 Coming up on DTNS, how do we avoid creator burnout? How do email newsletters survive new piracy trends? And how do we make sure that film photography never dies? This is Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 9th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Raffalino. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. For the show, we were talking about all sorts of stuff like, where did the Lakers come from? And who learns the most in grade school? And do we know all our state capitals? If you want to be part of the wider conversation and our expanded show, Good Day Internet, do so by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate approved the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a bill intended to boost America's ability to compete with China in the technology sector. It authorizes approximately $190 billion for technology and research and also $50 billion to increase U.S. production of semiconductors and telecommunications equipment. The bill must now pass the House of Representatives before being signed into law by President Joe Biden. President Biden also signed an executive order Wednesday, which revokes former President Trump's bans on apps like TikTok, WeChat and Alipay from U.S. app stores, instead calling on the Commerce Department and other federal agencies to recommend how to protect against the collection and sale and transfer of sensitive U.S. consumer data to foreign adversaries and also recommend future executive actions and legislation. The order doesn't address actions by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which previously set several deadlines for TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese owner, ByteDance. And its official, El Salvador, is the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender after Congress voted in favor of the bill by President Naid Bukele, adopting it by a supermajority of 62 out of 84 votes. The country's current official currency is the U.S. dollar and the bill says prices can now be shown in Bitcoin and Bitcoin exchanges will not be subject to any capital gains tax. The bill also proposed the state will promote the necessary training and mechanisms so that the population can access Bitcoin transactions. As part of Instagram's first Creator Week event, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced new tools to help creators earn money on the platform. A native affiliate tool will launch in the coming months to allow the discovery of new products available on checkout and earn commissions from follower purchases all within Instagram. Instagram CEO Adam Massari also said promoting offline transactions between creators and companies avoids Apple's 30% cut of in-app purchases. They're really just laying it out there at this point. And speaking of new purchases, the Verges, or new products, excuse me, the Verges sources say Facebook plans to debut its first smartwatch next summer. It reportedly includes a detachable display with two cameras, one front-facing and one 1080p rear autofocus camera for taking pictures and videos that can be directly shared across Facebook's suite of apps as one would expect. This fits nicely into Facebook's effort to build more consumer devices that circumvent Apple and Google in Facebook's ability to reach people. Facebook is said to be planning future versions of the watch as a key input device for Facebook's AR glasses. Oh boy. And yes, and the market category just got a little bit more interesting. All right, Scott, you're a creator. We're all creators. How's it going in Creatorland these days? Well, yeah, Creatorland is a weird place these days. As many people probably heard on yesterday's show, the team talked about Instagram's recent transparency around its algorithms work and really how they'll be helpful to creators who want to get traction and monetize their content. It's been a real problem on Instagram and other services where they're very reliant on an algorithm to show your stuff. But understanding the machine won't necessarily make being part of the machine any easier. The New York Times, Taylor Lorenz addressed this in an article titled, Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down, which cites a handful of examples of mostly TikTok creators who are in various stages of creative slump from loss of passion to deeper mental health issues as they try to keep frequency up and ride that algorithm. But this isn't really new. Like we said, Instagram and YouTube is another one. YouTube creators have been saying this for years. That longer video length and post frequency, just two factors that the algorithm favors work against healthy output and make burnout inevitable. Luis Caspucci, a 23 year old TikTok creator, told the Times, quote, when your views are down, it affects your financial stability and puts your career at risk. It's like getting demoted at a job without warning, unquote. People love creative content. Creators can do all sorts of stuff and make livings that way. But at an obvious cost, is there a solution that does not end in a churn and burn? I mean, I feel like you could ask any of us, some of the questions, those of us who've been podcasting since 2004, you know, seeing that industry kind of rise and see all sorts of new players come to bear. And even lately, Apple deciding the subscriptions are in the future and Spotify sort of changing the game. And all of us having to move and juke and jive based on these changes and be more fluid. I feel like that's what these creators are dealing with, but at a much more rapid pace. And it can be super scary because Sarah, they really are at the mercy, let's say, of an algorithm that doesn't necessarily favor their content or if it did Monday, it might not on Friday. Yeah, no kidding. That quote that you read about the 23 year old TikTok creator who's like, I feel like I'm demoted at a job and I don't know why. If somehow I'm not keeping up my numbers or growing them. And yeah, this is not a new tale of, whoa, YouTube creators and Instagram creators and even, I mean, I can certainly say that about my work as a creator over the years. Sometimes you think something's going to resonate and it doesn't, or you wake up one day and go, I gotta do this all again. You know, I'm getting tired, I'm getting burned out. But especially TikTok just use as an example because it's the hot new thing these days. You know, there is so much, there's such a like skyrocketing growth that can happen. In fact, I read story after story where it's like, so and so doesn't even know why they have 20 million followers, it just sort of happened. And I think that it's easy to, you get pigeonholed because that one video where you did that one thing was such a hit, so you go, okay, I'm the person who does that thing. And you can ride that out for a little bit and some creators are good at what they do and there's probably some luck involved and it might morph into something bigger. I can think, you know, of a handful of creators where I'm like, I know they're making a lot of money and they seem like they've figured out their niche nicely, but for others to constantly be trying to keep folks happy and of course the behind the scenes of any kind of production. TikTok is like, all you did was like, point the camera at your grandma and she said something funny. It's like, most of the time there's a lot more that goes into that and you just don't realize it unless you're the one doing the behind the scenes stuff. Right, the other thing to consider here is like, these platforms when they were established, certainly early on, like YouTube and even Instagram, they didn't know that this was where this would be, that this would be a platform for people that make a living on their platform. They didn't really know that. Now they know that now and it can be part of what drives people to their platform. The content is what keeps people there. YouTube is a better example of that probably, but now that they know that, I feel like they have a greater responsibility to at least work with their creators in some way to have sort of mutually assured success. It can't just be, well, you're a guest on our platform, so go ahead and make a bunch of money, but if we change our minds on how stuff works, sorry, you're out. That just feels like a bad plan and a lot of people are sort of just held to that. The nice thing about podcasting is we've always had RSS in a way to get it to everybody, and it was kind of an open, more sort of non-garden type system despite attempts to make it so. And that's made it a little easier for us to navigate, but these guys don't necessarily have that. Neither do streamers. I know Twitch streamers, like you said, who get pigeonholed. It's like, well, if you're really good at Fortnite, then all your viewers want is you playing Fortnite. And if you tried to branch out, they're gonna rebel, they'll revolt. And then your revenue goes down. You're like, well, shoot. Now I gotta go back to playing Fortnite. I don't actually really feel like doing today. And then we get into all these issues. So it's a lot to take in. There's a huge conversation around this thing. Rich, I don't know if you wanted to add anything to this. I didn't mean to take up so much time, but to me, this is like the big conversation right now with creators. And I think the burnout is also very acute because there is that dopamine hit when you, TikTok makes it very easy to monetize more so than any other platform at this stage in its life. So going viral previously on something like YouTube or Instagram might not necessarily lead to that big payday as quickly. Whereas TikTok, you can really just hit that rocket and all of a sudden you both get that popularity and that financial success. And mentally, that can have a huge, not just financially, but you're even more chasing that high, I feel like, by design on a lot of these platforms as they become easier to monetize. It's great for if you can figure out how to build that into a sustainable career, build a community around yourself and a brand. But coming off that high can be even, I feel like as it becomes more tied to monetization, much more devastating. Yeah, I mean, you could say that about lots of jobs, right? Where it's like, well, I'm making really good money so I'm incentivized to work really hard, but I'm working too hard and I'm burned out and I'm not happy, you know? And so it's like, okay, bring that down to young people, sometimes not even adults and something that's like catastrophic rise to fame and this pressure to sort of do something where there is really no business model because it's being invented right before your very eyes. It's no wonder that people are having mental health issues and I don't want them to have any mental health issues. Well, according to the most recent market share numbers from Litmus, for May of 2021, this is really interesting, 93.5% of all email opens on mobile came in Apple Mail on iPhones or iPads. That's not just, oh, for people who have those devices, it's actually all of it. On desktop, Apple Mail on Mac is responsible for 58.4% of all email opens and you might say, how's that possible? I mean, there are so many more Android devices, why wouldn't it just be something that you would have on an Android device? Because I guess there are more people who are looking at email more regularly on iOS devices. It's just the way it is. Now, at WWDC earlier this week, Apple announced mail privacy protection which is turned on by default and blocked so-called spy pixels that get hidden inside emails so that a sender of an email will know when I opened that email. If I went back and opened it again, that sort of thing. Apple says this helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, it also masks their IP address so it can't be linked to their other online activity or used to determine their location. Now, many users are gonna think this is great for privacy, I want this. Not necessarily so great for publishers who rely on that who opened my email metric to measure engagement and also share engagement with advertisers who might be paying the publishers to make more content. Casey Newton who uses Substack to publish the subscription-based newsletter platformer notes that for ad-based newsletters, publishers are gonna need to find other ways to understand their audiences, such as reader surveys. That's something that we do on Daily Tech News show every so often, extremely helpful. You ask somebody, hey, what do you think about this or that? You get enough feedback that if you are ad-supported, that's something that you can share as a metric. But pay-to-read newsletters kind of have more options and Casey Newton doesn't think it's such a big deal in that case because view counts that their stories get on the web go into it, overall growth of their mailing list, obviously, and of course growth of their revenue because if you're asking someone to pay for your content, if they pay for your content, you know you have reached a user who is probably opening that email. So I don't know, I wanted to pull the group here. How much do we think? I mean, clearly Apple is doing some disruption here. I think honestly, it's the advertisers who should be the most worried, throwing advertising at metrics that are pretty outdated and not very accurate. Yeah, I agree. These numbers are crazy. Like 23.5% of all email opens on mobile come from Apple Mail. They're not even the dominant platform overall worldwide and they control that much. That's just crazy. The 58.4 on desktop is also kind of insane. I don't even use Apple Mail and I use a lot of Apple products and I'm just shocked by those numbers. What that tells me is advertisers are gonna freak out about this just like a lot of people did about sort of inter app tracking when they implemented the, hey, this app wants to track you. Do you wanna let it do it across apps? I say no every time now. I think it terrifies them because these are massive numbers and bigger than I thought. So I don't know what the ad revenue in the email market is these days. I really have no idea but if there is money in there and if there is sort of a business happening this is basically shutting down a massive amount of your sort of viewable tracking and now you don't know what you're gonna charge what rates are gonna be like I can see how this is really disruptive but I personally think it's great for me as a user and that's what these kind of moves really feel good for me as a user but they are lousy for advertisers. I do have to wonder though, Apple obviously this plays into their marketing strategy of being very privacy centric. They're obviously using it as a major product differentiator for themselves successfully seemingly. I do have to wonder if at some point they will offer, I don't wanna say to put themselves in advertiser position but they do a lot of stuff with differential privacy. I wonder if they can offer some sort of solution to the problem that they are now creating for advertisers even if it is a boon to consumers. I don't wanna put that off there. I think for sub-stack people that run sub-stack newsletters revenue is the ultimate metric that you're caring about really. So I don't necessarily see it as a big impact and I feel like for smaller newsletters generally those will have more engaged audiences. So doing things like user surveys I feel like is one less of a burden and two your audience is going to be much more interested and if you frame it as, hey, you can help us out and we can get to know you a little bit better. I don't think necessarily it's a problem for those types of newsletter creators. Well, moving to browsers where apparently I'm the only person using it to open my email. Let's talk about what we kinda like around here. Browser choices are pretty plentiful. I was just doing a count myself and I've got Safari, Chrome, Vivaldi, Firefox, Brave, Edge, probably more than that. I think the only one I don't have is an Opera browser at the moment. I jump around all the time but today we're gonna highlight Vivaldi, mentioned them a second ago, a privacy focused chromium based browser. Seems like they're all chromium based these days anyway which launched version 4.0 this morning. Now including a beta of built-in mail, calendar, RSS, client and Vivaldi Translate. Vivaldi Translate is powered by LingVenix which is, this runs on Vivaldi's own servers. This is their own thing and is designed not to share data with third parties if you're using it but speaking of mail, interesting, a built-in mail client that has me kind of interested. I kinda wanna see what that's like but opens up the bigger conversation about browsers and the market continually seeming to grow with new entries all the time. Browsers coming along mostly focused on privacy. It seems like that's the big selling point. If you're not Chrome, then you're somebody who says Chrome is taking too much of your stuff so come over here and check it out and we default you to DuckDuckGo and that's more secure and blah, blah, blah. These guys are no different. Brave is very much steeped in the whole security and your data and your time and all of that. Somebody's gotta, oh, it's Apple themselves with Safari. They've got VPN stuff coming. So it seems like everybody's put a big flag in the ground that says security versus whatever Chrome's doing these days and I kinda like it. I like switching around. I currently just moved to Firefox this week because they had a major update last weekend or maybe it was early this week and I love it. It's fast, it's great. I'm using it like crazy, but who knows in a week I'll be back to Brave or off to Vivaldi again. I'll probably give that a shot today actually and see how it's going, but just moving around. You really love, you love, yeah, like browser hot potato more than anyone else. I also use Firefox. I switched to Firefox. I just thought, well, you know what? I remember what it was when I got my new MacBook Air. I was like, let's just try something different. I got this nice new shiny system and I've used it as my number one browser ever since. There are things though. There are things every so often I'll hit a site in Firefox so I'm like something's wonky here and it'll be fine in Chrome or fine in Safari. So yeah, I've always got my backups. The part of Vivaldi that struck me as interesting was that not only built-in mail but built-in calendar are also RSS client, but mail and calendar are two things that, especially because I use Google Calendar and I'm also using Mac OS calendar, which is they don't always talk to each other. So I've got an app open. I've got a browser tab open. I've got several Gmail browser tabs open at any given time. And that's not the end of the world. I've figured it out. I also have Apple mail. I'm one of those people who uses Apple mail for sure but it's sort of, I'm kind of, it's not all in one place. It's definitely not something that is natively built into the browser in a delightful way. To have something like that is not reinventing the wheel. I mean, browsers used to be more all in one than they are now. And so I kind of like that idea. And this is not to bury the lead. This is the dream of opera originally reborn. Kind of having all of this all in one functionality. Their former CEO was one of the founders of Vivaldi and he's currently Vivaldi CEO as well. So, I mean, really all this needs is like a little fish tank widget that you can open up in the side. And it really does have like an early opera, like these kinds of addition. Vivaldi also does a lot of UI innovation that a lot of other browsers like to copy with tab stacking and vertical tabs and stuff like that. So we'll see if maybe this also starts a trend of, hey, let's stack some more functionality in there. What really drives me is, is it fast? Is it snappy? Is it gonna run the two or three plugins I need? That's it. Like if it works well beyond that, I'm happy to be jumping around and do it for whoever's faster. And I don't know, we can try Vivaldi today and I'll let you guys know next week what I thought. Please do. If you have tried Vivaldi and you have thoughts or you'd like us to talk about some other browser on the show and there's a story that you could submit to our subreddit, then why aren't you doing it? That's the way to let us know what you'd like to see more of. Submit stories, also vote on other stories. Help them rise to the top. So we are sure to see them. DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. All right, so about two years ago, I started getting back into shooting film photography, like analog photography. And when I did, I hadn't done it since college, so it had been over 10 years. And looking at that landscape for starting to get into like 2019, I realized there is a ton of tech that is helping keep film photography, not just prevented from dying, but actually helping it thrive and kind of taking it in new directions. It's really kind of cool stuff. And I really wanted to share it with the DTNS audience. So the first thing, like just like first off the bat, whenever someone sees me with like my Pentax, KX, SLR, like everyone, the first reaction is always, oh, they still make film for those? And yes, like film is still around. It's more expensive. It's not maybe at the drug store, but it is still around. But like looking at the kind of film ecosystem, there's really kind of three components that are kind of needed. And two of them, I think everybody thinks of, right off the bat, there's cameras, there's film, but then there's also kind of this third element of processing and scanning where all three of these areas were seeing tech play some interesting roles kind of on the DIY side and like especially with the 3D printing stuff. On the camera side, there are still film cameras being made. It's not all vintage stuff. On the low end, you have companies like Lomography. In fact, I have my wonderful Lomography fisheye camera here. It's Hello Kitty themed. It's very nice. I love it. And these are super relatively inexpensive. They're all plastic. They're kind of toys. They don't have a lot of manual controls. On the other side though, you have like super high end stuff like Leica is still making film cameras, social servicing film cameras. And on the instant side, in fact, Fuji makes the majority of its imaging money. It comes from their instant film line. So like film is not only like camera sales and film, not only alive, but massively profitable in the case of Fuji. The problem is that there was this huge delta between a Leica and a Lomography camera, probably like to the tune of like $5,000. So like where vintage cameras a lot of times come in is for someone who wants, okay, I wanna be able to have all the knobs and settings to play with, but I also don't wanna mortgage my house to do so. And that's where we do see some issues of things like fixed supply on old cameras kind of as more people maybe are getting into this film resurgence, there's a limited supply. So prices are kind of going up, but we're seeing some really, because prices are going up, it's making these DIY projects become even more viable as businesses, not just as kind of one-off projects. Probably the most well-known in the space is a company or a project, I guess called Camera Dactyl. And this is using 3D printed camera bodies and essentially kind of having templates for that. So you can put on old vintage large format lenses and creating kind of a whole line of very customizable, you know, kind of give them all sorts of colors, large format and medium format cameras where you get these really giant negatives that are fairly unique, at least in the film world for the cost. You also have companies like Goodman Zone Camera, which kind of do, you can kind of have a DIY, like you can literally kind of build all the pieces together if you really want to. And it kind of operates on the same thing of kind of using vintage lenses, but providing these new bodies for them where old bodies might be wearing out. You also have other companies that are kind of taking, these are, I would classify like Camera Dactyl and Goodman Zone, I feel like those are like net new cameras, but there's also like a whole line of, hey, we want to make like Frankenstein cameras, we want to 3D print some parts to take an old camera body and give it some new functionality. And that's where you get into some really interesting stuff. There's a company called ZIN, or not, there's a project called ZINstax, which is run by a guy named Han Chen. And it's effectively taking the INstax printer back that where you can like send, you can send like a Bluetooth picture or a picture of a Bluetooth to this little printer and it actually prints out little INstax picture. He essentially took that and put it on the back of a very high-end Mamiya camera, which is like this studio camera from like the 70s and 80s. And it lets you get kind of that like a high-end instant camera. It's really interesting stuff. There's also stuff with like ultra-wide cameras called a press pan where they're taking old camera bodies and retrofitting them using 3D printing and stuff like that. On the film side, there's not as much of a DIY scene. A lot of the chemistry is well understood so you can create your own film if you really want to. There's not that big of a scene, but what's interesting there is that we are seeing the fact that technology can actually go away in this space as well. This is particularly acute in the instant film world where we've seen Polaroid, kind of the impossible project that kind of reinvigorated Polaroid essentially brought it back from the dead. They had access to a lot of the equipment, but not the chemistry. So we actually have kind of lost some of the like more quick processing and stuff for instant film photography, which I think is very interesting. But where there is the biggest disconnect technologically-wise is in kind of the processing aspect. A lot of film processing, you know, it was done in things like one-hour photos back in the day when you were shooting in the 90s and you had your little disposables. There aren't a lot of one-hour photos around. You might have one in your town maybe. It's kind of a rare sight now and it largely disappeared from Walgreen CVS and that kind of stuff. What you do have though are projects. There's a really cool project called Filmomat, which is taking Arduinos and, you know, kind of machine-cut acrylics to build up these really sophisticated, it's actually quite a beautiful machine, but it's able to be programmed with all sorts of different processing times for color, black and white, slide film, which all kind of have their own requirements. And it's really not just a technological solution, but also kind of a really cool industrial design thing. The other component is with scanning, is scanning technology peaked in like O5, where you had Fuji Canon, or excuse me, Fuji Kodak Nikon, even Hasselblad putting their top investment into scanning technology. Those are all 15 to 20 years old now and imaging technology has moved on a long way. And so you have whole communities of people trying to like hack old Kodak PAKON scanners to get more resolution out of them because right there on the cap that like six megapixels. But then there's also been this whole revolution around scanning with a DSLR, which I think is really fascinating because it's like, hey, these are modern, these are effectively modern scanning sensors. Let's figure out how to use those to essentially take very close-up pictures of film negatives and kind of give them a new life. There's a ton of really interesting technology aspects to this and it's kind of made possible because there is an increased demand and somewhat of a limited supply. Yeah, I love this. I got a couple of film cameras behind me. I don't use them because I don't know. It kind of turns into, in fact, I have a camera behind me that's like got half of a roll that has been in the camera for so many years that I don't even know what the first half of the roll is. Last time I picked up the camera, which is probably like college or something, but part of it is because it's like, yeah, then where do I get them processed? Sure, I can send them off somewhere. I mean, it can be done, but it's not the way it used to be. I used to work in a camera shop. Somebody comes in, gives me a couple of rolls. I say, yeah, come back in an hour. We're not too busy right now and get it done. There's a whole machine involved though. There's all these chemicals. You got to wear gloves. You got to do it right. It was actually a really fun job, but those places are very few and far between now, but to have more of that DIY, I mean, a lot of the stuff that you're talking about, I have never heard of. I know that I could build my own dark room, but that's kind of overkill. I probably would have done it if I wanted to back when I was actually using film a lot more. And there's a lot going on, speaking of chemicals, but yeah, particularly the film of Matt, I got to look into that because I love the hobby that's like, the parts all still exist. It's not like film and film cameras just disappeared one day like dinosaurs. It's more of like, oh, this is still a cool hobby. People still care, but there are ways to give up new life. Yeah, and actually the funny thing is that the issue is that as cameras became more computerized in the 80s and 90s and through the 2000s, those are the ones that are the hardest to repair. It's the purely mechanical ones that yes, they do break down. You have to get them serviced. It is not inexpensive to do so, but that's a matter of replacing parts whereas if a capacitor blows out on your 90s soccer parent or SLR, that basically there's no replacement for that. So it is an interesting dynamic of the old and the new. Well, Rich, this was very enlightening. I'm really glad that you're kind of, you're sparking my interest, re-spurking my interest in the film world. It's good stuff. And I also think you're a pretty good photographer because I follow you on some of the photography things. Well, thank you very much. It helps to have cute children to take photos of. Indeed. If you've got thoughts on film photography, maybe you've got a tip for us or a question or comment on anything that we talk about on the show or might talk about it on a future show, please send that email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. We do it every day and today they include John and Becky Johnston, Chris Benito and Steve Ayadorola. Special, special thanks to Chris Smith who is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Chris Smith, you are a shining beacon of light. Thank you for all the years of support. Truly there are for Chris Smith's and we want to give a big thanks to Scott Johnson, Mr. Frogpants himself, Papa Frogpants, I like to call them. Scott, where can people find more of Papa Frogpants? Well, I wish now I had papafrogpants.com but I don't. I do have frogpants.com and that would be the place to go. There's pretty much a view of all that I do there. There's podcasts, eight or nine in full production right now. We have pretty much anything you might want. I would say it all skews a little bit nerdy. So if you listen to this show, you're probably gonna like something I do over there. You also can check out my comics, my artwork, everything else I have going on over there. Just about to ship a card game for the first time. Very exciting stuff and you can follow all of it in and around frogpants at frogpants.com. Thank you, Scott. We are also live on this show, Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern is when we go live, 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Hope to see you there. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin, Robert Young doing it all again. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.