 This is the Daily Tech News Show for Monday, December 28th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Welcome to our end of year moderator co-host show. This is the annual episode where we usually invite supporters to appear alongside us on the show. And this time we thought it'd be fun to have some of the folks who help moderate our Discord, our Twitch chat to join us and talk about not only how they use technology, how they found DTNS, but also moderation in general. Joining us Preston Monroe, aka BioCal, Willie Scott, aka W. Scottus1. Hello. Beat, aka Beatmaster, hello. And Dan Christensen, aka Sergeant Muffin. Howdy. Folks, it's great to have you. Sarah, who should we start with? I thought we'd start with Preston. That's BioCal. And we're all going to ask you some similar questions. But really, the fun of this is getting to know some of the monikers that we're all very familiar with who help us a lot with the show and kind of where they came to be. So, Preston, how did technology play a role in your life to this point? It's definitely played a role in my life, all my life. I actually got into computers late, probably 98. I think I had a purple iMac was the first real computer I had actually. Previous to that was in sixth grade, I had an Apple II. But there's a big gap in there where I was missing things. But starting with that iMac and the Internet, I got hooked just like everybody else did. But the key thing was I wanted to know how it worked. I was viewing the source code of Pages in 1998 and creating animated GIFs frame by frame before there were tools for really doing that, just silly things like that. But in my current role, I'm in banking and finance and I basically manage online banking, mobile banking, digital payments for credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, things like that. So I'm just immersed in technology every day at work. Well, you're obviously among friends on DTNS. So speaking of DTNS, how did you get involved with the show? I actually started watching tech news today on the Twitter network, starting with episode one and watched it religiously or listened to it religiously through its entire run up until the day Tom left and including after, actually, I gave it a go for about a month after that, but the new host just wasn't for me. In the meantime, Tom had launched Daily Tech News Show and I just kind of followed him from there. All right, let's turn to W. Scott as one. You may hear his name thrown out as providing things in the Twitch chat. Willie, how did you get involved in tech? Oh, that's a interesting story. So like I've always been fascinated with computers from a very young age. I there's pictures that my that my dad took of me messing around with their computer was running Windows 95 back in the day. So it's it's been a while. But the thing that really got me into it and really interested and it's like a weird angle, I guess. But I was messing in PowerPoint, actually. And just dealing with like shapes and being able to like make things inside a PowerPoint like just fascinated me to no end. And it's been like an absolute thrill to to be doing it ever since to the point where I've at one point I've been I I offer tech support to pretty much everybody I interact with on, you know, on a semi regular basis. So it's really it's really great. Well, we really appreciate you offering some of that technology acumen in our Twitch chat and to our audience in general. How did you find us? How did you get involved in DTNS? Well, there is a long story to it, but I'll give the short version of it. So actually, it was through Lamar Wilson, believe it or not. So I was a big fan of Lamar, big fan of all the big tech YouTubers in the space. If you if you follow any of them, you know, the names pretty well. And he said, hey, I'm doing a podcast called This Week in YouTube. So I followed him over to there. And that's where I discovered the Twitch network, discovered OMG Chad, which he's gone on to do amazing things as well. And I found techniques today, funnily enough, right as it was winding down about two or three months before you left the show, Tom, which was funny to me, but I enjoyed it every minute of it. And followed you over to DTNS, been listening ever since. Oh, thank you, man. I'm glad you followed. Yeah, very cool. Let's move on to beat, beatmaster. Where do you live in the corner of the tech world? Well, pretty much everywhere, if you ask some people, but most things that I do are tech related. If I work with it, sell it, or now I'm in the IT department, or we'll start in two weeks exactly. So it will be my job, but it was always part of my life. Starting with the Commodore C64, but then advance bit by bit. I wanted my Nintendo console and my parents were sneaky and gave me a computer instead. It was a wise decision on their behalf. So I'm there where I'm because of that now. Very cool. Well, it sounds like your, your, your, your tech, that the world of tech as far as your livelihood continues to evolve. But when did you get involved with DTNS? It has been a while because when did the TMT start? When did you join? 2010. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a 10-year journey. I joined the Twitch streams 2008 on there. And just saw one or two episodes of Buzz out loud. But it was instant. It's the, I love the way Tom presented all his things and analytical part and staying on point and how to follow him around the internet since then. If I remember right, you used to greet me in the chat room before TNT every morning. Is that, am I remembered that right? That's very possible. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was when I would sit down before we'd go live. I, you were one of the people hanging out in chat. It was always nice to see that username in there. Let's, let's talk to you, Dan, Sergeant Muffin. How does tech play a role in your life, Dan? Oh gosh, where do I start? I was a normal kid, got involved in sports and all that stuff. And then third grade hit, we got our first computer with Windows 95 and then downhill from there, got really involved in computers and, you know, kind of like the other guys. It's once you start realizing what you can do with it, you just kind of want to learn more and more and more. And over the years, I've just on my own, even like middle school, I was building Windows Domain Networks in our house just to learn how it worked. So we had, you know, logins for the whole family and group policy. So I was having a lot of fun and learning a lot of things. Went for college and, you know, got that. But I started at our family business, which was way behind the times. I wrote all the software for the company over the last 10 years. And we went from a company that did OK to doing very good. And as of 2020, I bought half the company now. So congrats, man. It's been a very, very busy. But prosperous year. So yeah. And then how did you stumble upon this DTNS crew here? Sure. Well, like Beatmaster was watching Leo LaPorte a lot back in the day. And when tech news today was on, I was watching all the time. Good source of tech news. And I was actually teaching as an adjunct instructor for about two years at the local tech school, and I got there early and I'd have it up there. And that really got me into the the groove of, you know, watching it daily and turned out a lot of new people onto it. And then I really kind of dove in even more when I launched, you know, Diamond Club TV, the version two in 2014, I believe, or 2015. And then, unfortunately, as time went on and we just platform shifted, I kind of had to focus more on my job. We closed it down and still been watching and subscribing. And yeah, it's very happy to be here and part of the community. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate it. It's through the good efforts of Dan that we have a video podcast. So we appreciate your help with that. Oh, yeah, anytime. And all these folks, BioCal with Showbot helping us pick the titles, whether it's like Beatmaster and W. Scott has one helping with the moderation and Twitch and Discord. And I know BioCal and Sergeant Muffin, you guys, you guys pitch in on that. You're all involved in moderation of our community, which I don't know about you, Sarah, but I feel like we have. We are lucky to have one of the best communities out there. Absolutely. You know, it cannot be over-emphasized how important it is. And if there wasn't a community aspect, sure, we could deal with this ourselves if there were 48 hours and every single day. But but it's just it's not possible. And and I think in many ways, moderation kind of happens in the background and you don't necessarily get accolades if everything's going well. But it takes a lot of work. It's it's time and it's effort and, you know, and and it takes some heart to take care about the things that you believe in. So so thank you all for for doing what you do. But why do you do it? I'm curious to get your perspectives of of, you know, I think a lot of people look at the moderation and and like Sarah said, they either don't notice it because it's working well or they're angry at it because it didn't work well. But I don't know if any of you want to start, you know, by raising your hand or something, but but sort of like, why do you think people, not only yourselves, but other people get into wanting to help moderate communities? I can start with that one. I've been moderating in one form or another for about 20 years now on the Internet. The first one that I did was a web forum. And the owner of the forum came to me and said, I'm making you a moderator until you die or I find someone better. And he just kind of threw me into it. I had no choice. So I just became a moderator. And that was a it was a web forum that had 200 people on it. And there was really no drama at the time. But it eventually grew to, you know, well over, I think there were over 20 or 25,000. Oh, wow, regular users on this big forum. And so we we had this whole list of like guidelines and rules and strikes and three strikes and you're out and this all these rules. And and there were quorums that had to be met in the background by moderate moderators and private before an action can be taken. So it really got advanced over the years for that web forum. You know, originally, it was just the owner deciding, you know, ban hammer this guy or whatever. But like I said, once it gets bigger, you can't just start banning people right and left because there has to be some sort of precedence set on why you're taking action. And so why do you do it, though? Oh, why do I do it now? I am moderated on various discords and twitches, but I don't do a whole lot of moderation myself. I know Beatmaster does and others do Willie. But I'll only do it if if nobody else is there to do it, or if, you know, if we get a bot rate or something like that, I'll quickly put it into followers only or something like that. So is it feel like you just want to help make things better? Is that? Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's that's that's the why of it. What you're looking for is the why is it's a good community and I want to keep it that way. Simple as that. Yeah, I think for me personally, it's kind of just it's always been a matter of I've always been asked to like, hey, would you like to be a mod and help out? And I'm like, I'm always, yeah, absolutely. And even when I'm not mod in a in in a community or so, I try to always be like, OK, what can I is there any information that I can give someone that'll help them in any capacity, whatever that might be, you know, whether it's, you know, telling them, for example, I'll just give an example. I had it the other day where someone was trying to figure out how to connect their Twitch Prime so they could use their Prime subscription and Twitch chat. And so I provided them a resource for them to do that. And that's just kind of always the way that I've been. I've always tried to be as helpful as I can in any compute in any community I'm in, regardless if I'm a mod or not. And it also sets a tone, right? Because you're like, oh, you have a question. I have an answer. I'm helpful. We're all friends here. And it encourages people to act appropriately going forward. I definitely I'd say I like to teach people how to use technology in new in new ways, proper ways, you know, think when they need help, things like that. And one of those one of the steps in that is learning or teaching people how to act on the Internet. Some people don't know how to act on the Internet. You know, they don't know what's what's proper and what's not. And so you can kind of give them those little corrections and kind of help them on their way. I think most people would hear that and react like, ah, but they're not going to want to listen to you. But be master, I saw you nodding when when Preston was saying that, like, how do you approach that? OK, so by space is you. You don't have a one size fits all solution. And that makes a good moderator that he knows patterns. He knows what's usual for certain communities. And depending on the community itself or the streamer, the content provider or the forum, whatever it represents, you have to address to that general spirit of that place. And I think that's what makes with God is and my co and others good months is that they have some experience throughout several places to know what's if somebody is coming from a bad place or a good place when they argument and we make mistakes. That happens. It's part of learning and you have to just be certain enough that the actions you take are appropriate. And at the same time, be ready to learn and say, OK, I could behave differently in that case. And as by a co mentioned, we talk behind scenes sometimes to say, look at this. What do you think? So it's not a one man show. It's a collab. Yeah, yeah, communication, right? Yeah, definitely behind the scenes communication is going on all the time where, you know, watch out for this or this is kind of stewing in this area, you know, things like that. So it's really just kind of bouncing ideas off people sometimes taking unilateral action is necessary. Like I said, you put chat into followers only if there's a spam bot coming in or if there's one one troublemaker that's really causing trouble, you can ban them and you can always unbanned them if it was an accident or something or somebody says, why do you do that? It's easy to reverse. So Dan, what do you think? What are your biggest challenges you think as far as moderation is concerned? Well, I've been involved in a lot of communities with moderation, not as polished as this community where you can kind of learn who can handle power and who can't. So we've all kind of been there and we've seen it. We've seen the moderators that take the little bit of power you give them and kind of start molding. So, you know, you kind of, we're very fortunate to have that here. And, you know, I guess I shouldn't say that when I started kind of moderating as a younger kid, did I do it for power? Yeah, kind of. I'm not gonna lie, I was a young kid. I didn't know any better. But, you know, I think out of moderation you learn a lot about people and you learn to adapt. Cause like you guys said, everyone's different. And the main goal is you don't want to make the any issues worse. You want to try to either, if you can hide the conversation let them feel like they're getting their message across and don't let it disrupt and cause any problems. But if you have to ban, you know, you have to. But I would say I guess when I started I banned a lot more people than I would probably like to admit, but, you know, growing up and getting the responsibility and, you know, now I mean, when I was even at 20, you know, you realize you have to prove yourself. I mean, it takes time to prove yourself that you can be trusted and it's so easily burned. You can make one very silly mistake and it can be burned. So, yeah, it's a unique challenge. Yeah, absolutely. I was, before I was even asked to become a moderator of the of the night attack, Twitch, for example. I had been a part of the community for over two years at that point. And so that very much is the case where it's like you always want to find those people that are really like are really trustworthy. And you know, and you know them when you see them, you know, like you know when there's, when the right person is doing the right thing, you know, it's always apparent. What's funny with that too is that in my experience, I've seen dozens of people say, how do you become a mod? I want to become a mod in a certain community. Those people never become mods or rarely ever. It's normally the mods getting together in private and saying throughout some nominations, some names will go through and say, you know, what are the pros and cons, any problems with this person? And as long as they, you know, you vet them and they kind of pass, then you go to them and ask if you want to be a moderator, but very rarely have I seen anybody who's interested in it actually getting chosen. That in itself is interesting. Why do you think that is? Because if somebody wants to follow the rules, you know, play nicely, smart, has the time and is enthusiastic about it, why are they not the people that get chosen? Yeah, in my experience, again, it's just my experience, but it's usually the younger people who are looking for that power, I think. There have been some more polished people, let's say, that have shown an interest and I'm speaking from the web forum, I moderated years back, but you know, they show interest and we toss their name in, and maybe they got passed over two or three times because there were other candidates and then they eventually get in, but a lot of times it was just like new people joining the forum, you know, gung-ho, like, I'm here and I want to be a mod and I want to be a part of everything and it's a little too in your face, whereas most of the people who get chosen for moderator are involved, they're helping without being asked to help already, so they're kind of, they have those traits, the moderation traits and they show them and they're not asking, they're not looking for that power, they're just- It's more of a natural fit. Yeah, so if you've got somebody who's already looking to help, why not help them help by giving them a little more power? You become a moderator by your behavior, not by your desire. Correct, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, and even when I was first asked to be a mod for the first time in another chat room, that was always like, I never went out of my way to ask to be a mod, but there was an opportunity where someone asked, hey, we're looking for people to mod, if you're interested, shoot us a private message, and then that's when I did it, you know, because I, if I don't need to, if everything's going great, then everything's going great, you know, like, I don't need to insert myself into this, unless it's absolutely needed, you know? Yeah, it feels like what you guys are saying is that it's not that asking to be a mod is a bad thing or should disqualify you, it's that most of the time you observe that the reason someone is asking to be a mod is not motivated by the kinds of things you would want to see in a person who would make a good moderator? Yeah, I would agree with that. They're, yeah, they want to be involved and that's great, but they might be a little too excited about being involved, which could lead to them taking actions that are outside the mod core, if you will, their thoughts and their moderation style. So if you've got someone that's too gung-ho, who knows what they're going to do? Or they're gung-ho because maybe they legitimately want to help, but they also want the attention of the accolade or the power, like you were saying, Dan. And what you want is somebody who is motivated by, I just want to help and I don't want to cause waves, I don't want to cause drama. Yeah, and that's exactly what I was going to allude to too is the fact that, yeah, like we said earlier, it's very much an individual case basis because there are probably some cases where they are legitimately trying to help and that's how they do it. I wouldn't even, I would not even say that that is inherently wrong per se. It's more just a matter of like the process to get you to there, doesn't always, isn't always that way, you know? Go ahead, Tom. No, it was beat. I was beat, go ahead, beat. And the thing is, if you want to be helpful, be helpful, and then moderators will notice or the community and put you in the place to help even more. So if you are an unknown factor and want to be mod, this means you want to have power. And that's, yeah, that's a little bit sus, as we would say. The key word is time. You know, someone has to be around a community, has to understand what's going on, get the feel for things. Cause in the communities I run, you want them to be around enough to know that, hey, this isn't just a flavor of the month visit that they're gonna hang out and then they're gonna get, you know, just leave the community. So, you know, someone that's gonna stick around that is setting a good example. And yeah, like you guys said, not necessarily asking for it. Cause, you know, real leaders, they're gonna have that ability to lead and show that they can, you know, solve issues without having to be a moderator. And there you go. Well, Dan, you hit on something that I think is, would be a question for a lot of folks. All four of you have other things going on. You know, you're busy and you're doing this at the same time. I think there would be a lot of people who would probably be qualified, you know, they got the desire. They think, I mean, I have a job. I can't like, how do you manage your time so that you can make this work and you don't leave anybody in the lurch by not showing up? Yeah, no, that's true. So to be honest, I have actually left moderator positions. So there was a Reddit community that I was a moderator for that as I don't know if anyone else has moderated a Reddit or sub Reddit, but if it's a popular one, you have to deal with a lot of stupid things. I mean, the unfortunate part, and we can, you know, we'll get into it at some point here, but the just Reddit in general, they have a problem with things being a little too open. So that was taking up a lot of my time and that I had to back out of. But between the other things I deal with, the nice thing is having Discord, you'll be able to send you kind of alerts on my phone so I can still keep working. And if something needs me or I need to do something, I can step away. And fortunately in my position, I'm at the top so I don't have other people, you know, saying, you know, you're fired. So I can, as needed, you know, take care of that stuff. And I do my best to still get my work done, but also still, you know, have fun moderating because it's nice to throughout the day, not just think of work, work, work all day, you have to kind of space things out. So at the end of the day, you go home happy and not overly stressed. Yeah. And it's also like, I would even say that like, for me personally, I very much was in that same scenario where I was with, I was in a much larger community in terms of modding. And it was kind of one of those things where it's like, I love to help out, but like, but yeah, no, I had to step back and realize, okay, yeah, no, this is not gonna work because I just don't have the time to do this. And I was very glad, I very gladly, you know, because they were like, hey, we're gonna have you step aside for a little bit. And I was like, totally okay, absolutely. And so you gotta be willing to, you gotta be willing to make those, you know, tough calls sometimes, because you don't want to in certain cases. I think in some ways, I feel like we're lucky that we have a lot of really good people in our audience. We don't have such a big influx of unknown people like a subreddit can get, where we don't have that strong community knowledge where people know what's accepted and what's not and can help newcomers become accustomed to that. But do you think any of you that there's things that Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, you know, could take from your experiences to make moderation better in these larger arenas? Well, one thing comes to mind, and it's a fight that a lot of big companies have to deal with is they, especially if they're publicly traded, you wanna be able to show you have users and the downside is it's too easy to sign up, bots are too easy to sign up, spammers are too easy to sign up. You see that with Reddit, I deal with a lot of small subreddits being nonstop, not attacked but flooded with t-shirt spammers where people will copy designs and then make their own store, resell the stuff and spam links. And the same really goes for Twitter, it's really easy to set up an account and you don't necessarily need to have any vetted address and that's the fight that we run into. You can ban someone and all of a sudden they're right back and no one has the ability to moderate such large platforms. They do their best but it's so hard, it's just like YouTube. There's no way anyone can watch all the videos on YouTube because it's uploading how many more times quicker than people can watch it. So same type of problem. Yeah, I'll echo that sediment as well because whenever I hear a story about Twitter or YouTube or Facebook messed up and didn't ban X account for Y reason, I always have to be mindful of like, because we were mentioning earlier, it's like mistakes happen, like that's just part of human nature. So I would say for me being among myself, I can sympathize a little bit with some of these instances of whereas where some people would be very, very correctly outraged perhaps in some instances, I can at least have the understanding that it's like it's not an easy job. It is not an easy job to do this. But having said that though, there's always room for improvement. I just can't even imagine a platform like Twitter or Facebook or something like that, just the scale, like how do you even get a handle on that? It's hard for me to imagine having done a small forum, a large forum, various discords and twitches and things like that, that all varies. A really heavy forum, you have a huge moderate staff that has to agree and come to a consensus with a small discord like DTNS, it's really only active for a couple hours a day. If people aren't sitting in that discord 24 seven, I was going to talk about scheduling with things like cord killers. It's like certain mods are on during cord killers and certain are on during night attack or DTNS. And so you've got like almost day and night shifts. You might have a guy who you asked to be a moderator and he says, oh yeah, I can do it during the day. It's like, well, we're all full up on the daytime shaft. So, yeah. Soniac moderators, so. Or having mods in other different time zones. Yeah, definitely. But when you get to that scale of Twitter and Facebook and whatever else, it just blows my mind. I don't even know how they handle that kind of stuff. I was hoping to interject one question to all four of you, is how do you judge the success of your job? When do you know like, okay, I'm doing a good job at this? Like, what are your metrics? How do you decide, is it the number of people in the forum or whatever, chat, whatever stay the same or it increases? Or like, how do you judge how well you're doing? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't really know how you judge something like that on Twitter Discord. I mean, it kind of ebbs and flows. You get an influx of new people or something. Let's say one of the hosts guests on another show and all of a sudden you get dozens or 100 people joining all at the same time and they come from all walks of life. And that goes back to your behavior in one community might be okay for that community and it's completely wrong for another. So that's where moderation really comes in is what we were talking about earlier about teaching is that's okay over there, but over here, we don't do that, we do it this way. So it's kind of like guiding people in the right direction. And so it's really just incidents on the forum that I used to moderate on. We open a thread for every incident, I guess. So some months you'd have 20 threads opened and others you'd only have four. And so if you're doing a good job, then I guess the lower is the better, right? I guess the thing I would say to that question specifically, one of the things that I have used as sort of like a gauge of how well I'm doing is if the community is willing to talk to you, because that's one thing that obviously if there's a troll coming in and messing things up, you have to be abrasive as a mod. But you also have to have that compassion and understanding for people who are just not, what's the right word to use? I guess not, like they're just trying to figure out what to do and how to do it right, you know what I'm saying? So I think the way that I gauge my success, I guess, would be if the community is talking to you directly, not as if you're a mod, but as if you're just some ordinary user along with them in the chat. Just an extra helpful other person. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and when you're talking moderation too, I can't remember the exact quote and even what's from, but it's the saying of if you do your job right, no one will know that it was ever done at all. So your main goal is to make the experience for the average user like there isn't problems, everything's good and you can take whatever that the dirty laundry that they're trying to air on the site, hide it, take care of it on your own, but you don't have to drag the general public into it. Yeah, I mean, in my experience, the times that I've found the most strife, and this is usually more like IRC chat than sort of subreddits or that sort of thing, but kind of that real time stuff, it's the mods sort of clashing with the people who think of the mods as against them somehow, like you're not my dad, you know, that kind of thing. And when it works well, it works so seamlessly and DTNS has such a good community. I'm always floored that we just, well, I mean, with very few exceptions, we just don't have that kind of strife because everyone feels a certain amount of respect for one another and it's a community that wants to share knowledge and nobody's better than anybody else and that's pretty cool. I am constantly amazed in some fashion, it's almost surreal at how stable and how, you know, how amenable everyone is in our, whether it's Discord, whether it's Twitch or whether even in our emails, for as long as it has to, you know, I've been at companies where we've had message boards, we've had sites, we've needed moderation, where it works okay, even for a couple of years and then something happens and it starts this giant roller coaster all the way down and you know, testament to all of your efforts, it just is really rock solid with the Daily Tech news show growing and it just totally amazes me every time I look inside. And, you know, and I guess one other question I wanna ask all four of you is, is there a misconception you would like to dispel about what you do or what goes in your thinking process when you moderate? Like oftentimes, like I think Willie alluded to earlier, like sometimes people have the belief that mods are in it for the power because they wanna go around with the giant band hammer and just like looking for an excuse for you know, for someone just to say the wrong thing so they can just whack them out of the forum. I mean, oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, yeah, definitely there are some people who wanna flex and you're gonna get a couple of those and I think a lot of moderators do that once in a while that you kinda have to, it's your job. I think the biggest misnomer would be that we get paid very well. Yeah, I feel really bad about that part but yeah, these folks are just doing it for volunteer and I'm incredibly appreciative of that. No, I'm just kidding, of course. No, I think the biggest misnomer would be that there's some sort of like secret plot between moderators and the regular users or something. It's really, you know, every once in a while you get one person who's like, you're ganging up on me and you're not letting me talk and I don't know, freedom of speech or something, I don't know, but things like that and you're oppressing them or something and it's really just, it's moderating. The way I think of it is in DTNS's case, like Discord is Tom and Sarah and Roger's living room and you're throwing a party and you're inviting people over and if people start knocking over plants and spilling beers, we're gonna ask them to leave. That's just the way it is. It's your guy's living room, we're there as kind of bouncers and we're acting on your behalf because you trust us, but if we ask you to leave it's not personal, it's not that we're ganging up on you, it's that you did something that we either need to ask you to stop or if you don't, then you're out. That's it. Yeah. I think one of the other biggest misconceptions I think is that I know, certainly when I was a novice user so to speak, I always thought that the mods always have like the answers to pretty much any question. Like it's almost as if we're like a direct arm to you guys and in some cases that's true, but in a lot of cases what I've noticed is that like a lot of the stuff that happens like behind the scenes, it's like we're hearing about at the same time that everyone else is and so it's not like we have early access to important knowledge most of the time I would say. Yeah, that's definitely true. Yeah, no show Friday after Thanksgiving and that was a surprise to me. Sorry about that. No, I'm just saying like you don't let us in on that kind of stuff, but it's not, we don't need to know really. Well, and there's also certain things where people and this goes all the way up the chain. People are like, why didn't I know earlier? And it's because nobody knew earlier, right? And the Friday after Thanksgiving is not an example of that, but there are some things where we decide something late. Maybe we should have decided it earlier or maybe we just decided it in the moment. Or like, hey, let's do this thing spur of the moment. And then we tell people and people say, well, why didn't you tell me earlier? Like, well, because we didn't even know about it. We haven't made the decision, yeah, yeah. And that applies to y'all as well, where even if we do tell you immediately, like, oh, here's the new thing, then you're gonna tell people and they're gonna be like, oh, so why am I just hearing about this now? Like, there's always this perception that everything you're told always was known for a while before somehow. Yeah. And sometimes it was, right? But often, you know, things happen on the fly, especially when you do daily stuff. I mean, it's, as you all know, I mean, it's a grind. We're constantly reiterating and sometimes things do change last minute. Well, listen, I cannot thank you all enough. You four and the others, there are plenty of other people pitching in. So as I go around, if you wanna throw some shout outs to other mods that you wanna make sure get recognized, please do, and anything else you've got going on, starting with you, Preston. Yeah, I definitely thank you to everybody who helps in the community. It's not just mods, it's other people too. Zoe's in there every day and cheering people on. So just as one example, you know, there's many, many others, but that's a name that gets mentioned a lot. That's why I use her. But what else is going on? So yeah, I've got showbot.tv, which is a place where Twitch channels can collect titles, questions. If it's a question and answer show, I can be used for lots of different things. So check that out. And catch me on Twitter at Biocow. And Biocow.com is my website, which is real boring. Couldn't be worse than mine. Willie Scott, let's move on to you. Very, very active on our Twitch channel, but you have other projects as well. Yeah, I do, yeah. I obviously want to give a shout out to Sunbun. Sunbun is like the God among men when it comes to modding. He is the best. Love him. You can find me. I stream every Wednesday and Friday night on my Twitch, Twitch.tv slash W Scott is one. And if you want to support me even further, Patreon.com slash W Scott is one. And when this episode comes out, my first episode of my new podcast, Cinemavention is coming out, where I talk about movies that I haven't seen, like classic movies that I haven't seen. First episode is on Die Hard. So figured it's perfect for the Christmas season. You mean you haven't seen before? You watch them before the show, right? Yes, no, but I haven't seen the, I'll watch them for the first time and then talk about them on the show. It'd be really bold if you did an entire episode of my movie, you'd never actually seen it all. That would be quite the show. Kicking it up as you go along. Oh, that's a cliffhanger. That's good stuff. Thank you W. Scott is one. Whenever I see anything out there involving the Pastebin.com website, no matter what context it's in, I think of you because he gives us a Pastebin of all the links from the show in the Discord every day. And you've been doing that forever. So thank you. Thank you. Beatmaster, what about you? Yeah, I'm thankful to T2T2. That has made me the first mod on the crew, I think one of the first mods. And he's another god amongst men. We have many gods amongst us. And of course the whole community, because as you said before, we have a rare exception on the internet that everybody is so involved in a positive way. And I'm thankful for them to make us our jobs almost obsolete, but not quite. Get closer all the time. And Dan Christensen, Sergeant Muffin. Where do people keep up with the rest of your work? All right, well, a lot of my work is just private sector business stuff, but I do have a website, which again, not very good. That's sargentmuffin.com. I'm on Twitter at Sargent Muffin, SGT Muffin. And in regards to moderator, Ethan Kane, I would say Amos, he really goes out of the way. I've worked with him in so many different aspects. And I know people, they see him on the show, but gosh, I've worked with him so long. He's such a nice, honest guy, pleasure to know him. And he really cares about keeping communities running strong. Indeed, good guy. Beatmaster, was there any place you wanted to direct people to find more about you? I don't have any places on Twitter, I'm Beatmaster80. And I never tweet or almost never, so I wouldn't bring much to you, but you can be getting in contact with me there if you want to. And I record shows from Dictor Bertolo, The Guest Fist, and uploaded on my channel, on the YouTube channel, youtube.com slash the slash Beatmaster. And you can see the shows you missed there and future episodes that will come up. Excellent. Thank you all. Also, I want to shout out Captain Kipper, Jack Shid, Scotty Rowland, who moderate our subreddit at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com If you are one of the people that helps moderate our stuff and we didn't mention you today, consider it like the Oscars. We just got way too nervous and forgot you, but we do not appreciate you any less. So thank you all for joining us. And I think this was fun. This was a really fun way to do the Listener Co-Ho show, which this year is the Moderator Co-Ho show. So thanks a lot. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, folks, don't forget if you want a DTNS hat, hoodie, mouse, mask, anything like that, we still got them. Go check them out, dailytechnewshow.com slash store. And also, speaking of Amos, no one should have to spend New Year's Eve alone. And that might be a little harder this year, but every year, Ritual Misery presents the Diamond Club, New Year's Eve, Streamathon 27 hours of raising money for sick kids through extra-life.org. And this year, Sarah and myself will be ringing in the new year with a live show as part of that streamathon. We'll have one of those hours. So join us New Year's Eve at 2230UTC. That's 1430 Pacific. So an hour later than DTNS normally is for good year internet. Sarah, I have no idea what we're gonna do, but it's gonna be fun. I know. Oh, man, you know, this year has been challenging, but it's also been a good year. I think we've got an hour in us. Oh, we do. Even if we just talk about tacos for an hour. That's right. Yeah, bring the mold wine and tacos. It's gonna be great. Find out the details, including the full schedule, because there's lots of other great people involved at ritualmisery.com slash streamathon. And we're doing special shows this week, but we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130UTC regularly. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. If you wanna send us an email, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'll see you tomorrow. What do we have, Tom? We have our best of 2020, good day internet. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Hehehehe.