 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. That's you! Thanks to all of you, including Steve Aydarola, Jeffrey Zilx, Kriya Artem, and our new patron, Brad! Welcome, Brad! On this episode of D... This episode of DTNS, did Spotify just alienate its less popular artists? They say yes. Metas Thread seems to be in the running for a social network that might stick and all the latest from TwitchCon with Tricia Hershberger joining us. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 26th, 2023. In Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us is none other than Tricia Hershberger, TV host and streamer and frequent guest that we haven't seen in a while. Welcome back, Tricia! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here today and kind of debrief all things TwitchCon for you, which I just got back from, so it should be fun. Well, we are glad to have you here with us to do just that and talk about some other tech stuff. Let's first start with those quick hits. Google announced its Bug Bounty program will now specifically apply to generative AI. The Vulnerability Rewards program is being expanded to encourage research around AI safety and security, surfacing potential issues to ultimately make AI safer for everyone. Google says bugs should be categorized when reported. They won't all be AI associated, but since AI raises new and different concerns like the potential for unfair bias and model manipulation and misinterpretations of data, it's important. GM and Honda are abandoning a joint plan to offer sub-$30,000 EVs in 2027 after an April 2022 announcement of the partnership. A series of affordable EVs on GM's Flexible EV platform with its old TM branded battery packs was the plan, but Honda CEO Tricia Hershberger, excuse me, Toshi Hiro maybe said that in a statement after studying this for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business. So at the moment, we're ending development of an affordable EV. Xiaomi is claiming the first smartphone series using Qualcomm's Just Announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in its new Xiaomi 14 line. Both the Xiaomi 14 and larger 14 Pro have the new chip inside. Both have an LTPO OLED 120Hz panel with 3000 nits of brightness, offering 256 gigabytes or 512 or 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage, and 8 gigabytes, 12 gigabytes, and up to 16 gigabytes of RAM. Xiaomi's 14 Pro starts at 4,999 Chinese Yuan, while the Xiaomi 14 starts at 3,999. Pre-orders are open now in limited regions. X is rolling out audio and video call capability at least to some users after CEO Linda Jacarino previously confirmed in August that video chat would be coming to X. Some X users reported a new notification when opening up the app that says audio and video calls are here. There's a new enable audio and video calling toggle with the app settings, which says that you can turn the feature on and then select who you're comfortable with using it with. X hasn't officially said more about the audio and video calls feature, or if it's going to be available to non-premium users. X owner Elon Musk posted in August that the company hits records for user seconds in recent months, then said in September that the company has 245 million daily active users. But Sensor Tower reports that X's daily active users on mobile dropped by 16%, and September, compared with the month, Musk took over the company. Uber is now offering rides and self-driving Waymo cars in Phoenix, Arizona. So UberX, Uber Comfort, Uber Comfort Electric, and Uber Green customers all have the option to take their ride in a fully autonomous vehicle, which will cost the same as one that a human driver is operating. Now if you say I don't want that, customers paired with autonomous vehicles have the option to accept or reject that type of car. Alright Rob, let's talk about Meta's earnings. Absolutely. So Meta reported quite the positive third quarter earnings with a 20% increase in revenue year-over-year to $34.15 billion, and that income up 164% to $11.58 billion. Daily active users were up 7% year-over-year to $3.14 billion in September, although Meta now bundles this number into its family of apps across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. So overall, yeah, yeah. Daily active users up, however, not a lot of breakdown into where exactly they are up. Probably not Facebook, but hey, I don't know. However, Reality Labs was a bit of a sore spot for anybody looking at numbers for Meta. This is where things took a bit of a hit. Sounds like Meta expects losses to continue. In fact, that's exactly what the company said would happen for the next few quarters. Reality Labs is Meta's division overseeing AR and VR spending, so it's the Quest folks, and Metaverse folks, and efforts to go into the future with both, which continued its multi-billion-dollar losing streak with losses of $3.7 billion for the quarter, and $11 billion since the start of the year. And Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced that Meta's ex-competitor Threads has just under 100 million monthly active users since launching in July. This is a big number for social networks, and it's only been around for a few months. By comparison, in May of last year, Twitter, which is still called at the time, had only 229 million users. So, Tricia, where are you hanging out these days on social media? You know what? It's so tough because when Threads first launched, it was a nice easy transfer over, I think for a lot of people. And I had a delightful experience on Threads, and then I came to hear lots of other people say, but I'm only seeing posts from brands and like creators and not my friends. And I thought, well, when I go on, all I see is my friends, but then I thought about it and thought, you know what, Tricia? Almost all of your friends are creators. So the reason I had a lovely experience only seeing my friends post is because most of my friends work in social media somehow. So I thought it was great. That being said, I certainly understand if people are just seeing, you know, a feed full of stuff that is not what they came there to see. But I think overall, we do see a lot of dissatisfaction with the changes that have been made to X formerly known as Twitter. And I am one of the people that is discontent with a lot of those changes. I mean, I'm not thrilled to have us all maybe be charged money moving forward. And it's also very hard when your livelihood is somewhat based in a certain platform to have the creator just make changes all willy-nilly at the whim without even notifying their employees. So things are rolled out weird. And it just, it doesn't feel like a good place for me to invest my time and resources as a creator. I'm always interested what everybody else thinks, though. So Sarah, where do you stand on the threads X thing? Well, so when I've got, I've got an issue with X for, I mean, a variety of reasons. But the biggest reason is just that I used to go to Twitter as it was known for quite some time. But until recently, you know, first thing in the morning, what's going on in news, you know, who's breaking some stories, you know, you know, maybe a couple of laughs. It was kind of my, this is what I do first thing. And then throughout the day, it wasn't news gathering place for me. It was a fun friend place. And it still is a fun friend place, because I know a lot of my friends are still on the platform. And so I'm not, you know, saying that, you know, what they're doing doesn't matter anymore. But it has gradually over, I would say the period of, you know, the last three months, every morning, you know, it kind of becomes like, do I even check to the point now where I don't? In fact, there was a huge news story last night, there was a mass shooting in the US. And I went to X just to see, you know what, you know, what's kind of what's, what's being talked about there. And it wasn't even that I thought it was fake news. It was just nothing. And now that it's totally the people that you follow. So who I follow is not the same as who someone else follows. And you can curate a whole, you know, type of kind of news outlets and, you know, fun friend categories that make your experience very, very personalized. But X feels like it's not the place for me anymore. Threads feels like it could be. And I selfishly want everyone to just pick one so that we all just go there and have fun together. And it's like the old days. But I, I'm coming to terms with what were the old days? You know, what is not possible with the old days anymore? And what do I want from, you know, maybe four places that I check instead of the one place that I check? I don't know, Rob, where are you on this? So I, I created my threads account the first few hours that you were able to create threads account. And so I was part of that hundred million that, you know, in the first couple of days. And then I fell off of it. But I can honestly tell you in the last two, three weeks, maybe a month, I've been going back more and more to the point where yesterday, I actually changed my default app for, you know, where X sits and I swapped it with thread. So now my default app that I go to for social media from muscle memory is thread. We'll see if that's, if that stays the case, but I'm liking threads lately. You know, I'm really enjoying it. I am too. I think a lot of, a lot of, and again, I fall, lots of, lots of news sources and journalists, a lot of those people, specific people have embraced threads as like, you know what, let's, let's try this, you know, let's double down on this. So, you know, I, I, as I, I kind of, you know, hit the, my, my threads feed throughout the day. And I go, okay, this feels pretty familiar. I like it. Now there are other options. The mastodon people, the blue sky people until recently, the pebble people, and the pebble people, interestingly enough, because pebble has announced that it's shutting down formerly T2, you know, everybody in pebble is sort of like, okay, where are we going? Where are we going? Okay, here's my LinkedIn profile. Here's where I am on Instagram. Okay, mastodon instance. And so it's like, there feels like momentum here. I think that threads, threads kind of surprises me that it has the daily active users that it claims that it has. But hey, you know, if, if you're at 100 million, we're almost there about several months in, you're doing pretty good. So let's talk about some, something a little different here. Music business worldwide reports that Spotify is going to make a significant change to its royalty payout model starting in Q1 2024. The gist is that the company wants to shift its current $1 billion in annual royalty payments to legitimate artists and rights holders over the next five years, according to sources. Spotify reportedly will continue with its royalty system stream share, but with several changes. Yeah, so here are what those changes apparently will be. Spotify is planning to introduce a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track starts generating royalties on Spotify. The company currently triggers a royalty payment on any Spotify track that's over 30 seconds long. But after the change, tracks would have to reach a minimum, some minimum number of annual streams before those royalties get generated, even if it's just, you know, fractions of pennies. This is expected to demonetize a portion of tracks that previously absorbed about 0.5% of the services royalty pool. So these are the little guys. These are indie artists. These are maybe even just kind of strange albums that aren't even really music that Spotify doesn't want on there. Now financially penalizing music labels or otherwise distributors, if music is fraudulent activity, is also something that Spotify plans to do. Reportedly, that would be detected on tracks that are uploaded to Spotify, which would be, you know, for example, maybe a non-music noise track, a white noise track or ocean waves type of thing. Spotify would introduce a minimum length of playtime that those non-music noise tracks would have to adhere to, just like everything else. Not necessarily saying, well, you know, we just want to make sure people really like your stuff, more like we just want to get you out of here. Now under the new plans, the estimated 440 million rather that goes to this 0.5% of Spotify's library, you might say, really? I mean 40 million? Well, if you get enough creators who are generating a tiny, tiny fraction of money, you look at that per year and it ends up going to in the millions of dollars. This would apparently go back into Spotify's stream share royalty pot. And Spotify says, we want to distribute that amongst the tracks that are more popular. Our big artists, you know, our cash cow artists, they're not calling them that, of course. Now Tricia, content creation, you are no stranger to. What do you make of this? Because there are some folks who use Spotify who say, well, this is, you know, this is the final straw. How could they do this? But platforms do this a lot. Platforms do make changes regularly. And unfortunately, if you have tied your income source to a certain platform, you need to roll with the punches as best you can. Is it difficult? Yes. I think there's a lot of conversations to be had around how platforms communicate these changes to their creators. But ultimately the move of like, we're going to save money by penny-pinching the little guy and paying our top streamers more. It's not a creator friendly approach, for sure. It's not going to encourage new artists to want to try your platform. But maybe it will do more in terms of keeping your highest earners around. Now, I mean, I'm much more familiar with kind of the pre-recorded video and live stream video platforms. So I don't know who are Spotify's biggest competitors. I would imagine maybe, I don't know, Google Music, Amazon, Apple Music. Yeah, they all have their different ones. So maybe if, you know, by paying the top creators more on their platform, they can somehow incentivize more of the money to stay with them. I'm not sure. Rob, what are your thoughts on this? So yeah, this is, to me, definitely a play for top creators, to try to keep top creators. But because the top creators are what makes the money for Spotify. But the problem is, these top creators are figuring out, wait a minute, I have 47 million followers on Instagram. I have 19 million followers on TikTok. I don't really need Spotify. I can just throw up a server, put my content out there and you go get it directly from me, which you're starting to see some top creators doing that or they're coming up with their own alternative systems to Spotify. So I think that by fixing the problem, what you're going to do is you're going to chase the bottom away because they'll have no option but to leave Spotify to go somewhere so that they can make revenue. And it's just going to show the big creators that, well, if the little guys could do it, we could do it too. So I think you get into this circular type of situation where you're trying to keep your big folks on, by doing so, you're going to show them how, I don't want to say easily, but you're going to show them how effectively they could do things without Spotify. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of Spotify saying, you want to, I don't know, be an independent creator, making some music or even making some white noise albums, whatever. By the way, I like white noise albums. Thank you very much. Helps me focus. But you know, go to SoundCloud. This is not really where you are. Spotify has also recently been making some big changes to its podcast initiative. There are a lot of exclusive podcasts and podcast network that Spotify has brought under its wing, where those people aren't totally sure where we're going with that either. Spotify is clearly trying to figure out, okay. Yeah. Who are our creators that we want to stay with us with, for the foreseeable future? Who makes us the most money? They make money too, but who makes us the most money? And let's kind of get some of the other junk out of here, because all of that junk, while, you know, pennies on the dollar does contribute to a pretty significant amount of money. Now you might say, well, Spotify is evil for doing so. Is it? I don't know that I agree with that. I think that, you know, hey, if this was something that directly affected me, even if I was making $100 a month that now I'm not making anymore, of course, that's terrible. But yeah, this doesn't feel like, I don't know, I'm trying to find where Spotify is hurting anybody more than where this has already happened in the past. Well, Sarah, you said podcast, and boy, do I have a podcast to tell you about. If you want to stay up to date in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence, you want to listen to A.I. Name This Show. It launched during DTNS Experiment Week back in August. Each week, Tristan Jutra and Teja Custody waved through the hype and doomsday, keeping you informed with the latest news on A.I. Catch it on A.I.NameThisShow.com. And Teja's going to be on our show right here on DTNS tomorrow. Don't miss it. But for now, let's talk about TwitchCon because, Trisha, you were just there. It's Twitch's semi-annual game streaming convention at this year's TwitchCon, which took place in Las Vegas. Company made some key announcements regarding changes to their service. So let's talk about the takeaways. What did Twitch reveal? There were so many announcements and so many new features that were kind of rolled out immediately. For example, simulcasting across major platforms is now okay. I already saw some folks that are listening to this recording live on both Twitch and YouTube celebrating that win. So before, it was just that you could stream live to Twitch and then you could simulcast to vertical streaming platforms like, say, TikTok or Instagram Live, but not other traditional long-form streaming platforms. But now that's changed. So that's exciting. There are a couple caveats to it. You can have the quality of stream be less on Twitch than other places. And you can't show chat on-screen on Twitch from other places. So make sure you read all the fine print if it's something that you want to go forward with. But I ultimately think this is a win for creators. Having your content out there to be discoverable and more places is great. Also, now mods, there's some extra tools for you that were announced at TwitchCon. Mods in chat have a nicer way of asking somebody now to like, hey, please be respectful. Rather than doing a timeout or ban, which publicly shows up in Twitch chat, now they can just send a little warning. Some channels have something like that that they've created. Like my channel has a little like, hey, just a reminder to be respectful that we've created. But now it's built right into the platform, which is fantastic. Also, Twitch updated their terms of service as far as content that is not okay outside of your live streaming activities. Doxing and swatting, if you do those outside of your live stream, are now grounds to have your Twitch account banned or suspended. So that was an update there to the misconduct policy. Oh, they announced that September, if anyone's familiar with September, which is a nice little, little bonus for viewers on Twitch in September, where subs and bits generally are discounted. So you can help support your favorite streamer for less. That's going to happen during the holiday season this December. So subs, bits and holiday hype trains will all be affected giving discount counts to viewers, which is great, especially because a lot of live streams happen to see a little more traction around the holidays. I think people maybe, you know, get holiday breaks from work or whatnot. Maybe it's just cold outside for whatever reason. They're watching more Twitch is generally what the stats show. So it's really nice to have that extra bonus there. I know that Good Day Internet has fun emotes that I see in chat sometimes. And now streamers will get double the number of emotes that they had before for partners and affiliates. So that's exciting. And I think the other big thing that stood out to me, there were so many changes. There's now embed streaming changes, which has been a hot button issue. And Sarah and Rob, I want to get your take on this. Previously, streamers could have their streams embedded into other websites, and they would autoplay on those websites and then count as views. There were a lot of streamers really calling out that this was an unfair practice because it would put certain streams higher in the directory because they look like they have a higher view count than they actually do, depending how that embed is done. Sarah, do you, I don't know if you got into the embed hot button issue at all. Was that on your radar? No, it wasn't. But I mean, Twitch is definitely on our radar because we stream live on Twitch every day. What did, I don't know, I guess kind of come as a surprise to me. And maybe it's just because too many creators were leaving Twitch because it felt to close down the ability to simulcast on something like YouTube, which we're now doing. Super great. I think probably Twitch would prefer that nobody does that. But if it somehow, if somebody is prolific enough, when I say prolific, I mean, maybe our team here or somebody who's streaming on their own, if there's enough references back to Twitch, I guess the company wins overall. Maybe it was sort of like a let's throw in the towel and let people do more of what they want so that we don't lose them overall. You know, Trish, I wanted to just pick up on what Sarah was saying there because, you know, I'm not big on Twitch, but what I have been noticing for the last year, year and a half is that there have been a lot of folks that have been, I don't, I think Exodus is a strong word, but there have been a lot of folks that have been leaving Twitch to go to YouTube. And I want to just get your take. Do you think that all these things that, you know, were announced last week, you know, are going to actually, you know, keep people on the platform? Is it going to, is it going to stem the tide so to speak? I mean, certainly if people were streaming on Twitch before and then decided to leave to go to another platform, whether it be YouTube or kick or any of the other streaming platforms that are out there, being able to also stream on Twitch at the same time, if they still have a community there, then maybe their whole community to import will be a nice thing for them. I also think in terms of discoverability, especially if you're a smaller streamer, YouTube and some other platforms just have better tools for discoverability already baked in. And so being able to say, hey, whether you're watching this on this platform, this platform, or this platform, come on by my Twitch stream. I'm doing a giveaway over there now or something like that. That's only good advertisement for Twitch, pulling more viewers into the platform. So I really do think it was a smart move on Twitch's part to allow people to advertise on lots of different platforms. And also speaking of discoverability on Twitch, there were also some discoverability improvements that were announced at TwitchCon. There's now a discovery feed on your phone. If you open the Twitch app where it shows you channels that are currently live, right now you can switch, like flip through them horizontally, but they announced that soon they might be toying around with the idea of a more TikTok-like feed where you're looking at vertical live streams and you can just swipe through them until you find something you want to watch. So I think Twitch is hearing the feedback that discoverability may be better on other platforms or that there's lots of things people appreciate in different ways about other platforms. And I really do think Twitch is trying to make the effort to take that feedback and incorporate it into their streaming service to keep the community there. I mean, Twitch is I think most people's thought of live streamed gaming. We go to Twitch and as other platforms have come in over the years, that's you know, that's been diversified a little bit. So I think Twitch is trying to bring everybody home. But overall is a great TwitchCon. Vegas is wild and very spread out, but I think the same sense of community remained regardless of where the actual convention is. How many people do you think were there? Oh, I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it was a lot. I mean, just it was yeah, it was it was it was it put cons back, baby. Well, thank you for for for bringing in straight from the trenches. I know you're probably quite tired. You can hear how tired my voice is for sure. No, you sound great. You sound great. I just I feel for you. I feel it in my bones. I know how those those those those cons are coming off of it, especially when it comes to Vegas. But we appreciate it. As always, Trisha Hershberger, thank you for giving us the latest from Twitch. Got a real nice email from Duff who wrote in about the future of matter matter is the IOT. The IOT connection standard that just got an upgrade. Duff says as a blind person, I eagerly await the wide adoption of matter for all sorts of appliances and devices, the ubiquity of touchscreen user devices with minimal tactile or audio feedback interfaces rather make control of everything from dishwashers to heating pads kind of difficult. For example, a beep is reasonable feedback to let you know you've pressed a button, but it's insufficient when it's toggling a feature on or off. It's the if it's the same beep in each case, but a matter app on my computer or a phone combined with a screen reader like Apple's voiceover could make control of these devices a lot easier. I hope this can be done with a single app rather than a different one for each appliance. In a similar vein says Duffy, I find it nearly impossible to control the radio or HVAC system when riding as a front seat passenger in my family's car. What are the chances that matter would be incorporated into automotive instrumentation to allow control via passengers mobile phones? Well, I don't know the answer to that Duff, but I certainly I certainly can see where matter would make a really big difference, especially in your case. And for those cases where accessibility is all that much more needed. And also thank you for for the note, you know, that whole kind of like beep on or off being the same thing. That makes a lot of sense, you know, if it's the same beep and you can't see the difference, then you need other stuff. And something like matter, hopefully, is going to make your life easier as a result. Well, Trisha Hershberger, you make our lives easier every time you're on the show. Come back early and often, but until next time, let folks know where they can find you. Folks, if you want to find me, I am that girl Trish with no I in the girl. So just that GRL Trish on all of the socials, except for Twitch and YouTube where it's just my full name, Trisha Hershberger. I stream on Twitch usually 15 to 20 hours a week. Anytime I'm not on set doing on camera hosting, you can find me there. And I do an indie game showcase once a week. So if you're passionate about indie games, that's the place to be. All right. Well, we'd like to thank our patrons because our patrons are who make this show possible every day. Do stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet because we have more to talk about is a low-cost MacBook Pro on the horizon. We'll talk about some latest rumors ahead of Apple's October 30th scary fast event. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live here Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And like I mentioned, we'll be back tomorrow with Teja Custody joining us talking about the Pixel 8 Pro's features. Talk to you then.