In its latest effort to deal with rampant harassment on its platform, Twitter will look into giving users a second chance before they tweet. In a new feature the company is testing, users who use “harmful” language will see a prompt suggesting that they self-edit before posting a reply.
When things get heated, you may say things you don't mean. To let you rethink a reply, we’re running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it’s published if it uses language that could be harmful.
The framing here is a bit disingenuous—harassment on Twitter certainly doesn’t just happen in the “heat of the moment” by otherwise well-meaning individuals—but anything that can reduce toxicity on the platform is probably better than what we’ve got now.
Last year at F8, Instagram rolled out a similar test for its users that would “nudge” them with a warning before they post a potentially offensive comment. In December, the company offered an update on its efforts. “Results have been promising, and we’ve found that these types of nudges can encourage people to reconsider their words when given a chance,” the company wrote in a blog post.
This kind of thing is particularly relevant right now, as companies conduct moderation across their massive platforms with relative skeleton crews. All of the major social networks have announced an increased reliance on AI detection as the pandemic keeps tech workers away from the office. In Facebook’s case, content moderators are among the employees they’d like to bring back first.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information about the kind of language that triggers the new test feature and if the company will also consider the prompt for regular tweets that aren’t replies and will update the story if we receive additional info about what this experiment will look like.
Glance, which serves media content, news and casual games on the lock screen of Android-powered smartphones, has amassed 100 million daily active users, it said today.
The subsidiary of ad-firm InMobi Group reached the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest duration for any popular internet service to gain their first 100 million daily active users, said Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive of InMobi Group, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Glance uses AI to offer personalized experience to its users. The service replaces the otherwise empty lock screen with locally relevant news, stories, and casual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon-headquartered startup, that has enabled it to introduce short-form videos on the platform.
“Introducing short-form videos and games on Glance has helped us increase the engagement level. About 25% of our users actively play games on Glance,” said Tewari. The firm is now working to make these short-form videos available in many local languages. (You can also try the service on your mobile web browser or through its preview app on Google Play Store.)
Glance ships pre-installed on several smartphone models. The subsidiary maintains tie-ups with nearly every top Android smartphone vendor including Xiaomi, the top player in India, and Samsung.
But users can easily disable the service, said Tewari, adding that the 100 million users the firm is reporting today are those who consciously engage with content on Glance. Users spend about 25 minutes consuming content on Glance each day, he said.
Sitting on the lock screen, perhaps the most coveted real estate on a smartphone to reach a user, has allowed Glance to deliver any information to a very large number of users in a short time. Tewari said more than 50 million users reacted to Glance informing them about India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech last month surrounding the lockdown in the country, for instance.
“We are not just a short-form video platform. We are not just a gaming platform nor one that serves just news. Given where we sit, we cater to nearly everything that is out there across the world. So everyone has something to consume,” he said.
The service is currently available in India, its biggest market with more than 80 million users, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Tewari said the firm plans to roll out Glance across the globe in the next two years.
Glance, which raised $45 million last year, is currently not monetizing its users. Tewari said he has experimented with a few ideas, but won’t make any push on this front for another one to two quarters.
But what if there was another way to learn… one that was step by step and involved hand-holding to ensure that you are really learning SEO, so much so that your traffic starts going up?
Introducing SEO Unlocked
Over the next 7 weeks, I’m going to be teaching you SEO.
I’ve released a free course called SEO Unlocked.
Eventually, it will live on the training section of this site. But for now, it is going to be published on YouTube every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday for the next 7 weeks.
Here’s the first video which is a welcome video the course.
Make sure you watch it as I also give you 2 homework assignments. But don’t worry, they are easy. I even provide the worksheets and PDF templates here so you can get them done with ease.
I’ve also released the second video that goes over the fundamentals of SEO and why it is important.
Again, this video also contains some homework assignments, so make sure you watch it and follow everything step by step.
How can I follow along during the 7 weeks?
As I mentioned above, it’s a 7-week course. You’ll see videos released every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.
The videos are roughly 10 to 15 minutes in length on average so it will only take 30 to 45 minutes of your time each week to watch them.
The homework assignments are easy as well. The reason I will give you worksheets, PDF templates, and spreadsheets is so you can do the homework assignments faster.
The homework assigns should take you 30 to 45 minutes a week to complete.
In total, I’m asking you to commit an hour to an hour and a half each week, which really isn’t much.
Once you go through the whole course, you’ll know the formula for getting traffic to your website.
If you want to make sure you don’t miss a lesson because I won’t be blogging about each lesson, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel as I will be uploading the lessons there.
Once you click the link above, you’ll see a subscription box on YouTube… just click the “SUBSCRIBE” button.
And once you click “subscribe” on my channel, you’ll notice a bell image next to the subscribe button.
When you click on the bell, you’ll be given a few options.
Click on the “all” option. Once you do that, you’ll notice that next to the “subscribe” button your bell icon should look something like this:
This will make it where YouTube notifies you when I release a new SEO Unlocked lesson.
Conclusion
If you really want more search traffic and you want to take SEO seriously, this is your chance.
There is no excuse for not having the financial resources because the course is free. If you put in the time, my team and I are here to teach and train you on everything you need to know.
And don’t worry, we aren’t going to bore you with every Google algorithm factor or anything like that. Instead, we are going to teach you the main concepts and strategies of SEO that drive the majority of the results as we know that you don’t have 40 hours a week to dedicate to SEO.
That’s why the videos are short and you should be able to watch all of them and get your homework assignments done in less than 90 minutes per week.
Glance, which serves media content, news, and casual games on the lock screen of Android-powered smartphones, has amassed 100 million daily active users, it said today.
The subsidiary of ad-firm InMobi Group reached the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest duration for any popular internet service to gain their first 100 million daily active users, said Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive of InMobi Group, in an interview with TechCrunch.
Glance uses AI to offer personalized experience to its users. The service replaces the otherwise empty lock screen with locally relevant news, stories, and casual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon-headquartered startup, that has enabled it to introduce short-form videos on the platform.
“Introducing short-form videos and games on Glance has helped us increase the engagement level. About 25% of our users actively play games on Glance,” said Tewari. The firm is now working to make these short-form videos available in many local languages. (You can also try the service on your mobile web browser.)
In addition to offering a standalone app on Google Play Store, Glance ships pre-installed on several smartphone models. InMobi Group maintains tie-ups with nearly every top Android smartphone vendor including Xiaomi, the top player in India, and Samsung.
But users can easily disable the service, said Tewari, adding that the 100 million users the firm is reporting today are those who consciously engage with content on Glance. Users spend about 25 minutes consuming content on Glance each day, he said.
Sitting on the lock screen, perhaps the most coveted real estate on a smartphone to reach a user, has allowed Glance to deliver any information to a very large number of users in a short time. Tewari said more than 50 million users reacted to Glance informing them about India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech last month surrounding the lockdown in the country, for instance.
“We are not just a short-form video platform. We are not just a gaming platform nor one that serves just news. Given where we sit, we cater to nearly everything that is out there across the world. So everyone has something to consume,” he said.
The service is currently available in India, its biggest market with more than 80 million users, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Tewari said the firm plans to roll out Glance across the globe in the next two years.
Glance, which raised $45 million last year, is currently not monetizing its users. Tewari said he has experimented with a few ideas, but won’t make any push on this front for another one to two quarters.
Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations of its hate-speech rules. Most of these blogs contained Nazi-related content, it said. This week, Tumblr began to remove all the reblogs from these previously banned sites, as well — a number totaling 4.47 million individual posts.
In an announcement, Tumblr explains its reasoning behind the decision to also remove the reblogged material:
We’ve listened to your feedback and have reassessed how we can more effectively remove hateful content from Tumblr. In our own research, and from your helpful reports, we found that much of the existing hate speech stemmed from blogs that have actually already been terminated. While their original posts were deleted upon blog termination, the content of those posts still lived on in reblogs. Those reblogs rarely contained the kind of counter-speech that serves to keep hateful rhetoric in check, so we’re changing how we deal with them.
In other words, it saw no value in allowing the hate speech to live on in this reposted state, as the majority of the reblogs weren’t engaged in providing what Tumblr referred to as “educational” or “necessary counter-arguments” to the hate speech.
When asked if it did, in fact, remove reblogs of an educational nature, Tumblr said it used human moderators to determine which content was in violation and which was not. Any blogs containing “productive counter-conversations” or “educational blogs” were not removed as part of this process, we’re told.
In addition, Tumblr says that moving forward it will evaluate all blogs suspended for hate speech and consider mass reblog deletion when appropriate.
The company consulted with outside experts — including Center for Democracy and Technology, Brennan Center for Justice, EFF and Stanford tech policy academic Daphne Keller — to determine the right course of action. Ultimately, Tumblr believes the new approach is aligned with the recommended best practices it has been advised to adopt regarding hate speech.
“We are, and will always remain, steadfast believers in free speech. Tumblr is a place where you can be yourself and express your opinions. Hate speech is not conducive to that,” the company’s announcement read. “When hate speech goes unchecked, it eventually silences the voices that add kindness and value to our society. That’s not the kind of Tumblr any of us want.”
Tumblr also noted the decisions it’s making aren’t being left up to AI and algorithms. Instead, Tumblr asks users to flag for review by Tumblr’s Trust & Safety team hate speech they come across.
As expected, there’s a debate about the policy taking place in the comments of the Tumblr post about the changes. On one side are those who support the idea of companies enforcing policies around the sort of content they do not want to host. On the other are the free-speech advocates who see any such policy as a form of censorship.
The effort to take more action on hate speech follows Tumblr’s 2018 decision to ban porn from its platform after getting kicked out of Apple’s App Store for hosting the content. Similarly, hosting hate-speech reblogs could cause problems with Apple’s own rules.
Tumblr has made few changes since its acquisition by WordPress owner Automattic from (TechCrunch parent) Verizon in 2019. But its earlier decisions to clean up its site have had a negative impact on its traffic.
Its significantly devalued price point at the time of the Automattic deal was attributed to its decision to remove NSFW content. Almost every meaningful metric was down year-over-year since the ban, including total visitors, uniques, average site visit, traffic, daily active users and more. Meanwhile, the younger demographic who used to populate Tumblr in the millions have largely moved on to expressive, video-centric social platforms, like TikTok and Twitch.
Tumblr is making a change to how it deals with hate speech on its blogging platform. The company announced today it will also remove the reblogs (repostings) from any blogs that were suspended for violating its policies around hate speech. Already, the company says it’s identified nearly 1,000 blogs that were banned for blatant violations of its hate speech rules. Most of these blogs contained Nazi-related content, it said. This week, Tumblr began to remove all the reblogs from these previously banned sites, as well — a number totaling 4.47M individual posts.
In an announcement, Tumblr explains its reasoning behind the decision to also remove the reblogged material:
We’ve listened to your feedback and have reassessed how we can more effectively remove hateful content from Tumblr. In our own research, and from your helpful reports, we found that much of the existing hate speech stemmed from blogs that have actually already been terminated. While their original posts were deleted upon blog termination, the content of those posts still lived on in reblogs. Those reblogs rarely contained the kind of counter-speech that serves to keep hateful rhetoric in check, so we’re changing how we deal with them.
In other words, it saw no value in allowing the hate speech to live on in this reposted state, as the majority of the reblogs weren’t engaged in providing what Tumblr referred to as “educational” or “necessary counter-arguments” to the hate speech.
When asked if it did, in fact, remove reblogs of an educational nature, Tumblr said it used human moderators to determine which content was in violation and which was not. Any blogs containing “productive counter-conversations” or “educational blogs” were not removed as part of this process, we’re told.
In addition, Tumblr says that moving forward, it will evaluate all blogs suspended for hate speech and consider mass reblog deletion when appropriate.
The company consulted with outside experts — including Center for Democracy and Technology, Brennan Center for Justice, EFF, and Stanford tech policy academic Daphne Keller — to determine the right course of action. Ultimately, Tumblr believes the new approach is aligned with the recommended best practices around hate speech it has been advised to adopt.
“We are, and will always remain, steadfast believers in free speech. Tumblr is a place where you can be yourself and express your opinions. Hate speech is not conducive to that,” the company’s announcement read. “When hate speech goes unchecked, it eventually silences the voices that add kindness and value to our society. That’s not the kind of Tumblr any of us want.”
Tumblr also noted its decisions it’s making aren’t being left up to A.I. and algorithms. Instead, Tumblr asks users to flag hate speech they come across for review by Tumblr’s Trust & Safety team.
As expected, there’s a debate about the policy taking place in the comments of the Tumblr post about the changes. On one side are those who support the idea of companies enforcing policies around the sort of content they do not want to host. On the other, are the free speech advocates who see any such policy as a form of censorship.
The effort to take more action on hate speech follows Tumblr’s 2018 decision to ban porn from its platform after getting kicked out of Apple’s App Store for hosting the content. Similarly, hosting hate speech reblogs could cause problems with Apple’s own rules.
Tumblr has made few changes since its acquisition by WordPress owner Automattic from (TechCrunch parent) Verizon in 2019. But its earlier decisions to clean up its site have had a negative impact on its traffic.
Its significantly devalued price point at the time of the Automattic deal was attributed to its decision to remove NSFW content. Almost every meaningful metric was down year-over-year since the ban, including total visitors, uniques, average site visit, traffic, daily active users, and more. Meanwhile, the younger demographic who used to populate Tumblr in the millions have largely moved on to expressive, video-centric social platforms, like TikTok and Twitch.
During this period of shelter-in-place, people have had to seek out new forms of entertainment and social interaction. Many have turned to a niche party series made by a company best known for an irreverent trivia game in the ’90s called “You Don’t Know Jack.”
Since 2014, the annual release of the Jackbox Party Pack has delivered 4-5 casual party games that run on desktop, mobile and consoles that can be played in groups as small as two and as large as 10. In a clever twist, players use smartphones as controllers, which is perfect for typing in prompts, selecting options, making drawings, etc.
The games are tons of fun and perfect for playing with friends over video conference, and their popularity has skyrocketed, as indicated by Google Trends. I polled my own Twitter following and found that nearly half of folks had played in the last month, though a full third hadn’t heard of Jackbox at all.
There are more than 20 unique games across Jackbox Party Packs 1-6, too many to explain — but here are three of the most popular:
Fibbage: A twist on the traditional trivia game, players are asked to invent an answer to a question of obscure knowledge (e.g. “a Swedish man who works as a dishwasher receives disability benefits due to his unusual addiction to ____.”) Then all the invented answers are mixed in with the truth and players must select the real answer while avoiding fakes. You earn points for guessing correctly and for tricking other players (the answer is “heavy metal”).
