 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Philip Less, Daniel Dorado, Howard Urmich, and new patron, M.G. On this episode of DTNS Subscription Services in Vehicles, not a hit turns out who knew how SoundCloud wants to leverage the TikTok way of life, and can online reviews regain their former clout? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 7th, 2023 from Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And from Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And this show's producer, Roger Chang. Right before the show, the U.S. Senate approved Anna Gomez to fill the vacant and fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC, a slot. Gomez's term will span five years. That starts kind of backtrack to July 1st, 2021, so about three years from today. Now, let's start with the quick hits. According to Eurogamer, Nintendo showed off the Nintendo Switch 2, in some form at least, which is slated to be released in the second half of 2024. It was running a souped-up version of Zelda Breath of the Wild. The game initially launched with the original Switch. Now, VGC also reported that Nintendo showed off Epex, the Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, running on hardware that used Nvidia's AI-powered DLSS upscaling technology alongside ray tracing, with visuals comparable to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. Apple shares were down 3 percent Wednesday after a Wall Street Journal report that China plans to ban iPhones and sensitive government departments. Shares were down another 4 percent Thursday after Bloomberg sources stated that China plans to widen this ban to other government-backed agencies and state companies with several agencies said to be telling staff not to bring their iPhones to work. Pinterest continues to change its search algorithm to make its results more inclusive of the people that use its platform. After adding skin tone filtering back in 2018 and hair pattern matching in 2020, the latest update is aimed at improving the visibility of plus-size fashion and other styles that highlight a broader spectrum of body shapes and sizes of people who use Pinterest. Head of Inclusive Products for Pinterest, Annie Toss says that the company noticed users were adding descriptions and qualifiers to their searches, which is smart of them because the recommendations themselves weren't diverse enough. Now users should be able to browse styles without adding on extra search terms like curvy or plus-size, for example. In an effort to better protect teen users, Snapchat has announced new safeguards similar to the efforts introduced earlier this year by Facebook and Instagram. The news comes nearly two years after Snapchat was hauled before Congress to defend its App Store Teen Plus age rating on the App Store, given its content which some U.S. senators believed was inappropriate for younger users. These new safeguards take aim at some of these concerns by introducing features aimed at better protecting 13- to 17-year-olds from online risk, including in that warnings when a minor adds a friend on the App when they don't already share mutual friends or the person isn't in their contacts. In a post on threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the ability to search through posts more widely is rolling out in most English and Spanish-speaking countries with more to come soon. Meta spokesperson Sain Kim confirmed that the feature is coming to both the U.S. and the UK and is also rolling out on the platform's web app. All right, let's talk about the latest with SoundCloud. SoundCloud has historically been a great place for an artist to get discovered. Maybe they're not signed, maybe they are. But it is a social network for music very specifically. SoundCloud announced that after starting testing back in March, it's now rolling out a TikTok-style discovery feed with vertical scrolling and short clips for songs. They didn't call it TikTok, but that is definitely the style that you will recognize. The new UI will be available to all users on iOS and Android in the coming days. Now, SoundCloud very much not the first company to go the TikTok route as of late. It is the way that many people now consume content, but it might have some unique legs in this format because SoundCloud's updated app will let users listen to a 30-second clip of a song to let them decide if they want to listen to the full track. Now, users can tap on the play button while listening to the preview to hear the full version. This is all somewhat cut-and-dry, but it is using AI tech from the startup Museo, which SoundCloud acquired last year, 2022, which at the time it was using as upgraded music discovery experience. That would be picking the best 30 seconds from a song automatically to then share and use otherwise. I feel like if any company, and I was about to say SoundCloud trying to regain relevance, you might say, SoundCloud is super relevant. I love SoundCloud. For SoundCloud to offer some of these new features that are at least TikTok-like in nature, SoundCloud always felt like the place where all the kids were anyway. What do you think, Justin? Well, the question for SoundCloud going forward is, as their key demographic ages, do they continue to find new people that were as young as their key demographic were when they first exploded? Part of that is adapting to new ways that people discover music. This doesn't feel great for me, but then again, I was never a gigantic SoundCloud guy from the jump. I would agree with anybody who thinks, oh, waterfall scrolling is the new stories. It just has to be everywhere. So one of the things that I was thinking went out when we went through this story was that SoundCloud historically has been a platform for creators. Almost everyone who has a SoundCloud account, I don't want to say everyone, but many people who have a SoundCloud account, they are actively creating content to go on to SoundCloud. When you think of TikTok, clearly a lot of people create TikToks, but most of TikTok's users are consumers. They don't ever post anything. They're literally just going there to view other people's content. I think what SoundCloud could do is they could actually start to pull in your non-traditional users. In this case, folks who aren't creating content to go on that platform, folks who are literally just there to consume it, and this might be a way to pull them in. I mean, TikTok also, I can't pretend to be somebody who really has the finger on the pulse of all the hot new tracks that go around on TikTok, but let's say that a creator uploads something on SoundCloud, it gets traction on TikTok, and then the SoundCloud experience, if somebody cares enough about this to learn more about the artist, like, oh, here's where it originated. Oh, and here's some sort of a familiar, I don't know, platform setup that I'm used to. That makes sense to me. I mean, I don't think that, I mean, what I'm not saying is that, oh, now creators would only be uploading songs to SoundCloud in order to get TikTok fame, but I feel like the two could feed each other in a way that maybe they weren't doing as much more in the past. SoundCloud is, I can't tell you how many people I know who love music and we're just sort of like, well, I don't really, I don't really understand what's going on over there. Is it just sort of like, for like demos and weird stuff, it's like, well, yeah, that's a lot of that. But it's also a place where, you know, artists like break out into the mainstream. It just depends on what, you know, who finds you and, you know, how you resonate in the world where MTV exploded and there was no mainstream radio, the place where people discovered music had to go somewhere and SoundCloud became the cultural touchstone that replaced it. Well, let's move into this next story. They complained and BMW. Listen, when I say they, I mean me, I complained about this, the subscription service BMW introduced in 2020 to activate heated seats inside the car for fee has been scrapped. Speaking out of car this week, BMW said it would stop offering subscriptions to activate hardware that already exist in cars, adding we actually are now focusing with those functions on demand on software and service-related products like driving assistance and parking assistance, which you can add later after purchasing the car or for certain functions that require data transmission that customers are used to paying for in other areas. So Sarah, Justin, where do we all stand on these subscription services for vehicles? Does the software versus hardware stands make any difference to you? I mean, I guess it kind of does for me. The whole idea of if you've got, so okay, we've talked about this on the show before, you know, with various levels of outrage. I have heated seats in my car. That's something that, you know, I have the car, I turn them on, I turn them off, depends on the time of year. So I've never had the option to either kind of like say like, it's summer. I won't use them anyway. Maybe I wouldn't want to pay for something like this. And therefore my monthly car payment or lease would be lower. I get that in theory, this could be kind of cool for some people. I think for most people, what really rubbed everybody the wrong way was, yeah, but it's already in my car. You know, this is not like some software update that we're getting over the air here. These are heated seats that are available in my car, but now I have to pay for them instead of just paying for the car outright. And I totally get that. And I, it sounds like from what BMW said is, yeah, we did not get a good feedback about this. People don't like doing math at all. If you want to just price in how much those butt warmers are going to be, and then charge it when you buy a BMW, then people are okay because at least they are done with the math portion of the program. If you are asking them to add yet another subscription in a world where we already feel fatigue over how many subscriptions we have, and it's not in a lower end car. This isn't in a Kia. This is in a BMW, which is supposed to be a vehicle for which connotes luxury, which connotes that you have a reliable automobile that you're not going to have to worry about all that much. And your friends and family will be impressed when you drive up to Thanksgiving. If you are doing a nickel and dime situation in that realm, I think that there is no doubt that there was a very harshly negative reaction to it. And it quite frankly is a bad business decision that should be scrapped industry wide. I will say though, sorry, Rob, go ahead. I was just going to say, so when we talk about additional software services, like if you get some type of additional assisted driving that's added after the fact, my reaction to that is not as visceral because that didn't come as part of the car. Where my disdain for this initial decision that they made a few years back was that, are you charging me less for the hardware that you're putting in that car? And I know how our companies operate. They absolutely are not. So you're paying for those seat warmers. And then you're paying again to have the seat warmers turned on. That made me furious to the point to where I was telling like my parent to not look at V&W any longer, if these are the kind of things they were going to do this, that really rubbed me the wrong way. So I don't like it with software either, but I can at least understand that. And I don't have the visceral reaction. But if you put a piece of hardware in a car, charge me for it and then say, Oh, by the way, you got to give us more money for us to activate it. That is very problematic because the car could have cost me less if you wouldn't have put it in there in the first place. But Rob, you know that that is not the case, as you very correctly said. So this is a ploy to continue to get continued revenue out of customers that they know have it. The only problem is that those customers don't want to pay it. They don't want to feel like they are paying for a thing like you pointed out that you already have. Now to the assisted driving situation, I think that right now you can get away with that. But the BMWs that come out over the next five years, 10 years, I think assisted driving is going to be something that much like power steering or electric windows or something. It'll be bundled into the safety of any stock car. That has a luxury. And now they're just on every car. I mean, to just try to, I don't know. Okay. So again, with my car, I have parking assist. And I'm actually a pretty good parallel parker. So I kind of don't need it. Not going to lie. But when I lived in a city, it was a pretty fun thing that worked pretty well. I do not live in an urban area where I'm parallel parking ever or where I feel like parking is otherwise difficult and I need assistance. Let's say I took my car to New York city where maybe that would be a really, really big deal and something that I had to pay attention to. I might pay for that for a month. I could see where that could be something that you need sometimes depending on where you live and not other times. But I agree with you, Justin. I think that this is sort of a stopgap thing. And one day we're all going to say, remember when they charged people extra? Yeah. I mean, here's the reality. There are certain situations where people like to save money and it's usually when they are spending a lot of money on a regular basis like coupons at the grocery store. When you buy a car, you kind of think you're done with it for a while. You know your monthly payment. You're done, right? Either you buy it in cash or you have a loan for which you pay. But you're done thinking about it to make people think about it or at least to give you and you were giving the rosy a scenario where somebody can say, ah, you want to know what? I'll save a couple hundred dollars during the summer. But that is not a common consumer pattern of behavior when it comes to saving money. No, no. People aren't used to thinking of their cars that way. No. I mean, it's possible that this will catch on and the car companies just went with heated seats and that was the wrong way to start it out with. And you know, we will see different packages going down the road. But yeah, it doesn't seem like consumer feedback has been real good on any of this thus far. I'm trying to think of times where I would be okay with it. But even then, I'm like, yeah, but you know, I have a car payment. Just let me pave your car and have all the things. Well, in the season of no a little more might be about cars might be about anything. Tom breaks down a pivotal moment in tech history. The mother of all demos. You might say, what kind of demo? Well, it's a good show. How many technologies we use today were introduced in 1968 and why it took over a decade for them to go mainstream. That's all this season on no a little more. Check out the Patreon page at patreon.com know a little more to find out more. All right, the New York magazine's vulture writes that there might be a little stuff going on with movie aggregation site rotten tomatoes. Well, they say more than that. Basically that there are a lot of really crap reviews that are getting added to what's called the tomato meter. Now, if you're not familiar, the tomato meter is a way to gauge not only well known critics who write for various publications, but also the general public used to be just critics. Now it's both to figure out what a tomato meter is given giving a particular movie. If it scores below 60%, kind of not a good movie. So at a glance, that might be how you feel about it. But if you read a lot of the reviews, you might say, who was that exactly? Now rotten tomato says it prohibits reviewing based on a financial incentive, but vulture cites several reviewers who claim that production company bunker 15. This is just one example was paying reviewers $50 or more per review for a movie called Ophelia starring Daisy Ridley. Daisy Ridley, obviously very well known. Ophelia did not do all that well. So it would obviously be designed to nudge people into saying, this is a good movie, you should pay for it territory because they were getting paid. Well, you might care about a movie to made a meter score or not, but you likely do care about online ratings in general. These are gut check ways for all of us to decide whether we want to buy something or afford ourselves time towards something in general. Amazon is a great example of a place where reviews matter, but gaming reviews is a big problem. The blog comment section used to be a good way to gauge interest on topics, but that got problematic a long time ago. So Justin, is there a way to make ratings matter going forward? I think that when we say that all ratings are created equal, we're not really being honest because the conversation we're having here is about aggregators and aggregation is only as good as the material that it is aggregating. So let's take rotten tomatoes, for example, or as I refer to it, the Tomatometer. When it was at its best, you had a lot of big name professional movie critics. Names like Siskel and Ebert or Gene Schapp, Owen Gliedman. There were places for which you had a sense of they review everything and their opinions matter. For movie fans like myself, you'd have three or four that you checked in with depending on what the movie was, or if they were raving about something, you'd pay attention to it a little more. But rotten tomatoes gave you a good idea of what the entire critical community was thinking about. We don't have those jobs anymore. The era of every major metropolitan newspaper, plus most of the television stations, plus most of the major magazines, paying somebody who only reviews movies simply is just not the world we live in. And so, yeah, the Tomatometer is giving you a worse result because the thing that they relied on is simply not there anymore. Now, if we're going to look at the other side, look at something like video games, video games have had their reviewers explode. And there's a lot of names that people who pay a lot of attention to video games care about their opinions for. So aggregate reviews on sites like Metacritic for video games are something that I think are worthwhile in a way that movies used to be. Yes, yes and no. I mean, I guess it depends on, you know, there are, there's example after example of a podcast that all of a sudden has like crazy bad or good reviews on, let's say iTunes. And you kind of go, huh, wow, that's a lot of reviews. I wonder if there's something else going on here. Games also, you know, not exempt to this movies, same thing. I feel like I have gotten to the point now where, and you know, it's always good to judge everything with a little bit of skepticism. But I will, I don't know, I'll buy like a, I want to buy like a new eye mask for sleep on Amazon. This thing is $10, you know, this does not change my life one way or another. You know, where I go, a thousand great five-star reviews, something's up here, you know, and it makes me want to engage with this product less. Now it's not, it's not even necessarily the product's fault, not oftentimes it is, but there's so much of this that reminds me even back to the days of when, you know, there was a popular blog that had, you know, a lot of discourse in the comments and, you know, certain comments started to get weird where you go, like, why would that person comment this? This almost seems like it's trying to like gamify the system somehow, which is why you don't see a lot of blogs with comments enabled anymore. I mean, you sort of do, but that that's really been deprecated as a way for anybody to kind of like understand like the pulse or the interest of anything that someone's talking about online. Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about how reviews go today that are just done by, you know, your average Joe who went to the movie to see it and his review of a movie that generally is good, but because one of the actors snubbed them when they asked for an autograph 11 years ago, they hate everything they do. And because they have a platform, now, you know, a lot of their followers are thinking, well, that movie is bad for no reason other than the reviewer didn't like the person. Now, I know that that's the same case for people who actually get paid to do reviews. But when you just when you blow it up to just the infinite amount of people who are on the internet with a voice, it makes it very difficult to weave through a lot of things. Well, you know, I think the kind of opinion, if we're talking about movie criticism is going to be different between a professional and an average person, an average person is expects different things out of a movie. But yeah, more importantly, I didn't like it. More importantly, bad movie. The average person just sees a lot less movies than a reviewer. I was a professional movie reviewer for a year. And the one thing I will tell you is when you have to go see three movies in a theater each and every week, you realize very quickly how similar every movie you've ever seen is. And you wind up overrating things that are just different or take a chance, not because it necessarily is going to please the people that are seeing these movies. For them, they it's been a year and a half since they saw Dom Toretto say family. But for you, the movie reviewer, you have to watch every knock off of Fast and the Furious. And so by the time that the new Fast and the Furious comes around, you're more likely to say yawn and gigantic thumbs up to the French film where they only talk with hand puppets. So guys, have you heard about this game Starfield? Yeah, I've heard about it for the last couple days. CEO of Microsoft Gaming, Phil Spencer, has announced Wednesday that the new Bethesda game passed one million concurrent players across all platforms. The space epic officially launched on September 6 with players using the ship creator to recreate various vessels from Star Wars, Serenity and Star Trek and hidden references to other games like Skyrim have already been discovered. Like I said, I discovered this. I've been playing it and I'm enjoying it. It's actually thus far is pretty good. I'm probably about four or five hours in. Now officially released just yesterday, even though some people had early advanced copies. But man, I have not in, you know, not a gamer. I haven't played Starfield. Maybe I will at some point. I'm not a huge fan of space, but I have not heard this much speaking to reviews overly positive feedback about a game in quite some time. And it's not buggy, which oftentimes AAA games tend to be so good on Bethesda. Indeed. Just a real quick note here. Derek wrote in with a correction to our story from yesterday about last patches, last passes breach story itself is true, but we noted that Taylor Monahan was a co-founder of MetaMask. She is not indeed, but she is their lead project project manager. So thank you, Derek, for the correction. And we also want to give thanks to Justin Robert Young. Thanks for being on the show with us. I want you to tell us what you got going on. Absolutely. You heard it in the middle of the show and I'm going to end the show with it to know a little more from a dog and pony show audio and all the team that has made this program so awesome for so many seasons is back with a brand new edition. And it is all about it's a themed season around the mother of all demos 1968 things like the internet hypertext the mouse and audio visual conferencing were all demoed 1968. What made that demo special how it came together how it shaped all demos in the tech world going forward as well as why it took so long for some of these technologies to become mainstream. You will know a little more when you listen to Tom Merritt on know a little more available now. Well patrons you know what to do you want to stick around for a good day internet that is our extended show we call it GDI we're deep fakes today we're going to talk about deep fakes getting some new regulation ahead of elections not just us elections there are many elections going on around the world and people care about the deep fakes but just a reminder we do this show live you might not be listening or watching live but you can if you want to and we'd love to have you. Our show is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m eastern 20 hundred UTC you can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live we're so excited to be back tomorrow talking TVs with Robert Herron if you know Robert Herron you know nobody knows more about TVs than Robert Herron hope to see you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com club hopes you have enjoyed this program