YouSaid · the spoken record

Alan Schaaf

lines on the record: 65
first: 2018-12-26
most recent: 2018-12-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that's it. How did you get that? Oh, well, that's a whole nother long story. I like gaming. I like video games. I like to twisted metal black back in the day. I know. There's a character named Mr. Grimm.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a hugging one. Oh my God, I should go back because there was another one right after Dancing Baby that was wonderful and they toured too. A hugging, or was it something to do with kissing or hugging or something like that, but it was lovely, it was lovely, it was a lovely time. We sound like old people remember that. Any Alan, it was great talking to you. I love Imager. I think it's a wonderful company. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks to you all for listening. You can find more episodes of Rico Decode on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Please tell a friend about the show. If you want to say hi, tweet at me. I'm at Kara Swisher on Twitter. Alan, where can people find you? It's at Imager, right? I am at Imager.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I certainly hope so. I want immature content to spread everywhere. I want to be on VR. I want to be on TV. I want you to walk into a bar in San Francisco and have our fun gifs right there playing on the TV. I want to spread positivity out on the internet. And like you were saying, I want to bring the internet back to its original purpose where the dancing baby basically delighted the entire world. I want to delight the entire world with after.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's clean. You get what you looked for pretty much. And they have been had so many people try to game that system and game the distribution. And they lose for a minute and then they win again. They were constantly. So to me, if they can do that, anyone can do anything, like that kind of thing. Anyway, Alan, this is great talking to you. This is a really interesting thing. What is your prediction for the next thing in VR?”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's an interesting point that they will understand that they are playing you. And I believe that's what they do. Sometimes people will make it their full-time job. It's like their mission in life to play these companies and they'll figure out ways around all the different safeguards. Exactly.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, inevitably, you're going to take him down. I don't know why you keep resisting what you're going to end up doing because you'll understand he's playing you, which I think all these vicious memes do.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they play them beautifully, and they just sit there and take advantage, like Alex Jones to me. At one point during the Alex Jones thing, and you don't have that on yours. That's not an issue you have to deal with.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. Hate. Because they don't want to identify what hate is, even though you know it when you see it. Like, you know that expression, the expression pornography wants it. Right. You know it when you see it. I take issue with that and they say you don't. I'm like, no, no. There's a difference between criticism and criticalness. What they do is I think all these hate mongers play them all.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, we work with him. We work with him very closely. Explain Thorne because Thorne's an amazing thing. So I love it. It is an absolutely amazing company and we need to see more of this. But what they're trying to do is create a technology and a shared database around flagging illegal content such as child pornography. They work with all the big. So here you have a startup that is sole purpose is to make the internet a better place. And in doing so, they need to work with all the different companies basically get integrated into Facebook, into Imager, where we have them integrated.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they're absolutely fantastic. Do they get on the platform? Do they get under So, my point is they're absolutely fantastic, and they are on every platform. If there is a user-generated platform that exists, it is actively being manipulated right now. And so I believe that where I would like to go is I think, especially a lot of the bigger companies, they have to have some responsibility and have to have a vision for what they want to create on the internet. And everybody is also trying to tackle it independently for their platform. And so Facebook has their own efforts on how to deal with it. Twitter has their own efforts. We have our own efforts. And we're all, yeah, Reddit has their own efforts. We're all spending money on the exact same problem. And some of us are better at it than others due to the amount of resources that we have in the particular domain expertise of each company. But then there's one company that I think is doing something that I would like to see more of. And that company is called Thorn.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, that's the original vision for the internet. And I absolutely want to bring that back. And so I can tell you where I would like it to go. Okay. See, the internet, like this challenge here, especially with the manipulation that we see from Russia.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is when you saw that, when you did not see ever have a meme, this was the first meme, it was the most delightful thing you ever want to see. It was like what? It's sort of like I remember when I was when my kid tried ice cream for the first time. You know, he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like you could see it in his face. And that was what it felt like at the time. And now like 4,000 hundred million memes later. Right.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very niche views of the world. And then they're going to share those views and it's going to turn off regular people of the world. And so by allowing these other people in, you're actually making a much more unfriendly experience for everybody else. And so we just want to be the friendly place. And we don't allow the crazy niche racist views essentially.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they're not sure. I can't speak for the other platforms. I sort of imagined that by having sort of the super open free speech type of thing, you want to attract everybody. And that makes a ton of sense. But we also want to attract everybody. It's just we're doing a very different approach because I believe that you might end up attracting a tiny group of people that have”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disingenuous. And so we would even take that down. It's misleading. And then also on respect, like you can't harass somebody, you can't do hate speech. You can't post personal information. And so I believe that these platforms need to take control of their uses and create their own values for the products of what they're trying to do here in the world. And maybe that's where we just need to bring more of that in, I think, to the internet.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so while our pillars are value, transparency, and respect. And so that's what we try to uphold for our users. That's how we want our users to behave. And so when you post, we want you to post something of value to the community, whether that's funny or it's a story, but something that's not of value is just spam. And we also want it to be very transparent. So if you think you're posting something of value, like, hey, check out this new app, and this app lets you do all this stuff, but you're actually this secret creator of that app. That is just not transparent. And”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, on the connection piece and where kind of, I think social media is going, see, everybody's trying to connect with everybody and everybody already is connecting with everybody. It's sort of the basic expectations now of the internet is that you can go on, you can connect with people. Imager is not for connection. It is for disconnection. It is for the... Yeah, it is for the moments of downtime. It is too disconnect. So I don't go on to Imager to see what all my friends are posting. I go on there to laugh, to enjoy these quick moments that I have. And I get kind of sucked into this whole other world of content and people that I am not seeing anywhere else. It is sort of like a video game. It puts you into this flow of focus. And you end up seeing and just swiping through all of this amazing content. And you end up seeing these things that are funny or inspirational or uplifting.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So to speak. And there's nowhere to hide Right, so talk about we're not a free speech pepper because one of my things that I'm pushing, because what I get like attacked and I say, you cannot put these certain things on there. You have to clean, you have to clean up whatever you're doing, depending on, unless you just want to be a filthy place, essentially. And so I always say freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence. that if we have rules somewhere and you and what what I'm fascinated is why they keep doing this because it's of no good for their business eventually it's of no good for society it obviously is shown to have really ill effects with the Russians you know using the platform Facebook exactly as it was created what do you think has to happen in that area because I do the reason I wanted to have you on this because you're doing it right like you're actually doing it right in a way that's a good business too”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know what else to say. Then you're just. Well, most platforms, I think, take the sort of free speech approach, which may work for certain platforms, but what it means is that you will have these sort of pockets of little cesspools, so to speak. And let's contain this cesspool over here and let it not bleed out into this other cesspool. And then we'll have this other cesspool over here on Imager, however, it's all one thing. And there's nowhere to hide on Imager. So we can't have these little mini pockets. When you submit, you're basically submitting to everybody and everybody can see it. And so if you submit a wildly unpopular opinion that is racist or something like that, that's not going to sort of reach the other racists or anything because that doesn't exist. These sections on imagery don't exist. And you kind of submit it to everybody. And we very much take the approach where we're just not a free speech platform. That's not what we're trying to do.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big system of layers and layers of content enforcement and moderation. It goes from algorithms. Exactly, yeah, exactly to automatic nudity detection. Just the way that the product is set up from the beginning and that it has the upvote and the downvote, then the community norms, the community rules. But however these pieces of content, however they bubble up, whether it's automatically or whether a user is reporting it to us, we always have a human look at it and take it down. And that's just how we enforce our community to behave the way that we want is that if we see anybody trying to exhibit harassment or anybody posting personal information or anybody spamming”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a catalog that is in the probably close to 10 billion images at this point and millions come in per day. Only so many of those millions per day actually get shared publicly to the community. And that's what we actively moderate. And so we have these values and these rules to enforce the type of behavior that people That we want people to exhibit on Imager. And I feel like we take that responsibility and we're accountable to how our users are behaving within our community. At least I like to think so. We have a huge team of moderators located all around the world in various time zones. Human moderators. So that's a crazy interesting point. And that we have a huge”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are billions of photos coming through. The reason I want you to talk about this is because what you get from the Facebooks and the Twitter is like, oh, there's just too much to deal with. And I'm like, the guide imager seems to clean it up rather quickly.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the reason why we don't see a lot of PEP that frogs on Imager is because it's just not allowed. It does not line up to our values of open and transparency and bringing value to users and respect for users. It just doesn't line up for those. And so we just remove that content. And I feel like one key differentiator for imager.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they do not belong on Imager. And again, if we want to live the world's spirits for a few moments every day, then we can't allow hate speech or harassment. And probably the frog is just hateful content. Well, it wasn't the original content.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand, but I passed in that journalistic moment. I didn't want to win a Pulitzer that year, so I just decided not to see it. They're like, come and do an interview with him. I'm like, I'm not doing an interview with a cat. Anyway, what's interesting about these memes is they reflect a kind of thing that humanity has, is inside jokes or things. It's very relatable.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody made it. Everybody made grump the cat right, exactly. Yeah, they had him around. They brought him to San Francisco and I actually pour grumpy cat around. I declined to go visit Grumpy Cat. I passed on that journey. I've seen Grumpy Cat's magical experience.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's another sort of thing everyone can relate to that expression that he has. And success could actually and his family went on to license out the real success kid. And same with grumpy cats. Grumpy cat.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there's another meme. It's called Success Kid and the story of Success Kid is actually that it's this three or four year old boy who went to the beach and he ate some sand and he's got his fist up kind of near his mouth where he had actually just in real life just eaten some sand. But he's got this like heck yeah look on him like it's like yes I did it Oh”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are you wearing? No, I don't. I need to get back. My kids are getting on the internet. I'm on the internet, but my children do the memes. I do the money earning so they could buy them phones to do the memes. But go ahead.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our everyday interactions with other people. But it makes us all feel like we relate to him somehow. And we all have these little moments that we can create our own meme with that character. And they're always sort of funny.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so it's a picture of Steve, and he's wearing this hat and this crazy kind of coat. And you can put text over top of it, such as borrows your lighter, never gives it back. And I just believe that's a perfect, like relatable instance that we've all scumbags. Yeah, we all sort of know scumbag Steve. He's not really a real person. He's a persona. He's this created character based off of...”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are. Yeah, we do view Imager as a community powered entertainment destination because the internet at large is creating these fun posts for people to see. And it's very much unlike a traditional publisher platform that will have a thousand editors. Maybe they'll scour the internet for the best images and they'll put them together in a listical. Well, yes. Or whatever, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And we, however, have our large community of users putting together this content. Out of that, it becomes much more authentic because they're like real people, real stories. They're not put together for the purpose of clickbait headlines. And so it has this very authentic”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tried to move off again. Yeah, they had a sort of a couple of vlogs. Which Right, right. So talk about that idea of what entertainment is then because you can either go to an Instagram or Facebook and get sucked into and time suck that just you just watch other people's lives go by How do you look, you are entertainment, right? You are.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tried to move off again. Yeah, they had a couple of vlogs, and there was fail blog, I believe, which is, you know, gifs of people failing. Imager, however, because of the platform, you create a post. And a post can consist of one or multiple images, GIFs, videos, videos with sound. And it really lets you create a story. So it has a little bit more depth, a little bit more community, a little bit more discussion than just the bare image of the cat and the cheeseburger.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure if that was. So you That is why we exist. Right. Remember, I'm going to go to an opposite direction, LOL cat. Now, that was a big deal for a while. That was a lot of imagery. Yeah, it was one of the one.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a bag, of course. Well, that's why I could take so many photos of them. But it was really, I was trying to make a point that I was showing ugly things and it disturbed the entire. It was like as if I was like kicking everybody in the teeth, which I did on purpose. Like I was trying to bother people. And it was interesting. You're absolutely right. It's a medium. My son calls it a museum. Like people are putting up pretty pictures of themselves in a museum and it's not meant to make you feel good. It's meant to make you feel bad. It doesn't mean to, but it does, I guess. Is that right? Yes.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About their life. Do you know what I mean? I was posting pictures of horrible things in San Francisco. It disturbed everybody. It was all unfortunate pictures. There was a bag of urine in my yard. In San Francisco, yeah, we've all seen them.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And in reality, whether you know it or not, when you post on Instagram, you're actually curating your own personal brand. You are sharing the highlight moments of your life. And in order to make your life look quite good. But then on the receiving end, the people that are looking at it, it makes them feel just a little bit worse about their life. You know what I mean?”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with you. Yes. So when you go onto Instagram, you will likely see your friend and maybe he or she is on the beach in Hawaii. And that's why he or she posted that picture is because it makes them look very good. Here I am in Hawaii. I got a six-pack. And I'm surfing. Yes. But you, however, you're seeing this and you might be on your couch. And you just will never feel quite as... As you think that person looks?”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Instagram is very visual. You're absolutely right. That is what they kind of exist for. Immature is very different from that in that it is a community of people that you don't know that are sharing these moments of their lives or these funny jokes that they have. And Instagram, however, is all of your friends or your celebrities or the notable people in the industry. And I find it”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so it's a fantastic means of self expression. You immediately see this gif of, you know, a man, he's got a sad face and he's standing in the rain. You can teleport yourself into his shoes and know exactly what that sort of expression is. In order to get that same feeling through just text, like you got to type a lot, but it's a lot easier to just quickly share a gif with somebody”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Calls it Jiff. Oh, okay. All right. You know, he gets founder preference. It's You know, there used to be a peanut butter. It may still be around that was Jiff, and it was a J on the Jiff, right? It was a J on the Jiff. But that's why it looks like GIF.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I also think of it as self-expression. Right. Okay. Explain that. Yeah. So it turns out that people can express themselves better with an animated GIF or with an image, better than they can't through almost any other means. It's like I could show you a gif of.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After a while, A lot of people to support that. Right, right. So raising this way, how much have you raised total 40, right? We only needed one round. We only needed one round because you were making money already. And what was your hope to do that? Is just to build this out using this money, right? Correct.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's why we decided to raise money from Andrews and Horowitz out of all that Yahoo stuff. We actually met a guy named Johnny Greenglass who helped us put together materials to raise $40 million from Anderson Horwitz. And then after that, we start building up the teams. We start building up an iOS team, an Android team, the bigger back end team for the APIs. And then with all these different teams, you need different GA functions, you need HR, you need finance. And after a while, you look back, it's a pretty big business. You need a lot of people to support that.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And really, when you think about it, Imager is absolutely perfect on your phone because it's just entertainment. It's these quick bite-sized moments, this instant gratification that you get through images. And it works really well on your phone, but we didn't have an app. And we had, I think, 12 people.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then I thought in order to do that, we needed more money. And this is also now in around 2014 or 2013, 2014, when the world is clearly moving mobile. And I wanted Imager to be the next big destination for...”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't answer your question. But imager worked right for that. Yes, absolutely. But you wanted to keep independent. Because you were competing with bigger companies, right? Or do you not think that, that it was not...”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were like, what? Yahoo wants to buy us. Like, where I thought we were doing this hosting view. Everybody was talking about you for one minute there. Well, they may steal it, but they were interested in how you guys were manipulating photos, you know, how you were doing it. And they had no expertise, which was shocking to me. I remember thinking, why don't they just build over this guy, like that kind of thing, which was fascinating.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had a hosting agreement with Yahoo for Yahoo fantasy sports. We actually hosted their images. And I actually don't know the full extent of the story, but maybe some interest came out of that or maybe their Corp dev dep dep dep dep department got wind that we were the hosting people for fantasy sports. And then you called up Matt. And you're like, what's going on here? Does Yahoo want to buy you? And we were like, what? Yahoo wants to buy us. I thought we were doing this posting deal.”
2018-12-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Imgur avoids the ugliness of social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT