YouSaid · the spoken record

Nilay Patel

lines on the record: 81
first: 2024-03-04
most recent: 2024-03-04
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 more so the tension than individuals versus brands. But when you have a brand, you try to differentiate. And our company, at least in its history, has tried to differentiate on quality, which is more expensive.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is to have the most views. Its aspiration is an organization is to get the most traffic. And they think that way. You can see it comes through in the work they make because nothing is designed to be so big that it overcomes the view count. And I think that's empty. I think that's why people are sad that something like a sports illustrator that used to stand for all that stuff is in decline and it feels like there's no replacement. There should be a replacement. Media brands should die over time. There should be new ones. I think that's a healthy cycle. But all the new ones are either individual creators who are getting burned out by the dozen or they are media brands that are designed mostly to be optimized for platform distribution and never stand for anything much bigger. That effort and that care is actually what ends up differentiating you in any sort of non-commoditized market and the platform's commoditization. And that maybe that”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not anymore, but was, right? Like the great magazines, the great print magazines, the great media brands, they had aspirations that were bigger than their revenue, that were bigger than their view counts. It was, did we make an impact? Did we move the culture? Is this the thing everybody's talking about? Is this the magazine cover that maybe it sold the most on the newsstands, but it was the most striking and evocative, I judge the Asme Awards, the National Magazine Awards. And the people in those rooms, they still talk about impact. They still talk about what makes a great magazine. And that's like an art form that is discussed. I think that's inspiring, right? Like people really care about packaging and design and all this stuff. Barcelona Sports, whatever you want to think about Barcelona Sports, it has an editorial point of view. It absolutely does. It has a main character every single day. Absolutely does. But it is defined by its metrics.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just the coolest when it happens. And so I do think there's some amount of people would like to buy atoms, not just bits, you know, and the atoms are really meaningful to them. So I don't know what kind of future that is. I don't know that we're going to do a print magazine anytime soon, but what does that represent? It represents, well, somebody cared enough to print this picture and like mail a piece of paper to everybody around. And the care is really validating for the people who get to be on the covers or whatever. And that validation is really important. That's not really what I was getting at in that threads post, though. What I was getting at there.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tech website gets to go talk to the legendary print magazine and say, hey, do you want to work together on a big story? And by the way, we'd love to put it on the cover. And the legendary print magazine is like dope. Like, let's run. And so all of my credit to David Haskell and the people at New York who are like open to this idea. Like that is not an impossibility almost everywhere else, even for two print magazines to collaborate like that. For us to do it is amazing and like I love the company I work at. But it's really cool when it happens.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe I work at a company that runs a legendary print magazine in New York magazine. We've published Verge stories in collaboration with New York and had them on the cover of that magazine. And boy, does that make everybody excited. Boy, is that just the coolest feeling in the world? And, you know, it is not a normal media company where the weirdo”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is amazing. It's no, it's good. You are confirming yourself. Another reason we're mourning these magazines, this is about Sports Illustrated being shut down, is because the media that has replaced them is clout chasing algorithmic garbage. Not anything that has aspirations of being bigger than whatever metrics a platform gives them. Of course there is a new sports illustrated. It's barstool sports. It is weightless and empty, and the best case scenario for a media company built to succeed on platforms. Firstly, god damn boy. Call the burn unit. Second, though, this is going to maybe feel like it comes out of left field. You're talking about moving, like, let's have websites. Let's have distributed. Let's not have platforms. This feels a little bit like one step away from saying maybe.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By just looking at all the data will actually drive people to an intense amount of boredom and they'll just go try something else. I also think young people reflexively and to their great credit just reject everything their parents did. They just throw it out the window and then they do it again ten years later and pretend they invented it, which is great. And I think a very important cycle of creativity. But I think that danger is overblown because it requires a level of mathematical certainty that is not reflected anywhere in reality.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One very trite saying that I repeat a lot is that data can only tell you about the past. It is a perfect window into the past. It is an absolutely useless view into the future. Maybe it will help you make a smarter bet, but it will not tell you what is going to happen in the future, especially when it comes to people on the internet. Like, it just won't, and especially when it comes to art and creativity, it absolutely is useless in that case. Like the famous William Goldman saying is that the secret truth of Hollywood is like nobody knows what they're doing. It's true. There's a reason it's a saying. There's a reason it's a cliche. I'm not sure if that's 100% the saying, but it's close enough. No one knows what they're doing. See, I don't even know what I'm doing. I think the idea that you can algorithmically perfect a feed.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my history of making stuff on the internet, it has seemed like every time a company has said hello, we'd like you to make fewer decisions, and we will make the decisions for you. The people say yes, give me that. And I don't like this But I wonder if we. I mean, TikTok is almost already all the way like this, except for whether to keep watching. And all that. So the only data that the platform needs to continue to serve you things that will keep you infinitely satiated.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's like, oh, we invented a new ad thing that feels good in this place. Yeah. And you're like, oh, you can just like put some pieces together and be like, oh, this makes sense to me. And I would rather be in the sort of like market competition side of things than spin the wheel of what billionaire do you trust today?”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's just a pool of money that used to be getting spent on Twitter that who knows where it's going to go. If you can just make it kind of easier and safer and less Nazi filled. To spend money on our website. Like, maybe there's something there. We have to actually build it. We did one test of, you know, we have QuickPost. We did one test where we sold a QuickPost as an ad. It was very manual. They sold this Apple, which is really cool. And like neat, you know, and Apple did an experiment. They bought a new kind of ad with us. Great. That's not my side of the house, but it was a test. And everybody liked it our audience was like, oh, this is a better ad than the other.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got to invent some stuff. I have a very enlightened CO Jim Bankoff, and he's allowing me to poke at some ideas about those things. Like, what does new distribution look like in the Fediverse? And then our company has like a giant sports property. And you know what hasn't left yet is sports Twitter. So I'm going to poke at it with the Verge. And we're like lightly exploring it. But I think there's opportunity there to build new kinds of media products that is really exciting. And like, you just have to do the first thing, which is you have to be on one server and follow someone on another server and be like, oh, that worked. And then your brain starts exploding.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Website, and you are thinking, like, how can I redistribute this website? Like, how can I reach people more directly? My brain is like lit up. Like, you should be able to follow me at the Verge.com and see all my quick posts in your threads account when threads federates. That's a big deal. Like a really big deal, especially if we can find ways to monetize that in a way that feels good. That's a really big deal.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I am on a website that looks like Instagram and I can follow a creator that posts something that looks like tweets on this thing and I can open yet another app and log into both of them and it will just like show me everything. It is mind expanding in one particular kind of way because the commercial internet has never allowed you to do these things. Blue Sky, which is a different kind of decentralized service I just opened up. Anybody can go sign up for it now. They have their own decentralization protocol called the AT protocol. Their idea is that there should be a marketplace for algorithms that you can show up. You can look at the fire hose of content. You can say, I'm going to buy an algorithm that shows me only posts about Santa Claus and it's going to go do the work for you. That's a huge idea that is completely unproven, but it's more exciting than, okay, here's another billionaire who's going to prattle on about free speech and then eventually like betray you. If you're me and you run a big web”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you'll just poke at it. Okay. I think you should start a Masson account and you can follow a PixelFed account on it. And you're like, that's weird. I followed this account from the service that looks like Instagram. It's like”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Newsletter economy is full of a huge variety of creators doing a huge variety of things. They're more different than the same. So all I see with the Fediverse is, oh, this is going to open social distribution up a little bit. It's going to allow us to control our distribution networks. It's going to say, I'm not on Twitter, but people on Twitter can follow my website, and I can go promote that follow anywhere I want in different ways and build an audience outside of the pressures of the algorithm. To me, just that ability to try is 1% better.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Podcasters are more different than the same. The web is distributed largely through websites and through RSS. There's a huge variety of websites and the way websites look. But then you see the algorithmic search pressure push web design kind of all into the same box. Newsletters distributed by email, open distribution.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that means I think the content isn't king on the internet, like the distribution actually just creates the work or creates the pressures that forces all the work to be the same. And I think over time, that's what drives the audiences away. Right. So there's a real change in how these platforms work where over time they just become more and more the same thing and the creators become more and more the same. And that's a little exhausting. And every place where you see open distribution, you see a huge variety of creators and content. Podcasts have basically opened distribution, like RSS feeds, podcaster distributor, RSS feeds. That means people kind of own their distribution. There's a vast array of podcast creators. There's a vast array of podcast formats. They don't all sound like the beginning of YouTube videos or whatever. And I hate to keep picking on YouTube. It's just, you can pick any algorithmic platform and it's the same. Like TikTokers are more of the same than different.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And YouTube will probably listen to this until one of us that that's not right. But it's like YouTubers like, yeah, it's eight minutes long. There's a number and it gets what it wants. And that recommendation algorithm is the distribution for people. And they push things into boxes.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The format literally allowed them to make that song. YouTube is like that. All these platforms are like that in some way. YouTube, depending on how you think about it, to get a second pre-roll slot on a YouTube video, it has to be so long. And YouTube will be like, no, that's not how it works, but like every YouTuber is like, yeah, it has to be so long. And there's a push and pull between what the platform says about itself and what the people who create for the platform.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, I completely agree. So the YouTube algorithm wants something, and YouTubers deliver that to the algorithm. I'll give you another example that I think about all the time. I love the band New Order, the 12-inch single, when they made it possible to make vinyl records that were 12 inches with one song on them. New order was like, here's Blue Monday. We made it for you. It's very long because they just, the distribution medium”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, there's this phrase that people in media who think about media say all the time content is king, right? Everyone like. Like people pop out at dark corners to say this to you. Mantra, like people just say it, like people, the audience will go wherever the content is, no matter what. And you kind of take one step back and you're like, well, distribution is really important. And in fact, the lesson of the internet is that the distribution has an outsize impact on what content gets made.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the Fediverse excites me because I don't understand it. I understand the technology idea that my posts can be seen on different platforms because they're all part of a standard protocol and that like my follower graph can follow me and my bio can populate on other places. But I don't know what it means. I don't know what gets created in that space. I don't think anybody does. I think if you change social media in this way, what happens? A lot of people seem to be like, if you change it in this way, things will get better. But I've also remember feeling that way about everything so far that like... I remember back when Twitter was going to save the world and social media was going to bring us all together. Can you convince me that the Fedter verse will be better if it actually happens?”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think our audience wants us to push the boundary and just like just showing what the tools can do. But we are very precious. We're going to disclose everything in like largely what we sell here as people. This is where the people are, and we're going to stay pretty focused on that.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not saying we're never, I'm we actually because of the phones you reviewed and the things you've done, we've certainly now published photos that have been edited by AI just to show people. Like, look at this photo edited by AI. I'm sure over time there will be more elements of that stuff, but our policy very succinctly is like do not lie to people.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Won't get mad. I wrote an article that said, everyone should just buy a brother laser printer. And then to try to gain Google, I let ChatGPT fill out the back half of the thing with filler text. Google was not very happy about it. We did sell a lot of printers.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm the only person I know who has published AI written copy on the website. Everyone refuses to be outraged about it. This thing should go viral because the editor-in-chief of the Verge published a post half written by AI. And if I could just get the outrage viral traffic.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the same for every YouTuber, is great. The algorithm comes and goes and buffets people in different directions, but the ones who have had lasting success on any platform are the ones who are pretty true to themselves. And that, I think, is just a universal media lesson.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are just stubborn about being about one thing, right? That is our only secret. We care a lot. We work really hard. Those are basics. But then we have been very stubborn that the Verge has an identity and we're not going to get moved off the ball too much.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and to be fair, the VC money that started the BuzzFeeds and the other, it's not like they had great returns. It wasn't like it was a great bet. We didn't create a bunch of lasting millennial media institutions. We might have created but one or two, and I might accidentally run one of them. And that's weird. Like, I don't think that should be the case.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Habits yet to form. And then I think you do see some of these technology shifts elsewhere. I do think you see some of the action around the Fediverse and decentralized social networks and the collapse of Twitter. And there's just opportunity to build new kinds of products for audiences that are looking for something new or haven't yet formed their habits. And that is just a very powerful moment that reminds me of the moment that we were founded in. Now, is there a bunch of VC money floating around to make that bet again?”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're over it. Like these platforms to borrow the phrase from Corey Doctoro is being in shitified, like left and right. People are looking for something else. And then you have Gen Z, which is actually another new generation has.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because their habits were different. It was a huge generational shift. People were entering the workforce. They were young. They were going to do something different than their parents were going to do. And you could see, okay, a bunch of money is moving because these people have different tastes. At the same time, that was when the mobile phone had arrived, the smartphone had arrived. You're in the first flush of the LTE era of the internet, basically. And so you have a new audience with new habits and a new distribution format, right? And that distribution format really looked like social networks. And you just saw a bunch of media companies spring up to meet that moment. And a bunch of other companies spring up to meet that moment. And so the idea that you have an audience shift and a technology shift is very powerful. I think we see that again right now. Very clearly, I see that right now. You have a Gen Z audience. You have a millennial audience that is in a Gen X audience and a boomerang audience is pretty sick of the internet as it is today.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There have been in other times the internet. Let me make the case for the green shoots. We were founded in a particular moment where two things, there was a confluence of two things. One, you might remember, the millennial media moment was big. Millennials killed things left and right. They showed up. They entered the workforce. I'm like on the tail end of Gen X, so I myself think of myself as Gen X. One year younger than a year, millennial. Sorry, everybody. I think”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very dearly, like you can only do the things you only have so much time. You can only do the things you really want to do. And all the other stuff is kind of noisy. And if it's important, it'll come back around.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The most useful advice I've ever been given about time management was from Satya Dalasio of Microsoft. I was in the back of a car with him one time. We were going from one thing to another and he was telling me about all the things he'd done that day. Like he'd gone for a run, he went to an investor meeting. We are doing this interview. He was going to open a story. He was going to have it. And I was like, how do you do all these things? And he looked at me very seriously. And he said, it's your time. You have to be selfish about it. And I was like, oh shit. Like the master of the universe just like told me to have better time management. And I hold on to that.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm sure Sam Altman has a strong point of view on whether AI and copyright law are compatible. We just were like, the stories you want to do are a little more expansive than this box. We can do a shorter one. We can figure out how to make that efficient. And that will actually let us put more Verge reporters on the show. It'll let us put more friends the show on the show. And it'll let us, when we do our audience surveys, the audience is like, we like it when Neil and I explains things. There's like actual feedback we get. So let us deliver some more of what the audience wants. And that is to me a good use of my time because it serves my team. It lets my team come address the audience on the show. And it serves the audience.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's print again. And then that would be a useful artifact of the time we all spent making the show. We kind of got to a place where we're starting to talk about that. I don't know if we're going to do anything with it, but we were able to at least talk about it, which is fascinating. And then we're like, oh, there's more decoder we can make now that we've achieved the goal of like the show exists. It has a format. There are some questions we ask people. People want to be on the show when you start a new podcast. You have to basically beg people to be on it. Now we have a lot of incoming, which is really useful and good. And I hope it continues, although I still, there's still people we want to go get, so we still go ask. But the first version of decoder sort of running itself. And then it's like, oh, but there's other stuff we want to talk about that does not lend itself to an hour long interview with a CEO. There's lots of stuff that is happening in this world that we can talk about and explain that it's actually hard to find a not self-interested CEO to talk about. AI and copyright law.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second episode of Decoder, it's weird when you do a podcast. Podcasts are forever projects. They don't end unless you are telling a tidy story, right? You just make one a week for the rest of your life. Yeah, it's like they're just forever projects. So I have always with Decoder in the back of my head had one end state, which is we should do enough of these and ask the same questions enough times so that we can do a book. Right. And then we can put together a book that's helpful, that's full of advice about how companies work and how decisions are made.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yeah, absolutely. But when you're figuring out how to prioritize your own time, when somebody says it'd be better for the Verge if Decoder had a second episode a week, how do you say, yeah, that one, yes, is worth more of my time being spent on this, but not. Some other of the many other cool things you could be doing that would generate revenue and also be exciting for you.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And importantly, can that decision stay made? Because we can make a decision and then it has like bounced somewhere else and someone else has to like think about it. And that's when a decision gets unmade. And that's when the chaos sets in.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish more of my meetings were podcasts. Like everyone desperately trying to be a little bit more entertaining than they usually are would be great. I actually am really bad at context switching. So a big part of my decision making process is to stack up modes of operation. So I'll be in meeting mode for four hours. I need an hour basically to like turn that off and go into individual contributor podcast host mode. And so I really try to make like for lack of a better word like talent moments where it's I have to be on and performing for an audience and then manager moments where I have to like you know, navigate meeting world and like make a bunch of decisions and like evaluate trade-offs. Like all of that is a different part of my brain and I try to not switch between those modes very often. I try to stay really focused. But fundamentally when you ask me like how I make decisions, it's usually I know the stakes of any decision that we're making because we've been running the verge for a very long time and the people around me know the stakes of most of artists. And then it's can we make the decision quickly?”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff wrong Then there's like everything else, like. Should we spend money and going on this thing? It's like, yeah, we should just go. It's like see what happens. Like, get a story out of it. How many podcasts am I going to do today? There's only so many I can do.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pure pain I am optimizer on speed that fundamentally the crisper you are in making a decision, the faster that decision. And then you know a lot. So you get to remake the decision. There's one thing that makes that different for me than I think other people in other kinds of jobs. There's a bunch of decisions we make as an organization every single day, minute to minute, that don't get to be unmade. We publish a news story and it's wrong. We don't get to unmake that decision. We have to issue a correction and put it at the bottom of the story. We write a headline. It's really not great for us to write and rewrite headlines. So there's a whole bunch of instinct and taste and hard fought experience just about sort of making the product we make every day that we still have to do it really fast, right? The core value of a newsroom, especially news on my cars, is speed. So we still have to win every day, all the time, but we have to be fast. But next to that, and so I just want to bracket that set of like editorial decision making because that is a group product. Like a lot of us make those decisions altogether all the time and we are very aware of the stakes of getting some of that.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also, I will say we operate inside of a company called Vox Media that also makes money and is also in the turmoil of the digital media business. But overall compared to sort of its peers has managed to weather the storm. And a huge part of that is the company is founded on community and is founded on product, like building web products. And that is resilient.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We do. I think in my roles that Iron Chief is incumbent on me to make sure that one, we have an audience. The audience is happy with us. We're invested in places where we think audiences are growing or there's impact and that we are growing responsibly. So I have a publisher. Her name is Helen Havlock. Helen used to be our engagement editor. And then she was our editorial director. So she was my number one deputy and I would like go off into the company and have meetings and then I would come back and ask Helen what to do and then I would just like go do whatever Helen said. And eventually I was like, this is stupid. You should just be my boss. So Helen is our publisher. Above her is our group publisher, Chris Grant, who is the founder of Polygon. He and I have worked together for years upon years. So the three of us spend a lot of time just thinking about our business and like where we're investing and how it works. But the split is that I'm in charge of editorial and creative and Helen is in charge of our business.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we have a commerce operation that's sort of over there. And so we review things that is all editorially independent of what happens on the commerce side of things. And then that team adds affiliate links to buying guides and things like that. And that provides us some revenue. But that is walled off in a meaningful way from what our reviewers do all day. So if something makes us more money in affiliate sales, our reviewers are not incentivized by that. They barely know it. The one place where it gets a little muddy, and I hope people understand why this is muddy, is deals coverage. Like our audience wants to know, is this a good deal? Like, here are some deals that are happening. Are they good deals? And then we have to evaluate that. And so the person you want to evaluate in that is closer to editorial than not. You want an objective judgment of like, is this a good deal? But then you get affiliate fees on that. That's where I think it gets the muddiest.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so it's really interesting. Like that to me, what do those brands want? They want people to advocate for them and they can buy it at scale on a lot of platforms for wild amounts of money and they can't buy it from us. And the fact that we are not for sale, I think is I'm pretty sure this is a bad thing. The fact that we are not for sale is increasingly an anachronism. I think it's our competitive advantage, right? Because I get to yell loudly we're not for sale, but it is increasingly an anachronism.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they do. I think they do, and I think they know. Like, the thing I just said no to, it was because they wanted me to, it was a food product and they wanted me to be like a person who knows about the world being like, this is good for you. And I was like, that's not my job. That's not who I am. I don't know anything about whether this is good for you or not. And like, also, it's not. Like, it's not. Food is food. That's not the business that we need to be in convincing people that one snack food is better than another. Just eat the Doritos, everybody. It's snacks.”
2024-03-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT