Good Monday Morning! It’s April 12th. Yesterday was Master’s Sunday, the final day of the week-long golf tournament held in Augusta, GA (my home state 🍑). Although Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama won the tournament’s top prize, the Green Jacket, let’s not overlook golf’s real winner.
Also! Before we get into it, a quick plug to formally introduce the Weekly SWIRL Chat. Every Friday at 12ET, we go live on Matt’s TwitterSpaces to chat about the week’s issue. Join us this Friday.
Anyway, here’s the SWIRL:
📱 Tech: Offline behavior = online bans
📈 Business: Best Buy bundles up
🏛 Politics: Supreme courting more justices?
If this is your first SWIRL, keep reading this part. If not, carry on to the content. Welcome, new Swirlers! Here’s a brief reader guide for you: the three teasers above will unfurl below to briefly cover a buzzy development in their respective areas. You’ll read a little about each one. At the end, we pull on a common thread among all three and explore what it might mean for us. If you missed last week’s SWIRL, tuck in here.
📱 Tech: Offline behavior = online bans
Simply putting an equals sign in an expression doesn’t make it math. But for Twitch, a popular live-streaming platform for video gamers, the equation above now proves out ✔.
In a newly announced 📢 update to their misconduct rules, the streaming service broached new territory by expanding their policy to include “severe” offline offenses. Pushing beyond their current practice of banning 🚫 users for misconduct while on Twitch, the Amazon-owned company will now begin policing behavior that occurs offline or on other online platforms.
…we will issue enforcements against the relevant accounts, up to an indefinite suspension on the first offense for some behaviors, which can take place offline or on other internet services… - Twitch Off-service Policy
So what counts as severe offenses? Here’s Twitch’s list:
Deadly violence
Terrorism
Threats of mass violence
Membership in a hate group
Non-consensual sexual activities and/or sexual assault
Sexual exploitation of children
The compromise the physical safety of the Twitch community
Threats against Twitch staff
Over the last year, Twitch has been on a policy journey 🗺. Back in June 2020, several women came forward to assert the company hadn’t done enough to protect them from harassment. The aftermath of those reports and others resulted in a Dec 2020 policy change that strengthened 💪🏿 the platform’s rules around harassment and hateful speech.
Last week’s update to these policies appears to represent a further focus 🔍 on protecting its users from “offenses that pose a substantial risk to the Twitch community.”
Will other platforms follow suit? SWIRL reached out to a professor and video games 🕹 historian (new to the list of cool things I didn’t know were things) at New York University, who offered this response for us to consider.
“There's no objective answer to whether other social media platforms "should" follow Twitch's lead here, because privacy and safety policies aren't really about what's best for people in any objective way. They're about sustaining business models, supporting a certain imagination of community core to a platform's identity, avoiding government intervention, etc.
When Facebook and Twitter failed to act against white supremacists and domestic terrorists, they did so by design, as they had been doing for years. Their revenue models are built around the delusion of themselves as a hands-off public square, rather than as a network that can be manipulated through disinformation. Twitch, in contrast, monetizes largely directly off its user bases, by taking a cut of streamer donations.
This kind of micro-patronage relies directly on the idea of Twitch as a "community" in order to maintain its authenticity. Twitch has a different sent of incentives for trying to manage the safety of its community than other social media platforms.
—Laine Nooney, assistant professor and historian of video games at New York University
📈 Business: Best Buy bundles up
It’s 2021 and you’ve probably got subscriptions to Netflix🍿, Amazon Prime📦, and for the e-mingling singles, maybe Tinder💌 (good luck out there, you!).
So, would you also pay $199.99 for a Best Buy annual subscription? The execs leading the blue and yellow electronics 🖥 retailer hope so.
On Thursday, Best Buy unveiled a pilot program that bundles together multiple services for customers who sign up for its ‘Best Buy Beta’ membership. The program is currently limited to ~60 stores, as the big box chain tries out the subscription model—but the assumed goal 🥅 would be a nationwide expansion.
Some questions: what would the $200 get me? why are they doing this? does purchasing a Best Buy subscription make me more or less of a nerd?
Some answers:
What you get…
🤓 Unlimited in-home Geek Squad support
✈ Expedited shipping
💪 Free delivery & installations
🆘 24/7 concierge phone service
Why all of this is happening…
As I mentioned, it’s 2021…
…which means almost every company without one is considering some type of ‘recurring revenue 🤑 bundle’ or for short, according to business professor Scott Galloway (who controversially went bare-chested on Twitter last week), a “Rundle”
Best Buy’s services only accounted for 4% of its revenue in recent quarters; offering an annual subscription to bundled services, like Beta, could boost 📈 revenues
Does signing up make me a nerd?
If you need to pay $200 for unlimited Geek Squad support, your nerd factor is probably pretty low
Conversely, if you need to pay $200 for expedited shipping on video gaming devices, the latest optical laser mouse, or new HDMI cords because yours are actually failing due to overuse, you probably have strong nerd tendencies
We won’t know how successful this trial program is until Best Buy decides to either expand it or quietly cancel it, but we do know 🙋🏻♂️one thing: we’re living in the rundle age.
🏛 Politics: Supreme courting more justices?
Washington DC insiders often call the justices 👩🏽⚖️ of the Supreme Court “The Nine.” On Friday, President Biden called for a new commission that could possibly lead to “The Nine” becoming “The Thirteen”…or more.
Sticking to a promise he made on the campaign trail last October, the president has signed ✍🏻 an executive order that creates a bipartisan, 36-member commission to study potential reforms to the Supreme Court.
The new panel tasked with examining potential changes to the Court 🏛 will have 180 days to debate and offer analysis ⚖️ on questions like whether justices, unlike other government officeholders, should have lifetime appointments, and whether or not the number of justices appointed to the Court should be expanded ↗ beyond its current membership of nine.
According to the White House…
“The Commission’s purpose is to provide an analysis of the principal arguments in the contemporary public debate for and against Supreme Court reform, including an appraisal of the merits and legality of particular reform proposals…” - White House Press Release
Meanwhile, the Republican 🐘 Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, ripped into the White House’s actions…
“Today’s announcement is a direct assault on our nation’s independent judiciary and yet another sign of the Far Left’s influence over the Biden Administration.” - McConnell Press Release
The move was destined to raise eyebrows 🤨on both sides of the aisle.
On the left 👈🏻: The left has clamored about the imbalance on the Supreme Court, partly due to McConnell’s blocking Merrick Garland during the Obama administration. But likely to the left’s chagrin, Biden’s commission won’t be issuing any recommendations or guidance on the reform questions. Rather, it’ll simply provide analysis.
On the right 👉🏻: The right has long strategized to exert influence over the judicial selection process in America—and they’ve been successful at it. So, any potential changes to how the Supreme Court operates would ruffle feathers. And that’s why McConnell and others quickly slammed the White House’s announcement on Friday.
So, how do our three stories swirl together? All three pieces center around internal changes being driven by outside pressures. But we’re going another layer deeper. In addition to being under pressure, the specific changes these organizations are making/exploring also share something in common: expansion.
Let’s take them one by one!
🎮 Twitch
Outside pressures: Twitch users asking for better protections, broader societal concerns about the nexus between offline and online behavior (read: social media & the Jan 6 insurrection)
Response: expanding bad behavior policy enforcement beyond Twitch’s digital walls
📺 Best Buy
Outside pressure: competitors’ subscription programs wooing customers (e.g. Amazon Prime and Walmart+)
Response: expanding its current “Total Tech Support” plan into a full-fledged, subscription service to compete
🏛 White House
Outside pressure: Activists and groups calling for changes to the Supreme Court
Response: exploring an expansion of the number of Supreme Court justices, along with other possible reforms
We all have different ideas about how to handle pressure. Sometimes, we decide to ignore it and continue our journey. In other situations, the answer might be to pause or retreat. Today’s SWIRL stories shine a light on a third option: lean in to the pressure and chart a new direction.
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