YouSaid · the spoken record

Casey Newton

lines on the record: 91
first: 2024-02-05
most recent: 2024-02-05
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

“That's right. So after Neila confuses you about his stuff, if you just kind of wanted in plain English, come over to Hard Fork. We'll tell you the real story.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have three people at your newsletter, do you need HR? You know, like, do you need in-house counsel? Probably not. So one of the paths forward is just rethinking some of that stuff.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cost structure is really important. Nobody wants to say we need to build media businesses that don't have dedicated HR and accounting departments because that seems really disrespectful to your HR and accounting department. And yet”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That say, yeah, here's your hundred bucks. This means something to me. So that is a dynamic that is putting the wind at our backs. And it is one of the reasons where if you can nail that, have a good editorial idea and manage your cost structure, then truly I do believe the world is still your oyster.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the thoughts I had was like, all I need is a thousand people pay me $100 a year and I have a pretty good job. At 2,000 people, it's an amazing job. 3,000 people, that's more than anyone will ever pay me. And the internet is still big enough and there are enough amazing readers out there that they will create that job for someone. As much as we talk about the struggles of the media industry, look at how many people are thriving on YouTube. Look how many people are thriving on TikTok or on Twitch, right? People who have been able to create lives beyond their wildest dreams just having fun online. That is still happening at the same time. And it is often not people who are doing amazing public interest journalism, but the basic dynamics are still there. Children are growing up in a world where they are paying for Twitch streamers and they are paying for YouTubers and they are buying merch. And I fully believe those people are going to continue to come to the verge, the platform, and so many other websites.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always thought that in media, like to succeed, you need a combination of an editorial insight and a distribution insight, right? And I think that I was able to land both of those things when I left with platform and my distribution insight was that email was just a better way of like keeping in touch with an audience, but also, and I didn't realize this at the time, I was able to take advantage of Twitter because I did have a relatively large audience there. I was able to blast out every edition to a fair number of followers. Those people became subscribers. That was really important. I just don't think that part is particularly true anymore that like you're not going to be able to get the same bang for your buck on Twitter. Promotion of your stuff across social is much more diffuse. It's weaker. You have to publish on five times as many platforms to get maybe 50% of the impact, right? But at the same time, Nilai, like when I started platformer, one of”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt like the window that you leapt into it was the window, like you nailed that timing and that window was open for a while and it feels like the window, you know, windows open and closed and it feels like it is riskier than ever right now, but people, there's a lot of people got laid off. Like they might be thinking about it. Do you think there's opportunity there still?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think they're going to have to. You know, platforms don't want porn on them for a lot of reasons, but one of them is if you let it on, it just takes over everything. And that's not the environment they want. Keep in mind, I write about platforms and democracy, but mostly what I've learned is that they're just digital shopping malls. And so they have to get rid of this stuff. So yeah, they're going to do a pretty good job of that. I think the issue is we have all of this, what they're starting to call unsecured AI, so this open source AI, and you can still create these images. And there probably just are going to be places on the internet where it can be shared. We know it can be shared in Telegram, for example. There's basically going to be no content moderation there. I'm still skeptical that X is going to do meaningful content moderation despite hiring 100 people and patting themselves on the back about it until they broke their arm. So that's the kind of place where I worry about it. But what I think of as like the respectable platforms, the Facebooks, Instagrams, TikTok, like yes.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feels like all the platform companies have talked about knowing that generative AI is a problem. There's a bill now because they were deep fakes of Taylor Shift on X, now there's legislation. There's a whole story in there. There's a 10,000 word PhD thesis about that exact cause and effect. But there's legislation now. Do you think the platforms are going to do anything to tamp down on the deep fake problem, the generator of AI problem?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, this is one of those things where it's like we need the kind of whole of society thinking about this. We need a public investment in media. We need philanthropy to address this problem. We need entrepreneurial young journalists to start their own newsletters and see what kind of contribution they can make and like find an audience. But like we're in for a really tough period, you know, and if you're listening and you wonder how you can help, I mean, like subscribe to something truly, it does matter. It does help. you know that's one way that you can show that that you care is by like supporting media that means something to you”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm worried. You know, we've already seen these cases where generative AI has been used to create synthetic versions of Joe Biden's voice making robocalls. I expect we're going to see a lot more of that sort of thing. I think we're going to see more layoffs in the media industry. That's going to mean less coverage of some of these big issues. I think the national election will still be covered really aggressively and really well. I worry about the down ballot races. And if you're running for state Senate or like attorney general in some state and somebody creates a deep fake a you, is there going to be anyone in the media to come to the rescue and say, hey, this person is getting a raw deal. They never said that thing. That's the stuff that I worry about the most. You know, we're predisposed as journalists always kind of train our attention on the biggest thing. But there's going to be all these medium and small things that we used to rely on the local media for and to some really tragic extent that just no longer exists.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cycle is breaking in the middle of what promises to be very contentious election year. And I am wondering literally the purpose of platformer is to cover platforms and democracy. So I want to end by just asking the kind of the bigger question. It is going to be a very contentious election year. Do you think our media ecosystem, our social media platform ecosystem, are we ready for it?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think part of the instinct that drives that will fix the legacy media is one, they wish they were on the cover of those legacy magazines. I think there's more to that theory than anyone wants to truly admit. And two, it comes back to what you were saying, which is you want to make a thing that you like. And so a bunch of people are looking at the sort of algorithmic media and saying, this is garbage. What if I just get in there and meddle with the editorial a little bit? And they get in there and they meddle with the editorial a little bit or they tell the big newspaper, be more centrist or like whatever they think they want. And it turns out that doesn't play on platforms, which they run. And then it doesn't go. It's like, this is, the problem is not the product, like the editorial product. The problem is the distribution environment that forces the product to be this other thing. And I'm hopeful that we're in the moment where that cycle is breaking. I'm also very worried that that appears to be the moment.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think if they thought that there were more opportunity in media, they'd probably spend more time thinking about it. You know, like media is just a really hard problem, again, because it mostly just never has paid for itself. I don't think any of these billionaires have any brilliant ideas for how to reverse that problem. My wish for the billionaires is instead of trying to find some old legacy publication like The Washington Post or the Atlantic and taking that over and trying to help it lose a little bit less money, they would go out and they would find more defectors and they'd find more 404 medias and say, what could you do with $5 million a year and see if we could sort of see the ecosystem with a bunch of new media startups with really talented people? Because I think they got a lot more bang for their buck than they would by trying to rescue some 150 year old publication.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, Jeff Bezos would be like, I need the Washington Post to make money. And it's like, Have you thought about buildings and distribution for these web pages? And like, there doesn't seem to be a connection there. It's fascinating to me.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To help Yeah. It's funny how the billionaires of your like cared and thought it was a public service to just like lose money on the media for a while and this class of billionaires, they'll lose money on the side, but they won't actually solve the problems with the companies they run to make it work. There's a real discrepancy there.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think what you said is true, they just don't see the news as ever being hugely important to them, at least in terms of how many visitors do they have, how much engagement are they getting, how much money are they making? So I think news is going to be a little bit of an afterthought. But I think that they also just have reason to offer APIs that publishers can take advantage of. They have reason to create monetization schemes that publishers or individual creators can take advantage of. I think it can probably work well enough that something is able to thrive there. So I think the media is always going to have to be sort of like, you know, tugging on their robes, begging them to help us out. But, you know, they all also read the media. And like, we do have influence over what they do. And I think we can keep using it.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm very excited about that. I think I've mentioned it on this show, but I've mentioned it on the Virchas plenty of times where we are going to do some federated stuff to the Verge in order to preserve our status is the last website in the world. That's my goal. What's interesting there is that the platforms themselves are taking some dips into it. You mentioned Blue Sky threads is going to support activity pub, but there's a tension in there too. Atmissary who runs threads is sort of openly said, look, we're going to have news here, but that's not the point of this. No news, please. It doesn't seem like links travel on threads. Like threads is like a self-contained kind of experience. Twitter used to be a place where you would distribute news, and now it is called X. I'm told there's a video first platform. I don't know, man. I don't know what's going on there, but the big platforms feel like they're getting more and more self-contained. They're more and more.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So, what is cool about these protocols? Well, if they work out, it is going to be the case that as with email, no one platform controls them. Users are going to have a lot more control over what they're seeing. And if you're a publisher, maybe you're able to devise ways where you can build an audience, reliably serve that audience, not just feel like you're surfing algorithm changes forever, and you're able to build something a little bit more substantial there. So I do think that after a long winter, the attention of, in particular, like the developers and the nerds that you actually need to care about this stuff is turning back to protocols. And I do think that we're going to see good progress there this year.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe I shouldn't be. He's much more successful than we are, right? Like doing the thing that he does. But it's like, oh, you are just constantly in a conversation with someone else's algorithm. And the part where you're like, I'm going to build an audience. It seems like email is still the only distribution. That doesn't dramatically affect what you make. Do you see any others, or is it still email”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the difference between audience and traffic is something I think about all the time. You have to go build an audience. But the thing that keeps most people from building an audience is distribution, right? Like you can very quickly go build an audience on an algorithmic platform. Or what feels like an audience. And then the platform shifts, and you got to like start over. And this is the story of every YouTuber and why they burn out. And it makes everything the same. I think if you took the top 50 people on any platform and looked at the stuff they make, I feel like you would have more similarities and differences in terms of structure and form and how things are formatted. I look at the stories of Mr. Beast doing 50 different thumbnails on a video and I'm just like horrified.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other media businesses don't have to make that same kind of trade off because they've just sort of separated those two things out. So there's all trade-offs here, but I feel like I have a much better sense of who my audience is and what they want and how I can fulfill that and how I can get them to pay me than the folks running the messenger did.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big media business that no one cares about. On the business side of most of these media publications, you just have people who do not have very good editorial instincts. In our business for very good reasons, we separated the editorial people from the business people. That did a lot of good for the integrity of our businesses. But I also think it has been a catastrophe for the industry overall because you have these buildings full of people who don't understand each other's problems well enough to help each other build something successful. So, you know, while I will say, like, this creates some challenges for me, like platformer started an ad business last year, but we had to come up with a set of ad policies. We had to decide, you know, like we're actually not going to take any advertising from anybody we cover because we think that that would be bad for our business. But like.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something you and I have talked about for a long time is that there is a difference between an audience and traffic. And if you want to talk about the messenger in particular, no disrespect to the main talented journalists who work there, I had met one of them just the other day, seemed great. The messenger only ever had traffic, you know. I understand if I were trying to build a big scaled up ad supported business, of course I would want the maximum number of pages. Like, how else are you going to build an ad business? But it's unquestionable to me that media companies became too reliant on Google and didn't spend enough time thinking about their product and about how do you build something that people are going to seek out and have an authentic relationship with, like something that I am proud of about platform is I truly believe that everybody who reads it, at least in their inbox, knows that they're reading Platformer. I think most people are reading news through Google search have no idea what they're reading, and I don't think they care. And I think it's really hard to build a”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only surprising thing about it, I think, is sort of how quickly it collapsed. But yes, if, you know, when it started, they had asked me and you like, how is this going to fail? We would have explained it, you know, whatever.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do really worry that yes, that forest fire sweeps through and kills a lot of stuff. I mean, that's not even a prediction. We've already seen as we're recording this, the messenger is shutting down, right?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is going to turn off the spigot at any minute. And we are watching businesses collapse around us. Is that traffic source dries up? And then importantly, as advertisers realize they don't want to buy banners and boxes on web pages when they can just buy whatever slice the TikTok audience to do whatever happens on TikTok. They're coming back from that. Like, I say that out loud, and I again run the last website on Earth. I feel like there's some things to invent there that maybe help, but it feels like no one else is inventing stuff. Do you see any recovery from that disaster? Or is that we need to burn this down so we can grow a new kind of forest?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inventing new models is really important. I agree with you. This is happening in the context of the old model getting completely upended by generative AI on one side, but basically the end of distributing web pages by every platform on Earth, including Google Search, which when that domino falls, like there is no more web business. So, you know, the platform era distributing web pages was a great business for a lot of people for a long time. Facebook would distribute your web pages. Twitter would to some much smaller extent distribute web pages Snapchat for one brief bizarre moment had like a news business embedded in it and the idea was you'd make news you would put the link on Facebook Facebook would boost it tons of people would come in and they would like see a display ad or something and all the platforms work the same way then Facebook pivoted to video stopped displaying web pages everybody knows all the rest here the last thing where you get an audience to go to a web page is Google and it just feels like Google”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I worry about it more in politics and sort of national news than I worry about it in tech. But like, yes, that's a real problem. And we should say other countries have come up with one really good solution to this problem, which is publicly funded media. And I realize that that is probably a non-starter in the United States for the first future. But when you look, countries that invest in public media, whether it's the UK with the BBC or like Australia has pretty good public media, their democracies are generally considered stronger by political scientists. So we know that news is never going to pay for itself. It never really has. It is only typically made money as part of some bundle that people are mostly subscribing to for the games and the cartoons. So nothing about the internet is going to change those dynamics in ways that favor us as journalists. And so I think we need to do a combination of inventing new stuff, but also borrowing from what we already know works.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you worry about the problem where all the real information and the real reporting goes behind paywalls and liars and conspiracy theorists just are free? And like that's a dynamic that I see across every platform right now.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, here's where I will gas platformer up a little bit. So one of the things that I took from Ben Thompson was he makes one edition of every week free, which means that he gets to reach his full mailing list. You know, Ben has no ads in his publication. It's like he sends out really, really smart thoughts to a lot of people every single week.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The athletics ambition was we're going to replace every local newsroom in America because people will pay for sports. Worked out for the athletic in that they sold to the Times. And I don't know if it has worked out for the New York Times, which is fascinating to consider. Is there a tension there between, okay, a bunch of trade publications can work, a bunch of very targeted hyperspecific interest publications maybe can work. But the broader news audience is not going to pay. And that seems very dangerous because TikTokers exist and YouTubers exist. And you can just fill your media diet with free stuff.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But like, you know, trade publications, they do well because people need information to do their jobs, and that's lucrative. You go to consumer publications, like The Verge of Consumer Technology Publication. I'm competing with a bunch of YouTubers who are free. You go to sports, I think Defector is doing really well, but you look at the athletic that the time spot”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those are interesting publications because they are very different than Platformer. I will say this reductively about Platformer. You know I love you. You know I love Platformer. Platformer is a trade publication. Yeah. Like its audience as executives at tech companies, and within that, the people who work at trust and safety and in government at tech companies. And that's a very lucrative audience. You've picked the right group of people there. You go to other places and then there are other businesses that are doing well. Axios is a trade publication for DC professionals. There's one I read all the time called Fierce Wireless, which is just for like telecom professionals.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To report. But in terms of how do you get from like the thing that I'm doing to a healthy tech press corps, the only answer that gives me any optimism is not actually what I'm doing at Platformer, although I think, you know, there's probably some version of this will work for some number of people. I get really inspired by what I see at Defector, at 404media, these collectives of really talented journalists who maybe raise a little bit of money, maybe just sort of raise some from their friends and family, come together, collectively own the business, build an authentic relationship with their audiences using social media, monetize that well enough, and do it really sustainably. And while I don't know if you can like rebuild the press corps that we had in 2011 that way, I think you actually can have a much bigger press core than we are otherwise going to have in three or four years.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the answer is no. And it sucks. It doesn't feel good to win a game that feels like it doesn't have that many winners. The media is a business that we want to have lots and lots of winners. And I think in a lot of ways, we were better off during a time when most Americans could get most of their information for free just by visiting websites without having to like log in and without having to do a paid subscription, right? I think it enabled more coverage, more kinds of coverage, riskier coverage, like more investigations. There's some real limitations to what I do. Most of the stuff that I do, it's like if it takes longer than a day to do, it's really hard for me because I write three columns a week, which puts some real limitations on what kind of reporting I can do. That's actually one of the reasons why I hired was like, okay, well, maybe we can share this burden a little bit and give ourselves some more time.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. You do. God, you should make a Virge t shirt that just says the last website on Earth. I think it would be a big seller.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think it depends if I can ever convince you to come make websites with me. Because, like, if you would, then, yes, I would just have you help me do that. I really like.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, one of the things SubSac was good at back in the day was trying to figure out every single reason why you wouldn't join SubSac. This was like something that they actually deserve a lot of credit for. And they realized it was healthcare. It was legal. It was, I don't know how to design a website, right? And they just started chipping away at that stuff. Eventually, because their business is not really thought through, they had to stop offering all these services because they essentially couldn't afford to have them and still meet their valuation. But they were solving real problems. And that is a reason why I think fewer people will go into this. I mean, like I should say that really the only reason I was able to do this was because I had a great job in media that let me grow a big audience and save money. And, you know, very few people are in that position. And so, you know, that's just something I feel very grateful for and wish everybody had access to.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if I could get Becky to help, that'd be great. No, I mean, like, you know, you buy libel insurance is the answer. Like, I mean, there are products in the market that solve this problem. Doesn't mean it's not still a risk to the business. It is for anybody, even if you have libel insurance. But, you know, something you learn in business is that there's a lot of big scary problems, and the answer to them is like, well, you just buy a product. And so that's one of those.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, and I save set to 10% on my annual revenue, right? So that was basically why we picked them. And yes, there are some trade-offs. And yes, there are some risks. And I'm happy to talk about them, but that was why we made the choice.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can use it for anything. It is infrastructure. And yes, that means that Nazis can use open source ghosts to make websites, right? Similar to WordPress, Ghost also has a hosted version called Ghost Pro. You pay them money and they're the terms of service are more serious. So John O'Nolan, the CEO of Ghost, committed to me that they're not going to let any Nazis, literal 1930s Nazis, use the Ghost Pro service to build websites. Just by saying that, that meant that Ghost was a better home for platformer than Substack was, right? And then, you know, you look at everything else. It's like they have a free concierge service. We sent them some emails, gave them access to a few things. They built us a new website. They ported over our entire mailing list. They ported over all of our customer relationships from Stripe. They did it over a weekend. And in some very real sense, the only difference between me being on Substack and me being on Ghost is that I type into a different box.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you know a worse spelling of any startup, message me. I haven't heard of one, but they were super nice people. I was actually really impressed with them. I was really impressed with their product. They were super friendly to us. So we had a really, really great time, like chatting things through with them. But man, they're also a venture-backed email startup, Neil, and I just felt so burned by the Substeck experience. And I thought, I don't really know the guys that run this that well. I don't really know who their investors are that well. I don't know what kind of pressure is they're under. I don't know how good their business looks. I don't know how they might change the terms on their creators, you know, in six months or a year. And I just thought, even though this has some really nice features and is actually cheaper than the option that we wound up going with, I can't do it. So we kicked that one aside. That left ghost. Ghost was interesting to me for a number of reasons. One is it's operated by a nonprofit. It is open source software. So anyone.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We looked at, I guess, like sort of three options. One was just a complete roll your own stack, you know, get your own hosting provider, get your own email provider, stitch it all together with a bunch of services. That felt really complicated. I also felt like it would put me in the position of being a full-time IT person in addition to the other roles that I have at Platformer. You know, some people were sort of saying like, dude, if you're like running your own website, you're going to like face DDoS attacks. Like the website is just going to go down to random hours of the day. And like, that's your problem now. So that was one reason why I didn't want to do that. The other reason was putting that stuff together would have taken time. And I was motivated to move pretty quickly. So we didn't consider that option that seriously, although I will say it remains maybe the ultimate destination of platformer, assuming that like the platform that we're on isn't able to get us what we want. The other two that we looked at more seriously were Beehive and Ghost. Beehive is spelled probably worse than any other startup in the world. It's BEE.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had your choice of platforms when you decided to leave Substack. One thing you have said to me, which you hinted at here, was you realized all those other choices were cheaper, that ghosts and WordPress or whatever would just be cheaper to operate on than the fees that SubSac was charging you. How did you decide to pick Ghost?”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there will always be an elite. You know, I think that the fundamental nature of that conflict is that there are a bunch of, let's face it, mostly rich white people who want to complain about what they see as the forces that threaten them. And so they go up against the elite. And that manifests as a lot of criticism of the mainstream media. Even in a world where the mainstream media is much more fragmented or much smaller, there will still be mainstream figures that they can throw tomatoes at. And, you know, I mean, what we find over and over again, I mean, you look at somebody like Libs of TikTok, like Libs of TikTok's whole job is just to make up new main characters to try to target for harassment, right? So I think that sort of thing is just going to continue.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that discourse needs a villain, right? It needs something to point at that it is in opposition to, otherwise it doesn't work. And the thing that is in opposition to is crumbling. And I'm just wondering, do you think that will fade is the actual mainstream media begins to crumble? Because it seems like the center of that movement is defined in opposition to something that is going away. And I don't know what the new center will be.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I was legitimately curious. The last question I want to ask about Substack, and then I want to talk about Ghost and where things go from here. Because Substack is an ideological project, the people who participate in it need a villain. And then they can say like the mainstream media is out to get us, or this is what they don't want you to hear, or they're mad because we're going to replace them. I've heard all this stuff about the Verge for a long time from like YouTubers. There's nothing I love more than when people call the Verge the mainstream media. Like I remember when it didn't exist, you know, it's like, thank you for saying I made it is basically my reaction to that.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a little bit of back and forth, but the net result of it was that they never really had to weigh in on anything specific because a lot of the stuff that I had sent in to substack, substack, did remove and, you know, so on and so forth. And now I'm on ghosts. I will say that I talked to Alex Samos from Stanford, who's somebody who I look to on these content moderation issues, and he was basically like, it's not fair play to go after the payment processor because practically speaking, they're almost never going to have any awareness of this stuff. So like you generally shouldn't go after them. And so, you know, again, I accept the criticism, but like, am I sorry I asked Ripe about it? No”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I accept the criticism. I think it's fair to criticize me on this point. I don't think people fully believe me when I say this, but I truly did reach out to Stripe in a spirit of journalistic inquiry. And my question was exactly what you just raised. Stripe has a set of terms of service that says this kind of thing is prohibited. And as far as I could tell, before I met with the founders, what they were saying was, if you were a literal 1930s Nazi and you survived the end of the Third Reich and you have a sub stack, you can monetize it. That was my reading of Hamish's statement. And I thought it was worth going to their payment process or saying, hey, are you cool with the fact that this customer is doing this? And I think that that was worth doing.”
2024-02-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT