Down Round

Let’s face it: LinkedIn is one of the most annoying websites ever to exist. Terrible emails, armies of recruiters, and some of the worst posts you’ve ever seen.

And yet it’s also one of the most successful social media platforms, a genuine moneymaker for Microsoft, and now completely integral to modern white collar life. In this episode, we talk through LinkedIn and the horrible posters who populate it.

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Reddit, one of the internet’s last largely functional online communities, is undergoing something of a political revolution. Thanks to the company’s plans to implement charge for API access — potentially affecting everything from third-party apps to moderation bots — subreddits large and small have gone dark, with the platform’s army of uncompensated …

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It’s been a couple of weeks since Apple announced the Vision Pro, the ‘spatial computing’ headset it believes is the future of going on the computer, getting online, and posting up a storm.

Now the dust has settled, it’s time for the boys to go in.

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Despite the fact the entertainment world at large is — for better or worse — piling in to the streaming model, sport has proven much more difficult. A headache-inducing labyrinth of rights deals, blackouts and other thorny problems have kept sport broadcasting from fully leaning into streaming. But that is changing, with streamers from Apple to Amazon d…

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James is in the US this week, so we're digging an episode from the deep and forgotten archives.

Swimply is, to put it simply, Airbnb but for pools. As in, you can go to a strangers house and swim in their pool for a small fee. It has tried to launch in Australia three times now, so obviously it deserved our attention. Comedian Becky Lucas joined us to discuss.

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At every major juncture of internet development since 1994, you’re guaranteed to find one company making baffling decisions: Yahoo. From one of the biggest stocks of the dotcom boom to the laughingstock of the mobile era, Yahoo has managed to stumble ungracefully through internet history in a way we simply had to chronicle.

In this episode, we look back …

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Esports was one of the weirdest hype cycles of the last tech boom. A surge of venture capital and investment led to a frothy market which somehow convinced people that ‘watching Apex Legends’ was not only the next frontier in video gaming, but also in sports and entertainment generally. This unstoppable hype train culminated in FaZe Clan, an esports influencer house, listing on the public markets via a SPAC.

Turns out it didn’t really work, and esports has not remotely lived up to its promise of being the future of sport. What went wrong? Down Round discusses.

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Netflix was once the golden child of the tech industry, with its streaming model held up as the future of content consumption. Now that every rightsholder has a streaming platform, and the end of the tech boom has led to drastic cuts in content budgets and the return of advertising, where does that leave Netflix?

The boys chat. Raph offers his strident view as a man who does not watch scripted television.

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This week, GPU maker Nvidia was briefly valued at $1 trillion, which is pretty wild for a company founded to cater to the whims of one of God’s most pathetic creatures: PC gamers.

The surge in value is largely thanks to Nvidia’s critical position in the emerging AI economy. It turns out the company’s graphics cards technology, originally intended to support high-performance gaming, are actually very good at training the neural networks that drive platforms like ChatGPT.

In this ep, we dive into how we got here.

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Apple’s developer conference is in a couple of weeks, and all signs suggest it is about to announce an insanely expensive AR/VR headset, which it hopes will be their next computing platform and maybe a smartphone successor somewhere down the line.

In this ep we talk about headsets generally, the companies trying to make them happen, and why no one seems …

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