The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 1,444 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
Evans: Musk has zero experience in consumer software or social networks
“Whether, you know, Elon with zero experience of building consumer software, or, and zero experience of a social network is the right person to do that is a slightly different question.”
Evans: Bloomberg will never be disrupted because tech engineers cannot access it
“Well, the thing that occurred to me sometimes is that, you know, Bloomberg, for example, will never be disrupted because the only people who could disrupt it can't see it because it's 24,000 dollars a year. So nobody who knows what it is or really understands …”
Evans: Twitter Failed at Stories Because It Is a 'Clown Show'
“Obviously Twitter tried to do it, but because Twitter is a clown show, it didn't work, but, you know, other people can make this stuff work.”
Evans: Creators are crazy to trust their livelihood to Twitter's newsletter product
“I think you'd be out of your mind to trust your livelihood to Twitter's newsletter system.”
Evans: Algorithmic discovery and direct audience ownership are fundamentally incompatible
“You're asking for a recommendation algorithm that will drive all the readers to you, but you're also asking to own your list, and I think that's kind of a contradiction in terms, because if what you're saying is, I want somebody to open the app and have the ap…”
Evans: The Chinese government has absolute control over the ByteDance CEO
“ByteDance is a Chinese company. The government can go to the CEO of ByteDance and do this, and he does what he's told, and he doesn't have a choice. It, You know, who owns the shares is completely irrelevant. They tell him what to do and he does it or he goes,…”
Evans: Crypto is in an early-80s PC era of infrastructure and bullshit
“We're at this stage now of, like, internet early, PCs early eighties, internet early nineties, Enormous amounts of bullshit, and people kind of building this plumbing, and infrastructure, and that's where all the kind of clever, interesting stuff is.”
Evans: Banning profile-based ads benefits Google and could bankrupt The Guardian
“You want to ban advertising based on the user profile rather than on the context. Okay, well, that's probably good for Google and terrible for the New York Times, and the Guardian might go out of business.”
Evans: Dozens of massive tech companies do not compete with Google or Amazon
“There's an awful lot of fifty, hundred, two hundred billion dollar tech companies out there. You know, how does that model account for everything from Coinbase to Stripe to Shopify to Spotify to you know, Okta to Databricks to UiPath to, you know, there's doze…”
Evans: Cryptocurrencies are fundamentally open-source computers, not just digital gold
“Cryptocurrencies for want of a better term are not fundamentally about replacing gold and fiat currency and being a store medium of storage. That's just sort of the one of the early and obvious applications. What you're really seeing here is a way to run an op…”
Evans: Simplifying layers inevitably centralize decentralized systems
“And so there's a whole bunch of reasons why you tend to get simplifying layers and abstracting layers and aggregating layers. You know, most people don't open a command line on their PC. They don't want to. They just want to click on the icon that says interne…”
Evans: NFTs are architectural software primitives, not fundamentally about art
“NFTs aren't about art either, just as crypto isn't about money.
the point, you know, what we're still doing is trying to work out what the building blocks are.
And so the NFT might be another building block within how a crypto social system or publishing syst…”
Evans: In 10 years, the metaverse will run on Web3 infrastructure
“Go forward 10 years and the two of them sort of merge. In that, you know, if everyone is doing, if they could both work, and everything that you do in the metaverse will be web three, will be running on web three.”
Evans: Boring enterprise SaaS will out-mint Web3 billion-dollar companies
“While tech is obsessed with Web three and metaverse, There's going to be an awful lot of billion dollar companies that do something that sounds really boring until you describe what it is and you think, oh yeah, I can see how that would be useful.”
Evans: Major tech paradigms are no longer built top-down by giant incumbents
“Tech doesn't work like that. It hasn't worked like that since the seventies, maybe the eighties, but the days when like big companies could say, right, we're going to build the future. Like that's not how the future gets built.”
Evans: Facebook cannot centrally build the metaverse
“And now you hear people at Facebook saying, well, we're going to build the metaverse. It's like sitting down in 1994 and saying, well, now we're going to build the web. You know, it's like news corporate, it's like news corporation in 1994 saying, oh, well, wh…”
Evans: Crypto token activity blurs speculation with real product traction
“The stock price going up does not help the company, except that it makes them easier for them to raise capital by selling stock and issuing stock options. But the price going up itself doesn't tell you that they sold more product. Whereas a token activity in t…”
Evans: The concept of owning your personal data is logically incoherent nonsense
“Statements like, well, you should own your data, and maybe a third category, in that it is actually, this is actually logically... Incoherent. It's gibberish. It's nonsense. It means nothing.”
Evans: Epic Games' legal fight against Apple was driven by pure greed
“Epic wanted, A, not to pay the 30%, even though Epic has no marginal cost and was making loads of money, so that was pure greed on their part, and B, they wanted to run their own store so they could sell all sorts of different things, and so they could have al…”
Evans: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Evans: Fully autonomous, driverless cars will not arrive by 2022
“Full, full, full autonomy as in a car with no steering wheel that can drive from San Francisco to San Diego while you sleep in the back and there's no seats, there's just a sofa and no windows, you know, like that kind of autonomy is five, 10, 15, 20, I don't …”
Evans: All of Apple's App Store rules will be overturned within 18 months
“Now none of this will stand because all of Apple's rules are going to get overturned in the next 18 months”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Legacy carmakers will be able to buy autonomy from Google
“It's much easier to say that the screen on a Tesla is an enormous challenge, or even that the autonomy is an enormous challenge, but then they'll be able to buy the autonomy from Google.”
Evans: Telcos are infrastructure and Netflix is TV, not software companies
“Telcos aren't a technology business. They're infrastructure business. Netflix isn't a software company. It's a TV company. On the other hand, Airbnb, but Airbnb isn't a hotel company. It is a software company.”
Evans: Superior Software Rarely Guarantees Strategic Leverage Over Legacy Industries
“There's a very standard presumption in Silicon Valley that software companies can learn other industries faster than those other industries can learn software. And that's generally true, but.
Well, it's generally true, but it might not matter.
I think that's…”
Evans: Consumer tech is driven by cultural insight, not software engineering
“A lot of like consumer tech now is as much pop culture as it is tech. You know, is Snapchat tech or is that pop culture? You know, that, the inside, whatever you think the answer was, it wasn't software engineering. It was some insight about how people wanted …”
Li: Chinese tech should be framed as parallel evolution, not the future or past
“And I think the way to look at China might not, the framing in which I find the most helpful is to view it as this parallel world. You don't, you shouldn't view it as like the future. You shouldn't view it as like the past, but you just view it as like, Had th…”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Evans: Apple views user privacy violations as analogous to malware
“I think Apple sees privacy as sort of analogous to malware. It thinks that this is an architectural problem on the computer. It controls the computer. They make the operating system. It's their job to fix it in the same way that it was sort of Microsoft's job …”
Evans: Privacy is a strategic asset because Apple lacks an ad business
“Privacy is a strategic asset. You know, there's an old line in Silicon Valley that everyone is giving somebody else's business model away for free. Apple doesn't have, it doesn't have a social network, doesn't have a search engine, doesn't really have a, it do…”
Evans: Apple has always been a really bad partner
“The other kind of long-term characteristic of Apple is that Apple has always been a really bad partner.”
Evans: Eliminating ad targeting concentrates revenue into large platforms and paywalls
“So the aggregate of all of this is basically the strong get stronger, the big get bigger. The advertising moves to the big, strong, established sites. Small sites, new interim sites, less targeted sites makes less money. Content moves behind paywalls.”
Evans: Ad tech built an inverted pyramid of rent-seeking on cookies
“The last 25 years we've built up this sort of inverted pyramid of complexity, rent-seeking, arbitrage, Fraud, privacy, infringement, and god knows what else, on top of a cookie, and now that's kind of going to get turned off.”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Evans: Banning paid political ads inherently favors populists and established celebrities
“If you say you can't buy reach, what you're actually saying is you can only have organic reach. So Trump has got however many followers he's had, so he's kind of fine. So, so when you say you can't do political advertising, but you can have organic reach, whic…”
Evans: Enforcing platform competition inherently conflicts with protecting consumer privacy and security
“Competition conflicts, almost everything that we want to do here. Competition conflicts with privacy conflicts with everything else. You pick one.”
Evans predicts antitrust concerns will force Apple to open iOS NFC access
“Well, I think it's pretty likely that Apple will have to open up NFC access, for example. Because that's a payment monopoly thing.”
Evans: Microsoft Teams provides a collaboration substrate lacking in Zoom
“What Microsoft is doing in Teams is kind of interesting, because it's trying to not just be the video call, it's trying to be like a whole substrate for collaboration. Whereas Zoom made it really easy to get into a call, but everything else around the Zoom app…”
Evans: Shopify proves claims you cannot compete with Amazon are false
“Number one is it shows how dumb it is to say you can, can't compete with Amazon. And this is absolutely competing with Amazon because it, and it's competing with Amazon by offering a completely different way to sell to customers.”
Evans: Real tech competition redefines business models, ignoring antitrust market definitions
“The big strategic competition in these markets is not someone who's in your market that fits an antitrust lawyer's definition of your market. The competitive threat is from somebody who changes the whole fucking business into something else, or offers your cus…”
Evans: Saying Facebook won social is like saying Condé Nast won magazines
“The idea that like, well, Facebook is one has won social is about as dumb as saying that like Condé Nast is one has won magazines. In like, Vogue is one, there's no more magazines. Yeah, like, no, there'll be other things that aren't Vogue, and that's sort of …”
Fears of Amazon swallowing all retail mirror historical fears about Walmart
“It seems very obvious to me that Amazon is a new Walmart, and worrying that Amazon will swallow all retail seems exactly like worrying that Walmart will swallow all retail.”
Benedict Evans says Statista scrapes data incorrectly without context or sourcing
“There's this website called Statista, which scrapes other people's websites, copies the numbers in, copies them in wrong without telling you when they were calculated or what you're actually, what's being defined or who did them.”
Evans: If Tesla is a car company it is screwed; if software, everyone else is
“Tesla, this is the argument. Is it a software company or a car company? If it's a car company, it's screwed. If it's a software company, everyone else is screwed.”
Evans: For Facebook's VR to succeed, it must transcend gaming
“And so for Facebook, paradoxically, VR needs to not be about games.”
Brown: Uber expanded abroad by ignoring local regulations, causing severe backlash
“And it was just so interesting to see the complete lack of understanding of the policies and the regulations, whether it was in Europe, Saudi Arabia, you name it. And they were just like, we're just going to do it the American way and it will stick. And you're…”