#its been a long time since i tried to upload a video from mobile so i hadnt noticed it before

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

@royalwhumpness yeah!!! I just made this gif :3

When you go to post a video, click on this paint pallete icon and then to the left there is a GIF button, which let's you select a section of the video and loop it, or reverse it. Pretty neat!

TIL you can make gifs on the mobile app?? If you upload a video it let's you edit it right there and clip the video into gifs???

[baby-pigtails]

Kiddo Sites/Apps!

Hi hi! I always see a lot of posts recommending sites and apps for age regressors but a lot of the time they’re the same things, so I thought I’d make my own! All the sites and apps on here are free, don’t worry! (Some may have ads or in-app purchase, though!) It’s under the cut cause I tried to include some preview pictures which made it kinda long! If anyone would like to add more or have me add more, just let me know! Have fun and stay safe during this time of quarantine and social distancing!

WEBSITES

- DisneyClips

     This is probably my FAVOURITE site for when I’m regressed! It’s made by Disney fans for Disney fans, and is updated with new activites pretty often! It has a bunch of safe and fun games, quizzes, coloring pages, and even things like analysis charts for kiddos whose special interest or hyperfixation is Disney! It has dress up games that are super-duper easy and cute, and I love them because their style looks like it could come right out of the film it’s from! Like the dresses and everything, and they stick to each princess’s style while making different dresses from the original ones! It’s crazy!!

-PBS Kids

     A classic but awesome site!! You can watch all sorts of episodes for free, you don’t have to put in an email or anything! There are even games and episodes from shows that have long since gone off the air!

-American Girl

     Don’t be fooled by the site’s title, this site is for everyone! If you’re familiar with the American Girl characters, there’s lots of dress up and themed games, and if you’re not familiar with the characters, don’t worry cause there’s still super cute games like pet grooming and, my favourite, Coconut’s Safari! I linked to the games page, but there’s quizzes and polls, too!

-Webkinz

     I’m sure a lot of you know about Webkinz already, but it hasn’t gone anywhere even after all these years! It’s one of my favourite sites, and it’s free to play now! For people unfamiliar with Webkinz, it’s a virtual world where you can raise a pet, decorate rooms, and collect all sorts of objects, food, and clothing! You can play this one online, with their new desktop app, or with their mobile app! (I will warn you, though, the mobile app does not have that much stuff on it)

-Poptropica

     Poptropica has been around for a while too, but it’s changed a lot in recent years! You can play it online and there’s also an app. This one is probably for older kiddos, though - it has a lot of puzzles and requires a lot of thinking at times, so if you’re looking for a relaxing game this probably isn’t it. 

-Poptropica

    Poptropica has been around for a while too, but it’s changed a lot in recent years! You can play it online and there’s also an app. This one is probably for older kiddos, though - it has a lot of puzzles and requires a lot of thinking at times, so if you’re looking for a relaxing game this probably isn’t it.

APPS

- Habitica

     Habitica is a super-duper easy habit tracker/reminder app! I use it to remind me to take my meds, shower, brush my teeth, things like that! But you put in your habits and to-do list so you can personalize it! Usually I don’t like apps like this because they offer no incentive but Habitica turns it into an RPG like Dungeons and Dragons!! So you can level up and get equipment and even pets! What I love about it, too, is that if you ever have any question, their FAQ is super clear and easy to understand, which makes it ideal for autistic kids like me!

- Cookie Run

     Cookie Run is an oldie but a goldie! It’s a running platformer game where you can collect lots of cute cookies and their pets and learn their stories! Plus there’s canon LGBTQ+ rep with some of the cookie heroes! Cookie Run has a lot of bright colours and fast movement though, so it might not be the best game for kiddos with seizures or sensory issues!

- My Tamagotchi Forever

     Super cute revamp of tamagotchi!! Your pets don’t run away or anything in this one, haha! You can decorate your town and your house with coins you earn from simple minigames, and you can dress up your tamagotchis in different outfits and fill out their scrapbooks and collect them all! I really liked this app, definitely one of my favorites :)

- Hello Kitty Lunchbox

     Super simple “cooking” game! Again, this is a super easy, no hassle game and is good for really young kiddos. You get to make a lunch for Hello Kitty and decorate it, along with her lunchbox before “eating” your meal. But again, I wanna stress this one is super simple and some kids may get bored of it.

-Pocket Ponies

     A My Little Pony version of the classic ball shooter game. You aim to hit enemies with your balls, and eventually charge up your ponies so they can perform their special action. You get to collect My Little Pony characters and each one has a different ability.

-Hello Kitty Music Party

     This one’s more of an idle tapper game. It wants you to tap on your screen along with the beat of the music, but even if you don’t tap with the beat you can still get rewards! It has a couple cutesy pop songs in the app, but it can also access your music library on your device so you can tap with whatever you want! The app itself doesn’t offer much instruction but it’s fairly simple to figure out. But like the other Hello Kitty game, it can grow boring quickly for some kids, which is why it became an idle game for me. 

-Disney TsumTsum

     This one is kind of like Bejeweled or Candy Crush - you connect little Disney characters to make them “pop!” You get to collect a bunch of different characters and each character has a special ability.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

-RescueHero’s Nostalgia Zone

     A lesser known channel but it’s one of my favorites! It’s a gameplay channel, but pretty much every video is old video games like TV plug and plays, leapster/leap frog games, or CD-ROM games from the 2000s. It’s an active channel, too, and tends to upload every week or so! From what I can tell, there’s no voiceover and their videos are just simple, nostalgic gameplay.

-Shirley Curry

     This one’s a little weird but it’s very wholesome - it’s a grandma in her 80′s(?) who loves to play video games! She mostly plays games for older kiddos like Skyrim, but her videos are very calming and she’s very cute in the way she comments on games. She’s super sweet to her viewers and calls them her grandkids, and usuaslly responds in comments. Her videos are also easy videos to listen to in the background, too.

-pstoyreviews

     I don’t watch a lot of toy channels because a lot of the time they’re over the top and super corny or just... really weird, but this channel is run by two people (I think they are a couple but I’m not sure) named Shannon and Paul, and they’re very casual about their videos (despite the corny thumbnails, lol). Anyway, they mostly do blind bag openings for trinkets and toys that are currently on the shelves - things like Tokidoki, LOL Dolls, Shopkins, minifigures, things like that. It’s a very good channel if you like those cutesy sorts of things but don’t have the money to get them yourself! To my knowledge they’re not really sponsored, so there’s no encouraging you to buy a product or anything like that. Like I said, they’re very casual and do talk during the videos but they talk a little slow and there’s no background music, so they are very easy to understand! I believe Shannon also has a doll-specific channel, too, if you’re into that.

-nana825763

     Better known as piropito, this channel is well known for its really cute and wholesome Minecraft gameplay that you can start watching here. This is a Japanese channel, but he captions his own videos, so don’t worry! Anyway, his goal was to figure out everything in Minecraft with absolutely no cheats or searching the web for information or anything like that. That’s really the only thing I’d recommend on this channel, however, and do be careful because they do have some horror game playthroughs on there so stay safe!

-Sesame Street

     Not much to explain here! It’s Sesame Street, and they post clips of the show, songs, and sometimes even full episodes.

[bountyofbeads]

Trump's harsh words on 'squad' reinforce dark posts online

https://apnews.com/e43cf06befa24408b5a500626f2550d9

"Racist, inflammatory and inaccurate content has circulated on far right blogs, news sites and social media accounts about Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her three freshman colleagues since they ran for public office. With his tweets and harsh comments, Trump has elevated that rhetoric, playing into a conspiratorial feedback loop that reared its head repeatedly during his campaign and presidency.*

Trump's harsh(bigoted, xenophobic fascist) words on 'squad' reinforce dark posts online

By JILL COLVIN and AMANDA Seitz | Published July 19, 2019 9: 25 PM ET |

WASHINGTON (AP) — Long before President Donald Trump turned up the heat on four Democratic congress- women of color, saying they should "go back" to their home countries, hateful rhetoric and disinformation about the self-described squad was lurking online.

Racist, inflammatory and inaccurate content has circulated on far right blogs, news sites and social media accounts about Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and her three freshman colleagues since they ran for public office. With his tweets and harsh comments, Trump has elevated that rhetoric, playing into a conspiratorial feedback loop that reared its head repeatedly during his campaign and presidency.

Trump rose to conservative prominence by falsely claiming former President Barack Obama, the first black president, wasn't born in the country. Since then, he has promoted claims and memes that originated in the darkest corners of the internet while fueling new ones of his own.

His latest targets are Omar and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

In his Sunday tweets , Trump claimed, without identifying the women by name, that the minority legislators "originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe." He suggested they should "go back" to those "totally broken and crime infested places," even though three of the four were born in the U.S. and all are U.S. citizens. He has since questioned the women's allegiance to their country, accusing them of hating America and promoting terrorism while suggesting they should leave America if they're unhappy here.

For some, the Republican president's tweets were shocking. But for others, they were just an average day on Facebook or Twitter, where allegations that Omar was not legitimately elected, is not a U.S. citizen and committed immigration fraud have festered in far right chatrooms, blogs and social media sites since she was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016.

"This is the agenda of white nationalists, whether it is happening in chat rooms or it's happening on national TV," Omar said this week. "And now it's reached the White House garden."

Omar was born in Somalia and immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee in 1995 when she was a child. She became a U.S. citizen in 2000 at age 17.

The rumors about her have been spread by dozens of conservative social media figures and bloggers, including Michelle Malkin and Laura Loomer, the latter now banned from Facebook. In February, self-described far right social media influencers Jacob Wohl and Loomer flew to Minneapolis, where they provided live updates on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook of their trip to "investigate" Omar's past and immigration status. Even seemingly everyday citizens have taken to social media to upload their own theories on Omar's background, with one Minnesota woman posting a video months ago on Facebook sharing "proof" Omar is not a U.S. citizen. The video has been watched more than 50,000 times.

Trump also repeated a contested claim, characterizing as "fact" that Omar had married her brother, before acknowledging that he really didn't know.

"Well, there's a lot of talk about the fact that she was married to her brother," Trump said this week in response to a question posed by a conservative news outlet. "I know nothing about it. I hear she was married to her brother. You're asking me a question about it. I don't know, but I'm sure that somebody will be looking at that."

Omar has described such allegations as "disgusting lies." She has declined to provide access to immigration records, birth certificates or other documents that could verify her family history.

Omar, the biggest target of online vitriol among the four legislators, has made comments that raise eyebrows, including a remark this spring in which she referenced the Sept. 11 attacks by saying that "some people did something." She was also criticizing for asking a judge in 2016 to show leniency toward a man accused of trying to join the Islamic State.

But other allegations have been provably false.

Before they took office, for instance, Omar and Tlaib, the first Muslim women elected to Congress , were dogged by false online allegations that they were so anti-American they did not intend to take the oath of office. Others tried to delegitimize Omar in memes that falsely claim Obama resettled 70,000 Somali refugees in Minnesota in an effort to ensure her election. In fact, the state received 6,320 Somali refugees during the Obama administration. A similar inaccurate claim was later floated online about Iraqi refugees in Tlaib's home state of Michigan.

Other comments by the women have been taken widely out of context. Around February, social media users and fringe sites began circulating an edited 2013 clip that they said showed Omar "laughing" at al-Qaida and admitting to taking a "terrorism" class.

The full context of the 28-minute interview, originally broadcast on a local Minneapolis TV station, shows she was talking about a U.S. college course and was making a point about how the Arabic language had been hijacked by extremist groups to mean something negative.

In the 2016 presidential election, Russians relied on a similar online playbook, deploying anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in an effort to boost Trump's prospects.

Racially divisive content was the biggest component of the Russian disinformation campaign, according to Ian Vanderwalker, counsel for the Democracy Program at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. One Facebook post linked to a Russian agent, for instance, featured a group of women walking in headdresses and asked: "What are they hiding?"

"A lot of it was fearmongering that was intended to mobilize right-leaning voters," Vanderwalker said. "Some of it was similar to or echoed themes in Trump's own campaign."

He predicted Russians would revive racially fraught social media content in 2020.

Negative sentiment about the four congresswomen has migrated into more mainstream outlets recently. Last week, just days before Trump's incendiary tweets, Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Omar on his show as having "undisguised contempt for the United States."

The president's comments, in turn, appear to have inspired even more negative online rhetoric, including a new batch of Facebook and Twitter posts that describe Omar as a "terrorist." Memes also have emerged calling the women "anti-American" and "enemies within." One mock movie poster labels the women "The Jihad Squad" and includes the tagline: "Political Jihad is their game."

The attacks are part of a pattern for Trump, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a recent book about how Russian hackers and trolls influenced Trump's election. She pointed to Trump's birther claims against Obama, which she said suggested "he doesn't belong here, he belongs somewhere else," as well as Trump's unfounded claims in 2016 that Hillary Clinton and Obama were co-founders of the Islamic State group.

Chants at the president's rallies — such as "Lock her up!" in reference to Clinton or the newly minted "Send her back!" refrain for Omar — emerge because Trump has cast the women as enemies of the nation, Jamieson said.

The result, she said, is to discredit "the loyalty, patriotism and ability to act on behalf of the U.S. of an elected official."

[sam-lives-story]

#SamLives - Chapter 2

“A Call From a Friend”

[Previous|Next]

Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]

It had been three days since #SamLives had begun its run through the internet, and the influx of messages and asks and tweets Jack had received because of it had yet to cease. He was at his computer attempting to record another game for his upcoming videos…but he just wasn’t feeling it. Sam was asleep near the computer monitor in a little nest Jack had made for him inside his old hat - the hat everybody was familiar with. His eyes kept falling on the little eyeball, his thoughts falling to worry about the fact that people knew of his existence now. And he knew full well that people would notice his change in demeanor if he uploaded a recording like this, the same way they managed to catch every single Anti hint he had ever left in a video. They wouldn’t miss it. They’d know something was wrong.

So when a call came through on his phone, Jack was more than grateful for the interruption. He paused the recording and picked up his mobile, expecting Robin again…but this time it was Markiplier. Mark was one of the people who had been calling him non-stop since the clip of Sam had leaked, and he was also one of the ones Jack had yet to speak to. The Irishman sank in his chair, chewing his lip, letting the ringtone carry on for a few more seconds. He took a breath. He ran a hand through his hair.

Then he picked up.

“Hey Mark–”

“Jack! Dude! I’ve been calling you for days!” Mark cut him off loudly, the frustration and relief at having waited so long but finally getting a response both coming through in his words.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Jack chuckled, spinning in his chair a little. “Sorry. Been a little busy. What’s up?”

“The video,” Mark said. “Sam. That’s what’s up.”

Jack sighed. He should have known that would be the first thing on Mark’s mind.

“…what about it? Tryin’ to figure out how Robin an’ I managed to get the animation quality so high?”

He attempted to carry on the lie that both he and Robin had agreed to use as their cover story.

“Animation…? No, dude. Cut the crap. I know that wasn’t an animation.”

Jack’s chair stilled. His half-smile dropped and he swallowed thickly.

“O’ course it was…what else would it be? A puppet?” He tried to play it of as a joke, but Mark, apparently, wasn’t having any of it.

“Is Sam okay?”

The question was one Jack hadn’t been expecting and he sat up, looking down at Sam, who still sat snoozing in the little nest. His grip on the phone tightened.

“…S-Sam? Heh, you know he’s not…actually real, right?”

“Jack.”

Jack swallowed. Clearly Mark wasn’t about to let this go, though for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. He didn’t speak for a long moment, and a static-laced sigh came through on the other end of the call.

“…alright, fine. Are you alright? You sound stressed.”

“I’m fine.” Jack said it a little too quickly. “Totally fine. Behind on recording, that’s all. Didn’t…eh…expect so much feedback from that video. Got a bit distracted reading fan posts on Tumblr.”

That, at the very least, was true. He’d been searching through post after post, seeing how many people actually believed Sam was real, how many were praising the “animation”, how many were catching on and separating the fact from the fiction. Mark chuckled on the other end of the call.

“Well when you pull a stunt like that, what do you expect? I know you got the same response the first time Anti appeared.”

“This time it wasn’t a stunt though! This was an accid–” He cut himself off. Accident. It had been an accident. But that wasn’t the story he was supposed to be giving people. He sank further in his chair with a groan. “…it was s’pposed to be somethin’ fun and small for people to enjoy.” He mumbled the script he’d been teaching himself. Mark hummed.

“Mhm. Sure.” There was a touch of disbelief in his words, and Jack knew full well that he wasn’t convincing the other YouTuber one bit.

“You don’t believe me.” It wasn’t a question. “D’you know how stupid that sounds? I mean, c’mon, sentient eyeballs don’t exist. Why’re you so set on thinkin’ Sam’s real?”

For once his response gained nothing but an odd silence from the other end of the line. Jack sat up a little, frowning.

“Mark?”

“It’s nothing. Listen, I’ve gotta…go to bed. It’s almost 2am here. I’ll talk to you later.”

And Mark hung up before Jack could say anything else. Blinking, Jack pulled back the phone to stare at it in baffled confusion. What the hell…?

‘Jack?’

Sam’s voice echoed in his head and Jack looked up, seeing his little friend starting to wake up, blinking sleepily. He smiled.

“Heh. Sorry buddy. Was I thinking too loud? I’ll try an’ quiet down��”

Also find the latest chapters of this story on [Archive Of Our Own]

[Previous|Next]

[Chapter List]

[shirlleycoyle]

Amazon’s AI Cameras Are Punishing Drivers for Mistakes They Didn’t Make

In early 2021, Amazon installed AI-powered cameras in the delivery vans at one of its depots in Los Angeles. Derek, a delivery driver at the facility, said the camera in his van started to incorrectly penalize him whenever cars cut him off, an everyday occurrence in Los Angeles traffic. 

“Maintain safe distance,” the camera installed above his seat would say when a car cut him off. That data would be sent to Amazon, and would be used to evaluate his performance that week and determine whether he got a bonus.  

“Every time I need to make a right hand turn, it inevitably happens. A car cuts me off to move into my lane, and the camera, in this really dystopian dark, robotic voice, shouts at me," Derek, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared retribution from Amazon, told Motherboard. "It's so disconcerting. It’s upsetting, when I didn't do anything.”

In February, Amazon announced that it would install cameras made by the AI-tech startup Netradyne in its Amazon-branded delivery vans as an “innovation” to “keep drivers safe.” As of this month, Amazon had fitted more than half of its delivery fleet nationwide with this technology, an Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard. 

Motherboard spoke to six Amazon delivery drivers in California, Texas, Kansas, Alabama, and Oklahoma, and the owner of an Amazon delivery company in Washington who said that rather than encourage safe driving, Netradyne cameras regularly punish drivers for so-called "events" that are beyond their control or don't constitute unsafe driving. The cameras will punish them for looking at a side mirror or fiddling with the radio, stopping ahead of a stop sign at a blind intersection, or getting cut off by another car in dense traffic, they said. 

The Netradyne camera, which requires Amazon drivers to sign consent forms to release their biometric data, has four lenses that record drivers when they detect “events” such as following another vehicle too closely, stop sign and street light violations, and distracted driving. 

When the camera detects an “event,” it uploads the footage to a Netradyne interface accessible to Amazon and its delivery companies, and in some instances, a robotic voice speaks out to the driver: “distracted driving” or “maintain safe distance.”

Each time the camera registers an event, footage is uploaded into a system, recorded, and affects a score drivers receive at the end of the week for safe driving. 

For many Amazon drivers, these performance scores determine whether they receive weekly bonuses, prizes, and extra pay. 

The driver in Los Angeles told Motherboard that he has tried to contest events with Amazon with no luck. 

“When I get my score each week, I ask my company to tell me what I did wrong,” the driver told Motherboard. “My [delivery company] will email Amazon and cc' me, and say, ‘Hey we have [drivers] who'd like to see the photos flagged as events, but they don't respond. There's no room for discussion around the possibility that maybe the camera's data isn't clean.”

Jamie Gomez, a former Amazon delivery driver in Sugar Land, Texas said the Netradyne camera in his van has also detected “events” that didn’t actually happen, but that impacted his performance score at Amazon, which determined whether he received prizes, such as rain jackets, from his delivery company. 

“Before I would be able to win prizes and stuff, as soon as cameras came along, it went downhill,” Gomez said. 

Amazon drivers believe that AI-powered surveillance cameras have served as a cost-saving measure for the company. Amazon delivery drivers and delivery companies, known as “delivery service partners,” which contract with Amazon and employ drivers, have reported losing income from erroneous citations registered by Netradyne. 

“It’s consistently beeping at drivers all day long. This creates a massive distraction to drivers on the road, and it creates a massive workload for delivery companies to review video.”

“The Netradyne cameras that Amazon installed in our vans have been nothing but a nightmare,” a former Amazon delivery driver in Mobile, Alabama told Motherboard. “They watch every move we make. I have been ‘dinged’ for following too close when someone cuts me off. If I look into my mirrors to make sure I am safe to change lanes, it dings me for distraction because my face is turned to look into my mirror. I personally did not feel any more safe with a camera watching my every move.”

One current Amazon delivery driver in Oklahoma, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared retaliation from Amazon and his delivery company, told Motherboard that the biggest problem with Netradyne cameras is the frequency with which they detect false stop sign violations. 

“Most false positives we get are stop sign violations,” he said. “Either we stop after the stop sign so we can see around a bush or a tree and it dings us for that, or it catches yield signs as stop signs. A few times, we've been in the country on a dirt road, where there's no stop sign, but the camera flags a stop sign.” 

Multiple drivers said this means they've started to stop at stop signs twice, once before a stop sign for the Netradyne camera, and another time for visibility before crossing an intersection. Amazon delivery drivers are frequently under high pressure to meet delivery quotas as quickly as possible in order to qualify for Amazon's bonuses. 

The Netradyne interface can be accessed by Amazon and the delivery company that employs a driver.

"One of the safety improvements we’ve made this year is rolling out industry-leading telematics and camera-based safety technology across our delivery fleet," Alexandra Miller, a spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard. "This technology provides drivers real-time alerts to help them stay safe when they are on the road." 

Netradyne did not respond to a request for comment. 

Do you have a tip to share with us about Amazon? Please get in touch with the reporter via email lauren.gurley@vice.com or Signal 201-897-2109.

Since Amazon installed Netradyne cameras in its vans, Miller claims that accidents had decreased by 48 percent and stop sign and signal violations had decreased 77 percent. Driving without a seatbelt decreased 60 percent, following distance decreased 50 percent, and distracted driving had decreased 75 percent. 

Amazon delivery companies around the country are at different stages of rolling out this technology, and grouped into cohorts, but Miller said this data is comprehensive since the pilot installment of Netradyne.

For Amazon delivery companies, which receive bonuses by earning "fantastic" scores on a weekly scorecard, Netradyne “events” can ruin a scorecard, meaning the delivery company doesn't receive income it needs to pay for vehicle repairs, consumables, damages, support staff  and bonuses for drivers.

Every week, Amazon gives each delivery driver a tier rating, which ranges from “fantastic” to "good" to “fair” to “poor” based on a series of metrics, including Netradyne events. Each Amazon delivery company receives a scorecard that combines all its drivers' scores, according to a scorecard reviewed by Motherboard. 

“Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they're actually using them not to pay delivery companies,” an owner of an Amazon delivery company in Washington told Motherboard. The owner said he received no training on how to use Netradyne cameras. “They just take our money and expect that to motivate us to figure it out.” 

Miller, the Amazon spokesperson, said “each Delivery Service Partner is trained on the safety technology and are required to communicate to their teams how the events impact the DSP scorecard.”

VIMEO

According to an internal document obtained by Motherboard, which explains how Amazon weighs an array of metrics that make up the delivery company's scorecard, “safety and compliance” make up 40 percent of a delivery service partner's score. This includes a “safe driving metric” calculated by a smartphone app known as Mentor, a “seatbelt off rate,” a “speeding event rate,” “sign/signal violations rate,” “a distractions rate,” and a “following distance rate.” 

In June, Motherboard reported that Amazon delivery companies were encouraging drivers to shut off the Mentor app that monitors safety in order to hit Amazon's delivery quotas.

Each of these metrics has a specific definition. According to the document, the following distance, for example, “measures how DSPs are performing in terms of leaving enough following distance from the vehicle in front. Netradyne will create a Following Distance event if a [driver] has 0.6 seconds or less following distance from the vehicle in front.”

“Each time a [driver] doesn't leave enough following distance, Netradyne registers 1 event, and the [delivery company's] weekly score is the sum of all following distance events divided by the number of trips," the document continues. “[Delivery companies] who receive a fantastic score typically achieve 5 events per 100 trips or less.” 

VIMEO

Amazon currently defines stop sign and street light violations as “any time a DA [delivery associate] drives through/past a stop sign without coming to a full stop, illegal U-turns… and street light violations, which are triggered anytime a [driver] drives through an intersection when the light is red.”

Each red light violation counts as 10 stop sign violation events. In order to earn a “fantastic” score, delivery companies must earn 50 events per 100 trips or less. 

“If your safety rating is not fantastic, you don’t get a bonus,” the Amazon delivery company owner in Washington told Motherboard. “They say 'we’re safety obsessed’ or whatever bullshit, but this camera costs delivery companies hundreds of dollars in revenue each week that they need to train drivers and survive. Without the bonus, you don't survive, you go out of business.” 

Annoyed by, and in many cases, fearful of surveillance, some drivers have begun placing stickers over the cameras to avoid the camera from recording footage of them.

Others wear sunglasses to circumvent the camera's “distracted driving” monitor, which they say is hyper-sensitive. 

"Before I would be able to win prizes and stuff, as soon as cameras came along, it went downhill.”

According to an internal document obtained by Motherboard, Amazon collects three types of distraction, including when a driver looks down, when a driver looks at their phone, and when a driver talks on the phone. In order to earn "fantastic" scores and receive bonuses, Amazon delivery companies must register less than five "distraction events" per 100 delivery routes. 

“Most drivers at my company cover the cameras up with stickers, because the cameras get to be a nuisance,” an Amazon delivery driver who works at an Amazon delivery station in Shepherdsville, Kentucky told Motherboard. “They ping all day and people get horrible scores, but it’s a lie. They didn’t do anything bad. It’s impossible to stop at stop signs every time like they want you to.”

“If we brought up problems with the cameras, managers would brush it under the table, they're only worried about getting the packages out,” he said. “So we cover them up. They don't tell us to, but it's kind of like ‘don't ask, don't tell.’” 

On Reddit, an Amazon delivery driver recently posted a screenshot of a series of messages from their delivery service company owner, saying drivers who registered a single event on “Netradyne” would not be eligible for bonuses, because the company had lost thousands of dollars from seatbelt violations. 

”Good morning team: I just watched about 12 videos of someone here on the team with NO SEATBELT on," the texts read. "This will damage my revenue and our scorecard for next week. Several thousands of dollars GONE. If you show up for any event on NETRADYNE, your incentive will be gone automatically.” 

Drivers say that with their steep delivery quotas and the fact that they are often getting in and out of the truck, buckling and unbuckling their seatbelt dozens of times in a single neighborhood can slow down the delivery process significantly.

The delivery companies' overall safety score determines whether delivery companies earn bonuses from Amazon for the week, which can amount to thousands of dollars for a company that delivers tens of thousands of packages a week—and can be the difference between surviving and going bankrupt for a delivery company, which employs anywhere between 15 and 40 drivers. One Amazon delivery service partner owner said Amazon pay 15 cents extra per package if their fleet receives a "fantastic" score. 

"They say 'we’re safety obsessed’ or whatever bullshit, but this camera costs delivery companies hundreds of dollars in revenue each week that they need to train drivers and survive.”

According to an Amazon delivery service partner scorecard obtained by Motherboard, delivery companies are allotted four weeks of practice with Netradyne cameras before its metrics impact their scores, but none of the drivers Motherboard spoke to said they received formal training on how Netradyne “events” can impact their scorecards. 

In July, Motherboard reported that two Amazon delivery companies in Portland terminated their contracts with Amazon, in a rare act of protest against Amazon for imposing a financially unsustainable business model on them. In a letter to Amazon, their lawyer cited the Netradyne cameras as one way Amazon exerts unreasonable control over their business operations. 

Amazon's delivery service partner program relies on 2,000 small delivery companies that employ 115,000 drivers in the United States to deliver billions of packages each year. Amazon skirts liability for these drivers through this contract model, but requires delivery companies to adhere to a set of rules around hiring, drivers' appearances and social media activity, pay, routes, and safety mechanisms, including Netradyne cameras.

Motherboard spoke to four drivers and the owner of an Amazon delivery company who said it isn't possible under most circumstances for an Amazon delivery company to appeal erroneous violations with Amazon, although Amazon does have an automated portal for the appeal process where delivery companies can submit a feedback ticket to Amazon and dispute “events.”

“If you get an event at our company, you get a phone call. It’s an ass chewing. We’re not able to go to the manager or [delivery service partner] owner to appeal,” the driver in Oklahoma said. “We would love to but they won’t bother with it, unless you have clear evidence already.” 

AI experts have noted that Amazon and other companies rely on algorithms, such as worker surveillance systems, that increase their profits and cut wages. “The ability of automated management platforms to manipulate (and arbitrarily cut) wages has been at the heart of worker grievances,” a 2019 report from New York University's AI Now Institute said. “AI threatens not only to disproportionately displace lower-wage earners, but also to reduce wages, job security, and other protections for those who need it most.” 

A spokesperson for Amazon told Motherboard that a team of Amazon employees manually reviews all events that are appealed to ensure that erroneous events do not impact drivers or Amazon delivery companies. 

The delivery company owner in Washington said the number of events registered by Netradyne per week, the amount of labor involved in reviewing them, and the low likelihood that an “event” would be overturned, made the appeal process futile. 

“It’s consistently beeping at drivers all day long,” the owner of the Amazon delivery company in Washington said. “This creates a massive distraction to drivers on the road, and it creates a massive workload for delivery companies to review video. It's way too much labor to get it done every week. If you get 600 or 700 events a week, drivers might never get coaching on it.” 

Amazon’s AI Cameras Are Punishing Drivers for Mistakes They Didn’t Make syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[pokefan531]

I am bringing a changed decision about my MMD videos and for my upcoming Randomness 10. The shader tests above are showing you what problems I have when using Raycast (or RayMMD) and telling you guys why I am gonna lay off Raycast for now.

As you guys see, I use Arisumatio's Gloria model and already did all the bones and motions and everything. However, Gloria's hair and accessories are gray and white by default. You can use morph to change the colors, but Raycast so far doesn't work with morphed colors at all, as you see above. While I discuss about Raycast, I will also discuss about HDR10.

First off, Raycast is an advanced shader engine that is been around for last few years, and it can make things look great. Despite that, there are couple of problems.

Raycast has issues with colored morphs as mentioned. I've seen certain models that has a morph that can be a complete black, by turning all of it's color to a one color. However, Raycast does not work with colored morphs unless if the material was already colored on its texture or ambient. I could replace a model that is precolored by textures, but I don't have time to rework with bones or edit all textures for all models, even if I decide to change their colors to make a different person on their hair, clothes, or skin color. Not to mention, Raycast ignores toon texture, so some skin may look desaturated.

Transparency Texture issue. I've seen stages where it has transparent particles, as above. However, Raycast seem to have weird issues with transparent textures where it loses transparency information and can make things blocky, as seen above. It can not blend well to the background and will look often blocky and more flat. I've tried Main_alpha on the objects, and it either doesn't work, or gives me worse results. Last, certain textures receives banding, so it doesn't treat certain texture formats well. Stages with low amount of transparancy textures can look really great, but stages with a couple of transparent textures around can make it look worse than without raycast applied to the scene.

Computer usage and less optimization. I know some bring up that MMD is not as optimized for performance, but Raycast seems to take a larget hit. It's understandable that it's really advanced and have couple of shaders applied with SSAO and Materials. I do have Ryzen 3600 and RX 570 8GB, but it does still show how much usage the CPU and GPU and RAM use, especially when aiming at 4K. I got RX 570 8GB to do 4K videos with Raycast, and it served well. 2GB card can do fine at 1440p, but not anything higher. I've seen heavy scenes in MMD where it uses a bit more than 4GB VRAM at 4K, even lowering shadow textures. The highest shadow texture has a big hit and touches almost 8GB on big scenes, and I've seen other shaders that handles those scenes decently. Despite my setup, I know I can't work with Raycast outside of my Desktop if aiming at anything higher than 1080p. Even using different kind of shaders or shader engine can use a somewhat less usage and memory.

Antialiasing doesn't work well, only post AA. I've made post of my antialiasing methods last year or two to make better quality rendering. Since Raycast uses a different kind of rendering, the MMD's AA does not work at all. FXAA is my only option, but SMAA on any level gives me spikes on some edges. Temporal aliasing does show more by seeing small lines popping and disconnected lines and none of the post AA shaders have temporal antialiasing implemented, like modern DOOM 2016 and Doom Eternal. It looks worse in motion on 1080p and 720p, but 4K minimizes temporal aliasing decently. It really shows when switching to Raycast and you see jagged lines still and disconnections on static motion. 4K looks good enough to reduce it, but I know, like above statement, 4K only works fine on at least 4GB cards.

I would include how long it takes to set up Raycast, but a lot of 3D model programs would take time, unless if you see a recommended preset. Setting it up isn't that big of a deal, but it does take a while when resizing the window or loading the scene. Also, I haven't had enthusiast experience with it, so I don't have a lot of time to research all of it. Even if I tried to fix some errors stated above, it would take more time and testing on post production to see what works best. You would have to test each material shaders. Last minor thing is some effects may not blend well like fire and thunder. My Champion Iris video from April got transparency issue from Raycast on those effects, so it looks glitched. I can't seem to fix it at any way without making it invisible.

So what do I use now? I'm happy with PowerShader v3.2 and it retains the colors of the models better than raycast, even not doing HDR10 or use linear tonemapping. I tried GShader v1.10 at first, but LearnMMD has an article about PowerShader and says it's competitive with Raycast and that it's easier to use and have other effects blend the scene better. I know Raycast is experimental, but I've just uploaded a video about Konata's birthday, and Raycast looks really dull. This time, I don't use my HDR10 method, and while it looks decent, it's kinda disappointing. I wanted to have a constant color gradient and less clipping on colors, but it's really a hassle and too time consuming. PowerShader seems to save more time and more simple to use. I know, materials with bump mapping and reflection gloss will be missing, but there are other shader effects that can perform similarly. AutoLuminous does its job really well, and Hg_SAO and ExcellentShadows2 do too, so I'm more happy to use them. Also, colored morphs works so I get to keep Victor and Gloria models on the scene without a struggle.

Now let's discuss about HDR10 and why I'm deciding not to do more HDR10 content. This was a decision, even before I decide to leave Raycast as Konata's Birthday video was uploaded. My HDR10 Method is only through Raycast. HDR10 is more complicated process than Raycast itself, so the rest will sound complicated.

HDR10 is a lot of work. More work than working with SDR content directly. It's a long process and I have to edit from Sony Vegas and use white text to use 75% of white to not be too bright on displays with over 1000 nits. HDR10 can look good, but editing it and wanting to add pictures over it can be a hassle. Also, I have to use scripts and commandline and x265 pipe to do a single HDR. Not only that, it takes longer to render on HEVC 4K 10bit HDR than HEVC 4K SDR. It's hard to keep full range to x265 so banding is introduced a bit unless if you want the process to be slower to convert to 16bit from Avisynth+. I also have to use BT.2020 colorspace directly to not have colors process poorly. Last, only Avisynth script can do proper HDR tonemapping to SDR. Handbrake doesn't do tonemapping yet and I do want to play the video on my mobile device that doesn't decode HEVC well or do HDR Tonemapping. It's a long process overall.

Making HDR content is a challenge to make it pop well. My methods has improved, admittedly, from Iris goes to Court to Champion Iris video. However, having really bright objects doesn't seem to be that bright to see HDR10 like popping experience. It's kinda challenging to try to pull off really bright effects for HDR. It could be because our HDR TV doesn't go over 400 nits as the minimum standard to see better HDR experience. I've tried going from 300 nits average to 200 nits average, and I couldn't say if I allowed more bright scenes to shine. The tonemapping besides Linear and Reinhard, it desaturates and color shifts too heavily for SDR. I use Hable to fit better for HDR10 method. The desaturation and colorshifts are reduced, but I still see it on some parts of beight objects. The brightest device I could find is my tablet, which is almost 400 nits, but it performs poorly with HDR, even to 1080p 30FPS h264. I don't really have all the tools to do proper experiment by using HDR bright display to test the settings like what most movie studios do. Maybe the developer of Raycast can experiment HDR10 and make a tonemapping for it.

Many people don't make HDR videos currently and many other video sharing websites don't output HDR10. I feel like many people have one or two 4K HDR TVs on their houses, and I know Youtube tonemaps the videos to SDR. Youtube's tomemapping makes very dark spots a little gray. My Miraculous Ladybug Alternative video doesn't look great, and that was when my HDR10 method was experimental. There's not many video editors where you can directly edit in HDR, and it isn't user friendly to test HDR yet so it is the reason why many uploaders don't work with HDR. Making 3D HDR is a rare thing to do currently, and since it's a complicated process, it's not simple enough to have more people make HDR10 content. I realize certain video editors have HDR10 mode, but they are really expensive and not really affordable to mass media.

I do like HDR10 movies and videos, but three things above are the reasons why I wanted to pause my HDR video habits to make it easier to edit my videos and publish it. I'm gonna retire it for now, but I'll share my methods below if you guys want to test it and do a hard work for it or if you decide to share it to others.

Raycast: Hable Tonemapping, Exposure+=0.0, Exposure-=0.7 (200 nits Average Frame) or 0.61 (300 nits Average Frame), Contrast+=0.0, and Contrast-=0.9. Used cLUT shader from BowlRoll and made rec.2020 LUT Texture for HDR10. Average Frame nits=200 or 300 by Exposure settings above, max frame nits=1000, on x265 command line.

I just want to make my editing easier and more simple. My next experiment is gonna be easier and worth doing. I plan to show how to get MMD working on Linux via Wine and PMXEditor and MMEffect. It's a way to have MMD working on other OSes and it's really usable.

Edit 06/03: I also tested N3+C. While it doesn’t work with colored morphing, it doesn’t affect texture transparency, so it’s still a lot better than Raycast. N3+C allows native antialiasing and shadows looks better without worrying about VRAM usage on really high details. N3+C does have a few drawbacks, like colored morphs, but it seems to be generally stable, and allows bump mapping so it can be used on clothes. Lighting would have to take a little work when you first try it, but it looks really good.

[vsplusonline]

Lockdown treats with leftovers

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/lockdown-treats-with-leftovers-2/

Lockdown treats with leftovers

By now, most of us know that there are perhaps a hundred ways to bake a cake without flour, eggs, oil, baking powder or an oven. That a chakka (jackfruit) 65 could be as delicious as a standard chicken 65. Ever since the global lockdowns to tackle COVID-19 began, the internet has been teeming with food videos as people learn how to creatively work with basic supplies.

The pandemic is pushing home cooks to examine their larders and backyards more closely, as they find inventive, practical ways to use up everything in the fridge, thus limiting both waste and the necessity for yet another grocery run.

Paniyarams with leftover idli batter  

“Who can possibly have idli three days in a row?,” asks Krishnaraj PS, a software consultant from Kochi, who is giving a new twist to leftover batter with his appakkara (skillet used to make unniappams). He smears it with oil, and pours batter into each mould to get delightful golden paniyarams. “These made for a great lockdown snack,” he says.

Shreya N, a Kochi-based entrepreneur says the lockdown is taking us back several decades, in a positive way. “This is how our grandparents lived. No eating out, growing and cooking our own food. In a way, I would say we are evolving, food-wise,” she says. “It makes me think of ways to create something fancy out of the mundane,” she says. For someone who used to order in every weekend, Shreya has stopped ordering food, owing to safety concerns.

Black tea mocktail  

For those who miss eating out, digital marketing professional Najiya Sheejish from Kollam, has a solution: “You eat with your eyes. As long as it looks good, half the eating is done and it helps cure lockdown blues,” she says. Najiya makes a “mocktail” out of black tea, lemon spritz, a drizzle of honey and a handful of ice cubes. She also makes batter-fried, crisp chicken that resembles and tastes like its retail-chain counterpart.

Businessman Mathew M Joseph has decided to sun dry beef in order to avoid multiple trips to the market. “Especially for those who don’t get it delivered at home, it is ideal,” he says. He cleans the meat thoroughly, salts it and dries it in the sun. “This preserves the meat, which can be powdered and stored. It can be used whenever needed, sautéed with a handful of shallots, grated coconut and chilli powder,” he says. “Sun-drying tomatoes too are a great idea during lockdown,” says Mathew.

Crispy papaya chips  

Balram Menon, businessman and food enthusiast from Kanjiramattom, Ernakulam, made chips out of raw papaya, with a lavish sprinkling of chilli powder and curry leaves. “I upload the videos of my exploits with food on Instagram to inspire others,” he says.

When Aysha Abel from Kollam revived an almost forgotten traditional snack and posted it on Instagram, the video was shared over 2,500 times. The “ethakka ball”, which routinely graced tea-time home menus, has been pushed off tea tables by store bought snacks over the past few decades. The simple and wholesome dish, says Aysha, can be made with the most basic of ingredients — banana, coconut, rice flour, sugar and ghee. “The ingredients are thrown in together, mixed and steamed in a banana leaf,” she says.

Mango leaf green juice

Ingredients:

Mango leaves (tender)

Ginger

Sugar

Lemon

Method:

Wash the leaves thoroughly before grinding them in a mixer along with a piece of ginger. Strain the juice and add lemon juice and sugar. For those who want a spicy version, add a couple of green chillies before grinding the leaves in the mixer with ginger, and add a pinch of salt.

“Traditional snacks don’t need fancy ingredients. Almost all of them can be made with basic home supplies,” says Krishnaraj, whose food videos have a number of viewers. “We are familiar with the aval kuzhachathu (flattened rice with jaggery shavings and coconut peels), but a savoury dish can be made too, if you mix flattened rice with a little bit of water, slit green chillies, a pinch of salt and grated coconut. All you need is tea to go with it,” he says.

Mango leaf green juice  

Of course there are also plenty of experiments that border on the adventurous now that people are spending more time in the kitchen — ice cream made of wheat, green juice made of mango leaves and milkshakes made of jackfruit seeds. “It tastes so much better than it sounds,” says Shanti MS, a home-maker, who tried these with “great results”.

Making the most of resources and minimising wastage is one of the takeaways from COVID-19, as a women’s FaceBook group says. The discussions of late have been around ingenious ways of cooking with whatever is available.

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[mechanicsden-blog]

The Risky Business of Skirting Trademarks (re-publish)

Due to shutdown of Pretend Race Cars blog (since the admin, under the pen name “James”, although the sim racing community knows who’s him), where I originally submitted this, I’ve archived one of my reader submissions here. This post was originally published on April 6, 2016, at the height of Automobilista F1 livery controversy that led the game being delisted from Steam for a while. Unfortunately, I am unable to restore any of the pictures, although every pictures there are just taken from the interwebs.

James’ thoughts are in italics. (except for italicizing of game titles) My commentary/fixes are in [italics in brackets]. 

A snapshot of the original is here.

As the debacle surrounding Reiza Studios and their battle with Formula One Management continues into its second week – with Automobilista still failing to appear on the Steam marketplace – avid PRC.net reader FMecha has sent in a beautiful Reader Submission chronicling the long list of copyright claims across various driving games. A great entry that is well worth your time to read on this otherwise quiet Friday afternoon, the piece goes to show that Reiza Studios weren’t the first developer team to run afoul of copyright technicalities, and they certainly won’t be the last.

Hello PRC! I would like to discuss the issue and examples of skirting trademarks in racing games, in light of a recent controversy – what allegedly forced Steam to de-list Automobilista.

Dodging, evading, or skirting trademarks – whatever you want to call it – just like the alleged reason behind the de-listing of Reiza Studios’ Automobilista is nothing new. Other racing game developers, just like Reiza, when they are unable to afford license(s) for something they want to represent in their racing games, may chose to take shortcut and attempt to thinly disguise it. There are three types of skirting trademarks I have witnessed in racing games:

The first kind involved deliberate misspelling of trademarks, like it was a counterfeit brand or something. This was prevalent in Japanese racing games around the 80’s and the 90’s. [Supposedly because Japan at the time do not really protect trademarks.] Examples of games using this technique include Video System’s (best known for the Aero Fighters arcade shmup series) Tail to Nose (based on the 1988 F1 season and also known as Super Formula in Japan), and Visco’s Drift Out. Of note, both games had sequels with licensed vehicles – Video System would later create licensed F1 games based on early and late 90s seasons, while Visco’s Drift Out was followed with Drift Out ’94: The Hard Order, that had licenses for all manufacturers (except Ford) and Neo Drift Out, the best known of all three due to the fact it was one of few racing games for the Neo-Geo platform and had licenses for all three Japanese WRC racers featured in the game.

This method was not free of repercussions. Tobacco giant Phillip Morris sued Sega because of the “Marlbobo” logos in early revisions of the arcade version of Super Monaco GP, primarily on grounds it was seen as marketing cigarettes to the youth. Sega was forced to issue a revised version of the game with many of the fake “sponsors” edited out; the title screen, which featured a Marlboro-sponsored McLaren car and a partially visible Marlboro ad, had to be edited as well.

The second method involved changing everything that belongs to the original cars (usually race car sponsors) with something original, and invented by the developer, while keeping the livery intact – this is usually done only on the race cars. This tactic was probably as closest I can to describe what Reiza did; apart from that, a small, obscure developer, Prism Arts, released two arcade rally racers, Rally de Africa and Rally de Europe, both for PlayStation and only in Japan. Both games featured various rally cars that have the body and the livery of the original cars, but all sponsor decals have been changed to those invented by the developer. (For example, the Diac logos on the Renault Megane Maxi were changed to Juno, etc). A similar act was done in Grand Prix Legends, after Sierra/Papyrus’ inability to secure Honda and Cooper licenses forced them to thinly disguise both teams as Murasama and Conventry, respectively.

I don’t know if this belongs to the first or the second method I described, but BATracer did something similar after the debacle with Ferrari that lead to the birth of Team Wales; every other manufacturer and team names were changed, most of them were play of the name of the originals. For instance, McLaren became McLewis, Red Bull became Red Bell, Toro Rosso became Roro Torso, Lotus became Sotul, etc.

Japanese racing games that deal with JDM cars, such as Shutokou Battle (Tokyo Xtreme Racer) series, play it differently. Most of them opt to just put the chassis codes of the car directly in their games, since every car nerd – their target audience – practically knew them and under assumption that those are not trademarked. AE86, BNR34, NA1, CE9A, GC8, FD3S, JZA80, EK9, S14, you name it. The risks were displayed when Crave, the company that localized the PS2 Shutokou Battle/Tokyo Xtreme Racer series (Genki developed them), was asked by Honda – a manufacturer that [at the time] has a flip-flopping stance against street racing (they were absent in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3/Shutokou Battle 01, the first game in the series with licensed cars – as well in the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series, yet appearing in Need for Speed Underground games, as well as the latest NFS title [NFS 2015], albeit late in the development) to rename their cars’ chassis codes to something unrecognizable, as well as redrawing the front box art of the game (recycled from TXR2 for Dreamcast; fitting since TXR0 is retelling of TXR2’s story) so that one of cover cars’ front fascia resembled the NSX less. (Unfortunately, not only the disc art went unchanged, they left a Honda chassis code unchanged: RF2, for Honda Stepwgn, a Japan-only MPV. Yes, you can play as an MPV in TXR0).

Yes, I mentioned lots of obscure racing games and yes, thinly disguising things when a developer doesn’t have the license is nothing new, and a carries a high legal risk.

A great write-up, and I can’t say I have much more to add. Any time a developer tries to interpret copyright laws in their own way, it turns into a giant game of roulette. Either they get away with it and it becomes a part of the game’s lore – as seen with Tokyo Xtreme Racer – or it gets a developer in deep shit, which is what most likely happened to Reiza Studios.

Retrospective Commentary

I forgot to mention one method of trademark skirting (or actually, one variation of the method) when road cars are involved: developers would take a car exactly it is and slap a made-up name on it. That’s what happened when the Honda chassis codes got renamed in TXR0, actually. Many cheaply developed racing games on Steam and mobile platforms go this route (as well as many Chinese developed arcade racing games). Look at the incident where the Mercedes Vision GT sneaks into to Dubai Drift.

Something to note, several months/years after I wrote this, Honda officially joined Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune’s car list in 5DX+ along with Lamborghini, although their appearance is currently restricted to NSX old and new.

Also in the end, Automobilista ended up recoloring some of the F1 cars (the not-McLarens now wear the Madonna colors from Super Monaco GP, probably since Brazilians love that game, for instance). And it’s actually easy to go back to old liveries... provided you keep backup of old liveries, or knew someone who uploads it.

Maybe next I can make a rogue’s gallery of those trademark skirtings...

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/instagram-drops-igtv-button-but-only-1-downloaded-the-app/

Instagram drops IGTV button, but only 1% downloaded the app

At most, 7 million of Instagram’s 1 billion-plus users have downloaded its standalone IGTV app in the 18 months since launch. And now, Instagram’s main app is removing the annoying orange IGTV button from its home page in what feels like an admission of lackluster results. For reference, TikTok received 1.15 billion downloads in the same period since IGTV launched in June 2018. In just the US, TikTok received 80.5 million downloads compared to IGTV’s 1.1 million since then, according to research commissioned by TechCrunch from Sensor Tower.

“As we’ve continued to work on making it easier for people to create and discover IGTV content, we’ve learned that most people are finding IGTV content through previews in Feed, the IGTV channel in Explore, creators’ profiles and the standalone app. Very few are clicking into the IGTV icon in the top right corner of the home screen in the Instagram app” a Facebook company spokesperson tells TechCrunch. “We always aim to keep Instagram as simple as possible, so we’re removing this icon based on these learnings and feedback from our community.”

Instagram users don’t need the separate IGTV app to watch longer videos, as the IGTV experience is embedded in the main app and can be accessed via in-feed teasers, a tab of the Explore page, promo stickers in Stories, and profile tabs. Still, the fact that it wasn’t an appealing enough destination to warrant a home page button shows IGTV hasn’t become a staple like past Instagram launches including video, Stories, augmented reality filters, or Close Friends.

One thing still missing is an open way for Instagram creators to earn money directly from their IGTV videos. Users can’t get an ad revenue share like with YouTube or Facebook Watch. They also can’t receive tips or sell exclusive content subscriptions like on Facebook, Twitch, or Patreon.

The only financial support Facebook and Instagram have offered IGTV creators is reimbursement for production costs for a few celebrities. Those contracts also require creators to avoid making content related to politics, social issues, or elections, according to Bloomberg‘s Lucas Shaw and Sarah Frier.

“In the last few years we’ve offset small production costs for video creators on our platforms and have put certain guidelines in place,” a Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We believe there’s a fundamental difference between allowing political and issue-based content on our platform and funding it ourselves.” That seems somewhat hypocritical given Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s criticism of Chinese app TikTok over censorship of political content.

Now users need to tap the IGTV tab inside Instagram Explore to view long-form videoAnother thing absent from IGTV? Large view counts. The first 20 IGTV videos I saw today in its Popular feed all had fewer than 200,000 views. BabyAriel, a creator with nearly 10 million Instagram followers that the company touted as a top IGTV creator has only post 20 of the longer videos to date with only one receiving over 500,000 views.

When the lack of monetization is combined with less than stellar view counts compared to YouTube and TikTok, it’s understandable why some creators might be hesistant to dedicate time to IGTV. Without their content keeping the feature reliably interesting, it’s no surprise users aren’t voluntarily diving in from the home page.

In another sign that Instagram is folding IGTV deeper into its app rather than providing it more breathing room of its own, and that it’s eager for more content, you can now opt to post IGTV videos right from the main Instagram feed post video uploader. AdWeek Social Pro reported this new “long video” upload option yesterday. A Facebook company spokesperson tells me “We want to keep our video upload process as simple as possible” and that “Our goal is to create a central place for video uploads”.

IGTV launched with a zealotish devotion to long-form vertical video despite the fact that little high quality content of this nature was being produced. Landscape orientation is helpful for longer clips that often require establishing shots and fitting multiple people on screen, while vertical was better for quick selfie monologues.

Yet Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described IGTV to me in August 2018, declaring that “What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Now it doesn’t exist on Instagram at all since May 2019 when IGTV retreated from its orthodoxy and began allowing landscape content. I’d recommended it do that from the beginning, or at least offer a cropping tool for helping users turn their landscape videos into coherent vertical ones, but nothing’s been launched there either.

If Instagram still cares about IGTV, it needs to attract more must-see videos by helping creators get paid for their art. Or it needs to pour investment into buying high quality programming like Snapchat Discover’s Shows. If Instagram doesn’t care, it should divert development resources to it’s TikTok clone Reels that actually looks very well made and has a shot at stealing market share in the remixable social entertainment space.

For a company that’s won by betting big and moving fast, IGTV feels half-baked and sluggish. That might have been alright when Snapchat was shrinking and TikTok was still Musically, but Instagram is heading into an era of much stiffer competition.

[antikripkean]

Post #101 + Tumblr Recap

I had intended for this to be my 100th post, but I changed my plans due to unexpected circumstances. The following will be a very Tumblr-esque thing: a rant about my feelings.

TW/Disclaimers: Long; potentially boring; lots of rambling. Might not be very organized. There may be cringe. This is not logically focused and is meant to describe subjective matters. The purpose of this is for me to vent and make my feelings available to anyone curious. It is not meant to offend or argue a point. People do not have to cater to the feelings presented below.

History

I have a lot to say about my Tumblr experience so far, and I might as well start with the creation of this blog. I first started using Tumblr on a separate account back when I was less interested in politics and had yet to discover the wonders of people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Blaire White. (Though I was already a fan of Martin Shkreli.) At that time, I thought more about other topics such as anime, books, and Undertale. All of these things still interest me; I doubt that will change anytime soon. Still, I had expected to devote most of my blogging to the world of fandom.

That did not go as expected. I wasn’t very active on that blog for a number of reasons; real life obligations, lack of familiarity with formatting, posts getting deleted when I tried to post on the mobile app without saving them, and being a perfectionist with tagging. Whenever I began a post, I wanted to make sure I got everything just right and would sometimes stare at a few sentences for quite a long time before uploading them, and to my dismay, they would sometimes get deleted. Also, I was worried about art theft; I wasn’t (and still am not) sure whether using existing artwork or a photo off the internet for a background or avatar constituted art theft. I didn't know what sort of feel I wanted for my blog either, so I was unsure about what to draw and which colors I should use. And I had no idea what to write for my blog title and description.

Other things which irrationally troubled me were liking, reblogging, and following people. I think these are supposed to be some of the most enjoyable parts of Tumblr, yet they all made me somewhat stressed. I wasn’t sure how much I should like a post before I “like” it since there doesn’t seem to be a way to sort “liked” posts. I wondered if I should “like” every post which gave me a positive mental reaction or only the ones which I considered personally meaningful. I doubt it matters to most people, but I wanted a consistent standard for myself. As for reblogging, I didn’t want to do it very often since I wanted my blog to be almost exclusively my own content. With regards to following people, I wasn’t sure whether to follow anyone whose content I liked or only people who almost exclusively posted content that interested me. I also wasn’t sure whether I was socially obligated to follow Tumblrs from people I knew in real life if their content generally wasn’t about topics I enjoyed. I’m still not very sure of these things and probably still would not be if someone decided to talk to me about it. I’m the type who constantly thinks of counterarguments, so I’d probably get stressed holding them in or annoy whoever would try to help me.

Another major thing was the social aspect. I’m not particularly social in real life and was aware that I could find many people who share my fandom-related interests on Tumblr. And there are a lot of fandom people here, but since I barely liked, reblogged, or followed people, I wasn’t particularly noticeable. People had little incentive to interact with me as well since I barely had any posts, and my Tumblr wasn’t particularly good looking. I have low social initiative, so I wouldn’t try to initiate conversation as well.

So what changed?

Well, I was gradually becoming more interested in politics, social justice, and futurism. I was curious about the state of the world and the direction it was going. I always loved exploring moral issues in fiction and had increasingly thought about the ones in reality as well. Plus I love science and liked thinking of how it would develop in the future; I thought it important that society prepare for the effects of new technology.

And then there’s feminism. Feminism wasn’t even the social issue which interested me the most, but it was one of the ones (along with transgenderism) which raised the most questions. I used to think of feminism as a good thing and associated it with women becoming able to do things such as vote, work, and be educated. And as a child, I was sometimes bullied for being a girl with more traditionally masculine interests. I thought feminism not only made significant social changes for the rights of women but also would support girls like me who were being treated unfairly for not conforming to a limited gender role.

Over time, I read more about feminism on the internet and discovered that some people thought it was a bad thing. This confused me; how could people not believe women deserve equal rights? Were people really that sexist? I looked into this antifeminism movement a bit more. Not enough to discover its prominent leaders just yet, but to see what the basic arguments against it were.

What I learned was that many people who are against feminism believe that women have equal rights already and that feminism teaches women that they are inherently victimized by society and should blame men. The antifeminists saying those things no longer appeared sexist to me, but I was still confused. I hadn’t heard from feminists that I was doomed to be a victim because I was a woman or that I should hate men. The only thing I saw wrong with feminism was that some feminists believed all feminists should be pro-choice.

I did some more research, and I found that some feminists do say such things. The feminist movement no longer seemed as equal as I thought. At that point, I still thought such feminists were in the minority and that feminism was still needed to help women get rights such as educational opportunities and having a choice in their spouse elsewhere in the world where there is less gender equality.

I ended up taking two classes which heavily involved feminism and other areas of social justice. One of them was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken; the other one, not so much. I began to empathize with the antifeminist movement even more. I started planning a Tumblr essay analyzing women who don’t need feminism and explaining how both antifeminists and feminists bring up good points and should try to effectively communicate with each other.

I came across a website called Everyday Feminism during this, probably when I was researching trans people. I was very skeptical about the concept, and I wanted to see if my mind could be changed. After watching one of the videos, I found a response video and decided to watch it as well. Thus I discovered Blaire White, who did change my mind with her explanation of gender dysphoria. I realized I had misunderstood what it was previously. I watched more of her videos, which got me interested in other people such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Shoe0nhead. I was red pilled, and I felt like a whole new world of different perspectives and ideas had opened up to me.

I felt compelled to write about these topics, but I thought my current blog wouldn’t be the best place to do so. People might not want to look at my fandom material if they didn’t agree with my political content. I thought the solution would be to create a side blog. And so I did.

This new blog was titled AntiKripkean, named after my commitment against Kripkean dogmatism. (Kripkean dogmatism is when people dismiss anything contrary to their view due to it being contrary in and of itself.) I drew a background tiled with Bill Cipher (to represent my love of fandoms and my appreciation for trollish characters in both fiction and reality), the female symbol (indicating I support equality for women and am open to discussing feminism and antifeminism), Pepe the frog (as a tribute to the positivity I felt in my life after discovering the anti-SJW movement), and hearts (since I also value compassion, empathy, love, and peace). This background was meant to indicate the bizarre mix of ideas floating around in my head and to celebrate a diversity of subject matters. I drew a peach with inverted colors to make it look somewhat frozen, indicating my support for free speech.

Unfortunately, I realized that side blogs lack some of the features present in main blogs. I didn’t want my blogs associated with one another, and I found that a side blog can’t follow or like. I ended up making a new main blog with the same background, name, and avatar then reposting all the content from the original AntiKripkean. Thankfully, I only had ten posts. Thus this blog was created.

General Feelings

My Tumblr experience so far is not quite what I thought it would be. One big difference is that I thought I would do a lot more essay-type posts. I have a few longish ones, but a large portion of my original content is Martin Shkreli fanart and Milo gifs. There could be many possible reasons for this. One is that I like producing that sort of content, especially considering there is barely any available. I suspect that I might not feel as motivated to draw or make gifs as often if there were plenty of them already; I’d probably be staring at them for an inordinate amount of time instead. Another possible reason is that essays take more planning on my behalf, and I often will reread the same few sentences over and over again way too many times. I would like to do more essay posts, but I plan to continue making fanart and gifs as well, perhaps of other people such as Blaire White and Laci Green as well.

Currently, I’m the most proud of this particular drawing of Martin Shkreli. My digital art skills have been improving. While it doesn’t have the most notes out of all my posts, In the last few days, it’s become my most popular post (thanks, haters), and I’m proud of that since I worked very hard on it, and I consider it my best work on this site so far. I think I did well with the shading and colors. I also think I did a good job capturing how biased the media is against him. I still can’t draw hands well, though... ^^;

On the topic of people I draw, it still surprises me to see my Tumblr pop up as one of the top search results on this site for both Martin Shkreli and Milo Yiannopoulos. I know I feel very positively about both of them, but to see it acknowledged on the internet on a major website still feels surreal. I suppose it makes sense considering that most people on Tumblr think negatively about both of these people, yet I didn’t expect myself or my efforts to support them to be significant enough to warrant my placement in the search results. I feel happy that my content is prominent for others interested in these people and proud of myself for making it this far, yet I also wish that there were other people producing similar content. I’ve enjoyed having fandoms constantly producing content for books and anime, yet with Martin and Milo, I’ve been having to make the content for myself and anyone else interested. And I really like making it, though it’s a bit lonely when almost no one else on Tumblr is doing it as well.

I have generally felt good on Tumblr, though. I would like to thank my sister, @rightwingbarbie, @brightsapphireseas, and my chatroom frriends with accounts here (you know who you are) for making me feel welcome here; I appreciate all of you very much. I didn’t expect to be treated with such kindness here, and I’m truly grateful for you. Thank you to my followers as well; you’re also amazing.  ♥

People haven’t been getting upset in the way I’d expect, either. I thought that people would respond negatively to me almost as soon as I’d post content about controversial figures, yet it actually took a bit longer. I woke up one day to a bunch of notes after barely getting any before, and I was very surprised to have gotten what seemed to me like a lot of attention. (I’m aware it isn’t a lot, but in comparison to what I had gotten previously.) I was more upset about people speaking negatively of Martin Shkreli and Milo Yiannopoulos than people insulting me; I’m sick of lies about them being spread around all over the place. Still, it was somewhat amusing that people could get so upset over some drawings. And some people claimed to want me to die, which I’m not quite sure how to feel about. I’m cynically amused by the hypocrisy and double standards with regards to internet etiquette, but I’m a bit sad that people can be so close-minded. A lot of the people critical of me might be generally good people, and I don’t want to assume that anyone who disagrees with me, even if they do so rudely, is automatically a bad person. (I also want to add that I don’t draw controversial people to trigger SJWs; I do so to show my support for them. If people get triggered, so be it.)

I’m willing to talk to people even if they disagree with me, and I welcome ask box content. :)

The Past Few Days

When I realized that I had hit 99 posts, I began writing what you see here: a summary of my Tumblr experience and my ideas for the future of this blog. Due to an unexpected event a few days ago, there was a change of plans. I decided to dedicate my 100th post to Martin Shkreli instead. I can and will write a lot more about my feelings for what happened, but to stick with the theme of this post, this will be a recap of how it’s affected me on Tumblr.

I spent a few hours writing and editing Post #100, and Tumblr reacted to my previous posts more quickly than I can type. My art posts, or my favorite one in particular, were flooded with notes. (On the bright side, that post became the one with the most notes, which is what I’d wanted.) Many of the responses were negative, both towards Martin and myself.

Since Martin’s arrest, I’d get so many notes. My screen would light up with notifications all day. While most people would probably be happy about getting a lot of notes, my feelings were more complex.

The main thing was that I felt overwhelmed. I want and plan to respond to many of the comments and reblogs I’ve received, but there were so many to keep track of. I also wanted to finish my tribute to Martin and this post so they could respectively be Post #100 and Post #101. There are many claims I want to address. At least by the time this gets out I can begin to respond.

I’m aware that I could feel less overwhelmed by turning off my notifications, but I want to be fully aware of the impact of my actions and not cut myself off from knowing the consequences. Even if it can get distracting and overwhelming, I want to experience it regardless of whether I like it.

Also, it saddens me when people insult Martin. Whether or not it bothers him, to me, it’s an indication of the malice and ignorance present in society. I don’t think Martin is perfect and some may find him unlikable, yet almost all the criticism I see for him involves double standards or is founded on misleading premises and/or blatant lies. If people are to hate him, they should at least have a proper understanding of why. Still, an understanding of him could lead to them becoming fans, like it did in my case.

I’m not as bothered when people insult me. It doesn’t make me feel worthless or guilty; in fact, it strengthens my resolve. Some people have criticized me respectfully, but many of the negative comments are rife with profanity and lacking in logic. This is likely because they were posted with the intent of expressing negative emotions, not starting a dialogue or persuading me to change my mind. I respect people’s freedom of speech to do this, but it only goes to show that they prioritize their own feelings and degrading mine over rational discourse. And I’m not saying all of my critics are like this, but the more rational replies are unfortunately limited. It makes them as a whole seem rather unkind and lacking in the critical thinking department, and it’s giving me delusions of grandeur. I’ve been reminding myself that I’ve messed up in the past as well, and these people might be kind and intelligent in other areas of life.

I started looking through my reblogs after finishing Post #100 so I could determine who to respond to. While reading the responses and tags, I also noticed other things on people’s blogs. I feel like many of the people don’t quite see what they’re doing. I recall some of them specifically stating in their descriptions that they are nice and want to help others. This leads me to think that they might generally be (or at least imagine themselves to be) this way, yet they perceive me as a negative being undeserving of this component of their personalities. Some of them share things in common with me such as being demisexual, loving animals, and being fascinated by MBTI. Many of them are also fandom people. As a fan myself, I’m a bit disappointed by their behavior. While I recognize that liking something doesn’t mean one has to agree with or like everything about it, fandoms have influenced me to see people as deserving of respect, to look beyond public opinion, and to try to empathize with and understand others. It seems kind of wrong to me that Undertale fans won’t show mercy (and yes, I know there’s a genocide route), Game of Thrones fans disregard individual complexity, and FMA fans act as if people they don’t like have no value. Yet I try to see them as people, not just hateful text on a screen. But some can be very cruel.

There have even been threats and incitement of violence towards Martin himself. I doubt any of the people doing this pose a real danger, but this still goes against Tumblr’s community guidelines. I’m not referring to the people who say he has a punchable face or that they wouldn’t mind if (or even hope that) harm befalls him. I’m talking about people who say they will harm Martin or are requesting that others do so. I’m pondering whether I should report these people; ironically, the main things holding me back are the words of the people they hate. I want to give these people the mercy that Martin did not receive, and Milo has said that people should not have their lives destroyed over jokes, and I think these threats may have been intended as jokes. (Though Milo did say that threats and inciting violence do not constitute free speech.) I’m not sure what the consequences would be for these people if I reported them, and I don’t want them to be banned from Tumblr, subjected to legal investigation, or thrown in jail. I think they should have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes, and I’m not sure how Tumblr would handle the situation.

People have also been telling me to kill myself. I’m thankfully not suicidal, but if I were, I wonder how these people would feel and what would happen to them if I really did take their suggestion. I want to respect their freedom of speech, but I really don’t like that they’re saying this because they may get in the habit of it (if they aren’t already) and end up telling it to someone who’d actually do it. I don’t know whether this is covered under freedom of speech, but it’s an awful thing to say. Words have consequences. And for anyone reading this, please know that your life matters. If someone tells you to kill yourself, don’t do it; you are precious, and your life has meaning. And on a side note, Martin mentioned before that he wanted to develop a drug to treat suicidality. So not only are people urging me to commit suicide; they are taking a stand against someone who wants to help suicidal people.

I haven’t received anywhere near as much negativity as others, yet for me, it appeared to be a lot in comparison to my previous experiences on the internet. I was fully aware that this could happen, though. I’m not quite sure if what’s happening to me constitutes harassment; I haven’t blocked anyone no matter what they’ve said to me. (Yet some have left me hateful messages and blocked ME when I didn’t even say anything to them.) While I dislike what people are saying, I want to be aware of it, and I respect their freedom to say it. I also want to be able to have respectful discussions with those who are willing.

Future Content

I really think I should make a FAQ page, disclaimer list, an about me page, and a tag index. That may be useful to some people.

I also will be drawing more fanart and making more gifs, but for now, I plan to do longer text posts, with evidence to support my viewpoints. It will probably take a while to both write these posts and do my research, but I think it would be more useful if I produced more intellectual content.

I’d also like to cover more topics including but not limited to the environment, the abortion debate, feminism, futurism, racism, my personal experiences with political discussion, mental health, parallels and differences between fiction and reality, representation in fiction, cultural appropriation, reviews and responses to other content, SJWs, trolling, and the importance of lingual clarity. And I side with liberals on some issues and conservatives on others, so I plan to discuss my Leftist opinions as well. Yet for now, expect a lot more posts about Milo and Martin.

I’m not quite sure how to end this, but I hope my presence on Tumblr can benefit others as well as myself. I’d like to be able to start some discussion about various issues and help people who need advice. I look forward to posting more content.

And thanks to anyone who read through this entire mess of a post. ♥

[localbizlift]

Instagram’s vertical IGTV surrenders to landscape status quo

A year ago Instagram made a bold bet with the launch of IGTV: That it could invent and popularize a new medium of long-form vertical videos. Landscape uploads weren’t allowed. Co-founder Kevin Systrom told me in August that “What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Now a dedicated hub for multi-minute portrait mode video won’t exist anywhere at all. Following lackluster buy-in from creators loathe to shoot in a proprietary format that’s tough to reuse, IGTV is retreating from its vertical-only policy. Starting today, users can upload traditional horizontal landscape videos too and they’ll be shown full-screen when users turn their phones sideways while watching IGTV’s standalone app or its hub within the main Instagram app. That should hopefully put an end to crude ports of landscape videos shown tiny with giant letterboxes slapped on to soak up the vertical screen.

Instagram spins it saying “Ultimately, our vision is to make IGTV a destination for great content no matter how it’s shot so creators can express themselves how they want . . . .  In many ways, opening IGTV to more than just vertical videos is similar to when we opened Instagram to more than just square photos in 2015. It enabled creativity to flourish and engagement to rise – and we believe the same will happen again with IGTV.”

Last year I suggested IGTV might have to embrace landscape after a soggy start. “Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources” I wrote.

The coming influx of repurposed YouTube videos could drive more creators and their fans to IGTV. To date there have been no break-out stars, must-see shows, or cultural zeitgeist moments on IGTV. Instagram refused to provide a list of the most viewed long-form clips. Sensor Tower estimates just 4.2 million installs to date for IGTV’s standalone app, amounting to less than half a percent of Instagram’s billion-plus users downloading the app. It saw 3.8 times more downloads per day in its first three months on the market than than last month. The iOS app sank to No. 191 on the US – Photo & Video app charts, according to App Annie, and didn’t make the overall chart.

Instagram has tried several changes to reinvigorate IGTV already. It started allowing creators to share IGTV previews to the main Instagram feed that’s capped at sixty seconds. Users can tap through those to watch full clips of up to sixty minutes on IGTV, which has helped to boost view counts for video makers like BabyAriel. And earlier this week we reported that IGTV had been quietly redesigned to ditch its category tabs for a central feed of videos that relies more on algorithmic recommendations like TikTok and a two-wide vertical grid of previews to browse like Snapchat Discover.

But Instagram has still refused to add what creators have been asking for since day one: monetization. Without ways to earn a cut of ad revenue, accept tips, sign up users to a monthly patronage subscription, or sell merchandise, it’s been tough to justify shooting a whole premium video in vertical. Producing in landscape would make creators money on YouTube and possibly elsewhere. Now at least creators can shoot once and distribute to IGTV and other apps, which could fill out the feature with content before it figures out monetization.

For viewers and the creators they love, IGTV’s newfound flexibility is a positive. But I can’t help but think this is Instagram’s first truly massive misstep. Nine months after safely copying Snapchat Stories in 2016, Instagram was happy to tout it had 200 million daily users. The company still hasn’t released a single usage stat about IGTV usage. Perhaps after seemingly defeating Snap, Instagram thought it was invincible and could dictate how and what video artists create. But the Facebook pet proved fallible after all. The launch and subsequent rethinking should serve as a lesson. Even the biggest platforms can’t demand people produce elaborate proprietary content for nothing in return but “exposure”.

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

[pmsocialmedia]

Instagram’s vertical IGTV surrenders to landscape status quo

A year ago Instagram made a bold bet with the launch of IGTV: That it could invent and popularize a new medium of long-form vertical videos. Landscape uploads weren’t allowed. Co-founder Kevin Systrom told me in August that “What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else.”

Now a dedicated hub for multi-minute portrait mode video won’t exist anywhere at all. Following lackluster buy-in from creators loathe to shoot in a proprietary format that’s tough to reuse, IGTV is retreating from its vertical-only policy. Starting today, users can upload traditional horizontal landscape videos too and they’ll be shown full-screen when users turn their phones sideways while watching IGTV’s standalone app or its hub within the main Instagram app. That should hopefully put an end to crude ports of landscape videos shown tiny with giant letterboxes slapped on to soak up the vertical screen.

Instagram spins it saying “Ultimately, our vision is to make IGTV a destination for great content no matter how it’s shot so creators can express themselves how they want . . . .  In many ways, opening IGTV to more than just vertical videos is similar to when we opened Instagram to more than just square photos in 2015. It enabled creativity to flourish and engagement to rise – and we believe the same will happen again with IGTV.”

Last year I suggested IGTV might have to embrace landscape after a soggy start. “Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources” I wrote.

The coming influx of repurposed YouTube videos could drive more creators and their fans to IGTV. To date there have been no break-out stars, must-see shows, or cultural zeitgeist moments on IGTV. Instagram refused to provide a list of the most viewed long-form clips. Sensor Tower estimates just 4.2 million installs to date for IGTV’s standalone app, amounting to less than half a percent of Instagram’s billion-plus users downloading the app. It saw 3.8 times more downloads per day in its first three months on the market than than last month. The iOS app sank to No. 191 on the US – Photo & Video app charts, according to App Annie, and didn’t make the overall chart.

Instagram has tried several changes to reinvigorate IGTV already. It started allowing creators to share IGTV previews to the main Instagram feed that’s capped at sixty seconds. Users can tap through those to watch full clips of up to sixty minutes on IGTV, which has helped to boost view counts for video makers like BabyAriel. And earlier this week we reported that IGTV had been quietly redesigned to ditch its category tabs for a central feed of videos that relies more on algorithmic recommendations like TikTok and a two-wide vertical grid of previews to browse like Snapchat Discover.

But Instagram has still refused to add what creators have been asking for since day one: monetization. Without ways to earn a cut of ad revenue, accept tips, sign up users to a monthly patronage subscription, or sell merchandise, it’s been tough to justify shooting a whole premium video in vertical. Producing in landscape would make creators money on YouTube and possibly elsewhere. Now at least creators can shoot once and distribute to IGTV and other apps, which could fill out the feature with content before it figures out monetization.

For viewers and the creators they love, IGTV’s newfound flexibility is a positive. But I can’t help but think this is Instagram’s first truly massive misstep. Nine months after safely copying Snapchat Stories in 2016, Instagram was happy to tout it had 200 million daily users. The company still hasn’t released a single usage stat about IGTV usage. Perhaps after seemingly defeating Snap, Instagram thought it was invincible and could dictate how and what video artists create. But the Facebook pet proved fallible after all. The launch and subsequent rethinking should serve as a lesson. Even the biggest platforms can’t demand people produce elaborate proprietary content for nothing in return but “exposure”.

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

via Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2VNyOoY

[precise-desolation]

[[Okay, guys.  I am slowly, slowly working my way through drafts.  I’ve been mostly over on my Doctor Who blogs lately.  What with the reveal of the Thirteenth Doctor’s actress (yes, actress; I am excited) and with having finally watched Scream of the Shalka recently, I’ve kind of thrown myself headlong back into that fandom.  I haven’t consistently watched the show since sometime in undergrad.  Mostly because I didn’t get BBCA, but also because I just got so fed up with Eleven and his companions who were puzzles rather than people that I didn’t feel like making the effort to keep up anymore. 

And I am very long-winded and also a huge Whovian, so I will put the rest of my rambling under a read-more.

But my roommate and I are watching New Who (we started with Nine because he’d never seen any Doctor Who) and Twelve has given me hope.  Watching Clara change when she was with Twelve verses when she was with Eleven is like night and day.  Takes a few episodes, but it’s like “Wow, you’re actually a human being with actual flaws and strengths and feelings and not just an enigma with no personality.”  I do rather agree with the theory that Peter Capaldi came in and led a revolt and somewhere along the lines they just tied Moffat up and shoved him in a broom closet, because the writing did basically a complete 180.  It still has its issues, to be sure, but it’s amazing the differences.

I’ve also, as I said, watched Scream of the Shalka finally.  It’s part of the Doctor Who Extended Universe (or EU) and hails from the time after the movie but before New Who when BBC was almost certain they would never get the show back on air.  Their solution?  The internet.  It’s this very short six part flash animated story arc featuring a new Doctor and Master.  Of course, if you’re familiar with the movie, the Master dies at the end.  But more specifically, he falls into the Eye of Harmony, which is basically the heart of the TARDIS.  That bit is important.  And then at the very end of the movie, the Eighth Doctor receives a message about a war between the Time Lords and the Daleks and returns to Gallifrey to lend whatever aid he can.

Of course, that movie was supposed to bring the show back on air.  (I remember my dad losing it over that.  Have I mentioned I was raised by utter nerds?)  But it just kinda... didn’t.  That was the only thing Eight ever appeared in on screen until Night of the Doctor, the short prequel to the 50th anniversary special, Day of the Doctor.  A full seventeen years later.  (Although they did do another flash animated short featuring the Eighth Doctor around the same time as Scream of the Shalka.)  Now, this was back in the day before YouTube.  Yes, there was an internet before YouTube.  We had things like NewGrounds and Albino Black Sheep.  Which featured a shitton of flash animated videos.  I remember this because I am old.  But in keeping up with the tech of the day, they flash animated these arcs.  Which can make them a bit odd to watch if you aren’t used to that.

Scream of the Shalka, though...  It introduced the first Ninth Doctor and a new version of the Master.  This iteration was later replaced in the primary canon by Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor when New Who started.  There are some striking similarities in the two, but also a world of difference.  Eccleston’s Nine was very much a soldier who had seen too much of war.  That was true, too, of Shalka Nine.  However, the Shalka Doctor was much, much closer in characterization to the Classic Who Doctors.  I think the only New Who Doctor who has come even remotely close is Twelve, but even there the differences between Old and New are steep.  There’s a huge difference, too, in the characterization of the Master between Old and New Who.  Again, I’d say the closest to the Classic Who characterization is Missy.  So it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the dynamic between Twelve and Missy is also the closest to the dynamic between the Master and Doctor of Classic Who out of all the Masters and Doctors of New Who.  But the Shalka Doctor and Master retain that very definite “best frienemies” sort of relationship.  They act like an old married couple, assuming that married couple consists of a psychopath who enjoys making the other’s day miserable in tiny, petty ways and also occasionally poisoning their food and a put-upon “responsible” partner who runs around the universe cleaning up the other’s messes.

So some of the things I’ve mentioned earlier should make it no surprise that I grew up on Classic Who reruns.  My father actually wanted to name me after one of the Fifth Doctor’s companions, that is the extent to which this has been involved in my life.  I watched primarily Four and Six growing up, but did see bits and pieces of the others.  And one thing I have always loved is the relationship between the Doctor and Master.  It’s dysfunctional as all hell and most definitely not healthy, but it’s also interesting and oddly charming.  Mostly, I think, for their snark and pettiness over ridiculous things at some times but their genuine concern for one another at others.  And they did care for one another, no matter how disturbing the manner in which that care and affection was expressed.  They had been close friends since childhood, a point which is addressed in both Classic and New Who as well as extensively explored in the EU.  Their relationship was dynamic and layered and interesting to watch unfold.

Scream of the Shalka retains that.  As I said earlier, at the end of the movie, the Master dies by way of falling into the Eye of Harmony.  The heart of the TARDIS.  The TARDIS is no ordinary ship, though.  It’s sentient.  It is essentially a living, intelligent being that grows and changes and expresses opinions and makes decisions.  It just also happens to be a bio-mechanical entity.  And it exists across all of space and time simultaneously, which is how it’s able to travel the way it does.  So basically what you have, then, is a living mobile supercomputer.  Another detail about Time Lords is that when they die, their consciousness is uploaded into a huge database, called the Matrix.  (No, I could not make that up if I tried.)  Time Lord technology.  So it stands to reason that if Time Lords can upload their consciousness into what amounts to a really advanced computer data base, then a sentient supercomputer of a species that has co-evolved with and been heavily influenced by Time Lords would be able to do the same thing.  This is why the manner of the Master’s death is significant.  He fell into the heart of the TARDIS.  His physical body would have been destroyed, as the Eye of Harmony is basically a star trapped in an endless sate of decay.  But I see no reason why his consciousness, which basically amounts to electrical impulses, couldn’t have been uploaded by the TARDIS.

So if he was destroyed, how is he present?  Well, that’s not terribly clear.  You see, all we really have, at least in a film format, of the Shalka Doctor and Master is six, fifteen minute episodes.  Not a whole lot of time for backstory.  However, two things are revealed that are extremely significant.  The first is that the Doctor is apparently not able to travel freely.  Someone - ostensibly the Gallifreyan High Counsel, since it’s not addressed whether or not Gallifrey survived the war in this timeline and the Doctor was living as a fugitive prior to the war - seems to be controlling or limiting his and his TARDIS’s ability to move within the Time Vortex, just based on his dialogue.  So he is seemingly a prisoner in his own TARDIS.  That does make the Master’s presence make more sense.  Evidently, at some point the Doctor was either so desperate for company or missed his friend so badly that he built an android fashioned after the Master.  (He appears to be a blend of Delgado and Jacobi.)  One would have to assume, then, that he was also able to download the Master’s consciousness from the TARDIS into the android.  Now, the Doctor is many things, but an idiot is not one of them.  Letting the Master back out to roam the universe, this time in a body made of circuitry rather than soft, vulnerable flesh, would be a terrible mistake.  The Doctor may be fond of the Master, perhaps even love him, but he is also aware that the Master is dangerous.  Because of this, he has fail-safes built in that don’t allow him to leave the TARDIS and that give the Doctor the ability to switch him off if need be.

And if you’re wondering, I do have good reason for thinking all of these things.  As far as the Doctor and Master’s relationship, when the Master is first introduced in Scream of the Shalka, he tells Alisha that “I pride myself that I am the dearest companion of the owner of this craft.”  Fast forward to New Who and we have a scene where Missy gifts the Twelfth Doctor a legion of cybermen so that they can conquer the universe together.  The Tenth Doctor tries to get the Master to abandon his scheming and run away with him to see the universe together.  Their close, if horrendously fucked up, relationship is a well documented fact of the Whoniverse.

And then there’s the situation with the Doctor’s ability to travel and with the Master’s reappearance as an android.  In one of the first scenes of Shalka, the Doctor is seen seemingly shouting at the sky that “I won’t do it!”  It’s worth noting that at this point he doesn’t even know what “it” is.  He basically walked out of his TARDIS, went ‘this is not the time/place I was looking for,’ and then declares he won’t do it.  “It” ends up being saving humanity.  Again.  As to the Master, given what we know of Time Lord tech, the nature of TARDISes, and the manner of his most recent death, it’s really the only logical answer.

And I don’t even remember where I was going with all of this, but it’s a quarter to 3am.  So I am going to go sleep now before I ramble for another two pages or so.]]

[workfromhom]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

from Facebook – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2o9VBgD via IFTTT

[un-enfant-immature]

For IGTV, Instagram needs slow to mean steady

Instagram has never truly failed at anything, but judging by modest initial view counts, IGTV could get stuck with a reputation as an abandoned theater if the company isn’t careful. It’s no flop, but the long-form video hub certainly isn’t an instant hit like Instagram Stories. Two months after that launched in 2016, Instagram was happy to trumpet how its Snapchat clone had hit 100 million users. Yet two months after IGTV’s launch, the Facebook subsidiary has been silent on its traction.

“It’s a new format. It’s different. We have to wait for people to adopt it and that takes time,” Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me. “Think of it this way: we just invested in a startup called IGTV, but it’s small, and it’s like Instagram was ‘early days.'”

It’s indeed too early for a scientific analysis, and Instagram’s feed has been around since 2010, so it’s obviously not a fair comparison, but we took a look at the IGTV view counts of some of the feature’s launch partner creators. Across six of those creators, their recent feed videos are getting roughly 6.8X as many views as their IGTV posts. If IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot, it means there’s likely no free view count bonanza in store from other creators or regular users.

They, and IGTV, will have to work for their audience. That’s already proving difficult for the standalone IGTV app. Though it peaked at the #25 overall US iPhone app and has seen 2.5 million downloads across iOS and Android according to Sensor Tower, it’s since dropped to #1497 and seen a 94 percent decrease in weekly installs to just 70,000 last week.

Instagram will have to be in it for the long haul if it wants to win at long-form video. Entering the market 13 years after YouTube with a vertical format no one’s quite sure what to do with, IGTV must play the tortoise. If it can avoid getting scrapped or buried, and offer the right incentives and flexibility to creators, IGTV could deliver the spontaneous video viewing experience Instagram lacks. Otherwise, IGTV risks becoming the next Google Plus — a ghost town inside an otherwise thriving product ecosystem.

A glitzy, glitchy start

Instagram gave IGTV a red carpet premiere June 20th in hopes of making it look like the new digital hotspot. The San Francisco launch event offered attendees several types of avocado toast, spa water and ‘Gram-worthy portrait backdrops reminiscent of the Color Factory or Museum of Ice Cream. Instagram hadn’t held a flashy press event since the 2013 launch of video sharing, so it pulled out all the stops. Balloon sculptures lined the entrance to a massive warehouse packed with social media stars and ad execs shouting to each other over the din of the DJ.

But things were rocky from the start. Leaks led TechCrunch to report on the IGTV name and details in the preceding weeks. Technical difficulties with Systrom’s presentation pushed back the start, but not the rollout of IGTV’s code. Tipster Jane Manchun Wong sent TechCrunch screenshots of the new app and features a half hour before it was announced, and Instagram’s own Business Blog jumped the gun by posting details of the launch. The web already knew how IGTV would let people upload vertical videos up to an hour long and browse them through categories like “Popular” and “For You” by the time Systrom took the stage.

IGTV’s launch event featured Instagram-themed donuts and elaborate portrait backdrops. Images via Vicki’s Donuts and Mai Lanpham

“What I’m most proud of is that Instagram took a stand and tried a brand new thing that is frankly hard to pull off. Full-screen vertical video that’s mobile only. That doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Systrom tells me. It was indeed ambitious. Creators were already comfortable making short-form vertical Snapchat Stories by the time Instagram launched its own version. IGTV would have to start from scratch.

Systrom sees the steep learning curve as a differentiator, though. “One of the things I like most about the new format is that it’s actually fairly difficult to just take videos that exist online and simply repost them. That’s not true in feed. That basically forces everyone to create new stuff,” Systrom tells me. “It’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff on there but in general it incentivizes people to produce new things from scratch. And that’s really what we’re looking for. Even if the volume of that stuff at the beginning is smaller than what you might see on the popular page [of Instagram Explore].”

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom unveils IGTV at the glitzy June 20th launch event

Instagram forced creators to adopt this proprietary format. But it forget to train Stories stars how to entertain us for five or 15 minutes, not 15 seconds, or convince landscape YouTube moguls to purposefully shoot or crop their clips for the way we normally hold our phones.

IGTV’s Popular page features plenty of random viral pap, foreign language content, and poor cropping

That should have been the real purpose of the launch party — demonstrating a variety of ways to turn these format constraints or lack thereof into unique content. Vertical video frames people better than places, and the length allows sustained eye-to-lens contacts that can engender an emotional connection. But a shallow array of initial content and too much confidence that creators would figure it out on their own deprived IGTV of emergent norms that other videographers could emulate to wet their feet.

Now IGTV feels haphazard, with trashy viral videos and miscropped ports amongst its Popular section alongside a few creators trying to produce made-for-IGTV talk shows and cooking tutorials. It’s yet to have its breakout “Chewbacca Mom” or “Rubberbanded Watermelon” blockbuster like Facebook Live. Even an interview with mega celeb Kylie Jenner only had 11,000 views.

Instagram wants to put the focus on the author, not the individual works of art. “Because we don’t have full text search and you can’t just search any random thing, it’s about the creators” Systrom explains. “I think that at its base level that it’s personality driven and creator driven means that you’re going to get really unique content that you won’t find anywhere else and that’s the goal.”

Yet being unique requires extra effort that creators might not invest if they’re unsure of the payoff in either reach or revenue. Michael Sayman, formerly Facebook’s youngest employee who was hired at age 17 to build apps for teens and who now works for Google, summed it up saying: “Many times in my own career, I’ve tried to make something with a unique spin or a special twist because I felt that’s the only way I could make my product stand out from the crowd, only to realize that it was those very twists and spins that made my products feel out of place and confusing to users. Sometimes, the best product is one that doesn’t create any new twists, but rather perfects and builds on top of what has been proven to already be extremely successful.”

A fraction of feed views

The one big surprise of the launch event was where IGTV would exist. Instagram announced it’d live in a standalone IGTV app, but also as a feature in the main app accessible from an orange button atop the home screen that would occasionally call out that new content was inside. But in essence, it was ignorable. IGTV didn’t get the benefit of being splayed out atop Instagram like Stories did. Blow past that one button and avoid downloading the separate app, and users could go right on tapping and scrolling through Instagram without coming across IGTV’s longer videos.

View counts of the launch partners reflect that. We looked at six launch partner creators, comparing their last six feed and IGTV videos older than a week and less than six months old, or fewer videos if that’s all they’d posted.

Only one of the six, BabyAriel, saw an obvious growth trend in her IGTV videos. Her candid IGTV monologues are performing the best of the six compared to feed. She’s earning an average of 243,000 views per IGTV video, about a third as many as she gets on her feed videos. “I’m really happy with my view counts because IGTV is just starting” BabyAriel tells me. She thinks the format will be good for behind-the-scenes clips that complement her longer YouTube videos and shorter Stories. “When I record anything, It’s vertical. When I turn my phone horizontal I think of an hour-long movie.”

Lele Pons, a Latin American comedy and music star who’s one of the most popular Instagram celebrities, gets about 5.7X more feed views than on her IGTV cooking show that averages 1.9 million hits. Instagram posted some IGTV highlights from the first month, but the most popular of now has 4.3 million views — less than half of what Pons gets on her average feed video.

Fitness guides from Katie Austin averaged just 3,600 views on IGTV while she gets 7.5X more in the feed. Lauren Godwin’s colorful comedy fared 5.2X better in the feed. Bryce Xavier saw the biggest differential, earning 15.9X more views for his dance and culture videos. And in the most direct comparison, K-Pop dancer Susie Shu sometimes posts cuts from the same performance to the two destinations, like one that got 273,000 views in feed but just 27,000 on IGTV, with similar clips fairing an average of 7.8X better.

Again, this isn’t to say IGTV is a lame horse. It just isn’t roaring out of the gates. Systrom remains optimistic about inventing a new format. “The question is can we pull that off and the early signs are really good,” he tells me. “We’ve been pretty blown away by the reception and the usage upfront,” though he declined to share any specific statistics. Instagram promised to provide more insight into traction in the future.

YouTube star Casey Neistat is less bullish. He doesn’t think IGTV is working and that engagement has been weak. If IGTV views were surpassing those of YouTube, creators would flock to it, but so far view counts are uninspiring and not worth diverting creative attention, Neistat says. “YouTube offers the best sit-back consumption, and Stories offers active consumption. Where does IGTV fit in? I’m not sure” he tells me. “Why create all of this unique content if it gets lower views, it’s not monetizable, and the viewers aren’t there?”

Susie Shu averages 7.8X more video views in the Instagram feed than on IGTV

For now, the combination of an unfamiliar format, the absence of direction for how to use it and the relatively buried placement has likely tempered IGTV’s traction. Two months in, Instagram Stories was proving itself an existential threat to Snapchat — which it’s in fact become. IGTV doesn’t pose the same danger to YouTube yet, and it will need a strategy to support a more slow-burn trajectory.

The chicken and the IG problem

The first step to becoming a real YouTube challenger is to build up some tent-pole content that gives people a reason to open IGTV. Until there’s something that captures attention, any cross-promotion traffic Instagram sends it will be like pouring water into a bucket with a giant hole in the bottom. Yet until there’s enough viewers, it’s tough to persuade creators to shoot for IGTV since it won’t do a ton to boost their fan base.

Fortnite champion Ninja shares a photo of IGTV launch partners gathered backstage at the press event

Meanwhile, Instagram hasn’t committed to a monetization or revenue-sharing strategy for IGTV. Systrom said at the launch that “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” but noted it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” Without enough views, though, ads won’t earn enough for a revenue split to incentivize creators. Perhaps Instagram will heavily integrate its in-app shopping features and sponsored content partnerships, but even those rely on having more traffic. Vine withered at Twitter in part from creators bailing due to its omission of native monetization options.

So how does IGTV solve the chicken-and-egg problem? It may need to swallow its pride and pay early adopters directly for content until it racks up enough views to offer sustainable revenue sharing. Instagram has never publicly copped to paying for content before, unlike its parent Facebook, which offered stipends ranging into the millions of dollars for publishers to shoot Live broadcasts and long-form Watch shows. Neither have led to a booming viewership, but perhaps that’s because Facebook has lost its edge with the teens who love video.

Instagram could do better if it paid the right creators to weather IGTV’s initial slim pickings. Settling on ad strategy creators can count on earning money from in the future might also get them to hang tight. Those deals could mimic the 55 percent split of mid-roll ad breaks Facebook gives creators on some videos. But again, the views must come first.

Alternatively, or additionally, it could double down on the launch strategy of luring creators with the potential to become the big fish in IGTV’s small-for-now pond. Backroom deals to trade being highlighted in its IGTV algorithm in exchange for high-quality content could win the hearts of these stars and their managers. Instagram would be wise to pair these incentives with vertical long-form video content creation workshops. It could bring its community, product and analytics leaders together with partnered stars to suss out what works best in the format and help them shoot it.

The cross-promo spigot

Once there’s something worth watching on IGTV, the company could open the cross-promo traffic spigot. At first, Instagram would send notifications about top content or IGTV posts from people you follow, and call them out with a little orange text banner atop its main app. Now it seems to understand it will need to be more coercive.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted Instagram showing promos for individual IGTV shows in the middle of the feed, hoping to redirect eyeballs there. And today, we found Instagram getting more aggressive by putting a bigger call out featuring a relevant IGTV clip with preview image above your Stories tray on the home screen. It may need to boost the frequency of these cross-promotions and stick them in-between Stories and Explore sections as well to give IGTV the limelight. These could expose users to creators they don’t follow already but might enjoy.

“It’s still early but I do think there’s a lot of potential when they figure out two things since the feature is so new,” says John Shahidi, who runs the Justin Bieber-backed Shots Studios, which produces and distributes content for Lele Pons, Rudy Mancuso and other Insta celebs. “1. Product. IGTV is not in your face so Instagram users aren’t changing behavior to consume. Timeline and Instagram Stories are in your face so those two are the most used features. 2. Discoverability. I want to see videos from people I don’t follow. Interesting stuff like cooking, product review, interesting content from brands but without following the accounts.” In the meantime, Shots Studios is launching a vertical-only channel on YouTube that Shahidi believes is the first of its kind.

Instagram will have to balance its strategic imperative to grow the long-form video hub and avoid spamming users until they hate the brand as a whole. Some think it’s already gone too far. “I think it’s super intrusive right now,” says Tiffany Zhong, once known as the world’s youngest venture capitalist who now runs Generation Z consulting firm Zebra Intelligence. “I personally find all the IGTV videos super boring and click out within seconds (and the only time I watch them are if I accidentally tapped on the icon when I tried to go to my DMs instead).” Desperately funneling traffic to the feature before there’s enough great content to power relevant recommendations for everyone could prematurely sour users on IGTV. 

Systrom remains optimistic he can iterate his way to success. “What I want to see over the next six to 12 months is a consistent drumbeat of new features that both consumers and creators are asking for, and to look at the retention curve and say ‘are people continuing to watch? Are people continuing to upload?,'” says Systrom. “So far we are seeing that all of those are healthy. But again trying to judge a very new kind of audacious format that’s never really been done before in the first months is going to be really hard.”

Differentiator or deterrent?

The biggest question remains whether IGTV will remain devout to the orthodoxy of vertical-only. Loosening up to accept landscape videos too might nullify a differentiator, but also pipe in a flood of content it could then algorithmically curate to bootstrap IGTV’s library. Reducing the friction by allowing people to easily port content to or from elsewhere might make it feel like less of a gamble for creators deciding where to put their production resources. Instagram itself expanded from square-only to portrait and landscape photos in the feed in 2015.

“My advice would be to make the videos horizontal. We’ve all come to understand vertical as ‘short form’ and horizontal as ‘long form,'” says Sayman. “It’s in the act of rotating your phone to landscape that you indicate to yourself and to your mobile device that you will not be context switching for the next few minutes, but rather intend to focus on one piece of content for an extended period of time.” This would at least give users more to watch, even if they ended up viewing landscape videos with their phones in portrait orientation.

This might be best as a last-ditch effort if it can’t get enough content flowing in through other means. But at least Instagram should offer a cropping tool that lets users manually select what vertical slice of a landscape video they want to show as they watch, rather than just grabbing the center or picking one area on the side for the whole clip. This could let creators repurpose landscape videos without things getting awkwardly half cut out of frame.

Former Facebook employee and social investor Josh Elman, who now works at Robinhood, told me he’s confident the company will experiment as much as necessary. “I think Facebook is relentless. They know that a ton of consumers watch video online. And most discover videos through influencers or their friends. (Or Netflix). Even though Watch and IGTV haven’t taken the world by storm yet, I bet Facebook won’t stop until they find the right mix.”

There’s a goldmine waiting if it does. Unlike on Facebook, there’s no Regram feature, you can’t post links, and outside of Explore you just see who you already follow on Instagram. That’s made it great at delivering friendly video and clips from your favorite stars, but leaves a gaping hole where serendipitous viewing could be. IGTV fills that gap. The hours people spend on Facebook watching random videos and their accompanying commercials have lifted the company to over $13 billion in revenue per quarter. Giving a younger audience a bottomless pit of full-screen video could produce the same behavior and profits on Instagram without polluting the feed, which can remain the purest manifestation of visual feed culture. But that’s only if IGTV can get enough content uploaded.

Puffed up by the success of besting its foe Snapchat, Instagram assumed it could take the long-form video world by storm. But the grand entrance at its debutante ball didn’t draw enough attention. Now it needs to take a different tack. Tone down the cross-promo for the moment. Concentrate on teaching creators how to find what works on the format and incentivizing them with cash and traffic. Develop some must-see IGTV and stoke a viral blockbuster. Prove the gravity of extended, personality-driven vertical video. Only then should it redirect traffic there from the feed, Stories, and Explore.

YouTube’s library wasn’t built overnight, and neither will IGTV’s. Facebook’s deep pockets and the success of Instagram’s other features give it the runway necessary to let IGTV take off. With 1 billion monthly users, and 400 million daily Stories users gathered in just two years, there are plenty of eyeballs waiting to be seduced. Systrom concludes, “Everything that is great starts small.” IGTV’s destiny will depend on Instagram’s patience.

[howyoustudythestars]

New theory on #DFD

You would not believe how many times I’ve tried writing this post, saving it as a draft, forgetting about it, or not liking the tangent I got on, etc.  But I’m here to try again!

In 2013 and 2015, Adam wrote mysterious posts with the letters dfd on his blog.  In 2015, it emerged again as a tag on his post, saying what was going to be eventually known as Verge and Mobile Orchestra (May Single, Summer Album).  In that time, I posted my own theory about it that Adam himself refuted!  But now, to hopefully get the HootOwls excited for Owl City 2017, I’m deciding to make this new theory of mine public.  It’s one I’ve been thinking about since we were nearing the end of his monthly score plan!

Warning: Long Post Ahead!

To understand this theory, we must go back to the days after The Midsummer Station.  In early 2013, it was publicized in several locations that Adam was planning a fifth full-length album for 2013.  It was going to be more EDM-influenced and edgy.  Yet, 2013 was the quietest year for Adam.  Apart from the TMS Acoustic EP and select soundtrack songs, there was nothing released.

Suddenly, in 2014, he announced that he would be releasing a series of EPs, starting with Ultraviolet.  Yet, afterward, we heard nothing from him for a while.  He then announced he was planning a full-length album instead, but it kept getting delayed (more on this later).

Then in 2015, Mobile Orchestra was released.  Critical points aside, it was stylistically all over the place.  From pop to Maybe I’m Dreaming-esque, to EDM influenced songs, to Contemporary Christian, to Rock, and to Country, it was nowhere near Ultraviolet or the 2013 album he promised.  In fact, not only was This Isn’t the End, a track from Ultraviolet, on there after he said there wouldn’t be any Ultraviolet re-releases, he promised Tokyo would be on the album, and it was only included in the Japan Edition.  What gives?

The only relevant clue to this theory was that prior to Mobile Orchestra’s release, he uploaded to SoundCloud (and since deleted) his cover of “Goodbye” by Who Is Fancy.  Two things to note about this cover: First, Who Is Fancy was a newly signed artist on Republic Records, which was Adam’s label at the time. Second, even then, it was speculated by several fans, myself included, that despite its original meaning, Adam’s cover was about his desire to leave the label.  As we all know, he has since left Republic Records and has been releasing music independently.

Now, with all this in mind, think back to 2013 and 2015, when he posted “dfd” and where he posted it.  The first few postings in 2013 had dfd as the only actual content, but in 2015, it was a tag.  As is common on Tumblr posts (and his blog is a Tumblr blog), people usually post tags as follow-ups to the post’s actual content, sometimes for rants or comedic effect.  Therefore, I think the post would read like “May Single, Summer Album, and later... DFD!”.  But what does it mean?

Here’s what I think it means: It could be a variation of this, but I think DFD is a release title Adam has in mind, which stands for -- Wait for it... “Demos From Daydreams”.  Basically, the songs would amount to a collection of demos and/or otherwise finished tracks that were otherwise finished or completed.  These can range from vaulted songs like the Saltwater Room/The Yacht Club demo, Beautiful Mystery, Paper Tigers, Adam’s version of Sleepwalker, and Floppy Fish/Trust Me, to songs from 2013-2015 that Adam wrote and his label rejected.  (And to be clear, while I still believe Adam when he says his label didn’t put any restrictions on him, I do think they rejected a bunch of songs of his from appearing on what became Mobile Orchestra.  I think trying to find a compromise of a tracklisting that both he and his label would accept is the cause of the “delays” he talked about.  It could also explain why Tokyo didn’t appear, but This Isn’t the End did!  So my theory is that he had this in mind since 2013, and that whenever he would leave Republic, he would do something like this.  The posts were simply a tease nearly 5 years in the making!)

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Great Theory, but it’s unlikely.  He has written a bunch of new material these past few months, and he’s likely to release that as the next album, not Demos from Daydreams!”  But to that, I say, I can explain.  In his #AskOwlCity video answer to Sadie about the direction of his new music, he did say it would be more personal, but before he utters that word, he says something along the lines of, “If I could use one word to describe this album, or collection of songs, or whatever this is going to be...”  So, first things first: Adam did NOT commit to an album release.  Besides, the personal stuff was mentioned when he was talking about his new music, so this could still hold up.

And the next thing... Adam’s music buddy Matt Thiessen did this before with Relient K.  (And we all know how much Adam looks up to Matt.)  Anyone remember the Double EP The Nashville Tennis EP/The Bird and the Bee Sides?  The latter would essentially be equivalent to what my idea for a Demos From Daydreams concept would be, with the new stuff being whatever Adam’s equivalent of the Nashville Tennis EP would be.  If I’m right, there would be enough unreleased material from 2013 up through today to fill a double album!

So, what do you think?