Nilay Patel
I don’t think this genie is going back in the bottle.
Wow.
Nilay Patel
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Nilay Patel
The end of the social web is just really something.
Here’s former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief (and now Semafor co-founder) Ben Smith on the shutdown of BuzzFeed News.
“Peretti had built BuzzFeed into a traffic juggernaut by being among the first to see the rising social web. But BuzzFeed never found a new path when that trend turned against us — when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful; when platforms decided news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites.”
The end of the BuzzFeed era in news
[www.semafor.com]
If young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gonna... tie you up in a decade of fair use litigation.
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
The Fox / Dominion defamation trial is off to an appropriate start.
It’s day one of the big defamation trial against Fox News for broadcasting lies about Dominion’s voting machines, and here is this update from the New York Times live blog:
There’s been no shortage of drama in this case, and today is already no different. After the judge swore in the jury, one of the alternates raised his hand, stood up and said, “I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” He was dismissed and replaced in fairly short order.
Incredible strategy to get out of jury duty!
Dominion-Fox News Trial: Update from Jim Rutenberg
[The New York Times]
CEO Travis Katz is running a sustainable delivery startup from within a century-old car company.
Nilay Patel
Nilay Patel
Some people have been waiting for Starship to launch for a very long time.
A little under an hour to go before the first Starship launch, which means you have enough time to watch our video (or read our story) about the small community of people who’ve uprooted their lives to live near Starbase in Texas. A huge day for them!
Nilay Patel
I read this paragraph and just sighed.
Here’s a good piece in the New York Times about China’s homegrown electric car companies, which are actually shipping lots of cars people are buying, instead of endlessly launching vaporware. Anyway, this paragraph is so deeply revealing: it contains so many solutions to transportation problems. A small gas generator in a popular battery electric car to solve for range anxiety and bullet trains! Imagine.
Mr. Cao said he doubted he would need the backup engine. He plans to drive the S.U.V. for day trips to large parks on the outskirts of Shanghai, recharging it at home each night. Such outings have become popular in China with the end of “zero Covid” quarantines and municipal lockdowns. For longer travel to other cities, he said, he would fly or take one of China’s many bullet trains.
China’s Car Buyers Have Fallen Out of Love With Foreign Brands
[The New York Times]
Nilay Patel
A level-headed take on that Substack interview.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt has been writing about free speech and content moderation for ages, and this is about as clear an analysis as you’ll get.
Nilay Patel
We actually talk about free speech and content moderation a lot on Decoder.
It just usually goes a lot better than it did with Substack’s Chris Best. For example, I really enjoyed this episode with Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of both Wordpress and Tumblr, which got pretty far down the path of where the rules should come from. Or here’s Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, on how to properly regulate platforms. Maybe more than any podcast Decoder is the place to get all the way into the weeds of what various tradeoffs actually mean!
Nilay Patel
I promise you this was meant to be a softball question.
There’s only so much context you can put in a TikTok clip, but I really encourage you to listen to the entire 60-minute conversation with Substack CEO Chris Best that includes this exchange— we went pretty deep on Substack’s business, Twitter vs Substack, and, of course, what kind of moderation expectations people should have for Substack Notes, which looks a lot like a social network.