Future of Open Networks and Governance

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Get started at KL A I YO . com When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account, like if Vetween won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is gonna be all trampoline, bro. With a helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound but they're just being babies . But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe. It feels good to save some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico . Hello, welcome to Code. I'm Elia Patel, editor and chief of the Verge and Code is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Jack Conti, the CEO of Patreon. Jack last joined me on the show almost exactly five years ago in the summer of twenty twenty one and it's safe to say that a lot has changed on the internet and in the creator landscape since then. So I was very excited to talk to Jack again, especially since his ideas about what Patreon is and how it should work have changed dramatically as big social media platforms have gotten more closed off and more flooded by AI slot. In fact, you'll hear Jack say that he now thinks of Patreon as an index small business media companies, a dramatic change in perspective that led' hims to make Patreon a more direct competitor to social platforms like Instagram and TikTok. That's a huge change. In fact, the last time we talked, Jack was adamantly opposed to building any kind of discovery features into Patreon at all , but then Patreon built those features to help people discover content from new creators . And Jack's reasoning for that change will be very familiar if you've been listening to our media conversations here on Decoder. Jack says if Patreon didn't build its own audience platform , then everyone would be at the mercy of Meta and Google to find audiences and customers. Jack has really strong opinions about this. In fact, you'll hear him say that the current ways platforms treat creators is disgusting, and you'll hear him convincingly argue that big tech companies are going to just keep taking everyone's work however they want, and writers and musicians and artists of every kind will be left holding the bag. But you'll also hear Jack argue that this leaves a really big opportunity for a company like Patreon, which connects creators directly with audiences. In a world full of cheap and easy slop, Patreon's plan is to build demand from real people who want to connect in deep and important ways with real artists. There's way more in this one. Jack came fired up to answer the decoder questions, and we spend some real time talking about his approach to how meetings feel , something you just won't hear from many other C EOs . All in all, this was a pretty refreshing conversation. I think you're really going to like it. Okay, Patreon CEO Jack Conti, here we go Jack Conti, you're the co founder and C of Patreon. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks, DuA. Good to be here again. It's good to see you again. It has been five years since you were last on the show. I can't believe it. So much has changed A lot has changed. The creator economy has changed. The idea that everything is a TikTok clip is now totally upended the culture. Patreon itself has changed. Maybe we've all changed. Really the true creator economy is the friends we've made along the way How has your idea of Patreon changed over the last five years? Like I feel like there has been a lot of change. How would you describe Patreon today in twenty twenty six? You know what's so funny, Yeli? I think I think my answer to that is probably similar to your answer around the media industry. Because at the end of the day , Patreon is essentially like an index of small business media companies, right? Like that 's what we are. We help those small business media companies thrive and get paid and reach their fans . And so when they're hurting , you know, we feel that burn as a business and we feel that burn for them as like our customers . And so like the biggest shift I would say over the last five years, the way I would characterize it is really what happened what happened up Funnel, what happened with, you know, TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram . And the shift is really one main thing , which is the move away follower based paradigms from true subscriptions into an interest driven distribution system . There are so many problems with that, so many problems . It's hard to even like outline all of them. There are sort of societal level problems around mass polarization and addiction and loneliness and all the things that I think a lot of consumers are feeling. And then there's a bunch of problems on the creat or side as well, which is when you move away from a follower paradigm, you ruin the creator's deterministic line of reach to their fans. And if a creator can't reach their fans, then not only can a creator not build true community around their work , but they also can't build a business around their work. The biggest shift in the creator economy that I think has been the most impactful for creators and for Patreon as a business is this shift of the internet away from follower based paradigms and into interest based paradigms. And it, you know, it's very similar to Google Zero. It's the same concept. It's when the platforms stop sending traffic to the people who have spent a decade plus building their followings, building their communities, using those platforms as their top of funnel. I think it starts to become very clear to everybody that like these people were never our users, they were never our community members, they were never our fans. They were Facebook's users. And Facebook has made that loud and clear to creators and to the media industry and to publishers . And that has created like a whole set of like very important like product launches and problems that like Patreon has had to solve over the last five years, which has kind of been the center point for our strategy. I love it. We're like, we're in it, like we're in the heart of it. You know, my criticism of I guess the media industry over the last five years is these platforms have just been looking us in the eye and saying, We're going to kill you. Like it hasn't been subtle in any way, shape or form. They have they have just been very clear that these are their audiences and they can re mix attention in ways that serve them. They've basically even said to marketers who pay the bills for them, right? They're advertisers . They're basically like Meta in particular is like, we're going to kill you too, right? We will just make the ads Mark Zuckerberg has sat on stages and said, look , my vision is that you just show up with some money and we deliver you some customers and everything in the middle is AI. I don't know if that's going to work out or not, but it's just they've been pretty blunt that these are truly their audiences and they will do with them what they will, and anybody who gets in their way is probably gonna die, right? And it feels like in sort of media world where I live, like publishing company, media world, approximately zero has been done to address this, right? It's like this industry has just decided to die . And maybe now they're all saying Google zero and maybe the future of the Verges revenue is that I just charge licensing fees for it . You're saying in small business world, this is equally the same problem, right? Is the platforms go from intra space graphs? Yeah. Is there a concerted effort beyond Patreon to do something about it in like smaller creator world ? I wish there was something systemic or organized , but honestly it's very hard to fight the network effect. Like at the end of the day, that is what's happening. And honestly the only reason creators are still using these fucking platform s is because that is the only place where you can grow your audience . Like it is not the software even that is valuable about those companies. Although in many cases the software is good. They have built a bunch of features that are useful for , you know, for for media hosting and uploading and reaching people . But it is more of the fact that that's where the foot traffic is. And so that consolidation of traffic and of attention is like the, you know, one of the one of the core problems. That's also one of the reasons I was so excited about adding Mike McQ to our board and what he's doing with Surf is because at the end of the day, like it would be amazing. The only way to truly systemically address this is if the people own the network effect instead of the platform. And I think like ultimately that's what Mike is trying to address with Surf, and that's one of the reasons I'm excited about Blue Sky. It's there does seem to be this early stage effort to build an ecosystem around the open social web. You know, that like, that's not on our roadmap right now , but it is something I'm following very closely and very excited about because at the end of the day, I think it's probably one of three main things that needs to change to stop something like this from happening again. You know, if you look back at the last twenty years essentially , I think it's fair to say social media is a failed experiment that has failed humanity and been really bad for humans. I'm not saying there aren't some good things about it. We've all been connected up . We've been given multiple pipelines to reach people . There are now millions of channels instead of three channels , people who didn't use to have voices , now have voices , there are some really wonderful things about it. But I would argue that those things are attributes of the internet , not of the current platforms . And the internet is beautiful. The internet is important. Connecting people and giving people a way to reach each other and speak and make media and distribute that media. That's awesome. But these systems, these subsystems that we're using layered on top of the internet, which is, you know, social media , those systems are a bad implementation of those principles that have had a really harmful effect on humans at a scale that I think is even hard to even comprehend. So yeah, I mean, something needs to change. And when we look at the next twenty years of human collaboration and media distribution , I think we need to do some deep thinking about like what are the architectural elements of this two decades of failed experimentation that have had such a bad effect on us? And what do we need to do differently next time to make sure it doesn't happen again? There's a bunch of ideas in there. I want to come back to a lot of them in particular Federation . Mike McQugh, he's the CEO of a flipboard, which runs a platform called Surf. Surf is like a feedbuilder and browser for threads and blue sky and Massa and all the open social networks . There's a lot there that I want to come back to, particularly on this idea of the architecture of social networks. I was talking to Hank Greene a couple of weeks ago, and he said it feels like the end of one internet and we need to think of it as the beginning of another . That would be great. Like I would love to live fully in that zone. The problem is we have to contend with the end of the internet that we have today, the end of the platform era, if it isn't truly the end of the platform error . Tell me about Patreon right now in this moment, right? Maybe we see our way through the other side. Patreon has to operate today. How is Patreon organized today? The irony of all this, and I think we should spend some time getting into this because it's a really important point. The irony of this is that in order to, in order for Patreon as a business and on behalf of our creators to fight this , in order to give our creators the audience growth and the reach that they need and the ability to continue to grow continue to grow on the platform , we have had to build discovery systems into our platform, which I actually don't remember if I talked about this the last time I was on the show. You were host to it the last time you were on the show. You did not want to do that. Exactly. And that's the irony. The irony is now we have had to do that because what we've learned is if we don't provide our own top of funnel for creators , then we're just relying on Facebook to be the top of funnel. And that is not a good business strategy for creators or for Patreon. Essentially, what we're like, the stage that we're in as a company now is for the last few years we've been building a bunch of media tools, distribution tools, hosting tools. We built native video, we built chats, we built discovery, we built short posting tools , we built a feed . We have built all these new ways for creators to essentially start providing the growth for themselves, start providing a top of funnel for themselves. And for Patreon to have a top of funnel for our creat ors as well . That's the irony of all this. Now that is the right strategy for us where given like where the business is and where our creators are and the current media landscape, that is not that was not our strategy six years ago. That's something that we've implemented over the last four to five years . And we've implemented it out of necessity. They're looking us in the eye and they're saying, We're going to kill you all . And I believe them I don't want to wait for them to do it. I want to prep way ahead of time. And so the good news is, you know, a lot of this work has actually worked. So for example, one of the things we built since we last talked is free memberships. What is a free membership? It's a follow. It's like a line of deterministic reach to people who choose to follow you. You get the email address associated with the account that signs up for you And then when you make a post to your followers, it triggers emails . And you also see those posts in feed they get ranked above other posts to make sure that your followers actually see your posts, which is very different than how other feeds work. And that product has been an amazing success, right? We've had I think now we have one hundred eighty five million free memberships on the platform. And that's up like two X year over year since last year. So clearly, there's like a lot of fan side demand, a lot of creator demand for a better follower system that is true to the actual word follower . You know, we built native chats, which is also something like we didn't have before. We were relying on creators to have Facebook groups and to have communities on Instagram. And we were saying, hey, we're the payments architecture. That's different now. Now we have native chats on the platform. And so last year, you know, I think we have something like thirty five million chat messages that are sent back and forth . A hundred ten million hours of video have been watched on Patreon. So like a lot of these tools and a lot of these experiences that were previously happening that we were relying on to well we were relying on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to do those things, we can no longer rely on them to do those things. And our creators can no longer rely on them to do those things. They need a way to reach people deterministically on the platform. And so we've invested heavily in a lot of those communication and media hosting tools, and they've been very well received, which is why we're seeing that kind of adoption on the platform. So it is very different from where we were six years ago, but you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Like this is the place that we're in, like , you know, as an ecosystem, this is where the internet is. And I'm like, this is exactly what Patreon needs to be doing right now to help creators succeed. You're describing a lot of ch ange. Again, five years ago when we talked, you were very focused on payments and being the payment rails, like people would basically show up and be like, I have a lot of Twitter followers who need to monetize them and Patreon would be there. That's over. I think we all understand that that's over Twitter itself, is over. It's called X now it's the Everything app. I don't know if you're familiar with it. They do everything there. What's their strategy? It's everything I'm told . You don't make all your credit payments to Rex you're describing a very different company. That means you obviously have had to restructure, refactor the company. How many people work at Patreon, how have you organized them today? There are hundreds of people that work at Patreon now . And the way we're organized , you know, by manager, it's organized by function. So we're like a functionally organized company, the people who report to me run functions , which ironically comes with all kinds of dysfunction And so to solve for that , actually the way that we're organized is by objective . When you look at how we talk and what the company works on , it's working on objectives. And then teams are cross functional and collaborative and all the work ladders up into those objectives . And so when we run an all hands, which I did this morning or when we celebrate work that's happening or when we when we do company planning . All of that is not thought of in the silo of a function. It's thought of, you know , cross functionally under any given objective. And that helps solve some of the problems associated with with sort of organizing functionally but not all of them. But I would say it's that's been one of the biggest changes over the last maybe five years is like organizing by objective that has been like the most transformational for Patreon. Because if you don't do that, then you have a marketing function with one set of goals and an engineering team with a different set of goals and that's totally dysfunctional. Are you describing kind of the classic Google style objective and key result framework? Or is it something different than that? We're not so we do use some like some of that framework. It's not a perfect copy of objectives and key results . We have company level objectives and those have like very clear key results associated with them. But I would say we're less one of our objectives is to improve core experiences on Patreon. Our product is very wide. We've made this shift from being a membership platform and sort of a bottom of fun nel payments processing suite to being this top of funnel network and community and media product . When you do that, everything breaks. Everything. You have to rebuild the entire product from the ground up, like architecturally, all the systems , new infrastructure , like literally everything breaks. Navigation, you know, you have to build new privacy policies, you have to build everything . And so part of our work is chipping away at all those things one by one. And so making the core experiences fit into the current vision and product that we want is a really important objective for us. And we have ten fixes every quarter that we chip away at, and by the end of the quarter, we want to have shipped eight of them . And there's tons of cross functional teams that are working on that across the company. So it's a little different than objectives and key results. It's a little different than OKRs, but it's the sort of spirit of it is the same. The other question asked everybody decoder is about decisions. You're describing a very big decision. You're describing an existential change to the nature of Patreon and what your relationship to consumers should be. In many ways, you turn into a social network, which is a thing you've been fighting against. Tell me about your framework for making decisions and explain how you brought it to bear onon that choice. Sure . But before I have to combat the social network idea , I just like I don't call it that internally. I don't say we're building a social media app. That's effectively in my opinion it's like saying, Hey, we're building better cigarettes. Like nobody wants better cigarettes . And I mean some people really want . They're very popular. Fair enough, but I don't want to make better cigarettes . That's not how I want to roll into my grave and I don't want to do that. And also, I think like spiritually it's important because if we go out and say, hey, we're a social media app. What are we going to do? Like our teams are going to look at what happens on Instagram and what happens on Facebook and we're going to copy pasta a bunch of features and it's not going to make sense for our systems. And the truth is like our optimization function is really different for everything in the product, right? Like our algorithms that provide creators with discovery and distribution are not optimizing for watch time. Actually, Neilah, I don't know, I don't know what session time is on Patreon. If you were to like ask me questions like what session time was the average session time for users for creators? I don't know. We don't track it. We don't we don't AB test against it. Like that is not that is not what we're doing. It's not our optimization function. So I think grouping us into social media is just not true. We're trying to build a fundamentally different system with different bones. And so like we're looking at things instead of like session time, we're looking at deterministic reach. Are you able to build long term relationships with the people that follow you? Are you able to reach those people? Are you getting connected pieces of media as opposed to unconnected pieces of media ? Are we giving creators and fans agency in their experience? Or are we sort of like hacking their limbic systems which is kind of what it feels like on social media right now? I feel like I'm a lab rat . Are we optimizing for creator payments, which the platforms are not optimizing for. So there are going to be some primitives that look like social media, but the end of the day, it's just like the bones are different. And I think it's really important to, at least for me, like , you know, to acknowledge that. So okay, let me answer your second question around decisions th,ough. Yeah . I was very bad at making decisions . And I don't want to say I've figured it out because I think that's the kind of thing we're always learning . But there have been like a lot of little things that I've learned that I'd love to share . I hear a lot of heuristics that sound just like really great for decision making. You know, there's like, listen to decide, communicate, you know, there's all these simple things. That's not what's been effective for me in making better decisions. So let me just give you a bunch of like really tactical specific things that have helped me make better decisions over time. The first is when we start a meeting , like one thing that we're supposed to make a decision, one thing I like to ask is like, hey, does anybody have a str ong opinion? Off the bat? Are there any strong opinions in the room? Does anybody disagree with the recommendation? Sometimes the answer is no . But sometimes somebody right out of the gate says like, yeah, I really disagree with the recommendation. And here's why. And you just saved yourself a half hour of kind of fluffy discussion at the top of a meeting. You sort of cut right to the chase. And if you really press somebody, why do you disagree? You hear like three or four maybe genuinely good points. And then we can debate the merits of those good points and the whole room gets informed as you're making a decision like that. So I like to just sort of put some pressure at the beginning of the meeting to sort of cut right to the chase. The second thing is I don't I no longer trust framing of the decision. So sometimes the decision will be, it'll come to the group. It'll be okay, here's path A, here's path B, let's choose. And what I found is like more often than not not, it's actually path a or path b, and sometimes it's not even a decision. There's literally just like four or five action items that we can discover as a group and march through those things and solve the underlying problem that the decision was attempting to solve. So just like having a discussion where we get clear on what are the next steps? Sometimes it seems like half of path A and half of path B, but actually it's a more bespoke solution that is a better solution to a complex problem . Okay, another thing is like really great prereads . Man, you can spend forty five minutes just like context sharing . I feel very strongly about this. Meetings are not for information transfer. They're for debate and discuss ion . And so if we find ourselves spending forty five minutes in a meeting literally sharing context with each other, that's wasted time. And also we're going to make bad decisions if people don't, you know, if people have , in you knowform,ation asymmetry , then no wonder we think , you know, one person should take path A or another person thinks we should take path B. Like that's because we don't have shared context. So getting everybody to have shared context is huge and prereads are a great way to do that . Okay, let me give you a couple more. Naming that there should be a decision maker. Oh my God, I'm still learning how to be better at this. Sometimes I find myself in a meeting where we're all just arguing with each other, and then it's like, hey, who is the decision maker here? Who's actually making this? Having clarity around who the DRI is for that decision, I think, can be really helpful Directly responsible individual. Right, exactly. And then let me give you one more about halfway through a meeting, I like to tell people like if I find myself starting to be swayed in one direction or another, I just name that, and I say, Hey, team, like , here's what I'm thinking so far. Here's where I think we should go based on the conversation we've had, based on what I know. Like if you think that's wrong, tell me why . And what often happens at that moment is someone brings up three or four like really good points for risks of taking that path that we hadn't named before. And saying we're going to go in this direction is what surfaces those extra risks and that extra click down in like in the debate and because it starts to become visceral if people feel like , oh, we are going in that direction. And so then we can spend the next thirty minutes talking through those items and realizing like, okay, do we want to build mitigation plans for those risks or do we want to choose Path B instead So just like telling the team where I'm thinking and where I'm leaning in real time, I found has created a little bit of pressure to like get the real conversation out and to identify more problems with the path as we go. I have a bunch of more lessons that I've learned over the years, which I'd be happy to share, but honestly, I keep these lessons like at the top of a dock when I'm having a meeting so that I can just remind myself like, hey, do these things in a meeting to help drive it to conclusion . And it's been really helpful for me to just do that. This is great. I have a decoder book coming out and we're going to give you a whole chapter. I'll take it . What I like about this and what I'm curious about is there's a lot of Amazon in there, right? Like DRIs like a very Amazon kind of idea that there needs to be a decision maker, you need to identify them. And then there's what I would describe as you paying attention to the emotional tenor of a meeting and making sure that's driving it forward. Is that just because you're in a band and you understand like the creative process? Because most of the executives I talk to they think about this I would say mechanistically, right? We're going to go from here to here to here and these are the steps. And you're very much describing how it feels to be in a meeting and controlling that feeling. Yeah, I think there are benefits of that and there are drawbacks. Yeah , I'm a creator YouTuber. I'm not a, you know, my background is not , you know, an engineer. I didn't come from product management. I came from literally making music videos. YouTube . So like I think it's fair to say that just, you know, my , yeah, my job for a long time was transferring my emotions to other people. That's how I made my living, right? That's the job of an artist. Can you make somebody feel something that you fel'tve? Can you communicate that feeling to somebody? So yeah, I'm very aware of that in a meeting . And I think that can be really helpful, right? Because it can you can add a little bit of pressure, you can push a conversation forward. It can also be dangerous because I can overrotate on feelings sometimes , which I'm not in the Elon camp that empathy is the curse of all humanity. I'm very opposed to that philosophy. I do not agree with that in by any stretch of the imagination . But yeah, I do have to be careful that I'm not overrotating on feelings. I think the desire to make everybody happ y can really drag things down sometimes. And so I have to constantly be like aware of that tendency in myself. We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back Support for this show comes from Clavio . There are only so many hours in a day and Cl,avio's two power ful AI agents can make sure your team spends them on big things. The first Clavio AI agent turns your marketing ideas into reality instantly. Describe what you want. A holiday campaign, a VIP re engage ment series, and Clavio builds it instantly. Email, SMS , and push , all coordinated on brand, grounded in fourteen years of Clavio marketing data. Nothing goes live without your say so. The other Clavio AI agent keeps your customers happy at any hour. Brand trained to answer questions, make product recommendations, and handle orders and returns. No hold music. Marketing that launches instantly. Support that never sleeps. 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It's time to turn those what ifs into what Shopify today. You could sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at Shopify . com slash decoder. You can go to shopify dot com slash decoder. That's shopify dot com slash decoder Welcome back. I'm talking with Patreon CEO Jack Conte about some of the changes he's made to Patreon structure. So put this all to practice for me . You described instead of needing Path Air Path B, we're going to drill down and find just the action items and actually the decision is already made and we just need to move forward. I'm curious for a real example of that. And then I want the bigger picture of , oh, I need to drastically change what Patreon is ? Let me answer your second question first. And along the way, I'm sure I'll think of a specific example. For the bigger decision around this adjustment to Patreon's strategy , the truth is there is some element of top down decision making associated with a change like that . And there is some element of emergent strategy that comes from the organization . That's like I think necessary to embrace and even put some kindling against to get it to be more holistic and full bodied . You know, it started twenty twenty probably with bringing in more of like a consumer product leader who was thinking more about consumer experiences , less of like kind of a SaaS focus ed organization, less of the kind of B to B to C go to market motions and more of the consumer , you know, product motions and talent and teams and company structures . And you know, that was a big shift in and of itself, just like bringing in that leadership and honestly just a lot of learning for me because this is my first job. This is literally I've never worked at another company before, right? So in some ways I don't see the water, I don't see the air around me. And so there was a lot of learning for me as like, okay, how does how does this look different? And then as we're doing that teams are suggesting things that we want to do differently. And a lot of that is coming up, you know, coming bottoms up. Okay, we need to have, you know, before we were against native video, okay? But if we're going to be, you know, if we're going to have discovery for creators, we need to have free accessible media on the platform. You can't have identity based discovery. We've run those tests. They don't work. If you land on a creator's's page and there no free accessible media, you're not going to pay that creator. You have no reason to. You don't know who that person is. You have never fallen in love with their work. You need a way to fall in love with their work, which means you need free accessible media on the platform. That was an emerg ent piece of the strategy that came from the organization. It wasn't just like, ah, let's turn on discovery and put different creator profiles in front of everybody's page. We tried that, we tested that. It didn't lead to conversion. The organization learned, we had systems to make sure that bubbles up to PMs and product leaders and to me and to the executive team . And then you kind of keep chipping away at that flywheel. And over a period of, you know , two years you start to hone in on precisely what the right strategy . So yeah, there's some amount of like top down push that comes and there's some amount of bottoms up strategic emergence that comes from the organization. Let me ask you about just building products in that kind of environment, right? Where it's the age of AI and you sit right in the middle of just a totally polarized debate. On the one hand, every software engineer and product manager I know is either the most excited they've ever been or experiencing a full existential crisis about the ease of developing software, of making new features, of making new products, of token maxing. And then in creator world, the audience is hate it, and they don't want the slop and every platform is over on a slop, even though the audiences don't want the slop, and something very bad is happening. How are you bridging that divide where it's obvious that the future of software companies looks AI enabled in some way? I'm not sure which way it is, but it's obvious that it's somewhere. And then it is far from obvious that the future of creator media has any AI in it at all because the audiences are rejecting it so thoroughly. This has been really challenging, especially in the sort of modern environment of the internet. But I'll tell you what I did . What I did was I just said what I really thought and I spent a long, long time putting together my full thoughts. It took me the end product is forty five minutes of me talking through these issues . And then I posted that . And it is self conflicting and I'm holding two opposing beliefs at the same time and I'm terrified and I'm excited and I'm really pissed at how all this has been rolled out and how little ag ency creators have gotten through this process . And , I find the technology magical. There's a piece of like for me as a creator , I've always been interested in te newchnologies that helped me accomplish my goals as an independent creator. I remember when the first DAWs came out, you know, digital audio workstations in the late nineties and two thousands, you know, tools like Pro Tools, and I learned I could record I could make a record at my house in my bedroom. You know, that led to the emergence of Pomplamuse, which was, you know, my band I was obsessed with that. Now, there are a lot of analog recording engineers at the time who hated the idea of a DA.W They thought it was like it sounded cold, it wasn't warm, it wasn't analog gear. You're not respecting the technology of, you know of recording , you know, the skill set, the craft of recording. The same thing happened with YouTube and distribution systems when we started uploading to the internet, there was this whole backlash around that not being the real way to do music. The real way to do music is to sign a record deal and go on tour. And like Pomplu didn't do that. We distributed our own music through YouTube and sold MP three's on iTunes and made enough money to buy a house, literally off of MP three sales . And so there's always been this piece of me that embraces new technology. So the truth is like, I am holding all of these ideas in my head at once, and I myself feel very conflicted about it. At the end of the day, though , here's what I think is happening. The algorithms and social media platforms are so good at polarizing humanity sorting and filtering us one of two camps on basically every issue, whether it's politics or news or technology or anything the algorithms just push everybody into one of two camps and they push us so far apart . That is absolutely happening now with AI. And I'm not saying there aren't serious drawbacks and concerns in that. I'm not seriously angry about it. I am . But I think it is such an important time for artists to have an open conversation around these technologies right now . Like everything is changing for people . And this is going to be a transformative shif t for artists, for employees, for humans . And I think we're at this place where boycotting AI, that's like boycotting the internet, you know That's not a good strategy . I don't like what Instagram has done . I disagree with a lot of their decisions. I still have an Instagram page. I still post and reach my community. I don't like what Apple has done, especially to Patreon creators over the last year . I really disagree with those decisions. I don't think they're fair for creative people. I think they're hurtful for creative people. And here I am on my iPhone . I don't like what my federal government is doing right now on so many dimensions, and I still pay my taxes and I still live in the United States. Sure. I get it. I mean, I understand the sort of yet you live in society argument and I find it very frustrating too. I used to read guitar world when I was a kid and I'd read the angry screeds from analog recording engineers about logic being cold and fine , but I had a cassette four track at that time and I was like, this thing sucks. I would much rather use my computer to record my music. It was just very obvious, but that didn't have like logic hadn't stolen all of the music in the world to make logic. And in fact, it was very obvious that the people behind Pro Tools and Logic and whatever else had a deep and meaningful appreciation for the music industry. And they were trying to make tools for musicians. The internet and social media huge stacks of problems , and maybe they needed to be addressed in different ways. But the value exchange of Instagram, I think, is reasonably clear to people . You run a lawn mowing business. You can go find some customers on Instagram and you're good to go. If you just want to post dance videos on TikTok and reach an audience, maybe that's the easiest thing that's ever been in world history to do. The Vald Exchange for AI, I think, is so much more diffused that people hate it. But you're a musician. I know tons of musicians who are like, look, AI is everywhere. Suno is everywhere in the music industry. We just had Harvey Mason Jr. on the show. He runs the recording academy. He's like, It's everywhere and our line to give you a Grammy Award is you have to be mostly human. And that is fu aszzy of a line as can possibly exist. So you're saying you're sitting in it. And I think I have the exact same kind of conundrum as you do. I love new technology. We have an audience of people who love technology. We're going to post this clip on the intern et and people are going to tell you, of course, it's clear that you should hate it. And that makes no sense to me because those same people are probably using it in some way. But you're sitting in it and you run a software company that services the needs of creatives who hate it. There's no doubt in my mind that the software company side should be in full embrace of AI and maybe the creative services part of the company, which is what the software makes, should not . And can you smash those together or you just trying to keep those far apart? No, no, no, you nailed it. And this is the core of like our approach . Before I even get into that, let me just say like , what ultimately is happening to creative people right now disgusting . It happens every ten years, there's this techno legal cycle where tech companies build some type of new technology and it breaks the current system s . It usually uses creator work without consent, compensation, or credit. And then the tech companies claim that, well, it's this new technology and it's either fair use or copyright doesn't apply because it's transformative in some capacity, you know, this was the Google Books case. This was the YouTube case , you know, when Viacom sued YouTube for a billion dollars . And then and then there's sort of like industry mayhem around that. And that's where we are now. We're in the industry mayhem part of this cycle , we should be there. There should be a lot of lawsuits. And in my opinion, there should be regulation to prevent this type of thing from happening with regard to AI because what's essentially happened is these models have borg ed the entirety of the free creative web from all these creative people , without paying them, without letting them opt out, and without even giving them credit . That is bad, not only for those creators , but it's bad for society. Like the reason copyright exists, the reason IP law exists is to create a societal level incentive around novelty creation. Like that is the purpose of those laws like that comes from the Constitution. Like Congress was given the power to promote the sciences art and the arts . Yeah, the arts too. Like they wrote in the arts because it's important to promote and to protect people who invent within the arts. It's important for those rights holders to have rights. That's why they're called rights holders. So it's fucking crazy to me that these models are allowed to just use all the work and then claim transformation and then have a fair use case and get around it . So all that is terrible. Okay, so I think your question is like, Jack, how do you reconcile that with being a so ftware CEO? So I'll tell you, it's like a very practical approach, which is if Patreon does not fully embrace these tools as a product and engineering company, we are ultimately a product and engineering company. If we do not fully embrace these tools and use them to give the power back to creators, we as a company will be dead in three years. Look at what happened with the mobile shift, right? These platform shifts are material. They have a massive impact on the people who are playing in these ecosystems. And if the companies don't keep up with these new technologies , they will die. Patreon is much more useful to creators if we are alive, if we are shipping more valuable products at a faster clip that are higher quality. And so we one hundred percent are embracing these tools internally. And I've told our creators, we are embracing these tools internally. We are using LLMs to to write more features to our engineers are using LLMs when they when they code. We're using LLMs to organize the team. We're using Notion agents to crawl through pages, you know, our own internal documents and create summaries and help teammates understand who to talk to for which sorts of problems. Like we must embrace those tools. That is not a choice that we have because I want us to be a powerful product company that fights on behalf of creative people. So what we have done with our product strategy and here here''ss how we 've, I don't know if you want to say resolved the tension, but this is how we thought of it is there's a lot of companies that are sort of going to market loud and proud with now we're an AI company. Creators don't want us to be an AI company and they don't need us to be an AI company. Like we don't need to build a whole bunch of forward facing features for creators. If you look at what a feed on Instagram looks like now versus two years ago, it looks pretty much the same. There's not a whole bunch of changes because of AI. Like there's a consumption experience, there's a community experience. In many ways, Patreon is similar. There are some experiences that are different. And the way we think about where to use AI is , if you imagine a bull's eye diagram, at the center of the bull's eye is creators making their creative work. And what creators have told us is Patreon, get the fuck out of the way. Let me make my work. Don't give me script ideas. Don't build me an agent that helps me come up with a video thing. Don't title my post for me. Let me do the making , get out of my way. So we get out of their way on like creators making things. And then one rung out from that bullseye the packaging of that material. Now creators to us have been a bit more open to using AI to package their works. And so what does that mean? Like automated chapter markers and things like that, cutting long form podcast episodes into clips . One rung out from that is like marketing . So helping a creator like with automated email flows and things like that. And then one rung out from that is managing my business. And creators have even more openness to using AI tools to help them manage their business. And so the best quote we heard from our user research interviews was, hey, I have a million ideas for new videos. I don't need AI to help me make more videos. I need AI to help me do my taxes and clean my toilet. And that is our product strategy. Our product strategy is help ers do their taxes and clean their toilet using AI . And but we're not like going out and saying we're patreon at AI now and everything is going to be an AI feature . So I've explained all this to our creators in this very long forty five minute video. And I think for the most part, creators understand that like Patreon has to keep up and use these tools internally. And also it's important for us to be an advocate right now for creative people and fight on their behalf so that they're not forgotten about through this new techno legal cycle that we're going through. You published that video. It was a little bit ago not so long ago but a little bit ago. You sat with some feedback. Did you change anything about your strategy? Did anything about the feedback to that video shift your thinking? Yes. One of the things that came up in that process and a lot of the comments were around, okay, but Patreon, how are you how are you going to prevent the platform from being over run with slop, what are you doing from a policy and trust and safety standpoint to make sure that Patreon just doesn't get clogged up like other platforms are getting clogged up? And that was amazing feedback. We had already started thinking about that, but we accelerated those workstreams. Actually I have a meeting next week with a team that has a draft proposal for that. And that's a really hard problem, right? Actually, YouTube made an announcement about that this week , but the problem there is like how do you what do you label or do you label? Yeah . How do you even detect it? And how do you detect it? And like, and if you can detect it now, what makes you think you can detect it a year from now? There's no canonical system 's there no API you can call and say with certainty whether something is AI generated or not, right? Like that's not that that doesn't exist. And even if it does, somebody's going to build a tool that breaks that Our port reporter Jess Weatherbred is, you know, her beat is AI labeling systems. And she's like, what are we doing? She's been on the show, and she's like, We keep pretending that these are going to work because we have to . But there's no evidence that they ever will. And so then there's the reverse, right , which is, okay, maybe maybe you label human generated work . You know, I remember I remember growing up in the eighties and nineties when manufacturing shifted to Asia were all these made in the USA stickers, you know ? And that became sort of like a hallmark of like, hey, this is like you should buy this thing loud and proud. You know, you're voting with your dollars here. And so I can imagine some type of future where something is labeled as human generated . And that's like a loud and proud moment for people. So that's another way to solve the problem. Actually how town, you know, Joss Fongo, who used to be at, you know , Vox made an amazing video about this. Just like flipping the labeling game on its head by labeling human made work. There's a bunch of different ways to solve it. Anyway, we're thinking through all those problems. That was like a result of feedback that we got from the community as we rolled out some of this thinking. You have platform competitors who are a little more wide open with lots of similar features. I'm in particular thinking of Substack , right? Whose approach to moderation is famously laid out in the show is screw it . Like do not seize on Substack. That's just their vibe. I assume they're going to allow tons of slop. There's already a ton of slop in Substack. They have the same course set of features. And I realize you don't want to be called social media, but the feature, if you just list them in a bullet point chart, they're all the same, right? You have a Twitter like function, you've got podcasts, they're pushing into videos, you've got follow features. Substack's promise to everyone is we'll take ten percent of your revenue, but we will deliver you the next new follower . And they do it in all kinds of ways. I would even describe a lot of ways to do it as just straight up dark patterns. You subscribe to one newsletter, oops, you're subscribed to nine more, right? And some creators have gotten pretty antsy about this and a bunch of big publications have left . L theike ankler just left and now they're on Ben Thompson's platform, which I believe is called passport . You're sitting in that same zone, right? Is your promise we will help you get the next new subscriber in the same way as Substack or is it people are going to download this app and we will just surface stuff until they show up? Like Substack very clearly makes the promise that they will deliver the next new subscriber to you. Are you making the same promise? We don't frame it quite like that , but we absolutely are going out and telling creators now, hey, we're helping you get discovered. We are helping you find and grow your community . That's a big piece of our v alue proposition now. And we're we're talking about it loud and proud. I mean, you know, we are sending now one and a half million new followers to creators on Patreon per month from our own systems . And seven hundred fifty thousand free followers are becoming paid followers per month on those systems. One of the big differences between us when we last talked and us now is audience growth was not in our set of value propositions that we talked about , but it must be now unless like this is the whole point around , you know , being your own top of funnel for your own creators. If you rely on Google to do that, if you rely on YouTube for the audience growth and you provide no audience growth, you are a bottom of funnel company that will be Google zero . You just are lesson learned the hard way . So we don't want to wait for that. Okay, now that said, I think there are good ways to do that. And I think there are bad ways to do that. And I think you're Before I'll go back to Elon's takeover of Twitter, you wrote that amazing article on how with social media platforms, you know, the product is the policy, right? The product is trust and safety, it is content policy, which I think Elon learned the hard way. Now we see it SpaceX father S one and we got to see their revenue cut in half since the purchase . I think he learned very clearly that content policy, trust and safety is the product. And so I think that's a big piece of what we do and that is a big differentiator for us versus substack . We don't allow Nazis . You know, we don't allow that . We have much more I think thoughtful moderation. You know, there's some people who think that your content policy should be the First Amendment. That's not that's not how we think about it. You know, there are things on Patreon that we think are good for the mission. There are things on Patreon that are not good for the mission. And so we've been I'm like very proud of our content policy. I wrote the first version of it in twenty thirteen . It was forty pages with the help of an outside consultant . And we've iterated on that policy over the years and I think done a really good job of enforcing it. So like , yeah, I'd say one of the biggest differences between SubSack and Patreon is our content policy, which is not a by the way. That's a m likeain feature for us . And a lot of creators have left Substack and come to Patreon because of our content policy . We need to take on a quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for the show comes from OutShift, Cisco's incubation engine. Today's AI agents operate in silos, which can limit their true potential. When it comes to AI advancement, companies out there have been focused on building bigger and smarter models. But scaling up is just one approach. To reach superintelligence together, Cisco says we need to do more . We need to scale out. To do this, they're going back to the blueprint from seventy thousand years ago. Humans just didn't get smarter individually . Rather, the cognitive revolution transformed society because we began sharing knowledge, goals and innovation . And Cisco says that AI agents are now at that exact same inflection point. They can connect, but they can't think together. That's why Outshift by Cisco is building the internet of cognition. Its goal is to transform AI from isolated systems into orchestrated super intelligence by creating an open, interoperable infrastructure. Cisco says OutShift is enabling agents and humans to share intent, context and reasoning. The cognitive evolution for agents is here. Explore the internet of cognition at outshift dot com that's outshift dot com fort for the show comes from Ripling . If you run a company, you know how important it is to retain your top talent. But instead of worrying about who's staying and who's going , try Rippling AI . Rippling AI is built on your live global workforce data, giving you full visibility into your business and the ability to stay ahead of the curve. 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With GaiCo, you can use the app to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for it feels good to Geico . We're back with Patreon CEO Jack Conti. Before the break, we dove deep into Jack's complex thoughts about AI. Now I want to switch to another really thorny topic for a platform like Patreon. It's relationship to payment processors and the pressures to moderate content like a social network. It's time now to talk about the sexiest topic of all, which is your relationship to payment processors . This is what all the kids have been waiting for. As you go up to the top of the funnel, right? You have a more direct relationship with consumers, the pressure to moderate more increases and it increases from a number of different directions. I think when you were just the payment processor for a bunch of creators, you could get away with a lot more. In particular, you could get away with adult content. You could get away with people selling nudes. Patreon has a long history here. Now you're it. You're an app peopleon' ands home sc reens, direct relationship with consumers that you're trying to pass on to creators , and payment processors like Stripe , Visa, MasterCard , they can look right at you and say, Don't do this . And you've had to comply . Talk me through that. This is pretty controversial, like a lot of adult creators make their living on Patreon or did make their living on Patreon, and it seemed like you had no choice but to agree . I'm curious if you thought there was an ability to push back or if there's another way forward . There was not a way to push back in the early days. And you know , I think we're far enough down the road now. I sent many three AM emails to CEO begging for them to reconsider. And that's like the CEOs of Stripe ? Of payment partners and processors. Actually, never Stripe, but other payment processors. That was a real challenge for us, Neli . It's a challenge because if they're threatening to not be a partner to us anymore , it's not just that creators, you know, that one creat or's income that's at stake. It's, you know, the ten billion dollars that we've processed on behalf of creators since the company was founded. You know, we're processing over two billion dollars a year now. That's a lot of income that we need to be we need to be a rock for those creators and make sure that that income is, you know, protected for them. And so like these issues are really serious . So we did a couple things. One, over the years, we worked very closely with payment processors to understand their content policies and their constraints and make sure that our content policy was acceptable to them . And we coit iterated on those policies together and we also continue to co iterate on them because culture changes, right? Content policy is a living, breathing thing . It has to change as culture changes. It has to change as the internet changes. You know, now there's nonconsensual AI generated nudity. That was not a thing that platforms and payment processors had to worry about four years ago. Now you have to worry about it and you need clear to policy around it . So one is we worked with those partners to make sure that we had like parallel content policies . The second thing that we did is we built hot swappable payments architect ure , so that as the company got bigger, we could just unplug one processor and plug in a different one. And what that did is it gave Patreon a little bit of leverage, not a little bit a lot of leverage in those conversations because we're processing billions of doll ars annually , you know, those processors want that volume . And if we can hold back volume from them because we're not happy with their content policy decisions , that helps us That helps us fight on behalf of our creators and have the right content policy that we want for us. So it gives us some negotiating leverage in those conversations. Now, sometimes it's not even the processors themselves, it's the banks behind those processors or the acquiring banks behind them. This stuff goes like all the way up the chain. I wish it didn't work this way, but this is how it works. And so we've had we've had to both be more collaborative and also build some systems that give us more agency like this swappable payments architecture to kind of solve that problem over time. Now we're at the point over the last few years, we haven't had any P zero payments processing issues because we've done so much work on that. We learned the hard way over the first chap ter of the business . But that was a big problem like in the early years . Do you have adult content on Patreon right now? Yeah, we do. We have an eighteen plus category. We don't have porn and our content policy does not allow porn . There are people who say you can't define porn . That's not true. You can define it and we have . And we've done that in a little bit more definition. Well, that's way more detailed than I'm going to elaborate on live on a podcast. I don't know . But we have detailed out. Oh , pedantically, like in legal ease because the point of content policy you want, you know, ten humans to be able to look at a policy and look at a piece of media and then have nine of them make the same decision, right? Like that's how we try to write our policies in terms of level of detail. And so we do have that level of detail baked in, and we know like this is pornography, this is not pornography . And so one of the things we want to allow for is like, we're an arts platform. Like we have to have free like human expression in some capacity . And so we allow nudity, we allow, you know, there's like marijuana creators and there's people who talk about whiskey and there's like people, you know, there's all kinds of stuff. I want that stuff on Patreon. I want artists on Patreon. I want people who push the edge. I want people who expand the Overton window. I want people who are out there. You know, I don't want people who are just in the center of the bell curve. I want the people who are on the edges. Like those are the people who push society forward. And so we have like in some ways we have like a liberal content policy and that's important to me on some dimensions. So yeah, I want all those things. We've built policies allow for those things and now we have the payments architecture to support it as well. I'm just like personally required. I feel like I had to say this every time. Justice Potter Stewart, who came up with I know it when I see it, regretted it for the rest of his life and like even like at the end was like, I really wish I hadn't said that it is possible. You don't have to be that subjective. Let me ask you about the other payment processor conflict that seems omnipresent in the history of Patreon. You mentioned it already, which is Apple . We live in a world where Apple is constantly in some sort of legal fight that's on or off with Epic or the European Union or whoever else it is about the thirty percent fee. They pushed you into forcing creat to be on monthly subscriptions as opposed to some of the other plans you've had. You've changed some of your payment terms. I think everyone's flat fee ten percent now as opposed to eight or twelve, which you had before . This all seems like just a big swir l to me of kind of the same problems with Apple. Describe your current relationship with Apple and if you think anything else is about to change? I don't think anything else is about to change. I hope not. Are your creators still paying the Apple tax? Yes , I disagree with that decision. I think that's bad for creative small businesses. I don't think it's creator first. I told , you know, app store employees at Apple that to their faces . You know, I tried to be polite but also tried to advocate as best I could on behalf of Creators. We have been advocating for that for years and years and years. Apple was like very, very clear with us that IAP was non negotiable for them. The inapp payments system that they built was non negoti able. We had these legacy billing models that the billing structures did not work with IAP and Apple was not going to support they were not going to build new features into IAP that would make those legacy bill ing structures work . And as a result of having to adopt that, we have to basically deprecate those legacy billing structures. That's very painful for our creators. So not like there are two problems here. One is creators have to pay the thirty percent tax for memberships that come in through the IOS app natively . And then are you allowed to kick people to the web now? Is that one of the outcomes of the epic? Yeah, so igation that you just tell people it's cheaper on the web. And so we did that and we built that. And actually within I think after that epic ruling, you know, within , I think within like forty eight hours we had a new build submitted to the app store where we built that flow . Apple at first was okay with it and we had sort of pushed back this initial deadline that we had around our legacy billing model deprecation yeah, it didn't hold . They got in touch with us later and we're very clear again . And that's when, you know, I have had a tumultuous relationship with over with them over the years. Like when things come to a head, you know, I'm personally in the room with them talking about these issues with them . You know, they did extend the deadline for us . They gave us, I think, you know, to the end of this year as opposed to , you know, a shorter time period, which I thought would be really catastrophic for craters because they have all these workflows and business models that they need to uphold . Oh God, look, even as I'm talking about this, like I just I am so upset, honestly, I'm just so upset at . They have such a stronghold on the system and they're able to throw their weight around. And now here I am talking shit about Apple Live on a podcast and maybe that's going to bite us. But man, it was hard working with them. And at the end of the day, I disagree with their decisions, and I wish they had given creators more leeway. When you kick people to the web still, do they hold that update when you shipped it? Were they weird about it? I've heard that they did not like it when other platforms shipped those up. Yeah, they didn't. And that's what I just talked through. I mean, they wrote us back and sort of , you know, that's when we had to change the deadline for the original or wow. Reinstate the deadline for the deprecation but the kick to the web is still there and that flow still works . And so what we did is we gave our creators a way to up the price because we wanted our creators to have income continuity, right? It's like a thirty percent hit on your revenue is unacceptable . So we built a system that allows creators to form four memberships on the IOS , charge an increased amount for those memberships such that the net impact to them is flat . Now what that ultimately does is it passes the extra fee to the fan, which is also a bad experience But we pride ourselves on being a creator first company. And so we told our creators like, Hey, we're building this system. You can pass the fee on your fans and a lot of them are doing that now . And then they just tell their fans like hey, if you want this without the extra fee, you can go become a member on Web. You know, that basically allowed creators to preserve their income , but it's still a drag . It still passes the end fee onto the consumer and then the fan ends up paying more and there's, yeah, there's problems associated with that. You know, it's yeah, it was not a good experience. I want to end by talking about how you might push back against platforms. We've talked a lot about different kinds of platforms and the different kinds of pressures they can impose on a creator and things you're building to let creators take some control back. The last piece of that you mentioned at the very top of the show is maybe there are new kinds of networks to be built where creators own their audiences, they own their photographs, where users feel more in control where you can pick your own algorithm, right ? Blue Sky is run by very idealistic people who seem to think that picking your own algorithm will solve the whole problem in the end and maybe to the detriment of all other product improvements they're laser focused on that. Threads exist. It runs an activity pub, right? No one has yet interoperated with Activity Pub, such that it makes any sense for threads, but they keep doing it. Mike McHugh built Surf, you can browse Blue Sky and threads and mass on all the open social netw orks. You have Quips, which is a social ish product. They make social ish objects on the patreon. You said you're not federating it, but you could. What do you see as the benefit of going to interoperate with those networks? Is this bigger distribution? Is it bringing more content onto the Patreon platform? How should this work? It's creators owning their audiences . That's the benefit . When we launched in twenty thirteen , we gave I think we're the first platform that gave creators the email addresses of their fans when they signed up . And we did that despite advice that we got when we were raising money. You know, people were saying like, hey, sort of red uces switching costs . Like why would you let creators be able why would you give them emails? Because then they can just like email their fans and tell them to go to some other platform. And our whole point was like, yeah, that's exactly why you should do it because that lights a fire under our ass to build a product that's valuable enough to keep creators and to keep their trust . And so we, you know, that was part of the view one of Patreon. It's been in the product since. So sometimes I like to say we were we were Patreon was the original Web three before Web three. Like we were like we were we were trying to do things we were we had the spirit of building things in a decentralized way using protocols. You gotta be careful with that because that definitely sounds like you were doing crypto scams. No , I was robbing you blind before any of these enterprise ever showed up . No, but seriously, like the spirit of it was like emails based on a protocol and there's something really beautiful about that. And so we want to make sure that we can pull that into Patreon as much as possible. And so yeah, what is the benefit? The benefit is creators having confidence that the platform isn't going to fuck them, that the platform, even if the platform changes or insidifies or does something is abusive to their users , they can then take their audience elsewhere and use some different front end to interact with their network. That is ultimately the benefit. That's like a pretty That's a like that's a signal that the company believes that power is shifting away from institutions and towards individuals, which I believe. And I believe that companies that embrace that over the long run are going to be the companies that empower that movement and are chosen by people and used by people. And the companies that fight that ultimately, I think will lose . And so I think it sends a very powerful signal to the market that we want to treat people well and that we want you to own your data. We want you to own your social graph. We want you to own your relationships, not us. And you can hold us accountable for building a great experience because if we don't , you can just choose somebody else. I feel like I could do it a full hour on that with you because I'm very curious if there are products to be built with these technologies that aren't just signaling and there have yet to really be any existing platforms built on these technologies are actually, they still appear to be closed, right? Like Threads is maybe the most algorithmic of them all, even though it's built on an open technology. And I'm very curious if it is all just signaling