Our Dearly Decommissioned
Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 8:59 AM Eastern. And we have a miraculous show for you this week. In our first segment, we hear from some of the most notable users of Crowdtangle.
Mike Rugnetta:A social listening, tracking, and analytics tool used by brands. Yes. But also, disinformation researchers. Crowdtangle was bought by Facebook in 2016 and shut down in August. And we join a group to mourn its passing.
Mike Rugnetta:In our second segment, I talk with Dallas Taylor, host of the podcast 20,000 Hertz, about why podcasts sound the way they do. But first, let's talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. I have 5 news stories for you this week. Previously, we told you that X would be blocked in Brazil for not complying with their high court's moderation demands, as well as their refusal to appoint a national legal representative. Then, we told you that Musk paid his fines, appointed a representative, and X service in Brazil could return within a week.
Mike Rugnetta:Now, we're telling you, whoops. It hasn't because X paid their fines to the wrong bank. Reuters reports that quote, the company's lawyers maintain that the company has correctly paid the fines, end quote, but the court, quote, said that the money must be redirected to the correct account before it can consider lifting X's ban in Brazil. Oops. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress and Tumblr.com, severance package to any employee wanting to leave amidst rising attentions with WP Engine, a private WordPress hosting service operated by private equity firm Silverlake.
Mike Rugnetta:Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of using WordPress software, which is open source, as a vehicle for profit over all else and has called it a quote cancer. The 2 organizations traded cease and desists before an outright legal battle began last week. Mullenweg offered $30,000 or 6 months of salary, whichever was higher to employees not interested in weathering the spat, and 8% of the company took it. Including the company's quote, head of wordpress.com, head of programs and contributor experience, and the principal architect for AI, according to TechCrunch.
Clip:Bye bye.
Mike Rugnetta:Genetics analysis firm 23andme is unraveling. A co founder and CEO, Anne Wojcicki, said she was open to hearing 3rd party offers to purchase the company, taking it private, which prompted the entire board to resign. Wojcicki has since walked back her offer, but the question remains open regarding what exactly happens to all the DNA data stored by the company if it is eventually acquired? 23andme says genetics data shared with its partners, like pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline, is de identified, but a data breach in 2023 did expose the quote, ancestry data for just under 7,000,000 users to hackers, according to Business Insider. If you've used the service and are interested in attempting to delete your data, we'll put a link in the show notes to directions on how to do that.
Mike Rugnetta:If you haven't ever used a DNA analysis or ancestry tracking service, it seems like 2024 is a bad time to start. California has followed in Illinois' footsteps and passed laws aimed at protecting child influencers. At the end of September, alongside Demi Lovato, governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure which would require creators who feature children in 30% or more of their content to put a proportional amount of earnings from that content aside in a trust. Newsom also signed an extension to the 1939 Coogan Law, which protects minors working in the entertainment industry. The expansion says, the parents of minors working as content creators must put at least 15% of their earnings aside, also in a trust.
Mike Rugnetta:And finally, Do Not Pay pays a $193,000 to the FTC over bogus claims that its AI lawyer is as skilled as the genuine fleshy article. Do Not Pay is an automated legal services platform originally aimed at arguing parking tickets, but which has expanded to all manner of contest, like divorce, contract disputes, and so on. The company published accolades claiming their product could do as much or more than an actual lawyer, when of course that is not true. The underlying service relies on LLM Technology Chat GPT, which is famously, let's say, hit and miss when it comes to getting things right. The best part, according to ArsTechnica, the FTC found that the better than the real thing endorsement was actually, quote, from a high schooler's opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times High School Insider website, a user generated content platform for young people.
Mike Rugnetta:Not sure how many of them are using Do Not Pay's services to get divorced, but I imagine it's not that many. Okay. That's the news I have for you this week. Let's get this show on the road. 1st, you'll hear from the mourners at Crowdtangle's funeral, then me and Dallas on why podcasts sound like that.
Mike Rugnetta:But first, in our interstitials this week, video game menu music recorded off the Internet Archive's implementation of JS Mess. In order, you're going to hear Master of Orion, Dune 2, and Pizza Tycoon.
Hallie:Right? I'm just it's it's so emotional. I'm gonna read from my notes. I say, there's just so much going on around her death. I'll always remember her willingness to be there for you.
Hallie:She was
Hallie:like a
Hallie:grandma, always had the best insights, and was up on the best gossip. She succeeded in death by her cousin, Birdwatch, and this network now has a broken link, and we will never be able to replace it. So with that, let's share our memories and learn things the way they used to, through word-of-mouth and through revisionist history, to data, to accessibility, to ranking and authority, and to academic resilience.
Hans Buetow:Last week, last Monday, September 30th, there was a public event held at Georgetown University. It was co hosted by the Knight Georgetown Institute and the Coalition For Independent Technology Research. The invitation to the event read, in loving memory of Crowdtangle, 2011 to 2024. Please join us as we say goodbye to a loving friend. Crowdtangle was a tool that analyzed trends and data on social media.
Hans Buetow:It gave us real time insights into what information people were sharing. Krautangle was purchased by Meta in 2016 and then killed by Meta on August 14th this year. This event, this funeral, in person and on Zoom, was to honor that software. And, I mean, yeah, of course, we watched it.
David Karpf:Greetings, everyone. I'm Dave Karpf. I'm a professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs, a scholar of Internet politics, and we are I'm gonna assume my students are
David Karpf:this is a funeral, and
David Karpf:y'all are cheering in the back. Come on. We're here today to celebrate and remember Crowdtangle.
Hans Buetow:In the crowd, there appeared to be students, academics, researchers, journalists, and other mourners like Julia Anguen.
Julia Angwin:Hello, fellow mourners. We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and times of a piece of software called Crowdtangle. To state the obvious, it's not normal to hold funerals for software.
Hans Buetow:Which no. It's not normal. It's a weird scene. A memorial for a piece of software. Software dies all the time.
Hans Buetow:We do not tend to show this kind of sorrow.
Julia Angwin:But this software stood for something bigger than its executables. It stood for the power of the people against corporations that control and shape our speech.
Hans Buetow:Let's go with it for now because a memorial lets you understand more about what the person or in this case, a software, what they were like in life so that we can all understand the absence they leave in death.
Julia Angwin:We grieve its loss and we seek to use its life as inspiration to build a brighter future. CrowdTangle did something essential. It allowed us to see what was on the public's newsstand. In 2006, Facebook introduced the first newsfeed. And soon after that, all the other social platforms followed.
Julia Angwin:Zeitgeist moved online and became personalized. My newsstand became the items in my feed, and it looked entirely different from your newsstand, which was items in your feed. And in the beginning, we felt like we had some control over these feeds by choosing who to friend or who to follow, but everyone was in their own filter bubble shaped by technology and the zeitgeist had splintered into 1,000,000 feeds and no one could see it all in a glance. Enter Crowdtangle. It arrived on the scene and gave us a glimpse into zeitgeist.
Hans Buetow:Really specifically, Crowdtangle was a free app that when you opened it, you got this dashboard with a search bar. You could enter keywords in any language or in English that would translated and CrowdTangle would pull real time data about what was happening with those terms across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Twitter. You could see how many impressions a term was getting, you could see levels of engagement a term was getting including if it was quote, over performing. You could see trends over time, you could discover individual posts and users and public groups. You could also analyze accounts and groups of accounts.
Hans Buetow:You could see and identify the users with influence who are receiving the most engagement. This means you could see who was spreading information or misinformation and track how it moved. Importantly, Crowdtangle allowed you to export data for further use and measurement in other research tools. Newsrooms were very common users of Crowdtangle because it allowed them to see what people in their communities and constituencies were discussing, and to see what other newsrooms were covering just at a glance, just by looking. But a lot of people and organizations quickly discovered that Crowdtangle's capabilities had a lot of different uses beyond just keeping tabs on trending stories.
Hallie:I used Crowdtangle to track political candidates and their efforts to persuade and sometimes deceive the public.
Jule Krueger:Understanding the public concerns about human rights to inform strategy and advocacy.
Rachelle Faust:It helps MDI identify political narratives in pro Beijing and pro democracy social media spaces on the implementation of the national security law in Hong Kong.
Jule Krueger:We also used it for monitoring to help us keep track of the human rights movement on social media to support advocacy efforts.
Rachelle Faust:As well as monitor disinformation targeting candidates ahead of parliamentary elections in Moldova in 2020.
Jule Krueger:And it also has allowed us to collect evidence because we were using social media posts as evidence for our human rights investigations.
Rachelle Faust:CrowdTango equipped us with the tools to identify and challenge falsehoods, to understand the sources and networks behind them.
Jule Krueger:Last but not least, CrowdTango allowed us to engage in platform monitoring, which means we were able to observe the impact of social media algorithms, content moderation, and other platform operations on human rights issues.
Hans Buetow:That was Julie Krueger of Amnesty International, Jennifer Stromer Galli of Syracuse University, and Rochelle Faust of the National Democratic Institute. They were just some of the mourners who spoke about how this software was not just useful, it was beloved. Beloved by tens of thousands of journalists, academics, organizations, nonprofits that saw not just how important Crowdtangle was, but also how much power it had in helping us understand an increasingly dense and fractured and hostile information environment. Here's Julia Angwin again.
Julia Angwin:Soon, Crowdtangle became the best and only way to get a sense of what was happening on the biggest and most important social platform, Facebook. If you wanted to know what the top performing post on Facebook was, you checked CrowdTangle's dashboard. After the 2016 presidential election, it became clear just how important that transparency was. CrowdTangle wasn't just a tool for dipping into the cultural zeitgeist. The election showed us that Facebook had become the center of political movements around the world.
Julia Angwin:It was where Trump's campaign excelled. It was where the Russians tried to influence our elections. It was where the Burmese government incited violence against the Rohingyas. It was the public square in every nation. And so perhaps it was inevitable that such a powerful tool would not survive on its own.
Julia Angwin:Just a few days after the 2016 election, Facebook bought Crowdtinkle. At first, Facebook let it continue operating fairly independently even when it was embarrassing. Journalists and researchers used Crowdtangle to reveal just how far propaganda and lies were spreading across Facebook, and its demise was inevitable.
Hans Buetow:But why was that? If Crowdtangle was so good, why did Meta shut it down? And now that it's gone, if it was so important, where does that leave us? What can we do about it and what comes next? Obviously, we had a lot of questions about what we had heard at the funeral.
Hans Buetow:So we went and talked with one of the people who was there at the funeral. The first guy you heard in fact, the guy who led it, Dave Karp.
David Karpf:Well, I was the emcee for the Crowdtangle Funeral, last week.
Hans Buetow:A few days after the funeral, I caught Dave on a call. He was sitting at his dining room table before work and my first question to Dave was, why a funeral?
David Karpf:There's 2 answers. 1 is there are enough good outlets online perishing that I think we should probably have more funerals for them. Right? Like, it's not that we should have a funeral for this and not other things. It's that we should celebrate the nice parts of the Internet more often.
David Karpf:So the other part is academics and journalists who take it as our job to study what is going on on sites like Facebook are constantly finding out that the one access point that we had went away, but, hey, they promised, like, that was a headache, but what they will build next is even better. I personally am a little sick of it. I feel like it is a constant effort to understand Facebook up until that is uncomfortable for them, and it remains it's, you know, it's a Meta is a $1,000,000,000,000 company. Right? It remains such a big part of the online communication sphere that we should have better tools than we have.
David Karpf:And so I think the death of Crowdtangle, Facebook killing it off because it becomes inconvenient, is a moment where we should notice, yeah. You know what? This kind of always happens, and this is why in the long term or at least the medium term, we need something beyond the goodwill of Meta in order to study Meta. If we can only study Meta in ways that are convenient for it, then the tools that we use will constantly be, you know, put out to pasture. Once again, Meta as a company is putting the company's interests ahead of the public interest.
David Karpf:I'm not surprised by that. But since I'm not surprised by that, we should probably not have them be the only ones in charge of this.
Hans Buetow:There's this graphic on the website for the funeral, ripcrowdtangle.com. And this graphic lists the opposition to the killing of Crowdtangle. On that are 60,000 petitioners. There are 200 organizations. There are 17 members of Congress, the entire European Commission.
Hans Buetow:And on the other side, in support of Crowdtangle's death, there's one name, four letters, Meta. We think you can see this as a sort of signal of how Meta sees themselves in the global information ecosystem. A signal of how they partner, how they compromise, challenge and ultimately define the technological systems which drive so so much of contemporary culture. In a meta world, there are no needs of we. There are only needs of meta.
David Karpf:You live by the Facebook, you die by the Facebook. Right? Meta is standing against all those other actors. But what Meta is also saying is, yeah, we own this tool. We bought it.
David Karpf:We offered it, and then we decided to stop offering it. What are you gonna do about it? And the answer so far is a petition, a petition and a funeral. Right? So it is going to take more collective action to leave Meta uncomfortable enough that they realize we can't keep just taking away the research tools or else we're going to be forced to provide them by governments.
Hans Buetow:In some places, this has already started to happen and it continues to happen.
David Karpf:So some of my colleagues who are taking part in the funeral, particularly my colleague Rebecca Trumbull, who's actually w with me, has had a hand in the development of the Digital Markets Act for the EU. Governments absolutely can require openness and transparency from the very large online platforms. In fact, in the EU, they've started to do so. And if you are a Facebook, if you are an Instagram, if you are a I still wanna call it Twitter, but I guess he wants us to call it X now, you can no longer just decide that you just wanna be untransparent with this stuff because the governments collectively in in the European Union had demanded otherwise. We could do that in the United States.
David Karpf:It just requires rebuilding the policy apparatus that we let wither over the course of 30, 40 years.
Hans Buetow:The inaction by the United States is not just a matter of a lack of political will. It's also a lack of administrative capacity.
David Karpf:The, Federal Trade Commission is quite good. It has been quite good for, what, almost 4 years. Lawsuits take time. Investigations take time. They need more funding.
David Karpf:They need more time. There's also the difficulty that there is political will on the other side. Jim Jordan is a member of Congress who runs an important committee and mostly wants to harass and harangue Meta about times that conservatives didn't feel happy there. So, like, he he has decided that the problem is somewhere else. And with the congressional committee, he's got a lot of firepower there.
David Karpf:I think one of the reasons why Meta has retreated from this transparency is because they realized that transparency gets them called before congress, and now it's Republicans who are calling before it, so let's make them happy. And then we also have a a court system that is making us less administratively governable. We've got a lot of problems, all of which fit under political will, but are significantly more complicated than that.
Hans Buetow:Right now, it is not clear how folks who used Crowdtangle will be able to continue the work they did using the app. Meta has said that they are developing a replacement tool that is better, more integrated, but early reports are not promising. It seems to have more limited use of data and it can't spot trends as well, but importantly, not nearly as many users are being allowed access. Now there are other tools that do high level social listening similar to what Crowdtangle did, But crucially, they are geared towards teams working with massive entertainment and media brands, retail companies, news organizations, media conglomerates, and they come with a hefty price tag. In his closing remarks at the funeral, Dave said something that really stuck out to us.
David Karpf:I was thinking while I was sitting in the audience about the ways that 2011, when CrowdTangle was born, differ from today. And I wanna suggest to you that 2011 was a more innocent time.
Hans Buetow:I asked him what he meant by that.
David Karpf:So So I I said at the funeral, I hadn't prepared these remarks. I was just, you know, thinking about them as I listened to everyone. There was an innocence to that time. I mean, that is what we're talking about, like, Obama's second term here. We're also talking about just after occupy Wall Street, just after the Arab Spring.
David Karpf:So there's this deep optimism at that time that the Internet inevitably is going to give us a better world because all the tools that it has given us to communicate, to organize, to be a society together. People are looking out at that time and thinking, wow, we can use this for good and we're trending in the right direction. Looking online, there were so many reasons for a naive optimism that these tools have been made available and look at the amazing things people are doing with them. And then we have the Techlash, we have Trump, we have Cambridge Analytica, Facebook. And one of the reasons why Meta gets rid of Crowdtangle, like, the greatest sin is probably Kevin Roose's because Kevin Roose has the temerity to notice what's doing well on Facebook and then publish it in The New York Times.
Hans Buetow:Kevin Roose, a tech journalist for The New York Times, he created a Twitter bot in 2020 that published a list of the top 10 performing link posts by US pages on Facebook every day. It quickly started to show that the most popular content on the platform tended to come from and be shared within a hard right echo
David Karpf:chamber. And so Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg get mad about that and do not want you publishing in the newspaper that you got mad. That use of their data to make them look bad because if you look, they look bad is the thing that they as a company then decide we don't wanna have this anymore. We need to develop something that doesn't make us look so bad while still giving some researchers some transparency. If we can time travel back to 2011 and say to ourselves that Facebook, pre IPO, was gonna be that particular type of villain, I think we would have responded by being like, no.
David Karpf:We're we're in a different era. Like, yes, corporate big corporations are gonna be big corporations, but they take their role in the public seriously. They have these grand ambitions. They're not gonna shut down the tools for understanding what's going on on Facebook just because the tools are showing people things that they don't want them to know. They're gonna change their behavior instead.
David Karpf:And so in 2024, I think that end of Crowdtangle is a reminder of how much online conversation has shifted. The landscape out there is one that really calls on us to no longer say, hey. Whatever data the platforms are willing to give us, great. Let's use that. We're sure that they will be good and equal partners.
David Karpf:And instead say, you know, it's been over a dozen years. We keep hearing the same song. We know what the next verse is going to sound like. We know the chorus. The chorus is when they take this data access away.
David Karpf:Maybe we need a different tune, which means that we need to make demands that aren't just of Meta and the other platforms, but are of governance too.
Julia Angwin:Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Crowdtangle, not to praise it. The evil that men does lives after them. The good is often tarred with their bones. So let it be with Crowdtangle.
Julia Angwin:The noble Zuck hath told you Crowdtangle was not robust enough, and Zuck is an honorable man. I speak not to disprove what Zuck spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. We all did love Crowdtangle once, not without cause. What cause withholds us then to mourn for it? My heart is in the coffin there with Crowd Tangle, and I must pause till it come back to me.
David Karpf:So thank you all for coming here, and let's make this a moment that leads us forward to make collective demands together. Thank you all.
Hans Buetow:Thank you to Dave Karp, who you can find on Blue Sky as atdavekarp. That's k a r p f. He also has a substack, the davekarp.substackdot com. Thank you also to the Knight Georgetown Institute and the Center For Digital Ethics. We would be very interested in hearing from you, specifically, what site or app would you hold a funeral for?
Hans Buetow:What would it look like? You can reach us at 651-615-5007 or by email at the never post atgmail.com. All the details in the show notes.
Mike Rugnetta:I don't necessarily think that every podcast sounds the same. I I personally, I make a bunch of them. They all sound sort of different, but there are big ways in which they all also sound very similar. It's a vibe. A kind of sonic standard to which they all do and it feels like they must adhere.
Mike Rugnetta:And I've been thinking a lot lately about why. Why is it that though podcast defines a technological delivery mechanism for audio, it has also come to signal a certain sonic quality for that audio, and maybe even certain content level requirements, like people talking and marimba music? Is this because arbitrary norms, were settled on because the first big entrance into the space sounded the way that they did, and so everybody followed suit? Is it because the medium is young, and simply hasn't figured out that there's more Sonic territory to cover? Is it because this is what a podcast has to be in order for people to decide that they want to listen to it?
Mike Rugnetta:On the heels of our state of podcast round table, which Hans posted, I I was just thinking so much about why podcasting is the way it is. And part of that is audience and funding models and content strategy, but part of it is also the creative norms which provide the bedrock, the foundation for all of those things. For what's expected, that help us judge how a show is good and bad. And that leads to what can be successful and not. Anyway, clearly I had a lot of thoughts to work through around this.
Mike Rugnetta:So I thought it was probably a good idea to talk with someone else who does too. Joining me is Dallas Taylor. Dallas is the founder and creative director at Defaqo sound, who has done sound design work for movie trailers, ad campaigns, TV and films with clients like Netflix, HBO, Disney and others. Dallas is also the host and creator of the podcast 20,000 Hertz, a show about the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds. Dallas, thanks for being here.
Dallas Taylor:It's great to finally meet you after all of these years.
Mike Rugnetta:After all these years. I wanted to chat with you about, how podcasts sound. A thing that you are intimately familiar with.
Dallas Taylor:Very, very much so.
Mike Rugnetta:And like the kind of, norms, I think, that have like developed around tone of voice, the music that's used in podcasts editing style. But there was something that I wanted to start with, which is something that you wrote about on LinkedIn. And you shared kinda like a a portion of the 20,000 Hertz origin story.
Dallas Taylor:Yeah. So back when I had started the show, 20 or 30 episodes into it, it was actually NPR that reached out to me to potentially bring it on as an NPR distributed podcast. And I was totally psyched about that, at being a lifelong NPR fan. But something was interesting because at that point in my life, I consciously stopped really consuming news and NPR was part of that. And news is is incredibly important.
Dallas Taylor:But it almost felt like I could set a watch to within 30 seconds at any point that I ever turned on NPR that something would raise my blood pressure. That's a very easy button to push, and it's a way to very quickly get engagement and a visceral reaction from a listener. However, what I had started to notice is it felt like it was all day, all night, all the time. So it's really important that I made a show that never pushed that button because I just hear it so often Mhmm. All over the place.
Dallas Taylor:I wanted to make a show that was joy filled, that brought kids and parents together. And our sense of hearing is not something that really is like news or politics. But it's difficult to make a show that's just joy. Not to say that we don't have sad shows, but we really just live in an alternate universe where these hot button issues don't exist, really with the spirit of bringing people together through their sense of hearing.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I think I'm I'm curious about the way that you hear NPR and the way that you hear 20,000 Hertz and how you compare and contrast those two things. Because I do I think about NPR as like one of the main, almost like drivers of sonic quality for podcasts as a whole, like a standard bearer at this point. I find NPR kind of like it's very even, it's flat, I also find the sound of most podcasts to be pretty even, pretty flat, like if you listen to Morning Edition.
Rachelle Faust:It's Morning Edition from NPR News. I'm Leila Fauldin. And I'm Michelle Martin.
Mike Rugnetta:Or 99 PI.
David Karpf:This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
Mike Rugnetta:You know, they have a sound to them. Most of these shows and I think ours among them like Never Post is the same, reasonably sound is the same. I don't know how active it is, but we have chosen to not adopt the dynamism of like drive time radio, dance hall radio, even to a certain degree like AM talk radio. But like really specifically public radio, which is all about this like gentle scoring, really even pacing like you said, close miking, proximity effect, gentle compression, just kind of like stentorian address. We really live in relationship to radio, public radio specifically in a lot of ways.
Mike Rugnetta:It's like this American Life and Fresh Air and Radio Lab had a sound, that influenced serial, as we all know the first ever podcast and people thought like, oh, that's what podcasts sound like.
Jule Krueger:Do you
Mike Rugnetta:think about these things? Do you see these things as related? Or do you think is this an unfair connection that I'm making?
Dallas Taylor:No. I I hear that for sure. I think that one of the reasons that I don't shout or, you know, do the wacky drive time voice is because when you perform like that, you are in a space apart from someone. Because when someone is shouting or, you know, being really goofy, it's usually in a room with maybe a couple of people, and that's a much more conversational aspect, to just, you know, the way that we would be silly and communicate with each other. However, when you're a solo narrator, I'm very sharply aware that I'm millimeters away from someone's eardrums, most likely, and that my narration is not me as a character, but my narration is the voice in the head pushing and propelling the for the story forward.
Dallas Taylor:So that's the way that I think about my performance. I'm not the star of 20,000 hertz. The guest is and the sound is. And I think that when you're thinking of it from a standpoint of millimeters away, you're literally in someone's head, the most intimate medium that I can possibly imagine. You know, that's a time to perform things differently.
Dallas Taylor:And I think that that's kind of why these kind of NPR types highly produced shows, can sound the way they do.
Mike Rugnetta:It's really interesting to hear you say that. And it's a sort of, it's a very helpful framing and it also makes me think of, I don't really listen to a lot of them, but my wife listens to a lot of comedy podcasts. And so sometimes, you know, they're on in the car, while while we're driving. Even those to me feel restrained in a way that ostensibly comedic, convivial, highly conversational drive time radio does not. And so it feels like there's still, when you are making a podcast, a kind of corral around how vociferous and active, you can possibly be and still remain within the genre, even though it's not a genre.
Mike Rugnetta:It's a media type.
Dallas Taylor:I think of podcasting as an equation of the talent, whether that be a host or a writer. So talent times the amount of time and or money you can spend on it. I feel like that is the equation for what makes a podcast sound like a podcast. So for example, my talent is okay. I'm not really trained on being able to go for hours and continuously keep people entertained because that's not my style of show.
Dallas Taylor:We write everything. We rewrite it and nitpick every single word and pronunciation.
Mike Rugnetta:I mean, your show is like you know, episodes of 20,000 Hertz are like podcasting diamonds.
Dallas Taylor:Well, thank you. I can perform it, but it's like I can't just be off the cuff. So talent times time and money. We spend tons of time. So 200 to 300 hours per episode and sometimes 8 months to sometimes in the case of our Apple show, 5 years to even get the show, produced.
Dallas Taylor:And so we lean very high into time and money, and everyone on our show is paid. And we have kind of breakeven, thankfully, which is amazing for a podcast financially. Yeah. But then other types so going back to that talent times, time, and money, other people like comedians, you know, think of, like, Conan O'Brien or even the, Smartless type of people. These people, all they do all the time is entertain people in real time with, you know, their, like, brilliant brains.
Dallas Taylor:And so in that case, if you have an enormous amount of talent, you don't necessarily need as much time or money because you just make up for it in the talent. And I think that shapes most podcasts. Pretty much everything you can can boil down. And that's why you see so many comedians who just naturally take to that medium Mhmm. Because it's inexpensive and it doesn't take them very much time, but their talent is through the roof.
Mike Rugnetta:You can sit down in front of a microphone, start talking, entertain people. There's not a lot that you have to do on the back end. You just publish it and you're ready to go.
Dallas Taylor:Right. And I could try that, but I'm just too self conscious.
Mike Rugnetta:I feel, I I very strongly feel that. This makes me think of, like, if you think at all or if you see, like, a relationship between class and podcasting, There's a lot of anxiety about having the right gear, which of course, you know, if you spend enough time online, you can you can convince yourself that you need, mountains and mountains of 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars of stuff in order to get something that sounds right. Like in order to get the podcasting sound. When like I think really, in fact, it's like it's pretty easy for folks to get started, with stuff that's relatively cheap. It's just like, it might take them a little bit longer.
Mike Rugnetta:You work with a lot of people. I imagine not all of them are using 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars worth of, you know, they're not using u 80 sevens like Ira Glass.
Dallas Taylor:Right.
Hans Buetow:How do
Mike Rugnetta:you how do you think about, gear and access in this way?
Dallas Taylor:It's very easy to get distracted by all the gear. It's very easy as a artist or someone that wants to be some sort of artist to get too bogged down in the pencils. You know, number 2 versus number 2.7. I don't know what pencils are like, but I just know that there's number 2 pencil. People of my age still, you know, think about gear as being this $1,000,000 room to do something, and so many rapid developments have happened that that barrier to entry just doesn't exist.
Dallas Taylor:So we can still bury our head in the sand and think that it's 1997 and that you need all of this stuff, but you're just gonna never get a story out. How it goes far saying, like, gear is next to irrelevant now. You can do so much with the phone in your pocket and free software. Even the the iPhone microphone sound good.
Mike Rugnetta:The technological affordances we have with podcasting are so vast. It feels like we're just using, like, a very small percentage of what we could possibly do. Is there stuff that you've seen out there that feels like new and exciting and challenging and and weird?
Dallas Taylor:What's interesting is, spending so much time making a podcast that demands so much really ruins your podcast listening experience. However, I do. I do occasionally listen to things. But lately, I've been thinking a lot about the power of an RSS feed. And because when I think about other methods of entertainment so let's talk about YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Dallas Taylor:What those platforms promise is a large audience and a large, amount of people who can see it if you can get their attention. What they receive is nearly all of the ad revenue because it's a closed platform. The reason that Instagram, TikTok, YouTube all start to feel the same is because in the in in the increasing amount of competition and attention, you have to start doing things to make the algorithm work. And as much as there's so much democratization, there's also just, like it's so homogeneous in in style. Like, whether or not you're learning about, like, space or, you know, the the latest hairstyles, They're they're they feel and sound the same because you're under the same creative box.
Dallas Taylor:And, really, like, what you're doing as a content creator is you're you're you're working for free to make a mega organization money in hopes that you get an audience. The RSS feed is the simplest yet greatest invention to keep content creators making their own money. And I would love to see RSS based video apps start to pop up where, you control everything about your feed. You can make an update to your video if some if you accidentally made a mistake. You can control what ads are there or what's not there.
Dallas Taylor:The problem is is I think that in in the name of convenience and content creators not knowing the business, I'm just worried that the RSS will go away. And once the RSS goes away, the quality of content diminishes significantly, just like we've seen in, in video. The second that goes away and I can't control, the ads that play on my show or the, I think that that that'd be a difficult difficult time.
Mike Rugnetta:Part of me wonders just to bring us back to, like, kinda where we started, like, I agree that there you know, you open up YouTube, you look at the analytics and it's like, not enough people watch the first 30 seconds of your most recent video and here's why you should feel bad about that. Here's how your most recent video stacks up against your 10 most recent videos and look, it's 10 of 10 and it's bad, like feel bad. That drives a lot of content level decisions in YouTube videos and like that's a world that I was in for a very long time, am still sort of into a certain degree and so like many of my friends are in it. It's like I see it happening and what's funny and what's weird is that even though RSS is an open standard and in theory, podcasting has this really open, really democratized standard, you know, it can be anything, it can be collected by anything. People who make them still seem to recreate these really narrow content level boundaries for themselves because they think that that's what is required for them to be popular, even though RSS technology isn't saying and can't say not enough people listen to the first 30 seconds of your episode.
Dallas Taylor:Well, you're still beholden to the audience and grabbing their attention. So even in my show, while we do have a bit of a formula, we also break that a lot because we are all into surprises and surprising emotions because we we we know that sound is a very wide dynamic range of emotion, and we're trying to program in a way where where every episode has a completely distinct emotion from it. Yeah. But we do share certain aspects of create curiosity at the beginning, but we do try to also break that form and, and be surprising along the way.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I think it's really important. And we we talk about this a lot too with our show. You know, like, our interstitials are often just field recordings with no content of any kind. How do we show respect to our audience by consistently challenging them both on a content and a sonic level?
Mike Rugnetta:Mhmm. That's a hard line to walk sometimes because, you know, we wanna do things that are formally and sonically interesting to us and challenge our audience. We wanna give them credit. We wanna make sure, that we don't, like, patronize them or infantilize them. Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:But we also don't want people to turn something on and be, like, what the heck? Okay. That's not true. Sometimes we do want people to turn something on and go, what the hell is this? But not
David Karpf:Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Not very often.
Dallas Taylor:Right. I think that goes back to we all want bigger audiences because bigger audiences bring you more attention and and more, money too. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I make my podcast for me, specifically. I'm making the exact podcast that I would devour constantly. And as the host or creator of a show, if you're making the thing that you would be fully entertained by, you may attract 10,000 people who are very like minded and that's very that's a huge success.
Dallas Taylor:And these people need to go, wow, there's somebody who understands me and, you know, I think differently and this is something that I enjoy this this very specific thing. Doesn't mean that you're bad. For those people who listen, what they care about, what they think about, and how they are choosing to give their attention to this pursuit validates their passions and that there's a lot of other people who in who like that too. So, again, it's not about quality or quantity. It's more about finding your people and then also feeding them things that, that they love.
Mike Rugnetta:Dallas, thank you so much for sharing your, your insight and your opinions with us. It's it's been great having you on the show.
Dallas Taylor:Well, thank you for everything that you've done in sound and podcasting and curiosity.
Mike Rugnetta:Let us know where can people find you and your work on the Internet?
Dallas Taylor:So the podcast and any podcast app, if you're listening to my voice right now, go into that app and type in t w e and most likely 20,000 hertz will auto populate, and there's no need to hop into to the latest or anything. Just look at something and go, oh, that sounds interesting, and just click it and listen and enjoy.
Mike Rugnetta:Thanks again to Dallas for coming on the show to chat with us. Dallas and I have been sort of like dancing around the idea of teaming up, doing something together for a long long time. So it was great to finally get a chance and an excuse to do that. I'm curious what you all think. What are the pressures that you think podcasting is responding to?
Mike Rugnetta:Why does capital p Podcasting sound the way it does? And what have you encountered that sounds different? Does it work? Why or why not? Call us at 651-615-50007, email us at the never post atgmail.com, or leave a voice memo on our Airtable.
Mike Rugnetta:There's a link in the show notes.
David Karpf:Your responses may be included in a future Mailbag episode.
David Karpf:That
Mike Rugnetta:is the show we have for you this week. Thank you so so much for listening. We're gonna be back here on the main theme on Wednesday, October 23rd. If you're interested in helping us continue to make the show and listening to any of our side shows like posts from the field, Slow Post, and Never Watch, alongside extended segments, bonus segments, and an ad free version of the show, you can head on over to neverpo.st to become a member. We would love your support.
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Mike Rugnetta:Well, I mean, we're not gonna kill you or anything. I just mean that it's it's very nice and I think you're gonna like it. Never posts producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and Doctor First Name, Last Name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer, and I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta.
Mike Rugnetta:Having been taught by fools, how else could I have ended but as I am? A man who panics at the sound of his own voice, a blusterer, afraid that within the 5 pointed maple leaf, there lies another name he never knew. Ready, always, to be found wrong. Excerpt of On Fire by Andrew Feld. Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure.
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