In this episode, what's old is new again, and what's new is... AI again. The Verge's Allison Johnson and Dominic Preston join David to discuss their experience at Mobile World Congress 2025, where they saw the latest devices from Xiaomi, Samsung, Realme, and others — and found themselves confronted with some big, surprising new ideas about how our smartphones should look and work. After that, Kevin Rose and Justin Mezzell talk about the process of bringing Digg back, and how AI can improve the way social networks operate. Digg got a lot of things right two decades ago, and plans to do it all over again now. Finally, we answer a question about printers from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com! ), with some help from Framework CEO Nirav Patel.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of camera bump functionality.
00:00:07I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here trying to decide which iPad is the best.
00:00:13So I have the new Mini, which came out last fall.
00:00:16I have the new Air, which is coming out this week.
00:00:19I have the M4 Pro, which came out like roughly this time last year.
00:00:24And then I have the M2 Air, which is now last year's model, which also came out about a
00:00:29year ago.
00:00:30So basically, I have in my hands every iPad you can buy except for the new base iPad.
00:00:35I've not tried that one yet.
00:00:37I have lots of questions, but I generally think that the base iPad is the right iPad
00:00:41for most people.
00:00:43So I both have to review the new ones, and I have to go back and update our iPad buying
00:00:48guide on the site.
00:00:49So it requires a lot of like existential thinking about tablets that I found myself not ready
00:00:55for.
00:00:56So if you have thoughts on how you use an iPad and how to basically pick between them
00:01:01for people, I would love to hear them.
00:01:03But until then, I'm just going to be playing games on all of these iPads.
00:01:08And that's just what I do now.
00:01:09This is my life.
00:01:10Anyway, we are mostly not going to talk about iPads on this episode.
00:01:13We're going to come back and do some more iPad stuff once I've had a chance to try the
00:01:17base iPad, which will hopefully be soon.
00:01:20Today on the show, we're going to do two things.
00:01:22First, we're going to catch up with Allison Johnson and Dom Preston on our team.
00:01:25They were both at MWC, Mobile World Congress, last week, seeing all the weirdest and newest
00:01:30ideas in mobile.
00:01:31Going to catch up with them, see what they learned.
00:01:33And then I'm going to talk to Kevin Rose and Justin Metzl, who are two of the people responsible
00:01:38for bringing back Digg.
00:01:40Digg, an OG social network, coming back for real in 2025.
00:01:45Right now it's just a landing page in a waitlist, but it is coming.
00:01:49It's a real thing.
00:01:50And we had a really interesting conversation about community and how to build the social
00:01:54internet with AI and how we can do this better than we did the first time.
00:01:57And so I figured you guys should hear it.
00:01:59It's really interesting stuff.
00:02:00We also have a hotline about printers that I'm very excited to get into.
00:02:04All of that is coming up in just a second.
00:02:07But first, I think I have between one and 16 software updates to do on these iPads.
00:02:14Developer betas, deeply terrifying thing when you're a product viewer.
00:02:18Anyway, this is the Verge cast.
00:02:21All right, we're back.
00:02:27I'm putting the iPads to the side for now.
00:02:29It's too many tablets.
00:02:30I can't keep them straight.
00:02:31They all look the same.
00:02:32We'll worry about that later.
00:02:34Let's get into MWC.
00:02:35So MWC, Mobile World Congress, for many years has been the kind of the biggest show in mobile
00:02:40in the way that CES is like TVs and cars.
00:02:43MWC is phones.
00:02:46And for a few years, MWC got kind of boring, frankly.
00:02:49The phone market kind of died because no one else could get into it.
00:02:53It was just Samsung and Apple and then a bunch of stuff in China and kind of nothing else.
00:02:58But the mobile industry is actually really interesting right now.
00:03:01And there are a lot of companies with new ideas about smartphones, particularly as we
00:03:04get AI and particularly as cameras become important in an AI world again.
00:03:09There's just a lot of new ideas about phones.
00:03:11And so two folks on our team, Allison Johnson and Dominic Preston, went to MWC.
00:03:16They saw all the stuff and I have lots of questions about all the stuff that they saw.
00:03:20So let's just get into it.
00:03:21Here we go.
00:03:22Allison Johnson.
00:03:23Hello.
00:03:24Hello.
00:03:25And Dom Preston.
00:03:26Welcome to the Verge cast.
00:03:27Hello.
00:03:29Happy to be here.
00:03:30Allison, I'm really sorry for not being as enthusiastic about you.
00:03:31Oh, it's all right.
00:03:32I'm like, I'm also happy that you're here.
00:03:34I get it.
00:03:35Yeah.
00:03:36I'm just it's Dom's first time.
00:03:37I want Dom to feel welcome on the Verge cast.
00:03:40It's exciting.
00:03:41Yeah.
00:03:42And the shiny new thing.
00:03:43So you two were just at MWC.
00:03:45It seems like kind of an interesting year.
00:03:46Like tell me first, just sort of the the vibes in Barcelona at MWC this year.
00:03:50What was it like?
00:03:51It was kind of two things.
00:03:52There's like the phones and they were sort of boring.
00:03:57And then there was everything else, which was like laptops that fold a whole bunch.
00:04:04Stuff you put on your phone, stuff you use to charge your phone.
00:04:08It's just like it's a cool kind of like reprieve from the moment we're in of like, yeah, phones
00:04:17are boring.
00:04:18They're good now, you know, like there's Xiaomi 15 Ultra, which Dom tested is incredible by
00:04:26all accounts.
00:04:27So it was nice.
00:04:29It's nice to go see like weird, cool stuff.
00:04:31Dom, what was your experience like?
00:04:33Similar.
00:04:35The biggest phone launch is the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, and it's a great phone.
00:04:39It's a very cool phone.
00:04:40I was really impressed by it.
00:04:42But it's a super iterative update on last year's Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
00:04:45So like the most exciting phone launch of the show wasn't all that exciting.
00:04:49Right.
00:04:50But as Alison said, we just had all these weird little odysseys going around, accessories,
00:04:55concept devices, concept everything.
00:04:57This time, foldable things, weird cameras, all sorts of stuff.
00:05:02And then there are like smaller brands playing around with just odd versions of phones, like
00:05:06Nubia releasing a few strange kind of $100 phones that no one in the States can even
00:05:11buy that have rotating camera rings and giant speakers on the back and weird stuff like
00:05:15that.
00:05:16I want to talk mostly about some of these specific gadgets, but looking through the
00:05:20stuff that you guys covered, I found myself wondering how real these companies think these
00:05:25products are.
00:05:26I had this experience a bunch of years ago.
00:05:28I was in a in a Lenovo briefing at one of these trade shows, and they had this very
00:05:33cool looking orange laptop.
00:05:36And the product person I was talking to was like, oh, we're not going to sell any of those.
00:05:40They're just there.
00:05:41So people will come look at it and then they'll buy the black laptop.
00:05:44And that is like I have thought about that nonstop ever since.
00:05:47And what I wonder about so many of these gadgets is like, yes, we're in a very sort of iterative
00:05:52moment with smartphones.
00:05:54And so if I'm Samsung or Xiaomi or Huawei or Lenovo or any of these companies that you're
00:05:59seeing make this stuff, are they actually seriously making these things as in like this?
00:06:06This might be the next phone that you want.
00:06:08Or are these like wild science projects that somebody built in the lab that they're showing
00:06:11you so that we will cover them on the Verge.com even though they know absolutely no one ever
00:06:16will buy them?
00:06:17I think it's like a range of stuff.
00:06:19And Lenovo is a good example because the briefing we got, they literally had two rooms.
00:06:25They're like, here are the real laptops.
00:06:28You have to go to the other room.
00:06:30And that's where the weird laptops are that like fold and charge with solar panels.
00:06:35And there's like a weird little guy you put on your computer.
00:06:39And I think even in that room, there's degrees of like, this might be a real thing.
00:06:45They had that weird like, see, it's like extra screens for your laptop that you kind
00:06:51of like magnet to the back of your computer.
00:06:55And then you have like the wildest desk setup at a coffee shop ever.
00:07:02I don't know.
00:07:03I don't see that.
00:07:05It'll be strangely if I can go to Best Buy and pick that up someday.
00:07:10But other stuff I think is like plausible.
00:07:16The question is, yeah, like in the US, especially at something like Mobile World Congress, are
00:07:23we going to get these things or are we going to get even just the like $200 phone that
00:07:30that company sells that like kind of has some features?
00:07:34Yeah, it's kind of all over the place, I think.
00:07:39Dom, playing with these phones, you're like standing there attaching an enormous camera
00:07:43lens to a smartphone.
00:07:45Are you looking at these things being like, this is a real thing that maybe people will
00:07:49have in the real world on their phone someday?
00:07:50Or are you just like, neat thing that you made that I'll never see again?
00:07:53Trying to do a little bit of both, I guess.
00:07:56You always know, especially with ones like that, those concept devices where someone
00:07:59they're explicitly saying this is not yet a product or at least and maybe never will
00:08:02be.
00:08:03You're partly trying to assess how cool is it?
00:08:05Is it cool?
00:08:06Is it fun?
00:08:07How does this like solve some hypothetical version of a problem, even if it's not practical
00:08:12in any way?
00:08:13But then there is a bit of you looking, you know, sometimes versions of these concept
00:08:15devices do come out, you know, the big DSLR lens on the back of a camera is maybe a less
00:08:20practical version.
00:08:22But then, you know, Xiaomi had this concept where they had a much smaller lens that attached
00:08:27to the back of a phone via MagSafe style connection.
00:08:31And that's still a concept that's absolutely not a product, that will not be a product
00:08:34any time in the next two to three years.
00:08:38But I could imagine a world where it was and you're kind of playing around with that one
00:08:40and you start going, oh, this kind of does work.
00:08:43This is kind of practical.
00:08:44Like I could imagine a world where this is a product that comes out and this is maybe
00:08:49one I would actually want.
00:08:50Okay.
00:08:51I'm hopeful that you guys are right.
00:08:52I think you might have just both been very nice about a bunch of things that are definitely
00:08:55nonsense but I'm hopeful that you're right and that there is at least the 200 mil telephoto
00:09:02DSLR.
00:09:03It's not.
00:09:04Let's talk about a few of the specific ones here.
00:09:07Let's start there, Dom, because I want to run through a bunch of, I think, the wildest
00:09:11things you saw and just hear about your experiences with them.
00:09:14And I feel like, Dom, your beat was just weird ideas about cameras at MWC.
00:09:19Accidentally, yeah.
00:09:20So take me through some of the strangest cameras you saw.
00:09:23Okay.
00:09:24So, I mean, the two were the big concepts.
00:09:25So you kind of talked about them, talked around them a little already.
00:09:29Realme showed off something we've basically kind of seen before already from other brands,
00:09:34including Xiaomi a couple years ago.
00:09:35But they showed a concept phone where you could put a DSLR M-mount adapter on the back
00:09:41of the camera and then strap your big real DSLR lens to the phone.
00:09:47It actually had a one-inch type sensor in the camera module but with no lens on top
00:09:52of it.
00:09:53So basically the only lens was whatever DSLR you threw on the top of it.
00:09:58This is cool for people who own DSLRs already and think, wow, wouldn't it be fun to throw
00:10:04this lens on a phone sometime?
00:10:07You know it's nonsense because they made a point of demoing it with this giant, giant
00:10:12telephoto lens.
00:10:14And they actually brought a smaller portrait lens too.
00:10:16And I kind of would have liked to try that and I didn't get the chance to because that
00:10:19might have felt almost practical.
00:10:21I can imagine a more compact lens strapped on the back of a phone halfway towards something
00:10:26I might ever use.
00:10:28Having this huge telephoto that's like three, four times the size and weight of the phone
00:10:32itself strapped to one end of the device, like weighing the whole thing down and with
00:10:37no meaningful camera body to grab onto, it's frankly a terrible experience.
00:10:43It was really awful.
00:10:44It's cool.
00:10:45Again, this is in that space of concept.
00:10:46You're like, this is cool.
00:10:47This is fun.
00:10:48I'm shooting with this massive lens on a phone and the photo comes out really lovely.
00:10:51But awful, awful experience.
00:10:52You'd never ever want to use that in a million years.
00:10:54I just love the theory that you're like, okay, carrying a big lens around, totally
00:11:00doable, but carrying a whole big camera around way too much.
00:11:04Oh, that's where we draw the line.
00:11:05Yeah.
00:11:06This is not...
00:11:07Who'd want to do that?
00:11:08Who'd want to carry a camera body around?
00:11:10God.
00:11:11Awful.
00:11:12Yeah.
00:11:13But you said the Xiaomi one is a little more reasonable.
00:11:15Yes and no.
00:11:16I think it gets around a couple problems with this.
00:11:19One is they had much smaller lenses, which immediately won me over.
00:11:24Their solution is much more proprietary, much more custom.
00:11:26They basically had this small lens they built for themselves that magnetically attached
00:11:32to the back of a custom version of one of their phones.
00:11:35So it didn't actually attach to the existing camera.
00:11:37It goes right in the middle of the phone's body, which immediately makes it a lot more
00:11:41balanced.
00:11:42You don't have the lens on one end.
00:11:43It's in the middle.
00:11:44It feels a bit more like a real camera setup, a little bit more comfortable to hold.
00:11:47The magnetic attachment is quicker.
00:11:48It's easier.
00:11:49It's less bulky.
00:11:50It just feels a lot cooler and a lot more sci-fi.
00:11:54Also, because it attaches to the body of the phone rather than the camera, it can't take
00:12:00advantage of the image sensors in the phone.
00:12:02So what they actually did instead was put a sensor into this lens.
00:12:05It's this one little self-contained unit that has lens and sensor and then magnets to the
00:12:09phone.
00:12:10The perk of that is you can get a bigger sensor in there.
00:12:12So they had a four thirds type sensor rather than the one inch that is the biggest you're
00:12:17going to find in any phone right now.
00:12:18So you're getting a bigger sensor and a bigger lens.
00:12:21The lens was still something that could actually fit in your pocket pretty comfortably.
00:12:25It MagSafe's, well not MagSafe MagSafe, but it basically MagSafe's to the phone pretty
00:12:31immediately.
00:12:32And then uses an optical connection to transfer the data and then the phone handles all the
00:12:35actual processing.
00:12:36So that I get because it immediately felt like, oh, this is just like a lens add-on
00:12:42like someone like Moment does, but a lot better.
00:12:45It's a bit like Alison pointed out, this line of Sony cameras from like 12 years ago
00:12:50or something that clamped onto a phone.
00:12:52And this is ultimately, it's just that again, more than a decade later, they just replaced
00:12:57the clamp with a magnet.
00:13:00But you know, it works.
00:13:01It's cool.
00:13:02I wouldn't, obviously it would all come down to price and things like that.
00:13:05And this is so conceptual that we're nowhere near anything like that though.
00:13:09Alison, my stake in the ground on Friday's show is that I think this is an extremely
00:13:13good idea.
00:13:14It's a very sincere look that somebody actually makes and ships this thing, but you're more
00:13:18of a camera person than I am in general.
00:13:20What do you think of this whole, what if you just shoved a camera onto your phone idea?
00:13:25You lived through the Sony QX because we looked it up on theverge.com and it was a David Pierce
00:13:32review.
00:13:33I don't know.
00:13:34I just like, I saw that come and go.
00:13:37This is the clamp thing.
00:13:40And at first you're like, that's great.
00:13:42This is cool.
00:13:43Like big sensor for your phone.
00:13:44You just take it out, put it on.
00:13:46And that was obviously like way more clunky than something on magnets on your phone.
00:13:52But the thing it did not solve is that you're carrying around an extra thing.
00:13:56You're still like carrying.
00:13:58And at that point, you just carry a camera and that's where it falls apart a little bit
00:14:03for me.
00:14:04I think it's cool as hell.
00:14:06Like, yeah, I want to try that.
00:14:08I want a MagSafe lens on my phone and I'll give it a shot.
00:14:12But I just had such deja vu where I was like, we're doing this again.
00:14:17Oh my God.
00:14:18Yeah.
00:14:19There are no new ideas, just new attachment systems, I think is basically where we are
00:14:23with technology right now.
00:14:25Alison, the gadget that you saw that I would say I have the most questions about is the
00:14:30Noonal AI phone, which I have now spent a lot of time staring at and don't understand
00:14:35at all.
00:14:36And I would like you to explain this thing to me, please.
00:14:38Yeah, I have a similar feeling about it.
00:14:41So this is a company called Noonal.
00:14:45They have kind of, they're based kind of in blockchain stuff.
00:14:52The first thing they said to me in my briefing was that they never sold cryptocurrency and
00:14:56they were emphatic about that.
00:14:58So that sets the stage for this.
00:15:00It's a little kind of rectangle phone, like a small phone, runs Android.
00:15:07There's sort of two parts to the screen.
00:15:09There's this top little display and then the bottom one where the normal phone stuff is.
00:15:15And on the top part of the display is your avatar.
00:15:20It creates a version of you based on some photos, video, you talking, whatever.
00:15:29And that is your AI assistant.
00:15:33And the idea is you upload, you go around to Meta and Google and download all your data
00:15:44because they all have a system for data portability.
00:15:49And you bring it over to the Noonal OS and you upload it there and you train this AI
00:15:58version of you on all your stuff.
00:16:01They even have this like in the onboarding, I didn't see this but they described it, that
00:16:07you can describe the things you want in the future and kind of like input that as like
00:16:12here's the kind of thing I'm interested in doing.
00:16:16So it's so wild.
00:16:20So this little version of you, when you summon it on the phone, kind of pops up and just
00:16:25stares back at you and you tell it to do stuff.
00:16:29And that was the like, there's a lot of the like similar, you know, call an Uber was like
00:16:37the thing every AI assistant was doing on the show.
00:16:40We're just calling Ubers all over the frigging place.
00:16:44But like write a letter or, you know, someone calls and the AI version of yourself answers
00:16:51the phone and talks to that person and answers questions.
00:16:55They're like, oh, Allison's in a meeting right now, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:59And you could be like, ask about some like my availability to do something and it would
00:17:07answer. So the one that really got me that they showed me some live demos on this
00:17:14device, they had it by a car insurance policy.
00:17:19And the thing they told me was that they actually bought a secondhand car so that they
00:17:25could run through this demo.
00:17:27And it was going through it's it's very kind of rabbit are one in that, like you tell it
00:17:33to do something and then it's you see it clicking through the Geico website.
00:17:37But it's actually doing it on your phone.
00:17:39As far as I understand.
00:17:41Yeah. I asked the question of like, is this doing this for me?
00:17:46Is it on a computer somewhere else?
00:17:49And I'm I'm not 100 percent clear on it, but I saw it all happen.
00:17:56It answered the question. It was like, how much do you commute every day?
00:17:59And the idea is it shows you where it's getting its answers.
00:18:03It kind of like shows you its work as you go.
00:18:06So like go to Google Maps or whatever and be like you commute 40 miles a day or whatever
00:18:11it is. And then went through and paid for the insurance policy.
00:18:16And they were like, we need to go cancel this now.
00:18:18Oh, my gosh. It was wild.
00:18:20Like, I, I just don't even like saw it with my own eyes.
00:18:25I'm like, I have a hard time believing this.
00:18:27Like, so, yeah, it was it was one of the the wilder things at the show, I think.
00:18:33There are two parts of that that I find incredibly interesting and one of them I also
00:18:38find incredibly weird.
00:18:40The one is I actually think the idea of like having you train your own assistant by going
00:18:45and doing the various exports from all the other apps is actually very clever.
00:18:49Total privacy nightmare.
00:18:51Yeah. But in terms of like if you want to sort of solve the cold start problem of how do
00:18:56you train an AI, if you're willing to do that, that's actually like an incredibly smart
00:19:00way to do that is just go ingest all the algorithms from all your social platforms and
00:19:05let them just go to work again.
00:19:09Don't do that. Yeah.
00:19:10But if you're going to, it's a pretty smart way to do it.
00:19:12The thing that I don't understand is, is why this company decided that what I want when I
00:19:17summon my virtual assistant is me staring at me doing this.
00:19:22That's like, it seems so weird to me.
00:19:24Yeah. I would feel awkward looking at myself on my phone.
00:19:30Like, am I bothering you?
00:19:32Were you doing something important?
00:19:34Yeah. I don't know.
00:19:35Did you get to try this thing?
00:19:37I did not. I'm kind of sad now that I didn't get to see some tiny, terrifying.
00:19:42Alison, did you get to see a tiny AI, Alison?
00:19:45Did they make one for you?
00:19:46No, no.
00:19:48But they are, they say they're shipping this thing.
00:19:51It's going to go on sale in May.
00:19:53It's like $375.
00:19:57And then, then it's going, they said two months after that, it's going to be a product that
00:20:02ships in the wild, people have, and they're training their own AIs on.
00:20:06So I don't know.
00:20:07It may not be long.
00:20:08I'm going to go ahead and bet the over on the release date on that one.
00:20:12Yeah.
00:20:13May 1st, I'm going to guess is going to come and go.
00:20:16But hey, I hope I'm wrong on this one.
00:20:19Dom, you saw a bunch of other weird phones with weird ideas about things on the back,
00:20:26is I guess how I would, I would say it.
00:20:29Including one, I think the company was, was Nubia.
00:20:32Is that right?
00:20:32You found a phone with like a, with a scrolly circular dial on the back.
00:20:38Yes.
00:20:38I love a good circular dial, but I don't understand what this thing is doing.
00:20:41So Nubia is part of ZTE.
00:20:43They're the company that make the red magic gaming phones as well.
00:20:46That people may be more familiar with.
00:20:47That's kind of the biggest brand.
00:20:49And yeah, they, they, they announced an absolute ton of devices this year, and
00:20:54they had a few really weird ones.
00:20:56I think the camera ring was, was the strangest.
00:20:58It was on a, I think it's called the Focus 2 Ultra.
00:21:01If I've got that set of sounds the right way around.
00:21:04And it was a very cheap looking mid-range phone, but it just has this round camera
00:21:09module with a kind of brass ring around the edge that is a rotating crown, just
00:21:14like you would get on, you know, like rotating around the watch or something.
00:21:17So the, the bezel of the camera can rotate.
00:21:19The main way they had this set up was just that it works as a zoom dial in the camera.
00:21:24So you can hold the phone and just with like one finger on the back, just
00:21:28rotate that dial and it zooms in and out.
00:21:30So it's a bit more natural than the sort of clunky pinch to zoom or swipe to zoom
00:21:34that you tend to have on phones these days, which work fine, but
00:21:37they're slightly awkward movements.
00:21:39It definitely felt more natural than I thought it would to just have my finger
00:21:42resting on the back, swiveling this thing.
00:21:45It was a very kind of, it was very easy to move.
00:21:47It had a little bit of a ratchet to it, but not too much.
00:21:50And it didn't require a lot of force to move.
00:21:51So it was a very kind of quick, easy, smooth, rotate this wheel.
00:21:55And the camera just zoomed in and out.
00:21:57I I'm not sure if you can actually adapt it.
00:21:59What I hope you could do is customize that to do other stuff, uh, either within
00:22:02the camera, changing like exposure or something would be cool outside the
00:22:06camera, scrolling by just swiveling this wheel on the back of the phone.
00:22:10That's the kind of thing I'd like to see from it.
00:22:11Uh, and I'm not sure if that's in there or if that ever will be.
00:22:14Um, but yeah, I, I, I like this.
00:22:17This is a real product.
00:22:18It is actually a thing people can go and buy.
00:22:19Definitely not in the U S but elsewhere in the world.
00:22:22I think this will be real and available.
00:22:24And I don't think the phone as a whole, like a total winner, but, uh, this is fun.
00:22:28I like that as a concept.
00:22:30I'm sort of intrigued by this one.
00:22:31Cause I think like we're, we're definitely in the age of wild
00:22:34camera bumps on phones, right?
00:22:36Right.
00:22:36Like everybody's trying to either.
00:22:39Make them sort of the whole aesthetic of the phone.
00:22:43Like that's the pixel idea, right?
00:22:44It's like, what if the whole look of this thing was the camera bump or just
00:22:49like pretend they don't exist, which is like what Apple's doing.
00:22:51They're like, what camera bump?
00:22:52There's no camera bump.
00:22:53Don't, don't worry about the camera bump.
00:22:54There's no camera bump.
00:22:55You've never seen a camera bump in your life, but this, I think is very cool
00:22:58cause it's like, okay, there is.
00:23:00There is hardware on the back here and you're going to feel it with your finger.
00:23:03And I like the idea of actually making it useful in some way, even honestly, if it
00:23:09did nothing, but it was just like a little fidgety thing on the back, there's still
00:23:13something about like, you've made this phone more tactile in a way that I
00:23:16actually really, really like a fidget spinner built into the back of the phone.
00:23:21I love it.
00:23:22I mean, that's like 60% of what this pop socket on my phone
00:23:25is, is just a little fidget spinner.
00:23:27And I think that kind of thing, but Dom, I totally agree.
00:23:29Like if you could map that to other stuff on the phone, the way that you can like
00:23:33on some phones, map the volume buttons to scroll up and down or like, you know,
00:23:37turn pages in the Kindle app or whatever, like little bits like that, I think are
00:23:40very cool and should come back to more smartphones.
00:23:44Um, Alison, did you see any other cool phones?
00:23:46I feel like there's a bunch of like the nothing phone seems fine.
00:23:49There's like the, the solar smartphone concept, but was there anything else
00:23:53that like really jumped out to you on the mobile side of things?
00:23:55I got to give a shout out to the coffee phone, which was a concept.
00:24:01This is from techno.
00:24:04And I went over there like techno, um, Chinese brand.
00:24:07They, they had a bunch of concepts on their booth and there's like a trifold.
00:24:11They had a slim phone because we're doing slim phones.
00:24:14Um, but there's, you could actually like pick up and use, um, which was cool.
00:24:19So I went over there.
00:24:19I was like in line to see the slim phone and I got kind of the rundown on this.
00:24:24They had these like sustainable concepts where the back of the phone was made out
00:24:28of like some kind of coconut fiber and the woman showing them to me, she was
00:24:32like, this one is made out of coffee grounds and you can smell it and it
00:24:36smells like coffee and I smelled it.
00:24:39And it smells like coffee.
00:24:40Whoa.
00:24:41I know.
00:24:42Is that cool or is that horrible?
00:24:45I thought it was cool as hell.
00:24:47I loved it.
00:24:48I made everybody standing around me smell the phone.
00:24:50I was like, Julian, smell this phone.
00:24:52And made it my whole personality for the 30 minutes.
00:24:57Um, I don't, I don't know.
00:24:59I was like, that's so fun.
00:25:00That's not a thing I'm ever going to be able to buy, but I didn't.
00:25:04So like the most, the most practical, cool thing I saw, I think, um, was at HMD.
00:25:10Um, they had a whole thing.
00:25:12It was wild.
00:25:13It was at the FC Barcelona stadium.
00:25:17Oh, sure.
00:25:18Okay.
00:25:18HMD is the company that makes Nokia phones now, right?
00:25:21That's like in the U S.
00:25:21Yeah.
00:25:22They're the Nokia one.
00:25:23Nokia and their launch, they sell phones as HMD now.
00:25:27Um, but you, you can actually buy one in the U S.
00:25:30Um, but they have, uh, um, it's some earbuds that come in this kind of
00:25:36rectangular case and it magsafe to the back of a phone and it
00:25:42doubles as a little power bank.
00:25:44So it's got like somewhere it's like 1300 milliamps or something like that.
00:25:49Not huge, but there's like more of a battery in it than
00:25:53your typical like AirPods case.
00:25:55Um, the earbuds just kind of like pop out of the sides.
00:25:59They're real chunky and kind of weird looking, I think, because
00:26:02they need to fit into this case.
00:26:05But I think that's genius.
00:26:06Like you're, I'm used to charging my AirPods.
00:26:09I'm used to carrying those around with me.
00:26:11Wouldn't it be cool if that did something else for me?
00:26:14Like if my phone's running out of battery, you just slap it on there and
00:26:19you get a little more charge was like, I love it.
00:26:23I, a, that's a very good idea.
00:26:25Uh, and B I'm looking at this photo that you took of it now.
00:26:29And it kind of looks like you've magneted a vape onto the back.
00:26:36Oh no.
00:26:37How many, how far away are we from T2 vape?
00:26:41Not far.
00:26:43Oh, it's coming.
00:26:44You can vape and charge your phone.
00:26:46And also there's headphones inside.
00:26:48It's like, that's the, that's how you get the teens.
00:26:54Oh no.
00:26:55Well, thank you for that, David.
00:26:58We've really done something here.
00:26:59Um, okay.
00:27:00So there's one, one more gadget I want to ask you about.
00:27:03And then I'm just curious to hear favorite things from the show and
00:27:06then I'll let you get out of here.
00:27:07Um, this, this Nintendo switch looking thing that Samsung made.
00:27:13Uh, what, what is this thing?
00:27:15I feel like this, this was like an image that got passed around the internet
00:27:17and people were like, oh my God, what a cool thing that Samsung made.
00:27:19It's like a foldable Nintendo switch.
00:27:21Uh, did you guys see this thing?
00:27:22What is this thing?
00:27:23Yeah, this was at Samsung display.
00:27:26Um, and their, their booth is full of concept devices.
00:27:30Like, like very much like we don't make these things.
00:27:34These are just ideas.
00:27:35Aren't they cool.
00:27:36Maybe someone could adapt them and tell them.
00:27:39Um, so they had all kinds of stuff, all kinds of folding displays, but the
00:27:44coolest one was this like gaming handheld that was sort of set up with a
00:27:49very small sign that said, you know, it was like, do not touch everybody
00:27:53wanted to come over and touch it.
00:27:55It was, it was like very difficult not to just pick it up and touch it.
00:27:58And someone would yell at you.
00:28:00Um, but it just, it does what it sounds like.
00:28:04It's like a little switch looking thing that folds in half and you open it up
00:28:08and play your games and you fold it up when you're done.
00:28:11Um, it's green and yellow, so it's not a switch, but it's definitely a switch.
00:28:17Um, and it, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've like never travel
00:28:24with the switch because it just kind of seems like that bit too bulky.
00:28:29I'm like, what if it folded?
00:28:31Maybe I would take it around then.
00:28:33There is something about this that I find like irresistibly cool.
00:28:36I don't, I don't like, I have no idea what I would use it for or if it would
00:28:40change anything for me, or it would just stick a giant crease in the
00:28:42middle of all of my video games.
00:28:44But like, it's very cool.
00:28:46There's something, there's something about it that I'm like, I'm in on all
00:28:49foldables as you well know, but this one I'm in on as well.
00:28:52Yeah.
00:28:52Like immediate, immediate appeal.
00:28:54Uh, I mostly wanted to touch it just to try the D pads because the way this is
00:28:59designed is that the analog sticks have to go somewhere when it folds.
00:29:03So the D pads are kind of just like holes with buttons around the edge.
00:29:06So the analog stick can slot into these holes.
00:29:09Um, and they look like the worst D pads ever made.
00:29:12And I'm fascinated to try them just to feel what those buttons are like.
00:29:16Yeah.
00:29:16And how that would work to play.
00:29:17I haven't even understood that looking at this picture.
00:29:19They're like down sloping buttons so that the stick has somewhere
00:29:23to go in the center of them.
00:29:24Yes.
00:29:24On the inside edge of a ring.
00:29:26Yeah.
00:29:26That's probably not a great idea.
00:29:29Doesn't seem like it's going to work, but I like it.
00:29:31Um, all right, before I let you guys go, I want you to tell me just
00:29:34your, your favorite thing that you saw.
00:29:36It doesn't have to be real.
00:29:37It doesn't have to be plausible.
00:29:38It doesn't have to be a thing you're going to buy, but what's the thing you
00:29:40saw at MWC that you were most like just into for good reasons or for bad.
00:29:46Dom, you go first.
00:29:47For me, it is the, the Xiaomi camera concept that lends the
00:29:51magnets onto the back of the phone.
00:29:53Uh, I, I agree, David, I'm, I'm all in on this.
00:29:56I want this to exist.
00:29:57Um, I say that as someone who's a sucker for the, uh, the Xiaomi photography kit
00:30:01that they have for the ultra phones, which is a little camera grip that has
00:30:05a battery pack and slaps on the side and gives you a shutter button and zoom
00:30:07dial and stuff like that, they didn't show those things off together.
00:30:10And I'm kind of shocked.
00:30:11They didn't have a version that had that because then it really is
00:30:14just like a mirrorless camera.
00:30:15You pull apart, you pop the lens off, you pull the grip off.
00:30:17Now it's your phone.
00:30:18You slap those back on and you've got a full size camera.
00:30:21And I love that.
00:30:22It's very cool.
00:30:23I genuinely do see the potential in this.
00:30:26I very, very expensive potential.
00:30:27I'm sure about potential.
00:30:29I, I would, I would buy this if it existed.
00:30:32I honestly, like, what if you had a really good camera that had Instagram
00:30:36and TikTok installed on it?
00:30:37Just makes sense to me.
00:30:39I just, it just makes sense to me.
00:30:41And I think the answer is probably just your smartphone
00:30:44camera is good enough on its own, but like, no, it's not.
00:30:48Yeah.
00:30:48That's the closest hesitation.
00:30:49I have is like, the Xiaomi camera is almost that good, right?
00:30:52Like the 15 ultra is such a great camera that you almost look at, well,
00:30:56when they're doing that, well, anyway, do they need this whole other
00:30:58lens to slap on the back, but yeah.
00:31:00Why, why not?
00:31:00Even bigger sensors, even bigger lenses.
00:31:02Let's keep going.
00:31:04A hundred percent.
00:31:04Alison, what about you?
00:31:05What was your favorite?
00:31:06Uh, not to be boring, but like the 15 ultra, I think just that, yeah,
00:31:12though, like the, the upgrade and it's a minor one kind of on a spec page
00:31:18is the, um, periscope zoom is like, they, they were like, what if we took
00:31:23a telephoto camera on a smartphone and made it good?
00:31:27Um, and you're like, wow, that, that would be awesome.
00:31:30And they did it.
00:31:31It's like massive.
00:31:33And it makes the whole back of the camera look silly.
00:31:36But I, I haven't tried it out myself.
00:31:39I'm dying to like, what if a telephoto camera was good?
00:31:43Is, is such a like radical thought for a phone, you know, take, take
00:31:49portraits in inside where your subject is moving a little bit and like that
00:31:55might actually work with this phone.
00:31:57I don't know.
00:31:57I'm thrilled.
00:31:58I want to try it.
00:31:59I also love that the pitch for it isn't what if a telephoto was good at a
00:32:03hundred times zoom, because we've had that pitch again and again
00:32:06and again and again from Samsung.
00:32:08It's what if the telephoto or periscope was good at four times?
00:32:12Like it's just really, really good at four times and it's great there.
00:32:15And it can go up to 120 times and you should never do that.
00:32:17And the photos are awful, but they're not pitching it on that.
00:32:20They're not pitching on the fact that you can shoot a skyscraper
00:32:22from the other side of a city.
00:32:23They're just saying like, yeah, what if you could shoot something
00:32:25on the other side of the room?
00:32:26And it would actually be a nice photo that you want to use with bokeh and
00:32:30beautiful colors and all of that.
00:32:31I love that.
00:32:32And I think the, the, the, the message that Alison and I have been yelling
00:32:37into the universe that digital zoom is not zoom it's cropping, uh, is finally
00:32:42seems to be giving us some real benefits and they're actually
00:32:44starting to solve this problem.
00:32:45And Alison, I think you and I specifically deserve real credit.
00:32:48We did it.
00:32:49We got the W.
00:32:50I'm proud of us.
00:32:51I also think, by the way, it's very cool to see Xiaomi back to doing like
00:32:56really cool, interesting, weird smartphone stuff.
00:32:58Like that company was out in front of so many smartphone trends.
00:33:02It was doing the all screen stuff really early.
00:33:05It was doing foldable stuff really early.
00:33:07It's like, they've been pushing interesting trends kind of out ahead
00:33:12of a lot of companies for a long time.
00:33:14So I think this is the kind of thing that like, it seems weird, but
00:33:17might start to pop up other places.
00:33:19And Xiaomi's history of doing this well and early is pretty strong.
00:33:23So it's, it was cool to see Xiaomi like back at the forefront
00:33:26of fun ideas about smartphones.
00:33:28But we'll never get to buy them.
00:33:30No, Dom, you're going to have to get all of them.
00:33:31And we're just going to live vicariously through your experiences with cool
00:33:34phones that we're not allowed to have.
00:33:36Can you send me one, please?
00:33:40Awesome.
00:33:41Well, thank you both for doing this immediately after flying one of you.
00:33:45Not a long time.
00:33:46And one of you a very long time, but it's nice to see you both.
00:33:48Thank you for doing this.
00:33:49Yeah.
00:33:51All right.
00:33:51We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about dig.
00:33:59Welcome back.
00:34:00About a year ago, Kevin Rose and I got on the phone to talk about dig.
00:34:04Back then we were mostly reminiscing.
00:34:05The Verge did this big package of stories about 2004 and all
00:34:09the tech that happened that year.
00:34:10And dig was one of the things that launched in 2004.
00:34:13So we were talking about the early days of dig and how community has
00:34:16changed online and how the like button changed everything and on and on.
00:34:20But I asked him at the very end of our chat, if he'd given any
00:34:23thought to bringing dig back.
00:34:25And he kind of said no, but he said no in a way that made it clear.
00:34:29He actually had given it a lot of thought.
00:34:31And it turns out that not that long after our conversation, he started
00:34:35to give it a lot of thought, like a lot of thought, and now it's coming back.
00:34:39So dig after, I don't know, it's still technically around, but
00:34:44it's changed a lot over the years.
00:34:45And it is definitely not the dig that you remember if you
00:34:48remember the original dig.
00:34:50But now Kevin Rose, along with Justin Metzl, who's going to be a CEO at dig
00:34:54and people like Alexis Ohanian, who is the co-founder of Reddit and is now
00:34:58going to be an advisor and an investor in dig, the goal is to bring it back
00:35:01and to make a new kind of social network out of it, they have big ideas about
00:35:06how AI can make it easier for moderators.
00:35:09They have big ideas about how we can do community better.
00:35:12These are people who have learned kind of every lesson there is to learn
00:35:15about social and the internet.
00:35:18And their goal is to get it right this time.
00:35:21So originally when I talked to Kevin and Justin, I didn't actually intend
00:35:24to use it for the show.
00:35:25We were just having kind of a product briefing, but I enjoyed the conversation
00:35:28so much that I figured I'd just play it for you here.
00:35:31So this is Kevin and Justin and me, and we pick up when I
00:35:35essentially asked them, why now?
00:35:37Right.
00:35:38Kevin said he had been approached by various owners over the years about
00:35:42whether he wanted to buy the dig domain and buy the website and buy the whole
00:35:45thing back and try it all again.
00:35:46And he always said, no, and the timing was wrong, just didn't feel right.
00:35:49But this time it felt right.
00:35:51And so I asked him why and specifically what changed between then and
00:35:56now that got you back in.
00:35:57Here's what he said.
00:35:58Obviously, we all know that the hottest thing to talk about these days is AI.
00:36:02Right?
00:36:03Well, when we talked about that, when we talked last time that you were like,
00:36:05yeah, that might be the thing that makes some of this stuff sort of newly possible.
00:36:10And I think it is a very delicate topic to cover largely because one of the
00:36:16things that I believe that made dig and makes Reddit a special place on the
00:36:21internet is that, you know, there are humans behind the scenes with real
00:36:25opinions, real, real conversation going on, real stories that they find interesting.
00:36:30And you don't, the second you start to sterilize that, then you're
00:36:36just an aggregator of, of information.
00:36:39You're a fancy RSS reader with some voting on it.
00:36:42And it's like, nobody wants that or thinks that's the future.
00:36:46And so if anything, we want to figure out how to reinvent and re-imagine what it
00:36:52means to build communities and bring people together, and we see AI as a
00:36:57partner on a variety of different fronts.
00:37:00But the first front that we'll tackle is very much like, how can we remove the
00:37:10janitorial work of, you know, moderators and community managers and convert what
00:37:17they do every day into more of a kind of director of vibes, culture, and, and
00:37:23community builder than someone that is just sitting there doing the, the
00:37:27laborious crappy stuff that, you know, comes in through, through the front door.
00:37:34And that's a lot of tooling that needs to be built in.
00:37:38And we did some pressure testing there to see, you know, what different models
00:37:44are out there, how they handle different types of content, how we can surface that
00:37:47stuff, what kind of knobs and dials can we expose to different moderators and
00:37:53different community managers so that, you know, they're able to have a more honed
00:37:59and completely transparent, you know, version of what they're building.
00:38:05And I am speaking to the future a bit and not all this will be there on day one.
00:38:09That strikes me as the kind of thing in sort of broad strokes that a lot of these
00:38:13LLMs are actually like really well set up to be good at in a way that I feel like a
00:38:17lot of people tell me things that I'm like, maybe in a decade, LLMs will be able
00:38:20to do that.
00:38:20This one where it's like basic kind of content understanding and sorting and
00:38:26shuffling is like actually pretty well within the realm of what a lot of this
00:38:30stuff can do, right?
00:38:31Yeah, that's exactly right.
00:38:33And also just these models can also be discreetly defined and there can be
00:38:38multiple agents working on your behalf.
00:38:42So we very much see a world where, you know, and I'm just making stuff up here
00:38:47for the sake of whatever, for random banter, but there's everything from an AI
00:38:52agent that converts your entire sub-community into Klingon.
00:38:56And, you know, there's another one that, you know, you have a meditation group and
00:39:01you don't allow a certain type of profanity and that's, you know,
00:39:04automatically auto-moderated, right?
00:39:07Or at the very extreme end, and I think this is something that, you know, without
00:39:11giving away too much, you'll see down the road, but, you know, I think of Dig less
00:39:16like rebuilding a content management platform and more like creating the next
00:39:21version of Figma, like it's almost like akin to the shift from Photoshop to Figma
00:39:25where you went from, I'm defining the pixels as a 800 by 800 square and as by
00:39:33file new to a, I have a blank canvas and I'm just going to allow the dynamic
00:39:39rearrangement of information in a very flexible way as driven by multiple
00:39:45members of the community.
00:39:47So if we can create more of a dynamic canvas where, you know, agents are
00:39:52layered on top of that to assist, to help, to do wild things, to create games,
00:39:58to do whatever they want that that community wants them to do, then we have
00:40:02something and we have the ability to wake up one morning and be completely
00:40:06surprised by what, you know, our audiences create.
00:40:10And I think that marching towards that end goal is, is going to be a wild ride.
00:40:16You know,
00:40:16That's a really fun way to think about it.
00:40:17That's also like huge, right?
00:40:20Like what you just described, it could be sort of anything up to and including
00:40:24like the whole internet.
00:40:26Yeah.
00:40:26I mean, if you think about it, it's like.
00:40:30Forms have been in conversation has been such a, a, a kind of like as defined by
00:40:36CSS kind of world.
00:40:38And, and it's like those things get updated or refreshed or changed, you know,
00:40:43whatever, once every few years by the platform owner, or, you know, you install
00:40:48a new WordPress theme or whatever it may be.
00:40:51But, you know, if I'm in a, a eventual later sub community on dig, that's about
00:40:57stocks, you know, and I want a real time stock ticker, I should just ask my bot to
00:41:03go make one and drop it in there for me.
00:41:05You know, it's like, that's all going to be possible.
00:41:08Right.
00:41:08And, and, and, and that kind of flexibility and malleability of, of a future version
00:41:14of dig is what ultimately gets us really, really jazzed and excited.
00:41:18And the thing that Alexis has said about Justin is that, you know, and it's very
00:41:24clear in the, I know it's quite well in working with them is that you need
00:41:27somebody running these social platforms with a high degree of integrity and
00:41:32someone that's always going to point to that North star and say, the community.
00:41:36Eats first, this is all about the community.
00:41:38This is all about the, like, like serving those people and creating the best
00:41:42possible experience for them, because in my, from my point of view, in watching
00:41:49all the rebellion that happened against dig and the rebellion that's happened
00:41:53multiple times on Reddit, largely, a lot of that is driven by those people that
00:41:59put in so many hours of their life as being, you know, treated as second-class
00:42:05citizens and not really, you know, being taken their needs being taken seriously.
00:42:10And so, you know, one of the first things I did when even before buying dig is I
00:42:14went out and personally bought thousands of dollars of Reddit ads, and I targeted
00:42:19all of the moderation communities and I put in forms some of them targeted, some
00:42:27of them open-ended questions, asking moderators what they were missing, where
00:42:33are their pain points, where are they struggling, what do they wish existed
00:42:37that isn't being built for them?
00:42:39And I got thousands of responses that, of course, I dumped into AI and, and
00:42:44themes started to emerge and it's, and it's that level of attention that we need
00:42:50to be giving these people and helping them build the tools so that the back
00:42:53office and the suite of tools that they have looks as good as the front does.
00:42:58And that's just never been done.
00:43:00And that's something that's on us to build.
00:43:02Totally.
00:43:02And it's interesting to hear you talk about paying attention to the community
00:43:06as paying attention to the moderators, which I think is like, like I spent a
00:43:09bunch of time with Reddit mods during not this most recent Reddit mod revolt,
00:43:15but the one before that it's like every, every two years this happens all over
00:43:19again and the thing they were saying is like Reddit actually takes pretty good
00:43:22care of its users and horrible care of the moderators who are the ones who
00:43:24actually spend all of their time taking care of their users and they really felt
00:43:28that and they were like, the reason our users have a good time is not because
00:43:31of Reddit, it's because of us.
00:43:32And like appreciating that the middleman there I think is a hard thing to do
00:43:37because most people don't notice it, but I think it ends up kind of
00:43:40being the job in a lot of ways.
00:43:42I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with that.
00:43:44And then I also think that we can, it's not just about building them good tools,
00:43:49but it's also about giving them agency in a way that they haven't had before.
00:43:54And what I mean by that is like, it just like, it's a real bummer to me as a, as
00:43:59a creator, like if I step outside of the dig realm for a minute and I say like,
00:44:03listen, like a good example is like, you know, I own my email newsletter list.
00:44:08Right.
00:44:09And in some sense, until they take it away, I can export all of my Twitter
00:44:14data and take it with me.
00:44:15Right.
00:44:16Like how do we make sure that if a community comes along and they want to
00:44:23have a deeper, more real connection with these people that they spent so much
00:44:26time building up these communities, like it's not all for nothing.
00:44:30It's not like just some big corporate entity, you know, controls that.
00:44:35So we think deeply about these questions on how we can give them more real
00:44:40ownership and all the things that we build and do versus just making them
00:44:45unpaid, you know, moderators that, that don't get a lot of recognition, you know?
00:44:52Well, and I think the thing that was really interesting as we've even thought
00:44:55about it was, it was like, it's like that question you can ask, like, what
00:44:58would I do different if I was to do something like this again and having
00:45:03both Kevin and Alexis with their own stories, their own paths that each
00:45:07of these things have taken.
00:45:09I mean, it feels like I have the game guide to like look at and, and, and
00:45:12play really well from the beginning.
00:45:14I know where the secrets are.
00:45:15I know, I know where to look.
00:45:17And, and again, that doesn't mean that every single thing is super clear.
00:45:20And, but that's mostly because both, you know, Kevin, myself and Alexis
00:45:24very much value human centered design.
00:45:26We want the community to dictate a lot of these things, but the difference was
00:45:30like, how do we square up from day one to let them know that it's like, this is a
00:45:35place for people to gather for communities.
00:45:37And we recognize that people are able to gather when people catalyze and, and
00:45:43like a make it happen by building communities online.
00:45:46And I think it's even more important now that we think about those things and how
00:45:50it's working and how to do it in a healthy way.
00:45:51What's your sense of what you're kind of wading into with that conversation?
00:45:55Because on the one hand, I feel like there is more need for that than ever.
00:45:59And people are really aware of kind of how important community is, but also we've
00:46:05spent most of the last decade just being burned by that over and over
00:46:09and over in every different way.
00:46:10So I feel like you're going to run into a group of people who both desperately
00:46:14want what you're talking about and are also more skeptical every day of whether
00:46:19you will actually do it and deliver it to them in the long run.
00:46:22Well, it's, it's a balance because it's like a lot of, you know, modern social
00:46:26media with the algorithm.
00:46:27Like, it's like outrage culture.
00:46:28It's just like, what can we serve you that is so counter to, uh, what you believe
00:46:34that you'll see it and you'll just like want to throw your, your phone across
00:46:37the room.
00:46:38And so it's like, one of the things that we have talked about is like, how do we,
00:46:42obviously we're going to use AI to be able to make things more efficient.
00:46:46And hopefully that means there's relevancy service there and there's, there's
00:46:49interest that you have in the spaces that you follow and we can, you know, branch
00:46:53out from there to grow some of those things.
00:46:55But like, there has to be a balance where it's like, instead of doing it behind
00:46:59closed doors or, you know, really just saying, well, if you're mad, you're going
00:47:03to click a lot more.
00:47:04So let's just get everybody really mad.
00:47:06We can really start thinking about like, how do we get people into communities
00:47:10as the first, but then also like when you're in there, like, what does it mean
00:47:14to show up in a community?
00:47:15Like, like who are you in that community?
00:47:17You'll have people that post content, like post original content.
00:47:20You're going to have people that make comments and they're, they're funny and
00:47:24they're, and they're enjoyable.
00:47:25You have people obviously that make other kinds of comments and those people exist
00:47:28too, but it's like, you also have people that like just support other things.
00:47:32They're not the ones finding the stuff, but they're upvoting it and they're, they're,
00:47:36they're sourcing, you know, from like the earliest stuff.
00:47:38How do we get that to the top here?
00:47:40And those people deserve to be celebrated as well.
00:47:42So one of the things that Kevin and I talked about from the beginning is like,
00:47:45you know, there's like all these very simple, you know, systems that we already
00:47:49have for like commenting systems and branching and all that stuff.
00:47:52But it's like, even if we start there, we cannot stop asking the question about
00:47:57how to like give people the respect for being really insightful, for being really
00:48:03encouraging, for being really funny at times, or just even saying like, Hey, this
00:48:07isn't really adding to the conversation and maybe that's okay.
00:48:09And people do need to see that a bit.
00:48:12So I think for us, it really is just about when people create communities, they should
00:48:16have control on what kind of community they're looking to create.
00:48:19It should be efficient and easy.
00:48:22And it should be something that like other people have a real understanding of like,
00:48:25what does it mean to show up here?
00:48:26What are we talking about?
00:48:27What are we sharing and how are we doing it?
00:48:29Yeah.
00:48:29And I think just adding on top of that, the one thing that you'll see you know, and I
00:48:36think this is important to hit in and hit home with you is that, you know, dig day one
00:48:42is very much our like MVP.
00:48:44Let's just ship this lots of lots of bugs, lots of broken things.
00:48:48Like we're rushing this out.
00:48:49We're going to get it out, but there's a lot of nostalgia, but we're going to fast
00:48:52follow that every couple of weeks with just like just new stuff all the time.
00:48:56So when we get there, what you'll see that is a radical transparency that you will see
00:49:02you won't have seen anywhere else.
00:49:04There will be no such thing as shadow banning.
00:49:06You will see a full audit log of what's happening to who and why.
00:49:13And I think this is where, you know, we can kind of lean on AI to be a helpful.
00:49:20Like a participant here in that there's, there's a couple of different ways you can
00:49:26imagine this.
00:49:26You can say, okay, I'm a, I'm a community, you know, manager and I run this community.
00:49:32I generally want this type of conversation to be happen here.
00:49:39And I want to disallow this type of conversation.
00:49:41Okay.
00:49:42Those rules are written and available for everyone.
00:49:45You can see when AI takes action to enforce some of those rules.
00:49:50And if you even feel like it, you can add an extra agent on top of that, that grades
00:49:57the moderator's own actions and says, I agreed or disagreed with what this moderator
00:50:02actually did.
00:50:03Right.
00:50:04And so there's layers of this.
00:50:06In a transparency that I think a lot of the people that are very skeptical of these
00:50:12secret algorithms that promote agendas or do different things, I think they're really
00:50:18going to enjoy seeing that audit trail and exactly what's happening behind the scenes.
00:50:25Uh, because we just think that's, that's such an important piece of trust here is to
00:50:31let them know that, um, you know, one be very clear about how to show up, but two, when
00:50:38action does happen, which ultimately when you get to tens of millions of people all
00:50:42playing in the same sandbox, there will be being very transparent about why and how these,
00:50:48these things happened, you know?
00:50:49Yeah.
00:50:50It does seem like part of what you're going to have to figure out how to square is making
00:50:54something that is very fun and interesting and exciting to be part of, but isn't like
00:50:59a game to be won.
00:51:00And I think a lot of the mistakes dig made in its first iteration.
00:51:04And Kevin, you and I talked about this too, is like dig kind of became a game you could
00:51:07win.
00:51:08And so people figured out how to win it and win it even with things that shouldn't have
00:51:12wanted.
00:51:13And it's just starts to become this impossible, like SEO spiral into madness and bad content.
00:51:19That's right.
00:51:19And I feel like that's a, that just strikes me as a really tricky, but important thing
00:51:23to get right.
00:51:23Like this has to be fun, but you can't win at it.
00:51:26I feel like the internet doesn't have that much of that right now.
00:51:29Yeah, that's right.
00:51:30And we think deeply about this and I think you'll notice this.
00:51:34I don't want to get into unreleased features, but on day one, you'll, you'll notice a couple
00:51:39of very obvious things that, that on user profiles that you've never seen before.
00:51:44Uh, there's, well, we might as well just like say, cause it'll come out when it comes out,
00:51:49but like, there's no such thing as following and dig.
00:51:52And we've, we've replaced some of the core, what have been considered to be quote unquote
00:51:57vanity metrics in the past, which with what we believe to be our first attempt at things
00:52:02that are much more tangible and real and inspire you to do positive things inside of the ecosystem
00:52:08versus a game that's just one, um, versus who's got the biggest follower count.
00:52:14Um, and that's what we're really excited to continue to tweak after we get it out there.
00:52:20Man, if you can fix the social metric thing, you, you will have done the internet a great
00:52:24service.
00:52:25That's right.
00:52:26Like truly we don't have a thing that's better than likes and followers and both of those
00:52:30are bad.
00:52:30Yes.
00:52:31And, and we, we, that's, you know, going back to Justin's point, like when you, if you were
00:52:36a fly on the wall in the, the Alexis, Kevin, Justin hangout space, it is, it is very much,
00:52:43uh, it, it, there are, yes, there are the, the, the kind of table stakes, like lessons
00:52:50learned stuff that we need to pay attention to and are just going to continue to hold
00:52:53true today from the past.
00:52:55But a lot of it is like, okay, screw what we know to be true.
00:52:59Let's go back to first principles.
00:53:01If we were designing this from today, um, let's just imagine a world where, uh, let's
00:53:07challenge all these assumptions that we had previously had, uh, not just for the sake
00:53:13of challenging them, but really truly sit with them for a minute and say, what might
00:53:17me do differently?
00:53:18And that's led to some really different outcomes already.
00:53:20Yeah.
00:53:20That's cool.
00:53:21So Justin, I'm particularly curious for, for your perspective on like the nostalgia versus
00:53:26newness thing.
00:53:27Because like my sense is like, like you guys are saying, there is a real group of people
00:53:32out there who loves dig and remembers and we'll care about it and we'll come back for
00:53:35it.
00:53:35But I feel like that only gets you so far.
00:53:38And especially in terms of like the product you guys are describing, it sort of rhymes
00:53:42with old dig, but it's very much not old dig.
00:53:44So like, I don't know, how are you thinking about the balance of those two things?
00:53:47Yeah.
00:53:47You know, we had a different version, I think of this, that was probably a little more of
00:53:53a departure from the dig that people know that we were kind of actively working on
00:53:57as we spun things up earlier this year.
00:53:58And we were at an offsite together, all like doing a hacker house.
00:54:01And what I ended up just like waking up one night and I couldn't fall back asleep because
00:54:06I was just like, I am, I don't want to go out the door with a product that is duct
00:54:11taped together.
00:54:12That does not feel like an enjoyable space to be in, of course, but also just like the
00:54:17people who knew dig walk in and they go, oh, dig's back.
00:54:20Oh, that's great.
00:54:21You know, we've seen so many threads on, you know, various platforms, people talking about
00:54:24dig.
00:54:25And so it was like, oh man, I miss it.
00:54:26It's time to bring it back.
00:54:26And of course, just because we want to bring surge soda back does not mean surges as good
00:54:31as we remember.
00:54:31And I get that what we want to do is really build a platform that really works for our
00:54:36modern world that we exist in as well.
00:54:39So what we've really done, um, and at least here in the beginning that you'll see is like,
00:54:44there are a lot of things that feel innately like dig and it is a very stripped down experience.
00:54:49This isn't like you can do anything and everything.
00:54:52Um, it's, it's a very tight experience on day one.
00:54:55But the goal is two week iteration release cycles.
00:54:58So it's like discovery and delivery happening in two weeks and going out the door because
00:55:02we have a group that is tenacious.
00:55:05They are really hungry and they're really passionate about what we're building.
00:55:08Okay.
00:55:08Yeah.
00:55:08I mean, there's an interesting thing where it's like, I do feel like you're going to
00:55:12get a lot of people who just go to the website because it's dig, right?
00:55:16And that, that is like a very powerful thing to have going for you.
00:55:19Uh, but it comes with weird expectations, right?
00:55:22Like if it looks like, if it looks like it did 20 years ago, that is both good and bad
00:55:26in a way that is, I think, really hard to sort through.
00:55:29Yeah.
00:55:30And I think that's, but I don't think it's like, we have to throw out all the nostalgia.
00:55:35Like, I think, I think it's like, you know, if you come on day one, it's 99.9% nostalgia.
00:55:41And you're like, damn, this is like a slightly updated version of dig that
00:55:44I can confirm though.
00:55:45It's not a skeuomorphic website.
00:55:47I can confirm.
00:55:48That's fair.
00:55:50That's fair.
00:55:50Um, but, but I, I think that the, you know, the one thing we didn't want to do that Justin's
00:55:56alluding to when he said that he stayed up that one night, cause I got the call the next day or
00:56:00maybe two days later.
00:56:01And he's like, Hey, I just, I just trashed everything up.
00:56:06I threw away a bunch of stuff and I was like, okay, let's talk about it.
00:56:09Like what's up.
00:56:10And, and the insight that he had there that I thought was, was super sharp was that,
00:56:16you know, let's get that, let's get that nostalgia bump that we get.
00:56:19We all know, we know we're going to get on day one and what we can ride that for a couple of
00:56:23weeks and that trust with any of these communities and, and ultimately like playing the long game
00:56:32here, it's built up week over week, month over month, feature over feature.
00:56:38Uh, and this is a multi-year, you know, adventure for us.
00:56:44This is not something where, you know, dig's going to eat 50% of Reddit's traffic in,
00:56:49um, by the third month.
00:56:50You know what I mean?
00:56:51Like this is, this is us being, trying to stay as nimble as possible to have as many
00:56:58different wild shots on goal.
00:57:01Um, all with a very important direct line of communication with the user base so that
00:57:06we're listening and, and rolling that into everything that we do.
00:57:10Well, the thing too, that I, uh, I really do want to bolt on here is like, I, I love
00:57:14what you're saying about like, we're, we're going to get this thing going and it will
00:57:18be some of the nostalgia, but like, like at the same time, like the reason why we made
00:57:23that decision was it was like, if we brought people back to dig and they were like, man,
00:57:27I just want to dig back.
00:57:28And then they get it and they're like, Oh, this is not what I wanted at all.
00:57:31Like, like, okay.
00:57:32Yeah, no, this is a totally new thing.
00:57:34Now it's a chat app or something.
00:57:36Um, that's, that's where we'd feel like we kind of duped just like took the name or like,
00:57:40let's just do whatever we want on this thing.
00:57:41Um, and so the spirit of it, but then on the other side is like, I also don't want, you
00:57:47know, Reddit folks to come over on that first day and just like, okay, so this is like,
00:57:51just like Reddit with worse features, less stuff and less people.
00:57:55And so it's like, we really need to like figure out what is the first step that it looks like
00:58:00to build dig.
00:58:02And then we'll figure out the rest of the steps from it.
00:58:03Again, we already have a lot of, uh, steps immediately backing it up that we're pretty
00:58:08sure they're already in the chamber.
00:58:09And again, we need those quick release cycles.
00:58:11We don't just want to sit on our haunches because you're absolutely right.
00:58:13If we go out the door, there's an immediate dopamine hit of like, oh yeah, I remember
00:58:18dig.
00:58:18This is great.
00:58:18I remember that time.
00:58:19And then they get there and be like, oh yeah, this is why I stopped using dig.
00:58:22And that's not where we want to get.
00:58:24This is a horrible analogy.
00:58:25Doesn't come up with something better, but like in my head, I'm like, okay, the old dig
00:58:29users were used to Photoshop for, we're giving them Photoshop six and in 18 months they'll
00:58:34have Figma, you know?
00:58:36And it's like, okay.
00:58:37Yeah, it's, it's kind of that world where, and we're going to bring them along every
00:58:42step of the way.
00:58:42Right.
00:58:43And so if we would have just dropped Figma on day one, people would have been like, what
00:58:48the hell is this?
00:58:49You know?
00:58:50And, and it's going to happen not because we're just going to roll out features that
00:58:56we expect will just work flawlessly.
00:58:59It's going to happen because we roll back features that didn't work and we roll out
00:59:02the next thing, you know, that's, that's how we're going to figure out this, this whole
00:59:06thing.
00:59:06And then the future it's, it's that, it's that agility that a big competitor won't be
00:59:12able to have.
00:59:14And it's the, it's the fact that we've written the backend from scratch in a way that is
00:59:19so nimble.
00:59:21It allows for rapid experimentation in a way that a competitor won't have that is going
00:59:25to give us the edge here.
00:59:27Yeah.
00:59:27It sure helps to not be a public company in need of giant growth at this particular moment
00:59:32in the social universe.
00:59:34A hundred percent.
00:59:34That's why you nailed it.
00:59:36Like we're, you know, we don't even have ads on the site.
00:59:39Like there's no, there's no, there's no plan for ads anytime soon.
00:59:43Like that.
00:59:44And if we do, we're going to do it in a way that's completely different, you know?
00:59:48And, and we've already got ideas around some of that stuff, but it is, we're saying it's
00:59:51like when, as we're, we're, we're breaking in this new vehicle and we, we booted up and
00:59:58we kind of like, you know, we've got that fresh new car smell and everything is like,
01:00:03you know, just trying to make sure like the panels are bolted on correctly.
01:00:07It's going to be a fixed taxonomy of topics.
01:00:10And, and that, that'll be day one.
01:00:13We are going to very much fast follow that into open ended, build your own, whatever
01:00:17you like.
01:00:18And so when that happens, you know, to your point about smaller micro communities, if
01:00:25you just care about knitting, like, dammit, we want to have the best home for you to go
01:00:30build a community about knitting.
01:00:31And you may meet need very specific things for that community that we're just not even
01:00:35aware of.
01:00:35Right.
01:00:36But, you know, we want to make it as flexible long term so that you can describe those things
01:00:43and have those kind of like happen.
01:00:46So it's, it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of steps to get there.
01:00:52But, but to your point about, you know, will there be logged out people that just come
01:00:56for the homepage?
01:00:57Cause they're like, show me the homepage of the internet today.
01:00:59Absolutely.
01:01:00Right.
01:01:00I was just going to say, you're, you're trying to sort of do both of those things.
01:01:03You want to have the one sort of shared experience, but also let people kind of define
01:01:08their own inside.
01:01:08A hundred percent.
01:01:09It's like, if you've got a niche weird thing, then you, you'll have a pocket in the home
01:01:15for that, that, you know, I have been into lately into Japanese denim, and I would love
01:01:22to have a community that just talks about that all day long.
01:01:24That would be, I'd be all about that.
01:01:26Right.
01:01:26And so it is, it is a world where we will get to embrace and open it up to, to anything
01:01:32and everything, you know?
01:01:34So why, why launch this now?
01:01:35I'm going to let you guys go here in a minute, but like, to your point, you could sort of
01:01:39build this thing in secret forever, or you could just like launch the thing the minute
01:01:44you have a website and say coming soon and have a wait list.
01:01:47Like why, why now?
01:01:48Why is this the right moment?
01:01:50I think it's because somebody is, is going to connect these dots here.
01:01:54A new startup will connect these dots and that they'll see that we have competition
01:01:59in market right now that has largely neglected the user base.
01:02:07And I'm not just talking about Reddit here, but across the board that it's been largely
01:02:11driven by, by people that it's a top down development approach and that these are the
01:02:17features you'll like them and they are what they are.
01:02:20And you know, if you don't like it, leave.
01:02:24And I think that we have the ability to flip the script there.
01:02:31And then also it's just the most opportune time to lean into all these advancements that
01:02:36we're seeing on the technology front.
01:02:38You know, it's like when I built the first version of dig, I was rack mounting my own
01:02:44servers because AWS didn't exist.
01:02:46That's how ancient I am.
01:02:48And when AWS came out, I was like, oh my God, if I had only built it now, how much easier
01:02:54would this have been?
01:02:55Right.
01:02:56And this is another one of those moments where I'm like, I said, you know, Lex and I are
01:03:00looking at each other and, and we were like, oh my God, if, if now is another one of those
01:03:05moments where it's like, God, there's so many things we could fix, you know?
01:03:10And when you see as an entrepreneur and, you know, Justin obviously knows this quite well,
01:03:14but when you see problems and you actually see solutions to those problems and no one's
01:03:18doing it and you have a lot of domain expertise here, you know, and you've got the co-founder
01:03:24of Reddit that is like, hey, here are the five things I wish I could have built.
01:03:28And he's literally like, but never did.
01:03:31And we've got all this stuff that was on the cutting room floor that he just never saw
01:03:34the light of day.
01:03:35And we're like, damn, those are good ideas.
01:03:38We're going to go do it.
01:03:39All right.
01:03:39We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from
01:03:42Forecast Hotline.
01:03:49All right, we're back.
01:03:50Let's get to the Vergecast Hotline.
01:03:51As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11.
01:03:54The email is vergecast at theverge.com.
01:03:57Send us all of your questions about everything all the time.
01:04:00That's just the best thing we do here is try and answer your questions.
01:04:04Like I mentioned, we have some really fun sort of bigger picture stuff coming out of
01:04:08hotline questions that I'm very excited about.
01:04:10So stay tuned for that.
01:04:11For now, we have a question about printers.
01:04:14Vergecast, it's David from the center of the United States again, in Missouri.
01:04:20And I'm not actually sure I haven't called about this before.
01:04:25But here's what I need you to do.
01:04:27Before I miss all this talk about how Apple is declining as a company, as if it's new,
01:04:34I need you to get Apple to do their thing, to work their magic on the whole concept of
01:04:40home printing.
01:04:42I'm not even sure if I have to explain.
01:04:44Do I?
01:04:44I feel like they're the only people who might actually be able to make it acceptable and
01:04:51not a blight on the rest of our consumer electronics lives.
01:04:55If anyone's listening, and if not, I need you to make some calls.
01:05:00This is a thing I've actually done a fair amount of research on at this point.
01:05:04I talked to Cory Doctorow on the show a while ago about printers and the mess that is HP
01:05:10and other companies starting to DRM the ink so that you can't use third party ink.
01:05:14It's a real like razor and blade situation where they sell you the thing pretty cheap,
01:05:18but then the thing you need to actually use the thing is what's expensive and they lock
01:05:23you in.
01:05:24And it's a it's a crappy business.
01:05:26And the thing about printers is everybody also hates their printers.
01:05:28So it's not even like it's a predatory market in which you still get a good product for
01:05:33too much money.
01:05:34It's a predatory market in which the product sucks.
01:05:37But here's what I figured out.
01:05:39And I think this is just the answer.
01:05:41It's not an answer I like, but I think it is the answer.
01:05:43There just is no business in consumer printers.
01:05:47As far as I can tell, there is just simply no way in 2025 for a company to make a very
01:05:54good printer and come with the cost that it would require to make a very good printer
01:06:00that people would buy and that would make any money for the company that made it.
01:06:05I think it's just that simple.
01:06:06This is why you see that there are super, super expensive printers at the high end of
01:06:11the line.
01:06:11And then there are cheap, awful, crappy printers at the bottom.
01:06:16I think of it a little like the TV market, actually, in the sense that there's this high
01:06:21end world in which you can buy a high end television for tons of money.
01:06:25That market, we talk about it a lot, but that market is like this big.
01:06:29The much bigger market is big, cheap, crappy screens.
01:06:33That's where we are.
01:06:34And the way that all of those companies make money is not by selling you the television.
01:06:39It's by selling you ads.
01:06:40It's just the market now.
01:06:42You get companies like Telly who are like, look, we don't need a dime from the TV because
01:06:46we're going to make so much money on ads.
01:06:48You get companies like Roku and Amazon that are deep in the TV business now because it's
01:06:54an advertising business.
01:06:55TVs are not a hardware business.
01:06:57They're an advertising business.
01:06:58And in the same way, printers are not a printer business.
01:07:02They're an ink business.
01:07:04They're a subscription business, which sucks, but seems to be the case.
01:07:08And realistically, if you think about it, you're like, OK, I hate my printer.
01:07:11Would I pay three times as much for my printer to be awesome?
01:07:15I think the answer is just no.
01:07:16I think for almost everybody, the answer is just no.
01:07:19So I've been talking to people about this for a long time, and that is the conclusion
01:07:22I've come to.
01:07:22But before we get out of here, I just want to play you.
01:07:26So I've been talking to people about this for a while, and that is the only conclusion
01:07:30I have been able to come to.
01:07:31But before we get out of here, I want to play you a chunk of an interview that Sean
01:07:35Hollister and I did with Framework CEO Nirav Patel for last week's show.
01:07:39We didn't actually run this clip on the show last week because it didn't really fit the
01:07:43other stuff we were talking about.
01:07:45But one of the things people always ask Framework to make is a printer.
01:07:49It's a perfectly good idea, right?
01:07:51You want something that's upgradable, that's repairable, that just kind of works, that
01:07:54you can fix yourself really easily like printer print.
01:07:57Just what if somebody made a good printer?
01:07:59So we asked Nirav, what would a Framework printer look like?
01:08:02And his explanation was really interesting.
01:08:05So before we go, let me just play you this chunk of our interview.
01:08:08The reason we are not building a printer is actually that we haven't identified a plausible
01:08:14path for us to recoup the investment that it would take for us to build a printer.
01:08:19It's not like a laptop or a desktop where we see that clear path.
01:08:23It's actually very easy for us to recoup the investments we're making in these products.
01:08:27We actually easily have already on the Framework Laptop 13.
01:08:31As we look at a printer, we can't see a mission-aligned path to making that investment make sense.
01:08:38So we think we can go and work with suppliers, we can build a team, we can build a printer
01:08:42that people love, and it will be a massive money loser for us.
01:08:46And that's why we're not building a printer.
01:08:47So even beyond the mature and bad, there's also the, can we survive in this category
01:08:56as a business factor?
01:08:58But what is the fix?
01:08:59The fix that doesn't make sense for you?
01:09:00What could HP do tomorrow to fix their printers other than get rid of all the DRM?
01:09:05Sure.
01:09:06If we knew the answer for that, actually, we would go and enter that category.
01:09:11Unfortunately, I don't think we're getting better printers anytime soon.
01:09:14Just doesn't seem like that's in the cards.
01:09:16What are you going to do?
01:09:17All right.
01:09:18That's it for the show today.
01:09:18Thank you so much to everybody who came on.
01:09:20And thank you, as always, for listening or watching.
01:09:23I should say we've been getting better and better at putting more stuff on the Tuesday
01:09:28show on video.
01:09:29I can't promise we're going to do it every week.
01:09:30I can't promise we're going to do it for everything, but that's the goal.
01:09:34We want to do as much of this on video as we can.
01:09:36We know that you like watching it on YouTube.
01:09:38We've heard from a lot of folks who want more video.
01:09:40That is the plan.
01:09:41We're working on it and we're getting better at it, frankly, quicker than I expected.
01:09:45So it's pretty awesome.
01:09:46If you want to find us on YouTube, please do.
01:09:48If you just want to listen to the podcast, rest assured that the video thing is not going
01:09:52to make the podcast worse.
01:09:53It'll always be a listening experience, first and foremost.
01:09:57I promise that's the plan.
01:09:59All right, that's it.
01:10:00It's time to get out of here.
01:10:01As always, you can continue to hit us up on the Vergecast hotline with all of your thoughts,
01:10:06questions, feelings, whatever.
01:10:08866-VERGE11, vergecast at theverge.com.
01:10:11We want all your feedback on the video.
01:10:12We want all your feedback on all the stuff that we're talking about.
01:10:15Seriously, if you have an interesting iPad use case you want to tell me about, I'm all
01:10:18ears.
01:10:19This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Will Poore, and Brandon Kiefer.
01:10:22The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:10:26Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about AI news, politics.
01:10:31It just continues to be gadget season, too.
01:10:33There's just more gadgets.
01:10:34I'm hoping I'm going to get this base iPad.
01:10:36We got lots of stuff to talk about.
01:10:37We'll see you then.
01:10:38Rock and roll.