YouSaid · the spoken record

Rose Wang

lines on the record: 29
first: 2024-12-10
most recent: 2024-12-10
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 the fight that we're in, and that's what we believe is at stake, which is why sleep is a fifth priority, because we all very much believe that democracy needs to continue to uphold and we can only show, we can't tell.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we want discussions that are happening now to happen on Blue Sky. And when South Korea called martial law, right, where was that breaking news unfolding? It was happening on Blue Sky. It was really hard to follow on threads. It was really hard to follow on X. Many people we were hearing from reporters, academics, they were following the story on Blue Sky. We don't have the budget to go and win over every celebrity and every big brand, but our belief is if we could just focus on what the end user wants and needs, then everyone else will come. We're in a really interesting time in history where democracy is being questioned in general. Like, is this a process by which governance should work and blue sky as an online solution for society is a more democratic way to build online communities? And so that.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happening. And so we do know that people want to build a livelihood online. They want to build their own brand that they can control. They want to own the relationship with their community. And Blue Sky is trying to make that easier for everyone new who's trying to do that today.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That blue sky is a home for independent creators, journalists, publishers, entrepreneurs who want to build a presence online. There has been probably dark patterns happening for the last 10 to 20 years that we haven't understood. And most platforms are incentivized to lock people in and not link out, right? If you post a link, you're probably going to get depromoted in the algorithm. And Hank Green actually posted a YouTube video about this where he did an experiment of posting on threads, X, and Blue Sky the same posts, and then some posts with certain words, some posts with certain links and no links. And it was kind of wild what he saw, like on threads when he posted a link, he'd maybe get 60 likes. And on Blue Sky, he gets a thousand likes. That's actually kind of wild, how different that engagement metric is.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the key word, Bob. Prioritize. I think that in the midst of a million opportunities and so many people to talk to, we have to be very clear on who we're serving and why. I think what's been very clear.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Academics. And so we always ask please look at this with nuance. It's a very complicated issue. Blue sky has promised as a company we're not going to be profiting off of your data for generative AI models because that's not the business we're in. We're trying to build a new layer of the internet for social. And so that's our directive. That's our promise. But we still want to go and make partnerships with AI companies to set a precedent to show, hey, you don't have to do this people have expressed consent. There's tons of data out there.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, we're taking a page out of the web. Every web page can be scraped by developers. What we've done on the web, though, is that we have allowed different websites to express consent. We want our data to be scraped or we don't want our data to be scraped. It's still up to the developer to respect that expression, but at least the ability to express consent has been given. And so we're going to follow that on blue skies. We're going to implement a feature where you can express whether you want your data to be trained on or not. It's up to the developers and AI companies to follow that. There are lots of interesting open source models that academics are training on to help better moderation systems be built, to help safety across the web. And so Blue Skies data in that way is actually quite helpful for those.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a very difficult problem. And so with data, we had to choose when we came out, are we going to make our data private or public? Private is what meta, threads X has done is they own your data and they're training their own proprietary AI models that they're profiting off of from your data and your post. We've chosen a completely different path that's much more like Reddit, which is we're open, we're public. And that does mean that any open source model, any AI person out there can go and take that data and train.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transaction. And so we did not lock ourselves into an advertising business model, which is why J said that we can't anchidify your experience with ads because you can just leave. We've opened sourced the Blue Sky app so anyone can copy and paste the code and create Green Sky overnight. And so for us, our incentives are aligned with the user, which is why I think most people are having a better experience on Blue Sky, because we're ensuring that they are, or else we know they'll leave.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, our first business model is subscriptions where we want features like speech, very core features behind a paywall. There'll be more features that help with self-expression like custom avatar frames, you know, higher resolution image uploads and views. Another business model we're thinking about and what we like to see is what are users doing on the app where they're finding a lot of value and how do we then amplify that behavior rather than force a new behavior? And so one of the things we're excited about is the Blue Sky app is created by not just us. It's created by lots of users, right? 50,000 different feeds that are created by users. And these users are paying each other on Patreon or Kofi. They're supporting their livelihoods. And so we want to be able to build a payments network where we can help more transactions happen in more volumes. And so we'll take a percentage of.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Towards younger folks on Blue Sky. We have a fire hose of data and then the positive certain types of data gets fed to maybe the more positive teen app. There's just like so many ways in which we're excited to see experimentation in this area. That said, we very much plan to comply with Australian law and we understand the reasoning behind what they're doing. I think Blue Sky as a solution, we're saying, hey, rather than having different regulations in every city or every state or every country, which becomes a lot more state controlled media, is there a way in which we can provide a marketplace where there's lots of different experiments happening and users are voting with their feet and that's a more democratic process in which we can evolve social”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We understand that social has been harmful for a lot of teens. And there definitely needs to be solutions to make sure that bullying, harassment, the type of content that's shown to them when they're extremely vulnerable and still trying to figure out who they are. And so is social media serving teens today? No. And we recognize that. That said, there are many teens like myself when I grew up I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. There were very few Asian Americans in my community. And where I would go and find others to connect with would be online. And I think that there is a positive to what social does serve. Socials should still be available for them to go and connect. And so what we hope to do is there's actually a lot of innovation that hasn't been done. Like, can you create an app that's mostly targeted towards”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, moderation is governance. I think we think about it as like a checkbox to just get rid of bad actors. And that's, I think, is never going to create a safe environment if you don't come at it proactively and think about moderation as a reactive behavior. So for us, the way that we've thought about governance is we've taken a note from kind of like how court systems work, which is you can't just have one court system take in requests from hundreds of millions of people, which is basically how most other social media platforms work. And so the way that Blue Sky has envisioned moderation is what we call stackable moderation, where we've given a lot of the tools that have previously only been available to the moderation team to users. What does that look like? There are a lot of behaviors in between intolerance, hate speech, misinformation, and users having a bad time. And on most other”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decision of do we open up invites so when everyone comes in, they get the same experience they had on Web 2, which just locks them in, doesn't give them choice, and then makes them feel unsafe. Or do we stick to our principles and build a strong moderation team? And then also give users choice not only in feeds, but also moderation services. And so we chose the latter. We didn't know that that was the right decision because for many months, threads came out of the woodwork and they started with a hundred million users and that's really hard for a tiny startup to look at and say, hey, I think we can beat that. And so I think in hindsight, we're really very appreciative of the choice to stick to our principles. And that's partly why we have a more positive and safe environment. But also, it could have gone any way. And this is how startups work is, you know, you write history as you build the plane. And I think if you can stick to your principles, then...”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A really cool, first of all, awesome trending topic. The thing that I think is important to point out is just that the first users of the Blue Sky app was the Blue Sky team. It was very much an extension of who we are. We're a team that's led by two women who have been on the internet for decades and experienced the internet as women. And so I think prioritizing safety ahead of growth in some ways has been one of the reasons why we're seeing a more positive environment on Blue Sky. I think a lot of people know Blue Sky before this big wave this month as the app last year that had invite codes and wouldn't let people in. And we didn't do that to be hot. We did it because we weren't ready on a moderation front. We weren't ready on a federation front for people can have choice in feeds. And so it was.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really hard question to answer because that's assuming that Blue Sky is just an app and that we're just the next Twitter alternative. And so we can look at those numbers and say, you know, we'll probably get a certain percentage of that, but that's not what Blue Sky is. We're building the whole new social lab. We see Blue Sky the app as the lobby to now explore so many other experiences. Social has been closed off for the last 10 to 20 years, where APIs have been closed and developers haven't been able to build. For those of us who've been around since the 2000s, we probably remember Zing.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You in and not show you what they're doing. That's the whole point of the centralized authorities. They can go do whatever they want. My analogy is it's like moving to a city where if you wanted to change the color of your door, you have to go and petition the city government. We're like, how is that possible that that's how the online world works when we don't want that? And so I think ultimately what we're trying to provide is a toolbox for you to go and paint your door yellow or green or blue or whatever you want because that's your prerogative. And that's the way that social should work online.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really interesting what the algorithms have been doing because it's been done in a black box. We don't know what's happening. For the first time ever, Blue Sky is kind of opening that box because we've provided something different, which is chronological feeds as a completely different platform. That's the true A-B test that's happening. And what publishers have discovered, for example, is, I believe The Guardian came onto Blue Sky recently and then their first week they had 300,000 followers on Blue Sky and they had more engagement in that first week on Blue Sky than they did all of 2024 on X, even though they have 10.8 million followers on X. I think that tells you that the algorithm has some sort of manipulation. The whole point of other centralized social platforms like meta and like X is that they're incentivized to lock”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About new ideas in a safer environment. And so what we've learned is putting people in a town hall and having other people scream their extreme opposite viewpoints at you probably won't change your mind. But if you're in a community with people with adjacent viewpoints and then you have other things that are similar to them, you're actually more likely to take on that adjacent viewpoint. And so we actually think that Blue Sky provides both of those experiences where you have all these custom fees that are these smaller communities in smaller worlds where you can go and have fun and feel safe and connected. And then when you're feeling more abundant and ready to go and discover new and maybe not so familiar experiences, you can go to the discover feed, which is the global algorithm with just one swipe and then go and see what's happening across the world. And so we're saying you don't have to choose, depending on how you feel that moment, that afternoon, you can choose.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, we're not building the infrastructure for a specific political viewpoint or a specific group of people. The goal is, hey, here's open infrastructure for global conversation and here are the tools that give you the ability to create your own experience upon that infrastructure. And so, hey, go create your own space. Go figure out what your community needs to feel safe. And we won't disrupt what you want unless you're building it in our society and it goes against our terms of service and community guidelines, in which case you can start another server and just leave our society and build your own. We actually take a lot of inspiration from just how are humans not online? How do they interact at parties? How do they interact in communities? I think there is a maybe like a wrong belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that communities actually help us learn.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've built the plumbing, the infrastructure for many apps to be built. That's the whole point of Blue Sky is people say, you know, what is decentralization mean? And what I say is it just means that it's more democratic. It means that we can build blue sky and you can build green sky and yellow sky and users or voters can go and choose where they want to live based on the experience that's provided rather than locking them in and forcing them to stay in a home that they don't like.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a question that keeps coming up, right? I think there's a lot of people who are worried have we completely lost the town square or has the internet unbundled and broken up into all these smaller communities where people are tired of a global stage? And I think that it's hard to point to a point in time and say that all of time will look like that point in time. We've seen that history is cyclical and we've seen that there's generally unbundling and a rebundling that people tend to go through when they go through periods of, hey, you know what the experience I had on the town square or in the town square wasn't serving me. And so that's what's driven them to unbundle and find these smaller communities. We believe that there will be a time again when people want to know what's happening and be in a larger conversation and there will be a rebundling. And so rather than just build one app.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I do love this question, so thank you for asking because a lot of people assume that we're just an ex-alternative, but we're very different. We are an open social. And so we're seeing that people want a lot more control over their experience and know who they're talking to. And these feeds just they provide a cozier corner to connect with other people with either similar interest or have similar dispositions because there's just no longer a single dominant algorithm that only promotes either the most polarizing post and or the biggest brands. And so you actually get to interact with real people and have fun conversations again.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When X made another announcement about their difference in block, that it was going to be more of a strong mute, but that was not the first time they announced it and they hadn't even enacted it. But already that night, 500,000 users came onto Blue Sky. And so we were seeing already that users were very unhappy with the experience they were having on other social platforms like X. And I think that the reason they're coming here is actually something a lot deeper, which is there's dark patterns happening. They're not feeling good. They're not making friends. They don't feel safe. It's these like very fundamental human needs that are driving people away.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the thing that felt really different about this surge was that momentum continued much longer than it did in a lot of other countries. And there was no clear end date. For Brazil, for example, you know, like you mentioned, it was because X was banned in Brazil. We had also assumed that X would get unbanned in Brazil. So we knew that there was a certain time limit that we were able to win over a lot of Brazilians and tell them about what Blue Sky was. But here, I think that people are coming to Blue Sky for very different reasons. I think, you know, people will attribute it to a certain event, but I oftentimes say that people don't leave their homes after one thing that goes wrong. It's generally like after so much disappointment, the trust has been lost. It's some sort of event that just tips you over the edge. We started to see this.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think being prepared and being surprised are actually two different things. You can be both. And we were prepared in the sense that we had built our protocol for Twitter initially. And so we were ready for a large number of users to come on all at once. But then in the like, could we have predicted the wave that was going to happen and when it was going to happen? Absolutely not because I think we would have probably more staff members, but we have managed quite well with the team that we have. And our priority is let's keep the app online.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of come out and know what we're working on in Join Blue Sky. And that's really fun. But it's important for us to note that I think there's a general need for a new social media platform, not only in the US, but truly all over the world. And we're really excited to fill that hole.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has been a hyper growth phase that a lot of companies dream about in some ways. And so I think the personal experience is that sleep has been a fifth priority in my life when maybe it's been in the top three in the past. But also I would like to say that, you know, this isn't the first time we've experienced growth. We experience a lot of growth in February of this year when we launched Blue Sky to the public and we had over a million Japanese users join in a week. And then sometime between April and August, we also had millions of Brazilians join Blue Sky. And so we've been experiencing growth across the world. It's really awesome to experience it in your own backyard because, you know, we have our server down the street who's like, oh my gosh, I've seen you on the news. And so that's really cool to have people from all walks of life.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“South Korea called martial law, right? Where was that breaking news unfolding? It was happening on blue sky. It was really hard to follow on threads. It was really hard to follow on X. Don't have the budget to go and win over every celebrity and every big brand. But our belief is if we focus on what the end user wants and needs, then everyone else will come. We're not building the infrastructure for a specific political viewpoint or a specific group of people. There is a maybe like a wrong belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that communities actually help us learn about new ideas in a safer environment.”
2024-12-10 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT