What's New: Reddit enters the live audio game with Reddit Talk

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Subreddit moderators can now sign up for the waitlist:

• The new feature will allow moderators to start live audio rooms in their subreddits. Soon, every platform will likely have a live audio feature. Pick the platform you like and start building community before the market is saturated.
• Bitcoin consumes more carbon emissions per year than the country Argentina. As experts argue about the true environmental costs, some point out that Americans’ idle electronics are more of an environmental issue than the entire Bitcoin network.
• Prospera, a tech charter city in Honduras, is now open for business. Dru Riley believes that charter cities are the solution to poor governance, as there are more successful charter cities than you may think.

Want to share something with over 70,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🗣 Reddit Enters the Live Audio Game With "Reddit Talk"

from the User Acquisition Channels newsletter by Darko G.

Reddit Talk launched on Monday, and mods can now sign up to try the feature in their subreddits. Founders can hop on this new feature by becoming active in subreddits related to their products, and holding live chats when the feature fully rolls out.

Reddit Talk

The live audio wars have begun: Reddit launched Reddit Talk, a Clubhouse clone that will allow subreddit moderators to start live audio rooms.

Live audio will soon be everywhere: Reddit Talk joins the live audio fray with Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. Last week, Facebook announced various social audio features, one being the ability for Facebook Group admins to create live audio rooms for their members.

What this means for you: Communities are going to get even more powerful. Text is a human invention, but voice has been around since the dawn of evolution. Hearing a voice creates a bond faster than just typing a bunch of keystrokes onto a computer/phone screen.

The opportunity: Now might be the best time to start a community for your industry. Choose a platform you like and get onboard soon, because live audio is coming everywhere. LinkedIn and Slack have announced that they will add this feature soon, while Discord and Telegram have already implemented it.

YouTube

Around 72% of the US population uses social media. A recent Pew study showed that YouTube is the most popular social media platform for US adults, with 81% using it regularly. Facebook is second with 69%, and Instagram is in third place with 40%.

Supply/demand: YouTube and Facebook had a similar market share in 2019 (73% and 69%, respectively), but things changed after the pandemic with YouTube jumping to 81% and Facebook staying at a flat 69%.

The opportunity: There's an obvious supply/demand gap between YouTube and Facebook. Go to Google and type "Facebook ads." Now do the same for "YouTube ads." The ecosystem around small businesses advertising on Facebook is HUGE. YouTube? Not so much.

2021 might have created a gap in supply/demand that you can use to your advantage if you use YouTube ads in an efficient way.

Facebook conversions

A data-driven marketer tweeted about how he used Facebook broad dynamic product ads (BDPA) to reach a cold audience and get return on ad spending (ROAS) > 3.5x.

The key: The marketer gave Facebook some additional values for his products. He's into the e-commerce space, so he added an extra field: "google_product_category." This small tweak helped the Facebook algorithm better understand what his product is about. That resulted in the algorithm showing the product to more relevant people, ultimately getting him better return on investment.

Why this works: The Facebook algorithm has gotten so advanced that many top marketers don't even scratch the surface on all the targeting capabilities. They just target the whole country and leave Facebook to figure out to whom to show their ads.

The opportunity: Explore different ways through which you can give the Facebook algorithm more information about your product. That allows it to better understand what your products are about, and start showing them to relevant people. This second part of the experiment explains how to do this. Some of the tactics involve interacting with the Facebook Marketing API, but doing this can potentially give you an unfair advantage.

What platform's live audio do you like the most? Share in the comments!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to User Acquisition Channels for more.

📰 In the News

🍔 The global market for plant-based meat alternatives will reach $450B by 2040.

🚲 Peloton stock fell 5% after a child died in a Peloton-related accident.

🚙 Cadillac rolled out electric vehicles amid plans to exclusively offer all-electric vehicles by 2030.

🤫 A new US federal privacy bill would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to obtain identifying information.

🛍 LVMH, Prada, and Cartier have formed fashion's first blockchain alliance.

🌏 The Environmental Costs of Mining Bitcoin

from the Indie Economy newsletter by Bobby Burch

A recent BBC report found that Bitcoin consumes more carbon emissions per year than the country Argentina. In light of this news, some crypto creators are eyeing a more sustainable future.

Bitcoin mining

The background: The distributed network that makes Bitcoin secure also consumes significant energy to validate transactions and mine the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s “proof of work” algorithm, also known as mining, requires members of a network to compute math puzzles that prevent others from cheating the system.

The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimates that a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough electricity (985 kilowatt hours) to power a US household for nearly 34 days.

Carbon conundrum: As Bitcoin’s price has skyrocketed, so has its energy consumption. Energy use from computers mining Bitcoin transactions has increased 83% in the last year, per the Digiconomist. In just the last two months, Bitcoin’s energy usage has jumped an estimated 33%.

Value begets competition: Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum, said that Bitcoin’s quadrupling of value in the last year has created more revenue for miners, spurring more competition:

The more successful Bitcoin gets, the higher the price goes; the higher the price goes, the more competition for Bitcoin; and thus the more energy is expended to mine.

Coal-powered crypto: The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance notes that nearly half of all Bitcoin mining operations are located in China, which relies heavily on coal power. Cambridge estimates that coal powers about 38% of Bitcoin miners.

Eco-friendly alternatives: Bitcoin gave birth to the blockchain, but the concept has evolved into more energy efficient crypto options:

• Nano has cut out mining operations entirely, opting instead for a low-energy consensus mechanism called Open Representative Voting. For each transaction, Nano says it uses about 0.0001 KWh, as compared to Bitcoin’s 985 KWh and Ethereum’s 62.5 KWh.

• Cardano created the Ouroboros, an energy efficient blockchain protocol that's based on peer-reviewed research. Cardano says its network consumes about 6 GWh of power per year, making it roughly 4M times more efficient than Bitcoin.

• Ripple may be facing heat from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but it was designed with sustainability in mind. Ripple has also eliminated mining operations and uses a consensus procedure to validate and execute orders. The company says its network is 57K times more energy efficient than Bitcoin.

Counterarguments: Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer of the digital asset management firm CoinShares, argues that emails also use electricity, but are not criticized in the same way. He points out that banks and stock exchanges also draw significant power but aren’t held to the same scrutiny:

What we have here is people trying to decide what is or is not a good use of energy, and Bitcoin is incredibly transparent in its energy use while other industries are much more opaque.

Energy policy vs. crypto costs: The CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank founded by Charles Koch, argues that claims of environmental damage caused by cryptos are exaggerated. A CATO researcher maintains that the environmental impact of Bitcoin is a function, not of the technology, but of the countries’ energy policies in which miners operate:

There is no evidence that cryptocurrencies have environmental externalities beyond those that can be ascribed to any electricity user wherever electricity is inefficiently priced. But public policy, not cryptocurrency innovation, is at fault there.

Unused electronics dwarf crypto: While crypto’s energy bill is growing, Americans’ idle electronics are more of an environmental issue than the Bitcoin network. The amount of electricity consumed in the US every year by always-on, yet inactive devices like laptop chargers and microwaves could power the Bitcoin network for nearly two years, according to Cambridge University.

What do you think of the environmental effects of mining Bitcoin? Please share your thoughts below.

Subscribe to Indie Economy for more.

🤥 Marketing Lie: You Need to go Viral

By Julian Shapiro

The lie: You need to go viral.

The truth: Word of Mouth (WOM) is far more realistic and applicable to most startups.

WOM is the result of a product that:

• Removes obstacles or pain from people's lives: Slack removes the pain people feel when sorting through inefficient email threads.

• Gives people dopamine hits of delight: Airbnb's refreshing take on traveling like a local is delightful.

Create something that people can't help but share.

Discuss this story.

🏙 Charter Cities Could be a Solution to Poor Governance

from the Trends.vc newsletter by Dru Riley

Prospera, a tech charter city in Honduras, recently opened for business. Amid gripes of poor governance, particular in the global handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, could charter cities be the solution?

Why it matters

What separated East and West Germany? Zhuhai, Shenzhen, Shantou and Xiamen from China? What separates North and South Korea?

Governance.

Bad laws lead to poverty.

Problem

Poor governance works. For a few.

Benefits are concentrated. Costs dispersed.

Solution

Charter cities are new cities with better laws.

They go by many names: Special economic zones (Dubai Internet City), special administrative regions (Hong Kong) and countries (Singapore).

As expert economist Tyler Cowen points out:

There are a lot more charter cities than we think. It's just that the successful ones stop looking like charter cities.

Players

Charter Cities

• Nkwashi: A university-anchored city under construction in Zambia.
• Próspera: A semi-autonomous zone on the island of Roatán. Built in partnership with Honduras.
• Talent City: Charter city located in Nigeria. Focused on creating "technology-enabled" jobs.

Special Economic Zones

• Shenzhen: Located near Hong Kong. China's first special economic zone.
• Mariel - A port located near Havana.
• Tanjung Lesung: Located in Indonesia. Focused on tourism.
• China-Belarus Industrial Park: Focused on high-tech manufacturing.

Special Administrative Regions

• Hong Kong: The former British Colony transferred to China in 1997.
• Macau: A former Portuguese colony with a separate governing system from mainland China.
• Sinuiju: A region of North Korea experimenting with a market economy.
• Yogyakarta: The only recognized monarchy within the government of Indonesia.

Organizations

• Charter Cities Institute : A nonprofit aimed at improving the ecosystem for charter cities.
• Creator Towns: An initiative to grow small towns by leveraging the digital economy.
• Plumia: Billed as the first country on the internet.
• Bluebook Cities: A group aimed at building cloud-first cities. Also behind Praxis.

Predictions

• Remote work will lower switching costs between cities. Where we work and live are being decoupled. We'll optimize for lifestyle and physical networks over offices.
• Cities will compete for citizens. Miami's mayor makes a show of it. Governance options lead to more competition between jurisdictions.
• Relocation incentive programs will become more aggressive. See the remote work report with 25+ relocation incentive programs.

Opportunities

• Fight as few battles as possible. Consider relocating before building a new city.
• Decide what to test. How much political autonomy do you need to:
  • Ban cars
  • Lower taxes
  • Legalize drugs
  • Reform education
  • Use ranked-choice voting
  • Institute an open container law
  • Legalize certain medical procedures
• Start with problems, not policies. Don't fetishize charter cities or seasteading. Think from first-principles.
• Cheaply try ideas. Test governance models in cruise ships, DAOs, virtual worlds and temporary autonomous zones like Black Rock City (Burning Man).

Key lessons

• Experiments have positive expected returns. Most fail but some have asymmetric upside. We need more than 195 experiments.
• Environment matters. We've seen natural experiments where culture, geography and other variables are controlled. Governance tips the scale.
• Evolution needs variation and selection to work. We need more governance options and the ability to vote with our feet.

Haters

"Lots of charter cities have failed."

There are more than we think. The same goes for no-code tools like WordPress. We move goalposts.

"Charter cities will be unequal."

We don't need charter cities for that. Will Durrant reminds us that:

Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

"Charter cities will discriminate."

We don't need charter cities for that either. Teams behind relocation incentive programs run competitive screening processes to decide who receives thousands of dollars to relocate.

"This will lead to gentrification."

Most organizations focus on greenfield cities. Those who don't could argue that unshared upside, not gentrification, is the issue.

"East and West Germany. SEZs in China. The difference was a market economy. That's low-hanging fruit. Now what?"

I asked lots of people what they would change about their city. Everyone had answers.

"What about seasteading?"

We covered it. Costs need to drop, political issues need resolutions, there's a quality of life question and practical things like wave breaks.

Links

1. What would the world look like if economists were in charge? A list of changes economists would make from legalizing drugs to removing the minimum wage.
2. Building the Network State: We've ceded power to gods, nation-states and now networks.
3. Citizens Vote With Their Feet: On the importance of choice.

More Reports

Go here to get the Trends Pro report. It contains 200% more insights. You also get access to the entire back catalog and the next 52 Pro Reports.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Nathalie Zwimpfer for the illustrations, and to Darko G., Priyanka Vazirani, Bobby Burch, Julian Shapiro, and Dru Riley for contributing posts. —Channing