Linked List: May 15, 2020

Friday, 15 May 2020

Six years ago Slack added built-in Giphy support. So post-acquisition, Facebook will now have tracking info for all the Slack channels where this has been used. That’s cool.

Update: This seems to have gotten some folks’ attention. Via email, I received the following response to my post from Brian Elliott, VP and general manager at Slack, quoted in entirety:

We’re excited for the Giphy team on the news of their acquisition.

Slack users love using Giphy, as well as tools like emoji reactions and apps like Donut and Hallway. They all bring teams closer together, especially when they’re working remotely. Allowing teams to share their personality through GIFs and enable camaraderie at work adds to the social glue teams are looking for when there’s no physical water cooler, and will continue to be an important part of the Slack experience.

As always, Slack is committed to protecting user and company data. Giphy doesn’t receive any information about users or even companies using the Giphy for Slack integration, and only sees Slack usage of the Giphy API in aggregate.

I also heard from a little birdie and trusted source who works at Slack, who told me:

Slack built and still owns the Giphy integration. We call their API, and don’t send them identifying info about channels. (This is pretty much the opposite of how most Slack integrations work, so your initial assumptions were reasonable.)

Above Avalon Turns Five ★

Neil Cybart:

Above Avalon membership was launched five years ago this week. I am happy to report Above Avalon continues to thrive with a sustainable business model based solely on paid memberships.

Congratulations to Cybart. Not surprising though — in-depth research and consistent analysis is a good combination. Count me as a longtime happy subscriber.

One debate that continues to be waged online is over people’s changing reading habits and the trend of people writing shorter pieces. For example, it has been said that blog posts are replacing books while tweets are replacing blog posts. My honest opinion of this is that it’s hogwash.

People will pay for quality. Not everyone, of course. But the people who will pay for anything are most likely to pay for quality. That includes paying with their attention, not just their wallets.

Financial Times Reports the Obvious: Trump Resisted Testing ‘Too Many People’ Lest the Results Spook the Stock Market ★

The Daily Beast, summarizing a paywalled report from The Financial Times:

President Trump was wary of making preparations for the coronavirus pandemic because he was concerned doing so would sent the stock market into a panic, the Financial Times reports. In a quote attributed to an unnamed Trump confidant who is said to speak to the president frequently, it’s claimed: “Jared [Kushner] had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it… That advice worked far more powerfully on [Trump] than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate.” Elsewhere in the FT investigation into Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, an unnamed administration official is reported to have told the paper that trying to advise the president is like “bringing fruits to the volcano… You’re trying to appease a great force that’s impervious to reason.”

People can’t get their head wrapped around this because it’s so grotesque, but it doesn’t require believing in a hidden conspiracy. Trump has told us, again and again, that he’s against testing because he doesn’t want “the numbers” to go up. In Trump’s view testing for COVID-19 is a bad idea because it’s going to reveal something he doesn’t want to be true.

Here he is again, just yesterday: “If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.” He’s trying to argue that we have more cases than South Korea because we’ve done more tests — whereas the truth is that South Korea instituted widespread testing early and has the virus under control. The problem isn’t testing, the problem is sick people, and testing is a way to get a handle on the problem. Trump’s stance is like telling your girlfriend not to take a pregnancy test as birth control.

Also: Sarah Cooper is a national treasure.

Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400 Million ★

Dan Primack, Kia Kokalitcheva, and Sara Fischer, reporting for Axios:

Facebook has agreed to buy Giphy, the popular platform of sharable animated images, Axios has learned from multiple sources. The total deal value is around $400 million. […] Giphy is expected to retain its own branding, with its primary integration to come via Facebook’s Instagram platform.

Matthew Panzarino:

There are two reasons Facebook buys a consumer company. Eyeballs or data.

Of course Giphy is going to retain its own brand. If they renamed it to “Facebook Tracking Pixels”, usage might drop off. Think about all the messaging apps that don’t offer Facebook integration for security/privacy reasons (not to mention not wanting to have their apps crash on launch when Facebook pushes a buggy update), where Giphy images appear. You know, like Apple’s Messages. Well, now Facebook has tracking pixels in them.