You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.
I’d posit that even if you somehow do this in a neutral way, consumer adoption will fall in three buckets: (1) largely supportive, (2) largely unsupportive, (3) ambivalent/silent majority.
People who are largely supportive are already seeking out additional data points in their news consumption. Similarly, people who are largely unsupportive will gravitate towards their chosen echo chamber. The silent majority will remain largely ambivalent and, if they vote, will remain single issue voters.
The risk is that the government doesn’t find an effective neutral way for deciding what’s included and what’s not.
We're not encouraging spam with this. We're mainly focused on existing conversational use cases that's currently done over SMS/RCS. They can be more human and expressive when done over iMessage.
what you encourage and what actually happens are two different things, though. gmail does not actively encourage spam, yet most spam emails i receive are from gmail addresses.
you have to actively fight against malicious uses, like spam. "not encouraging" is nowhere near enough.
what systems/processes/safeguards do you have in place to prevent abuse?
I agree. We're not completely self-serve right now, so we get to talk with each potential customer and learn about their use case before onboarding them onto the platform. This way, we can prevent use cases that involve spam or abuse.
"right now", which implies that you plan to move to self-serve. and obviously manually checking in on each and every customer is not sustainable if you scale.
do you do periodic checkups now? hoping nobody lies during onboarding is risky, in an already-risky endeavor. have you thought about anti-abuse systems for when you go self-serve?
We do run checkups and keep very closely in touch with our customers. We don't plan to go self serve in the near future and will most likely still have a very personalized onboarding process.
For iPhone only users, so right off the bat your product is targeting 50% ish of a companies customer base. And the non iMessage people get a worse experience?
In North America iPhone/android split is far from 50/50. I have 4 different apps running and the split is about 80/20 and has been for a decade. Internationally android is used at a higher rate - but that is decreasing as lesser economies play catch up.
Not sure what bubble you live in, but that is incorrect. Maybe in California it's 80/20. Every single statistic globally is nearly 80/20% for android. There is a few rich markets and they may be 80/20 for Apple, but realistically Android wins every single time, no matter what market you look at.
China/India are like 30-40% of the world, and they are both under 20% usage.
Europe - 60/40% split for android
US/Canada - 40/60% split for iPhone
Even some of the higher countries are only 70/30% for iPhone.
Ignoring that is fine if your target is rich North Americans.
Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
> iMessage is intended for communicating with family and friends, and is not for conducting commercial activities or disseminating unwanted messages. iMessage misuse may result in service limitations.
Apparently, they are against ANY commercial messages. Even if I personally sent marketing messages and typed them myself. So of course they are not going to like you making it easier for people to do that at scale.e
Technically, you are right that being programmatic is not the issue (so presumably those openclaw adapters are okay).
But let's not mislead investors or customers -- Apple has clearly stated your use case is not welcome (except through the iMessage Business Program they control).
They developed AppleScript for people to do this individually, at limited scale.
Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale.
This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
People don't report our phone lines to be spam because the use cases that we focus on are either mostly inbound (e.g. customer service, the user is the one who texts first) or warm opt-in outbound (e.g. form-fill text back or follow ups). Businesses want a better medium to communicate with their users and users want something more conversational and native to their messaging behaviors.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is naivety or willful ignorance, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.
This is in direct violation of the terms of service, and Apple invests a lot of money in keeping iMessage clean of this kind of misuse.
They control the servers, the client, certificate provisioning, hardware identification, and user identification. They can trivially trace a registered account to the point of sale and the card and PII used to buy the hardware on which the account was registered.
You will fly under the radar for just as long as it takes to annoy enough of their customers that Apple brings down a massive ban hammer.
Elsewhere in the great they said they can't support the customer in the right way on RCS. I can't think of any technical reason for right vs wrong support, but I can think of deception as a reason (gaining trust through using a closed platform).
SMS/RCS is better for some use cases (e.g. transactional messaging, promotions, or order updates) while iMessage is better for others (e.g. customer service). iMessage is better for these use cases because it feels more natural to the users texting the number
That "opt-in" is going to be a vaguely-worded auto-filled checkbox and the "consent" will be stretched far beyond what any user thinks they're agreeing to.
How are your financial incentives aligned against sending spam? From this side, your words seem hollow and the typical viability of these businesses relies on sending spam.
I grew up reading NYTimes on the weekend with my parents. I held them in extreme high regard when it came to their news and journalistic integrity. Over the years, I've shifted to think of them as another data point. For the industries that I'm most familiar with (Tech, Finance, and Pharma), I find their reporting often shallow, lacking in nuance, or intentional/unintentional misreporting. And I often wonder if their reporting of other areas is similarly lacking.
Now, they are just another data point, which is sad.
Same story with me. To be clear, I am a subscriber, though I tend to hold out for the ultra-cheap last ditch retention deals they through at you. But I take them with a grain of salt these days. They have a narrative like anywhere else, and they don't let the full facts get in its way.
Michael Crichton said it best:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
Honestly, they have never been particularly trustworthy. People go on about the "newspaper of record" title, but as far as I can see, those are mainly handed out on the basis of age, not actual quality and journalistic integrity.
The NYT (and Judith Miller) was one of the most shameless shills of the Iraq War, laundering complete bullshit and lies. It’s not completely bad, there have been outstanding individuals, and the election coverage is still the best imo, but there is no reason to believe the organization has higher integrity than the rest of the MSM.
> The NYT (and Judith Miller) was one of the most shameless shills of the Iraq War, laundering complete bullshit and lies. It’s not completely bad, there have been outstanding individuals, and the election coverage is still the best imo, but there is no reason to believe the organization has higher integrity than the rest of the MSM.
Very respectfully, as pre-teen at the time, I recognized that there was no real reason for going from 9/11 to Afghanistan or Iraq... based on my then daily reading of NYT. And I am sure there were opinion articles in that same paper that said we were rushing towards something that demanded deeper reflection.
Fundamentally, I don't think the job of a newspaper is to think for us.
All the absurdities of that time were, in fact, news. What wasn't present at the time was a link to justify the inane war we began. And that link is still absent, which we are all collectively realizing.
Wasn't it Apple that was trying to get Meta to implement age verification in the first place? So, Meta is trying to get them to do it, which seems right.
Doesn't apple already check your age when you make an Apple account? using credit card information (before you use any app)
It already feels enough to me.
Threats exist in both trusted and untrusted environments though.
This feels like a really niche use case for SSH. Exposing this more broadly could lead to set-it-and-forget-it scenarios and ultimately make someone less secure.
What part of the quote below suggests encouragement of violence? Seems like one person’s pov about what Kirk espoused.
> In one screenshot shared by the agency, a person identified as an Argentine national said Kirk “devoted his entire life spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric.”
American Citizens have the right to offensive free speech in America, a foreigner wishing to obtain a VISA does not and would be an idiot to think he should be allowed to visit if he was posting things like "f... ck America"
Ackshually there is part of the first amendment that applies to certain people, specifically the right for "the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The courts have prior held that non-immigrant visas and illegal immigrants usually aren't "the people" referenced by the constitution, which is why they have no right to bear arms which also uses "the people" in reference to the people with that right. If they don't have the right to bear arms, it follows they are not "the people" and thus have no implicit protection to parts of the first amendment that explicitly assign protection to "the people."
It may be up for interpretation whether the immigrants in question were petitioning the government for grievances, if so that may have not been protected if they are not people.
Ahhh.. 1A, but only for specific groups, in specific contexts, as long as you're ok with it. Yes, that's exactly what they meant when they wrote it. le sigh.
I hope your enjoying the current state of the country. It's people just like you that brought it about, so carry on with the winning!
It's a gross verbal onanism over someone's death, mixed with the typical baseless dehumanization. If you want this sort of person in your country, my condolences.
please point out any and all verbs or other terms that call for any kind of action. so you found 'remove', right? it's a call for ceasing friendship. is that considered violence?
Words do have meanings. That comment may be cruel, but nothing in it is dehumanizing -- unlike, for example, this quote:
"Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump's deployment of federal troops to DC. 'Shock and awe. Force,' he wrote. 'We're taking our country back from these cockroaches.'"
It’s not just whataboutism when the comparison points to a broader systemic process of eroding rights and worsening conditions. It is also an observation of this next stage in that process and how it departs from the last.
Ultimately, I think it’s self-serving/pointless Daily Show “gotcha” finger-waving trying to face down a steamroller of hate, but it’s more than whataboutism.
The hypocrisy is that, when somebody was banned from a mere social media website for praising or implicitly encouraging violence, the argument was always skewed toward the legal (e.g. "doesn't meet the bar for imminent action"). Yet when confronted with the fact that it was a private platform, the arguments skewed away from the legal ("free speech absolutism"). And of course now that it's physical people being banned from a physical country, somehow the arguments are now reversed on principles, weaker, less passionate - despite the situation being more concrete/dramatic, rather than just social media moderation.
It's never been about free speech - not morally nor legally - and the fact that they pretended it was is insulting to American principles.
I'm a citizen and describing speech I may engage in such as saying that Kirk “devoted his entire life spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric” as something that the government doesn't approve of creates a chilling standard for my own speech.
So my speech, you authoritarian jerk. I should be able to say stuff like that- why the fuck should the government get to say what is okay for folks to say?
We often accept some limits on speech - such as disallowing threats or blackmail. But on what planet is some person stating that Charlie Kirk "devoted his entire life to spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric" an endorsement of Kirk's murder?
How is anyone supposed to believe the administration is being at all genuine when it categorizes that sentence as an endorsement of murder and then applies punitive action toward the man who wrote it?
Are we now at the point where (in Soviet Russian style) the government gleefully makes absurd factual claims and administers capricious punishments specifically as a demonstration of the government power to oppress?
The legal theory is that you, as a citizen, have a clear free speech right to say that, but that foreigners outside the U.S. don't have any free speech right at all under the U.S. constitution to say that. (In a related legal doctrine, denying people a visa in retaliation for their specific actions is officially "not a punishment".)
I think this theory is pretty broken, but I also find that there are a lot of things where longstanding legal doctrines give the government humongous amounts of power and discretion, and they often did not just, like, make up the concept just 10 minutes ago. Often it's arguably been the rule for many decades.
The thing that I'm more familiar with in this category is border searches. My mom was surprised to hear that people's devices (including U.S. citizens' devices) were being searched at the border without suspicion, something that would obviously violate the fourth amendment in a regular domestic context. Something my mom didn't know, but I happened to know from having studied and written about this in the past, is that we have legal precedents going back decades that specifically say that that is a power that the government has.
Now, I would like to see a rule that the fourth amendment does apply at the border, but we've been far away from that for years, with important cases in 2004 and 1985 and even longer ago saying that it doesn't. (In this case, it is held not to apply to either citizens or non-citizens in the border search context.)
So, I would encourage people to have a broader sense of historical perspective about the staggering amount of power and discretion that the government has repeatedly been given, and the considerable number of limitations that have been held to apply to various legal rights, while also opposing this and trying to change it.
Edit: In terms of foreigners' political expression, I believe we've had rules in the U.S. at least since the 1920s that foreigners ought to be excluded from moving here, or even from visiting, for some kinds of radical politics. I also find this notion concerning, I just want to point out that it's in some sense a 100-year-old concept rather than like a 1-month-old concept.
I understand that your theory holds a lot of sway.
I am not in favor of doing anything that cedes more power to the assholes who want it.
I'm not a legal scholar but it certainly feels like "removing citizenship from classes of folks" so that they can be deported to purify the body of the volk is a thing that has been done, so anything that we can to maintain the rights of non-citizens seems to be reflexively self-interested.
I do understand that the government of the US will do whatever it feels like- it's never felt like that they wouldn't, like, drone strike a citizen if they felt like it. As much as I despise the views of folks like Randy Weaver, it's been a long time since I thought the US might not just shoot folks if it felt like it to.
So here is a question:
if they don't really care much about the doctrines of laws, why should me and mine?
Well, one point is just that the Trump administration is often accused of making up government powers when, on inspection, they're kind of dusting off powers that were actually on the books for a long time. Or perhaps dusting off and oiling?
Now, I think some of their interpretations are unreasonable. But some of them are actually just making things more routine and visible that have happened under many different administrations, doing those same things on a larger scale. That's why I mentioned border searches: lots of people (like my mom!) first heard about this recently and thought that the Trump administration somehow invented this power. But in fact, we've seen thousands, or tens of thousands, of border searches of electronic devices, including those of citizens, under all presidential administrations.
Even for things like tariffs where the administration's interpretations just sound silly to me, we've had every single administration for decades declare and renew multiple "emergencies" in order to impose various kinds of trade restrictions by executive fiat (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...). Some of those emergencies have probably been going on longer than the lifetimes of most people reading this, and they led to very expansive executive control over trade and trade-adjacent foreign policy issues.
In the Trump administration case, you can find increasing numbers of border and immigration actions, like border searches, that are "political", but I remember some that were "political" under the George W. Bush administration, again including against U.S. citizens.
Similarly, people's visas were cancelled and denied for political reasons all the time under prior administrations, just on a smaller scale because it wasn't (many?) people's job to identify targets for this, and we didn't have social media, and we didn't have government programs to search or archive social media in an immigration context. But we had the "revocation or denial of a visa is not a punishment" (and is generally not appealable for cause...!) doctrine for ages.
I've kind of just repeated myself a bit here, but I guess my overall point is that I see lots of government powers as something like loaded weapons that we've left lying around for many years. (Or we could use some other metaphor like toxic waste, landmines, whatever kind of danger is seemingly largely inert but can still eventually be dangerous.) So it feels to me like people are concerned to see the current administration pick up or play around with some of those weapons, but to me the big picture is that lots of people should have been able to agree to dispose of some of them longer ago: to say that we don't want the government to have so much power and we don't want the president to have so much discretion.
Furthermore, I even think we could still say that, and possibly find broader political consensus about that idea than we could about the personal virtue of Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush as a wielder of some of that power.
Not to understate the actual reason that I find authoritarian controls on speech outrageous: I 100% agree that it's wrong to revoke visas over politically-protected speech.
I just find it easier to communicate "a basic sense of self interest" to the sociopaths who are happy to see state power used against strangers their country is hosting. If the state can do it to those folks, they will eventually do it to you and I.
It used to be the case that treating strangers and foreigners -better- than we might treat ourselves was a goal for humans. You can read it in the religious texts of the assholes I live around who pretend that their religion should rule all the subjects of the land they have occupied.
It's interesting to see the positive views of benevolence, tolerance, hospitality, and justice toward strangers in many of the ancient Mediterranean cultures. I wonder how typical or atypical those are across time and across cultures, and what kinds of limitations are placed on them.
Apart from Exodus 23:9 and similar commandments (and specific stories of hospitality in the Bible), I think of the idea of ξενία xenia from ancient Greek culture, and then the proverbially famous Arab and Middle Eastern hospitality today.
There is an old joke attributed (variously) to Ronald Reagan or Yakov Smirnoff: "In Soviet Russia, there is freedom of speech. In America, there is also freedom after speech."
Government sanctions (not simply those limited to imprisonment) used as a punishment for speech is most definitely a free speech issue.
Not sure where you're going with this. Obviously the immigrants who were speaking are the ones whose speech is being regulated by the government.
If you want to argue that immigrants don't have protection under the first amendment, clearly they do per centuries of jurisprudence.
If you want to argue that this is one of those "no freedom from consequences" situations, recognize that this isn't a private party. You or I can cancel someone by refusing to deal with them, but the government is expressly prohibited from from doing so by the clear text of the first amendment.
I mean.. I dont agree with the Trump administration on nearly anything. But deciding that they dont like what an outsider says and blocking them entrance based on that is not a free speech issue, they're not citizens.
Edit: yeah ok fair call. it needs to apply to anyone, still the US needs to be able to say : I dont like you, you cant enter.
Note, even if this were true, the entire point of being the free speech party or being a free speech absolutist was that those people supported free speech above and beyond the legal concept of free speech. They explicitly built their free speech crusade against moderation actions on privately owned websites.
"still the US needs to be able to say : I dont like you, you cant enter."
So, here is a question: is it for the US gov to tell me, a citizen "we don't like you and wouldn't let you enter if you weren't already here"? Because that certainly seems to be what they are saying? Does it make sense why I'd be worried about the government of the only place where I have citizenship letting me know that they would expel me if I hadn't been born here?
> Edit: yeah ok fair call. it needs to apply to anyone
It was pointed out how historically un-American this is, and your response is to say we should in fact expand this policy - to be able to kick people out of the country or deny them entry for saying things online that aren't even as dramatic, hateful, or violence-glorifying as the things that this administration's supporters constantly, constantly, constantly say, for example, about victims of police shooting or victims of mass shootings?
Yes, and you can come back here and see all the comments that either say its justified in this case. Or, comments will state that the other side did it first.
I'll remove my comment if a clear case exists that is not generally celebrating it here.
Both parties have denied Visas for social media posts in the past - in fact that has been going on since it started many years ago. It's only news now for some strange reason. Although, I'm sure it's "different this time(tm)".
You provided zero evidence that Democrats have denied visas based on social media posts. You just mentioned the number of border crossings in 2021 to 2025. What point are you trying to make here?
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Democrats have never denied a visa? Oh. I see now that you added “based on social media posts”. Still, I fail to believe that Democrats would admit someone into the country knowing that they posted something on social media that demonstrated the applicant is lying, made threats against political figures in the US, posted to known terrorist or friends with known terrorists, etc.
In fact, the Biden administration sued for the ability to continue the Trump policy of looking into social media. Here is an excerpt from the lawyer that was suing the Biden administration.
“We’re disappointed that the Biden administration has decided to double down on this Trump-era policy of mass surveillance of visa applicants’ social media,” said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute.””
I see so many posts on here that only see the world in black and white. It’s either or, never shades of gray.
No political party that supports free speech claimed it was so absolute that we ignore the national security implications of non-citizens promoting violence against US citizens.
During the biden administration I had dozens of people tell me that they were criticizing the biden administration because of their free speech absolutism. Absolutism.
The richest man in the world called himself a free speech absolutist.
"Free speech absolutism" was always applied just as vigorously - more so even! - to people "inciting violence" to a greater degree than in this example (they defended much more explicit glorification of violence and hatred than in this example, and even outright inciting of violence, as you call it, which this is obviously not an example of).
I think it's more about the type of store. I was with acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).
From my point of view processing a return costs the store money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
Exactly. Europe’s regulations are about the absolute bottom, not intended to be taken as the average experience.
On average US companies are much better with customer experience. Of course until they corner you, then they may choose not to and then you have it worse than Europeans.
Shedding low value users to others makes you stronger and them weaker.
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