internet phenomena - Elixis Technology

Grimace’s Birthday Was a Marketing Success

Elizabeth Technology August 22, 2023

Chaotic videos of teens and mascots across all sorts of brands trying the Grimace shake only for something indescribable to happen to them litter social media. Why? Why does the Grimace shake inspire such a reaction?

And why did it make people want the shake more?

TikTok Advertising

It’s no secret that songs with trends attached usually do better on TikTok. Drake’s song “Kiki” started a somewhat dangerous trend of dancing beside a moving car. Tessa Violet’s “Crush” inspired a trend of makeup videos. We have evidence it works for stuff outside of music, too – Martinelli Apple Cider containers blew up big time when teens on the app discovered that they sounded sort of like apples when crushed. Not really, but the incredulity only sold more apple cider.

If you can get something to trend on TikTok, you can sell tons of it. However, this comes with a downside: once the trend is over, the sales go back down. Pink sauce comes to mind – once it was no longer a spectacle, the desire to buy it went out the window for most. Now it’s at Walmart. In many pictures, it’s in the clearance section, a rainbow of inconsistent beige-pink sauce dominating the shelf.

Grimace Shake

Knowing that, a limited, never-been-done before promotion for Grimace’s birthday was a great idea. The McRib? Shamrock shakes? Who cares, those are things the adults talk about when they come back. The real killer is something new to the teens who go to McDonald’s, and by golly the Grimace Shake delivered.

It’s purple! It’s allegedly blueberry flavored. It comes in a special cup. It’s the sort of cutesy, visually appealing, and easy to imagine beverage that social media loves. It was destined for success. But something bizarre started happening.

TikTok loves horror. They love liminal horror, they love personal horror, they love dreamlike Subway orders and nightmarish song generator accounts both featuring clever editing and implications never outright stated. In this environment, the thought “hey, wouldn’t it be funny if the grimace shake was secretly evil or something?” came to multiple creators almost at the same time. Predictably, the results were completely bizarre. The Grimace shake took on an almost Eldritch status, and consumers of it would do everything from chugging it to bathing in it to cutting to themselves in the Family Guy arm-behind-the-back death pose after drinking it. Truly, it was a phenomenon.

Marketing

Ultimately, the marketing was a huge success. Teens made funny, trendy videos with the milkshake, kids enjoyed the taste and usually never saw those videos, and since the campaign had a clear ending time, it didn’t have time to start turning cringe. People didn’t run out of ideas before McDonalds stopped selling the shake, at least. As a marketing campaign, it was about the best McDonalds could hope for from a generation of ever-more jaded youngsters looking for something fun to do. Why not make a video with a McDonalds product for the internet? That sounds fun. And it was fun. Something weird happened to a business’s product and everyone just kept running with it. It’s wholesome in comparison to the treatment brands normally get online!

Game Lore in an Online World

Elizabeth Technology August 10, 2023

You’ve probably seen at least a screenshot of a Five Nights at Freddy’s lore video stretching an hour or more. The game is so extraordinarily good at producing theory content that people will gladly sit down and watch the content creator draw lines between a serial killer, a defunct Chuck E. Cheese style restaurant, and you, playing a security guard.

Doing all of this takes a surprisingly long time.

Lore wasn’t always such a major source of content, so what happened when FNaF hit the scene?

Online World

Lore didn’t used to be so easily accessible to people who hadn’t played the game. Lore also used to have to be somewhat straightforward, so the less observant and less obsessive players still had a shot at understanding what happened in the background of whatever they were playing. Now, in the age of the internet, you can watch people explain it for you! Game developers can build layers upon layers of complexity and know that people will put all of the pieces they have together in a fan forum, so not everybody needs to get all of the pieces to see the finished picture. In some cases, this is great! The people who can play the game for 50 hours and the people who only got to play it for 5 can now collaborate, so nobody is missing out just because they don’t have the time to get super deep into the game. Players don’t have to play through a game twice, thrice, or more just to get some little piece of the lore puzzle that appears based on RNG – someone else may have gotten it first try and shared with the class.

Because mysterious lore encourages sharing and collaborative puzzle solving/theorycrafting, it also tends to be good for content engagement. Heck, I’ve never even played a FNaF game, but I get the gist of what happened lore-wise because so many people are putting out videos and articles about it.

Speaking of which, FNaF changed the way indie games looked at lore – if you can get an interesting enough mystery going, your game may get picked up and incidentally advertised as people try to crack it, even if the actual plot is simple or the gameplay weak.

Plot Vs. Lore

I’m going to use FNaF as a common thread, because FNaF is one of the origin points of the deep and heavy lore trend in Indie Games. The first Five Nights at Freddy’s game is very simple, in terms of lore. The first ‘hour’ you play (which is really only several minutes IRL), a man on an answering machine is explaining the mechanics to you. “The animatronics get a little quirky at night”. That’s plot. Later, he mentions the Bite of ’87 – which is lore. Lore used the way the internet uses it is sort of peripheral to the game, stuff that becomes plot when it directly affects you. Bite of ’87 is used to warn you that the machines are dangerous, yes, but it also references a specific event that you have no context or additional information for, a little bit of flavor that doesn’t affect the plot of the game any more or less than the other numerous warnings you get about injury does.

Lore in this sense of the word includes things like what Princess Peach’s favorite flavor of cake is, or where the cars are made in Burnout. It’s stuff you may have found in a game that doesn’t interact with the plot at all, or does, but only barely, and not in a way that removing it could change the plot. If there came a game where you had to learn Peach’s favorite cake, then in this case, it’s plot!

These aren’t the exact definitions of these words – lore, as in folklore, refers to shared knowledge and tradition passed around a community. That said, people online understand what you mean when you ask about FNaF or Mario or Metroid lore, the stuff that’s happening behind the plot that the community has worked to assemble and share with each other. Online, the words have taken on new meaning.

Plot OR Lore…?

The issue with stories modeled after FNaF is that they sometimes sacrifice solid plot for mysterious lore in hopes of generating engagement online. While this works for a little bit, and while it works better for big games with lots of eyes on them, it doesn’t work consistently! If anything, it tends to irritate fans who joined the community to spend less time finding pieces and more time analyzing the content, which they now can’t do because 50% of the content is outside of the game in the form of lore.

Look at Silent Hill’s P.T. – the lore enhances the game, but the game never sacrifices anything within itself to clarify that it has an ARG attached to it and there’s more mystery afoot. Meanwhile, Hello Neighbor was so desperate to generate mystery that the outside content about the ‘mystery’ is longer than the content within the game.

Part of this is the difference in experience between the two development studios, but another part is that P.T (a demo) is okay with only being an hour long where Hello Neighbor was not. While lore is fun, it can also be used as a cheap trick to lengthen the time the player spends in the game by offering up little tidbits that either trigger randomly or after a certain number of playthroughs. A compromise is the FNaF 2 minigames, which you get to play after every ten or so deaths. You’re going to die a lot in the early game, but if you want to get (or see) all of them later as you get better, you either have to die in-game or watch a Let’s Player do it.

All this to say that lore can take the importance of plot in a game if the development studio isn’t careful!

And then, there’s theorycrafting, which has always existed, but turned into a special kind of hell in the late 2000s/early 2010s, and has held steady since.

TheoryCrafting and Lore

People theorycraft because it’s fun. What if Ash from Pokemon accidentally made a wish to a Pokemon that grants wishes in the first episode, and that’s why he’s been 11 for over a decade now? What if Lost wasn’t set on an island, and all of the characters are actually dead and this is just purgatory? What if Rey was related to a Skywalker? What if she wasn’t? But wait, what if she was again? What if Superman is secretly telekinetic, and he doesn’t even know it himself, and that’s why physics seems to break down around him when he lifts things that should fall apart under their own weight like airplanes and yachts?

Theorycrafting is a fun pastime, but it got to a point (especially on Tumblr and Twitter, in the seven or eight years around 2010) where superfans would send death threats to a media creator because their personal theory didn’t pan out. More on that later.

Theorycrafting often goes hand in hand with lore, especially when the lore’s a little obscure, or incomplete. For example, to go back to FNaF – we knew nothing about the Bite of ’87. Until the next game came out, people liked to theorycraft what exactly that bite was: did it kill the kid? Did the animatronics gain sentience after tasting human blood? Were you involved in the bite, and this game is you having a nightmare about being in control of the situation, but not really? And then, we got a few bits more of lore with some strategic tweets and the second game, and we learned another animatronic called Mangle was responsible for the bite. All that theorycrafting went out the window, and new theorycrafting slid in to take its place.

Too Much Involvement

Again, theorycrafting is fun. It’s also one of the hardest parts of asking for fan participation, because in order to get fans to make theories, the information has to be incomplete! On one hand, you want people to theorycraft because it generates interest in what you’ve made. On the other, theorycrafters may figure it all out before the creators get to explain it, which many game makers seem to hate. Creating a puzzle that took hours to make and five minutes to solve would be frustrating for anybody, but especially for people trying to generate a lot of engagement out of said puzzles. On the third, theorycrafters, with the power of crowdsourced, forum-based discussion, can sometimes create something deeply unhinged that gets accepted as fact within the community based on disjointed, incomplete information.

If the community is particularly green and young, they may be so disappointed in what actually happens next in the show that they stop participating altogether, or… start behaving erratically. For example: Johnlock, and BBC’s Sherlock, which Youtuber Sarah Zed has a very good video on (here!). It’s long, but her video collects a ton of fan reactions. It shows exactly the pitfalls of asking and poking and teasing fans with clues and little bits of lore online without expecting them to take it seriously. The showrunners, known as Mofftis at the time, encouraged the fans to go after every little detail, every obvious red herring, until eventually those fans had convinced themselves as a collective that Sherlock and Watson were going to be together as a couple at the end of the series for sure. The showrunners should have known that by the time people were putting together Johnlock couple cosplays based on a handful of semi-ambiguous lines in the show, they’d gotten in too deep.

Fans were sure Watson and Sherlock were going to end up in a relationship together and got very upset when that didn’t happen, ending in death threats to anyone even remotely involved in the show if they could be found online. It got so bad that Lucy Liu, who played Watson in the American TV show Elementary, a totally different adaptation of Sherlock, was getting harassed online because of a British-made show that premiered a few years earlier.

If you encourage the wrong kind of theorycrafting or attract a community that hasn’t learned these lessons yet, you run the risk of the fandom overpowering your original vision for something a small majority has decided it would rather have instead. Again – it’s sort of bad to let lore, a secondary part of the story, interfere with plot, the concrete, primary threads of it.

Lore Isn’t Inherently Bad

Lore isn’t inherently bad. What makes lore bad is overuse and overreliance on the fans to put together a good story out of little disjointed pieces of lore. Bad lore is essentially crowdsourced story-writing and collectible fluff, where good lore enhances an understanding of the content in question, giving viewers a better feel for the world without robbing them of essential plot if they choose not to pursue it.

It comes down to skill and demand. The original Sonic lore is mostly unknown because people just didn’t want it. FNaF lore, on the other hand, was written fairly sparingly to it’s own benefit. Finally, games like P.T., Resident Evil, Death Loop, Hades, etc. all benefit from their lore bringing the player in with little interactions and bits of flavor text they want to see, without dragging their attention away from the core content itself.

Lore is good! But it has to be done well to be good. Being complicated alone doesn’t make anything good.

Sources:

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/lore

Fake Podcasts: Why Bother?

Elizabeth Technology August 8, 2023

Podcasts As A Visual Art

Podcasts are everywhere. They’re a more relaxed, theoretically less-edited form of content that’s fairly easy and cheap to get into. However, getting into podcasting and actually turning a profit for the work put into it are two totally different things! Spotify pays famously terribly – while podcasters make more money than musical artists, the money earned per stream is still not sustainable for most. Specialized groups like the Maximum Fun network may lessen the load by acting as advertisement and hosting, but they have their own requirements for members on their platform.

Podcasts are not an easy source of passive income unless the creator is already established. New podcasters may spend years trying to get something off the ground and never succeed! It’s an incredibly competitive field filled with many skilled people.

As such, it sort of makes sense that creators who already have an established fanbase would have an easier time putting something together, and of those established creators, creators who do something almost like a podcast – making Youtube videos – would have an easier time learning the language. If the creator is a Youtuber and they already have cameras available, they may as well film what they’re making and put that up so that listeners listening from Youtube have something to watch. Ordinary podcasters don’t tend to have a nice space they can film in, but most Youtubers at least have a desk or something. Some shows go full circle to talk-shows and play clips, even. Shows that didn’t start with video start filming to follow the tide. Podcasting now comes with video as often as it doesn’t.

Fake Podcasts

There’s a visual language to these filmed podcasts. Two or more people are wearing headphones. There’s a microphone, maybe multiple. The cameras used to film are angled in such a way that you know who is facing who if the entire cast isn’t caught in a shot (often, podcasts with visuals are edited to cut to a zoomed in shot of the person who’s talking). And, most importantly, the cast is almost never looking at the camera. They’re looking at each other, an artifact from previous podcasting eras where looking at the camera wasn’t strictly required. Looking at the people you’re talking to instead of the camera turned out to be more natural not only for the hosts, but also for the audience watching the show.

If you know the tricks, you know how to fake it!

The question is: why? Why fake it?

The majority of podcasts aren’t that prestigious, as mentioned before. However, while a podcaster could be anyone, a guest has to be ‘worthy’. To say ‘I’ve been interviewed’ and to post videos from the podcast is an affirmation that the guest is interesting and worth listening to at some level. Posting clips of an interview gives the interviewee clout and perceived status.

After that, even though the faker can’t attach a name, they can hint at the quality of the show they were allegedly on by using high quality filming and audio equipment visible in the shot. More expensive show? More expensive stuff. Therefore, they were asked on to interview at a prestigious, well-run, and profitable show with a lot of listeners eager to hear their wisdom. The “set” behind them gives hints too: Is it a podcast run for sports? Does it appeal to drama-loving gossip hounds? Are they on a comedy podcast, or a serious one?

Also, it’s just really easy to fake! The interviewee doesn’t have a name or a watermark to attach to their video, but whatever; a lot of clips of popular podcasts just expect viewers to know the names of the people in them, and they don’t really tag their Shorts or TikToks with the show’s full title. It doesn’t tend to affect how realistic a clip looks. There are hundreds if not thousands of podcasts, many of which are super popular within their niche but nowhere else, which is why the equipment quality trick works at all – being on a super popular zoology podcast doesn’t mean that any true crime podcast listener would have heard of the guest, and vice versa. If someone posts a clip of themselves talking about animals or true crime, the listener just assumes they haven’t heard of the show they were on, not that the clip itself is fake.

How To Spot It

Spotting fake clips is tough, but not impossible. Hosts rarely take snips of just themselves or just the guest. If the “guest” doesn’t have any footage of the “host”, then they can’t include it, which means it’s probably fake. Similarly, if the “guest” is not treating the equipment or environment like it needs to be treated to get the audio (touching microphones or turning their head too far away from the mic on their desk, etc.) there’s a solid chance that’s a fake.

As long as they aren’t “borrowing” someone’s image or credibility without actually being on their show, there isn’t much harm in these fake podcast clips. It’s just a weird little quirk of the internet today that fake clips are being made to sell soundbites easier.

What Will Switching to “X” Actually Look Like?

Elizabeth Technology August 1, 2023

There are a lot of theories as to why Musk would go from the widely-recognizable “Twitter” to a single letter name like X.

Much like colors, brands can “own” letters, but only in certain markets. UPS owns their distinctive shade of brown in the shipping industry, but if Hershey chocolates decides they want brown and yellow wrapping on a special edition bar, UPS can’t tell them not to. Why? Nobody is going to confuse Hershey chocolate for a product of UPS. Tiffany owns their robin’s egg blue within the jewelry and fine glasswork market, but again, if Hershey wants to use robin’s egg blue on their Easter candy, Tiffany has no legal way to stop them even if they wanted to. And they don’t!

Letters are much the same: many social media sites own a stylized version of the first letter in their name to maintain recognition even in teeny designs like app icons, including big ones like Facebook and Google. So, on the surface, switching to a single letter follows a cogent line of logic. The problem? Tumblr owns the letter “T” for social media. Twitter’s app icon is a bird because the two are so similar they can’t both use the letter T (both blue, both blogging or microblogging sites, etc.). The equivalent would be UPS trying to switch to “F”. FedEx would have something to say about a choice that obvious even if they didn’t touch their colors. Twitter wouldn’t try.

So why X if not T? Easy – Musk owns X.com. That’s why they’re going to X.

Notably, Musk used to work at PayPal and tried the same thing there, but they parted ways before he could convince anybody. The times have changed, and the era where Musk worked at PayPal is very different from the era today. For example, Microsoft now owns copyrights around the letter X as it relates to communications and Threads/Meta have copyrights for X relating to software. Twitter is also now visible in many more places than PayPal is. PayPal only appears when money needs to change hands – Twitter is (or was) considered essential for businesses of any size, from the biggest shipping companies to the smallest boutique newsletters. Everyone knows of Twitter, and that would make rebranding incredibly difficult even if it wasn’t to a single letter.

Execution Gets Them Every Time

Firstly, the UI of the site is still coated in Twitter and Tweet terminology as of this article’s writing. That means it’s still Twitter. There just aren’t enough staff on hand to do one big update/rollout for their new X branding like they might have liked to, and as a result Twitter is still Twitter until users recognize X to be Twitter, which won’t be complete until everything says X. Making a big deal about the switch (so customers are less likely to become confused when something isn’t where it used to be) is only a part of the equation for success; another huge part of it is getting people to stop saying the old name. Hard to do when the microblog posts still go live as ‘tweets’.

Brands who feature ‘Find us on Twitter!’ notes on their packaging will have to switch over to the ‘X’. This alone may take weeks, both because the process of getting the new label on the packaging itself will take a while, and because the old packaging needs to cycle out at the grocery store. Websites using Twitter links will have to change their icons. Twitter has been a bird for so long that some of them might have forgotten how.

Elon owned X.com. That’s the easy part. But everywhere else, even if big names like Meta and Microsoft don’t pitch a fit over the copyright issues Twitter is creating for itself, and even on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter, X/Twitter’s branding is incomplete and rushed. The entire launch seems to be the result of an impulsive decision in a morning meeting. Twitter didn’t own the @X handle on Twitter before it made the switch. Someone else snatched it up immediately. The Japanese rock group X Japan had the X handle they would have used to stay in format with Twitter Japan, and so they just can’t use that handle for Japan.

What is X? Outside of a domain Elon has been sitting on forever. What is ‘an X’? X by itself means nothing. It’s an exit. It’s the top right of the screen when you want to leave. It’s the mark over treasures and mines on maps, but nothing itself except a marker. It’s the thing you replace when you first start learning algebra. It’s a cool letter, but maybe going with “Twitter X” would have been more comprehensible vs. what the site has going on now. What, tweets are now called X’s? They’re… exes? I’m no longer tweeting, I’m exing? Did you see that X that The Rock posted? I can’t believe some guy is leaving X. You know, X? Like the letter? It used to be Twitter.

There’s no meat on it, no associations to make with it, not a fanciful mark or a made-up word. It’s a letter. Just a single letter is expected to carry all the weight of a brand like Twitter.

WebP Images

Elizabeth Technology July 27, 2023

Google Images

Google Images is one of the most powerful image-finding resources in the world. In the early days of the web, you could quite simply just copy and then paste an image from Google Images into your project and call it a day. This wouldn’t work for publications, and it opened up a gigantic legal nightmare for anyone caught using copyrighted images in their advertising “by accident” after an intern did that (copyright is one of those laws you can’t say ‘I didn’t know you couldn’t do that’ and get off), but for personal and internal use, Google Images could do what you needed it to.

However, the internet is a tricky place, and a website who used a picture (legitimately or not) could appear before the original source of the picture did. While this still didn’t affect the most basic use of an image, it had the potential to turn into a problem when content reposting got really popular on Instagram, Pinterest, etc. and online news sites wanted to use an image they found. They’d end up asking the wrong person!

Secondary to that is images that are free to use, but poor quality. The website supplying the image doesn’t want people to use the worse 300×300 px version of it if a better-quality version exists.

WebP images solve both of these problems, both intentionally and accidentally!

Websites Run on Google Properties

Image-loading speed has been an unbreakable barrier for websites with images on them for forever. Pictures are a lot of information, and pulling that information from the server makes the entire page slower. The bigger the image, the slower it goes.

The earliest days of the web only had JPGs and other weak, lossy formats to supply the web with the images, and even those took forever on dial-up internet. Now, we have dozens of formats to choose from, although JPGs and PNGs are the most common for both size and convenience of use. PNGs are also capable of being transparent, although they take up more space than JPGs do due to their lossless nature. Thus, in Google Images, a WebP image will likely be both the smallest and best copy of any particular image.

WebP

However, WebP has thrown a wrench in many a meme – the file type can’t be converted to a JPG or a PNG with the default software on your Windows computer (yet). When they come up in Google images, you can’t just save them straight off the site (which you shouldn’t have been doing anyway!) anymore and expect that same file to be uploadable to a meme website or your art program. Sketchbook and GIMP can’t handle WebP images!

Of course, nobody at all would be using these if it was all downsides. WebP images are faster to load, smaller, animatable, and can handle transparency, fusing all of the best traits of JPGs, PNGs, and even GIFs. When making a website, every single second the user has to wait is a second they’re less likely to continue to wait, unless they actually care about the content they’re looking for. Waiting even five seconds for a webpage to load wipes out a huge chunk of potential views! PNGs have been a pinnacle online image formats for a long time, but they can delay loading times, and can even be used to DDOS a website if that website doesn’t have size upload limits. WebPs can do that too… but only if the website allows WebP uploads, and only if the format of it is lossy. It’s weaknesses are it’s strengths – it’s difficult to use, difficult to steal, and difficult to alter (again, for now – as it becomes more common, many of these problems should subside given Google works with developers).

Sources: https://99designs.com/blog/tips/webp-image-format/

New Top-Level Domains

Elizabeth Technology July 25, 2023

Google recently released some new top-level domains for purchase.

What is a Top-Level Domain?

A top level domain is one of the most important parts of a website’s internet address, after the ‘root’ zone. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is made up of several pieces. The first part, usually http:// or https:// is the ‘scheme’, which tells your device which application it should use to open the URL. ‘www’, the part right after that part, is a subdomain – it gives your device additional information about the website, and can even be swapped out depending on the website being used (although www is very common). After that is the domain – in a website name like www . example . com, ‘example’ is the domain. In www. Google . com, Google is the domain.

After that is top-level domains – the last part of the address that use .com, .org, .gov, and others, which are just below the domain name in importance. If you type in the wrong top-level domain, you will not land on the correct website, just like if you mistyped the main domain name. Some top-level domains are controlled (only U.S. government bodies can use the .gov ending, according to CISA, and only websites in the United Kingdom use the .uk top-level domain) but others are open and available to whoever wants to use them. They don’t have to be three letters or less, either – .pizza , .tube, and .online are just some of the top-level domains one can buy. Truly, the world is an oyster!

Trouble Afoot

With all that out of the way, what has Google done this time?

The thing about top-level domains is that they have to be for sale first! There are a limited number of domain vendors, and not every domain vendor can sell every type of top-level domain. However, any established organization in the world, public or private, can apply to create and then operate a new top-level domain. They have to prove their capability, because doing that takes a lot of money and server space, but it’s possible for large companies like Google.

The problem is that a few of Google’s cool new top-level domains are A) already in existence elsewhere, and B) exist in a place where they can overlap. Google released eight new top-level domains, and two among them are also file types: .zip and .mov.

For convenience, many websites will turn links into hyperlinks. Typing in www.google.com into Word, for example, will create a hyperlink. The same goes for Outlook and Teams. This is the core of the problem – trying to reference a file you’ve saved elsewhere in online communications channels is creating an opportunity for the recipient to click on a link they didn’t mean to.

If you mean to tell someone that they should check out the photos[dot]zip file attached to the email you’re sending, and they mistakenly click the auto-hyperlink instead of downloading the file attachment, they’re left visiting an unknown (potentially malicious) website. Or, if someone in a Teams chat group says the new photos are ready in the photos[dot]zip file in the company OneDrive, then they’ve opened their team up to accidentally clicking a link thinking it leads to the shared files. Simple statements that weren’t issues before are now security risks! A particularly clever scammer could set up auto-downloads for .zip files named the same as the website, so the victim doesn’t even realize they’re downloading malware. If their browser throws a warning, they’re likely to trust the source if they don’t know that this is a possibility. The same goes for .mov files, but those aren’t as common as .zips are.

Google has basically opened the door to a new kind of scamming, and their reasons for doing so are unclear.

What is Going On With Social Websites Lately?

Elizabeth Technology July 13, 2023

A bunch of websites are metamorphosing into new and unrecognizable shapes. Outside of Twitter (it’s own major disaster), what’s going on in these social media sites?

Reddit Kills Apollo

Reddit’s decision to start charging for direct access to their API has resulted in Apollo, alongside a number of other third-party apps meant to work with Reddit, shutting down. It’s simply too expensive to keep running. Many subreddits (which are like forum pages for niches under the Reddit umbrella) shuttered their doors, some for 48 hours, some indefinitely, only for Reddit staff to threaten to de-mod the moderators who made that decision and replace them with more agreeable users who would open the subs back up. Why would anyone scab for arguably one of the worst online jobs available on a volunteer basis? The power to control the ‘vibe’ of the subreddit, and therefore the mood of whatever hobby or niche that subreddit represents if Reddit is a big enough part of it. Some hobbies and communities only exist on Reddit – outside of the easy pre-made forum format that Reddit provides, these people would not be able to come together and share information with each other. That’s a lot of power!

As an aside, Apollo (and many of the other third-party apps designed to read Reddit on mobile) work with accessibility tools, while the primary app… struggles. Shutting down Apollo means a sizable chunk of the population just won’t be able to use Reddit on mobile, full stop. Reddit doesn’t seem to have plans in place to address that!

From most angles, Reddit’s decision is a transparent grab for more ads. Third party sites don’t do the ads like the official app does, so Reddit will get more money if everyone is forced to either use the mobile site or the official Reddit app. Many moderators have chosen to reopen their subreddits, but flag them as NSFW pages, which Reddit can’t monetize with ads.

Discord Changes Their Username Policy and Freaks Everyone Out

Discord used to work by giving everyone a name and a number discriminator that would allow people to pick out exactly the name they wanted without having to add a bunch of special characters or numbers into it. It was elegant! It was clean! It was easy to use and easy to learn! You could change your name on a whim, add or remove pertinent info, and goof off with holiday-themed usernames without risking losing the “real” username.

Now, everyone just gets a username. A username with numbers permanently built into it, since many people are not getting the username they wanted (or even the one they already had). And, thanks to a bad rollout, Discord is watching with their hands up in the air as people grab names like “Markiplier” and “PewDiePie”, which are both social media handles belonging to users already on the site with huge followings elsewhere! Both had their names with the discriminator attached until that change happened and locked them out of using the handle they already had, due to the staggered rollout Discord is doing.

Just names is worse. It was always worse. It is still worse now. An old system that could handle emojis and names written in non-English characters is simply gone for the sake of a more Twitter-like system, allegedly to ease confusion… but the rollout really screwed up any chance this change had to land well. People are grabbing up names they know were already in use, not to mention that Twitter’s system really struggled with scammers up until the verification checkmarks were introduced to kick impersonators.

Twitch Threatens Sponsorships and then Says it Didn’t Mean To

Twitch has had a rough couple of weeks or months. Initially, Twitch announced that it would be downgrading some users from 70/30 to 50/50 money split: where the streamer used to get 70% of the bits and subscription money their viewers spent on them and Twitch would get the remaining 30%, now they’d get half. Smaller streamers were very upset – many were on contracts that kept them from dual-streaming on sites like Youtube or Tiktok, which would allow them to supplement the income twitch had just announced it was cutting. Clarifications came out later, some users were exempt, but it was a bad look.

And then Twitch said it would be limiting the screen space sponsorships could have during a livestream to 3% of the screen, and that it would be banning burnt-in sponsorship panels altogether. Tickers, icons, and all sorts of other shout-outs to brands were going to be taken out of action. AFK screens, the screen a streamer sometimes puts up when they take a break to use the bathroom or get food, were now nerfed. Sponsors would have very little incentive to pay money to people if those people couldn’t show their logo in high definition, and as such this would have killed a lot of sponsorship opportunities.

The website flipped! Immediately, almost everyone was angry in a way they’d never been before!

Many of the largest streamers make their money off of sponsorships. Where big streamers didn’t care so much about the 70/30 or 50/50 split change, they cared a lot about the sponsorship change. Sensing the enormity of the mistake they made, Twitch went back on it almost immediately, but trust in the site as a money-making opportunity for content creators is damaged if not dead. ‘What’s next? What will Twitch do next?’ Rings through chatrooms and Discord servers. Streamers, big and small, are now wary – this kind of behavior points to Twitch needing money badly and not looking hard enough at the consequences before they announce their ‘plans’, letting the audience puzzle out what could go wrong for them.

How Did The Titan Communicate Underwater?

Elizabeth Technology July 6, 2023

For those out of the loop, the Titan was an experimental vessel meant to dive to depths of around 13,000 feet, specifically to visit the final resting place of the Titanic. Tragically, it imploded on the way down on its last voyage, taking all of its crew with it. The Titan was made of carbon fiber and titanium, designed to be steered with a plug-and-play controller, and used an electric engine. You may be wondering why everyone is questioning their navigation system, and lack of backup comms.

Firstly, The Pinnacles Of Submersible Technology

To say the Titan was unusual in the field of submersibles is a vast understatement. So to truly get the basics, it’s better to look at everyone else’s submarines and submersibles first, alongside the physics of water. Water, especially salt water, is actually really good at absorbing radiation! It’s how life was able to survive in the water even when the Earth lacked an ozone layer. The ocean soaks up electromagnetic radiation and disperses it far before it can reach the depths submarines get to.

This holds true even though most subs aren’t made to reach the deepest parts of an ocean. Strategically, 800 to 1,000 feet is plenty deep enough to hide from surface vessels, so most military subs don’t bother going any deeper. In exploration terms, unmanned vessels equipped with cameras are generally better for observing wildlife or underwater structures, although there are a variety of submarines and submersibles designed to hold people and reach further depths. James Cameron has famously reached the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Marianas Trench, as well as multiple dives to the Titanic in his submarine The Deepsea Challenger.

How do those boats communicate? There are a variety of methods, but one of the easiest methods for communicating with others on the surface is to simply come up and put up an antenna. Air communicates radio waves much easier. Some crafts use tethers, tied to buoys with antennas attached, so they don’t have to come all the way up to the surface themselves. That allows them to stay further down, and further out of sight of surface vessels if so desired. At depth, options are limited. One such option was ELF communications: ELF, or Extremely Low Frequency radio waves, were used to summon certain submarines to the surface so they could receive longer instructions up until 2004, when the project was shut down in the US. ELF communications were a highly specific tool used for a highly specific task during the Cold War – they ate up an enormous amount of energy and took a gigantic antenna to broadcast (56 miles of cable total) – and as a result they didn’t see much use, with the original project site shut down in 2004 in the US.

How Did the Titan Get Instructions?

Using a buoy with an antenna attached or a tether is simply not feasible at the depths intended for the Titan. Neither is GPS, or WiFi, or ‘true’ text messaging. Instead, the Titan used acoustic pulses (otherwise known as sonar), where packets of data are sent down as sound waves, and a hydrophone on the receiving party’s vessel is able to catch and decipher the packet for the people inside. All of the messages the Titan team sent or received were meant to be short, coded messages with no room for confusion. A laminated sheet inside the vessel provided translation, according to a photo from David Pogue.

However, such a system with few navigations tools on the craft itself made it easy for the submersible to get lost. While the craft had sonar, it wasn’t the sort they could use to bounce off of obstacles to navigate, so they were entirely reliant on the surface vessel for eyes. Additionally, the boats could only talk when the surface vessel was directly over the sub. Think the difference between planning a route using a paper map of the highways to travel on and using a GPS – the CEO even compared it to a game of Battleship, where the top ship gave directional instructions using a grid system. Taking an unmarked exit on a highway using a paper map means re-orienting yourself on a landmark to get back on track, but underwater, there just isn’t much to orient with. The Titan was reliant on the topside vessel knowing where it was on their battleship grid to steer it, and with no real landmarks outside of the sunken ship itself, getting ‘lost’ in the water at those depths happened surprisingly infrequently for how low-information that system was.

Unfortunately, even in the event the craft was recoverable, there just aren’t great ways to send signals back and forth and guarantee someone will receive them. Acoustics powerful enough to communicate with anything anywhere on the surface (not just directly overhead) eat up a lot of electricity, and so wouldn’t be a reliable backup if the sub had lost power. Radio waves are out until the craft ascends. ELF only works one way. Once any craft is deep enough in the water, it’s alone!

Podcasts Aren’t Actually so Easy

Elizabeth Technology June 27, 2023

There was a time when podcasts were an obscure form of entertainment. After all, in the early days of the internet, storage space for mobile devices was precious.

The Before Times

Podcasts used to be pretty rare, back when CDs were the main method of data storage. You could get okay-ish radio recordings of professionals who had advice to dispense on a CD, or you could listen to an entire album instead on that same CD.

Podcasts as a format just didn’t make sense. It’s like a radio show, but never aired live? It’s like a TV talk show, but with no footage? It’s… sort of like an audio book… but without premade content? What is it bringing to the table that’s new, exactly? The podcast’s first form was as audio-blogs, and audio blogs existed, but the people making them had to be pretty darn interesting to compete with the other entertainment available.

Especially with what a hassle it was to even get the things and store them!

It took til downloadable files could be accessed by anyone for podcasts to start growing in popularity, in the 2000’s. In the peak era of talk shows, sitting down to watch an interview was more convenient, and easier to parse. The format was tried and true! The interviewees were always interesting, and always previously vetted. Recording those off of TV could be like a podcast, but recording it from there meant recording the entire thing, not just the audio, so stripping the video just didn’t make sense if it was all already there. The same went for radio shows, which were already doing plenty for that niche. Format transfers were a pain for the average person with an average desktop.

Speaking of average desktops, recording equipment and studio space were also prohibitively expensive. If someone in 2004 wanted to record something, they’d have to either go to a specialty shop or settle for consumer grade microphones from Best Buy. Their ‘free’ recording space, their house, wasn’t soundproofed unless they went out of their way to do so. Echoes, interruptions, editing, distributing – this is all studio-level stuff at that point in time, and studios just weren’t interested. Talk shows were live, on the radio, and sometimes available for download on the radio’s website if the radio’s host company wanted to go through the effort. That was a very powerful if. As a result, the best of the best is what most people got, classic Abbott and Costello bits and tips from self-help guides who were actually professionally trained and licensed to help people. The difficulty of starting a show was both a blessing and a curse.

The Now

Now that high-quality microphones are cheaper than they used to be, and many people have the internet speeds necessary to upload hour-long segments, nearly anybody can start a podcast. Audacity, a sound-editing program, is free to download! OBS will let you record yourself for free. A decent-quality mic with a pop filter no longer costs as much as a gaming console. Of course people are going to try and get into the business.

The problems begin to arise when things like soundproofing or room noise or echo aren’t considered. Inexperienced beginners set out in echo-y rooms with audible distractions popping in every now and again, and an entire ocean of them are competing for the attention of their listeners. If they have the right set-up and a quiet place, they still have to jump the hurdles of adjusting their own mix, making an intro or scripting one, cutting out dead space and breathing noises, editing the final file, and finally, uploading it. It sounds so simple to just ‘make a podcast’, but the hidden work is beginning to cost more effort than it’s worth.

Not to mention the marketing and ads, which is why so many people try to jump into podcasts in the first place. Many people misinterpret ‘audio-only’ as ‘easy-money’ but it’s really not. The effort to produce something as cleanly made as any of the top podcasts on Spotify is a full-time job in and of itself – and with so many new podcasts, content consumers aren’t going to settle for poor-quality ones anymore. This is bad news for hopefuls aiming at ad money and sponsorships.

The Money

Ad-reads took over Youtube after what is termed the ‘adpocalypse’. Essentially, Youtubers with good records and decent subscriber counts could be solicited to read an ad directly within the video, bypassing the Google Ads system altogether, as the Ads system was much less profitable once advertisers pulled away en masse. The format, however, was tried and true long before in early podcast break-ins. Many podcasts from the 2010’s contained ad reads as their standard, the same way radio shows did.

Ad-reads are a very good source of money. Incredibly good. Unlike Google Ads, the ads can never be pulled from the video or audio by a third party, which is good for the creator. The ad is also always tied to the content, unlike Google’s rotating reel of pre-roll ads, which is good for the advertiser! The ad’s perpetually advertising for them, even if relationships with the creator crumble. They’re worth more money because of this stability, and as a result, they’re more difficult to attain than the standard Youtube Partnership.

The bigger the podcast, the more likely it is to be approached by an advertiser, and the more potential money one could earn. Unfortunately, because so many podcasts are so opaque about their total listener counts, it’s much harder to gauge how big a channel needs to get before they can start pitching their show to the advertisers. There’s also a sort of wariness around new and upcoming shows because followers and download counts can be purchased from shady folks who specialize in bots. 5,000 subscribers might not be 5,000 sets of ears ready for advertisement – the efforts to cheat the system have made the people with money more wary, and made the bar higher for new entrants along the way.

Longevity

Of course, the only consistent way to get those necessary followers is to produce consistently good content on a schedule. Not every podcast that does that succeeds, but all of the successful podcasts do that. One good episode? Easy! Two good episodes? Maybe! Three, or four, and then five when you really don’t feel like recording? Episode 6, when you’ve gotten a total of three listeners? It’s tough to find the motivation to continue. The NY Times says that between March and May of last year, only a fifth of existing podcasts released a new episode. That’s abysmal.

The question is if a new show can keep it going in spite of the work, or in spite of a rocky start, and many just can’t. Luck doesn’t strike every attempt at a show, and podcasts are not as fun and easy as hosts make them seem. It’s easy to talk with friends for an hour, for some people. It may be easy to spend an entire night together gabbing about whatever the current events are. It’s not easy to guide the conversation using pre-written topics, day after day, week after week. How often did you spend two solid hours just talking to people before the pandemic struck? No breaks. Very little dead space. Long stretches of listening and no pauses once it’s your turn to respond.

I would wager most people overestimate the time they can talk about something before repeating themselves, which is why so many podcasts also feature friends and interviews, a niche that’s become overdone. Having another person to bounce info off of is a great idea, but so many podcasters treat interviews as a marketing method instead of an actual interview that sorting out interesting interviews is like finding a needle in a haystack.

And then there’s the ‘friend group’ podcasts, which have the same core members, week after week. Every issue with scheduling recording time, having a quiet studio, and finding relatable talking points is magnified by however many people are in the group. That being said, they are much easier to run (and more appealing to listeners) than single-person podcasts, or rotating interview podcasts if the host is mediocre. Most radio shows have two or three people for that exact reason. Even then, running out of content is still a very real threat, and if one of the members leave? The show is as good as over.

Shows like My Brother, My Brother, and Me rely on Yahoo Answers as well as audience send-ins to build out content. Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet does the same, but with reviews of various locations. Other podcasts with similar formats have all but consumed the niche, and now others trying to get their own podcast off the ground are having to do “X – But With a Twist!” style content. The number of dead shows with premises like the Youtuber Markiplier’s Distractable podcast, or the Joe Rogan Experience, is in the hundreds, because it’s so incredibly easy to make one episode and then bail. People starting podcasts now might only be able to get a reliable viewer base if they have their own built in off of other projects. Distractables, Very Really Good, Schmanners, etc. all come from people who have successful channels somewhere else.

Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/style/why-are-there-so-many-podcasts.html

The Complete History of Podcasts

Outfits for the Met Gala

Elizabeth Technology June 20, 2023

Opulence and Impossible Styles

The Met Gala is primarily a place for the rich and famous to come together in support of the arts. Actors, influencers, singers, fashion designers, heads of makeup brands, anyone who faces the public and isn’t too controversial is welcomed. The organization who throws the event, the Met, is actually a museum dedicated to the preservation of clothing, and the documentation of history through fashion. What better way to do that than to ask celebrity stylists to come up with new styles riffing on themes?

The Met Gala always has a theme. That theme is not always successfully met, but when it is, it’s incredible. “Heavenly Bodies”, the theme a few years ago, was both broad and specific enough that nearly everybody in attendance (everyone who modeled a look at least) understood the assignment, and most nailed it without accidentally copying other looks. “Guilded Age”, the theme a little while after, was not so successful, but still full of plenty of great looks. The lack of cohesion came from a mixup of “Golden Age” and “Guilded Age” by the people styling the attendees; the Golden Age of Hollywood was from the early fifties to somewhere in the sixties, the heyday of stars like Marilyn Monroe, while the Guilded Age refers to the last twenty years or so of the 19th century. Obviously wildly different, but still mostly a good showing. The year “camp” was the theme revealed that nobody who showed up knew what camp was, and many of the attendees only managed to hit it ironically. ‘Camp’ is difficult to define and even harder to achieve on purpose without stumbling into ‘tacky’, but it’s more than bright colors or strange silhouettes.

In recent years, the Met Gala has attracted some controversy in spite of a growing love online for runway-style fashion – why?

Goofy

Karl Lagerfeld was a designer for Chanel, and the subject of this year’s Met Gala. He’s famous for both his impact on Chanel’s silhouettes and his somewhat unsupportive attitude after the #MeToo movement unearthed a lot of mistreatment in Hollywood. He also famously had a cat. Three separate mainstream celebrities (Doja Cat, Lil Nas X, and Jared Leto) went as his cat.

Lagerfeld is not an ideal choice in many ways. Critics on TikTok point out that Virginie Viard, a longtime collaborator at Chanel, was still around and might be a better choice. Additionally, the Met Gala already had a Chanel-themed gala while Karl was the head of Chanel about eighteen years ago, effectively giving him two theme years. He brought Chanel back from serious decline, yes, but he wasn’t the only big designer at Chanel in all that time between galas. Other, more serious controversies included several comments about women he considered overweight or ugly, and xenophobia relating to Muslims in Germany. He said in an interview that his persona was an act… was it? Nobody knows for sure which opinions he actually held and which ones were exaggerations or poorly received jokes.

Attempts to rebel without rebelling against the Met itself included wearing pink, which Karl famously criticized… but then also featured repeatedly in his shows, because his remarks about the color were not made seriously. How does one navigate this situation without sparking controversy? There’s no way out of it – either an attendee is on-theme and implicitly supporting Lagerfeld, or they’re not on theme and criticized by people who liked his style. The three people who showed up as cats were taking the theme as seriously as Karl himself took anything. Maybe that’s the only real way to win.

#TaxTheRich

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a beloved figure among young New York voters. She understands computers and worked retail, both of which are uncommon amongst her coworkers. Famously, she wore holes straight through her shoes going door-to-door campaigning. So, when she showed up to the Met Gala wearing a nice dress saying ‘Tax The Rich’ splashed in red down the back, some people were confused. Others got angry.

Unfortunately, the muddying of the waters between ‘Big on Twitter’ and ‘Big, and Posts to Twitter’ left many people uncertain of what role she was trying to fill by showing up wearing that dress – for an influencer, this whole debacle really would have been about hollow messaging, but for an actual real-life politician, that dress reflects her bringing her job with her. An influencer can’t show up to New York’s legislature and draft a bill about taxation, but AOC could. Twitter, where the worst of the fighting was happening, could not separate these ideas. The Met was caught in the crossfire, unable to quench the fire in 120 characters or less: New York politicians are invited to attend because some of them get a say in the Met’s funding, and the design house gave her the dress to wear for free because they supported her goals. She was there for fairly cheap, but Twitter did not care. Twitter got a picture of her in the dress with limited captioning and ran with it.

Letting Twitter and social media become such a critical part of their publicity during this event means giving a direct line of access to the general public, many of whom have no context for the Met, the Gala, or AOC herself. A combination of confusing symbols like AOC at an expensive party (but for free!) wearing a quality dress that asked the other attendees to pay more in taxes may as well have been a press release in Klingon to people who only go to Twitter for their news.

The Monroe Dress

The Met Gala may be beloved, but every organization dedicated to preserving history has an opportunity to do it wrong. They may record history with conscious bias, perhaps believing their home country’s culture to be superior, or they fail to return artifacts to the living relatives of people who never wanted their stuff in a museum. They mistreat their collection, fail to provide context, or don’t investigate their sources as thoroughly as they should. Every museum has to contend their collection with their idea of the culture that collection comes from. Anthropology especially is prone to bias. Things have gotten better, but not linearly, and not completely. Marilyn Monroe’s famous raindrop dress serves as a warning.

The Met doesn’t actually have the Monroe dress – Ripley’s Believe it or Not does. They should have never let the dress out of the case. Kim Kardashian requested the item for wear at the Guilded Age themed gala (once again, Guilded, not Golden!) and posed in it for pictures after an obviously difficult time getting into it on the carpet. This isn’t to dunk on Kim Kardashian or the shape she was in, but modern beauty standards are an exaggeration of what was in style back when Monroe was everywhere, and Kim had already been on an extreme diet to try and match Monroe’s measurements. It was an impossible ask. The dress was made for Monroe – she was sewn into it on the day she most famously wore it. It would have been a miraculous coincidence if Kim fit into it simply because it wasn’t made for her.

Everything about this dress, down to the choice of fabric itself, was made for Monroe. It wouldn’t have fit 99.5% of the population as a result.

So why even try? Why not pay an homage with the replica, and leave it at that? Kim wore a replica the rest of the night, also owned by the same company that had the original, and looked identical. In fact, the replica fit better – the museum only let her try on the original because the replica fit so well, and the original did not fit at all the first time Kardashian tried it on. Worse, the effort of getting her into and out of the dress on the big day put strain on the stitches, and caused some of the gems to detach from the fabric. This event has permanently altered the way the original looks, even now that it’s back in storage.

The entire thing was an ego-trip-slash-publicity-stunt that backfired badly on an organization that swore it was dedicated to preserving fashion history, especially now that people online are beginning to recognize what a tragically used figure Monroe was.

Is fashion inextricably tied to controversy? Can the Met get through a gala without tripping itself? Next year, we’ll see.

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