Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist

Mysterious meme gets Tech Twitter to clamor for invite to app that doesn't exist(businessinsider.com)

86 points by willstrafach 5 years ago | 56 comments

whymauri 5 years ago |

The statement is the most interesting part, in my opinion:

>In a strange way, this sort of became an anti-statement against what we’d all seen on tech Twitter. We’re a diverse, ragtag group of young technologists tired of the status quo tech industry, and thought that we could make the industry think a bit more about its actions. Despite calls-to-action like that “It’s Time to Build” essay we’ve all read, most of the industry (from product teams to VC) still stays obsessed with exclusive social apps that regularly ignore — or even silence — real needs faced by marginalized people all over the world, and exclude these folks from the building process. As an industry, we need to do better.

perl4ever 5 years ago | |

You've got to be part of a very insular and exclusive group to know what "tech twitter" is. Let alone these "exclusive social apps" they allude to.

anoncareer0212 5 years ago | | |

That's the really cringy part of this, the only people who are talking about this being deep are the people who have been pumping that garbage into my timeline for the last decade

Thorentis 5 years ago | | |

Yeah, this was my thought. Silicon Valley as a whole wasn't captivated by this. Just the people that are usually caught up in "exclusive social apps" (whatever that is) making this less of a deal than it's made out to be.

perl4ever 5 years ago | | |

Ha, downvoted for outing myself as marginalized.

dmix 5 years ago | |

> Despite calls-to-action like that “It’s Time to Build” essay we’ve all read

So is this 'team' building something real or offering an sustainable alternative? Being snippy on social media is an even more rampant way to do nothing while patting yourself on the back about progress.

Besides, there's rarely ever seems to be a shortage of navel gazing and satire written about Silicon Valley.

soared 5 years ago | | |

> most of the industry (from product teams to VC) still stays obsessed with exclusive social apps that regularly ignore — or even silence — real needs faced by marginalized people all over the world, and exclude these folks from the building process. As an industry, we need to do better.

Yes? Promoting social equality imo is building something real. More real than hover cars and spaceships.

Read: real as impact on the world.

buboard 5 years ago | |

This is awesome, the revolt of the postmillenials

searchableguy 5 years ago | | |

Honestly I doubt they are young kids. In the recent years, I have noticed this pattern of using young generation as the hotness to push political messages.

Example: https://www.news18.com/news/tech/mitron-not-indian-tiktok-bu...

ALittleLight 5 years ago |

"Most importantly, we raised over $60,000 in donations from people who hoped to get special treatment within our fabled waitlist."

Isn't this basically fraud? "Hey, give us money and we'll help you get something. Nope, just kidding, we gave your money to charity and that 'something' we promised doesn't exist."

aripickar 5 years ago | |

It was more of a case of "Donate money to these causes and see what happens". Not fraud

amingilani 5 years ago | | |

I'd say it's borderline fraud. They've been retweeting app screenshots with that emoji combination on it[0], retweeting people saying someone took their "username on that emoji app"[1], and directly tweeted "we’ll see what we can do about an invite" if people donated and sent receipts. And now they're using this publicity to gain employment and sell merchandise.

This team mislead people to "support causes" and is now profiting off their newfound fame. I have nothing against non-profits getting more money, but...I'm not sure if I'm happy about this situation here. The ends really don't justify the means.

[0]: https://twitter.com/itsmezhi/status/1276617354013626368?s=20

[1]: https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12764265029435187...

[2]: https://twitter.com/itiseyemoutheye/status/12766503684207656...

Natsu 5 years ago | |

It's also interesting that this was timed right around the release of Parler, a Twitter alternative.

sukilot 5 years ago | | |

Parler is 2 years old and not exclusive. It just got popular this week thanks to some Twitter influencers and due to the founder requesting peot to join.

chrismorgan 5 years ago |

Ugh, BI mangles the emoji badly: the breadcrumb turns each emoji into two of U+FFFE REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, which suggests something turns it into UTF-16 (that accursed encoding that ruined Unicode by making the always-doomed UCS-2 live longer even though the just about uniformly superior UTF-8 was already available, and which persists in distressingly many languages), then tries to turn it into UTF-8 by iterating through each UTF-16 code unit rather than each Unicode scalar value. Then the summary and body of the article just vanish the emoji altogether!

———

I’m fascinated to observe that Firefox Nightly on Windows is, when using a font stack that doesn’t include Segoe UI Emoji (e.g. the headline of the Business Insider article, and the body of https://xn--mp8hai.fm/statement, but not the header of the statement), not emojifying the first U+1F441 EYE, but emojifying the second. I can’t think of any way this could not be a bug. (Update: found a report from about a year ago, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1567178 .)

Chrome is not emojifying either, which is reasonable when its font fallbacks hit some other font that includes EYE first.

For best results on things like this, include U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 after each code point to say “emojify it if you possibly can”. (See also U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15, which says “render it in the old style without colour, please”.) Then you don’t need to worry about whether the font stack hard-codes system emoji fonts.

xvilka 5 years ago | |

One more reminder that UTF-16 should go away and everyone should use UTF-8 everywhere [1].

[1] http://utf8everywhere.org/

BelleOfTheBall 5 years ago |

Not a surprising outcome, considering that the general attitude in Tech Twitter is wanting to learn everything, to get in on the ground floor of cool stuff, etc. It's a harmless-ish prank since the money went to good causes and most people willing to donate just to get in on some app clearly have disposable income. Still misleading and not "victimless" but it's probably the most fun many people have had in this hellish year.

an_opabinia 5 years ago |

Another interpretation of the meme is that even for something pretty obscure, virality alone is worth about $20k/day.

Barrin92 5 years ago |

William Gibson was ahead of the curve with this in Pattern Recognition and the idea of anti-marketing, where secrecy itself becomes the distinguishing factor in creating interest mostly of perpetually bored, shallow, bohemians and the plot centers around finding the source of deliberately hidden anonymous film clips.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 5 years ago | |

Well spotted. Did you read that recently? How did you make that connection?

saagarjha 5 years ago |

I'm pretty sure that emoji combination was in use for quite a while before this happened. Actually, when I saw it around Twitter I assumed it was people just referencing that or using it for its slightly surreality…

politelemon 5 years ago | |

I've seen it used multiple times over the past few years on Reddit.

soared 5 years ago | |

The article explains the origin of the emoji: https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s

nickthegreek 5 years ago | |

I’ve seen kids using it on TikTok for at least 2 weeks

berberous 5 years ago | | |

Their statement said this started out when a group of friends put the emojis in their profile after seeing it on tiktok, and then people started to wonder if they were all working on something together, so they ran with it.

_5659 5 years ago | |

You're right, because I was the one that started using it in 2014.

xenospn 5 years ago |

They could've made it much bigger and raise 10x as much. Not sure why they stopped after 2 days.

synaesthesisx 5 years ago |

Apparently they’ve already raised their pre-seed at a $1B valuation. Cheers to the team!

rjeli 5 years ago |

That article read like GPT2, not even GPT3. The same few points over and over for a dozen paragraphs. Didn’t actually explain why or how anyone donated money to this fake startup/charities

Nasrudith 5 years ago | |

They sound like "Social Text" style bullshit really. Tons of fashionable ideological buzzwords and their own arcane cant for cant's sake, deliberate unpleasability in terms of vast complaints, and having no remotely concrete plans. They shame them for supposed inadequacy of donations and involvement but what would the donations actually be used /towards/ and how would they help the recipients? They already ignore the "boring" answers like scholarships and outreach initatives as not radical enough.

To be frank the actors come across as either insane narcissists or acting in cynical bad faith. They get to feel good about it and/or gain influence but actually helping anybody? They are doing their adversary's work for them while lauding themselves for it!

soared 5 years ago |

The lyrics from the music video that first created the emoji combo is pretty much this group’s thesis:

>Stop blaming twitter. Stop blaming black men. Just because you not getting chose.

https://youtu.be/9Od6y_Kgj3s

Twitter, blm, exclusivity building hype from people who aren’t getting chosen to join. Honestly pretty eloquent.

runnr_az 5 years ago |

For me - a guy who runs an emoji domain registration site - I've been sort of waiting for the right project to take off, so it becomes, like, a thing. Will this finally be our moment? (I wish I could put a shrug emoji in here...)

colejohnson66 5 years ago | |

Would ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ work?

mahaganapati 5 years ago |

> as was shone with invite-only app,

Shouldn't that be "shown"? Or is it a pun?

carapace 5 years ago | |

I think it's just bad editing, it should be "shown".

jasonbourne1901 5 years ago |

I guess we all just learned a trick to check for traction on an idea!

tmabraham 5 years ago |

I was wondering why I was seeing this meme on my Twitter feed. When I first looked it up I couldn't find anything about it... Now I know...

buboard 5 years ago |

Software enters postmodernism

perl4ever 5 years ago | |

It's weird to me that "postmodernism" is eternally current. It was invented like 90 years ago! It reminds me of how people have been talking about millennials so long as youth that they're about to start turning 40.

labster 5 years ago | | |

My own theory is that postmodernism is much much older. Even some of the Mannerist art from the late Renaissance has that sort of conceptual dissonance to me.[0]

The four big pillars are romanticism, which is focused on the past; realism is concerned with the present, modernism is focused on the future. And then postmodernism exists as some sort of combination of the three, combining elements of each in surprising ways -- sometimes a synthesis, other times a rejection.

Of course all my university education is in physical science so this is probably stupid and wrong.

[0]: Seriously, look at this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Librarian_(painting)

cagenut 5 years ago |

In a world of rapidly increasing inequality FOMO actually is the rational response. Most people are missing out.

HenryBemis 5 years ago | |

I perceive FOMO to be a chance to waste time. I miss-out on a billion things per day, I am not reading 10k new articles per day, not playing a million games per day, not eating hundreds of cuisines per day, etc. so I can focus on the 5 articles, and 5 songs, and 3 lunches that I choose to.

If you call that FOMO you are more desperate than you imagine (or probably cannot even imagine) and you will always be chasing something that cannot be caught.

Equality is not achieved by fighting FOMO, but by fighting inequality. Solution (imho) is not to battle 24/7/365, but by picking battles you can win. Yea a government can win far more battles should they want to, and your battle it to be poking them to do so.. but FOMO is irrelevant to the story, just a thing that adds to confusion and, eventually, inaction.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 5 years ago |

This was a very effective way to demonstrate the venality and homogeneity of techie PMCs. Unfortunately, donating that money to BLM is itself a manifestation of that venality and homogeneity.

If only we could devise a way to get money from the wealthy to fund projects that benefit the non-wealthy instead of the billionaire-supported NGO class...

FailMore 5 years ago |

If you want to try a thoughtful social network, you can checkout the one I'm building, Taaalk.

https://taaalk.co

It's a platform for long form text based conversations between closed groups (that everyone can read).