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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One quick note about Alex’s comment regarding iCloud Private Relay - since it only works in Safari, it wouldn’t prevent packet shaping in third-party apps.
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My love for this show has returned now that I hit the skip button whenever Alex contributes. I can’t take the Apple apologist anymore. At least Leo stands up to him and has a more balanced perspective.
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@Leo is correct, Apple can’t say that you can trust them, or rather the Store. That they do their best und difficult conditions, probably, but that we can trust that the Store is safe? No.
It is a mammoth problem and Renee is probably correct, that they pull out a vast majority of the bad apps, but there are still a large number out there, ripping people off.
Until they can be prosecuted and all the money seized, there is no incentive not to play the system, and as long as there are millions of apps, you can’t test all of them completely.
I do find it difficult to listen to, when Alex tries to brush it under the carpet or defend the indefensible. He is better than that and when he talks technical about creative tools and methods, he is a pleasure to listen to.
Someone should stand behind him with one of those foam clubs and hit him on the back of the head, when he starts talking such nonsense. 
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LOL. Like many people on here I own a number of Apple products and am very happy with them. However, you can’t overlook a number of their more shady business practices like anti-competitive behavior in the app store, inhibiting right to repair, privacy theater, and the aforementioned app store safety.
Being a complete Apple apologist consistently just blows your credibility. No matter how talented you are in the video production industry. I can’t decide who’s more intolerable: Scott Bourne or Alex…
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I haven’t seen anyone handle content moderation at that scale well. I’m not excusing them, they need to do better and we should hold them to account, but we need to come to the realization that massive scale (FB, YouTube, etc) means that you will see more bad content.
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Precisely, which is why the Apple argument of trust us is not realistic.
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Alex is not an apologist and I’ve heard him come down on Apple many times. I could say something about the overly liberal points of view I hear a lot when the hosts go on a rant. But I listen to and give all the hosts and guest hosts their due because it’s what makes the show worth listening to. Name calling is not desired.
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Alex’s opinions are a mix of “technocoporate” He definitely has the background in both departments. I think he tries to give options based on his experiences owning his own company and as an Apple user, much like a lot of us here in the ether. Then there is flip side of the arguments coming from the other end as well that wrinkle the noses of some viewers also.
I guess if you don’t like what your hearing, don’t bother to listen to the podcast because your going to get both sides. In spite of some of the stuff I hear, MacBreak Weekly is the podcast I listen to the most.
You rock Alex!
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Alex Lindsay: for those who find John Gruber too anti-Apple.
I’m just not sympathetic to arguments that Apple, YouTube, Facebook, etc. are simply too big to do better at moderating their platforms. They are approaching effectively unlimited resources. They simply choose not to do more.
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Resources are never unlimited. Money might be unlimited but talent is not. I am hiring a product manager for my team as we speak and I can tell you that good talent is very hard to find, even if you are willing to pay.
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Sure. I’ve been struggling to hire people the last year, too. But you and I are not in the same universe as Apple, Google, Facebook. How much raw talent do you think it would take to moderate YouTube content? Do you think you need a Stanford grad to do that? How many people do you think would have the ability to handle that job with a few months of training? Come on, Joe, let’s not carry water for these companies.
Beyond just throwing bodies at the problem of overwhelming content, they could in fact increase the barrier to entry and thus reduce the amount of content. Paul Thurrott was just bemoaning the terrible experience of Xbox Live ever since it started; that he had been routinely reporting users for bad behavior and nothing ever changes. That is because Microsoft is not incentivized to make it better. They make more money by allowing bad actors to continue using the platform. The same with Twitter. Do we really think it is not possible for them to come up with a way to verify users and still allow for the possibility of pseudonymous usage? But that would limit growth and user engagement metrics, which impacts the bottom line. Ditto for Facebook, which I thought has a real names policy, but doesn’t seem interested in adding too much friction to the process of creating accounts. YouTube couldn’t institute a program to identify “trusted” or “quality” sources, or Apple do something similar with developer accounts?
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A random Google search says “As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.” It’s hard to envision that even 100K talented employees could do a good job keeping up with that.
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I think that at the end of the day, this is the real answer.
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I agree…but, never happen!
See the last part of my comment. YouTube has chosen to set the barrier to upload exceedingly low. They could raise it, thereby reducing the volume of content being uploaded. But this is antithetical to their profit motive.
Humans being humans, they’re going to work around any limit, and it’s more likely a limit will need enforcers too (aka humans) to prevent abuses of the limits or to prevent them from disenfranchising someone who should legitimately be making content. It’s akin to who polices the police… who chooses which content stays and which goes and which gets blocked. You could say that screw up once and you’re blocked forever, but that won’t work because we don’t exist in a police state.
One could argue that this is a good thing. It has its downsides, but I am glad that I can easily upload videos without having to jump through hoops.
The be clear, Alex sounds more like a “business” apologist more than favoring only Apple. I don’t share his views on many issues, but I want to hear those points of view so that “I” know where I stand on the same issue; not because I go against “anything” he says but because it tempers my certainty on many subjects. That’s the point of debate!