YouTuber and filmmaker Casey Neistat is a prolific user of social media. He uses YouTube, of course, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and even an app of his own creation: Beme. But he does not use Periscope. Why? He quite often makes that point that life is inherently boring, and thus, livestreaming it, unedited and unfiltered, makes for tedious content.
That’s just one of many problems with Periscope, the livestreaming app Twitter bought and launched in March 2015 before the original creators and founders released the app themselves.
The launch was quite messy and felt fairly rushed
Another livestreaming smartphone app, Meerkat, beat them to it, making its debut at film, media, and tech convention South by Southwest 2015 just a couple of weeks earlier near the beginning of March
Twitter actually cut off Meerkat from its social graph just as South by Southwest started, which didn’t really give people the favourable feels
A few months down the line, Meerkat also beat Periscope to Android
Twitter’s severed ties with Meerkat only helped propel the rival app into a stronger limelight. I’d go as far to say that Meerkat actually had a brief cult/celebrity moment. The Verge summarised this well »
That’s all in the past, though. I’ve heard hundreds of people talking about Periscope since it launched, but mentions of Meerkat have been nigh-on non-existent. Periscope have won, and I use ‘won’ very loosely, this battle. Let’s skip forward to the present, and start with the most alarming issues within the Periscope community before drilling down the app’s broken core.
Paedophilia and sexually abusive comments
Remember Omegle? A webcam chat service which connects you with another random user. It quickly became a cesspool of men flashing their penises, resulting in the number of female users shrinking to a bare minimum. Periscope is the opposite, in a way: most streams are by females, and most comments are from males.
The comments are usually deeply concerning:
Tens or hundreds of guys incessantly commenting on the stream of one girl pressuring her to take her clothes off or expose herself
This pressure frequently turns into demand, with language becoming violent and threatening
This makes the streamer understandably nervous, tainting the quality of the stream as they get distracted by being targeted and find it impossible to have a decent conversation with genuinely interested viewers
Males proceed in describing how they’re masturbating while watching the female’s stream
Females often end streams abruptly, looking disgusted, hurt, and confused
For the past couple of weeks I’ve spent an hour each evening perusing Periscope’s global list and trying to talk to people. On two occasions, I’ve landed on streams from girls aged under 18. And on both of those occasions, a regular pattern emerged: commenters would write disgusting perverse things, someone would ask the girl their age, they’d say 15 (the first) or 16 (the second), but the demands for nudity would just keep on coming.
This is both illegal and disturbing behaviour. Periscope has a system in place for reporting this sort of behaviour though, right?
There’s no way to report this sort of behaviour
Nope.
You can report broadcasts, but they’re rarely concerning. In fact, I’ve only seen one penis so far. The comments are almost always abusive, though.
You can’t report comments. Not in your own stream or in other people’s streams. You can only block people.
Periscope’sown guidelines say this: “If you see a user posting abusive comments in a broadcast, please take a screenshot and email [email protected]. We will take action if we find that the user violates the Periscope Community Guidelines.” This is not good enough. To properly quell hateful comments on a livestreaming service, there needs to be a team of people constantly monitoring certain abusive keywords.
For a moment, let’s imagine we’ve skipped forward two years and Periscope has implemented a suitable framework for reporting abusive comments or built a system intelligent enough to detect abusive comments. Let’s focus on…
The actual content of streams
Three quarters of Periscope streams are people sat in their bedrooms talking to their front-facing camera. Watching these streams is a lot like being on the receiving end of awkward date small talk: it’s just not fun.
Only, it’s worse than awkward date small talk, because streams regularly buffer every 30 seconds, and there are frequently 10-second delays between comments being sent and comments appearing on the streamer’s screen. This makes communication disjointed and turns something which could perhaps be fun into a chore.
Sidenote: ‘Trying to reconnect…’ doesn’t feel like good copy design. Is it trying to reconnect, or is it reconnecting?
People driving. Very soon we’ll hear of the first fatal car crash caused by people Periscoping while behind the wheel.
If you’re lucky, you’ll open Periscope while someone is livestreaming an interesting event, like conferences or concerts. Obvious copyright issues aside, these streams only ever seem genuinely interesting for a few minutes. Events livestreamed from a smartphone fall into a monotonous grey area between experiencing live events for yourself in person and seeing photos/reading write-ups of events on news sites and blogs. Live broadcasts (e.g. televised sports) need a lot of work — multi-angles, replays, graphics, etc. — to be engaging.
Finding interesting content or people
When you open Periscope you’re presented with a feed of live broadcasts or archived replayable broadcasts from the people you follow. The second main screen is a global view — a list of randomly-selected streams from people around the world. More recently, Periscope introduced a map view for this worldwide feed. Let’s talk about both the list and the map view:
At the top of the list view, there are usually three featured streams — the only attempt Periscope makes at pushing interesting content to the forefront. These are, most of the time, news anchors giving behind-the-scenes studio tours, which is interesting at first but quickly gets repetitive and bland.
I haven’t the faintest of clues how the rest of the list view is selected from a technical perspective, but for all intents and purposes to the user, it’s entirely random. This would be a good thing if streams were typically engaging or interesting, but as explained above, they’re almost always not.
LANGUAGE. One of the options in Periscope’s Settings panel is the ability to filter the list view down to only the languages you know. In my case, this is English and German. Do I see only English and German streams? No, I don’t. I see streams in every language. French, Dutch, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian — everything. What is the point of this option? What is the point of showing me streams in languages I don’t understand? I can’t listen. Or converse. The filter doesn’t work.
HASHTAGS. It’s just about forgivable that the original developers didn’t implement a hashtag system to make it easier to search for content you might be interested in, but it’s the eighth deadly sin that Twitter, the pioneers of the hashtag, still haven’t developed this feature more than half a year after launching the app. Amusingly, users still include hashtags in the titles of their streams — entirely non-functional, and makes the list view look messy.
CATEGORIES. Nope.
RECOMMENDED PEOPLE. Nope.
When you go to the third main screen of Periscope, the place where you find new people to follow, you’re presented with a couple of Featured Users and then a long list of everyone you follow on Twitter who has Periscope. Not people you follow on Twitter who actively use it — just people who have accounts. In alphabetical order.
This screen doesn’t appear to be intelligent or tailored in any way. The Featured Users seem entirely random — I was recommended two Food Network accounts, and I don’t follow either on Twitter. Nor do I follow any foodies/chefs/restaurant brands on Periscope.
People you follow on Twitter who actively use Periscope aren’t given priority over everyone else. As said, it’s just alphabetical.
As for the map view, it’s not clear how the pins shown are selected. Instead of being able to zoom in on a place you’re interested in and see the streams from that location, you’re presented with a random array of dots across the world. Opening a live stream of a random place would actually be quite a nice idea if the livestreams were interesting, but alas, you end up staring at a bored teenager lying in bed 90% of the time.
It’s pretty impossible to purposefully find interesting content on Periscope. It’s like the lottery, but instead of hoping to win loads of money, you search in vain of some useful or intriguing content to watch.
Hearts
Comments are how watchers interact with streamers, so they have to appear somewhere. Annoyingly, they appear over the bottom third of the livestream, getting in the way of what you’re trying to watch. That’s okay, though, because where else are you going to put them?
Hearts aren’t necessary at all, though. They bounce and flow up the right edge of the screen, cutting out more of the livestream you’re trying to watch, and they don’t contribute to how the app is used. You can’t see a list of streams you’ve hearted, and you can’t see who has hearted your streams. Hearts just accumulate into an overall number which sits on people’s profiles.
If it’s a way for Periscope to figure out which content people are enjoying so that they can push certain livestreams to the forefront, fair enough. But that’s still a very one-dimensional way to measure interest and choose content to show users when they land in the app.
In summary
Periscope has a long way to go. Given that Jack Dorsey has just taken up the helm at Twitter and has already proven ruthless in the staff layoffs he’s actioned, hopefully for the benefit and interest of the ailing social network, it will be very interesting to see how he approaches Periscope, which, from the outside, looks much more like a burden than a blessing.
The team behind the app first need to address the legal issues Periscope presents: bullying, sexual abuse, paedophilia, and copyright. Then they need to throw lots of weight behind making it easier to find good content.
They also need to work with content creators from other platforms to give them an incentive to use Periscope. At the moment there’s no real clear reason for YouTubers, brands, businesses, et al to livestream through the app. Their audience isn’t there. Celebrities I’ve seen venture into Periscope territory have used the app once and then given up, never to return.
Sherlock Holmes is fine with problems. More than fine. Problems are his job. More than his job. Problems are his life. Sherlock really wants to ask John something. Only, he’s not sure what…
In his frantic determination to complete his sensory catalog of John, Sherlock hits the boundary of social niceties by asking to gather insight from taste receptors. Oral fixation at its finest brings John and Sherlock past the point of platonic flatmates experimenting for quantifiable data into much more sexual territory. As Sherlock struggles to express his desires John faithfully waits for the opportune moment to participate.
Sherlock’s obsessive attention to gathering minutiae is brilliantly utilized in his approach toward initiating a dalliance with potential for growth. Third person narration alternates between Sherlock and John but does not interfere with the flow or clarity of the text. Despite his efforts to mask internal processing of his feelings, Sherlock is an open book for John who has been waiting just as patiently (if less compulsively). What I enjoy about this piece is the tension which carries through the first few chapters, blossoms at the actual tasting, and lingers through the resolution along with a certain levity. MATURE READERS ONLY.
2D: -Feeds Kinder Eggs to cats -Eats Massive Dick -Needs Murdoc to tie his shoelaces -His name is literally Stu Pot… stewpot… -Dated Rachel Stevens -Mum Jeans -Sold the Geep!!!
Murdoc: -Turned green seemingly overnight -Dressed as a nazi that one time -Kidnapped Russel -Kidnapped 2D -*various Murdoc noises* -He’s been wearing the same Cuban heels for about 16 years -THE BAFF -Hangs pictures of him cutting an onion up in his house
Russel: -Likes eels -Sleeps in the middle of the road -Seems to be tired all the time (same tho) -Probably cares too much -There’s not really anything wrong with him. I’m finding this one really tricky. He’s so lovely please take care of this boy.
Noodle: -??? -Umm… -It says that for the new Humanz album, she pretty much Fed-Ex’d herself to the band again. Why? She didn’t need to do that. I mean, it’s cute because that’s how she initially arrived at the very beginning but like, the poor girl could’ve just got a plane. She finished Moby Dick though so that’s good. I hope she enjoyed it.
This woman is giving you a thumbs up. IS THIS FEMINIST?
TRIGGER WARNING. The “thumbs up” is the most phallocentric gesture imaginable. You are literally telling someone that a good job is the equivalent of growing a penis. In this case, two penises.
I fully expect this to be the one and only post I ever do about Amber Rose.
Occasionally, Amber Rose surfaces in pop-culture as a trending topic. I don’t look into her often, but when I do usually I understand where she’s coming from, if not agree with the point she’s trying to make.
Recently, Kanye West called her into a twitter-fight between himself and Wiz Khalifa–and she shut it down entirely. And as amusing as that is and no matter how much I identify with the things she said and does – there’s one thing about her that bothers me.
Yet she clearly appears to have features heavily associated with blackness: full lips, an olive complexion (relatively common in black people), a thick, very curvy body, and a large round butt. The icing on the cake: she has an African mom. She still says, “I’m not black.”
Many of the descriptors she uses for herself are nationalities that do not define her race. It’s as if stating countries which a possess white populations and/or have substantial European influence is a free pass on blackness – As if black people didn’t live in Portugal, Scotland, Ireland or Cape Verde. As if her mom didn’t wasn’t African.
But rest assured: her mother is African and she is brown-skinned.
Cape Verde, where Amber Rose’s mother is from, is an island off the coast of Western Africa. It’s an African Country. Africans have been there since the Portuguese trafficked African (black) slaves from the African continent in 1456.
And because of the heavy European influence and racial mixing in Cape Verde, they’re considered a mixed people – And According to Amber Rose, she views herself as Creole:
“With my family, they feel like they’re more superior or better than an African American because we’re Creole and we have culture and that’s something I battle with most of my life.” (source)
Amber Rose was born and raised in America. Her mother is a brown-skinned (black) African woman, she has a white father (Irish and Italian descent), and because she has light skin, she has people defending her as non-black.
In the United States (and many other places), any black ancestry easily qualifies a person as black – especially if that person is not white passing and especially if that person has an African mother. Amber Rose is not white passing. Her mother is African. She openly participates in black culture. And still, she hesitates to even use the descriptor “black” in reference to herself. In every interview I’ve found and every quote, she is quick to claim her white ancestry but does not even utter “black” or “African.”
She denies it.
I think it’s wild because one of my best friends @shakotancisco is Cape Verdean. My mans is PROUD of his heritage. How can Amber Rose be of such beautiful heritage and hate herself so much to deny her own blackness?
This is one of the reasons why I can’t ride with Amber Rose. I know a lot of my followers may take issue with this, but aside from her apparent love for her child, nearly everything else she does seems to be nothing more than her making herself feel comfortable about her own delusions and justifying her behavior in the process. To me, it seems like her anti slut-shaming and sexual liberation crusade is less about standing up for (primarily) women (but men too), is a matter of cleaning up her own public perception.
Amber Rose makes herself the “other,” or, “the exception.” It’s as if she’s saying, “I’m not really black, I’m just a perfect mixture of races,” and this further supports the fetishization of mixed women. You mentioned that her reality was that she may not see love first and that using men for her own personal gain was just what she had to do. I can see that and it makes sense. However, in her case, it seems like she revels in it, almost maliciously, until someone calls her on it and she reverts back to the anti slut-shaming argument.
Though problematic, I enjoy her clapbacks and I think she’s hilarious in her pettiness. I liked (past tense) that she was providing a voice to those who own their sexuality. I liked (also past tense) that she was making a point to create her own lane and challenge the notion that she was a ‘creation’ of Kanye West. And I really liked (yup, past tense again) that she handled herself through the nonsense and media slander with grace and dignity.
But then, she goes on to deny her blackness and it immediately makes me distrustful of her. Without her clapbacks, is she much different than Raven or Stacey Dash? Is she even worth taking seriously if she denies who she really is? Is her carefully crafted persona nothing more than armor that she wears to protect her own insecurities about her identity? I just don’t buy it.
As a non-sex worker–I do not critique sex work which includes dancing, stripping, partial and full services.
She has sold/possibly still sells sexual fantasy/services/sexual appeal as a living – and she’s gotten a lot of money for it. If she revels in it, she has a right to. If someone is rewarded with money or items for sex acts/sexual performance/sex appeal, then that becomes a justified connection. In this entire side of the house, it’s incredibly important to note that if she does have a particularly toxic view of using men for money, it did not happen in a vacuum.
“black” is literally a descriptor used to oppress people so it makes sense that some people would distance themselves from it–not to mention that this would have the additional trial of facing anti-blackness in everywhere they went.
You seem to be particularly upset by Amber Roses’s statement about using seductive skills on her significant others for cash, and that’s understandable.
Is it upsetting? Yes. Is it manipulative to seduce a man into financial gain? Also yes. Is it morally unsettling? Sure. Is that the nature of her work as a dancer? As it turns out, yes. Have her former lovers complained about using them? None that I can find.
I don’t know where this recent idea came from that fiction has to be perfectly healthy anyway. Fiction is not inherently healthy and never has been, its not real, its for exploration and imagination. Fiction is separate from reality and that is why we like it. What you write about is not what you condone, Stephen King is not serial killer for writing about murder. People are not being “abuse apologists” for shipping two characters in a less than healthy way.
I’m sick of this new trend.
You don’t have to like a ship but you want to know what is actually hurting people? What is not promoting healthy behavior? Harassing shippers, telling them they’re disgusting over fiction, that kind of shining behavior antis exhibit.
Tag invaders (for one example) are displaying an unhealthy behavior. You don’t burst into your neighbor’s living room and tell them they’re gross for liking that television program. You don’t monitor their bedroom and tell them they practice their sex lives incorrectly—not if you’re a healthy individual, you don’t.
So I’m watching The Big Bang Theory for the first time in a while. And as much as I don’t appreciate it as comedy, I do appreciate it as a form of self reflection. And therefore, find it amusing because I can relate to it
