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Transcript

No Good Feed Goes Unpunished · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Mike Masnick: So Mike, what fun thing did you see on the internet this week?
• 0:04
  Mike McCue: I recently came across a speech by Steve Jobs in 1983, that he gave to the International Design Conference in Aspen.
• 0:13
  Mike McCue: And it was amazing, both the speech and the Q&A after, and mind-blowing.
• 0:19
  Mike McCue: a blast from the past and a welcome, a welcome set of commentary from Steve back when he was, like, 28 years old
• 0:26
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 0:27
  Mike Masnick: so I started to watch some of this because you said you were going to do it, and then I got hooked, and I was up late last night because is absolutely fascinating.
• 0:36
  Mike Masnick: and you called out one little bit of it that you thought was especially mind-blowing.
• 0:40
  Mike Masnick: Do you wanna talk about that?
• 0:41
  Mike Masnick: What was that?
• 0:42
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 0:42
  Mike McCue: he was very prescient as we all know.
• 0:44
  Mike McCue: but one of the things he alludes to here is AI,
• 0:48
  Mike Masnick: Again, this is 1983.
• 0:51
  Mike Masnick: I just wanna remind people.
• 0:52
  Mike Masnick: Yeah
• 0:52
  Mike McCue: Exactly.
• 0:53
  Mike McCue: And he talks about how important books were to him in his, development and learning, and how amazing it was that someone like Aristotle could write, a book that he could then read, so much later And, he starts then talking about, what if you could ask Aristotle a question using computers?
• 1:10
  Mike McCue: And I think we have a clip of this
• 1:11
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 1:12
  Mike Masnick: We'll, we'll put it in the clip right here
• 1:14
  CLIP: Steve Jobs: When I was, um, going to school, I, um, had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers, and the thing that, that probably kept me out of jail was books.
• 1:27
  CLIP: Steve Jobs: Because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote, uh, and, uh, I didn't have to have an intermediary in the way And a book was a phenomenal thing.
• 1:39
  CLIP: Steve Jobs: It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle.
• 1:44
  CLIP: Steve Jobs: The problem was you can't ask Aristotle a question And I think as we look towards the next fifty to a hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life, his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person's dead and gone, we can ask this machine,"Hey, what, what would Aristotle have said?
• 2:17
  CLIP: Steve Jobs: What about this?" And maybe we won't get the right answer, but maybe we will, and that's really exciting to me.
• 2:25
  Mike Masnick: So yeah, that, it's, uh, like, that's incredible.
• 2:28
  Mike Masnick: Because, like, people are doing that now, right?
• 2:30
  Mike Masnick: and some people mock it that people are having conversations with historical figures or with works of literature, but to predict that over 40 years ago that this is the world we would live in is
• 2:42
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 2:42
  Mike McCue: It is.
• 2:43
  Mike McCue: and the whole concept of like, you know, maybe this person will carry this machine around with them and just keep entering information into it, and then later we can ask a question and Maybe it'll get it wrong, and maybe it'll get it right.
• 2:56
  Mike McCue: I just, I just thought that was just amazing.
• 3:00
  Mike McCue: And, the dream of a lot of people who've been building computers and tech for a long time, you know, is like, it's here now.
• 3:07
  Mike McCue: And like, okay, but now what do we do?
• 3:11
  Mike McCue: so Mike, what fun things have you seen?
• 3:13
  Mike McCue: What's, what's something fun you've seen on the internet?
• 3:15
  Mike Masnick: so I was actually struggling.
• 3:17
  Mike Masnick: I had a couple of different ideas for what I, what fun thing I saw, and then last night I saw this thing that Paul Ford, who's a very, very interesting developer and commentator on all sorts of things, launched yesterday.
• 3:29
  Mike Masnick: And it is this, this thing called Tiny Little Office.
• 3:32
  Mike Masnick: I don't know if you've seen this or not.
• 3:33
  Mike McCue: I have not
• 3:34
  Mike Masnick: Okay, this is fascinating.
• 3:36
  Mike Masnick: It took me a minute or two to wrap my brain around it, but it is an entire Office suite you know, like a, Google Docs or whatever.
• 3:44
  Mike Masnick: But You don't log in, you don't save documents to the cloud.
• 3:48
  Mike Masnick: Each document lives directly in your browser and is saved entirely in the URL.
• 3:55
  Mike Masnick: It is encoded into the URL.
• 3:58
  Mike Masnick: So if you make a document and you, just have it on your computer, it doesn't exist anywhere in the cloud, it exists on your computer.
• 4:07
  Mike Masnick: But if you wanna share it with someone, you share the link, and the entire document shows up in their browser as well.
• 4:14
  Mike Masnick: It
• 4:14
  Mike McCue: Wow!
• 4:15
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 4:16
  Mike Masnick: it is very, very cool.
• 4:18
  Mike Masnick: Th-
• 4:18
  Mike McCue: That's kind of mind-bending.
• 4:20
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 4:20
  Mike Masnick: it like...
• 4:21
  Mike Masnick: Yes, take some time to think about it, and you're like,"Oh, wait," this is...
• 4:25
  Mike Masnick: it is truly mind-bending.
• 4:27
  Mike Masnick: And then you begin to think about different things you can do with it.
• 4:29
  Mike Masnick: And it's not just...
• 4:30
  Mike Masnick: They have documents and presentations and spreadsheets and a full Office suite that is this lightweight, everything built into the URL, and the whole thing is open source,
• 4:40
  Mike McCue: Wow, it's open source too
• 4:42
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, It's
• 4:43
  Mike McCue: That's incredible I mean, God, that's a long URL, huh?
• 4:47
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, it, it can be a long URL but you can also use a URL shortener and it has a built-in ability to create a QR code that you could share the entire document within a QR code as well.
• 4:58
  Mike Masnick: So
• 4:58
  Mike McCue: Wow.
• 5:00
  Mike McCue: That's incredible.
• 5:01
  Mike Masnick: is really cool.
• 5:03
  Mike McCue: That really-- that's gonna take a little bit of, time to get my head around the implications for something like that.
• 5:09
  Mike McCue: That's, that's very cool
• 5:11
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, That's what I said.
• 5:12
  Mike Masnick: When I saw it last night, I was like,"I've got my cool thing this week."
• 5:16
  Mike McCue: I love that
• 5:25
  Mike Masnick: Hello, and welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet.
• 5:36
  Mike Masnick: This week, we are talking about AI bots and what to do about them, some misinformation about misinformation, some stuff about scam ads, and in our Patreon-only portion, an appeals court ruling about Florida's age-gating law that I think seems to change how courts interpret the First Amendment, which to me is perhaps problematic.
• 5:59
  Mike Masnick: It is October the 15th, 2026, and as you will notice this week, our usual co-host, Ben Whitelaw of Everything in Moderation, is not here.
• 6:08
  Mike Masnick: He is, in fact, traipsing around New York City, I believe.
• 6:13
  Mike Masnick: So instead, we have a double dose of Mikes.
• 6:16
  Mike Masnick: I am, of course, Mike Masnick, the founder and editor of Techdirt, and I am excited to have another Mike to co-host the podcast.
• 6:23
  Mike Masnick: This is Mike McCue, as our guest host.
• 6:27
  Mike Masnick: Mike is a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is the founder and CEO of Flipboard, who, among other things, makes Surf, which is a fantastic tool for, well, surfing and organizing the open social web.
• 6:42
  Mike Masnick: And Mike has been around Silicon Valley longer than I have, I think.
• 6:46
  Mike Masnick: Um, and, and has been all over the place, including, there was a period of time where you were on the board of directors of Twitter back when it actually was Twitter.
• 6:57
  Mike Masnick: and, just to get some disclaimers up top, as, I often have to disclaim and have Ben ring the bell that he has that I am on the board of Blue Sky.
• 7:08
  Mike Masnick: If anything we talk about involves Blue Sky, I am biased.
• 7:13
  Mike Masnick: Mike is on a few boards as well, including Patreon and, Alt Store, and we may discuss some things relevant to those companies today.
• 7:23
  Mike Masnick: but, uh, since he's on the board of Patreon, that is an opportunity for me to remind everyone that you should subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/ctrlaltspeech in order to get early access to our episodes and access to our bonus discussions and, the deep dives that we do each week.
• 7:40
  Mike Masnick: But with that, Mike, welcome to Ctrl Alt Speech.
• 7:43
  Mike McCue: Thank you, Mike.
• 7:44
  Mike McCue: It is really a pleasure to be here.
• 7:47
  Mike McCue: I'm excited to do this.
• 7:48
  Mike McCue: I think this is my first co-host gig ever,
• 7:51
  Mike Masnick: There we go.
• 7:52
  Mike McCue: yeah.
• 7:53
  Mike Masnick: Well, we make this fun.
• 7:55
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and, to demonstrate how much fun this can be, let us dive in with our very first story, it's a few different things that I think we're going to wrap into a larger discussion about AI and AI bots and how different people are dealing with them.
• 8:10
  Mike Masnick: And it starts with a couple stories that you found.
• 8:13
  Mike Masnick: So do you wanna kick us off and, talk about specifically what you saw with Reddit this week?
• 8:18
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 8:19
  Mike McCue: Well, you know, that Steve Jobs video, that we were just talking about, I discovered that in Surf because, of something called RSS, which is an amazing thing.
• 8:30
  Mike McCue: RSS allows YouTube videos, for example, and YouTube channels to be shared, and broadcast out so that, people can discover them outside of YouTube.
• 8:39
  Mike McCue: And of course, we have, Surf integrated with RSS, and therefore I found this fantastic video, which I never would have seen had it not been for RSS and using Surf.
• 8:51
  Mike McCue: And, I have a whole feed that's just nothing but, like, inspirational speeches and talks and, and of course, Steve Jobs is one of those, that I, I'm always looking for great Steve Jobs speeches.
• 9:02
  Mike McCue: So anyway, as great as RSS is, I also just saw that Reddit is shutting down RSS, because they say, it's being abused by AI bots which I think is really That's just an excuse, I think.
• 9:17
  Mike McCue: I think that ultimately this is really about them being even more of a walled garden.
• 9:21
  Mike McCue: They're also, by the way, simultaneously closing access to their public API completely and I think it's a real shame.
• 9:27
  Mike McCue: credit and props to YouTube for keeping RSS going, and YouTube also has a very robust API.
• 9:33
  Mike McCue: there's a lot of rules with how you use those things, but, it's ama- YouTube and their, sort of general, sense of openness is so much better than where Reddit is headed right now.
• 9:44
  Mike McCue: and it's a shame.
• 9:45
  Mike McCue: I think it's a real shame and, and it's, it's a, it's a blow, to the open web
• 9:50
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 9:50
  Mike Masnick: and just in case some of our listeners aren't as familiar with RSS or just sort of vaguely know what it is, I think the...
• 9:56
  Mike Masnick: It, it literally stands for Really Simple Syndication.
• 9:59
  Mike Masnick: That's what the stands for.
• 10:02
  Mike Masnick: And it just basically allows you to syndicate content outside of a closed platform and access it somewhere else.
• 10:09
  Mike Masnick: And often that is done in a way that, drives more traffic back to the original platform.
• 10:13
  Mike Masnick: People wanna see things, but it allows people to use a tool like Surf or, other forms of RSS readers to follow things or to find things.
• 10:22
  Mike Masnick: and Reddit closing off support for RSS feels like a really big blow for the open internet.
• 10:29
  Mike Masnick: One of the things that I thought was interesting about the announcement was they, suggest that instead of using RSS, people use Discord and sort of Discord's relay controls.
• 10:39
  Mike Masnick: And it struck me as this sort of weird thing where it's kind two walled gardens like, you know, collaborating a-against the open internet.
• 10:49
  Mike Masnick: and like, you know, I think both Discord and Reddit have actually been historically pretty good, supporters of an open web.
• 10:56
  Mike Masnick: there are much worse companies out there in terms of, like, closing down the open web.
• 11:00
  Mike Masnick: But this worries me, like, moving from an open syndication system into closed, proprietary API, setups, is a step away from an open web.
• 11:13
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, I think that is really, pretty damaging.
• 11:17
  Mike Masnick: Even if, like, part of the idea behind it that they claim, and or not this is the real reason or not, who knows?
• 11:23
  Mike Masnick: But they claim they're doing it because the RSS feeds were getting hammered by AI bots.
• 11:29
  Mike Masnick: And I think that is also part of an interesting discussion, and with some of the other stuff that you had found this week as well, right?
• 11:35
  Mike McCue: Yeah, exactly.
• 11:36
  Mike McCue: I mean, there are, a lot of content creators who are also seeing these bots hammering their websites and then taking content and summarizing that content, with no attribution or little, if any attribution, and no compensation, unless that creator happens to have been one of the few that did a licensing deal with just OpenAI or something like that.
• 11:58
  Mike McCue: But there was an article in The Guardian about, how, a set of publishers, are specifically lobbying, the UK to make bots and scraping illegal.
• 12:09
  Mike McCue: you know, and as we know, there's, of course, this is also a hot topic here in the US too.
• 12:13
  Mike McCue: This is, how does the open web contend with this, use case that was, nobody ever intended to have their content scraped and summarized, and some people would say stolen.
• 12:23
  Mike McCue: and so yeah, this is one of the big challenges I think the open web is facing right now, whether you're a platform like Reddit or you're a content creator, how do you deal with these bots?
• 12:33
  Mike McCue: What's the right model here?
• 12:34
  Mike McCue: how do we create something that can preserve an open web and can be sustainable?
• 12:39
  Mike McCue: How do content creators get, attribution and compensation here?
• 12:44
  Mike McCue: and importantly, what are the new business models or business thinking that would allow, the open web to flourish in a world where the bots are scraping everything and everyone is spending their time inside of a chatbot?
• 12:56
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 12:56
  Mike Masnick: And like, this is one of these situations that I think there are no easy answers to, but I think a lot of people are looking for easy answers or, or expecting that there's, like, a simple solution, and it's like ban the bots or, put in a copyright regime that just says you license everything or something along those lines.
• 13:15
  Mike Masnick: And I think the simple solutions that people are pushing for will have really, really negative consequences.
• 13:22
  Mike Masnick: But that's not to say that doing nothing won't also have r- or already has had really n- negative consequences.
• 13:29
  Mike Masnick: and certainly you're right.
• 13:31
  Mike Masnick: I think this is...
• 13:32
  Mike Masnick: It's interesting is that this is a tricky moment for people who do believe in the open web, and I consider myself in that camp.
• 13:39
  Mike Masnick: and, I think the open web and the openness of it and things like RSS are incredibly important and, are a huge part of, why the internet itself is valuable.
• 13:50
  Mike Masnick: And I worry about the eventual, closing down and, and making the internet proprietary.
• 13:55
  Mike Masnick: And yet, at the same time, you can say, well, because the internet is so open, because everything is freely available, that enabled this rush of bots that scrape everything You know, there was a report earlier this year that there's now more bot traffic than human traffic on the internet, though I remember hearing claims about that, claiming that same thing a decade ago as well, so, it's, I, I don't know how they exactly judge that.
• 14:19
  Mike Masnick: and so, like, there is this classic concept of the tragedy of the commons, right?
• 14:24
  Mike Masnick: Where, the idea was that if you have a, a commons where, cattle grazes, because it's a commons, people will overgraze, and it will destroy the commons, and there'll be no way for the cattle to, graze there anymore, and so having a commons destroys the commons.
• 14:40
  Mike Masnick: now there's been a lot of research that tends to suggest that actually people do figure out how to retain a commons.
• 14:48
  Mike Masnick: I, I'm, blanking on the economist's name, and I feel bad about that now, but, there was, uh, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics probably five or six years ago for her really detailed and thoughtful research into the fact that, like, the tragedy of the commons is probably not true because humans have agency, and we can look and see, the potential damage that is caused and figure out ways around it.
• 15:13
  Mike Masnick: but that doesn't mean that there's necessarily an easy answer to how to deal with that.
• 15:17
  Mike Masnick: And so I think we're living in that moment now where we see the potential tragedy of, the commons of the open internet, and everybody's trying to, deal with that in their own way.
• 15:28
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 15:28
  Mike McCue: How are you thinking about that as a creator, you know, as, as a publisher?
• 15:33
  Mike McCue: Are you seeing a lot of bot traffic detector?
• 15:35
  Mike McCue: Are you seeing a lot of scraping?
• 15:36
  Mike McCue: And what's
• 15:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 15:38
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 15:38
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we have.
• 15:40
  Mike Masnick: I feel it's interesting because, like, there are reports that I've heard from, like, other publishers who say, Oh, it's, it's almost impossible to run an internet service.
• 15:48
  Mike Masnick: We're constantly being taken down by bots." We haven't seen that.
• 15:52
  Mike Masnick: The traffic from bots, it does come in waves, and we have been hit a few times, and there have been a, couple of times where suddenly the website TechDirt is not working properly.
• 16:03
  Mike Masnick: Um, and, and when we go dig into it, it is usually because we're being hit with some sort of bot traffic.
• 16:09
  Mike Masnick: though we've just been-- this last month, we went through this process of really trying to figure out what was going on and to lock it down.
• 16:16
  Mike Masnick: And, and some of actually what we discovered was really actually some...
• 16:21
  Mike Masnick: I wouldn't say mistakes on our part, but there were things that we could have locked down better.
• 16:25
  Mike Masnick: And in fact, you know, one of the things that we saw was that we were getting bot traffic that was effectively, trapped in a loop on a page that, doesn't exist, that used to exist on an old version of TechDirt that somehow got cached somewhere, and for whatever reason, it's just sort of trapped bots in there hitting it over and over again.
• 16:45
  Mike Masnick: Uh, a-a-and so but, you know, so there is this element, like part of it is like I do feel some responsibility on our part, to fix that, which is something that we, we undertook over the last month.
• 16:54
  Mike Masnick: And saying like, if there are technological approaches to dealing with these things, you can, You should be able to manage that on your own.
• 17:00
  Mike Masnick: And I realize, like, some of that is, like, that is extra work for publishers.
• 17:05
  Mike Masnick: but, there is some value and importance there.
• 17:07
  Mike Masnick: And then beyond that, I, I do struggle, I struggle with a bunch of different aspects of this, and I, again, I don't have easy answers on it.
• 17:14
  Mike Masnick: you know, obviously I see these stories of publishers signing massive licensing deals, Reddit being one of them, right?
• 17:22
  Mike Masnick: They signed a big licensing deal with, Google, which is a little bit weird because Reddit doesn't hold the copyright in any of the content on their sites, and so it's a little odd for them to be able to sign a licensing deal.
• 17:33
  Mike Masnick: and, there's the pure business person hat aspect of this, like,"Gee, it would be nice if these giant AI companies signed license deals with me," as well.
• 17:45
  Mike Masnick: But then also a recognition that, whenever we've seen sort of licensing regimes, music is a big one where there are these big licensing regimes, they don't actually tend to work out well, especially for the smaller players and, Techdirt is definitely a smaller player in this market.
• 17:59
  Mike Masnick: you know, maybe you get a little bit of money, but you tend to get squeezed out because the bigger players have all of the leverage and all of the power, and you're just kind of along for the ride.
• 18:08
  Mike Masnick: And the nature of scraping content on the internet, there is value there obviously, but the value is in the aggregate.
• 18:14
  Mike Masnick: And any individual site, and, Techdirt has over 80,000 articles, which is a decent amount, but to an AI bot is not that much.
• 18:22
  Mike Masnick: And so, like, the actual value of our content is probably fairly minimal, so we would maybe get a, a small amount of money for it.
• 18:29
  Mike Masnick: And so my bigger fear though is that if we set it up so that everything requires some sort of licensing regime, then there are only a few companies that can afford to pay in the aggregate, right?
• 18:41
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it would be a small amount to us, but in the aggregate to everybody else, it would be a large amount.
• 18:46
  Mike Masnick: And the only companies that can pay that are the very biggest companies.
• 18:50
  Mike Masnick: And my big complaint about the internet these days is when we get bigger players that create silos and squeeze out smaller, decentralized, open players.
• 19:03
  Mike Masnick: And so I fear a world in which everything is licensed that we only have Anthropic and OpenAI and Google, you know, and maybe one or two bigger other players.
• 19:14
  Mike Masnick: But we don't have decentralized, we don't have open weight models, and we don't have these other sources where the users are actually in control and that things are more decentralized.
• 19:25
  Mike Masnick: and I think that takes us right back to the things that everybody is mad about.
• 19:28
  Mike Masnick: I think, and, and this may be going off on a bit of a tangent, but I'm known to do that.
• 19:33
  Mike Masnick: That, that, you know, A lot of people are really mad about AI these days, and I understand it.
• 19:38
  Mike Masnick: I think their anger is slightly misdirected.
• 19:41
  Mike Masnick: I think a lot of the anger is really about big centralized companies that control too much and have too much power, and that makes people nervous, and I think that is correct.
• 19:53
  Mike Masnick: And I think the answer to that is that we should have more smaller, more decentralized, more distributed, more open opportunities out there.
• 20:01
  Mike Masnick: And I fear in, like, saying, like,"Oh, the big AI companies are such a problem that they need to pay all these publishers," that we lock in only the big players and we lose out on that more decentralized, more open, you know, and it just sort of entrenches the power of the big players.
• 20:16
  Mike Masnick: So that, that's my, my, my, my rant.
• 20:19
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 20:20
  Mike McCue: You know, and I, I think in addition to licensing being not particularly great, solution, because there are a lot of, you know, smaller creators who really won't make much money.
• 20:30
  Mike McCue: I, I've talked to artists who are on Spotify, who are actually relatively big artists like within jazz and other, categories, and they basically don't even bother checking their Spotify account because it's just so little money.
• 20:43
  Mike McCue: So there's, there's that.
• 20:44
  Mike McCue: But then on top of that, I think one of the, big things that I hear from creators is why abstract away our relationship with our audience through a licensing deal, right?
• 20:55
  Mike McCue: You know, being able to maintain that direct relationship with an audience member is so fundamental to a creator's livelihood and, building community out of those direct relationships.
• 21:07
  Mike McCue: And people who have the direct relationship with a creator and can engage with that creator in a more direct way are way more likely to pay.
• 21:15
  Mike McCue: So it's a fundamentally better business.
• 21:17
  Mike McCue: It's more sustainable, it's decentralized, and I think this is one of the things that a licensing solution will, not address that at all.
• 21:26
  Mike McCue: And I think it'll actually be far worse for content creators, in addition to all the other problems you, you highlighted.
• 21:32
  Mike McCue: and so, I think that, like, the big challenge now is, well, the internet isn't just used by people, it's used by bots, and we have to accept that and design around that, and create business models that accept that and basically enable, content creators to participate in this agentic web that's now this new era of the web.
• 21:52
  Mike McCue: And I think that's very doable.
• 21:53
  Mike McCue: I think that is absolutely achievable.
• 21:56
  Mike McCue: I think personally, every content creator should be making an agent.
• 21:58
  Mike McCue: you know, we used to make websites and then we made apps.
• 22:01
  Mike McCue: We should be making agents now, and agents should be able to be active participants on this agentic web.
• 22:06
  Mike McCue: And then creators can set up the rules for how you can engage with their agent.
• 22:10
  Mike McCue: you know, is there some content that's free or some content that you're gonna need to pay for?
• 22:15
  Mike McCue: ask me a question.
• 22:15
  Mike McCue: You can actually get some value, from my content, but I'll charge for it, right?
• 22:20
  Mike McCue: And I think there's an opportunity, I think, to recast how do content creators, and, and really websites in general exist in this, agentic realm.
• 22:30
  Mike McCue: rather than walling yourself off from this, right, there's an opportunity here.
• 22:35
  Mike McCue: And I think, that's the key moment we're in, is trying to navigate to that so that we can really have a web that is, hey, we're-- it's cool with that there's agents crawling around on this web.
• 22:45
  Mike McCue: That's, by design, and you can actually participate and take advantage of that.
• 22:49
  Mike McCue: But also users themselves can also engage directly with content creators.
• 22:54
  Mike McCue: and so we have to get to that.
• 22:56
  Mike McCue: Otherwise, yeah, we're gonna see, I think, a, a, continued degradation of the open web
• 23:00
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:01
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's, it's interesting.
• 23:02
  Mike Masnick: It's, one of these things where, like, instinctually I think you're right, though I'm still...
• 23:08
  Mike Masnick: And this is, just I think probably a failure of my own imagination to, like, see exactly how that works.
• 23:13
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and
• 23:14
  Mike McCue: Well, there's a lot of hand-waving there.
• 23:16
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 23:17
  Mike Masnick: The, the, but this is like, I mean, but that's true of like every major innovation that, changes stuff, where it's like in retrospect it will seem really obvious how all this fits together.
• 23:26
  Mike Masnick: But beforehand you're like,"Wait, how would that actually work?" But I, I mean, it is interesting.
• 23:31
  Mike Masnick: One of the things that I, have been thinking about is the fact that like to some extent we've spent, whatever, 20, 25 years using search as a very weak form of agent, right?
• 23:42
  Mike Masnick: Like you need an answer to something and you will ask Google to go find it.
• 23:47
  Mike Masnick: And nowadays like, so search is sort of considered natural, but it really is kind of a very weak, not very powerful agent, right?
• 23:56
  Mike Masnick: It is sort of going out onto the internet and trying to give you a result based on information that you have.
• 24:02
  Mike Masnick: And so I do think there is something to the idea of taking the concept of the agent and the way that we've used search in the past and sort of taking that to the next level and saying like, the agent is there to find you the information that you need.
• 24:15
  Mike Masnick: But there is a, it is truly an agent, right?
• 24:17
  Mike Masnick: there should truly be an a- agentic relationship where it is representing you and there is some responsibility that you have in controlling and instructing and prompting the agent to do stuff on your behalf.
• 24:31
  Mike Masnick: you know, I'm, I'm sick of this idea of like agents going rogue, right?
• 24:34
  Mike Masnick: There's like, there's a responsibility somewhere and we, we have to figure out how and where that, that is and how that works.
• 24:41
  Mike Masnick: but I think, yeah, I think there is some- something interesting.
• 24:44
  Mike Masnick: I will note, by the way, since we're both, you know, we talk a lot about the, open social web, one of the other things I had considered as my fun thing before I saw the tiny little office, was something called DelveTown, which I don't know if you saw this, uh, but somebody just released this week, built on@Proto, which is what powers Blue Sky, ding, ding, ding, I'm on the board.
• 25:06
  Mike Masnick: Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer.
• 25:08
  Mike Masnick: so someone built on@Proto what is effectively a Blue Sky but for agents, to see sort of where it goes.
• 25:15
  Mike Masnick: And it's, they're sort of like, experimenting with it and saying like,"Agents are going to be among us on the internet, and wouldn't it be better if they were on an open protocol rather than locked in, in some billionaire's silo?" And so they're just sort of experimenting with it.
• 25:32
  Mike Masnick: It's very early.
• 25:33
  Mike Masnick: It just launched a couple days ago, and I was looking at it and I was like,"Oh, this is, this is kind of interesting to see how we're going to interact with agents." And because it is hand-wavy and we don't know yet.
• 25:46
  Mike Masnick: The best way to see what happens is to do experiments, and something like DelveTown strikes me as an interesting experiment, and something that'll be more productive than publishers rushing to, various government officials and saying,"Ban the bots!" You know?
• 26:01
  Mike Masnick: Like, I don't, I don't think that that is a productive way to go about all of this.
• 26:06
  Mike McCue: Right.
• 26:07
  Mike McCue: You know, ban the bots, but not Google'cause they crawl us, but only if they refer back to us or you know, you know, the, bots are bad and bots are good.
• 26:17
  Mike McCue: It depends on, how do you interface with these?
• 26:20
  Mike McCue: how do you create a presence on this agentic web that, can, enable you to participate in the, the bot realm?
• 26:28
  Mike McCue: The bots are definitely here, and they're going to increase.
• 26:31
  Mike McCue: I think that, the amount of traffic to sites, it's gonna be, you know, if it isn't already dwarfed by bots, it will be.
• 26:38
  Mike McCue: It's, very clear that this is where things are going, and it will just exponentially increase.
• 26:43
  Mike McCue: So, you know, I think figuring out a way where we can, as a collective open web, embrace the fact that there will be automated access, which is all we ha- uh, to your point, there always has been this, right?
• 26:55
  Mike McCue: It's a matter of now sort of modernizing our thinking around, how do we, a-a-agentify our content and our, you know, the value we're providing.
• 27:05
  Mike McCue: I think this is also interesting, you know, as it relates to, other services like Amazon being crawled by Muse and then Amazon blocking that.
• 27:13
  Mike McCue: So there's a, there's a whole new kind of, approach that has to be...
• 27:17
  Mike McCue: I think there's an opportunity for open protocols, of which, by the way, there are many.
• 27:21
  Mike McCue: the great thing about this space is that you have things like A2A and, the Agent Resource Directory, which a number of companies are getting behind, and it's an open protocol, right?
• 27:31
  Mike McCue: You have things like DIDS and@Proto, and there's enough open protocol, capability, I think, to find a solution here that could be a breakthrough for the web.
• 27:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 27:43
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 27:44
  Mike Masnick: But it is, it is definitely a sort of cloudy prediction in terms of how that plays out, but it'll be interesting.
• 27:49
  Mike Masnick: But I think we will segue from that onto our first eye-catching story in which we're gonna be talking about bots of a different kind.
• 27:58
  Mike Masnick: the main story this week was all about, agentic bots.
• 28:02
  Mike Masnick: but there was another story that made the rounds this week about, other kinds of bots and misinformation.
• 28:08
  Mike Masnick: And, Mike, do you wanna describe the, facts of this story?
• 28:11
  Mike McCue: Yeah.
• 28:12
  Mike McCue: Yeah, I was scrolling through my feeds and I ran across this, like, awesome news that a bunch of Russian bots had been taken out by a Ukraine drone strike.
• 28:23
  Mike McCue: You know, Yandex data centers in Russia had been bombed, and as a result, all these Russian bots had just like, been cut in half overnight.
• 28:31
  Mike McCue: And, uh, there was, there was a, Polish political scientist who shared this information out.
• 28:38
  Mike McCue: uh, Zelensky apparently himself had said,"Hey, you know, we're, we're like striking, against the bots." and there, there was some- somebody made a, graph of all this Russian bot traffic dropping.
• 28:51
  Mike McCue: and then this political scientist, from Poland shared it, and it just went viral.
• 28:56
  Mike McCue: And, and, you know, I saw it, I was like,"Great." I was getting ready to hit the repost button, but, you know, as I scroll...
• 29:02
  Mike McCue: I've, I've been bitten by this before, and I was like,"Hmm, let me think about it." And I scroll down further, and I didn't get very much farther and started to see people saying,"Wait a minute, this is not true.
• 29:13
  Mike McCue: This is actually false.
• 29:14
  Mike McCue: And in fact, that graph is AI-generated."
• 29:17
  Mike Masnick: interesting.
• 29:18
  Mike Masnick: Oh, I didn't even realize that the, the graph was AI-generated.
• 29:20
  Mike Masnick: I'd seen a chart that showed that Yandex bot traffic had dropped precipitously, but this is where the definition of bot means different things to different people.
• 29:30
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, Yandex is a search engine, and so it does crawling.
• 29:34
  Mike Masnick: And so yes, the crawling did go down, but that's different than like social media bots pushing propaganda and hatred and so like, you know, I think over the next few hours there were a bunch of, disinformation researchers who were like,"Mm, the propaganda bots are still going full force." And like there's no change to like mentions of, different things and different controversial places and elections and, things like that.
• 29:59
  Mike Masnick: But, you know, this story reminded me of the fact that like, misinformation is often demand-based.
• 30:05
  Mike Masnick: there's this belief that it is a supply thing, like, oh, if we just stop the Russian bots misinformation bots from lying, like all the bad things will disappear.
• 30:15
  Mike Masnick: But the reality is like it is often confirmation bias, right?
• 30:18
  Mike Masnick: People are looking for things that they believe in and then they're quick to repost them.
• 30:22
  Mike Masnick: And everyone is guilty of this.
• 30:24
  Mike Masnick: I am guilty of this.
• 30:25
  Mike Masnick: Like this is not a, you know, people who believe false things, like I, I can't blame them'cause there are things where it's like I see something, I absolutely wanna believe it, it feels true, and therefore you reshare it, and it turns out to be misinformation.
• 30:38
  Mike Masnick: So this, happened to be misinformation about how misinformation spreads, which, which is perhaps a little ironic.
• 30:47
  Mike Masnick: Um-
• 30:48
  Mike McCue: Very, very meta.
• 30:49
  Mike McCue: But, you know, the thing that was, great was that this political scienc-- There was, um, a great article in Mother Jones that, Anna Merlan wrote, and she did some great reporting on this.
• 30:59
  Mike McCue: And this political scien-scientist, issued a retraction, deleted his post, Then there was additional, research, like where did this, AI-generated graph even come from?
• 31:08
  Mike McCue: And, you know, I felt bad for him because I, you know, I have done that too.
• 31:11
  Mike McCue: I remember, you know, in the run-up to the 2016 election, I reposted something, I forget what it was, but on, on Twitter.
• 31:18
  Mike McCue: and it turned out to be completely false.
• 31:21
  Mike McCue: And so I had to issue my own retraction, like,"Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 31:24
  Mike McCue: This was not actually true." but yeah, you know what, especially, I think, you're very vulnerable to being taken in when it sort of aligns with your worldview, but also sort of connects logically in with some framework you have.
• 31:36
  Mike McCue: You're like,"Oh, of course.
• 31:37
  Mike McCue: Of course that makes sense," right?
• 31:38
  Mike McCue: Repost.
• 31:40
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 31:41
  Mike Masnick: It is interesting.
• 31:42
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I've done that too, and I've certainly apologized for sharing misinformation.
• 31:45
  Mike Masnick: But I do think it, it is important that, both you and I, like, if we're caught, we're willing to admit it.
• 31:50
  Mike Masnick: the ones that annoy me perhaps are there are people who repost misinformation and then just refuse to take it down, or even say like,"Well, I feel this is true, and therefore it's okay to share." And it's like, it's okay to share it at the beginning, but then once you find out that it is untrue, you should recognize that and apologize and
• 32:09
  Mike McCue: Elon.
• 32:09
  Mike Masnick: whatever.
• 32:10
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, Yeah, That's a whole other story.
• 32:13
  Mike McCue: whole other thing, whole other level.
• 32:15
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 32:16
  Mike Masnick: so moving on to our next eye-catching story.
• 32:19
  Mike Masnick: I saw a piece in Forbes this week which was quite incredible for people who, live and die in the sort of trust and safety world and are trying to deal with scammers, about scam ads on TikTok.
• 32:34
  Mike Masnick: and, you know, scam ads is a topic that comes up all the time.
• 32:37
  Mike Masnick: People are trying to fight them and deal with them.
• 32:39
  Mike Masnick: But according to a number of insiders that Forbes was able to speak to, basically in the last year or so, it appears that TikTok changed the rules on scam ads to allow many more of them to go through.
• 32:53
  Mike Masnick: and this included, as the article details, scam ads that are literally like advertising name brand products that they just never send.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: They just get people to buy it and then the products themselves are never sent.
• 33:05
  Mike Masnick: They're, usually advertised for much cheaper than you would normally get them and so people are like,"Oh, I can get this fancy handbag or sweater or whatever," and then it never arrives.
• 33:14
  Mike Masnick: but TikTok changed the rules so that that is no longer a bannable offense
• 33:19
  Mike McCue: Yeah
• 33:19
  Mike Masnick: for, for advertisers, which is kind of
• 33:21
  Mike McCue: Unreal
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:23
  Mike Masnick: And they, they more or less admit that it's entirely about driving more revenue.
• 33:28
  Mike Masnick: and I think that there's like a sort of a larger geopolitical angle to this, which is as we've also discussed, TikTok was effectively or sort of or kind of banned in the US if it was still owned by China.
• 33:41
  Mike Masnick: then so th- yeah, but then had to be sold even though Donald Trump sort of ignored the law for a while and then sort of forced the sale to friends of his effectively.
• 33:53
  Mike Masnick: but, recognizing that they had to be sold, they had strong incentives to show higher revenue because it was a, they were being forced into a sale which is never-- you lose all your leverage, in that case.
• 34:05
  Mike Masnick: But if they could show higher revenue, they could probably get a, a higher price at the end.
• 34:09
  Mike Masnick: So if that means allowing in a whole bunch of scam ads just to juice the revenue numbers to sell for a higher, higher amount, and then it's no longer your problem because somebody else owns the platform, that feels like really bad incentives all around.
• 34:24
  Mike McCue: 100%.
• 34:25
  Mike McCue: And, you know, I run an ad business with Flipboard and have learned, especially when it comes to self-service or programmatic ads, that's a whole moderation effort in and of itself.
• 34:35
  Mike McCue: And if you don't moderate that, bad things will happen.
• 34:38
  Mike McCue: and so this is a decision, you know, this is not one of these like,"Oh, shoot, we didn't realize we had done..." You know, this is a decision from the, top down.
• 34:47
  Mike McCue: This is a strategic decision that, moderation doesn't matter.
• 34:51
  Mike McCue: and I, I would expect that this would bleed out into, moderation everywhere else as well, because that will also drive more revenue, all the misinformation, et cetera.
• 35:00
  Mike McCue: So it is, it's a conscious decision that they're making to drive engagement and revenue, I guess perhaps for some sort of short-term, near-term sale or something.
• 35:11
  Mike McCue: I've kinda lost track of what's going on with these guys recently, but it's all very confusing.
• 35:16
  Mike McCue: But what isn't confusing is, when you allow, anything to go, an anything-goes model for advertising, and moderation in general, bad things can and will happen.
• 35:28
  Mike McCue: And, they've just decided that that's okay
• 35:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 35:31
  Mike Masnick: I mean, one thing I'll note on that is that there are claims in the past on other social media platforms that they don't care about these things, they don't care about scams, that they allow anything to go because they just wanna boost revenue.
• 35:43
  Mike Masnick: and I often think that those are exaggerated and that those aren't accurate because most companies do have a long enough term view to realize that that doesn't last, right?
• 35:52
  Mike Masnick: Like if your advertisers are scamming all of your users, your users are gonna go away and they're gonna have a bad experience.
• 35:57
  Mike Masnick: And
• 35:57
  Mike McCue: And you're gonna lose your good advertisers and so on.
• 36:00
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 36:00
  Mike Masnick: And so for most companies that have a longer term view, I think they do take these things seriously.
• 36:05
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you talked about, you know, Flip- with Flipboard.
• 36:08
  Mike McCue: And it's never perfect.
• 36:09
  Mike McCue: And so you can always be held, you know,"Hey, you guys are..." Right.
• 36:13
  Mike McCue: But these guys are the specifically deciding to get rid of all of these
• 36:18
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 36:19
  Mike Masnick: But then there are some examples and I think what it really has to do with is this idea that they were forced into this short-term thinking because the only thing they had to do was get over the line of the sale.
• 36:29
  Mike Masnick: There's a separate, issue which w-we don't even have time to go into, but I'll just mention in passing and we'll put a link in the show notes, which is that Politico reported this week for all the talk of how TikTok had to be sold and not controlled by the Chinese, ByteDance that owned the company originally, that they haven't really separated.
• 36:47
  Mike Masnick: This was s-sort of all for show, that apparently they still have the same internal communications tool.
• 36:52
  Mike Masnick: They can communicate with each other.
• 36:53
  Mike Masnick: In some cases, they share offices.
• 36:55
  Mike Masnick: and so all of this feels a little bit hand-wavy.
• 36:59
  Mike McCue: Why does that not surprise me?
• 37:01
  Mike McCue: It's just...
• 37:02
  Mike McCue: Yeah
• 37:03
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 37:03
  Mike Masnick: so anyways, on that note, but yes, bad incentives lead to bad results, and I think this is a, an example of where there were clearly bad incentives in place and, and it led to a bunch of people being scammed and potentially still being scammed.
• 37:16
  Mike Masnick: With that, I think we're going to move on to our Patreon-only section.
• 37:21
  Mike Masnick: if you are subscribed to Patreon, stay tuned and you'll hear it.
• 37:24
  Mike Masnick: If you are not, we're gonna be talking about a ruling that came out in the 11th Circuit yesterday regarding Florida's age-gating law.
• 37:32
  Mike Masnick: And I will note also, we may be talking very, very briefly because it came out, minutes before we started recording this.
• 37:39
  Mike Masnick: There was a second ruling in the 11th Circuit this morning, which is related to that one, and I haven't read it yet, but I, I did spend a lot of time reading the one from yesterday.
• 37:48
  Mike Masnick: but it is actually a really important ruling because it is allowing age-gating of social media in Florida to move forward.
• 37:55
  Mike Masnick: and this is a big deal because there are a bunch of these laws and a bunch of them are being challenged, and Supreme Court has not fully weighed in.
• 38:02
  Mike Masnick: And I think the 11th Circuit here interpreted a bunch of Supreme Court rulings from the past 20 years in a way that I found to be dangerous and problematic, but, may now set the standard for other places and eventually the Supreme Court as well.
• 38:16
  Mike Masnick: So I think it's a really important ruling that we should pay attention to.
• 38:19
  Mike Masnick: and if you wanna listen to that and you are not subscribed to the Patreon, now is a good time to go subscribe to the Patreon and you can hear, this conversation we're about to have, as well as getting access to the podcast a little bit earlier.
• 38:30
  Mike Masnick: But for everyone else, thanks for listening.
• 38:34
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• 38:37
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• 38:45
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• 38:48
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• 38:55
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