Sunday, June 23, 2019
Religious and spiritual content gets hot on social networks
Online credit biza Paytm Postpaid is transferring its loan book to Clix Capital
Ravelry, a social networking site for knitting with ~829K MAUs, bans all posts supportive of the Trump administration, which it claims supports white supremacy (Samira Sadeque/The Daily Dot)
Ravelry, a social networking site for knitting with ~829K MAUs, bans all posts supportive of the Trump administration, which it claims supports white supremacy — Ravelry, the leading social networking website for knitting activities, banned posts that are supportive of President Donald Trump and his administration.
Gillmor Gang: Cash Machine
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Sunday June 23, 2019. Streamed live to Twitter, or just slightly after the fact. Debates and free media, or how Facebook could take crypto global with Libra and the Democrats the White House in 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @ekolsky, @kteare, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
Internet companies that call themselves "platforms" instead of publishers have no special legal protections or obligations under the Communications Decency Act (Mike Masnick/Techdirt)
Internet companies that call themselves “platforms” instead of publishers have no special legal protections or obligations under the Communications Decency Act — from the stop-pushing-this-nonsense dept — Alexis Madrigal, over at the Atlantic has a mostly interesting piece recounting …
Review: Teenagers must ward off mischievous supernatural beings in Jinn
Supernatural creatures threaten a group of high school students in the new Netflix series Jinn.
A high school field trip to the ancient archaeological site of Petra turns tragic, and supernatural creatures are unleashed to prey on the living in Jinn, the first Arabic language original series from Netflix. Forget the Westernized concept of genies found in our popular culture, like Aladdin or I Dream of Jeannie. This series draws on more traditional Arabian/Islamic mythology for its portrayal of the jinn, and it's all the richer for it.
(Mild spoilers below.)
Mira (Salma Malhas), a high school student in Amman, Jordan, is struggling with the recent loss of her mother and brother, and her mixed feelings for her jealous boyfriend, Fahed (Yasser Al Had), who is pressuring her for sex. When the high school class takes a field trip to Petra, tensions emerge, largely driven by Tareq (Abd Alrazzaq Jarkas), your typical high school bully with a broad misogynistic streak for good measure. He and his cronies torment the shyly anxious Yassin (Sultan Alkhail) because they think he ratted them out to the teacher for their many misdeeds.
Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Privacy experts worry about how Amazon and Walmart will store and use videos captured by cameras worn by delivery associates during in-home deliveries (Sam Dean/Los Angeles Times)
Privacy experts worry about how Amazon and Walmart will store and use videos captured by cameras worn by delivery associates during in-home deliveries — The war for the e-commerce shopper is fought on the battlefield of convenience. One-click ordering, same-day delivery …
Who’s going to use the big bad Libra?
There is so much to write about Libra, and so much which has already been written misses the mark, mostly, I think, because most pundits haven’t spent much time in the developing world, which is very clearly the target market here. Just look at its launch video:
I’ve seen apocalyptic reactions warning of Libra ushering in a new dystopia: the alleged logic appears to be 1) Libra will immediately conquer the world 2) Libra comes from Facebook 3) Facebook is evil 4) it’s the end of the world! I am most baffled by that first postulate. If you’re a rich Westerner, there are already dozens of payment systems out there, most of which offer huge advantages compared to Libra, such as reversible / contestable transactions, frequent-flier miles, and credit lines.
I’ve seen dozens of technical and regulatory and political and high-level analyses of Libra, many of which are worthwhile, but so far, little which has dwelt on its actual intended users, according to the white paper: the unbanked. That isn’t quite the category for whom Libra is something new, interestng, and important. But no one else seems to be talking about this. It’s strange to see this cornucopia of hotly argued reactions which go deep on pretty much everything but its actual users.
The white paper cites 1.7 billion people as “unbanked,” a number which is … questionable. Its source is the 2017 World Bank Global Findex database. “Aha,” you might think, “that sounds pretty definitive and recent,” and it does — but the same source also notes that 515 million people became “banked” between 2014 and 2017. By the time Libra actually launches, the “1.7 billion unbanked” might have dropped by fully half. Not because of banks: because of mobile money providers.
From its birth with M-Pesa in East Africa, mobile money has expanded massively worldwide. Orange Money in West Africa, Ovo in Indonesia, Paytm in India, and of course WeChat and Alipay in China: money on your phone is nothing at all new in most of the developing world.
This might make you think that Libra already has a legion of competitors who speak the local languages, understand the markets, and have pervasive distribution, just as in the rich world — but no. The whole point of Libra, after all, is that it’s not a local currency, but a global currency, which is both its competitive advantage and its Achilles heel. And its true market isn’t the unbanked per se; it’s people who might have a mobile money account, but no straightforward access to any global currency.
Why would that access matter? Because international remittances, transfers to the developing world from (usually) family members in the rich world, total half a trillion dollars a year, much of which is sent by slow, high-fee processors such as Western Union. The Libra whitepaper, accordingly, prominently cites “remittances” in its problem statement …
… but makes only a few handwavey mentions of exchanges. Why does that matter? Because remittances are indeed a huge marked () but as I’ve argued before, “yes, it’s great if you can send five thousand FaceCoin to your family in Ghana for an 0.1% fee. But then your family in Ghana has to somehow convert them to cedis at an exchange — a task which is, as of this writing, likely to be slower, much clumsier, far more user-hostile, and very possibly even more expensive than the usual medium(s) of remittances.”
“So what,” you might think, “doesn’t matter if the local businesses take Libra.” But a) it’s very hard to get every local business in a developing country to accept a new payment method b) eventually they too will have to pay exchange fees, in order to pay local taxes. (Before any dreamers suggest governments accept taxes in Libra and use it as a national currency, I assure you they won’t be eager to give up all control over their monetary supply.)
So for truly mass adoption, especially for business and institutional transactions, the exchange experience will be absolutely key. There’s a lot of competition in the remittance space, and they usually handle the actual currency exchange for you. It seems like Facebook is implicitly relying on the marketplace to provide highly competitive, liquid, effective, efficient, well-publicized Libra-to-local exchanges in every nation where it is used. Maybe. But that’s asking for a lot.
On the smaller scale, though — individuals and families — Libra makes a lot more sense. It won’t replace M-Pesa, but I don’t think it’s trying to. Instead Libra wants to be to M-Pesa what the US dollar is to the Kenyan shilling. Libra could become the global mobile reserve currency, maybe not for institutions, but for individuals. And on that level, exchanges are less important.
The US dollar is acceptable, and transferable, in small amounts almost everywhere around the world; there’s hardly a poor country where it doesn’t act as a de facto shadow currency. (I’ve been to places where taxi drivers are experts on the various different issuances of the US $20 become some are easier to forge than others.) Furthermore, it’s often hoarded purely because it’s hard currency, unlike the local currency — consider Venezuela, or Zimbabwe, even Argentina.
I expect the same will be true of Libra. Individuals won’t need to open an account at any exchange; instead they’ll follow the Local Bitcoins model, and just transfer Libra to a local moneychanger, who will receive their Libra and send back local currency in exchange for — hopefully — a very competitive fee.
If that happens, if Facebook’s sheer size and reach makes that option near-universally available, then even if Libra doesn’t catch on in the rich world, or with businesses and institutions, then for the first time ever, individuals and families around the world will be able to receive, save, spend, and exchange a global hard currency, immediately, across borders, using only their phones, for fees (hopefully) drastically less than e.g. Western Union — without having to deal with the volatility, limited utility, and user-hostility of decentralized cryptocurrencies. That would be a huge deal, and a great good thing.
It’s by no means guaranteed. Much about Libra remains uncertain. It will somehow have to crack the extremely tough nut of the identity problem. And while not technically part of Facebook, it still comes from Facebook, a company increasingly despised by politicians and regulators (and journalists), which is at least one strike against it from the beginning, and makes many people question the true motives behind Libra.
But let’s not throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. If Libra manages to succeed, at scale, it will be massively important and highly important to an enormous number of people around the world. Be skeptical, by all means. Be concerned about privacy. Ask pointed questions. Remain well aware that it is not a decentralized solution and may never be. I’m with you: I’m a well-documented harsh critic of Facebook myself.
But in your rush to outrage and condemnation — as righteous as those might feel — please don’t ignore Libra’s potential to do a whole lot of good for many millions of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable. Do you think a decentralized, permissionless, censorship-resistance version would be better? I agree! Call me when one is anywhere near as usable as Libra is likely to be.
Week-in-Review: YouTube’s awful comments and Google’s $1B tech-free investment
Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.
Last week, I talked about how the top gaming industry franchises were proving immortal and how that could change. I mainly asked questions and I got some great answers in my email. Keep the feedback coming.
An interesting corollary to that conversation was Niantic releasing its Harry Potter title this week, a game that takes liberal gameplay cues from Pokémon GO but attaches it to new IP. The big question is whether Niantic can strike gold twice; here’s an Extra Crunch interview my colleague Greg did with the startup’s CEO.
This week, the biggest tech topic at hand from the big companies was probably Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency, I’d normally dig into that but my colleague Josh did such a bang-up job breaking down Libra and why it’s important that I don’t feel the need to. You can read his explainer below.
Facebook announces Libra cryptocurrency: All you need to know
In the midst of scouring this week’s headlines, a pretty low-key story from Friday caught my eye detailing how YouTube was testing a version of its app where the comments were hidden by default. Companies test this stuff all the time and it’s hardly a commitment but it did make me reflect on how the nature of user-submitted comments has shifted and how certain platforms develop community cultures based on the way those comments are sorted.
Web comments have been searching for their final form for a while now. Twitter turned comments into the main 140 character dish, but Twitter’s influence is getting baked into a ton of platforms. Sites like Instagram are starting to gain a greater understanding of how users want responses to complement their content and the opportunities they’ve seized on really showcase the user-submitted opportunities being wasted by platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
YouTube downgrading their comment visibility kind of highlights what a cesspool the company has allowed them to turn into, but rather than being a place where people are vile, the platform just hasn’t grown them into something useful or exciting over the past decade.
As Instagram continues to become a place where more and more famous users interact with each other, the comment fields are becoming the place where users “bond” with the accounts they follow even if they’re still lurking around and reading how the account responds to other high-profile users.
This is how public channels with big audiences should operate. Sure, it’s partially a result of the culture of the platform, but algorithms can shape these cultures.
The issue is so many other comment systems are seemingly organized to treat anonymous users, real-name users and verified personalities the same. Ascribing an equal weight to all of these types of content is kind of a surprisingly quaint way to handle user-generated content, it’s also a great way for platforms to find engagement ceilings and the limits of what spam can become.
You don’t have to go searching far through TechCrunch’s stories to find some good old-fashioned “how I earned $72/hour working from home” spam, but just because something isn’t spam doesn’t means it’s worthwhile. Platforms have developed their own comment memes based on what can play the algorithms, it’s not particularly useful, “Like if Jimmy Fallon brought you here,” “Like if you’re watching this in 2019.”
Platforms organized around building communities have an incentive to elevate anonymous voices and foster relationships and dialogue. Back in the Gawker days, most of my time on the site was spent digging through the comments looking for commenters I recognized and enjoying their dialogue. That’s what Reddit has become in a lot of ways, a place where the posts are secondary to the reactions, but the forum systems of web 1.0 aren’t made for such general influencer-focused platforms of 2019 and it’s an area where there are a lot of wasted opportunities.
YouTube comments have garnered this reputation for being so laughable bad because the company has let the average of what’s submitted define them, acting as a one-size fits all for platforms that are decidedly more dynamic.
Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com
On to the rest of the week’s news.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.
- Tesla paints it black (for a price)
Tesla is looking to keep those margins hopping and there next play to make your Tesla a bit more pricey is by making the white paint job on its vehicles, making white the standard color. It may seem like a rough deal, especially when you can a monitor stand for your new Apple Display for the same price. Read more here about why Elon did this. - Google drops a B on the Bay
To those living in the arena of Silicon Valley, it’s no secret that the housing shortage is hurting wallets. How much of that is big tech’s fault and how much of it is the local government’s fault is hard to tell at times, but certainly neither is doing as much as they could. This week Google pledged a whopping $1 billion worth of assistance to the problem. Forking over $750 million worth of real estate and a quarter-billion dollars worth of funding for residential projects is quite the pledge, let’s see how the money gets spent. You can read more here. - Slate failures
Google’s Pixel Slate tablet was such hot garbage that the company is leaving the tablet game for good and focusing on its Pixel laptop line instead. Read more here.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of awfulness:
- Apple recalls some MacBooks:
[Apple issues voluntary recall of 2015 MacBook Pro batteries due to overheating concern] - Google swats down shareholder vote:
[Google defeats shareholders on ‘Dragonfly’ censored search in China] - Facebook in hot water over fake review sales:
[Facebook and eBay told to tackle trade in fake reviews] - Maps keeping it real fake:
[Google responds to report that concluded there are millions of fake business listings on Maps]
Image via Getty Images / Feodora Chiosea
Extra Crunch
Our premium subscription service had another week of interesting deep dives. TechCrunch’s Ron Miller wrote a story asking VCs and CEOs just how much startup founders should be paying themselves.
Startup founders need to decide how much salary is enough
“…Murat Bicer, general partner at CRV, says you could probably ask 10 VCs this question, and get 10 different answers, but he sees the range at the low end of perhaps $125,000 and at the high end maybe $200,000, depending on the location of the startup and the cost of living in a particular city…”
Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week TechCrunch writers talked a bit about keeping your H-1B status and how you should be negotiating your term sheet with strategic investors.
- You won the H-1B lottery, don’t lose your ticket when changing jobs
- How to negotiate term sheets with strategic investors
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Snap introduces Snap Select, which lets advertisers buy ads exclusively for Snap's premium content, like its shows and vetted premium partners, at fixed CPMs (Kerry Flynn/Digiday)
Snap introduces Snap Select, which lets advertisers buy ads exclusively for Snap's premium content, like its shows and vetted premium partners, at fixed CPMs — When the hedges arrived at La Malmaison on Saturday, they had to be trimmed down. Snapchat wanted the vibe of its Cannes space to open — not private and exclusive.
Redmi K20 Pro India Launch Date, Asus 6Z Launch, and More News This Week
Huawei files lawsuit against the US Department of Commerce
Caught between the political tussle between the United States and China, Huawei has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Commerce. According to Bloomberg, Huawei is suing the American agency over the seized telecommunications equipment.
Back in 2017, Huawei had sent the equipment in question to a lab in California. The officials seized the equipment in Alaska, as it was on the way back to China. This was done by the U.S. Department of Commerce to verify whether an export license was needed. Huawei alleges that at the time, no export license was required and that Huawei had presented all requested information to the officials.
“Defendants have neither made a licensing determination for the equipment nor even indicated” when the decision will be made. The lawsuit also claimed American officials “simply left the equipment in limbo.”
Huawei already has an ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. Government for deeming the company a security risk. This was in light of Huawei being placed on the exclusion list, which effectively banned any American company from doing business with Huawei. This has impacted Huawei in the worst of ways, cutting the Chinese brand off from access to Google’s Android. Even companies like ARM, which is not American, had announced that they would be suspending business with Huawei.
In the days since the U.S. took the step of cutting off Huawei, American tech companies like Intel, Google and even Microsoft are coming out in favour of Huawei, saying that the ban would equally hurt American tech companies.
http://bit.ly/2Iz48EO
How Schneider Electric is using AI in call centers and manufacturing to complement employees' work and boost productivity, rather than to replace them (Patricia Cohen/New York Times)
Patricia Cohen / New York Times : How Schneider Electric is using AI in call centers and manufacturing to complement employees' work ...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
