Decoder with Nilay Patel

Latest Episodes:

Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Mar 25, 2024

Show notes

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.

Links:

Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform — The Verge
Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it — The Verge
The fediverse, explained — The Verge
Bluesky showed everyone’s ass — The Verge
Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
The ‘queer.af’ Mastodon instance disappeared because of the Taliban — The Verge
Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests — Forbes
Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk — TechCrunch
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media — TechCrunch
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech — Mike Masnick

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23872913

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How Europe’s Digital Markets Act is reshaping Big Tech Mar 21, 2024

Show notes

Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something.

The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In theory it's a landmark law that will change the way these companies compete, and how their products operate, for years to come. How did we get here, what does the law actually say, and will it work half as well in practice as it does on paper? Verge reporter Jon Porter comes on Decoder to help me break it down.

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Figma CEO Dylan Field is optimistic about the future and AI Mar 18, 2024

Show notes

We’ve got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI.

Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billion dollars, a deal that only just recently fell through because of regulatory concerns.

So Dylan and I talked a lot about where Figma is now as an independent company, how Figma is structured, where it’s going, and how Dylan’s decisionmaking has changed since the last time he was on the show in 2022.

Links:

Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field — Decoder
Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma — The Verge
Adobe’s Dana Rao on AI, copyright, and the failed Figma deal — Decoder
Figma’s CEO on life after the company’s failed sale to Adobe — Command Line
Amazon restricts self-publishing due to AI concerns — The Guardian
Wix’s new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts — The Verge
Apple is finally allowing full versions of Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone — The Verge
What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement. — Built In

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23866201

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why Google Search feels like it’s gotten worse Mar 14, 2024

Show notes

If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now.

So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed the web in its image. Mia and I really dug into this to explain why search results are so terrible now, what Google is trying to do about it, and why this is such an important issue for the future of the internet.

Links:

How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh
How Google perfected the web — The Verge
The people who ruined the internet — The Verge
A storefront for robots — The Verge
The end of the Googleverse — The Verge
The unsettling scourge of obituary spam — The Verge
What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers? — The Verge
The AI takeover of Google Search starts now — The Verge
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results — The Verge
Ethics Statement — The Verge

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka Mar 11, 2024

Show notes

Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world.

If you’ve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to sound very familiar. The core thesis of Kyle’s book — that algorithmic recommendations make everything feel the same — hits at an idea that we’ve talked about countless times on the show: that how content is distributed shapes what content is made. So I was really excited to sit down with Kyle and dig into Filterworld and his thoughts on how this happened and what we might be able to do about it.

Links:

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture — Kyle Chayka
Welcome to AirSpace — The Verge
The Stanley water bottle craze, explained — Vox
TikTok and the vibes revival — The New Yorker
Why the internet isn’t fun anymore — The New Yorker
The age of algorithmic anxiety — The New Yorker
Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube — The Verge
Taylor Swift has encouraged her fans' numerology habit yet again — AV Club
How fandom built the internet as we know it, with Kaitlyn Tiffany — Decoder

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23858379

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why people are falling in love with AI chatbots Mar 07, 2024

Show notes

Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we’re wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more personal note: How is this technology making people feel, and in particular how is it affecting how people communicate and connect?

Verge reporter Miya David has covered AI chatbots — specifically AI romance bots — quite a bit, so we invited her onto the show to talk about how generative AI is finding its way into dating. We not only discussed how this technology is affecting dating apps and human relationships, but also how the boom in AI chatbot sophistication is laying the groundwork for a generation of people who might form meaningful relationships with so-called AI companions.

Links:

Speak, Memory — The Verge
A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled — NYT
Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient — The Verge
The law of AI girlfriends — The Verge
Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island — The Verge
Replika’s new AI app is like Tinder but with sexy chatbots — Gizmodo
Don’t date robots; their privacy policies are terrible — The Verge
AI is shaking up online dating with chatbots that are ‘flirty but not too flirty’ — CNBC
Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots — Nature
Virtual valentine: People are turning to AI in search of emotional connections — CBS

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23856679

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future Mar 04, 2024

Show notes

On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It’s Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms’ control of distribution has shaped the internet.

In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he’s going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people’s platforms, Nilay has built something very rare in the year 2024: a website that publishes content and isn’t behind a paywall yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is The Verge structured? The tables have turned.”

Links:

Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok — Decoder
Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next — Decoder
Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine — The Verge
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers — Futurism
The fediverse, explained — The Verge
Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23851875

The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live.

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election Feb 29, 2024

Show notes

Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week we’re continuing our mini-series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip — and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system.

A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really good at making just believable enough fake images and audio — and with tools like OpenAI’s new Sora, maybe video soon, too. And of course, it’s once again a presidential election year here in the US. So today, Verge policy editor Adi Robertson joins the show to discuss how AI might supercharge disinformation and lies in an election that’s already as contentious as any in our lifetimes — and what might be done about it.

Links:

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world Feb 26, 2024

Show notes

Today, I’m talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime — and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll.

Anime might seem like niche content, but it’s not nearly as niche as you might think – our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge survey of anime viewers and found that 42% of Gen Z and 25% of millennials watch anime regularly.And Crunchyroll is growing with that audience — like most entertainment providers, the service absolutely exploded during the pandemic, going from 5 million paying subscribers in 2021 to more than 13 million as of last month.

But interestingly Rahul says Crunchyroll’s growth isn’t being driven by more and more people watching anime, but more and more anime fans — especially those watching pirated content — choosing to pay for it.

Links:

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23845221

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is the Apple Vision Pro All That? Feb 22, 2024

Show notes

The Decoder team is off this week. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes; we’re really excited about what’s on the schedule here.

In the meantime, I thought you all might enjoy a conversation I had with Kara Swisher, the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the Apple Vision Pro. All of us have been covering Apple for a very long time, and we had a lot of fun swapping impressions, talking strategy, and sharing what we liked, and didn’t like, about Apple’s $3,500 headset.

Links:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected