YouSaid · the spoken record

Anil Dash

lines on the record: 131
first: 2017-12-28
most recent: 2017-12-28
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

“Is it I think you say social behavior. There are people that do that, of course, that are like ignoring anybody who disagrees with them politically, but they were already doing that. Like, they don't need software to do that. If you're the kind of person that can't deal with dissenting ideas, the block was not the issue. The interesting thing that's happening rhetorically now is where I'm like, I don't want to interact with, for example, like white supremacists online. Why is that? Go figure, right? And they'll come back to me and be like, oh, you can't handle political dissent. Snowflake. I love the expression.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, right? And so being able to have analogous tools for sort of just limiting really, really antisocial behavior. I think it is really useful. I'm glad that the tools are starting to evolve. I think it's a shame they're happening by activists self-funding themselves building it as opposed to the platforms building it in the party.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a really valid use to blocking people that we learn from, again, like I always think digital communities need to learn from physical communities. And there's a reason why we sort of say you can't come into this coffee shop if you're going to shout at people and you can't come into this lobby if you're.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then who else is blocked? I don't think so. They've been very thoughtful about it where they don't encourage sort of willy-nilly blocking. It's really about sort of sharing with the community and people having human judgment involved in it. And so I think that's really good. And you can also go and search for people that you follow who do have lists. And so those things are very handy. I think Twitter's going to evolve their tools too. But the key is that like,”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Notifications on my phone while I'm out with my kid, and I'm like, yeah, exactly. And I like, I don't want to be distracted by this. If I can just go and find somebody who's already got a good block list and just share it and be like, oh, okay, good. I've been able to sort of cut this off.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what? There are going to be some false positives, but that already happens in email. That already happens in everything, right? But you can at least check your families. Yeah, but it's the same thing. Go through the block list. Yeah, exactly. You can just go and vet it. Like if you're like, I really want to see this tweet, but I have this person blocked. You just unblock them. Right. There's nothing to vet. I think what is key is being able to use a service where it's not some huge barrier. If you block somebody, they can still see your tweets if they want to. Sure, they just don't have to be lobbied. Yeah, absolutely. So it's not like this is some impermeable barrier. All it's doing is making it harder for a mob of harassers to target you. Right. And that's really useful. Like for me, it's like if I'm like whatever out with my kid, we're doing fun stuff on the weekend and it happens to be the moment when like a mob of white supremacists have decided they want to come after me for something I wrote. And the thing is like they'll go digging back through history. So it could be something I wrote years ago. And I'm getting.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter has its own service for importing and exporting lists of blocks, but it's not very well integrated. There is a site called BlockTogether that actually a bunch of activists made that gives you the tools to share a block list with your friends or to subscribe to theirs. And it's really handy because then you don't have to individually block a whole community of people that are trying to troll or harass you.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I see this where I have extremely thick skin. I am loudmouth all the time. So I'm pretty hard to shut up. There are times when you get to the worst of a mob of people coming after you and they're, you know, targeting you, your friends, your family, your coworkers, and you just say enough. I'm going to put this way. And like, if I can go through that with all as fortunate and privileged as I am with as much of a network as I have to be able to be like, sometimes it's too much, people who aren't as lucky as I am and don't have that support network behind them can easily be hounded out off of this network. And it's like their speech matters too. And I care a lot more about the people who are targeted unfairly for harassment. I care a lot more about their free speech than the people who are saying horrible things to them.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that is starting to seep into Twitter a little bit. They're getting a little bit better at hiding and flagging things. And it's hard to say, but that's part of it is they need to communicate clearly about it. The other part is we always talk about the free speech for the people who are harassing and abusing. But what they do is they chase off. Vulnerable voices. And what about the free speech of the people who are targeted?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And especially machine learning is making leaps and bounds and advancements. Like that can be something where you can get better at.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tech is there. It's not harder to detect a sound signature and a song than it is text, right? This is a racial epithet”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a couple parts they sort of ignore, one of which is there's often the argument of technically it's too hard to limit these things. They say, well, listen.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that's easy to lose track of outside of Silicon Valley is how extreme they are about some of some parts of libertarianism around these views, right? So they're very like everything is free speech, everything is fair game to put it there.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just that he transgressed so frequently so often that he was openly explicit about the fact he was trying to harass people. These are the things where it's like this is a...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the things that are making me feel terrible, you're doubling down on. So I think they've gotten better at that. They've sort of started shipping more. Two is to sort of be really clear about a harassment policy. So instead of these nebulous vague rules, like we have to see this person who's very obviously transgressing being abusive and horrible to people, we got to see their account get suspended.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Show people you know how to update the service and update the apps, just the ability to iterate and introduce new things would introduce a lot of trust into the platform because they hadn't shipped any features. They hadn't updated anything. So you can make whatever proclamations you want to about we're fixing abuse, we're fixing harassment, we're adding better features or filtering or whatever. And people won't believe it because it's like, well, the thing hasn't changed at all in a long time. And in fact, they were killing off things like Vine that was really great and creative and interesting and didn't have a harassment problem. And she said, okay, well, these things that make you feel good and those are getting killed.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a couple things. I actually wrote a piece back in January 1st. Jack Dorsey asked, I guess, the whole internet, like how would you fix Twitter? And there were a couple things I wrote in there. The more cogent ones, one of which was”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think there's a lot of reasons for that. One of the key issues is... Who feels the pain? So we talk about the inclusion and diversity issue in tech. And Twitter is like most of the tech companies. It doesn't have a lot of people from black and Latino communities. It doesn't have as many women. And guess who gets targeted by the majority of the harassment online?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hard thing. I do have a lot of empathy for the team. I do think they're trying, but I think it was so long for them to turn the ship around to really address a lot of the issues that people don't believe in”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I thought, I have, if I could tie that search feature into my app, it'd be really useful. And I was like, but I'm running a company. I'm busy. I don't have time to learn all this stuff, even if I got a little bit of coding skills. Now I can go remix an example app from Angolia that already has search working. Just plug in the parts that I want to into my own app and be up and running instantly. That was something where I was like, it took it from, it would be cool to try this out. I have this intent of learning this programming skill into I can deploy it instantly. And the biggest thing I see is the coders who we show it to like their eyes light up. It looks like Christmas morning for them. And I'm like, that is a really good sign that we were on the something big with glitch.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twitter buying this Everybody's desperate to make things easier for developers because developers are so in demand and it's so rare to get them to pay attention to your platform. And I look at it, there's a search tool called Algolia that I just love it. It was one of those, search is really hard to do well. I'm not Google. I'm not going to figure this thing out. I had always been interested in trying it.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just really interesting. Now, you see that, and you're like, wow, I wish it would talk to this other system we're using. You're like, I can never do that. That's too hard. The process with glitch now is we've got a sample Slack bot for you. You go and you remix it, you change the part that just works for your system to be exactly what you want it to be and it's instantly up and running. So we take the time to develop a Slack bot or a Lexa skill from days or hours into minutes. And that is something that's enormously valuable to all these companies that have this platform. So they want to use it and be able to pay to do a couple different things. The key one is supporting developers creating these things. So, right now, if you're like, I want to build on Alexis' skill set from Amazon.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the business There's a couple parts to it. The first thing we're doing is incidental to the fact that you can code at the same time as other people, Glitch is an incredible learning tool, teaching to Because you can help people. So, right now, all of the big companies have what they call their APIs, application programming interface. And this is the way that you build services on top of Stripe for payments or Twilio for messages or Twitter for sending messages, obviously. But it's really hard for them to get developers to try out their tools. So if you say we have a new developer platform and we want people to use it, for example, Amazon has skills for the Alexa. You want to make new commands that work there, or Slack has bots in their messaging app, they're desperate to get.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for application. Exactly. Web embedded in applications. That's exactly it. So nobody has made that kind of powerful real programming environment that is multiplayer.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, say somebody already made a to-do list app and you say, well, that's nice, but I want to be blue instead of green. You go in there, you edit it, that's instantly yours. You can remix it, do whatever you want to with it. So it's really the power, the promise of open source that we've had for many years. And then the thing that blew my mind when I saw the team had built it was you can edit this code in real time with other people. So like Google Docs.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was just a pain. So we took all that away. And that was step one. Step two was your entire coding environment, everything just lives in the browser. And that's easier for the same reason that you like to use Gmail instead of having a mail app on your computer. It's just there, whatever computer I log into, all my stuff is there. Those alone were a big leap forward. The biggest things that happened, the two things that sort of came out earlier this year was the first is we made almost an app store, a catalog of all the different apps people had built. And you can remix any of them.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are right now web apps, so this is things you go to in your browsers if you want to make a little app for your business. You're going to make an expensing app for your team to use or you make a to-do list app or something like that. It can be as complicated as you want. But the problem is that process of like, even if you knew how to write the code and you'd built that whole thing yourself, just getting it onto the web was a lot of work.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what glitch is very simply, it's a programming environment where you can go and write code. And there's a couple things it does that nobody's done before. The first is as you type, it's automatically taking the code you're writing, the app that you're creating, and publishing it live to the web. That sounds trivial, but that's, you know, you take entire businesses like Amazon's Web Services, hosting business, or Heroku, which is sort of beloved by coders. And the whole process of getting an app live onto the web is really hard. It's become very complicated. To do it completely automatically in the background is a radical change.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they approached me about taking over as CEO last year and I said, well, what's coming down the pipe? And I saw what became glitch that we launched earlier this year. And I was just blown away. I think it's one of the most revolutionary products I've seen in my life, like in my whole tech. Really?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you know, like I think historically one of the biggest challenges was they weren't probably friendly enough to newbies because they were like, you have to phrase your question the right way and it has to be exactly right. I think that's starting to ease up a little bit as the sort of the community evolves into being more welcoming. But the key thing is there's never been wide scale harassment. There's never been a wide-scale abuse. And that's what the site that is probably in the top 40 websites in the world in terms of traffic. So it's possible to make a large site that works well. So Stack was co-created with Jeff Atwood and his team and that spun out. It's an independent company. They made a project management tool, Trello, which lots of people use. It's really popular. And that spun out. And Atlassi bought that. So there's this track record of making these wildly successful products.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do that, yeah, for sure. Stack Overflow has an enterprise product for that. I'm still on the board of Stack, so I get to see a lot of what they're doing. And the bigger thing to me is you have this community where tens of millions of coders around the world come and answer each other's questions in this really collaborative way. And interestingly, it's a very reassuring, nurturing supportive environment. People really get answers right away. No problem with trolls.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fog Creek is one of the one. So Fog Creek is a very storied company. It's been around 17 years, brilliant co-founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. And what they always wanted to build was one, a great place for people who want to make the most interesting technology to come work. And it's been a very influential company that has spun out. They co-created Stack Overflow, which is a community that pretty much every coder in the world uses to answer their questions about programming.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a bridge too far Rubicon. And what you realize is one, there's that reverence. Two, they're like, who am I to complain? I am getting a good salary. I am being paid well. Workers, and they never get equity in these companies. And so what you realize is there's this sort of class system built in that, and I'm just a big believer in like, you got to treat your people well. And they certainly have the money to do it. And they didn't need to nickel and dime their workers. Yeah, that's kind of odd. There was no reason.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, the people at Apple who went through this, I talked to people that worked there, and they were like, yeah, I still just really love and revere Steve. And I'm like, the guy took money out of your kids' college fund. And you're like, he seems like a nice guy. I'm like, what would he have to do for you to be like, I'm not going to, you know, follow along with this? He'd have to remove.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the amazing thing the workers like there was a sort of obligatory lawsuit. I think it was for $8 billion or something. They settled it for a tiny pittance of that. Which the lawyer, right?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amazon 14 of the biggest tech companies. Everybody essentially except for Facebook colluded against their own workers to depress their wages by saying we're not going to poach each other's workers, which is still astonishing to me. And there was no...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's a lot of factors. I think one of them is, you know, H1B workers can never organize or really complain. Because if you, you know, essentially if you get too uppity, you lose your job, you get deported. And then you're not sending money back to your family or to your village or whatever else. So the amount of leverage they have over these workers is incredible. I have to think that's a factor. Particularly in the case of there was this collusion orchestrated by Steve Jobs and Eric Strachman. Google.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge. So there's clearly. That's the ideal. And I mean, I could not be more pro immigrant. My parents are immigrants. They're here because, you know, they were willing to do the work and get educated. And I'm incredibly proud to be in that descendant and that tradition. That being said, you look at the cost for paying for an H-1B, for paying for the lawyers to bring somebody over here, for paying for all these things, to bring those workers over here is a huge investment for these companies. Huge. And for the same amount of money, you could train workers here, and they're not. And you could train people from the underrepresented communities. So what's the thinking behind?”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so there's just this proportionality where you're like, at a certain point, you can say, okay, it's not getting exactly matched. Of course not. It's got to be ballpark. If you take 40% and you say, well, we looked at 40% of the population and we could only find 3% of our staff that could meet our requirements. I just don't buy it. Just the math doesn't add up.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, you know, like I said, being a media, publishing, entertainment, I was like, I know that there are black and Latino folks in California. You can't tell me they're not there. And yet you go to these offices. And it wasn't just technical staff. It was the legal staff, the marketing staff. Everything, every one of these roles, the representation was way out of whack. To a point where you just couldn't ignore it anymore”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, well, and it's interesting because it's particularly complicated being Asian American where we're overrepresented. We overindex. We're 2% of the population. And yet you look at just Indian American people in tech, the CEO of Google, CEO of Microsoft, CEO of Adobe. These are all Indian guys. So like we're doing fine.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had people that were friends that were outside of tech and they were in other disciplines. So they could be in fashion, they could be in media, they could be in finance, whatever it was. And you just get a different view of the world. And it was astonishing to me. It's like with all the problems that, say, the entertainment industry had, they were still much more inclusive and much more diverse. And so to go into conference rooms, boardrooms, meeting rooms in Silicon Valley and look around and be like, Essentially, this is just a bunch of white and Asian guys.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know you as a New Yorker, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when did you hear? When we were there? We were doing six apart and the company was growing. And I went out to San Francisco in 2004 And I was there until 2007. And really one of the drivers for me of sort of being done with being in Silicon Valley and being in San Francisco was it felt so homogenous. And yeah, it just, you know, well, I think I'd been spoiled. I'd been in New York. I had worked in media, true melting political polishing, no matter how you are. There's so many.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's definitely a moment of reckoning going on right now. And for me, 10 years ago, I was just, I had been in Silicon Valley a couple years, even though I've been in tech 20 years. I'd spent a couple of years.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, if you say the person who did this transgressive thing, this dangerous thing, who posted this threat, I'm going to identify them, that is actually protecting people. So the exact same activity, I'm going to identify this person who's trying to hide can be both very good or very bad. It can be very much a positive that helps society or can be very negative because you're making somebody vulnerable. And so the logic of what I think a lot of programmers tend toward, of like, if you do this rule, you're bad. If you follow this rule, you're bad. It ignores power, ignores the dynamics of society, and that's why we keep bumping into what seemed like really obvious screw-ups in tech where we're like, how come you can't make a civil place? It's like, you're not going to be able to regulate human behavior with a single binary set of rules.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. You know, so there's an interesting thing where part of it is about reclaiming I'm going to control this stuff and I'm going to put what's out there. Some of it is I do. Want to show people of good intent. I am accessible. I'm not trying to hide something. I'm not trying to be wall myself off from because I do think most people are good and do want to engage with ideas and want to be thoughtful. And so that's something that is just signaling. Like I'm open to that. Then there's this other part, which is, so there's a behavior where like if somebody is legitimately vulnerable and they are keeping themselves anonymous or pseudonymous in order to keep themselves safe and you out them, that's a real danger.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic, you know, one of the worst things that people do to threaten people who are on the margins, who are vulnerable, or have ideas that are unpopular, is they're going to, we're going to expose you. We're going to, what they call doxing, we're going to publish your home address. I mean, I've had this happen to me, the Gamergators published my home address. Don't you have...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly, exactly. Binary logic, like the stuff that doesn't always work. And that ignores the realities of society, which is that people have different positions, roles, power, all these things shape the dynamics. And the example I always give is the sort of like...”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my back and forth. Yeah, and it's an interesting thing because there's also, I think, especially technical people, have this desire to say, I want one set of rules that applies to everybody. And I want this one set of, you know, this behavior is always bad if you do this.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think that there's a really tough challenge where you can express yourself however you want. You're not entitled to destroy my platform.”
2017-12-28 · Masters in Business · Anil Dash Talks About Tech Industry Ethics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source