I Listened To Zuckerberg Talk For An Hour So You Didn't Have To

Image source: Sidechannel's Discord server

Casey Newton is one of tech's most loved journalists. Mark Zuckerberg is a CEO of a company with considerably different public vibes around it.

This morning Newton hosted Zuck for a live audio chat on his Substack-based company's brand new Discord server.

I'll admit that 3 months ago I wouldn't have understood what half of that last sentence meant, but it has significant implications for the digital and media landscape so I'll break it down (if you're a step ahead of me already, scroll down to the bullets to see what they talked about):

Casey Newton was a star reporter/podcaster/etc. for The Verge (one of the Internet's most influential tech news sites. He left his job to start his own newsletter using a platform called Substack where users can easily sign up and pay to receive email newsletters.

He teamed up with a few other now-independent writers to create a group that they call Sidechannel, and that group has launched a conversation channel on a platform called Discord. Discord looks a lot like Slack, and it's growing in popularity as a place for people to congregate and discuss things like gaming, investing, memes and other hot topics.

When Zuckerberg heard that one of tech's most influential writers was going to have a Discord server (a "server" is Discord-speak for a space, like Groups in Facebook, or Workspaces in Slack) his people reached out and offered to have Mark chat with Casey as a bit of a launch event. That happened this morning.

Here's what those two got up to on the call:

• Zuckerberg used the majority of the time on Discord to talk about how Facebook is building a bunch of tools to compete with platforms like Discord (he didn't say that specifically, but the irony was fantastic)
• He also said that the social space in general is facing a fundamental shift: “Increasingly the new special platforms are being built off of messaging, rather than broadcasting”
• He announced three specific products that Facebook is working on:

1. A way to create and consume short-form audio clips that will be algorithmically served to listeners, similar to the way that TikTok serves up video - the new product is called Soundbites
2. The ability for podcasters to share their content on Facebook - he was less specific on this one, and instead just commented that there are over 150 million people who currently follow podcasters on Facebook, and that this will give them a way to share more audio content with them directly.
3. Live audio. He referenced Groups and other communities, saying "you already have these communities that are organized around interests. We're allowing people to come together and talk".

What's clear is that audio-based content is not going anywhere. I'm skeptical about anyone's desire for short, "snack-able" audio content that's served up via an algorithm but in general, once Facebook puts its resources behind something (see: social video, stories, etc.), that format tends to go from early adopters to mainstream real quick.

Discord doesn't record their conversations, but one enterprising user used an AI tool to create a rough transcription of the conversation. You can find it here.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting