Threads is Meta's New Twitter Killer

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1:03All right, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew and I'm David and we've compiled we've been taking notes this whole week about what we wanted to talk about and it's turned out This is mostly a social media episode. We have a lot to say about a lot of different social networks Starting Google Plus of course is the hottest one. Just kidding YouTube fighting some things Twitter fighting some things reddit fighting some things Instagram fighting some things but first We want to talk about the Zen phone.

1:36You've been actually using the Zen phone alongside I can officially say, so I've been using this for about two weeks now. Feels kind of cool. Somebody else, baby. Somebody else. I want to preface this by saying, also, this is the first non-Pixel phone I've used since the Pixel 3. The 3 is when I switched to the Pixel lineup, and I've only used Pixel since then. So this is a fairly close to stock Android phone. Yes. How have you been finding the Zenfone 10? I will start it by saying I really appreciate it. Oh, you have all the fun colors. I was just showing the colors. what five colors this time yeah five colors blue white black green red yes blue's hot blue is hot and by hot i mean really subtle it's really cool actually red is really quite that's warm yeah yeah i like it the green is like a like bright pine green yeah i've been using the green i think we kind of were wondering if which one's gonna fade the worst because remember the zenphone 9 had like terrible fading i do think this back material is gonna not fade as bad they said they made the material better from last year right yes yeah actually i'll just said that yeah so i'll start with just my like summary of the phone okay which is i love the zenphone 9 shamelessly like it's one of my favorite phones ever it won my small phone of the year last year and i could only really come up with maybe two nitpicks about that phone one is it didn't have wireless charging they added it to this phone so it's got 30 watt 30 watt wired 15 watt wireless boom they did that epic the other nitpick was the back material just like faded so hard i had a red phone within a month keep in mind you own a phone for years within a month my phone was like dark and used looking like really patina but not in a good way yeah i'm thinking like after a year two years three years this phone's gonna look crazy i mean it probably bottoms off after a while but that was that was a legit nitpick i had um this phone still feels kind of the same like it's a soft touch it's it's got a little texture to it but they told me it's a different material so i said okay it's a different material it hopefully is a better aging more durable material and so far that's felt like it's held up to be true as well so i no longer have anything negative to say at all about this phone that's literally just has like the tiniest littlest nitpicks for me but this phone is incredible i mean that's kind of how i feel i those two things i agree with i said the wireless charging was a deal breaker for me and i was like man if this had wireless charging now i would use it and here we are i'm using it and i do agree i've i mean i take this to the climbing gym it gets chalk all over it i throw it on the ground i've seen very little wear on the back of it and the green's really light so i feel like it could show wear very easily i was hoping i had it with me on you know some hiking over the last week but i didn't um so i didn't get to see if it got that dirty from there for those of you out of the loop andrew i said was on vacation when we recorded last week but then his flight got canceled and now it's a different yeah it was terrible so he's back it was rough he's back we're rescheduling it but but we're back i'm happy to be here and um but yeah so so far like you said i've loved it it has wireless charging the size i'm getting used to because i'm not used to something small which i think let's take a minute we were arguing about this beforehand what did you say someone said on on youtube so there were a lot of comments um i don't know if it was from your tweet when it got announced or something but a lot of people are saying like this is a misconception this is not a small phone we are talking about relative to any other mostly phone any other android phone you can get right now it's like one of the smallest ones specifically with flagship specs it is definitively i'm pretty sure i can say it's definitively the smallest phone with the snapdragon 8 gen 2 yeah and it is definitely the smallest flagship phone you can get that doesn't fold in half the iphone se is technically slightly smaller yeah but that's not a flagship phone as someone who's used a lot of phones too like when i type on this phone the keyboard feels a little bit small sometimes i agree do you have it wait wait before we go forward yeah i also think one of the complaints of that though was comparing it to the iphone mini when it is closer it is closer to the size of a regular iphone than the iphone mini but it was being compared to that just because it is one of the smaller android devices the iphone is a smaller ios device the iphone mini which is no longer made when it was out it was by a landslide the smallest flagship phone you could get yeah um currently it is small is what we're trying to say it is a small phone yes it is my front runner for smallest best small phone of the year again right now do you think this would be a front runner for just overall best phone of the year so here's where it gets interesting value So I think yes for best value.

6:19$699, right? Yes, the same price as last year. Crazy. Awesome, awesome value. Literally incredible battery life. Yeah. Really good cameras. I think in order to be like an overall MVP best phone, it's a little more blurry. Like I think you could argue on impact or on overall like sentiment about a phone. Yes, it's right there. But I would also want slightly better cameras. I would want slightly better. I dig the cameras a lot. So I think the cameras are good. But I think they're B plus to A minus good, where the absolute cream of the crop, the S23 Ultras, the ones that have a telephoto camera, the iPhone 14 Pros, the Pixel Pro, those are going to be a bit better.

6:58I mean, it doesn't have a telephoto. I think that's just one thing it's lacking. And it's a small phone, and that would be a lot of room to take up. But it's not like a flagship camera system. It's right underneath one. So it's not going to be the best phone of the year, but it is good at everything it does. It also has a headphone jack on the top. I just want to do a quick rundown of what's inside this phone, right? Yeah. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, wireless charging. It's 5.9 inches, 144 hertz, IP68, headphone jack, 30 watt charging, very durable. It's got basically everything that anyone ever asked for.

7:32And the fact that the battery life is so good when it's a small phone. It makes no sense. So I'll say for my battery life, it's the middle of the day. I'm at 47%. that's because I haven't charged it since yesterday morning. It's incredible. It really is. I'm a day and a half in it, almost half battery. You said 144 hertz. I will mention, it is almost never 144 hertz. Okay. So you can put it at auto and it will go up to 144 hertz only when Game Genie has told it that it is playing a game that can take advantage of 144 hertz. Not even on like the home screen? Not only, yeah. Does it do 120? All the time.

8:08Well, I don't care. it's just like they get to say 144 on the press materials but it's 120 i mean 120 is perfectly fine great that's a great photo this is low light at coney island the other night that's a really good picture low light photo yeah i was very impressed i've always really liked asus's cameras even when i did like the zenphone 5 or 6 review way back in the day they don't lean super hard into like computational photography hdr stuff which i think is a strong suit for them because it gives them a little more contrast or a little sharper there's less noise reduction yeah yeah i think they're they do well in the test every year as well like it is potentially one of the top four or five phones in this blind or it get like gets knocked out by the winner and puts up a fight against it which is i think a lot of people would argue like oh so okay why is it not one of the best flagship cameras it still has to compete with ultra wide still has to compete with telephoto still has to compete with video it has it does have it has no telephoto it does have really really great stabilization right which should be obvious if you look at the giant camera module almost to the point where it's like it's like too finicky about being like no no you weren't perfectly still maybe you should take that picture again and i'll look at it and be like that looks totally fine but now i'm worried about it i remember i just remember walking around just taking like handheld video just like normal not thinking too hard about it and i played it one played it back it was just like normal 4k 30 not even the super smooth mode and it was just remarkably smooth and i was like this is as good as i'd want it it's really good yeah six nine and i i still am like how did they get the 699 price point it's crazy that's so crazy it's not gonna sell well this is my thing is like and actually aaron he made a video where most of his video was about how this phone won't sell well and i kind of tend to agree but i am so happy that asus has continued to spend on and make money or to to make the effort to make this phone yeah good and small because it takes extra work and extra engineering to fit it in a small space and still make it so good and uh it's gonna be in the u.s this year they're actually gonna launch at quarter three which is cool i don't know if it's gonna be in a bunch of carrier stores or maybe just one or two that would be nice but yeah it's it's not going to oversell the big screen because what do people like buying big screen big screen so yeah i don't know claire's using an s10e and she was like i want this as my next phone s10e is a really good parallel because this also has the fingerprint reader power button it really is oh my god this is the s10e yeah stays with the headphone jack yeah uh does the s10e also have the corner hole punch yeah yeah yeah remember the um big hero six wallpaper we used exactly yeah so that that's a good i think that's a good parallel yeah um but overall love it it's getting it took me a little while to get used to a smaller phone because i've always used bigger ones um my tiny gripes are the fingerprint sensor i miss under of the screen just because when I grab it with my left hand even though I've used my pointer finger as a fingerprint unlock it's not great at figuring that out um and then it has that like side swipe thing you can use but you can only launch apps in it in floating windows which I just like let me open a full side a full screen app from that because I like it's like a quick it's like a one-handed mode yeah it's like the quick actions from the side and you can either do like settings toggles on it or also apps.

11:23But they're always windowed. So then you have to open it and then click the big button because I hate using windowed apps on a phone. Got it. There's just not my... On an already small phone. On an already small phone. Maybe the idea is that it's sort of like Arc where you're opening a window temporarily and then you're closing it quickly. I think the best version would be you have an app already and you're like, I need to throw the calculator app up and do it really quick and then click out of it. That's kind of cool. That makes sense. It's a cool idea. I just don't. If it was full screen, that seems like a really simple addition it could do would be awesome to be able to do that every time we like toggles add toggles like what was the um the pixel fold thing it's the same give me the option to have a separate layout on the inside and outside just to just a toggle yeah just doesn't have to be on by default just let me toggle it yeah yeah we like android because it's customizable like those are simple ones like toggles yeah toggle me moral all right moving on youtube is testing blocking a video entirely if you have an ad blocker installed i wouldn't run about this is the thing about these headlines is whenever i see a headline that says youtube is testing yeah i kind of just wait because YouTube tests a lot of crazy things.

12:37Yeah. A lot of the, some things do make it. YouTube was testing removing a dislike counter and it made it to the top and they disliked it. YouTube was testing, you know, some other weird things that eventually made it to the top. But YouTube also tests like insane things that they just want to see if it'll work with like a fraction of a percent of people and then it goes away. So I don't know how far in the testing process this one has made it. It seems like it's still not fully rolled out. But yeah, you know, social media companies like to protect the way they make money so if you have an ad blocker you're not making them any money that's the thing how many things do they test that are directly affecting their bottom line like youtube offers an insane amount of stuff with free video uploads and essentially unlimited space for anybody so like they need to make money and i'm not gonna sit here and like totally defend youtube they have plenty of money but it's their whole business exactly i would be pretty surprised if this doesn't push forward yeah yeah i will also say uh i've had youtube premium for so long that i forgot there were ads on youtube i was guilty of that for a while too yeah and i know that for one person it's kind of expensive but you can have up to six people in your google family plan and it's only like three dollars and 80 cents a month per person if you have all six people in your family right it's funny how we think about these prices it's only $3.80 for no ads on an unlimited video supply of the entire internet.

13:59You don't have to go to college for$3.80 a month. That's it. One person has to pay and everyone pays them back, right? Just checking. It's the smart way of doing it. If you work for YouTube, you didn't just hear that. Nope. We are family. We are family. To describe how it seems like they're testing it though, essentially if you were to try and play a video with an ad blocker on, rather than immediately just block videos entirely, they give you like three chances with a screen that says like. They designed the whole thing, yeah. Yeah, because they want to like push people towards like why they're doing this.

14:33And it says, it looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowed on the, is disabled on the ad blocker list. Or you can use YouTube premium. So trying to push it towards that. Also with a like, creators still get paid from your subscription. So more along the lines of like, help your creator friends. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is. Exactly. But also us. Yeah. I will say, like, it felt like the earlier internet, everyone was like, oh, ads suck. Like, get away from ads. Like, use ad blockers, blah, blah, blah. I think people are a little more open to, like, seeing ads because we kind of zone them out a little bit more now.

15:09Like, even banner ads on websites, like, I don't even really notice anymore. And then, like, YouTube video. The thing with YouTube video ads, though, is I was so used to not seeing them for so long. and then sometimes I go into incognito mode to watch a YouTube video because I don't want it to ruin my... Getting like double ads at the beginning. Yeah, double ads at the beginning. They're both 30 seconds. I'm like, jeez, this is like a three minute video and I'm watching one minute of ads. Yeah, I also agree with you in like being more okay with ads just because more and more of how the internet is working is without those ads is like you're not getting the people creating those.

15:41So like... If it was going to meta, I would like block the ads. But if it's going to creators, I'm like, yeah, it's going to creators. Or like if you think of your favorite tech blog like nine to five mac or verge or something like that it's like i'm going to put those on my like i use an ad block but i also use the white list feature very like cognizantly of like making sure that the people i want to keep reading are white listed from that so they make money and i can keep reading because so many places are shutting down now yeah because they're losing money and i'm sure a lot of those places are scared of these ai things taking all their information yeah and this is this is even beyond just online video like we just saw a whole bunch of espn layoffs how many ads do you see on espn like when you watch tv aren't there like four consecutive minutes of ads or something like that for every 10 minutes of tv something crazy yeah and they're still like uh yeah we're out of money for you sorry i know that like spongebob episodes they have two episodes or they have one episode in fit within a 15 minute block but then like four or five minutes of that is ads so a spongebob episode is actually like 11 minutes long wow which I think that's like most television.

16:45Yeah. Like a lot of episodes. Yeah. It's crazy. Like when you watch a 30 minute TV episode, you only watched a 21 minute thing. Yeah. And most of like a lot of ads. I feel so old that we're explaining how commercials in SpongeBob was as kids. Like, and that kids, there are people listening to this that don't understand. Yeah. Yeah. So kids, for those of you who don't know, there's this thing called linear television where you don't get to choose where you are in the video ever. It's just playing nonstop and you don't get to hit pause. Well, I guess maybe you could. Which is what Pluto TV is now.

17:16But then unskippable ads would just play back to back to back to back to back to back. Unskippable ads. Yeah, then you'd move on and watch the rest. Commercial break. That's what it's called. Yeah. It's like when we go to break, but we don't really have commercials. Well, sometimes we do, I guess. Well, speaking of breaks, let's take a quick ad break. Wow. And then we'll come back and we'll talk more about social media. But of course, we have this little fun thing that we do for ad breaks, which is trivia. Trivia. better than Spongebob. Can you remind us of the score? The score. Andrew got a lot of points last week.

17:50He wants to press that in. Marquez with 19. David with 23. Andrew with 20. 20 club.

18:02Rude. This is going to be rough when I lose both of these. Can we clip that? Can we clip that for later? Marquez, I wouldn't have done that high five if I had known that he was just trying to put you in the all right first question so what was the first commercially available smartphone with wireless charging seeing as the zenphone 10 now has wireless charging what was the first one i'm gonna enjoy not being lost for this one episode i have a general idea it's wrong okay ad break

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20:28iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus's much younger sister. And at T-Mobile, there's no trade-in needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone. Or give it as a gift. And the best part? You can make the switch to T-Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes. Nice. My side of the tree is slipping. Timber! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade-in needed. with 24 monthly bill credits for well-qualified customers plus tax and$35 device connection charge credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier cancel finance agreement 256 gigs $830 eligible port in a new line$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required check out in 15 minutes or less per line visit T-Mobile.com all right welcome back so I have a question and David I promise this will make sense in a minute but it might be confusing right now Marquez Adam free agency happened it did well last week it popped off any were there any like cool fun things big trades blockbuster trades like interest you find it hard to follow at all interest literally being like david i know you don't know sport okay okay but it will make sense it will roll into something we all understand you didn't know wayne gretzky was the other day i'm not gonna ask you if you paid attention to free agency that's fair uh no there's some good i'm not saying you're wrong i'm just saying i'm a little hurt chris paul got waived and he was uh he was technically a washington wizard for a few days and then now he's uh he's on the warriors which is fascinating because he he was like their biggest not biggest you're a big Chris Paul fan yeah yeah he was their rival and I was going to play for them so you're a warriors fan now well I'll keep watching them play it's tough being a west coast sorry I'm tangenting already west coast basketball fan because all the games start at 10 10 30 p.m.

22:09yeah you end up going to bed at like 2 a.m. yeah I want to watch some east coast teams this year but yeah there were some moves have you heard of the knicks the new york knicks yeah I've to them. We did make a good signing, though. Did you? Yeah. DiVincenzo? Dante DiVincenzo. He's gonna run your whole team? No, no, no, no, no. But we got the core crew now. From the Villanova? Yeah, from the Villanova team that won. So, like, I like it. It's fun. They're gonna keep winning. Naturally. So, question. When you're following free agency, how do you follow it? Alex. I was gonna say, shout out to Locked on Nix.

22:42Honestly, it's usually Twitter. or i'll open instagram and it'll refresh and there'll be a woj post at the top oh yeah woj is like it was funny he sorry so there's this guy is that a real thing adrian woj i don't know woj narowski yeah i'm gonna butcher his name what is it he's a crazy reporter that he knows things before the players so he tweeted out like a week ago about one player that was like not getting their contract extended or something like that and that player was like thanks for the heads up I had no idea. Oh, man. Yeah. So he knows things. He's inside. Well, so the reason you might be wondering why we're talking about this.

23:17Yes. To me, the two best ways to follow free agency. I'm an NHL fan, not an NBA fan, but they they're like exactly the same. Yeah. This all happens on July 1st and I follow all of it through Reddit and Twitter, which July 1st, Reddit and Twitter were very hard to follow on because Reddit lost all third party apps on July 1st. They all closed down. And Twitter had a fun little rate limit feature, whatever you want to call it. The day of. July 1st for both of them. So, I would like to talk about both of these and how annoying they were. Where do we start? Yeah, which would you like to talk about first?

23:55Twitter or Reddit? First, I would like to say, I do not know sports. But, I think that we should talk about Reddit first. Cool. For no reason. I agree with that reason. Cool. We talked in length about what Reddit is doing in a previous episode. The update is that now they've gone through with actually nuking. We got to the limit for when they had to pay the bill, right? Yes. They didn't nuke. So they turned on the API cost thing. Not all third-party apps shut down. No. I believe Bacon Reader is still around and said they are switching to a paid only option very soon. Or was that Relay for Reddit?

24:41I'm still using Relay and have had no updates at all. Relay is still on the fence. But I think the most recent thing I saw about them is that they were like, it's probably going to cost about$7 a month. Which might mean just shut down because that's expensive to ask for. I think we would probably pay that much. yeah i would probably not want to pay more than five but i would seven's a lot of seven's a lot of money per month but if you think about what has to go through play store and app store and by the time they make it back to uh like pay for these stupid api changes like yeah they're not totally sure yet um but apollo sync and reddit is fun all shut down they were gone end of june 30th over with um and i just have to say because of free agency i had to use the default app for a little bit and i previously had mentioned that it's very bad and now after using it for a weekend i think i need to make a small correction on that it's really bad it is so much worse than i thought it was it is horrible it is the worst experience i think i've ever dealt with it's pretty bad an app i just like have you used the default app i have managed to avoid it so far yeah oh my goodness look at scrolling through this i'm in dark mode okay oh i'm also in airplane mode so that might take a second it's not loading any i also want to make it i want to make a quick correction that bacon reader did fully shut down but did it relay for edit is still around for now but they will be moving to a subscription model in the coming weeks i'm so glad they're keeping it the developer is trying to get their the api calls that they're using it's down as low as possible so they can charge as little as possible yeah but we'll find out soon how much that actually i've gotten a couple updates in the play store and every time i see an update for really i'm like oh no what is it i load up the uh the notes and it just says api optimization so i'm like oh okay wow keep going yeah keep going so it still works yeah so so this is i just loaded up the hockey subreddit it has a pin post at the top look in dark mode you like can't even tell where a new post starts yeah do you see how bad this looks then a potential full page ad that's an ad this is an ad full page video ad um and then just like these terrible just everything looks and that's a full page video ad yeah i mean i'm not logged in which i think would still be but look how many ads there are it's this is horrible it's just been my normal reddit experience well it sounds like that's probably why you don't like reddit very much if you're on android use relay for reddit it's in my opinion one of the best reddit apps that's ever been made and uh it's free it's still free for now so for now weirdly enough oh it's free for now i was using a relay pro i guess yeah because i paid for it yeah it's still free for now but they're going to be moving to a subscription model they haven't announced the price yet but interesting they must be doing pretty well if they can take that time because they're getting charged.

27:37They're starting to. Yeah. I paid for Relay Pro, but it was a one-time fee. Yeah, same. You have a couple bucks. It was$3, I think. And then I have to switch it. There's still some things. $3 seven years ago. Yeah. Switch over. The scary part about all of this, though, is that the more people that go over to these apps that didn't have as big of a user base before, the more it's going to cost them. Yep, and then the more likely it might just shut down. Don't use Relay. It's awful. It's the worst. to use it um weirdly enough claire has reddit is fun on her phone and it still works and i don't know how i read something that like there was some weird setting that reddit is fun still works for for some reason and but it's going to get patched soon and it's gonna it's gonna get destroyed soon i'm sure it will she was i she told me she's like i've been using reddit and i was like no you haven't and she's like no no i'm fine he's like you just haven't refreshed it yet like you probably it's just old stuff and then she refreshes it right in front of me i was like can i borrow this for a minute i gotta get my fix in um so right now pretty much what i'm doing is i have the default app if i want to like really look at something but because i'm not logged in in the default app for me to go try and read comments on reddit is like a chore so i don't find myself like freely scrolling through it anymore okay so it logs you out but it still works so does claire so yeah apparently she doesn't log into anything apparently it's reddit is fun currently is like basically just accessing the old dot reddit like public website and you and using that data somehow huh um yeah it says most likely using the dot json api which is still available anonymously so you can't you can't be logged in and use it which is annoying so it's basically just like a different interface to read the website i guess front page without being logged in if you're point like if you're trying to go to a certain subreddit i guess that still would work okay because then you can just you have to search it every time to be fair this is as of four days ago so maybe reddit patched it and yeah now they're shut down so it'll probably be on there but i mean like ultimately yeah so yeah following nba free agency or nfl free agency on reddit would have been pretty tough this is like impossible but then there's twitter but then there's twitter there's twitter which is great all right so the twitter thing that happened um was on july 1st a lot of people might have seen this little notification pop-up that says rate limit exceeded and uh did any of you guys get it i did i have not got but i did it the first thing when i woke up in the morning i opened twitter and i saw it i think it's within like 24 hours or whatever so i probably hit it the day before and then it went into effect um great notification prompt for people that have no idea what that means great job elon uh but basically they they set this limit so that you can only read a certain number of posts and they also for some reason uh made it so it was a different amount for Twitter blue users.

30:27It was 10 times the amount for Twitter blue users. It started as 600 for non-blue users and 6 ,000 for blue users. They are increasing it more and more over time. Elon said it was temporary. We'll see if it's temporary. Yeah, they also didn't tell anyone until 1 p.m. Eastern, like the whole morning. The whole morning, it was just fair. Like I said, this is NBA and NHL free agency. They were like some of the biggest reporters that I follow trying to see stuff, they're just like, well, I guess you can look at all this on my MySpace page, because this is not working. And those people need to scour the internet to look for breaking news.

31:06And Twitter's supposed to be the site of breaking news, and now you're limiting that. I think that the reason that they turned this on was that they are trying to figure out what AI companies are scraping Twitter without using the paid API. Because you can do that without using the paid API using scraping services, and technically it'll just like run through tweets really rapidly so you'll hit a wall really quickly whether or not they actually like make it a temporary thing or if they just have it for a very long period of time because they need to keep catching these companies i have no idea yeah that that's a similar excuse to what steve huffman said it is like which i think that's a like i do think it's a legit excuse agreed yeah but it sucks that like this new era of technology is coming in and it's basically completely destroying all the other stuff yeah it's destroying a lot of other users i'm sure woge hit his uh hit his rate limit for the thing about woge is he's he's on the phone he's getting his info and then he's just tweeting it and so everyone who's trying to follow and refresh and find the latest stuff will hit their limits probably if they're not logged in or whatever um but yeah that's it is it's kind of like we constantly see google and youtube like fighting their demons of like people trying to take advantage of this site in Twitter's case it's people scraping or AI services scraping in YouTube's case a lot of times it's spammers and scammers and things like that people making fake accounts so I could imagine like the brute force version of this on YouTube would be like you left too many YouTube comments rate limit exceeded and you're like what yeah what do you mean rate limit exceeded I like going around and leaving comments on things yeah it's like well spammers just go around and leave thousands of comments on things So if we just set a hard cap before we think about it at all, that's at least a way to stop scammers from being so effective.

32:54Yeah. And this is Twitter's version of that. It's like, wow, people are going around scraping all of Twitter, pulling thousands of things off the site and whatever they're doing with it. We're not getting paid. Yeah. So we'll just set a hard limit and that's temporary. We'll figure out a better way to do something else about it later in the future. But for now, some regular users are going to hit that limit, too. And oh, well. also all the tech VCs have all been like if you're hitting the rate limit then you need to go outside and touch grass and the funny thing about that is like bro you own this app like the point you are clearly just using that as an excuse because you're trying to make us use the app as much as possible so you can't just like turn around and be like oh my app is too toxic for you so you should go outside like alright I feel like Elon's was like we're not going to tell anyone and they're going to just think twitter broke yeah then at one o 'clock i'm going to tell people it's a very small number and then everyone's going to complain and then an hour later i'm gonna be like well hold on we'll increase it and then another hour later he's like okay we'll increase it more and then right after that is like touch grass losers it's like it's like what is going on how is this the pr cycle of twitter that's the elon cycle that's pretty much consistent with everything that's ever happened negatively to him so yeah it's just the i don't know i can't believe you don't announce it at first because everyone was very confused they just thought twitter was going down like they thought it was one of those days where twitter was just not gonna quite work it's a funny thing because some of these it's funny that this coincidence it's like the how do i say this youtube also never tells anyone about the changes that it makes to stop spammers and scammers all the algorithmic changes it's a black box all the rule changes about things like that that you can't do with an account that you just made when we made a brand new account for this podcast we tried to upload and took like 24 hours to process i'm sure that's another rule we don't know about um but the reason they never announced those rules is so that those spammers and scammers cannot read the rule book and go how do i get around this because that's a guidebook for how you get around all those rules yeah but it's a weird coincidence that with Twitter this limit also coincided with regular users use where like a regular user could just be reading tweets and then hit the limit where like most of the things with YouTube it's like you can't leave 300 comments in an hour okay well if you did you'd think YouTube broke because you couldn't leave any more comments but most regular people are never going to do that Reddit has had that built in since like the beginning like you can't leave like more than like three comments within like 10 minutes or something yeah or it goes oh that's kind of spammer behavior make more than that many posts within 10 minutes yeah right yeah so yeah i'm sure you can't you know change your profile picture 10 times in 10 minutes i'm sure there's a lot of things we don't know that you can't do on youtube and twitter it's just this one happens to be something that regular people are like wait what i hit the limit what i'm just acting normal what's going on yeah when you do views on a thing that's just you're scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of like posts and comments like going through one post in their comments, like you're hitting a hundred views very quickly.

36:01When somebody gets traded, I scroll through all the reaction tweets so fast. There's like hundreds of names about the guy that just got traded. It's pretty easy. I haven't hit the limit yet, but I imagine it's not that hard. I hit it. Although you're verified, I'm unverified. So 600, when it first happened, 600 posts. You kidding? I'm not even out of bed. I'm through a thousand posts before I even step my feet on the floor. Touch grass. Touch grass. Yeah, man. Touch grass. yeah loser so yeah that was just it was a hectic day and it happened on a day where like twitter and reddit were very important and i was very sad and you know i really feel like both of these has just turned into me using them far less on my phone which probably is a good thing yeah yeah it's probably ultimately probably touching terrible for them to make money but it's yeah the ultimate goal of all these social media companies is to make as much money as possible basically i'm so simplifying but like they want to make as much money as possible and if the mechanic of them making money is you spend more time on the site so you see more ads, then anything they do that's counter to that seems hilariously dumb.

37:07So this seemed pretty stupid. You're getting people to leave the site faster, thus making less money. They'll figure it out eventually. Also, on July 1st, there were massive surges of signups to Mastodon and to Blue Sky. Oh, this happens every time there's a weird Twitter feature. Literally anytime there's any sort of weird thing on Twitter, you get like some surge I'm sure on all these sites. Yeah. Mastodon, T2, everything. Yeah. Probably not. We'll probably talk about those after the break. We got to get to Twitter competitors, right? That's its own section. And a fresh one. So we got some new things to talk about there.

37:41Yeah. But before we get there, let's take one more quick break and let's do a trivia question. All right. Trivia question number two. I'm really hoping I know this one. Maybe, maybe not. In the 2022 blind smartphone camera test. I should know this one. The Pixel 6a won first place. What phone came in third? Third? That's hard. Well, so there's two. It's either the two phones that are tied for third. There's two thirds. Or. Is there? Yes. Because there's no tiebreaker. Or ELO rating. What? Oh, because it was 2022. Just kidding. No, we did do ELO. There is a third. so is it in which category overall overall elo overall third highest elo yes okay i should know oh so all three of them put together what there's a standard photo a low light photo and a portrait photo standard no we had overall we did an overall overall elo okay i should 6a one and i remember second place dang therapy okay well second place the pixel 6 pro was it or was it not said pro I lived in this sheet for like two weeks.

38:547 Pro. I know the bottom one. Are you sure that was second? Are you sure that was second? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. And was Pixel 7 third? 7 Pro. We didn't have a 7. All right. Time for break. Time for break.

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40:51Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today, right now, as we speak. find your next great hire on linkedin post your job for free at linkedin.com slash mkbhd that's linkedin.com slash mkbhd to post your job for free terms and conditions apply all right welcome back so marquez you said this new app you're trying is a for sure twitter killer you said twitter is probably going to be done by the end of the week i think that's what you said off camera that's what some advocates would interpret my statement as oh but i'll read what i wrote and then i'll expand on it how about that sure like that okay so what i tweeted and just for background twitter mostly text-based i think we can agree it's a yeah at least a lot of that way so the number one thing twitter has over blue sky and mastodon and t2 and all these other competitors is has always been the people uh that's what makes meta launching their twitter competitor threads so interesting they'll pour everyone's Instagram handles over and we'll just have people right away.

42:17And I tweeted that. I hit send. Got a lot of interesting replies. I am currently using threads. I have the app on my phone. I'm in the sort of like early access group. It's going to go live right before this podcast goes up. So we will also be using threads by the time you hear this. Follow us on threads. You know, it's another one. But I think that's the interesting thing. And I guess I'll expand it to two things. Actually, the thing that Twitter has had, over t2 mastodon blue sky is infrastructure and people yeah infrastructure i just say because like they're a real company and when i look at t2 like they're slowly like building features and bug fixing and they don't have an app yet and it's like we're gonna figure out how to do dms in the next month like they're really early i don't think you can even block someone on t2 yet like mastodon is down all the time blue sky the app crashes all the time like things are slowly coming together but twitter to be say what you want about twitter but they implement stuff for real and fast even if you hate what they're doing maybe too real sometimes you know so that's one thing um and meta has that meta has that in spades they're a real company that can make a real app with real features and as soon as i use threads i'm like yeah they made they built twitter they've got re-shares they've got dms they've got posts they've got sharing images and videos they've got profiles they've built the connection with instagram they've just built it and they they have the infrastructure to keep building things so that's number one and then number two i think we obviously twitter doesn't have a ton of people compared to facebook whatever i think it's maybe 300 million versus however many billion but it does have a lot of like real people that people care about following they've got athletes they've got artists they've got creators like us they've got politicians they've got all these sports teams tv shows are all on twitter um and mastodon t2 blue sky i'm there's a couple here and there like you might log in and be like oh cool like oprah's on mastodon like i don't know randomly you'll see like a couple things pop up but to me it was always like well twitter has everybody already so even if the features are a little bit weird at least that's where the people are and that's what i'm here for and meta also has that because instagram facebook the social graph is built in and i guess what's basically happening is when you sign up for threads you keep your instagram handle i guess is how it works you don't automatically get uh you don't automatically follow everyone or get followed by people who follow your instagram but at least you have your handle and you're verified already and then you jump in and the people are already there like when i was using it pre-release as i've been using it obviously um you know instagram employees zuck and adamissary and people like that but also just like a bunch of celebrities are already on it using it kind of just like poking around and i have a feeling that's just going to grow kind of the same way it was because everyone already uses instagram and expects that yeah so those two things infrastructure and people they are what made twitter better than its competitors and this is the first competitor that's come along that has potentially both of those things right out the gate and that's why it's interesting to see what happens i have some questions yeah okay um wait i want to tell a story first okay okay so okay yeah this morning david posted to slack saying like oh threads is like available and you can go to it and see it like it's not out you can't just download it but like the website is up and then marquez goes in real life like in real time yeah i've been using this for like two or three days now like in previous and i was like the real life meme happened to us yeah like every time i'm always like oh i've some exciting new information and marquez is just like oh i've been using that for a while it's popping it's popping off over there i have a ton of i had to mute my threads notifications for the day because dang i guess because i got a notification for every everything yeah okay so questions yeah uh number one is the does the app feel like really well built out like does it have basically all the same features as twitter good question so 80 yeah 80 of all the stuff you'd expect and i think they're probably going to add stuff that twitter doesn't already have so there is no like for you page but there's like sort of the home page thank god can we see that yeah you can i don't want to sort of let me Let me screen record.