Jimmy Wales’ new social network WT.Social started November with just 1,500 members. Four weeks later, it’s skyrocketed up to 345,680 members — and that’s just the beginning. Next year Wales plans to hire journalists, with the site’s users acting as their “editors-in-chief,” fulfilling the dreams Wales had for the site’s earlier incarnation as a crowd-sourced news platform Wikitribune, reports the journalism…
Tag: the platform
HSBC Swaps Paper Records For Blockchain To Track $20 Billion Worth of Assets
HSBC aims to shift $20 billion worth of assets to a new blockchain-based custody platform by March, in one of the biggest deployments yet of the widely-hyped but still unproven technology by a global bank. From a report: The platform, known as Digital Vault, will give investors real-time access to records of securities bought on private markets, HSBC told Reuters, and…
Twitter Prepares For Huge Cull of Inactive Users
Twitter will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for more than six months, unless they log in before an 11 December deadline. From a report: The cull will include users who stopped posting to the site because they died — unless someone with that person’s account details is able to log-in. It is the first time Twitter has removed inactive…
The Year of AI: End of Year Round-Up 2019
Trends from 45 million learners on Coursera show nearly two million enrollments in AI-related content in 2019, AI for Everyone breaks into the top ten list in its first year By Dil Sidhu, Chief Content Officer at Coursera When it comes to popularity and demand, tech-centric courses like artificial intelligence and data science consistently rank […]
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Why Firefox Fights for the Future of the Web
“Mozilla is no longer fighting for market share of its browser: it is fighting for the future of the web,” writes the Guardian, citing Mozilla Project co-founder Mitchell Baker: Baker’s pitch is that only Mozilla is motivated, first and foremost, to make using the web a pleasurable experience. Google’s main priority is to funnel user data into the enormous advertising engine…
Facebook Staff Lamented ‘Unethical’ Practices But Were Rebuffed
Facebook employees repeatedly chafed at what they viewed as anti-competitive or unethical practices by the company, internal chats show. But their concerns, voiced in 2012 and 2013, were overruled by senior managers including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who argued that the survival of the social network was more important. From a report: The messages come from a roughly 7,000-page trove…
‘I Worked on Political Ads at Facebook. They Profit By Manipulating Us.’
Yael Eisenstat, a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech in the Digital Life Initiative and a former elections integrity head at Facebook, CIA officer, and White House adviser, writes for the Washington Post: As the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it’s clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won’t…
‘OK Boomer’ Is the New Retort To Older Generations
Teens are increasingly using the phrase “OK boomer” to fire back at older generations’ criticisms. Slashdot reader ItsJustAPseudonym shares an excerpt from an NBC News article: In recent months, the phrase “OK boomer” has become a common retort in the parts of the internet inhabited by teenage and young adult users. On Instagram, the phrase appears as a hashtag alongside memes…
AI Will Soon Be Able To Decode Your Poop
Microbial health company Seed is launching a campaign to collect 100,000 fecal photos to build what developers say is the world’s first poop image database. The campaign dares you to “give a shit” for science by uploading photos of your feces so that scientists can use it to train an AI platform launched out of MIT. Developers say that your photos…
Just 6% of US Adults On Twitter Account For 73% of Political Tweets, Study Finds
A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study, which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says that just 6% of U.S. adults…