Daring Fireball

2024-11-23 01:31:24

Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:

Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official keyboard accessory. [...]

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet 2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity). After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and 9to5Google’s framing of the same news as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.

This comes on the heels of news just this week that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as the existing Pixel Tablet does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.

A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps.

2024-11-22 01:16:49

Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and ... crickets. The silence is deafening.

There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of how Musk set up an entire account on his own platform for his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray” check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.

The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters over this merging of private and public interests — which they deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.

A man named Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018 that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.

Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.

The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.

2024-11-21 11:33:13

Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”:

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

I am upset by the above, but only insofar as I’m jealous that I had never thought to make the analogy to an author telling people to “read my Amazon”. A publication on Substack is no more “a Substack” than a blog on WordPress is “a WordPress”. It’s really quite a nifty — but devious — trick that Substack has pulled to make this parlance a thing.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

You might disagree. Like I said, I know a bunch of good, smart people who see Substack like Dash does, and refuse to pay for any publication on Substack’s platform because of their “Hey we’re just a neutral publishing platform, not an editor, let alone a censor” stance. What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.¹

What I object to isn’t their laissez faire approach to who they allow to publish on their platform, but rather how they present all publications. People do call the publications on Substack “Substacks”. And Substack publications do all look the same, most of them right down to that telltale serif typeface, Spectral,² which is kerned so loosely it looks like teeth in need of orthodontia. It’s not an ugly font, per se, but it is very distinctive, which contributes, I think significantly, to the blurring of the branding line between Substack publications as discrete standalone independent entities or as mere sections under “Substack” as an umbrella publication.

Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

Substack’s app, along with the company’s home page, defaults to presenting itself as a Twitter-like short-form posting platform. As if what we need right now is another Twitter-like platform. But especially: why would anyone want to participate in a social platform tied to one specific publishing platform? It doesn’t make any sense to me, as a reader, nor do I see the appeal to writers on the platform. It only makes sense strategically from Substack’s own perspective. If, as a writer, your feedback and social interaction with your audience is tied to Substack’s own social graph, your publication is tied to Substack, too. It’s so transparently a lock-in play that it’s almost hard to object to it. It’s right there on the tin. But it’s not hard at all to just not use it.

Substack no longer even hosts a majority of the newsletter-style writers I subscribe to. Casey Newton moved Platformer from Substack to Ghost in January. Craig Calcaterra moved his excellent baseball-focused-but-with-heavy-dashes-of-politics-and-pop-culture Cup of Coffee from Substack to Beehiiv in January as well.³ Molly White runs Citation Needed on Ghost. My newest paid subscription is to CNN expat Oliver Darcy’s new media-industry focused Status, for which he chose Beehiiv. And of course there’s my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery, running on his own platform Passport, not only long predates Substack but served as their model to replicate. (Substack’s pitch deck was “Stratechery in a box.”) All of these sites look distinctive, with their own brand. All of them offer much better subscription and delivery management interfaces than Substack.

My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.

2024-11-21 02:58:54

Sara Fischer, reporting for Axios:

Apple has started selling its own advertising inventory for Apple News, two sources familiar with the effort told Axios. It’s pitching new ad units that it hopes will maximize revenue for itself and its publishing partners. [...]

• Publishers will get a 70% cut of the ad revenue sold by Apple within their articles.
• They will get a percentage of the ad revenue sold by Apple within the Apple News feed, dependent on engagement with their content.
• Apple News publishers will continue to receive 100% of the revenue from the advertising that they sell against their content in the app.

Apple News+ is a really good product. Scanning its main Today tab in the morning has become my modern-day equivalent of scanning the front page of a printed newspaper — a way to get a sense of what’s going on in world news. There’s a level of editorial curation and presentation in Apple News that I don’t think has a peer. Apple News itself doesn’t publish or report anything, but there’s clearly a talented, level-headed editorial team that is picking and choosing the most important and most interesting (which are often very different things) stories from a wide variety of sources. So maybe a better analogy to the bygone era of print isn’t scanning the front page of a newspaper, but rather stopping at a good big-city newsstand where you could scan the front pages of a slew of newspapers from around the country (and world).

I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means NetNewsWire), the web (Safari), and social media. But for national, world, and general interest news, Apple News is really good. I don’t know what it’s like without a News+ subscription, but with one, it’s truly excellent. And a News+ subscription gets you access to a bunch of great publications with paywalls on the web.

If you cemented your opinion of Apple News years ago and tuned out, you should give it a fresh look — especially if you have a “free” News+ subscription via Apple One.

But, my god, the ads suck — low-rent and highly repetitive. I posted screen recordings over the summer illustrating this. It seems like recently, though, I’ve seen fewer ads, and they’ve gotten less repetitive. I just spent a few minutes now perusing the Today tab while writing this post, and I read a bunch of articles without seeing any ads at all. For me at least, the Apple News ad experience seems to be getting better already. But there’s still so much room for improvement.

Whenever I write about this, some readers will comment that, to their minds, a paid subscription like Apple News+ should bestow a completely ad-free experience. That’s how streaming video and music subscriptions tend to work, but even there — as I just posted regarding Disney+ — many people are choosing lower-priced streaming subscriptions subsidized by ads. The economics for ad-free news just don’t work, and never have. News+ isn’t like TV+, where Apple owns or has paid for the rights to all of the content.

2024-11-21 02:54:01

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

Fielding a question from a Wall Street analyst about the growth outlook and pricing strategy of Disney+, Iger divulged how many Disney+ subscribers take the ad-supported tier in the U.S. (37%) and globally (30%). The disclosure was unusual in the streaming sector. Netflix, for instance, has never broken out a similar percentage, preferring instead to report monthly active users of its ad tier (as it did earlier this week).

When the Q&A with analysts moved to the next question and CFO Hugh Johnston was giving his answer, Iger’s voice suddenly could be heard on the call. “I don’t know if I was supposed to disclose those AVOD numbers,” he said, before Johnston continued speaking.

Looking at Disney+’s pricing page (and ignoring the wide assortment of bundle offers), their ad-supported “Basic” tier costs $10/month; their ad-free “Premium” tier costs $16/month or $160/year.