social media

ZebethMedia staff on what we lose if we lose Twitter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in Drama, EC Media, elon buys twitter, Elon Musk, Social, social media, TwitterNo Comments

I spied a tweet the other day that journalists would suffer if Twitter ever shut down because they would lose a driver of traffic. While there is some truth to that — Twitter does help expose your writing to a larger audience — it’s also true that Twitter has value beyond that for journalists and other users. It’s safe to say that Twitter is in disarray as Elon Musk fecklessly tries to grasp the business, instituting mass layoffs as the remaining essential employees flee the general chaos, spurred on by midnight email ultimatums. That most recent missive, it seems, triggered a mass resignation, according to reports. When you add that to the people who were let go in the layoffs, it’s fair to ask how many people are left to run the site. Even before all this happened, the ZebethMedia team had a conversation on Slack about what we would miss if Twitter went away tomorrow. At the time (three days ago), it felt more like a whimsical game than a real possibility. For all its warts, Twitter has a way of connecting people who otherwise might never connect. It gives us a place to share our passions, our random thoughts, and yes, our shitposts, all while keeping us up on what’s happening in the world in real time. “It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way.” Dominic-Madori Davis While there are surely many negatives to the platform — it’s way too easy to spread misinformation and hate speech and attack people you disagree with — there are also loads of positives, and many things we would miss if Twitter perishes. It now feels like it very well could. So several ZebethMedia staffers contributed what they would miss most if Twitter went away (while hoping it’ll still be up tomorrow): I’m not even sure where to begin to describe the immense impact Black Twitter has had on, well, the world, really. From when I was a teenager, watching so many Black people mobilize to bring awareness to the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, to that time we all shared experiences and made jokes as to what it was like having Thanksgiving with a Black family. “When it’s time to leave and the plate you hid is missing, *insert Kermit screaming meme here.*” The memes are endless, as is the support — and the heat — we give and place onto people and topics. It was a place to find community in a world so unkind to us. It really does feel like its own universe sometimes. I remember a few years ago going to Clubhouse to hear the talks and then running to Twitter to watch everyone live-tweet the conversations. This thread from a few days ago really brought back memories, in which author Kira J hosted a little “Black Jeopardy.” Famous dates for 500, please. “On December 21st, 2020, what were Black people waiting around to get?” Superpowers. And they’re coming still, don’t worry. They’re just running on CP time. The community always felt quite insular; what happened there rarely burst out of our bubble. When it does hit the mainstream, everything shifts, everything changes. Like someone walking in on you mid-shower. Non-Black people often don’t understand the humor, the sarcasm, the wait, did we all have the same childhood? I’m always reminded of some tweet a while ago asking, How does one get into Black Twitter? It’s not quite the same or as easy as people just giving invites to the cookout (stop just giving those out, please!!!). “I really want a place to post sentence-long shitposts with no punctuation, and I don’t know where I would go if I couldn’t do that on Twitter anymore.” Amanda Silberling I often wonder what it is like to not be in Black Twitter. What do people think when they come across a photo of Chris Evans wearing long neon yellow acrylics with a honey mustard-colored satin bonnet? Where do other people get their news, if not from Philip Lewis? I’ll miss seeing something trending and saying yep, that’s Black Twitter, it has to be. I would miss the solidarity, the camaraderie often not easily made or reciprocated out in the physical world. Yes, I think I would even miss Roc Nation Brunch Twitter, also known as LLC Twitter, also known as the people who tell everyone to start a business and become entrepreneurs. “Would you rather take $500,000 or dinner with Jay-Z?” Seriously, just take the money and run. Last week, Brooklyn White-Grier, the features editor at Essence, asked everyone what we were going to wear to Twitter’s homegoing service. Someone made programs, started planning gospel music performances, and, of course, we started picking out our hats. I tweeted that I was excited to get an extra low vibrational plate at the repast and would probably show up with slicked-back baby edges and in Valentino couture, as Zendaya did to the Emmys. It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way.

Summer International uses social media data to launch new beauty brands • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Asia, beauty, Influencer Marketing, Singapore, social media, south korea, Southeast Asia, Startups, Summer International, wellnessNo Comments

If you follow #beautytok, #beautytube or any beauty content on social media platforms, you know that popular product trends are hard to keep up with. Summer International stays ahead of the game by identifying the most influential content creators, and working with them to incubate new brands. Founded in Singapore and based in Los Angeles and South Korea, Summer International announced today it has raised a $5 million seed round from investors including GDP Ventures, Teja Ventures, Gushcloud International and Singaporean angel investors Koh Boon Hwee and Shirley Crystal Tan. NYX founder and Bespoke Beauty Brands CEO Toni Ko will also join Summer International as a strategic investor. NYX was acquired by L’Oreal in 2014 for about $500 million. Summer International co-founder and CEO Xiaoski Kuik said the company’s goal is to create an ecosystem to help influencers and creators launch and sell beauty brands using consumer data and analytics. It operates in the United States, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. The company launched in 2018 along with Gushcloud International, an influencer marketing firm. Since then, Summer International has incubated brands like skincare line Baby Face with Singaporean influencer Jamie Chua, who has over 1.2 million followers, and wellness brands HANJAN, which launched in April at Coachella and recently struck a partnership with singer Nicole Scherzinger. Kuik told ZebethMedia that Summer International looks for creators and influencers who have a strong connection with their audience based on engagement rates, how active they are a video-first platforms and whether they have a strong localized community and global presence. “Many times, creators seek us out because of our reach and resources,” she said. “We have our own supply chain and we have the power to distribute brands across Asia via our social commerce and live distribution platforms. Our goal is to establish these top influencers as founders of the next-gen beauty, skincare and wellness brands and to provide them with the access and necessary resources they need to break into the market.” Other companies that also work with creators to launch brands include Pietra and Forma Brands. Ko said Summer International differentiates by owning its own distribution network and it also has a network of live commerce and social commerce distributors, mainly micro influencers based in Southeast Asia. “It gives us the ability to understand data of what consumers want and would buy and this allows us to collaborate with creators to build brands in a more cost-efficient manner,” Kuik said. Summer International’s live commerce distribution network helps it understand what brands and products consumers from different parts of Southeast Asia want to buy. It also provides data points like pricing and demographics to create new brands and market them. Summer International brands are sold through a mix of digital and offline channels, including e-commerce platforms, social and live commerce platforms and big box stores. They are also available on Summer.store, the company’s proprietary social commerce network.

Google and Twitter veteran maps out a Twitter alternative • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, gabor cselle, Social, social media, Startups, TwitterNo Comments

Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe that kind of chaos as a garbage fire, others see it as something very different: an opportunity. Years-old federated social networks, legacy social platforms that have their own issues, and a cacophony of pre-existing fringe efforts are all emerging as possible alternatives to Twitter. And in that vein, so are completely new ideas. One of these is being hatched by Gabor Cselle, a repeat founder who wants to build what he described to me as “a new Twitter.” In true Valley hustle style, Gabor is still honing in on small details like a name and what, exactly, all this will entail. He’s doing that in real-time, with a multi-tabbed Google Doc that you can view. But as a first step to gathering interest for his New Twitter, Gabor has put together a sign up list for people to register their interest as he works away. (Note: The name on the sign-up page, T2, appears to be an abbreviation for Twitter 2, but Gabor says this is just a placeholder name.) Now you might be asking yourself, why pay attention to this? Isn’t Gabor getting a little ahead of himself here? He doesn’t have a name, or even a product, yet. Well, yes. Gabor is in that sense just one of hundreds of millions of founders out in the world noodling on ideas. But there are a few things that set him and his alt-Twitter effort apart. For starters, he’s a repeat founder who sold his first company, the YC-based mobile email startup reMail, to Google. His second company, the native advertising startup Namo Media, he sold to Twitter itself. He’s worked on products at those two titans between and after those acquisitions, and that experience — he focused on Timeline, new-user onboarding and logged-out experiences at Twitter; and on many, many different consumer ideas a director at Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator project — has given him a taste of what’s interesting, and what is not. And also what works, and what does not. Gabor left Google in July 2022 and has since been tweeting out his daily journey to figure out what to do next. (Day 106, for example, was spent at ZebethMedia Disrupt, where he came to see Paul Davison, another hustler, talk about the highlights of Clubhouse and the low lights of Highlight.) His public journal has been giving Gabor some Twitter-style viral momentum and attention and, naturally, insight into conversation about Twitter itself. He tells me that Elon’s initial mobilization to buy Twitter led to a huge whir of interest among his friends and contacts, who chattered in downcast tones about how the whole place would fall apart. Then, Musk did buy it. And then, the layoffs hit — a tipping point for Gabor. “I had been thinking about a new Twitter for a while,” he said. “But after multiple friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week, I thought to myself, ‘This is the thing I’ve been thinking about for so long! Maybe this is the time.’” Gabor is long on big-picture ideas at the moment. “I want to build the next public square for discussion. I want it to be delightful and fun, rewarding and valuable, and safe from harassment,” he tells me. “We’ve had 15-20 years of content moderation experience on the internet now, and so let’s build that in.” He’s also a big fan of Andrew Chen’s Cold Start concept. For his own cold start, Gabor is focusing first on coalescing a critical mass of people — a community to hit the ground running when “T2” launches. According to the Google Doc, this is currently set to be September 2023, a date Gabor tells me he might try to move up. He’s even had some investor interest, which he has been building via iMessage. That inbox includes a former Twitter-exec-turned-investor who he will not name, who has already texted asking how much money Gabor would like to have to get this new bird off the ground. And he’s had plenty of unsolicited advice. Twitter is great for that. “Someone asked last week, why doesn’t someone just start a new Twitter? It would only take 3 days and $50 million,” he said. “That’s what got me first to ask what a roadmap might look like. I think for me it wouldn’t be a three-day build, but it also doesn’t take $50 million.” This brings up many other questions… not least why he thinks he can build what Twitter has never managed to build itself. For now, his hunch is that creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something that’s already big and in operation, and that it definitely won’t be as simple as just bringing together what he calls “the best people,” but also not impossible. “I think right now I’m seeing this empty space,” he said, “and I want to be in that space.” Sign up here if you want to take a gander, too.

Twitter begins to roll out grey checkmarks for high-profile accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Apps, grey checkmark, Social, social media, Twitter, verificationNo Comments

A day after announcing that it’d denote high-profile accounts in a way distinctive from the blue checkmark now available to all Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter has begun to roll out new badges that denote particular categories of official accounts, including government accounts, major media outlets and some public figures. The move is an attempt to safeguard against information spreading and impersonation on the platform as Twitter grapples with the fallout of expanding eligibility for its blue checkmark, which was previously reserved for vetted, expressly-ID-verified Twitter users. The new badges — a grey checkmark beneath the old blue verification checkmark — designate accounts as “Official,” in line with what app researcher Nima Owji revealed less than a week ago in Twitter’s public code. Accounts including ZebethMedia’s and several government officials, among them U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mitt Romney (R-UT), show the grey check as of this morning. But from a cursory search, there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme or reason to how the badges have been applied. For example, The Wall Street Journal’s account initially didn’t have a grey badge; The Information’s still doesn’t. Nor does Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s. Image Credits: Twitter Those oversights will be addressed in the coming days presumably — Twitter no doubt has thousands, if not millions, of high-profile accounts to comb through and vet. It’s work it made for itself — as alluded to earlier, the recently-launched Twitter Blue plan that grants subscribers a blue checkmark doesn’t include ID verification, a flaw Twitter users including comedians Sarah Silverman and Kathy Griffin exploited in the past week to show how easy it is to pose as another account. Silverman, Griffin and others who created satirical handles were banned following Musk’s unilateral decision over the weekend to permanently bar from the platform impersonators who don’t make it clear that they’re engaging in parody.

Boosted by Twitter drama, Mastodon reaches 1 million active monthly users • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Apps, mastodon, Social, social media, social networkNo Comments

Mastodon, the decentralized social network that’s increasingly being positioned as an alternative to Twitter, has eclipsed 1 million active monthly users. That’s according to CEO and lead developer Eugen Rochko, who revealed the milestone in a post on Monday morning. Germany-based Mastodon has experienced rapid growth since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with nearly half a million users joining the network since October 27. While a fraction of the size of Twitter’s 238 million daily active users, Mastodon’s user base remains on a steep upward trajectory, growing from 60-80 new user registrations per hour prior to October 27 to thousands of registrations per hour today. Twitter’s controversial new ownership — and recent product changes — have supercharged Mastodon’s expansion. Some users say that they were inspired to switch to Mastodon over to concerns about how Twitter’s functionality may change under Musk’s control, while others joined as a form of protest against Twitter’s new paid verification scheme and Musk’s heavy-handed approach to moderating certain forms of satire. Mastodon offers an experience in many ways comparable to Twitter’s, with features like hashtags, replies, bookmarking and retweet-like “boosting.” But unlike Twitter, the network is ad-free and distributed across thousands of servers organized around interests and geographic regions, run largely by volunteers who join their individual systems together in a federation. Once they sign up and pick a server via the web or a mobile client, Mastodon users can swap posts and links with others on their own server as well as users on other servers across the network. Each server can choose to limit or filter out undesirable types of content, such as harassment and gratuitous violence, while users on any server can block and report others to administrators. Founded in 2016, Mastodon — supported through crowdfunding and a small grant from the European Commission — isn’t governed by a central entity. No one server owner can impose their will or shut the network down; server owners can easily cut ties with any one server that embraces policies they view as too extremist. As my colleague Sarah Perez notes, the decentralized design has the added benefit of reducing the cost of overhead and making it impossible for a single entity — like Elon Musk — to acquire. Twenty-five-year-old Rochko is the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in Germany on a modest €2,400 ($2,394.96) monthly salary. He’s been working 12- to 14-hour days to keep up with the influx in demand, he noted in a recent post, purchasing more powerful hardware to upgrade Mastodon’s database server.

Twitter begins rolling out $7.99 Twitter Blue plan with verification, fewer ads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 5, 2022Posted in Apps, Elon Musk, Media & Entertainment, Social, social media, Twitter, twitter blueNo Comments

Just days after newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk floated changes to Twitter’s system for verifying user accounts, including charging $8 per month for the privilege, Twitter appears to have begun rolling out a new tier of Twitter Blue, its premium subscription service, that reflects some of the changes that Musk has proposed. According to an in-app iOS notification viewed by ZebethMedia, the upgraded Twitter Blue, starting at $7.99 per month, will add the blue verification checkmark previously reserved for accounts that applied through Twitter’s free verification process. Other benefits include “half the ads” seen by non-paying Twitter users as well as ostensibly “twice as relevant” ads, and the ability to post longer videos to Twitter (although it’s not clear just how long; the notification doesn’t specify). Image Credits: ZebethMedia The new, pricier Twitter Blue will also offer priority ranking for “quality content,” promising to boost subscribers’ visibility in replies, mentions and search. Twitter’s making the claim that this will help “lower the visibility of scams, spam and bots,” but time will time will tell whether that’s truly the case. Image Credits: ZebethMedia Musk earlier claimed that Twitter, which recently ended support for ad-free articles offered under Blue, would create a new program for bypassing paywalls for publishers willing to work with the company. But if he intends to follow through with the proposal, the program doesn’t appear to have made it into the new Blue — at least not at launch. Available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. on iOS to start, the new Twitter Blue arrives after mass layoffs at Twitter affecting roughly half of the company’s staff, including employees on key human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation teams. Musk has claimed that the cuts — along with the introduction of new paid features — are necessary to bring Twitter to profitability, as the company faces an estimated $1 billion a year in interest payments on $13 billion in debt. It’s likely to be an uphill battle. Data from analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests that Twitter’s app has generated only $6.4 million in in-app purchases to date, with Blue being the top purchase. Musk’s management of Twitter doesn’t appear to have instilled much confidence in major advertisers, however, many of whom have paused campaigns on the platform. In a tweet on Friday, Musk blamed a “massive drop” in Twitter revenue on “activist groups pressuring advertisers,” likely referring to an open letter sent Tuesday by civil society organizations urging Twitter advertisers to suspend their ads if Musk didn’t commit to enforcing safety standards and community guidelines.

Musk blames ‘activist groups’ for major advertisers pausing spending on Twitter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in advertising, content moderation, Government & Policy, report, Social, social media, TwitterNo Comments

As mass layoffs begin at Twitter, major advertisers are pausing their campaigns on the social network — a move that’s gotten the attention of newly-minted CEO Elon Musk. In a tweet this morning, Musk blamed a “massive drop” in Twitter revenue on “activist groups pressuring advertisers,” likely referring to an open letter sent Tuesday by civil society organizations urging Twitter advertisers to suspend their ads if Musk didn’t commit to enforcing safety standards and community guidelines. Musk bemoaned the activist efforts, claiming that “nothing has changed with content moderation” on Twitter. But recent developments tell a different story. Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022 Sarah Personette, Twitter’s chief customer officer, who managed the company’s relationships with advertisers, resigned from the company late last Friday. According to Bloomberg, Twitter shut off employee access to certain content moderation and policy enforcement tools, prompting workers to cite concerns about misinformation ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. (Musk later agreed to restore access to the tools.) And as a part of the layoffs today, Twitter eliminated its curation team, which was responsible for providing factual context — and corrections, if necessary — to trending terms and conversations on the platform. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that General Mills, Audi and Pfizer have joined the growing list of companies temporarily pausing their Twitter ads. (Automaker GM last week became the first major brand to announce a pause.) Oreo maker Mondelez and Volkswagen are also reevaluating their ad spend with the network, reportedly spooked by the departure of top executives over the past week including chief marketing officer Leslie Berland and VP of global client solutions Jean-Philippe Maheu. Mondelez, whose brands also include Ritz, Chips Ahoy!, Trident and Tate’s Bake Shop, is among the top largest 20 advertisers on Twitter in terms of ad spend. Given that ad sales accounted for more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue in Q2 2022, its pullback alone is likely to have a substantial impact on the platform’s bottom line. On Tuesday, a New York Times report revealed that that IPG — one of the world’s largest advertising companies, with customers such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Mattel and Spotify — issued a recommendation for clients to temporarily pause their spending on Twitter because of moderation concerns. According to the piece, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a coalition of platforms, advertisers and industry groups fighting harmful content on social media, also said it was monitoring how Twitter planned to uphold previous commitments to deal with content moderation. Musk has made increasing efforts to reassure advertisers that Twitter remains “brand safe,” publishing an open letter to advertisers saying that Twitter wouldn’t become a “free-for-all hellscape” and announcing plans to form a council to advise on content moderation. In recent days, Musk has also participated in video calls with ad companies including WPP PLC, according to the Wall Street Journal, during which he’s promised to rid Twitter of bots, add community management tools and introduce new ways to give advertisers the ability to choose which content to be near. Musk has little choice but to make good with Twitter’s sponsors. His deal to buy the company included making Twitter take on $13 billion in debt from banks, which means the social network will owe about $1 billion a year in interest payments.

BeReal raised $60M in its Series B earlier this year, now has 20M DAUs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, bereal, funding, Social, social media, StartupsNo Comments

BeReal, the photo-sharing app, has been a huge hit with Gen Z and beyond. Now with other big social apps rushing to clone some of its no-frills ethos, it’s put together a war chest to work on its next chapter. ZebethMedia has learned that the startup closed a round of $60 million earlier this year. The funding is coming in the form of a Series B and it values Paris, France–based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (Exchange rates are tricky right now; the dollar is strong against other currencies in the face of global economic turmoil. When the Information first reported on some of the details of this round, it noted the premoney valuation of around $600 million. The size of the round had not previously been reported.) A source tells us that the company now has around 20 million DAUs. As a point of reference, the Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. The numbers appear to indicate that despite efforts from competing social apps to reproduce the core of the BeReal experience — a two-photo set taken from a user’s front and back phone cameras, to be shared with friends at the same time each day — it ain’t nothing like the real thing, so to speak. The numbers are still only a small fraction of the users the world’s biggest social apps are attracting, but the velocity of BeReal’s growth, and its traction with the key demographic of young adults, have been strong fillips for those other apps to pay attention to how they can bring the same kind of experience into their own platforms. Others that have cloned the app include TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. (We’re not including the now-defunct FrontBack in the list.) Founded in 2019 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, BeReal began to take off in earnest earlier this year, as its Gen Z user base sent the app climbing the App Store charts. In April, app intelligence firm Apptopia reported BeReal had grown its installs by 315% year to date. BeReal itself is simple to use: once a day, it sends users a notification encouraging them to take a dual photo, or a “BeReal” — a combination of a selfie and a front-facing photo, snapped simultaneously. This experience intends to provide its users with a more authentic photo feed compared with the curated aesthetic found on Instagram. And the photos themselves disappear after 24 hours. The app’s appeal attracted a range of investors, culminating in a $30 million Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in June 2021. When the Information reported on the Series B earlier this year, it was said to be valuing the app at $100 per daily active user. As one of our sources described it to us, yes, the world of consumer apps has had a lot of examples of early juggernauts fizzling out (sad waves to YikYak, Peach, Yo and the rest). But in relative terms, BeReal’s fast growth and how it seemed to capture attention among a certain group of users made it enough of an interesting bet at this stage. It also came at a time when the app was reaching mainstream awareness — as apparent by the fact that it was the subject of an SNL skit in October. The big question now is how BeReal plans to use the funding and what its next moves might be to evolve its product. The app today has no business model, though the FT said it may be considering subscriptions. Data provided by Sensor Tower this month also found that, despite some 53 million lifetime installs, only 9% of BeReal users on Android were opening the app daily. This doesn’t correlate to real-world usage, though, because more of BeReal’s core user base — younger Gen Z users in the U.S. — tend to use iPhones.

Kanye joins the ranks of arrogant billionaires buying their own echo chambers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in EC News Analysis, kanye west, parler, social media, Startups, Twitter, VentureNo Comments

After a whirlwind month of spewing racism, antisemitism and just straight oddities, Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, announced his intention to buy right-wing extremist “free speech” platform Parler. Coincidentally, we’re sure, the app’s CEO is George Farmer, who is the husband of Kanye’s new best friend, conservative political pundit Candace Owens. In announcing the deal yesterday, Parler’s parent company said that Kanye made “a groundbreaking move into the free speech media space and will never have to fear being removed from social media again.” “The proposed acquisition will assure Parler a future role in creating an uncanceable ecosystem where all voices are welcome,” the company wrote in a statement. The deal is expected to close this upcoming quarter. The financial aspects of Kanye’s acquisition of Parler have not been disclosed. In the past, billionaires and racists could just say whatever they wanted, knowing the class they wished to oppress wouldn’t call them out in fear of retaliation or harm. These are not those days. With his agreement to buy Parler, Kanye represents yet another conservative billionaire attempting to wield control and influence over social media platforms, using the notion of free speech as a guise to continue fomenting hate speech and ginning up right-wing ideologues.

Discord doubles down on apps to make servers more dynamic • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in discord, Social, social mediaNo Comments

Discord is refreshing its popular chat app with a handful of new features, including one that developers who build tools for the platform have wanted for a long time. The changes seek to make the community-building app a more versatile place to hang out, with new ways to customize the servers where hundreds of thousands of people regularly gather around games, hobbies or even well-loved creators. Discord says that more than a third of its chat room-like servers use apps, often referred to as bots, already. The apps, miniature bits of automated software that run within Discord’s servers, offer utilities like moderation, digital DJing and basic games. Now, the company is introducing a full directory of apps, elevating the many bots and quirky bits of software that make Discord tick with a proper directory. The app directory, which launches on Tuesday, will give server admins a one-stop shop for ways to build out their server to their liking. There’s already an app for almost everything. A sneakerhead server tracking new releases might plug in the StockX DropBot app, while a role-playing community could play a text-based RPG together directly within chat with IdleRPG. On Discord, apps have largely been the realm of scrappy, small developers looking to build useful utilities. But it’s clear that the company’s vision for its in-server experiences is moving in a more official direction that could involve more official partnerships with big, established software makers. The company is also announcing an expansion on the games front, introducing “activities” that bring more elaborate mini games like virtual golf, chess and poker into servers. While they’re not limited to games — one activity lets users queue and watch YouTube videos together — the new feature is designed to offer server members more ways to casually hang out and spend time together. Discord’s new activities launch this week. All users will have access to Putt Party (virtual putt putt) and the Watch Together activity from the jump, while anyone subscribed to Discord’s premium Nitro membership can play additional games including poker, a Pictionary-like game, chess and a Scrabble clone called Letter League. Users who pay for Nitro can invite non-premium members to play the expanded roster of games, but non-premium users won’t be able to initialize the full suite of new games and activities. In addition to the app-focused changes, Discord is also adding a new entry-level subscription tier for Nitro that will cost less. Nitro Basic will cost $2.99 a month, offering some core features for casual users including custom emojis, larger file uploads and a profile badge. The new tier was available already for some users in the UK but it will launch globally on October 20.