What's Going On With Threads and Twitter?

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1:03All right, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. back to your regularly scheduled format. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And David, as you can tell, is currently not here. He's out. I think he's taking some pictures in the Pacific Northwest somewhere. So we'll see him when he gets back. Yeah, follow him on Instagram because he's posting a lot of them and they're pretty sick so far. Get some previews of those. But in today's episode, we have a little bit of Twitter versus threads. Round two, I think. We've got some thoughts. Is it round two?

1:32We've definitely talked about them specifically once. Yeah, it feels like it's sort of a second wave of Twitter versus Threads. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. But we also have a little bit of a hype or not game to play at the end. So it's not a full game show episode, but we still have games. We've done it before. And I think people liked it. It's a lot of fun to just like speculate about things that are maybe too hyped or not hyped enough. Yeah. I like playing hype versus not hype games. Yeah. But first we did both. We traveled. We did. You did something pretty cool. I had a trip. Right. So you went to, it's called The Open.

2:05The Open. The Open and the couple days before the Open was something called the Open Invitational. Okay. First time they've ever done it. So some of you guys may or may not know this, but I'm a golfer. I've been a golfer for, and I actually, someone asked me this. I heard this part, yeah. I've been a golfer for 20 years. Isn't it wild that we're at a point in our life that you can say you've done something? I've been snowboarding for like 23 years at this point, and I thought about that like, whoa. That's weird to say out loud. It's weird, yeah. But yeah, I've been golfing for 20 years. uh i'm not as good as you would think as someone old when you say that a soundbite when you say out loud that you've been doing something for 20 years you think you're really good at it i'm i'm not i've been playing on and off and obviously we have other stuff that we do but uh my first love my first sport so it was super cool to be able to play on the golf course that is in championship condition because the open the major is being played there uh basically as we speak and uh uh it was actually sort of a practice round day so a lot of the pros showed up i walked through security right in front of phil mickelson put it on the putting green with him and it was like a new event to sort of hype it up a little bit so it was a sort of a teams format and a bunch of invited sort of celebrity guest people uh and we played a scramble and we played the whole course and it was amazing that's really awesome you guys won too right and we won the scramble that's awesome yeah i'll tell you what there's nothing like first t jitters when there's there's first First tee jitters in any sport where you first drive and hit your first shot or hit the court for the first time, take your first shot.

3:42But when you're not used to playing in front of a crowd, the amplifier of people watching you, you don't get to appreciate on TV how many people there are and how close they are to you. You can hear people mutter things under their breath. It's that close to you. And they've been watching. It's making this shot. Also, they've been watching professionals the whole day. Yeah, true. amazing shots and then we walk up and we're like sorry guys this is gonna be a little worse than that but no it was sick that's really it came on the tail end of a adl double header in colorado and salt lake that we also won both games that's awesome and you can watch um you can watch that it was live streamed right i skimmed through and tried to watch all of your shots and i don't know golf but they looked pretty solid the announcers liked it yeah yeah yeah i played okay obviously we won we had a great team shout out to katherine she was the best player of the entire group and she had a nasty shot yeah yeah she had a sick shot uh she hold out for eagle on the last hole in front of the whole crowd it was unreal so yeah go watch that it'll be on youtube we'll put that link in the show notes if you want to check it out you also went on your uh canceled vacation figured out a way to get there we rescheduled it um i went to grand teton national park in yellowstone national park and it was like beautiful tons of animals i posted some photos some really crazy wildlife photos I never thought I'd be able to get in my life because I rented an awesome lens yeah of a grizzly bear I have a couple grizzly bear shots which is pretty cool yeah um I'm actually making a video for the studio channel right now um kind of about some of the tech that I like to bring because I talk about hiking way too much on the podcast so I figured let's get it all in one video so I can maybe shut up about it for like a few months and then we'll get all the gear all the nerding out of exactly yeah so that'll that'll be up there soon but we also just posted another video on the studio channel that was like a total banger from ellis his his first solo hosted video um do you want to tell us a little bit about it no okay sick go watch it definitely go watch it's really good it's really funny and really insightful i i like learning experience yeah but the week i was supposed to be on vacation i missed a little bet that you guys had and adam just posted it on shorts and i wanted to kind of get in on this because i missed get in on the cyber truck on the cyber truck bet yeah okay so i think the bet was 25 non-employees received delivery by the end of 2023 yeah well it actually happened i say yes everyone else said no i'm going to agree with you on this one actually which thank you it's come on hit the buzzard i know you're looking for it yeah man i'm telling you so yes i agree with you I still think it'll be like under a hundred I think it's going to be a very small amount I don't think it's going to be a lot I also we're all excited about it and everyone on Twitter is like oh my god it's coming bro this got announced in 2019 like oh no I know no I know you're not I just need to say it like we're excited but like man this thing was out there and I was just thinking like how many other EV pickup trucks have come out since that since it got announced and just like the lead they thought they were going to have in the pickup space world and how much they blew that lead away.

6:53It's been really interesting. I don't know how much I thought it would matter that they were first to be an EV pickup truck. Like, yes, Rivian came out like before them and that was their thing was they were the first EV pickup truck basically to ship. And I don't know how much it helps to be the first one if it's$100 ,000. And then the F-150 Lightning comes out and I am seeing a lot of them on the road and it's an F-150, so it should be popular. But the Cybertruck also has, I don't know how many, I'll Google it, how many million pre-orders are there for the Cybertruck? I mean, a$100 refundable pre-order is like a weird, which for Tesla is a great little four-year interest-free loan they got.

7:35But yeah, I do think it, I kind of think it is pretty important, especially if you're not a company known for doing pickup trucks. So I think the fact that Rivian got in there first probably helped Rivian quite a bit to be able to say first EV pickup is and then when Ford comes out like you know people who are Ford loyal are going to go for it yeah yeah they had a ton of people in line we were talking to Ford about this they had like tons of people pre-ordering F-150 Lightning and for many of them it was their first truck and for many of them it was their first Ford and so you know just like getting an EV just changes the equation for a lot of people so So yeah, I think Cybertruck, it's still going to come out in this sort of newish age of EVs.

8:16And I think it's going to have an impact. It kind of reminds me of a hot take that I'm going to talk about in a hot take video, which I kind of want to spoil a little bit because I think it's one of the funniest ones. Should I just do it? Let's send it. Okay. One of the hot takes that I'm going to address in the video with a little more precision than this is someone said the Cybertruck is going to outsell the F-150 by 2026. Can I confirm the F-150 or the F-150 Lightning? The F-150. I did the same thing. That person is... Optimistic, I would say. That person is, I don't even know a nice way to say it.

8:50That's one of the dumbest takes I've ever heard. So you can convince yourself of this. By what, 20 when? 2026, so three years. Zero shot. So, okay, but think of it this way. If you're a Tesla fan and you see, this is the, I'm going to the most optimistic route, right? Okay. Okay, there's a million and a half pre-orders of the Cybertruck right now, right? Let's say they start shipping at the end of this year, and they make them all in the first two years. And by the time they start making them the third year, they have another million people order. So by 2026, they ship all the pre-orders, and they're going to make another million new orders.

9:26That would put it on pace to match the F-150. now the chances that they actually ramp up production that fast and sell all the ones and nobody cancels and they sell all the ones they made and make another million orders very very low but the f-150 sells like 600 to 900 000 every single year and it's the most successful vehicle in america so if you're saying it's going to overtake the most successful vehicle for the past 40 years running in three years you're an optimist and it's probably a hot take and i like that it's hot but it's probably not going to happen just yeah yeah i there's i just don't think there's any shot that that happens i mean it's it's four years of pre-orders right that and even that is barely what ford actually sells honestly i think the most of the pre-orders happen in the first year i do think so also but that's why i don't see that pre-orders getting finished and x amount more coming in like you hit a very huge part of the ones that you think you're going to sell those aren't all gonna sell and then you're not gonna get a higher influx once it actually comes out especially with now r1t ford f-150 lightning i'll say the the hummer pickup truck but like i don't think that's much and the silverado is already getting test driven by journalists now so like there's quite a few i think that comes out probably around the same time and there's a lot there's other options at this point don't forget the lord's town yeah it sounded like you couldn't see through if you're not watching the video version i'm sorry for that i don't actually mean that there's a but uh we were talking this morning because i wanted to say it's interesting how many pickup evs got announced and delivered since the cybertruck got announced and i thought the rivian was announced after but it was actually a year before before the cybertruck which i didn't realize and i think that just kind of goes to prove that when you're an EV company no one knows about and you announce a truck no one takes it seriously because to me until the Rivian started like showing up I didn't really take them seriously so this Lordstown stuff like no part of me considers this a thing that I'm going to ever see until I start actually seeing that's totally fair I think the difference is with Rivian it was their first ever vehicle and so it's hard to take anything they do seriously until they start shipping their first ever vehicle and that's true about Faraday Future and that's true about Lordstown and that's true about so many others but why I think it's different with Tesla is it's not their first rodeo agree which is why when I see them starting to test mules and roll around camo versions of it it seems like they're actually ramping up to something real where the others I could never prove that yeah I agree I think you clarified what I meant there is more like these new EV companies as they're just first EV in general like Tesla's been around for longer but it's also been four years so maybe I shouldn't have given them as much trust as I thought I did Maybe it's impossibly hard to make an EV truck and we're all learning.

12:19But it's a simple stamp that so many fleets, they can just stamp out a bunch of them. That's why the design's like that, man. They'll just roll out like nothing in four years. This thing is a 6 ,000-pound guillotine with electric motors. I will say, this is true. And I think it's weird because I keep hearing this about the Cybertruck, but the Hummer EV and the Rivian are both over 7 ,000. I think the Hummer EV might be over 9 ,000. It's 9 ,000. The battery is 6 ,000. Yeah, and it's bigger than the Cybertruck. And admittedly, it's not sharp on the corners. That's definitely a difference. And I don't know how that plays into these tests or whether it'll get pulled or not.

12:56It also has crumple zones. The Cybertruck, they're really big on the fact that this thing won't crumple. It'll just go through. Despite having a front trunk. Whatever you hit. Which is good for the occupant, but not whatever you hit. It's good for the occupant in theory, right? assuming you just do go clean through but remember that the whole point of a crumple zone is to slow you down it's to send energy around the vehicle past the passenger compartment so there is a very realistic chance that your truck will be perfectly fine and you will be like a chef boyardee can in this you're like but the windows are bulletproof so you won't go through them don't worry you'll just splat up against those i feel like i should say before the tesla boys come out too late the the the model 3 and the model s are some of the safest cars money can buy some of the biggest biggest crumple zones in any vehicle yeah the nhtsa says like those are at the top of the chart so maybe they've got some tricks up their sleeve but to me this just seems like they should make this illegal to drive around schools right there's like like there's no way any grade schooler could survive getting hit by a tesla truck which is so high off the ground they couldn't see them anyway i don't know how different it'll be than the hummer ev the thing even just outside of evs the trucks and like suvs we're driving in america are so dangerous towards pedestrians every way and we let them drive all the time like i just don't see anyone actually stopping the cyber truck as being any more dangerous as these the amount of times i've almost been like clipped on the side of a sidewalk in town because some lifted pickup truck i was in Uber, yeah, in the city and we were in like a Denali or a Yukon XL or something and just like riding it and I'm just like, we are kings of the road right now.

14:40This is insane. They're so high and they have such a big front and like front grill and everything it's hard to see over and if you're in the blind spot of them, it's dangerous. Yeah. It's terrifying. Let's put a blade on it. Yeah, let's make it go 0 to 60 in three seconds. Hand drive itself. This is why the Hummer was hilarious when it came out. it was like this 9 ,000 pound massive refrigerator of a vehicle can also do a 0 to 60 in 3 seconds how does that make any sense? I think the only reason I'm more scared of the Cybertruck is just I know there'll be more of them on the road whereas the Hummer EV just like I think it's a pretty niche vehicle so I'm not as, but like if I saw a Hummer EV on the highway I probably would just pull over, take a break and just like wait for that thing to be far away from where I am that's fair yeah we'll see we'll see if the deliveries happen and and then if they reverse the deliveries we'll have to come back to that bet but i stand it's not i don't think it's coming out this year i really don't it's totally happening all right well i think that's a good spot to take a quick break we got a lot to talk about with threads and twitter but of course before we do breaks it's time for trivia start of the season all fresh what number season is it three is it this is season three officially okay you won season two um you also won season one so sick okay first question coming from ellis all right so i was reading on the internet as one does and i found out that you can wake up a computer from sleep using just the internet you don't even have to be at the same room in order to do that you send a very particular message to the target computer to wake it up it's a very silly name that's why it's a trivia question what is the name of that message this is multiple choice or yeah am i need multiple choice for this one you know what i'll make up some choices i was gonna say i mostly want it because i want to hear your made-up versions You know what?

16:49I'll just off the dome right now. Ready? Number one, A. Stomp. S-T-O-M-P. These are all acronyms. Number two, Womp. W-O-M-P. Number three, Klomp. And number four, Alarm. Wildcard. Alright. I'm impressed by the off the dome. I have a feeling some of them rhyme. Yeah. And that helps a little bit. I'll be brainstorming on that through the break. Answers are at the end, as usual. We'll be right back.

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19:33With 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, we're back. So we've been using Twitter for years. Yes. And we've been using Meta's threads for about two weeks now. Two weeks. Do you call it Meta all the time? I still call it Facebook. I do have to remember to call it Meta. Okay. And sometimes I don't.

20:06I just say Facebook. But it does say like when you have the splash screen Meta. So, you know, I get reminded of it. yeah we have a lot of thoughts I've been using them both various intents and I think you kind of see the waves now of things happening with each of them we were saying it's like the second wave but it almost feels like the fourth wave like the first wave was the day it launched which was in the midst of a trough with Twitter because it had like the rate limit scandal and all these things happening and then Threads launches and explodes and it has tons of people joining tons of engagement you could consider that the first wave okay even though there was like the zero wave of like all the pre-release testers i'll leave that out then the second wave was like all right it's sort of stabilized we're like four or five days in 70 million 100 million users all right we're here what do we do now and then twitter on the other side is like a little bit quieter than usual and you're kind of looking around twitter like interesting it feels like there's less posts happening but also is it a day off is it a holiday why isn't anyone on the road today there's like a tumbleweed going across and then the third wave was then suddenly like all of the here i am engagement farming posts happening on threads and then all the all the like threads versus twitter talk and then i feel like the fourth wave is now twitter flips the switch turns on a monetization feature starts writing a bunch of checks and like literally the other day there was a post from Adam Aseri that they had to turn on rate limits because suddenly there's a bunch of spam happening and they needed to actually slow that down and so now it's sort of equalizing and obviously the spike in engagement at the beginning is what you'd expect to see but it's it's never going to hold up to that level but it is at a different place so there's a lot to go over with uh where we see both of these platforms going yeah and the last time we talked about it was by the time the episode came out that launch date had happened but when we were talking about it we were just basing it off of your like day before pre-release and talking there so like we haven't really covered that whole step through process that you just mentioned all the waves so do you want to like really quickly go over how you've been using threads and what you've thought about it so far sure yeah so i mean it launched and there's always just that like fun first couple days of something new where you just play around with it start poking around you know i think i i tagged just random people i tagged mark cuban i said can i be a guest on shark tank and he was like yeah let me get back to you on that i like the idea i i tagged zuck in a feature request and he was like yep it's on the list like just kind of poking around and seeing what's happening and things are all moving and colorful and exciting um it's fun that that part is fun like everybody's just like what do we do here yeah and like it's the difference i think of that is what we've talked about a million times before is that the user base is so important in all of these like we all dealt with this on blue sky and t2 and mastodon but now within was it not 24 hours threads already had more than probably all three of those combined probably within hours yeah yeah so like you get to actually experience this like hey this is kind of neat yeah everyone's nice what do we do it's like walking into a party and like so many people you know are there and you're like whoa this oh you're here too oh wow you're all here that's crazy what are we what are we talking about what are we doing here and you're so excited you don't get into the like toxic hellscape arguments of like the regular twitter thread and that was just nice for like a week yeah i think then once you've gotten over the hump of like right we're all here we're all trying to do stuff then it's like what do we post here and and this is from someone who posts on social media for a living i'm like do i post the same things that i'm posting in other places or do they not belong here?

23:49I saw at the beginning so many, you know, so much emphasis from the founders about things like conversations and just text posts. And it's called threads. It's literally just like text threads, people talking to each other. So I kind of assumed I'd mostly just be using it like Twitter in like text threads. Not a lot. I didn't post any YouTube links. I wasn't thinking about posting any, you know, photos or videos, even though you still can technically but then the question is like well i i just posted some short form video on instagram do i also post it on threads is that like double posting i posted on twitter maybe i posted on threads and twitter but not instagram or reels or shorts is i don't know it's kind of just a weird there's a thought process now to it so that that's in the back of my head the whole time but then also i do find it fun to engage with shorts because it does for me still feel like it has the second fastest engagement rate of any social network behind instagram sorry your threads or short you said shorts threads okay yeah so like on instagram if i post something within 10 minutes there's over 100 comments there's probably 10 000 likes and you can just see just a chaos activity happening where that's very different on twitter versus shorts youtube shorts has almost the opposite like a low two-day burn before it hits the shorts feed and then takes off so it shorts is just or threads is just interesting to just like poke around and and reply to something and just see how fast you can talk to people on threads before the thread's over yeah and from that first week like despite having wildly like less people on the platform and less followers than like twitter that i had like the engagement i was getting felt kind of crazy i think just everyone was so excited to be on it they were on it a lot more they were replying all over the place.

25:39There was engagement everywhere. Everyone was like, oh shoot, I didn't realize you're on here yet. Like, what's up? Did you follow everyone that you followed on Instagram or did you follow separate people? It's funny because it's more along the lines of the people who I follow on Twitter because Instagram to me has still been this slow move over of more of my like personal life versus this like social media work life, I guess. and on threads I found it really interesting because a lot of people that I do know in my personal life on Instagram that don't have Twitter were creating threads and then you get to see yeah just some of their stupid little that's what I love about just like very short text based posts is like you can just have one random thought and that thought can be hilarious and it just like makes my day that's the most pure like early version of Twitter it's incredible I love it so much that's like when you can only tweet from your phone yeah like when you're sending a text message to it.

26:36Yeah, just 140, just a blurb of a thought. Yeah, that's kind of how it starts and I think now you're seeing like the people who are here to get, you know, engagement here to figure out like how to turn this into a page. There's the LinkedIn bros showing up like trying to optimize and like doing all these crazy things. Like you expect that with any new shows, even though it's not monetizable directly yet, it's still, you expect that. That was kind of the fun part of the beginning. It was like when that happened, people were like, no, get that off of, no, this platform's fun right now get that grind set crap off of here like yeah block that mute that and yeah um but i think like like you said one of the biggest issues of it at the beginning or you didn't say it but this is what you tweeted at i think adam responded to you about just having an actual front page with the people you follow not random people and they did say they're working on it which is great i'm a little worried it's going to be which is similar to twitter now where that's not going to be your main you're gonna have to swipe into it as a secondary one that is always fascinating to me because every social media has to have some balance of this where you follow people because you want to see what they post but in order for them to be successful and keep you engaged they need to be giving you new things it's almost like on spotify like we have the music that we want to listen to but there's also like if you hit shuffle it's gonna just toss in some music you've never heard before it's gonna toss in some explore weekly or whatever and that's what tiktok has got tiktok is probably the far end of the scale you don't even really check who you follow most people don't check who they follow it's just the for you page and on the other side maybe it's closer to like twitch or youtube back in the day i only watched who i subscribed to but now it's mostly home page it's things they recommend youtube's getting closer to that that tiktok side where like i'm watching people that i realize i'm not subscribed to because i'm just so consistently getting fed their stuff that i enjoy and so instagram that too wants to be it used to just be like people you follow in the posts that they make with the photos now it's just like tossing stuff in my feed obviously the explore page and reels is giving you new stuff so now they're pushing towards that so now threads shows up and of course we're following a bunch of people we're engaging with a bunch of stuff but yeah the home page is full of people you don't follow and so as a purist i want just the list of people i follow and the things that they post because that's why I'm here.

28:53I just joined threads to follow 12 people. Uh, but they don't even have a following count for people. They just show you the homepage and you can follow people on the homepage, but it's constantly pushing you new stuff. And, uh, that's just the way social is in 2023. And I guess it's cool that it's on their list, but I kind of doubt it's very high on their list. Yeah. Or it's not going to be like a default year because Instagram, you can do only following chronological, but it's not even like in Twitter where you just swipe over. It's like a drop down menu yeah which that you have to do every time you open the app i think which my suspicion is it will never be the default i totally agree with that yeah um i did sorry quick question when do you think they're going to add ads ads because i think a big part of why people like it right now is because there's no ads it's very pure with no ads i think meta has the bank role to be able to roll this for a little bit without ads and i think that's probably the smartest decision to eventually dump ads and make a ton of money on it um but they i think we all can probably agree they pushed this pretty quickly in a very opportune moment with what was going on with twitter so why not completely capitalize on twitter maybe uh stumbling you don't think they did that already i feel like they already like i think it's too early i think they did a lot of the thing but they're still definitely in don't mess this up mode i think yeah the pressure needs to stay on yeah like i think twitter can have a bad week and it's fine but if you have a really good couple of months in a row on threads and it's the activity still going and like you didn't ruin it with ads yet then you start to really think about like all right we're actually taking real meaningful market share we're actually changing the landscape of social media then maybe you start thinking about okay we'll do a little bit of ads here and there yeah and there's a there's a benefit to being having multiple different social media sites and products that are making money and then one being able to lose some versus spending 44 billion dollars immediately halving the worth of that and then having to try and make up for all the loans that you take yeah but meta is also like burning money in vr and ar so like they need something to give them a little money right they've got some others they still have facebook and instagram that's true plenty of money okay so the next question how long until google makes one google everyone with a gmail already gets an account you just bring it over i was this is why i was saying do you remember how many things google plus did to like google plus was ahead of its time for real google plus which i used for every year it was out as i've mentioned many times before but like do you remember when there was a plus one button on everything on Google search.

31:37There are still, like, I'll still see some trucks with advertisements on them that will still show their social media links and there'll be like a Google Plus link on it. Food trucks all have Google Plus links. I don't know why. Yeah. On YouTube, they forced everyone to turn their profile into a Google Plus account. So you could only like, you could plus one comments, plus one videos, share it to your circles. they forced all of that like the same way that we got this like nice plug with Instagram for threads to take off they did that with Google search and YouTube so the fact that that doesn't exist anymore is a pretty good indicator that you can't really brute force your way into it, it's gotta be good but like Google tried, Google did try so yeah but they tried like 14 years ago they gave it the good old Google try like whoa this didn't work immediately cut it I totally remember when they did that and like being however old I was like a child and like watching the Philip DeFranco video where he's like going over like, yeah, they're making everyone sign up for Google Plus.

32:42And I remember just childhood me being like, this is an outrage. As if it like affected me at all. That's amazing. It seemed like a turning point on the internet because Google had that kind of power where like if you got a lot of plus ones on your site that would specifically improve your search ranking. And so you had an incentive to be strong on Google Plus. The gamification of that would be out of this world. More than SEO right now. Like they should just go back to that. And that'll be again the way that you rank good content on the internet. destroyed by bots and like people just turning it into a total mess by gamifying everything i mean google never said specifically what how much of a percentage the google plus thing had to your ranking but it became very clear that like you wanted to be strong on google plus you want to be the most plus one thing on your search page to get you to the top you were the second most plus one thing weren't you maybe i don't know i was one of the i was one of the accounts that they suggested you follow when you joined that's awesome so that was pretty solid for that's a badge of honor yeah that was pretty cool um so yeah i don't know i i do think the the instagram poll is very strong but i don't think the growth phase is over yet i still think they have to they're still in don't mess this up mode and as people poke around and find what to do they can add the features that people seem to want the most yeah they're definitely in like a slight you know they they had their high of like everybody joining right away and now it's going to dip a little bit and exactly what you said don't screw this up so that dip doesn't go too far down and that dip it steadies off and then they start slowly rising again yeah um i did find one thing this is funny i think i found one thing that i think threads can do that twitter and instagram can't do except when i tried to do it it didn't work so let me explain it i was at the airport and i think the reason this didn't work is just because of poor airport wi-fi that's why I didn't post.

34:38But if you think about it, Threads is the only place that you can post more than four images that don't all get automatically cropped to square. Because once you add more than two photos on Instagram in a gallery, it auto-cropped it into a square, and you can only do four photos on Twitter. So I took all these different pictures and different aspect ratios in portrait and landscape. I was cropping them, and I wanted to post all the photos I took on my trip, and I could do that on Threads, except that it just kept failing to post in the airport Wi-Fi and it didn't actually go through. So I just wound up cropping them on Instagram.

35:11Some things like that feel like features when I think really they're just not yet pruned. Like they're going to definitely limit that. You think they're going to limit that? I think so. Yeah. Kind of the same. It's meta. Like they're going to probably find a way to, you know, compress more efficiently and they're going to find ways to like reduce the amount of bandwidth you need to use to post. And, you know, maybe if everyone's, you saw what David was posting. He had these huge panoramas and landscape and it would take up your entire phone feed. I wish he was here so we could talk about this because I feel like that is something he would enjoy.

35:42David is definitely not taking 10 square pictures at once and wants to post more than four at a time. So I'm sure that would, if it works, work well for him. He's giving you that IMAX experience on threads. It's longer than your phone. You can only view it on a Sony Xperia phone. Yeah, exactly. Before we get into Twitter and what they were doing, Twitter had to have been if we step back to wave one here there's just something a little peculiar about if you posted any threads links on Twitter that I think is pretty obvious and just very funny but it was clearly suppressing right like I think I have a picture here of your timeline you posted something that just says it's actually impressive how bad Siri is 8.4 million impressions on Twitter next post for some threads and the link to your threads link 200 000 impressions and then another video of a caviar iphone 1.1 million impressions yeah something's a little fishy there interesting yeah i don't i don't think it would be a shock to anyone if they uncovered just the word threads or any threads.net url especially yeah yeah they're they're definitely not showing that to people the way they show other things to people not shocked by that i don't honestly this is like a part of social also where I think when you post a lot to social media and you're trying to optimize all your content you're like what do these platforms incentivize and how can I ride those waves on Twitter or on any website like on YouTube they do not like you sending people to external websites period so on YouTube if you have a really popular link at the top of your description and that link is sending people somewhere like I remember we used to do uh giveaway videos and a A lot of people would use like a giveaway hosting service or whatever, like Gleam, and there would be a link at the top, and those videos would always bomb.

37:34Really? Because you're sending people off the site, and YouTube's going, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't like this video. This video is sending people off of YouTube, and so you do this massive giveaway, but it would get like a tenth of normal traffic. Do you know what another good example of that is? Doesn't shorts have a thing that sees if the TikTok logo is in it because they don't want you to just take your exact TikTok video? that also shows a link to how you follow them on TikTok. I'm not sure if they've admitted this yet, but a lot of them definitely. I think that was like a pretty obvious thing.

38:02Yeah, I'm not sure if it was shorts or reels. Oh, maybe it was reels. If reels sees a TikTok logo, I think that's the one everyone knows about. But I'm also pretty sure like if YouTube sees a TikTok logo, they don't want to push that either. Yeah, that's a fact. It's all very funny. It's also very funny that Threads has an immediate share to Twitter button, which is just like I'm sharing essentially my tweet. On a different road to Twitter, but. Yeah. But let's talk about Twitter. Yeah, Twitter went through some stuff. Twitter had that like sort of a quiet couple days. You know what it felt like?

38:34It felt like New York City after the hurricane. After Hurricane Sandy. When the power was out for like two days and it was like, dang, it's kind of quiet. What's going on? Which is kind of cool. Yeah, it's kind of like. You don't usually see it like that. Post-apocalyptic Twitter pretty much. Yeah. There was some graph of a, I think it was a Cloudflare thing. I was trying to show that like Twitter traffic did actually tank for a little bit. Oh, sure. I don't even know how accurate that would represent. everyone's Twitter experience. But if you use Twitter every day, you probably noticed there was less stuff happening.

38:59It came back. Lots of random things keep happening at Twitter. And then one big thing that happened is they started doing payouts for verified users who are in like a revenue sharing program. Yeah, it's essentially if you now get a portion of the revenue that is created through the ads that are only posted inside your replies. So I'm sure we've all noticed that replies on Twitter have ads now. very annoying but I get it so those specific ads will now benefit the creator that it gets posted under yeah I tweeted to my subscribers on Twitter so if you are a subscriber on my Twitter you saw this a week or two ago but I got a screenshot because I just like got a pop up when I opened Twitter one day it says congrats at MKBHD as your share of ads revenue and replies you're receiving$6 ,698 your portion will be deposited into your Stripe connected account within the next 72 hours thanks for being a creator on twitter and you just hit okay and that's it there's no analytics there's no this isn't the last 30 days this is there's no like here's the tweet that generated you the most or like any information this is the only information i've gotten about this and i can go into my analytics and try to find more i can go into my stripe account and try to find more almost nothing but interesting but everyone got this screenshot of like oh i'm gonna get paid for my tweets, I guess.

40:21Yeah, so let's I had some questions. It sounds like you can't really answer them. So my favorite thing to do on Waveform, let's speculate. Sure. There's a bunch of people and some people are getting paid a lot of money. I saw some crazy numbers. I saw multiples over$10 ,000. But one interesting thing here is my two main questions are one, it says that this is retroactive back to February when it was announced. Interesting. So if you think about that, then this isn't just like 30 days worth of payments. This is like six months. worth of payments. That makes a lot of sense. Which is a lot, which under why a lot of these are very big.

40:54Do you have a separate payment for subscriptions? Yes. It is separate. So that is not included in this. This is different. And it's also through Stripe, but that this amount, this new thing that popped up was separate from subscriptions. Subscriptions has already been happening. It has a payout in a totally different way. It's the same way, but it's, this is just an addition. It's not in the lump sum. Okay, cool. So that does actually help that because I was wondering like, man, some of these numbers I'm seeing are crazy yeah um do you want to go i saw jimmy mr beast posted one i think he did the same thing he posted for subscribers so sorry jimmy but yeah it was the same thing it was like 25 000 i think i saw his so i don't think it's a subscriber i think i saw it so it's just out there yeah yeah so that's like six months worth of so you're you're looking at maybe a thousand a month basically yeah so you do the math six months six thousand yeah i mean not much to just share your random tech thoughts every once in a while to deal with the annoyance of ads showing up under tweets all the time that seems like basically i think that moment on twitter where it was like oh if i am a part of this program i am incentivized to post more and use twitter more because i will be paid more accordingly and anytime that moment happens on a social media platform that changes the landscape of it forever like every time that's ever happened yeah now to different extents like when that happened with tiktok it was a creator fund and people didn't really make that much money so it didn't change it that much but when youtube got the partner program and started revenue sharing that inflection point changed youtube forever yeah so twitter finally getting this moment and we don't have any details about like what are rpms what are is it a shrinking pile of money is it a percentage like what is even happening we don't really know but the fact that it happened at all was enough for people to sort of come back to twitter and start talking about it and figuring it out yeah and there's some cool parts of it you do have to be subscribed to twitter blue but i actually don't think that's that big of a deal if it's eight dollars a month and you're probably going to make if you're somebody making obviously over eight dollars a month right it pays for itself that's kind of nice the one question i saw people have was it says you need five million impressions over the last three months and two things here one do you have to keep that streak do you always have to have three straight months of five million in order to do that and then i also included this tweet on here which we'll show on the screen and i'll read out loud but someone named john kraus i think we've talked to him for the podcast before he takes um photos of like spacex and like rocket launches he has his impressions are hilarious when you look at them versus having to have a three-month streak of five million because he goes january 6.7 million february 5.3 million march four million then april 74 million may nine million or June 4.9 million.

43:48So wouldn't hit it there. And then July 101 million. So if that's what it was, he's well averaging over 5 million. But he doesn't have the streak of three. But potentially doesn't have the streak. I mean, this is a very niche amount of people that this would happen to, but that would be super unfortunate to pull 101 million impression a month. I think it should be, I guess if I was going just by the YouTube model, you just have to get the streak once and then you're in the program. Yeah. It would be hard to imagine getting 70 million impressions in a month and just not being in the program like pretty quickly.

44:22But, you know, it's hard to tell. We don't know. My other worry, and I saw this a lot of people saying this, is just does this potentially incentivize people to steal more content on Twitter and post themselves versus retweeting or linking to original sources? like why would you link to a youtube video that might not get as many clips when you can clip the youtube video and upload it yourself it's obviously gonna have to go through a bunch of copyright things now which i think it already is apparent on twitter just not as enforced as youtube and now you're potentially making money like why would you like am i wrong on that no no i was just like that's a really soft there's whole movies on twitter it's like shrek one two and three right There's like, like the Super Mario movie was in theaters and on Twitter at the same time.

45:10Like, this is reminding me of like the kick website. They're just like, yeah, man, come over here, stream whatever you want. Like we're streaming the Super Bowl. And it's like, you guys know that's not going to work for very long. Right. And they're already starting to now like strike all these big people that went over there and are like, I thought we could watch movies. It's like, no, it's not the Wild West. It's the Internet still. There's still copyright laws. That's exactly right. Right. So this is why it feels like Twitter. And I've been telling people at Twitter whenever I have any contact with Twitter, like, please communicate more.

45:40Like people need to know what the rules are. And at this point, we don't know most of these rules. Like on YouTube, for example, we know about the copyright system. We know about how to get into the partner program, what the requirements are. And then once you're in, how it works, you get all the analytics and the revenue sharing information so you can optimize however you want based on known info. on twitter none of that is really communicated at all so you need people to communicate in order to communicate communication team turns out but like this would be super useful information for this whole inflection point to have the most impact but as of right now yeah it feels like yeah there's going to be people who just go oh more twitter activity equals more money okay let's just post constantly and steal a bunch of stuff and post more because it doesn't seem to be rules that specifically enforce that, where when you do define them, then you get better answers to those questions.

46:33Yeah, and I think a pretty good example of, even past, videos are pretty obvious, you're copyrighted, or audio, it's pretty obvious you're stealing that. But when it's just a random thought, it's very hard to prove that you were the original of that. And there are people that can just scrape, not only Twitter, but a ton of other stuff. We know, there's somebody who we know got very popular on Twitter from just scraping Reddit threads about programming, and now has a very big following and just basically retweets and reposts things that are already on the internet already and probably is making quite a bit of money from this.