Reddit Talk, the social site’s Clubhouse-like social audio product, is rolling out a handful of updates aimed at allowing hosts to better engage with listeners. Among these is a new soundboard for audio effects and a topic selector, that allows hosts to select up to three topics for their tal…
Reddit announced Thursday that it would buy Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments, for an undisclosed amount. Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution to allow anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments wit…
A new study suggests 33% of U.S. Twitter users post about politics
A new study from the Pew Research Center noted that out of 25% of adult Americans using Twitter, 33% tweet about politics, up from 13% in 2019. The report highlighted that while only 24% of American Twitter users are aged 50 or above, they produce a massive 78% of the political content on the platf…
The next big social platform is…the smartphone’s homescreen
BeReal, LiveIn, Locket… what do these new consumer social apps have in common besides a highly-ranked position on the App Store’s Top Charts? They engage their users through a combination of push notifications and homescreen widgets, instead of forcing people to spend a long time browsing their app…
Twitter now allows local businesses to display location, hours and contact info on their profiles
Twitter’s expanding its suite of offerings for businesses with a new feature called Location Spotlight for professional accounts, the company announced on Tuesday. Now, local stores can display details on their profiles such as the location of their business or shop, contact info, and operati…
Twitter’s Report Tweet update rolls out globally to make reporting dodgy tweets easier
Last December, Twitter ran a limited test in the U.S. for a new Report Tweet flow — designed to improve the process of flagging offensive or dangerous content on site by adding more options for explaining whatever the issue happened to be. The test worked: the number of actionable reports inc…
Discord is giving voice channels their own text-based chat rooms
Discord is giving its voice channels text-based chat too. The company announced Wednesday that it would roll out text chat for the platform’s voice-based chat rooms, adding a way for anyone hanging out out loud to easily share links and other text without having to channel hop to go find it. …
Friendly Apps raises $3 million, pre-product, for apps that improve people’s well-being
Longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter, where he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Sayman was only 17 when he joined Faceb…