are sort of playing at this idea that they're going to have some sort of wrestling match, which is like, never gonna happen. No, it's never gonna happen. And I can't tell if they're like, I can't tell how I feel about it. My gut says cringe, like, he's just the, like, the play acting of like, I'm gonna fake you more. Well, I love the, like, they both have to act like the other is the one who would pull out, right? I mean, ultimately, it was Elon's mother that he uses a pretext, not to do it. Well, any, okay, we have a couple other things I want to cover before we wrap, but make a prediction or like, let's offer some sort of prediction about how this plays off. Talked versus Elon and then through the cage. Talked versus Elon, threads versus Twitter, like, I mean, now, you know, Twitter's threatening to sue. I don't know. Any creative? Well, that's, I can, I can make a strong prediction on that one. I mean, they have a history of making, there's a lot of saber rattling that goes on from Elon's lawyers when it comes to lawsuits. I've gotten to see that a little bit when they threaten to sue Microsoft over, you know, over, over usage of their API and stuff like that. And Elon, it's not exactly a huge winner at the courts these days, too. So I'm not expecting anything on there. It's hard to not see Twitter. It's funny. I was told before going on this podcast, I shouldn't veer too much off of, you know, reported material, but it's hard not to see Twitter as like continuing its precipitous decline. And not just because, you know, threads could or could not be a huge hit. It's just the product decisions aren't getting any better. It seems like, you know, business wise. We did. Literally died. I mean, I think I've seen reporting that Facebook rushed this out in part because, you know, they were doing the rate limiting with Twitter. And so people were so mad at Twitter that I was like, oh my God, we need to seize on this. So definitely my point of view would just be like, whatever happens, I feel like even if, you know, threads wasn't super successful, the decline of Twitter, it's just going to continue. And they're playing not very smart games with their cloud computing bills. And, you know, that's just ultimately going to result in more downtime and the people that were on the fence about this thing, like the one thing you can't overcome is a non-usable product that you can have as many, you know, policy decisions and algorithm decisions you want. But if the thing doesn't load, and you can't post, there's not a lot going forward with that. You're going to pay to play at, like basically you paid money to them and you get to annoy everybody else. Katie, you have any predictions for the season? Yeah, I think that like Twitter, I think it's going to get weirder in the next six months. Like a lot of people are going to leave. A lot of people are going to see threads as like a perfectly serviceable exit, you know, that will scratch the itch for something to open on your phone when you want to read a few jokes. They all, you know, leave the celebrities will probably start posting less because ultimately like celebrities will find it not that rewarding to do text posting. And I think, yeah, like I think that Twitter will just get like weirder and weirder and more insular because you're going to be left with like only the real, like the true freaks. The real posters. Yeah. Does that include you, Katie? I'm genuinely curious because you're so, like you built your career in many ways. I think I'm being so good on Twitter and kind of defining a certain voice there. And I sort of see someone like you being like, I'm out as a real death knell for any version of Twitter that I ever found interesting. Well, there certainly are people like myself who, you know, especially like journalists who spent a decade building up a large following on Twitter so that when they tweet out their stories or whatever people click on them, they get sourced as that way, you know, losing that is going to like suck, you know, like this was a great tool for me professionally. Hopefully I will still be able to do work without it. But do you think you're going to dual app or what's your job plan? I guess. I mean, I guess. I mean, it's weird. It's like there's been so many moments where I've been like, this is the moment everyone's going to leave Twitter. I'm like, I don't, I think so many people are like, I don't want to leave Twitter. But eventually it's going to, the thing that will make me leave is not that one day I'm going to say, that's it. I quit. I can't take it anymore. It's just going to ask other people as other people that I care about leave. It's going to be less interesting to open and literally within a day, you see a friend that you fall. It's like a lot. You're not like breaking up just like one day. It's slow. Right. It's just. Oh, I guess that was the last one. You know, I didn't realize. Yeah. I mean, even in the last day since threads launched, I, like, and part, I mean, I think the rate limiting that happened last weekend, two weeks ago, when people hear this, like, was that really, like, I think was a big problem for me. Like it was, it became like, like, I'm just not going to bother with this app. And so I just, even on Twitter now, you can get real ghost town vibes that like have been being ghost town vibes for the last six months, but really, really now. Like, I'm just not seeing that many people that I know or like posting. I can see that there's lower engagement on my own posts. Like, it's just, it's less and less fun. Eventually, it will get to the point where I don't feel like opening it as much. Oh, I want to talk briefly about each of your reporting Arcadey, really. I mean, you, you were such, you were a diehard BuzzFeeder. I mean, you really stuck with them as things got rough and, you know, represented some of the best of their reporting, always such a creative and wonderful writer. I'm curious, what's your plan right now? Are you, are you definitely staying in the reporting biz? I mean, you sort of made a joke about Ben Smith, you know, giving you the, what was the wisdom Ben Smith had? He was like, oh, if you have a bunch of rebels, do you like, you know, you give them station posts, basically in the new regime. Whether they're occupied and then they don't cause you trouble and you were saying, like, oh, now I, I can have the real heart of a poster. I'm not a journalist. I'm only to, like, yeah, I don't know. Is there a world where you're like, oh, this influencer world or something? I'm interested in that. Or what do you think about the reporter influencer divide and what's, what's your ambition at the moment? I think that I will probably continue to be in reporting, but right now, I mean, the people who have been laid off of BuzzFeed News, which is like, it sucks and it's very sad. The only upside is that because it was the entire division of BuzzFeed that shut down, it triggered. This is like so boring now. It triggered the New York Warren Act, which means that they have to keep you on payroll for an extra three months before your severance consent. So you didn't pay to tweet on threads, like, yes, that's where we're really the editor. Yeah. I'm still a BuzzFeed employee for another month. And then I get six months of severance. So like, I'm sort of, like, relaxing for right now. That's beautiful. It's like a nice, personally, I'm finding it a very nice time to be able to take a break. But yeah, I was sort of having this moment where I was like, oh, this is such a weird thing. This new app is launching and it's very squarely in what I would normally be covering. Normally, I would have been reporting and writing about this and having to come up with a story, but I don't have to do that. So instead, I did this whole stack about pretending to be the editor in chief. But also, like, I probably couldn't have done that if I was, like, actively being a reporter. But I have this little hobby horse that, you know, the reporter class, especially, you know, which I'm a part of, which came up either through newspapers or journalism school or whatever, who believes in sort of the priesthood of, you know, journalism is very defensive about distinguishing, like, the creator, influencer world from journalists. Whereas I'm, I've become much more of an advocate of, like, we should collapse the mall and hold everybody to the same standards, you know, if you're a Lex Friedman doing an interview with Mark Zuckerberg or something, you should be held to your reputation and people should pressure you to ask tougher questions and all that and like drawing some huge distinction between, I don't know, the journalist class and everybody else is like not serving anybody. I don't know. Do you agree with that? Or like, is there a world where you would lean more into being sort of a creator who with journalism instincts rather than sort of work at a media company as a sort of traditional journalist? I don't know. I mean, like, I think I'm inclined to agree with you in general. I think that this was a specific case where, like, I think have I been actively reporting on threads and also purposely misrepresenting myself on threads that probably, like, that probably wouldn't have been okay to do while I was. My boss would have been like, that's a funny joke, but you need to stop. I could have got it. But it's funny. Like, it's like, you're not hurting. Yeah. I could have gone away with it at BuzzFeed for six hours, I think, at the Wall Street Journal zero hours, you know, but, but I don't have a job so I was allowed to get away for it for 24 hours. Exactly. All right. That's a good transition. Tom. All right. You left the show. You're at the Wall Street Journal. Now you're in authority. You, you know, voice from God. What have you learned? Well, since I left the show, I've been flourishing at the Wall Street Journal. I cover Microsoft and Enterprise Tech since I joined that has basically been the AI beat, like every other reporter these days. Yeah. I wrote a story about AI and the effect it's had on the downturn that we're in right now. This is really more of a newcomer story, honestly, but I kind of took the ball and ran with it. I had had some conversations and I was actually out in New York with some startup founders who were, you know, people had been around the tech space for a long time. And they were telling me that this was like a weird downturn, like, they'd been through different downturns, like the dot-com bust or the O7, you know, financial collapse. And people always talk about 2015 as being one of the downturns. I don't, I was covering tech that I don't really remember what happened. Well, there was a blip, there was a blip where value, evaluation down a couple months maybe. Anyway, but this, so that was actually maybe the weirdest one of all, but the point here was like, we were all expecting things to look really bleak in tech for an extended period because of, you know, whatever interest rates and the decline of all the stock prices and things like that. And then AI happened to come along and be this incredible, buoyant force that props up at least a lot of the optimism within the tech world. And look, I'm not here to say that the downturn is over and we've reached a floor and everything is on its way up. But it's at least been like a surprising turn compared to other downturns. And so I was just talking to people, investors and other, you know, startup founders who ended up raising decent... It's a very newcomer story. Yeah. Well, I didn't see it on newcomer. So like I said, I ran with it. But you just had a chart that showed, I think like series C rounds sort of rebounding a little bit. Yeah. There's starting to be some evidence and private market improvement. Yeah. The problem with all those data-driven stories to make this even more boring is that it's all very backwards looking. And so you don't get a good sense of what's going on right now. So I actually didn't get incredible data to back up the idea that like things are up and up. But just in terms of optimism, it was funny to hear, you know, how many people are expecting huge things out of AI right now, which like let's be clear, hasn't produced a ton of money so far for everyone, right? Like it's obviously... Or what? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like it's, you know, Nvidia clearly. It's going to start cleaning up. They'll talk to the roaders. I just wrote about this bought a company, bought CaseTex 650 million. I mean, that's a real exit and I hate it. Sure. And Rose, that's all in stock. 0.3. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the exits are there. So that's one side of it. And I mean, if you look at the stock prices for all of these companies, I mean, this is a real departure from like the cage match between South Korea. Well, you're really negging this, you know, we get... No, but I'm negging myself. God forbid people, you know, like, you know... This is a serious business podcast now. We don't just talk about media things, but yeah, anyway, you know, there's a lot of optimism and expectation of what AI can do. And so the piece that I wrote was mostly about that and where that fits into like previous downturns. But I want to be clear in case people start thinking that I think that we're past the worst of things. I mean, I have no idea. It's very likely that we're going to see like bankruptcies and like a huge calling of overvalued startups that came around in the last couple of years. But AI has been like a funny wrinkle in all of this. So that was my story. I mean, I basically said over the last like, I don't know, nine months now that like, it's this story of dueling narratives with like AI rounds like super up and everything else, super down. I think the new turn is like some of those super down things, you know, what's happening with with the rest of the market and eventually some enthusiasm out of AI will cool down. But yeah, it's a weird, it's a weird narrative time. I think, I mean, my last podcast was with the CEO of tech stars who is pretty bleak. And you know, her main point was just like venture capital funds take a long time to fail. And so I think to some degree, people get impatient to see sort of the deaths. And it's like, there's a big lagging indicator when it comes to funds in terms of the actual pain. I find like the opportunism of this era to be interesting and the story I wrote before that actually I did it with a colleague of mine was about crypto and how a lot of the crypto miners have been trying to pivot to AI because they're stuck with these rigs now that are completely unprofitable because mining is basically dead at least for Ethereum. And so they're hoping that they can like somehow turn these things into AI compute devices. And it's an interesting kind of play because there's a lot of arguments about whether they're even powerful enough to do it. And it really flies in the face of like Nvidia, which tells everyone you need to buy. They're like multi tens of thousands of dollars, expensive chips in order to train your AI models. And so again, it's just funny to see the crypto people reemerging again, you know, the ones who the survivors of the last tech hype cycle to see how they can somehow make some money during this current, you know, craze that again isn't really making a lot of people, you know, revenue. All right, Tom, great to have you back in the podcast. Katie, thanks for coming on. I'm excited to see what happens after this, this Buzzfeed pay, pay to tweet on or paid to post on threats. Thank you for having me. And there is currently an opening right now to be the editor in chief of threats. Right. So step down. I've been, I've been fired. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So if anyone wants that job, did they get in touch with you or how do you like them? I think it's mark at meta.com. Okay. Sweet. All right. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Eric Newcomer. Thank you to Katie, the top of this and Tom do Tom for coming to the show. Shout out to Tommy Herron or audio editor. Riley can sell a bunch of you from staff and young Chomsky or the King music. Like, comment, subscribe on YouTube. Leave us a nice review on a podcast. And of course, subscribe to the sub stack, newcomer.co. See you next week. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.