Back to episode — Episode 338 Scott Adams - Imaginary Presidential Risk, LBGTQ Under Trump, Inauguration Expenses
Context —
not an unreasonable article, but it would be better to say "Here's how impeachment works, just as a reminder." That would be a little more objective than to say it happens, here's how it would work. All right, they're taking your mind into the future where you're thinking about a specific president having a specific impeachment. They could have made this objective and said it's very unlikely ther…
← Previous segment →iate the correction. And I'm getting beat up all day on Twitter about this, so maybe I'll send them to this Periscope.
Hey, thanks for the super heart, Herbert, by the way. Any of those who like to reward me for the fun you have during the simultaneous sip and Coffee with Scott Adams, you can send the super heart. There's a little icon at the bottom of your screen. If you click it you'll see what that's all about.
Google still has me as a Nazi, you say. Well, so giving you an update on that. Let's see what I'm gonna Google myself and see what comes up. Doo doo. All right, so here will be a test to see if they're still calling me a Nazi. Now on the top page, all good. So the first search results that come up, it looks like they've been scrubbed of the Nazi Photoshop job that somebody did on me. But that's probably because at least some of those pictures, or at least one of them, went to a Twitter account that got killed by Twitter. So fair is fair. Let's give credit where credit is due.
I had a problem with Twitter because it was a Twitter account pretending to be me in the Nazi uniform. I reported it using Twitter's own process, and within one day the account was taken down. So if I'm being objective, Twitter did everything I would ask of Twitter on this topic. I have nothing but positive to say about Twitter on this topic.
Google, however, is another question. Because if I were to click the images, how far down would I have to go before I see a picture of me in a Nazi uniform, photoshopped of course — I would never put on a Nazi uniform — and then right below that a second level. So Google still has me listed in the top ten, which you would see in your first, you know, if you clicked Google Images and saw all my images. It would be in the top ten.
Now I don't know how to score this because the fact that so many of you went and clicked on it because I'm talking about it might be the reason that it surfaced so high. It could be that I've just talked about it too much. So there's no way to really know if the algorithm is driving it up at this point because so many of you clicked on it because I drew attention to it. So I'm gonna have to wait a few weeks to see if the algorithm lowers them naturally. If it doesn't, I would still conclude that Google is racist, basically. There's no other way to say that, right?
If Google either allows or is behind the demonization of me in a Nazi uniform, let me ask you this: would they ever put a non-white male in a Nazi uniform? Well you might see a meme somewhere about that, but generally speaking it's an anti-white male thing. It's racist. So Google right now — I don't know. Does Google have other racist images that they leave up? Is that a thing? Okay, does Google allow any image that's a real picture to stay up in their images if it's obviously and unambiguously just a racist image? Because they've got two completely racist images.
So if those images don't go down in the rankings or disappear, it's not reverse racism. It's just plain old racism. Let's stop saying reverse. There's no reverse to it. It's not reversed. It's just racism. There's no other way to paint that. All right, Google is allowing the racist images. I'm on the top search. Now if that's who they want to be — now I'll wait a week or so — but if that's who Google wants to be, then I will certainly help their brand. If Google wants to be racist, I will be the first one to help them brand that. Hashtag racist Google or hashtag Google racist. Now racist Google is better because I'd like Google to come up as an autofill whenever you're typing racist if they keep it. But you know, let's wait a week for that.
No, I don't think lawsuit. Lawsuit is not really the way to go on any of this because it's impossible to win lawsuits like this.
Did you know Johnny Hart? I met him once. Are the new free speech platforms doomed? Well it's the trouble is that the big social networks have what's called the network effect. If you don't invest in startups and tech companies you don't know what the network effect is. And the network effect is that once all of your friends are in one place, you know, such as on Twitter or Facebook, you're just not gonna leave because everybody you know is on the other platform.
So now I would say there's no real chance that the big social networks will have a free speech competitor. Let me tell you why. The day a new free speech competitor opens up, let's say Gab, they have one really, really big problem. Who are the first people who go to a free speech app? Who goes first? Well, who goes first? Other people who got kicked off the other ones. Yeah, racists. So real racists end up being your base users. And then people who are not racist, they say, oh I like free speech too so I think I'll go over there. And the first thing they realize is that there are a lot of racists over there.
So they have a business model that the free speech apps have a business model that almost can't work. They need to figure out how to tweak that business model to prevent that problem. And one of the ways that I'm wondering — I don't think anybody's done this yet — but suppose you had an app that allowed you to post to the social media entities but when it did it also posted automatically to a free speech place.
So let's say nobody can join the free speech site. It's impossible to join it. You can only join the other sites. But every post also shows up as a mirror on the sort of a mirror free speech site. And if you've already been kicked off Twitter then your message just goes wherever it's allowed. If you had that, wouldn't you be able over time to build an audience for this free speech one? Because it wouldn't be any comments.
How would you like to have a social media platform that showed all the tweets but none of the comments? And if you wanted to see the comments you'd have to go back to the site it came from. So I'm just brainstorming here. But listen. So let's say you've got an app that posts all of your tweets to multiple platforms, puts it on Twitter but it also puts it on Gab. Maybe it puts it somewhere else. And then if you want to read them, if you want to read tweets, you just go to the free speech one. You'll see everything but the one thing it doesn't have is no comments. Because aren't the comments the bad part? If you had a choice of just not reading any dumbass troll comments, would that be a plus or a negative?
Somebody saying Hootsuite. And Hootsuite is designed for a different purpose and that's important because Hootsuite is optimized for business users. We're trying to schedule things and time things and measure things and hit all the social media stuff, but it's a little awkward and hard to use. So I tried to use Hootsuite a few years ago and it was just so hard that I just stopped using it.
So if you had an app it would have to be as easy to use as just posting a tweet. If it's not as easy to use as just posting a tweet nobody's gonna freaking use it. And Hootsuite is harder to use than posting a tweet.
Somebody says they like the comments the most. Well you would still have access to the comments if you clicked on the tweet and you wanted to see the comments. You would just go over to the platform where they show the comments. Your tweets appear on Gab. My tweets appear on Gab. Do that. Somebody says my tweets appear on Gab. Is that true? Somebody is somebody mirroring them somehow.
Magazine. You're proposing a magazine. I guess I am. You know what? Suppose you took all the — all right, so here's a model. So right now if I read my Twitter feed or any social media feed it's in chronological order. Suppose you created a social media site that organized it like a magazine. So you would send your one message. It would go to Twitter in its normal way and people could comment on it and everything. It goes to Facebook, goes to Instagram if it's Instagrammable. But it also goes to a magazine. And what the magazine does is it organizes the tweets by topic. So you would see all the tweets on this hashtag, all the tweets on that. Now of course you can always click on a hashtag and do that within the social media networks, but it's a little extra step. It's not edited.
Somebody saying Flipboard. The Flipboard is sort of what I'm talking about except that there's no app that sends one content to all those things including to Flipboard as far as I know. Not me. Too complicated.
So suppose you have an app that lets you post to all those media sites including this magazine one. And from the app you could then go read your comments on any one of those sites. So it just lets you go back and forth from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or whatever the other is. Anyway, that's the idea. Enough on that.
The basic idea is that the current free speech platforms have a problem with their business model that I don't know you can solve. And I will talk to you later.