Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In early July, Meta introduced Threads, a text-posting social-media application that was clearly designed to steal market share from Twitter, which continues to struggle under the leadership of Elon Musk. Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of Threads, recently explained that the goal of the service is “to create a public square for communities on…
Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. Whether the platform is dying or not, it’s time to reckon with how exactly it broke our brains. Credit…Photograph by Jamie Chung. Concept by Pablo Delcan. April 18, 2023 Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm The trouble began, as it usually does, when I saw…
LATEST March 10, 3:10 p.m. Rippling relied on Silicon Valley Bank to process its customers’ employee paychecks, but when the bank suddenly collapsed, the human resources startup had to quickly pivot. The firm’s CEO, Parker Conrad, posted an update Friday afternoon, saying that though SVB’s systems indicated that payments were processed, money hadn’t actually gone…
Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and…
It all seemed so inevitable: that Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Twitter, would appear onstage at last week’s TED ideas conference, in Vancouver; that the conference theme would be “Bigger Than Us,” an ambiguous invocation of either inspiration or fear; that Dorsey, during a session called “Power,” would calmly acknowledge the proliferation of…
Photo: Adam Glanzman (Getty) Barstool Sports is seen as valuable not because it is read by many people, but because of its social media accounts, which boast millions of followers. The way those accounts operate was scrutinized this week after comedian Miel Bredouw called them out for taking one of her videos and uploading onto…
Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and the tech journalist Kara Swisher conducted a full 90-minute interview entirely on Twitter. The interview was meant to be an old-school “Twitter chat,” and users were instructed to follow along using the hashtag #KaraJack. It was a disaster. Attempting to follow a public conversation happening on Twitter is…
A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound…
Our phones’ GPS and location capabilities are a key part of what make them magical — enabling them to speed our commutes, hail rides, and find the devices when we lose them. These capabilities are also ground zero for the looming fight over defining the boundaries of privacy and acceptable uses of our personal information….
Screenshot: Fox (YouTube) Yesterday morning, Televangelist Lice emerged from beneath the cellar of a Barbie Glam Getaway Traphouse repurposed as a trundle coconut waterbed to tweet that the billions of dollars President Trump wants to spend on the border wall would be “the BEST $5 billion taxpayers EVER spent!” Naturally, Tapeworm Leatherback’s assertion was immediately…