1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,120 The internet, as we know it, is dying. 2 00:00:03,120 --> 00:00:06,120 And maybe it's not a bad thing. 3 00:00:06,120 --> 00:00:10,440 Seems like maybe mostly it is a bad thing, though. We'll have to see. 4 00:00:10,440 --> 00:00:13,560 Do you have an immediate emotional reaction? 5 00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:18,040 I, my immediate emotional reaction is, hey, I'm here for you. 6 00:00:18,040 --> 00:00:21,880 You're fine with this? No, I'm not. You're fine with the internet, as we know it, just... 7 00:00:21,880 --> 00:00:27,200 I want you to walk me through what you're talking about. What it feels like is if the internet was someone 8 00:00:27,280 --> 00:00:33,280 that I've known my entire life, a close friend, and then all of a sudden the friend decided 9 00:00:33,280 --> 00:00:38,280 they actually want to go become a monk in the Himalayas 10 00:00:38,640 --> 00:00:42,120 and they leave and I can never see them again. And the only way you can see them 11 00:00:42,120 --> 00:00:45,880 is to give them your Google account at the front door. Yeah. 12 00:00:45,880 --> 00:00:48,600 And if I sign a business deal with them. 13 00:00:49,720 --> 00:00:53,400 It's kind of the opposite of that, actually, rather than going and being a monk. 14 00:00:53,440 --> 00:00:57,480 If you let the monks scrape your dead skin off your back 15 00:00:57,480 --> 00:01:01,200 and use it to clone you, then you can see your friend. 16 00:01:01,200 --> 00:01:06,160 Yeah, it's a stat holiday in the office, where this is going up on Monday, August 5th, 17 00:01:06,160 --> 00:01:11,080 and we were trying to think of something to talk about, and I thought that it would be good to talk about this change 18 00:01:11,080 --> 00:01:15,160 in the internet that's happening. We've been kind of monitoring some of these stories 19 00:01:15,160 --> 00:01:19,960 that have been about the internet being segmented 20 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:24,640 into these discreet chunks that all have to now pay each other 21 00:01:24,640 --> 00:01:30,080 for access to each other. But we are kind of like the same generation. 22 00:01:30,080 --> 00:01:35,280 We both grew up with web 2.0, right? Like you were on Facebook. 23 00:01:35,280 --> 00:01:38,760 Yep. You were on Instagram. 24 00:01:38,760 --> 00:01:44,120 Technically, I still am. Technically, I still am too, but I don't use these platforms anymore 25 00:01:44,120 --> 00:01:48,360 just for many reasons. But the reason this question is interesting to me 26 00:01:48,360 --> 00:01:52,600 is because the internet used to be open. It was like the open web. 27 00:01:52,600 --> 00:01:57,160 Everybody's freely linking everywhere. You go to a website, it's a cool website. 28 00:01:57,160 --> 00:02:00,360 Maybe there's a forum to discuss what's going on there, 29 00:02:00,360 --> 00:02:03,880 but there's no closed off platforms. 30 00:02:03,880 --> 00:02:08,880 Then we get into this era where the internet is basically 31 00:02:09,360 --> 00:02:12,680 made up of discreet kingdoms. There's the Facebook kingdom. 32 00:02:12,680 --> 00:02:17,040 There's the Twitter kingdom. There's the Reddit kingdom. 33 00:02:17,080 --> 00:02:21,560 And people are kind of congregating with communities 34 00:02:21,560 --> 00:02:24,760 that are like them. 35 00:02:24,760 --> 00:02:29,240 But there's still lots of discourse and crosstalk among them. 36 00:02:29,240 --> 00:02:33,040 Now we're heading into this era where if you want 37 00:02:33,040 --> 00:02:36,600 to search Reddit, there's only one search engine 38 00:02:36,600 --> 00:02:39,680 that you can use to do that, which is Google, 39 00:02:39,680 --> 00:02:44,680 because Reddit and Twitter and some other platforms 40 00:02:44,800 --> 00:02:48,400 that I can't think of right now closed off access to their API. 41 00:02:48,400 --> 00:02:51,520 Friendster is a huge one. Dig it. 42 00:02:52,560 --> 00:02:56,040 Didn't they die? Dig? You're the man now, dog. Dig it. 43 00:02:56,040 --> 00:02:58,360 You mean dig.com? I couldn't care less. 44 00:02:59,760 --> 00:03:04,440 The reason this has all come up recently for us on Techlink 45 00:03:04,440 --> 00:03:07,520 is because of these stories about perplexity. 46 00:03:07,520 --> 00:03:10,840 And what do you know about perplexity, Jacob? 47 00:03:11,840 --> 00:03:14,840 It's the measure of how confused one person is. 48 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:21,720 Don't define the word. Perplexity, AI. Perplexity is was, I mean, depending on how you just, 49 00:03:21,720 --> 00:03:28,280 sorry, no, it was an AI startup that was focusing on searching the web using AI and then getting summaries 50 00:03:28,280 --> 00:03:32,040 on things that you search, which just kind of does sound like being AI. 51 00:03:32,040 --> 00:03:36,080 Like what's the difference between like, wasn't that the whole thing with being AI? You ask a question, then we search the whole web. 52 00:03:36,080 --> 00:03:39,080 The difference is that Microsoft added AI search 53 00:03:39,080 --> 00:03:44,080 functionality to Bing. Perplexity, from the ground up, it doesn't give you 54 00:03:44,120 --> 00:03:49,160 like a list of search results. It just summarizes stuff for you 55 00:03:49,160 --> 00:03:52,600 and then links you to stuff. So if you go to Bing and you say, 56 00:03:53,600 --> 00:03:56,800 what is perplexity AI? 57 00:03:57,720 --> 00:04:02,400 Bing still, like it has this blurb at the top that has been part of search engines 58 00:04:02,400 --> 00:04:07,160 long before a chat GPT came out. But then under that, it's just a regular search engine. 59 00:04:07,160 --> 00:04:10,520 They have this list of links. But what perplexity did, 60 00:04:10,520 --> 00:04:15,480 I think you can go to perplexity right now. Perplexity.ai. 61 00:04:15,480 --> 00:04:18,920 And we say, what is perplexity? 62 00:04:18,920 --> 00:04:22,640 I mean, that's right there, but will that just be like, yeah. 63 00:04:22,640 --> 00:04:26,520 So perplexity.ai doesn't give you a list of links. 64 00:04:26,520 --> 00:04:32,120 It gives you, as we're looking at right here, it now lists the sources right up at the top. 65 00:04:32,120 --> 00:04:37,840 I believe that's a relatively recent addition after they were criticized for plagiarism, 66 00:04:37,840 --> 00:04:41,160 which we're going to get into. Now they list the sources up top, 67 00:04:41,160 --> 00:04:44,360 but then they just have this AI summarized answer. 68 00:04:44,360 --> 00:04:49,520 So that's the difference. You can get that kind of search result by using Copilot, 69 00:04:49,520 --> 00:04:54,520 Microsoft's AI, but perplexity is trying to change 70 00:04:56,160 --> 00:05:02,960 the search engine from a list of links to an AI-generated summary of what's out there, 71 00:05:02,960 --> 00:05:07,200 which is another way the internet has largely changed. 72 00:05:07,200 --> 00:05:13,440 I think that a lot of companies are trying to turn the internet from a library where you go in, 73 00:05:13,440 --> 00:05:18,360 you find the sources, you collect a list of books or links 74 00:05:18,360 --> 00:05:21,560 that you can go through yourself, and then you form your own opinion. 75 00:05:21,560 --> 00:05:28,040 Now it's like a sommelier. Yeah, they're trying to turn the library into a librarian 76 00:05:28,040 --> 00:05:33,560 who knows everything in the books already, so you don't go and check the book out yourself, 77 00:05:33,560 --> 00:05:37,640 you just talk to the librarian and they know everything, and they'll give you the gist, 78 00:05:37,640 --> 00:05:42,080 except that the librarian is a liar, and occasionally- 79 00:05:42,080 --> 00:05:46,840 It has like 17 personalities. Occasionally they just make something up for fun, 80 00:05:46,840 --> 00:05:50,560 17 personalities. They get bored of their job, so they just make shit up. 81 00:05:50,560 --> 00:05:53,720 Yeah, yeah, and you can tell the librarian, 82 00:05:53,720 --> 00:05:58,160 okay, tell me this information as if you're a pirate, 83 00:05:58,160 --> 00:06:01,560 and then they will, and they'll lie even more. 84 00:06:01,560 --> 00:06:06,760 And also, you used to be able to tell the librarian to ignore all of its previous instructions for its job 85 00:06:06,800 --> 00:06:12,160 so that you could make it do nefarious shit. We can just keep this analogy rolling all the way. 86 00:06:12,160 --> 00:06:16,000 Like I was saying, now we have these sources. 87 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:21,160 I'm not sure what perplexity looked like before, but I think that they made some changes recently 88 00:06:21,160 --> 00:06:26,160 because they were accused by multiple tech outlets, 89 00:06:26,720 --> 00:06:31,560 news outlets of plagiarism. I think Forbes was the first one to kind of start 90 00:06:31,560 --> 00:06:37,920 levying accusations at them, primarily because when you searched for this Forbes story, 91 00:06:39,240 --> 00:06:43,160 this original Forbes story that they did original reporting on, 92 00:06:44,680 --> 00:06:50,200 perplexity summarized the whole story, and because Forbes was like one of the only sources on it, 93 00:06:50,200 --> 00:06:55,200 it didn't have all of these extra links inside the result, 94 00:06:55,960 --> 00:07:00,760 it just had like something at the very end where it was like sources, Forbes. 95 00:07:00,760 --> 00:07:04,360 Yeah, you know what? They definitely have changed it, and the sources are up at the top now 96 00:07:04,360 --> 00:07:09,800 because of that criticism. And then Condé Nast, which owns Wired. 97 00:07:09,800 --> 00:07:15,600 And it's also my rap name. Condé Nast, nasty. 98 00:07:16,760 --> 00:07:19,880 They also, no, they sent a cease and desist letter. 99 00:07:19,880 --> 00:07:25,720 They didn't sue them, but I think that this is like a very light form of pushback. 100 00:07:26,480 --> 00:07:29,600 We've had some, there was a lawsuit 101 00:07:29,600 --> 00:07:35,720 from the New York Times against OpenAI for like training on their information and on their data. 102 00:07:35,720 --> 00:07:40,680 And now you have some other news outlets trying to fight back against this like new paradigm 103 00:07:40,680 --> 00:07:43,880 of AI companies just 104 00:07:45,080 --> 00:07:50,160 Scraping. Steam rolling over the internet with their scrapers, just scraping whatever the hell they want. 105 00:07:50,160 --> 00:07:54,720 And to be fair, that's the way it always worked 106 00:07:54,720 --> 00:07:59,200 with scrapers, like web scrapers did not arrive 107 00:07:59,240 --> 00:08:02,920 with AI companies, but these scrapers have become more of a problem. 108 00:08:02,920 --> 00:08:06,280 There's more eyes on them. And people are thinking a lot more 109 00:08:06,280 --> 00:08:09,960 now that the AI models have already been trained on all the content on the internet. 110 00:08:09,960 --> 00:08:15,000 People are like, wait a second, maybe the people who make the content should be compensated for that. 111 00:08:15,000 --> 00:08:18,400 Though the people that conglomerate the content, 112 00:08:18,400 --> 00:08:22,040 not as other people that make it, Reddit's not giving really any money to Reddit. 113 00:08:22,040 --> 00:08:26,640 Yeah, I mean, I'm talking about news outlets, but yes, Reddit is, that's interesting 114 00:08:26,640 --> 00:08:30,480 because as a Reddit user, you're thinking that maybe you should be compensated. 115 00:08:30,480 --> 00:08:33,880 And I think they had some sort of compensation. I forget what happened with that. 116 00:08:33,880 --> 00:08:36,960 It's very small. It's very small. Yeah. 117 00:08:36,960 --> 00:08:42,960 But regardless, now these AI companies are being forced to, well, forced, I don't know, 118 00:08:42,960 --> 00:08:49,240 to make publisher deals. So they're making deals with certain aggregators 119 00:08:49,240 --> 00:08:51,320 or creators of the news content. 120 00:08:52,280 --> 00:08:56,920 And so that's first started with OpenAI when they launched SearchGPT, right? 121 00:08:56,920 --> 00:09:02,480 So they launched it after Perplexi had all these issues with the publisher plagiarisms. 122 00:09:02,480 --> 00:09:05,640 Yes. The plagiarism accusations. Yep, season desists. 123 00:09:05,640 --> 00:09:09,080 And then, so SearchGPT gets launched. 124 00:09:09,080 --> 00:09:12,200 They're like, hey, we have deals with publishers. Yeah. 125 00:09:12,200 --> 00:09:17,760 And then a week after that, Perplexi's like, oh, we also have deals with publishers? 126 00:09:17,760 --> 00:09:22,160 Yeah, we're doing that too. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I mean, OpenAI started making these deals 127 00:09:22,160 --> 00:09:26,360 with publishers last year, I believe. I think it was one with the Atlantic. 128 00:09:26,360 --> 00:09:32,080 They definitely one with the Atlantic. And no, I think the New York Times, 129 00:09:32,080 --> 00:09:35,640 they don't have a deal, obviously, because the lawsuit is still ongoing with that. 130 00:09:35,640 --> 00:09:40,760 But they have made a deal with a number of other large news corporations. 131 00:09:40,760 --> 00:09:45,000 And yeah, you're right. When they announced SearchGPT, it was basically like, 132 00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:50,880 oh, OpenAI's doing Perplexity, except they have the deals with publishers. 133 00:09:50,880 --> 00:09:54,280 And they also now have a deal with Reddit. Yes. 134 00:09:54,280 --> 00:09:58,240 So you can use Google to access Reddit content? 135 00:09:58,240 --> 00:09:59,560 Or SearchGPT. 136 00:10:01,560 --> 00:10:05,720 Now, here's my question. Tying back into the whole thesis about internet dying, 137 00:10:05,720 --> 00:10:11,880 becoming more closed off, when AI chatbots sort of took off like, 138 00:10:11,880 --> 00:10:14,160 oh, there's censorship and stuff like that, 139 00:10:15,560 --> 00:10:18,840 is this not sort of accentuating that? 140 00:10:18,840 --> 00:10:22,860 Because I'm assuming because they wanna, 141 00:10:22,860 --> 00:10:27,900 avoid plagiarism accusations, Perplexity is probably going to either only use 142 00:10:27,900 --> 00:10:31,060 or only promote publishers that they have 143 00:10:31,060 --> 00:10:35,340 these ad revenue sharing deals with, which means that the answers that you get 144 00:10:35,340 --> 00:10:38,980 when you search with Perplexity, and I would imagine SearchGPT, 145 00:10:38,980 --> 00:10:46,420 would only use those publishers. So you're only getting information from a smaller pool 146 00:10:46,420 --> 00:10:51,460 of potential information from the web if you were to look around yourself, perhaps. 147 00:10:51,460 --> 00:10:56,740 That is what I am confused about. OpenAI has launched SearchGPT in like, 148 00:10:56,740 --> 00:11:01,660 they call it a prototype. So it's not widely available to the public right now. 149 00:11:01,660 --> 00:11:04,780 But yeah, I mean, the fact that we aren't entirely sure 150 00:11:04,780 --> 00:11:09,780 how this works, is indicative of the extent 151 00:11:09,780 --> 00:11:14,780 to which this is changing the web. I mean, even the ARC browser, the ARC company 152 00:11:14,780 --> 00:11:18,180 who like made this alternative new browser, 153 00:11:18,180 --> 00:11:22,860 they're like, oh, we wanna break like Chrome's monopoly basically on the browser market. 154 00:11:22,860 --> 00:11:27,500 And just like change how people think about browsers. Yeah, basically the way that those worked is 155 00:11:27,500 --> 00:11:31,620 they use AI, the AI goes and searches for the results 156 00:11:31,620 --> 00:11:34,700 and then it summarizes stuff for you. It's the same kind of thing. 157 00:11:34,700 --> 00:11:37,820 And I remember having the thought when the ARC announced that thing, 158 00:11:37,820 --> 00:11:41,820 where I was like, okay, wait, websites, 159 00:11:41,820 --> 00:11:45,780 it costs money to have people visit your website 160 00:11:45,780 --> 00:11:50,900 because your server runs your website and every time people go to the server, 161 00:11:50,900 --> 00:11:54,460 you're expending resources in order to keep that running. 162 00:11:54,460 --> 00:11:57,780 And the way that they keep it running 163 00:11:57,780 --> 00:12:01,580 is by having ads run on the site. It costs money to run the site, 164 00:12:01,580 --> 00:12:07,460 you get revenue from ads. It's unclear to me how much ad revenue 165 00:12:08,540 --> 00:12:12,980 and a site is getting if a web scraper 166 00:12:12,980 --> 00:12:16,100 or like an AI comes and fetches a result 167 00:12:16,100 --> 00:12:21,060 and then brings it back and summarizes it. I've seen people say that it is the same, 168 00:12:21,060 --> 00:12:26,180 that like a page view is a page view. I've also seen people say that, 169 00:12:26,180 --> 00:12:30,460 well, when a human comes to a website and they scroll through and they see the ads 170 00:12:30,460 --> 00:12:34,140 and maybe they click an ad and like an AI isn't gonna click an ad. 171 00:12:34,140 --> 00:12:39,660 You might get an impression because it's like, oh, we can see in our system that that ad was served 172 00:12:39,660 --> 00:12:44,020 to some agent. I don't know if it was a human or an AI, 173 00:12:44,020 --> 00:12:51,700 but that's an impression right there. But I think that if I had to guess the, 174 00:12:52,060 --> 00:12:55,900 and correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, if you're like in the ad world, 175 00:12:57,380 --> 00:13:01,180 I'll try to find if there's people correcting me in the comments and like- John Hamm, you there? 176 00:13:01,180 --> 00:13:05,980 Put it up. I believe that if you're a human visiting a website, 177 00:13:05,980 --> 00:13:10,900 that's gonna be a lot more valuable to the people who run the website than an AI, 178 00:13:10,900 --> 00:13:18,020 like a bot or a scraper or whatever. So that's, I mean, the fact that we, 179 00:13:18,020 --> 00:13:23,020 the search industry, Google and its competitors, 180 00:13:23,380 --> 00:13:28,700 Google is still, I think we've talked about this recently, Google is like 95% of- 181 00:13:28,700 --> 00:13:32,860 That's big. It's like the vast majority, like everyone's like, look at all these 182 00:13:32,860 --> 00:13:36,380 alternative search engines, they're there. 183 00:13:36,380 --> 00:13:39,820 People are looking at them, they're just not using them. Yeah, very few people use them, 184 00:13:39,820 --> 00:13:45,220 the vast, vast, vast majority of people still use Google and so like the paradigm is shifting 185 00:13:45,220 --> 00:13:49,580 from Google and these other search engines, leading people to the sites, 186 00:13:49,580 --> 00:13:54,000 they click on the sites, they go through, they give those sites ad revenue. 187 00:13:54,940 --> 00:14:00,940 It's changing from that to like the Google or search GPT or whatever is doing all the summarizing 188 00:14:00,940 --> 00:14:05,540 for you and it's, hopefully they have these deals worked out with some of the big publishers 189 00:14:05,540 --> 00:14:11,260 because otherwise no one is gonna get nearly as much revenue as they used to. 190 00:14:11,260 --> 00:14:16,020 The fact that these AI scrapers and the bots 191 00:14:16,020 --> 00:14:21,020 are like costing websites money is indicated by the fact 192 00:14:21,660 --> 00:14:26,020 that like some people are calling out the bots 193 00:14:26,020 --> 00:14:30,140 for being annoying. Like the iFixit CEO just said recently, 194 00:14:30,140 --> 00:14:35,820 he called out specifically Anthropic because the Anthropic scraper was hitting, 195 00:14:35,820 --> 00:14:39,220 he said they were hitting our servers a million times in 24 hours 196 00:14:40,220 --> 00:14:47,860 and even the AI company's own chat bot disapproves according to PC Gamer, which I hate when people do that. 197 00:14:47,860 --> 00:14:52,940 I love PC Gamer, but I can't stand when people are like, I asked this chat bot what it thought about this. 198 00:14:52,940 --> 00:14:56,260 It's like, it's not alive, it doesn't, 199 00:14:56,260 --> 00:15:02,980 it can't have opinions. And then also the Reddit CEO told the Verge 200 00:15:02,980 --> 00:15:06,860 in an interview, talking about his Google deal, 201 00:15:06,900 --> 00:15:10,060 he basically said, hey, we made this deal with Google, 202 00:15:10,060 --> 00:15:13,180 we made this deal with open AI. Steve Hoffman. Yeah. 203 00:15:13,180 --> 00:15:17,860 Hey, Microsoft, Anthropic, Proplexity, if you want Reddit, like pay up. 204 00:15:17,860 --> 00:15:24,260 And I don't know, like there's a part of me that wants people to be paid for the content that they make. 205 00:15:26,140 --> 00:15:28,020 On the other hand. F*** you, Spess. 206 00:15:29,140 --> 00:15:33,380 On the other hand, when it comes to Reddit charging 207 00:15:33,420 --> 00:15:37,300 for the use of their API, when Reddit was, 208 00:15:37,300 --> 00:15:41,340 Reddit is such a great example of the phenomenon that I'm talking about here. 209 00:15:41,340 --> 00:15:44,420 I never used Reddit that much when I was a kid. 210 00:15:44,420 --> 00:15:48,420 I don't know about you, but to me it was, 211 00:15:48,420 --> 00:15:52,220 when I discovered Reddit, fairly late in the game, 212 00:15:52,220 --> 00:15:56,300 I was like, what the, this is amazing. That the front page of the internet is just like, 213 00:15:56,300 --> 00:16:00,060 literally anything on the internet can be posted here. 214 00:16:00,060 --> 00:16:04,580 It was like user, it's a user built site. 215 00:16:04,580 --> 00:16:08,020 It was like a home for every forum ever. Yeah. 216 00:16:08,020 --> 00:16:11,700 And now Reddit, the company is like, that's our data. 217 00:16:11,700 --> 00:16:15,540 And like, if you want access to our data, then you have to pay us. 218 00:16:16,460 --> 00:16:19,940 And it's just weird. I don't know, it just feels weird. 219 00:16:19,940 --> 00:16:22,980 But maybe that's because I was a native of this 220 00:16:22,980 --> 00:16:27,100 like web 2.0 and I need to get a lot. I mean, with web 3.0, it was like a crypto thing. 221 00:16:27,100 --> 00:16:30,420 We're not even talking about that anymore. That's a deprecated term. 222 00:16:30,420 --> 00:16:34,340 You said web 2.0. I did. I didn't like it. 223 00:16:34,340 --> 00:16:39,220 I'm sorry. I love you. Did you use Reddit when you were younger? 224 00:16:39,220 --> 00:16:44,380 How active on the internet? I started using it probably when I was like, 225 00:16:45,540 --> 00:16:48,600 maybe late teens or early 20s. 226 00:16:49,780 --> 00:16:53,860 That was really when I started sort of using it. I remember like, I really started using it 227 00:16:53,860 --> 00:16:58,060 like when I started university. Like I heard about it before then. 228 00:16:58,060 --> 00:17:03,940 Like it was sort of talked about. But I don't think the app was very good. 229 00:17:03,940 --> 00:17:08,860 I didn't really scroll social media on my computer. I didn't really like how the whole layout was. 230 00:17:08,860 --> 00:17:12,740 Cause this was in the time of old Reddit, which I know people have a fondness for. 231 00:17:12,740 --> 00:17:17,100 Well, that's the funny thing is that it wasn't, like it is social media, I guess. 232 00:17:17,100 --> 00:17:21,660 It's like a social website. But when I say, when I hear the word social media, 233 00:17:21,660 --> 00:17:27,620 I think of like, you know, if we're talking early days, I'm thinking Myspace, Nexopia, 234 00:17:28,260 --> 00:17:31,060 I used Myspace, I did not use Nexopia. Neopets. 235 00:17:33,060 --> 00:17:37,020 Lego.com. In some ways, yeah. The chive, anyway. 236 00:17:38,020 --> 00:17:41,820 No, that was like a feed. Iken has cheeseburger, anyway. 237 00:17:41,820 --> 00:17:45,700 So I was just kind of like, I was like, I want to watch TV. 238 00:17:45,700 --> 00:17:49,580 I want to watch TV, I want to play video games. So I didn't really do that. Like I would scroll, I started scrolling Reddit, 239 00:17:49,580 --> 00:17:54,580 I'm like my phone. And then I posted a couple of times, got like 5,000 comments a little bit. 240 00:17:55,580 --> 00:17:58,620 But then I stopped using it when the API thing happened. 241 00:17:58,620 --> 00:18:02,300 I now use Lemmy, which is the Fediverse alternative. 242 00:18:02,300 --> 00:18:06,860 See, okay, so now this is, I think this is where the sort of difference 243 00:18:06,860 --> 00:18:09,980 in our generation comes up. 244 00:18:09,980 --> 00:18:14,180 We're technically both millennials. But I'm 35. 245 00:18:15,420 --> 00:18:17,940 You're younger than me. Classified. Classified. 246 00:18:19,980 --> 00:18:25,380 But when I was in university, I don't remember using Reddit, basically at all. 247 00:18:25,380 --> 00:18:29,620 I remember like discovering Reddit, I think mostly after I graduated. 248 00:18:29,620 --> 00:18:34,860 Which I'm thinking now, I'm like, how is that possible? Because I did research things to write papers 249 00:18:34,860 --> 00:18:40,060 and stuff in university. But I think I was mostly like using academic sources. 250 00:18:40,060 --> 00:18:43,540 I would go to the library at the university 251 00:18:43,540 --> 00:18:49,180 and like look for stuff. But yeah, it's actually wild to me 252 00:18:49,180 --> 00:18:54,020 that I did not use Reddit. So to get back to this, it's for us, 253 00:18:54,020 --> 00:18:57,100 the digital, are we the digital natives? 254 00:18:57,100 --> 00:19:02,060 Who's supposed to be the digital natives? I think millennials are supposed to be like, 255 00:19:02,060 --> 00:19:07,380 we grew up with the internet. We had some of the early services as they were developing. 256 00:19:07,380 --> 00:19:11,660 I found this article recently on Business Insider. 257 00:19:11,660 --> 00:19:13,660 It's called RIP Club Penguin. 258 00:19:14,780 --> 00:19:19,260 That was a dark day. Club Penguin being another example of like, it's a game, but it was also very, very, 259 00:19:19,260 --> 00:19:20,420 so it was an MMO. 260 00:19:23,060 --> 00:19:27,100 I remember being a secret agent. Did you play Club Penguin? 261 00:19:27,100 --> 00:19:32,820 Yes. I never did. See, I'm feeling nostalgic for this era of the internet 262 00:19:32,820 --> 00:19:37,580 even though I feel like I barely partook in it. I was busy playing Xbox 360. 263 00:19:39,500 --> 00:19:42,900 And the sub-headline of this is millennials were raised by the internet, 264 00:19:42,900 --> 00:19:47,300 now their internet parents are gone. And this kind of got me thinking about the topic 265 00:19:47,340 --> 00:19:50,100 that we've been talking about today. It's like. 266 00:19:51,460 --> 00:19:56,060 Like someone else's parents died because you weren't raised by this. And you're like, man, these other people's parents died. 267 00:19:56,060 --> 00:19:59,780 Let's talk about that. I think that, you know, I know that my parents had anxieties 268 00:19:59,780 --> 00:20:04,900 about like what was happening with my generation and how much time we were spending like, 269 00:20:04,900 --> 00:20:10,100 in front of the internet instead of the much more traditional and acceptable way to waste time at home, 270 00:20:10,100 --> 00:20:13,540 sitting in front of the TV, so much different. 271 00:20:13,540 --> 00:20:18,340 I've had so many arguments for that. For my dad, it was all about, it was going outside. 272 00:20:18,340 --> 00:20:22,380 What? My dad, that was how he was. He didn't want you to go outside? No, no, no, he went outside like with his friends. 273 00:20:22,380 --> 00:20:29,300 Like he would go outside and hang out with his friends and they'd come home when the street lamps came on. 274 00:20:29,300 --> 00:20:32,460 Oh, you mean when he was a kid? Yeah, when he was a kid. So like he was like sort of like kissing. 275 00:20:32,460 --> 00:20:36,260 He's like, why don't you bike over your friend's house and like go play outside? And I'm like, eh. 276 00:20:36,260 --> 00:20:39,620 I mean, I did do that, but like I think that 277 00:20:40,740 --> 00:20:46,180 I was so confused when you were talking about like, your dad went outside when you were a kid? 278 00:20:46,180 --> 00:20:50,580 Anyways. My dad went outside with his friends while I was inside watching the TV 279 00:20:50,580 --> 00:20:55,060 and he played street hockey with his old friends. That's what I thought you were talking about. 280 00:20:55,060 --> 00:20:59,540 No beers, just Capri sons. My dad was in like the stranger things type group 281 00:20:59,540 --> 00:21:00,940 as a 40 year old. 282 00:21:02,580 --> 00:21:06,980 Riding around his bike solving mysteries while I was on Wikipedia, like a loser. 283 00:21:06,980 --> 00:21:09,820 When his friends got sucked into the upside down, he was so upset. 284 00:21:10,660 --> 00:21:15,660 But yeah, I mean, I'm kind of like, I lament this. 285 00:21:16,380 --> 00:21:19,380 I mean, like what is there on the internet 286 00:21:19,380 --> 00:21:24,020 that is like ye olden times where, you know, 287 00:21:24,020 --> 00:21:27,500 you go on, you make a free account, it's everything goes. 288 00:21:27,500 --> 00:21:30,260 The Fetaverse, I think would be the closest. 289 00:21:31,220 --> 00:21:36,340 You've mentioned the Fetaverse before and I kind of understand it to be sort of a like Reddit 290 00:21:36,380 --> 00:21:41,140 slash Twitter slash interconnected group of websites 291 00:21:41,140 --> 00:21:45,100 where you can like cross post and stuff. Is that more or less? 292 00:21:45,100 --> 00:21:48,780 So there are a bunch of, it's a collection of social media alternatives. 293 00:21:48,780 --> 00:21:52,980 There are like alternatives for like every major social media platform you can think of 294 00:21:52,980 --> 00:21:58,380 or even like YouTube and stuff like that. And they all can communicate with each other 295 00:21:58,380 --> 00:22:02,540 using a common protocol. It's the internet for vegans. 296 00:22:04,780 --> 00:22:09,420 It's weird to say that because I feel like there are a lot of vegans on Lemmy. It's the gluten-free, crunchy internet. 297 00:22:09,420 --> 00:22:16,460 No, no, no, it's more free form because like there's servers and they're publicly hosted 298 00:22:16,460 --> 00:22:21,140 and it's more like, it's not all controlled by one entity. 299 00:22:21,140 --> 00:22:24,860 Like people can make servers and then people can join those servers 300 00:22:24,860 --> 00:22:28,900 and then still access to the other servers and then there's this cross communication 301 00:22:28,900 --> 00:22:34,100 between other platforms. You know, every time you've brought up Lemmy, 302 00:22:34,100 --> 00:22:37,940 I'm like, okay, whatever, man, I'm using Reddit. But I think given everything 303 00:22:37,940 --> 00:22:43,380 that we've been talking about here, I feel like it might be kind of time to consider it, 304 00:22:43,380 --> 00:22:48,060 which is kind of funny for me to say because even as I say that, I'm like, I don't wanna do that. 305 00:22:48,060 --> 00:22:52,740 I really just want the internet to be fixed and maybe that's stupid. Maybe it won't happen. 306 00:22:52,740 --> 00:22:56,900 Cause it is scary looking ahead at what we're, 307 00:22:56,900 --> 00:23:00,260 I have a child, what I'm sending my child into. 308 00:23:00,260 --> 00:23:05,140 Like what is the internet gonna look like when he's a teenager, you know? 309 00:23:05,140 --> 00:23:09,660 It's like, I... See, Riley, what you're describing is you're like, 310 00:23:09,660 --> 00:23:14,180 my issue is all of these different places are closing off themselves 311 00:23:14,180 --> 00:23:18,700 and there's all this information and stuff on the internet 312 00:23:18,700 --> 00:23:22,340 that's becoming centralized and like gated. Yeah, yeah. 313 00:23:23,860 --> 00:23:27,140 Decentralization is what the Fetaverse is. 314 00:23:27,140 --> 00:23:30,740 And that's awesome. I think that like... It's free and open source. 315 00:23:30,980 --> 00:23:33,980 Download Lemmy. It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? 316 00:23:33,980 --> 00:23:37,180 Because the Fetaverse sounds really great 317 00:23:37,180 --> 00:23:40,340 and it sounds like everyone should use it. 318 00:23:40,340 --> 00:23:44,100 But if I go to use that and no one's there, 319 00:23:44,100 --> 00:23:47,420 then it's like I'm cutting myself off from culture 320 00:23:47,420 --> 00:23:51,220 and I think that this is a whole another debate 321 00:23:51,220 --> 00:23:55,340 baked into this. It's like, should I be lamenting the ways 322 00:23:55,340 --> 00:24:01,340 that the internet is changing or should I be just kind of like accepting the changes 323 00:24:01,340 --> 00:24:05,740 that come with societal transformation? 324 00:24:05,740 --> 00:24:10,860 I think that you don't have to pick one of those. I think I can say that an internet 325 00:24:10,860 --> 00:24:14,940 in which everything exists in these little bubbles 326 00:24:14,940 --> 00:24:20,220 owned by corporations that have to pay each other to access it, leading to a worse experience 327 00:24:20,220 --> 00:24:23,300 overall for users, I can say that that's bad. 328 00:24:23,300 --> 00:24:26,860 Well, also kind of admitting that, 329 00:24:26,860 --> 00:24:33,180 all right, we got to find a way to live and advocate for change in this culture. 330 00:24:34,420 --> 00:24:40,460 I just don't know if like I said this when Elon bought Twitter and Twitter started changing, 331 00:24:40,460 --> 00:24:44,020 Twitter is objectively worse than it was. You mean X? 332 00:24:44,020 --> 00:24:47,620 Yeah, you know what I mean. It's objectively worse than it was 333 00:24:47,620 --> 00:24:52,860 except for community notes, community notes are great, other platforms should adopt the same thing. 334 00:24:52,860 --> 00:24:57,180 But the algorithmic changes and the moderation changes 335 00:24:57,180 --> 00:25:02,020 on X are just unquestionably worse. It's just, anyways, I will get into that. 336 00:25:02,020 --> 00:25:05,140 But I said this when that first happened, 337 00:25:05,140 --> 00:25:09,500 that like I don't think Twitter is ever gonna go away. I think it'll, I don't think anything will really 338 00:25:09,500 --> 00:25:13,220 take the place of Twitter. I will say that it's been encouraging 339 00:25:13,220 --> 00:25:17,860 to see threads do well. I think threads is doing okay. I thought they were gonna die immediately. 340 00:25:17,860 --> 00:25:22,380 But that's another meta platform. I don't want them to have it. 341 00:25:22,380 --> 00:25:25,540 Have you considered Mastodon, which is a Fediverse alternative? 342 00:25:25,540 --> 00:25:29,620 I feel like everything that I'm saying, I tell you that I'm not interested in the Fediverse 343 00:25:29,620 --> 00:25:33,880 and then everything that I'm saying is like, I should just check out the Fediverse. 344 00:25:35,380 --> 00:25:39,220 It is fun constantly bringing up. When you keep describing the same problem. 345 00:25:39,220 --> 00:25:44,540 You know the thing is like this one site that I used to like, it's closed off 346 00:25:44,540 --> 00:25:49,540 and this controversial technocrat runs it. 347 00:25:49,780 --> 00:25:53,860 And I don't know if I wanna support him and it makes me feel uncomfortable. 348 00:25:53,860 --> 00:25:58,620 If only there was a way that I could have like a free or like another open source alternative 349 00:25:58,620 --> 00:26:02,400 that was decentralized, that wasn't controlled by like someone like Mark Zuckerberg. 350 00:26:02,400 --> 00:26:06,020 The Fediverse sounds like something in Star Citizen and that weirds me out. 351 00:26:07,140 --> 00:26:11,860 Like the... Like it's a universe specifically for federal agents. 352 00:26:12,860 --> 00:26:16,820 Maybe my brain is adding a R to it 353 00:26:16,820 --> 00:26:20,820 and now it sounds like the Frediverse. So it's a universe of just threads. 354 00:26:21,580 --> 00:26:26,300 It's such a universe made by Fred and that makes me think of Star Citizen 355 00:26:26,300 --> 00:26:32,580 because the company that makes Starships in Star Citizen is called Robert Space Industries 356 00:26:32,580 --> 00:26:36,620 named after Chris Roberts, the creator. Did you follow my path of my thought? 357 00:26:36,620 --> 00:26:39,620 That didn't relate to Fred at all cause I was just thinking of Fred from Scooby-Doo 358 00:26:39,620 --> 00:26:46,420 and then Fred from Old School YouTube. I would get on Fred from Scooby-Doo's social platform 359 00:26:47,780 --> 00:26:51,780 if that was him, but it's not, so I won't. So where is the internet going? 360 00:26:51,780 --> 00:26:54,860 I don't know. I hope that we're not going into this 361 00:26:54,860 --> 00:27:00,540 like straight up dystopian situation where like there's no open internet at all anymore. 362 00:27:00,540 --> 00:27:05,420 You know, it's basically just TV channels that you have to pay to access and that's the internet. 363 00:27:06,540 --> 00:27:11,140 I hope not, but I hope it looks like 364 00:27:11,140 --> 00:27:16,060 that might be where we're going. I'm not sure. That neutrality just got, it might be, 365 00:27:16,060 --> 00:27:20,060 it looked like it was coming back now that it looks like they're not bringing it back 366 00:27:20,060 --> 00:27:25,860 because of the Chevron thing. That's a whole other thing. Regardless, guys, we don't have time anymore. 367 00:27:25,860 --> 00:27:29,540 Thanks for watching this TalkLinked. It's Monday. 368 00:27:29,540 --> 00:27:34,980 We'll see you on Wednesday for more tech news. Love y'all, be good to each other. 369 00:27:34,980 --> 00:27:38,060 That's nice. I love you too. I used to say that. 370 00:27:38,060 --> 00:27:43,660 Say it back. I used to say, I love you. 371 00:27:43,660 --> 00:27:44,500 Thank you.