Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Perhaps this isn’t appropriate to do this in the public but I wanted to comment on how disappointed I am with the new direction Leo seems to be trying to push this show down following the IM rebranding. TWIG was always a show I eagerly streamed live, and honestly why I kept my club membership up was to be in the Discord when this show was going on. When the IM rebrand happened the first few interviews were full skips for me, the latest few have been okay as the new format seems to have got some footing.
The sillyness, and “fun tech news” of TWIG is why I love this show, I would often find myself laughing at various things, it was fun… however the removing of the Craig Newmark intro has potentially confirmed a hunch I had that TWIT is trying to ‘serious up’ this show, and it sounds like everyone clearly did not like this move and the will of the people was heard but “heed it not” says Leo. I dropped my club membership after the first IM show, and for now I won’t be renewing, and I hope this show isn’t changing for the worse 
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No, this is the perfect place to comment. That’s the main function of the forums!
We were having trouble with declining numbers and disappearing advertisers with the old TWiG format. I, too, was a little uncomfortable with the silliness. It had increased significantly and frankly that was because so much of the Google news was irrelevant as the years went by.
I decided to pivot the show into a more informative direction, without abandoning the sense of fun that made TWiG special. At least that’s the goal.
I am, indeed, sorry to lose you, but the downloads have doubled so I think it was the right move. We can’t please everyone, but I am always open to input. Thanks for posting.
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I think you’re succeeding with that goal. While I’m not that fascinated by AI right this moment, it is obviously going to become very important, and I can see from the Discord chat that the show is drawing a lot of people who are passionately interested in AI. At the same time I’m enjoying the continuing humour and sparkiness of the conversation between the hosts, and being stealthily better informed without necessarily being aware of it.
Seems like the format is appealing to a lot of different viewpoints. The interviews can be interesting, and when you get the occasional wide-eyed zealot that I can’t relate to, it’s only part of the show and there’s plenty more diverse content after they’re done. It’s good.
You aren’t going to be able to sustain a long show run with interviews. How many AI interviewees do you think you can find? Only a couple to date have been interesting. Triangulation was a lot better, and yet it failed.
Bring back the old format TWIG.
It’s pretty simple. Google is old news, no advertiser wanted to buy ad space on it. AI is the new hotness, and that is what gets advertisers’ interest. So I think the change was made not because of the audience but because of the advertisers. I do also want to note that the interviews are only the first part of the show, and you could skip them without too much hassle and the rest of the content is pretty similar to the old show, near as I can tell.
Any change is going to annoy some people. But we were hemorrhaging audience (it was down to 20,000 people at one point) and changing the focus and the format has turned that around. We’re around 40,000 each week now. So, on balance, more people like the change than hate it.
And, honestly, we enjoy doing the show more. Google was getting pretty stale, and whatever you think about it, AI is changing the world.
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Yep, I agree. Whatever people might say, TWiT is a business, and has to earn the money to pay the bills. Any change of format that doubles audience and gets advertisers interested has to be a good thing to help TWiT survive.
Now I might not be that fascinated by AI at this stage of its development, but this is still a highly enjoyable show with a team that works really well together, and makes for lively conversations that keep the entertainment value high. The format leaves room for digression if needed in the later part of the show.
Meanwhile I’m being informed about AI without really noticing it, which has got to be good. And you manage to keep the snake oil ratio fairly low with the guests, unlike some other general tech podcasts which just give AI fantasists a megaphone and point it at the audience. 
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I like the new format and when you run out of interesting AI mavens to interview, hopefully you’ll have identified a new host to join the crew and go back to 3 hosts as when Stacey was still there 
