Weekly Scroll: Killing the Internet
Encryption dramas, baby mamas, Reddit paywalls and a wholesome AMA
The UK Tries To Kill The Internet
In a world that’s been run over by Elon Musk and the DOGE children, the dumbest story about government and technology this week managed to come not from the United States but from the United Kingdom. The British government is demanding that Apple install encryption backdoors that will let it spy on any user’s encrypted messages:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
Rather than break the security promises it made to its users everywhere, Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K., the people said. Yet that concession would not fulfill the U.K. demand for backdoor access to the service in other countries, including the United States.
The UK has been on this bullshit for years. They’ve always seemed to believe encryption is something that they should have the right to break at will, and it’s always been idiotic from both a moral and technological standpoint. But this is a stunning escalation of the UK’s previous bullshit - it’s hard to overstate how sweeping and authoritarian this order is. The order demands a full backdoor into any encrypted communications on any Apple device. This is not limited to UK Apple users. The British government is demanding a permanent backdoor to every Apple user worldwide. This would break the fundamental security of every Apple device anywhere in the world.
To make things even worse, the British government has a gag order that forbids Apple from announcing this order exists or from warning users that the security of their devices had changed. We only know this is happening because it was leaked to the Washington Post. The UK’s long war on encryption constantly makes me wonder whether anyone in Britain has actually read 1984. It was a warning, not an instruction manual! Throwing out some limp-wristed statements about ‘criminals’ and ‘child safety’ is not enough justification to break the security of every digital device in the world.
Encrypted devices with a backdoor are no longer encrypted. You cannot create a secret key to encryption that only allows the good guys to read your messages, not the bad guys. Once an encrypted system has been deliberately weakened, it’s weakened for all attackers. That’s not a hypothetical scenario. The recent Salt Typhoon hack, where state-sponsored Chinese hackers gained access to the entirety of America’s telephone infrastructure, happened to due a security vulnerability mandated by the US government. The US government, by law, requires the ability to wiretap any phone, and Salt Typhoon used that access point to gain access themselves. Now the UK wants Apple to build a similarly wide-open access point for every form of internet or cloud-based communication worldwide. It’s horrifyingly stupid.
This could quickly become an international incident - I don’t think the US government will stay silent if Apple is booted from the UK. And I don’t think the EU, which is famously stringent about privacy laws, would allow the weakening of EU user privacy to satisfy UK regulators. Without exaggeration, this would kill much of what the modern internet is.
A prediction: This order is such a disaster that I would expect Apple to leave the UK entirely rather than comply with it. That seems unthinkable, but it would be equally unthinkable for Apple to destroy the security features of every user worldwide to comply with the UK’s insane request. The UK will likely back down at some point - I simply cannot imagine that a government that bans the iPhone is a government that could stay in power. But it’s insane that the UK is even attempting this.
Elon’s Baby Mama
Ashley St. Clair, a conservative influencer known for reinforcing traditional gender norms and criticizing single mothers, has announced that she’s the baby mama of Elon Musk’s 13th child. And things are getting messy, as you’d expect. There are accusations of underage pictures (????), further babies, and penile implants.
I hate that this is somehow relevant online news. Anyways:
Reddit Paywalls
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in a video AMA last week that the company has plans to begin paywalling some content this year. The paywalls wouldn’t apply to existing communities or subreddits, but to newly created parts of Reddit.
This seems very dumb? Reddit has been a functioning website for almost two decades now and there’s never been any paywalled content. The users are used to everything being free. If and when there’s special paywalled content, Reddit’s famously ornery userbase will likely reject it and make a bunch of noise while they do it. It’s hard to imagine this working - the cultural norms about what belongs on Reddit are too entrenched.
Reddit’s leadership for the last decade has a sort of Mr. Magoo-like quality where they don’t seem to understand the product they have, but they stumble blindly into success anyways. They’re always chasing the latest thing, and have a list of failed products and concepts longer than Elon’s child support bill. When NFTs looked like the next big thing, they introduced purchasable NFTs. When ClubHouse seemed like the hot new idea, they quickly created Reddit Talk. When Twitch started to really get big, they experimented with tipping users on Reddit like you do on Twitch. They’ve copied aspects of Twitter Blue and TikTok Shop. And this latest move towards paywalls seems like a pretty clear copycat effort to capture what’s happening here on Substack with paid subscriptions.
All of those efforts were copycats and failed to gain any real traction. I really want to sit down with the Reddit executive team and just mash this chart in their face over and over:
You’re already doing great! Your stock has quadrupled since your IPO last year! You don’t have to keep inventing dumb new things.
Reddit is a true tech company in the classic sense that they have relatively fixed costs but scalable revenue. And revenue has been skyrocketing as Reddit gets better and better at selling ads. Reddit’s ad sales are up 70% year over year. That’s why the stock price is up. It’s very simple:
Reddit is still gaining users
Reddit is getting better at selling ads and is significantly increasing revenue
Reddit is sitting on top of one of the most valuable user-generated datasets on the internet in the age of AI
Those three things are your entire business. You don’t need paywalls, you don’t need RedditCoins, you don’t need ReddFriends or ReddTok or ReddAI or whatever the latest trend is. You are the sixth most popular site on the entire internet. You are an irreplaceable font of internet culture. Just keep the site growing and keep selling ads! The rest is a stupid distraction.
Capturing The Value
Derek Thompson at the Atlantic had an interesting tweet last week that on the surface is about the NBA and NFL, but it actually about the nature of online platforms and cultural conversations:
Both the NBA and NFL are wildly popular sports leagues - the NFL moreso than the NBA, but both are doing quite well. What’s interesting about them is that the NFL seems to do a much better job of capturing the value they create. So much NBA content is consumed through channels not controlled by the NBA. It’s /r/NBA on Reddit, it’s the NBA Twitter community, it’s the extremely successful network of NBA podcasts. Watching the actual games? Well, some people do that, but the audience for NBA gossip and stories online is at least an order of magnitude larger than the audience for an actual NBA game (especially a regular season game).
Meanwhile, the NFL seems to more directly capture their audience. The games themselves are the draw, not the online drama. You can quantify this to some extent. Google searches for the NFL are higher than for the NBA, but only by a little bit, perhaps by 30-40%. That’s in contrast to viewership numbers, where NFL regular season games draw more than 10x as many viewers as NBA regular season games.1 The NBA wildly outperforms its actual viewership online. The /r/NBA subreddit is outright larger than than the /r/NFL subreddit.
What’s notable here is that the NBA creates an enormous amount of value for online platforms who are not the NBA. This value is captured by Reddit, by Twitter, by podcasters and NBA influencers and people who don’t pay the NBA a dime. There are several reasons why that could be the case: NFL games are more scarce, NBA players are more culturally relevant as dramatic figures, etc. But it may be a signal that the NBA needs to jump in and start playing in those areas directly. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the NBA try to acquire some of the more successful basketball podcast networks - they’re creating the product, they may want to vertically integrate to capture the value.
Whale of a Post
Are YouTube Creators Cooked?
Forgive the pun, but it’s a question I’m thinking about after seeing prominent chef Carla Lalli Music explain why she quit making YouTube videos.
Music is a fairly well known chef/culinary influencer - she was part of the enormously popular Bon Appetit Test Kitchen several years ago.2 She’s since been an independent creator with a Substack, Instagram and YouTube channel. In her post about quitting the site, Carla details the economics of YouTube:
Back to the rough stuff. Until recently, I put out a video every week, costing me $14,000 per month, plus groceries. (My time is not included in that figure.) Average monthly earnings from Google Adsense, the program that matches ads to content on YouTube? Brace yourself.
My top grossing months were October 2022, $7544, and May 2024, $7028. My two worst months were December 2023, $1799, and July 2022, $3689.
That means that on my best month, income fell short of expenses by about $6500. My crappiest month put me more than $12,000 in the hole. On average though, I grossed about $4000/month in ad revenue; my sales partner takes 8% of that off the top.
I want to state upfront that I’m sympathetic to Carla here. I like her videos! I was a fan from back in the Bon Appetit test kitchen days. But there are some fairly obvious reasons why she’s not succeeding as a YouTuber. The first is in the screenshot she provided of her videos:
Videos that get 20-30,000 views on average are simply not going to generate that much revenue.3 Imagine a TV show that put out one episode a week and only had 25K people watching. Nobody would be surprised if that show got cancelled!
It is possible to build a business on this type of traffic. Here’s an example of an account I like - TheKillPeteStrategy is a channel that showcases the creator, Pete, playing the game Risk online. He averages 15-20,000 views per video and has repeatedly said it’s a viable business.
But there are two key differences. Pete puts out a video a day, so his actual traffic is much higher than Carla’s. And Pete is essentially a one-man shop. He turns on his webcam, plays the game, and uploads the video. Carla, in her explanatory post, has a far more involved process:
My crew consisted of a producer, Omega, a DP, Timothy Racca, and an amazing editor, Meg Felling. Two food stylists worked on Carla’s Cooking Show at different times: Cybelle Tondu and Alivia Bloch.
At the risk of sounding like an asshole: Yes, if you have a production crew of five full people to produce videos that only get 20,000 views, that is not a sustainable business. No shit? I think this is something that ‘professionals’ in a field actually struggle with when they go independent. Carla worked for Bon Appetit, which had corporate money to throw around and a giant audience. She was used to making videos with full time producers, a director of photography, professional editing, professional food stylists, etc. That’s the world she came from and she wasn’t able to break out of that mindset.
Meanwhile, there are hundreds/thousands of successful food influencers who work much leaner. Only the biggest and most successful channels can really afford to keep large staffs - the rest do it themselves. It’s absolutely possible to make videos on the cheap. J Kenji Lopez-Alt is out there strapping a go-pro to his head and filming on the fly, the uploading the footage basically untouched:
Nevertheless, Carla seems to be doing well enough on Substack - she has more than 44K subscribers! And she does make quality content, so I think in the long run she’ll be fine.
I do think there’s a trend to watch here. There’s a type of Substack-ization of certain kinds of content, content that doesn’t exactly fit the parameters of what makes economic sense on YouTube or other ad-supported sites. This could be on Substack directly, or it could be another version of paywalled content like Dropout. Popular YouTube channel The Try Guys just put out a video where they say their YouTube metrics have been disappointing recently, but their paywalled video site 2nd Try has seen huge growth. Ultimately I’m in support of anyone who can get paid to make things online, and I think the direct consumer-creator relationship is a a healthier way to make that happen than faceless advertising machines.
Links
I love a good Reply All disaster, and this one involves essentially every prominent comedian and celebrity in the SNL universe. A normal Reply All chain has a bunch of confused messages from Barb in Accounting, this one has Tina Fey! Colin Jost! Renata Adler! Jon Hamm! Celebrities, they’re just like us.
The Verge reports that the timeline apps are here - most major social media sites are now just feeds, so why not have a single app that combines all your feeds into one? Buzzfeed, somehow not dead yet, plans to go in the opposite direction and build a platform ‘free from algorithmic doomscrolling’. Good luck with that!
WhatsApp is debuting a new kind publicly viewable group chat they call Viewing Gallery. The idea seems to be that celebrities or influencers will have group chats in public that fans can watch.
An interesting YouTube interview with streamer Pokimane, where she talks about the costs of being a popular female influencer and how she has to have security basically 24/7. Taylor Lorenz dubbed this the Female Creator Safety Tax.
The cracked coders over at Elon Musk’s DOGE set up a website that literally anyone could edit.
TikTok is back in the App Store.
Posts
Wholesome content - A Reddit Ask Me Anything with Paddington Bear
The NFL averages 17.5 million viewers per regular season game, while the average NBA game is at 1.5 million viewers. Part of this is because the NBA has more regular season games, but the disparity is roughly similar if you compare events like the Super Bowl to the NBA Finals - the NFL is larger by 10x.
Before the company fell apart amidst accusations of a toxic workplace and racism.
Subject to a few caveats - depends on which content niche you’re in, which countries your audience is in, etc.
Don't get rid of the AI graphics, they're fine
Get rid of the goddamn AI graphics, good lord