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Aram Zucker-Scharff

Jan 29 • 9 tweets • 2 min read

I think there's a clear case with Spotify, they pay his salary, they're responsible. Some of the other cases coming up are less clear, but I think equally correct...

Anyone can self nominate on top Apple Podcasts for example, and if it was just a directory, a lack of moderation, while a different case, is also bad and needs to be addressed. But I don't think it's just that problem...

Apple Podcasts intermediates itself between downloader and site. When you download a podcast to listen on Apple News you're usually getting a cached version off of Apple's servers. So, for podcasts listed by Apple, it essentially acts as a CDN...

And, as we've seen, CDNs rightfully need to consider responsibility. By intermediating between source & user, it's easier for a source to scale up, it makes building an audience cheaper &, by caching the promotional metadata of a podcast, Apple makes it easier to find an audience

(I believe this same principle applies to AMP, if Google is caching a site's content, they're fundamentally making it cheaper to operate, insulating it from market forces that might otherwise be a way for users to express their preference against the site)

Cache layers can and do make ethical choices because they're a powerful tool for any site's growth and maintenence. As we have seen, many hate sites simply shut down without their cache systems. I suspect that is, to a lesser degree--but still, true for podcasts.

If play on your values as a podcast platform & dunk on Spotify in tweets, it's reasonable to ask if you are going to act on these values you place in opposition to Spotify's by doing something to stop making spreading misinformation and hate cheaper & take action on your platform

*to

https://twitter.com/CheckMyAdsHQ/status/1487327680957665282

So yeah Apple, maybe don't crow about how your values net you wins on Twitter until you delist and stop giving free caching services to infow*rs's misinformation and hate.

https://twitter.com/CheckMyAdsHQ/status/1487327680957665282

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

@Chronotope

Jan 30

The problem with many digital ad conversations is modern capitalism has bent our society into thinking that earning money makes a company virtuous... but there are many ad tech companies that are built on nothing but fraud. Billions of dollars built on entirely imaginary value.

The ad tech ecosystem grew in product count from 100ish to over 8,000 in just a decade. That isn't real growth. Those aren't real profits. It's fraud built on top of misleading metrics built on top of BS. A stack of fictitious capital only barely held up by user data.

Ad tech firms will demand that the share they cull from user data, or even really from the illusion of user data, somehow be maintained for them. Because they claim profit is intrinsically good t/f it most be preserved. Profit is not intrinsically good for society.

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

@Chronotope

Dec 17, 2021

My grandfather is a doctor & medical researcher & has been very concerned with COVID (rightfully so) and, in the biggest indication to me that the world is shifting back into lockdown, has decided, w/input from all of us, to cancel the in-person family holiday event this weekend.

I think this is absolutely the right choice. We have a ton of at-risk people at all ages of the family. Considering that he was ok with in-person Thanksgiving I can't think of a more foreboding sign to me personally that NYC/the US/the world is backsliding into a lockdown.

"The new despair wells up from the gap between what we knew & what we did, like sulfur seeping from deep-sea vents. Having had the chance to tame the virus and failed to do so, and then fallen prey to exactly the risks that we foresaw—this is a new burden" theatlantic.com/health/archive…

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

@Chronotope

Dec 16, 2021

Designing media companies with a focus purely on scale is a bad idea. cjr.org/the_media_toda…

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1425092154242781185

👀

https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1425092154242781185

The biggest problem is that almost every media company that chases scale never accounts for the resulting costs and that's what does them in. Hopefully Vox can avoid this... but they are def fighting against the tide of history if that's the way they are looking at this deal.

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Boomers refusing to move on professionally and just slowly washing up to the top of every profession while becoming, in average, increasingly incapable of handling their accruing responsibilities exhausts me. The negative results are always exhaustingly predictable.

I'm already hearing bad things about the new Jon Stew*rt show, and I dunno what people expected. We didn't "need" him during Trump or now, he was great for the time he was in. Times have changed. Should have let him go off and produce, lobby, whatever;...

let people who have to live in this mess step up to take the lead instead of maintaining the gerontocracy run by those who aren't going to have to live through the climate apocalypse.

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Had an interesting conversation with a restaurant manager today. Apparently because COVID has changed hours for restaurants and they were not evenly updating services the big listing services are scraping each other, so...

if you update hours on Yelp but not Google your new hours can get overwritten by a bad updating process, & b/c updates can be cached, they can't update their hours, b/c the 3 big services (Google, Yelp, Facebook) keep undoing the updates with cached data scraped from each other.

Now, finally, I understand why the listing services have been so wonky listing hours as places reopened.

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Aram Zucker-Scharff

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Oct 17, 2021

wut

Who at NBC was like "yeah, Frogger, the kids fking love Frogger. They play it all day and all they want now is to be *poignant pause* inside Frogger!"