Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The drawing for the largest-ever lottery prize will be on Wednesday, if you still want a ticket. ID: 7740669 4. The meme claims that if the winner of the big prize instead split the money with every American citizen, each person would get $4.33 million. “Poverty solved!” it declared. ID: 7741504 One of the first…
Peach is dead, four days after its launch. This seems as obvious as the death of Meerkat one month after its debut. One cool aspect of the modern app market is that the hype cycle can now peak in less than 24 hours. A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the…
Twitter is rumored to be considering increasing its per-tweet character count from 140 to 10,000 – a potential move that instantly sent the troubled tech company’s share price into a tailspin. Twitter shares plummeted more than 2% on the news, first reported by Re/code on Tuesday, which seemed to undermine the essential nature of the…
This position paper is a development of a previous article I wrote for Model View Culture, titled: “The Politics of Trending.” Every time CNN points to “Trending” in order to discuss breaking news, we should laugh. That is, laugh at: CNN, journalists, experts, the simulacra. Smirking at the notion that privatized, opaque institutions of selective…
Twitter’s removal of journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s verification badge for unspecified rules violations has pushed the company — in the midst of a crackdown on harassment — deeper into the politicized battle over online speech. Though Yiannopoulos is still on the platform, the self-described supervillain is widely impersonated and the loss of the verification…
A trendy New Command-line Chat Playground is a Honeypot for Meta Data and Gives Web the. Peach isn’t on the web. Your profile has no❌URL. % proprietary walled garden. Private but not privacy-positive. Free as in not . — This tweet is making the rounds today, so unpacking with obligatory thinkpiece on Medium. Peach New…
The famous Selfie Rat. Are the Internet’s most cherished viral rat videos the work of a mysterious woman who trains rats to do her bidding for an elaborate series of YouTube stunts? Possibly. Meet Eric Yearwood, an actor and member of the Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) improv theater. He says he was paid $200…
The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion after and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can…
In the past couple of years, Twitter’s user growth has slowed and then practically ground to a halt. As a result, the company has come under increasing pressure — from both Wall Street and the media — to reinvent the service in order to jump-start growth. Last summer, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo resigned and was…
Snapchat’s valuation is based on a single flawed assumption I recently was reading a leaked email written by Twitter’s current CFO, at the time representing Snapchat’s investors, to Snapchat’s CEO which dissected Facebook’s recent earnings announcements. It’s clear from the mail that Snapchat’s investors view Facebook as the benchmark when it comes to the size…