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AirChat, the buzzy new social app, could be great – or, it could succumb to the same fate as Clubhouse | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 3:05 AM0


Over the weekend, another social media platform exploded into the fray: AirChat. The app is like a combination of Twitter and Clubhouse. Instead of typing a post, you speak it. The app quickly transcribes what you say, and as your followers scroll through their feed, they’ll hear your voice alongside the transcription.

Built by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder exec Brian Norgard, Airchat takes a refreshingly intimate approach to social media. There are people I’ve known online for years, and only after following each other on AirChat did I realize I’d never heard their actual voices. The platform makes it feel like we’re actually having conversations with one another, but since AirChat is asynchronous, it doesn’t feel as daunting as joining a room on Clubhouse and having live conversations with strangers.

Posting with your voice may sound scary, but it’s not as intimidating as it seems — you can re-record your post if you misspeak. But if you’re someone who loves sending your friends three-minute voice memos instead of typing (or if you have a podcast), AirChat feels intuitive.

AirChat wouldn’t be worth using if the transcriptions were sub-par, but it’s the best speech-to-text product I’ve ever used. It almost always hits the mark in English… it even transcribes Pokémon names correctly (yes, I tested this extensively). It also seems to be doing well in other languages – I found it functional in Spanish, and TechCrunch reporter Ivan Mehta said that the app did a decent job transcribing Hindi. Sometimes, the app will translate speech directly to English, and while the translations were generally correct in our testing, it’s not clear why or when the app translates instead of transcribing.

So, is AirChat here to stay? That depends on what kind of people can find community on the platform. For now, the feed feels like a San Francisco coffee shop – most of the people on the app have some connection to the tech industry, which could be because tech enthusiasts are often the first to jump on new apps. This wasn’t the case for Threads when it launched (it’s just an extension of Instagram), or even Bluesky, which developed an early culture of absurd memes and irreverence. Right now, the app has paused invites, so this won’t improve in the near future.

The app’s current culture could also be a reflection of its founders, who are influential in Silicon Valley and venture capitalist circles. But it’s telling that when AirChat introduced a channels feature, two of the first to spring up were “Crypto” and “e/acc,” which stands for effective acceleration, an aggressively pro-tech movement.

This doesn’t have to be an automatic red flag – I (somewhat reluctantly) use Twitter/X every day, and the tech industry also feels especially loud there. But at least on X, my feed also contains posts about my favorite baseball team, the music I like, or the ongoing debate over adding more bike lanes in my neighborhood. So far on AirChat, I haven’t seen many conversations that aren’t about tech in some way.

What I do consider a red flag is AirChat’s naive approach to content moderation.

“We’re going to try and put as many of the moderation tools in the hands of the users as possible. We want to be as hands-off as possible. That said, sometimes you just have no choice,” said Ravikant on AirChat.

The phrasing of “hands-off” is reminiscent of Substack, a platform that lost popular publications like Platformer and Garbage Day after it refused to remove pro-Nazi content proactively.

AirChat did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Ravikant argues that AirChat should function like a dinner party – you won’t kick someone out of your house for partaking in a civil debate. But if they start violently screaming at you, it would be wise to intervene.

“We don’t want to moderate for content, but we will moderate for tone,” Ravikant said.

In real life social situations, it’s very normal behavior to disagree with someone and explain why you think differently. That’s a pretty manageable situation to handle at your own dinner table. But AirChat isn’t a normal social situation, since you’re in conversation with thousands of other people; without more robust content moderation, this approach is like hosting a big music festival, but with only one person working security. One might hope that everyone will enjoy the music and behave themselves without supervision, but it’s not realistic. Just look at Woodstock ‘99.

This is another way in which AirChat parallels Clubhouse. Clubhouse’s approach to content moderation was even more permissive, since there was no way to block people for months after launch – AirChat already has block and mute features, thankfully. Clubhouse repeatedly played host to antisemitic and misogynistic conversations without consequence.

With this minimalist approach to content moderation, it’s not hard to see how AirChat could get into hot water. What happens if someone shares copyrighted audio on the platform? What about when someone doxxes another user, or if someone uploads CSAM? Without an actual plan to navigate these situations, what will happen to AirChat?

I hope that people can behave themselves, since I think the concept behind AirChat is brilliant, but we can’t be so naïve. I would like to know that if neo-Nazis tried to politely explain to me why Hitler was right, the platform would be able to protect me.

Naval Ravikant’s Airchat is a social app built around talk, not text


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X adds support for passkeys globally on iOS | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 12:06 AM0


X, formerly Twitter, is rolling out support for passkeys, a new and more secure login method compared with traditional passwords, to all iOS users globally. The option debuted in January, but only for iOS users in the U.S.

In an update to the X @Safety account on Monday, the company shared that passkeys are now available as a login option for global iOS users. Similar technology has already been added to other popular apps and services, including PayPal, TikTok, WhatsApp, GitHub and others. Google last fall made passkeys the default sign-in option for all users. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and other companies also support the option.

Passkey technology was initiated by Google, Apple, Microsoft and the FIDO Alliance, alongside the World Wide Web Consortium. The idea is to make passwordless logins available across different devices, operating systems and web browsers. Unlike traditional logins, which require a username and password combination, passkeys use biometric authentication like Face ID or Touch ID, a PIN or a physical security authentication key to validate logins. The process combines the benefits of two-factor authentication (2FA) into a single step, making logins more seamless while maintaining increased security.

For X, the addition could help users protect their accounts against hacks from bad actors. The social network has seen a number of high-profile hacks over the years, including one in January where the U.S. Securities and Exchange’s X account shared an unauthorized post regarding Bitcoin ETF approval. Donald Trump Jr.’s X account was also hacked to post a fake message saying that Donald Trump had passed away. There was also a 2020 crypto scam that saw many larger accounts compromised, including Apple’s, President Biden’s and X owner Elon Musk’s account, among others.

The addition could also help X users who previously relied on SMS 2FA to re-secure their accounts, as X announced last year that option would be removed for non-paying users. X had argued that the cost-cutting measure could be abused by bad actors, such as in the case of SIM swaps. But the reality is that it made X less secure.

X offers users instructions on how to get started with passkeys on iOS. There’s no word yet on when Android users will have the option.




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Substack’s Notes feature is getting more Twitter-like capabilities | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 8:37 PM0


Substack is adding new capabilities to its Twitter-like Notes feature that bring it more in-line with the social network now known as X. The company announced on Tuesday that users can now post videos directly to Notes in the Substack app and on the web. Users can now also embed Notes on external webpages.

The launch of the new features come a year after Substack introduced Notes in April 2023, during a time when companies were aiming to attract users who were fleeing Twitter after Elon Musk took the reigns of the social network in late 2022. Notes let users share posts, quotes, comments, images, links and ideas in a Tweet-like format, The short-form content is displayed in a dedicated Twitter-like feed.

Starting today, users can post videos directly to Notes by recording a video or selecting one from their phone’s camera roll or their desktop. The company says more writers and creators are using its video tools and starting new shows on the platform, so it wants to make it possible for them to share their work on Notes, too. Given that apps like X and Meta’s Threads allow users to post videos, it makes sense for Notes to offer the capability as well.

As for embedding Notes on external pages, Substack says the new capability will allow writers’ content to travel widely across the web beyond Substack. In an example given by Substack, a writer’s Note could be embedded into a news article, which happens with X posts quite often. Users can find a Note’s embed code by clicking on the three-dot menu in the top right corner and selecting the “embed note” option.

Substack announced on Tuesday that Notes has generated more than 3,000 paid subscriptions and 230,000 free subscriptions for writers and creators on Substack in the past 30 days. In its blog post, Substack explains that Notes is especially valuable for users who don’t have large pre-existing audiences.

The company saw an opportunity to capitalize on the chaos at Twitter as soon as it began. In October 2022, Substack took a direct shot at Twitter and warned in a post  that: “Twitter is changing, and it’s tough to predict what might be next.” The post had encouraged creators of all sorts to port their Twitter follower base to Substack. Substack then took its ambitions further with the launch of a Chat feature, and then later, Notes.

As Substack continues to build out its Twitter-like product, X is spiraling further into disarray, as the company announced on Monday that it plans to charge new users a small fee before they are allowed to post on the social network, in an effort to curb the platform’s bot problem.

Substack now allows podcasters to sync and distribute their episodes to Spotify


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Meta explains why the NYC/NJ earthquake didn't trend earlier in the day | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 4:25 AM0


Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads is no X. At least, not yet. The text-focused social network — and Meta’s answer to Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter — missed a moment to shine on Friday when users once again turned to X to discuss the New York/New Jersey area earthquake. The traffic surge drove #earthquake to the top of X’s Trends section, followed by other areas of impact, like “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philly,” “Manhattan” and “Brooklyn.” Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms didn’t register on Threads’ trends section until closer to 2 p.m. ET, even though the earthquake had hit a little before 10:30 on Friday morning.

That’s not to say people weren’t discussing the earthquake on Threads — many were. In addition to conversations taking place around the earthquake, people were even tagging their discussions as EarthquakeThreads or NYC Threads, among other things, to help surface their posts to the wider Threads Community.

 

Post by @timothyjchambers
View on Threads

 

Another reason the term likely wasn’t trending: Unlike Twitter/X, Threads doesn’t use hashtags.

While this design choice makes the user interface cleaner, it also may make it less obvious how to tag trending terms. It seems obvious that discussions of the earthquake should be tagged #earthquake (or “earthquake” without the hashtag, as on Threads), but people on the Meta-owned platform have started using the tagging convention of “[term] Threads“ — like “Tech Threads” for people in tech talking about tech, for example.

This could complicate things when a big trend comes along because some will tag it “earthquake” and others will tag it “Earthquake Threads” while others still may target their local community, like “NYC Threads,” which leads to none of the terms gaining the velocity and momentum needed to break into the top trends on Threads, despite all of them referencing the same event.

Around 1 p.m. on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why the earthquake didn’t make it into Threads’ top trends.

We were told that Threads’ five top trends are based on various signals, including how many people are talking about a given topic, and how many people have engaged with posts on that same topic. Because the earthquake was a regional event, and trends are based on national conversations, it may have simply taken more time for enough people to join the conversation, Instagram said.

 

Post by @backlon
View on Threads

 

Shortly after checking in with Threads, the now many-hours-old earthquake became the No. 1 trend on the platform.

Unfortunately for Threads, being unable to keep up with trends in real time could hamper its ability to fully compete with X. Combined with Meta’s plan to distance itself from discussions of a political nature — even going so far as not to “recommend” political content across Instagram and Threads’ platforms — Threads may never fully be able to supersede X, even if it builds many of the other same bells and whistles, like reposts, search, bookmarks and linkable tags.

This stands in sharp contradiction to how Twitter’s founders perceived the power of their new platform to deliver real-time information — and a reason why Twitter became the home to breaking news, active topical discussions and a hub for journalists.

Not long after TechCrunch covered Twitter (then called Twttr) for the first time, the San Francisco earthquake rocked the service, allowing both the founders and users alike to grasp Twttr’s potential. Later that fall, the app had grown to thousands of users.

Said former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in a 2016 Harvard Business School newsroom interview, “I was in the office on a Saturday, and my phone buzzed, and it was a tweet, and it said simply, ‘Earthquake.’ Immediately after that I actually felt the tremors in San Francisco. The phone kept buzzing, and there was, ‘earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.’”

“What was amazing about that is I was experiencing something in the world, and immediately I felt comforted because it was obvious that other people were experiencing the same thing,” Dorsey said. “I thought, ‘Wow, the world is so small. You can actually — just by having that shared sensation that shared experience, you all feel like you’re all in this together.’”

Threads may have 130 million monthly active users, making it the largest player in the “fediverse,” the social network of interconnected servers and services, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, PeerTube and others. But despite usage declines, X has remained “stickier” than some would have believed, especially given the wide crop of competitors that have emerged to challenge Musk’s X. In fact, according to one report by Sensor Tower, X’s usage by power users remained largely unchanged as of last fall.

Already there are signs that Threads is failing to deliver a true X-like experience. As Max Read described it in a March newsletter, “Threads is the gas-leak social network,” referring to the randomness of the posts that filled users’ For You feeds.

“Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage,” Read wrote. “Who are these people? What are they talking about? Are they responding to something that I missed? Why am I reading this? How did it get into my feed? How am I supposed to react?”

If Threads can’t capitalize on real-time information, like an earthquake or a current political discussion; if its feed bubbles up very old posts; and if its trends remain delayed by hours, Threads’ ability to be a viable Twitter alternative could suffer. While people may use it — because they don’t like X’s new direction or Elon Musk specifically — they’ll never have a true X-like experience.

Is it just me, or was that an earthquake?


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Elon Musk plans to charge new X users to enable posting | TechCrunch

April 16, 2024 12:50 AM0


Elon Musk is planning to charge new X users a small fee to enable posting on the social network and to curb the bot problem.

In reply to an X account that posted about changes on X’s website, Musk said charging a small fee to new accounts was the “only way” to stop the “onslaught of bots”

“Current AI (and troll farms) can pass “are you a bot” with ease,” Musk said, referring to tools like CAPTCHA.

While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.

As is the case with a lot of announcements related to the social platform, there are no details at the moment about when this policy will be applicable and what fees new users might have to pay.

Last October, X started charging new unverified users $1 per year in New Zealand and the Philippines. New free users signing up for the platform from these regions could read the posts but couldn’t interact with them. To post content, like, repost, reply, bookmark, and quote posts, they had to pay a fee. Musk might apply a fee similar to other regions.

Earlier this month, X said that the platform was starting a major purge of spam accounts, warning users that their follower count might be affected. However, with a plan to charge new users, the social media company seemingly aims to tackle the bot problem better.

While Musk has talked about battling AI bots, last year, X updated its policy to include a clause that public posts could be used to train machine learning algorithms or artificial intelligence models. Separately, in July 2023, Musk said that his AI company xAI would use public posts to train models.

Earlier this month, xAI made its Grok chatbot available to Premium users of X, who pay $8 per month. The chatbot was previously available to users paying $16 per month for the Premium+ tier. Last week, Fortune reported that X plans to make Grok available to users to compose posts.




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Is it just me, or was that an earthquake? | TechCrunch

April 15, 2024 10:42 PM0


For just a brief moment, this was the internet at its best. I stared at a vase of dried out Trader Joe’s flowers, rumbling on my table for maybe 30 seconds, but I was too shocked to even process what was happening. Then I saw the tweets (which, in this moment of shock, I refuse to call X posts).

“DID WE JUST HAVE AN EARTHQUAKE IN NEW YORK?”

“was that an earthquake??????”

“did everyone just feel that?”

“THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I MOVED AWAY FROM CALIFORNIA”

“So excited that us east coasters can finally get earthquake Twitter”

People on microblogging sites (it wasn’t just X — I see you, Bluesky) had already determined the scope of the earthquake, confirmed it was, in fact, an earthquake, and began posting jokes about the situation before the less chronically online people even realized what happened.

It’s rare that something happens so suddenly that it unifies an entire geographic region — people from New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York City and Massachusetts chimed in on my timeline, each unabashedly sharing our experiences. It’s like the old school Twitter, where you could post “eating a ham and cheese sandwich” and it wasn’t ironic. You were invited to say exactly how you felt, and everyone else was doing it too. It’s like old LiveJournal or Facebook statuses, where you could post “is feeling sleepy” and never consider that no one really cares.

It’s like a middle school cafeteria, hours after an unplanned fire alarm goes off. We’re all still buzzing with a certain naive excitement and awe, bouncing off of each other’s surprise and exaggerating our memory of what happened, like it was some legendary event. Everyone has lost focus at work. On Slack, Ron says he thought it was a train, and his chair shook a little. Matt says that in California, it usually feels like a car crash. Dom says she used to live in LA, and this was definitely an earthquake. Brian said, as a Californian on the East Coast, he didn’t even feel it. Then I share my own riveting account of this brief moment we all just experienced: I thought it was my neighbor’s washing machine.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, and critics embarked on a mass exodus to platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr, and even ones that no longer exist, like Pebble, we mourned the end of an era. There used to be just one option for microblogging, and it was Twitter, unless you were really into open source federated software before 2022. Moments like these show that there really is value in the “public town square” — it’s a way for us to know that we aren’t crazy, or our boiler isn’t exploding, before anyone even knows what’s going on.

But when the most populous town square is becoming actively more hostile to people who aren’t crypto bros or Tesla stockholders, we get a sense of what we’re missing. On Threads, people are talking about cherry blossoms. On Facebook, I am delighted to learn there is a new grocery store coming to my neighborhood, but no one is talking about the earthquake.

As a lifelong East Coaster, I experienced something I’ve never felt before as the ground shook beneath me. And immediately, scrolling through my Twitter feed, I felt nostalgic for what the internet gives us at its best: a sense of calm, comfort, camaraderie and reassurance that I wasn’t alone.


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ShareChat's valuation drops below $2 billion in new funding | TechCrunch

April 15, 2024 12:18 PM0


Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round, a source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch, marking a steep decline for the nine-year-old Indian startup that boasts over 400 million users in the South Asian market.

The Bengaluru-based startup, which operates a popular social network supporting a dozen Indian languages as well as a short-form video app, announced on Monday that it had raised $49 million in a convertible round. It did not disclose the valuation at which the funds were raised but strongly denied that its new valuation was below $2 billion, asserting there was “no valuation” attached to the round.

Existing investors including Lightspeed, Temasek, Alkeon Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures and HarbourVest have invested in the new round, the startup said. Their debt will convert to equity at a valuation below $2 billion in the next round, according to a source with direct knowledge of the terms. The source requested anonymity to speak candidly. TechCrunch reported in December that ShareChat was facing a steep valuation cut.

ShareChat also counts Google, X, Snap, Tiger Global and Tencent among its backers. It has raised about $1.75 billion to date. ShareChat was valued at $4.9 billion in a funding round it raised in mid-2022.

The markdown comes despite ShareChat experiencing a remarkably positive year, aggressively cutting expenses while managing to double its revenue. “When the market turned, we had to temper [acquisitions and creator payments] and move towards more profitable growth,” Ankush Sachdeva, ShareChat’s co-founder and chief executive, told TechCrunch in an interview.

ShareChat has not spent money acquiring users in the past year, with Sachdeva crediting improvements to the startup’s content recommendation engine for driving user retention and engagement. The company has also invested heavily in AI talent, particularly for senior roles in its London-based team. ShareChat also unveiled that it has doubled the ESOP grant for each employee in the firm as part of a special bonus grant.

It has also been able to pare down its single-largest expense, the cost to serve content, he said. “When you fetch content on one of our apps, we do a lot of computation to find the 10 best content. To serve and consume that, there is another delivery cost. Optimizing this has helped us lower our burn,” he said.

ShareChat has reduced its monthly cash burn by 90% over the past two years while doubling revenue, attracting large FMCG firms and gaming companies as advertisers.

The startup also remains committed to the short-video market in India, despite strong competition from YouTube and Instagram following the country’s ban on TikTok in 2020.

“In terms of traffic, ours is lower than those of Instagram and YouTube, but we are the largest in terms of a standalone app,” said Sachdeva. He believes ShareChat’s unique focus on live-streaming as a destination for entertainment and creator-user connections will differentiate it from American rivals. The startup acquired local rival MX TakaTak in a deal valued over $700 million in 2022.


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X warns that you might lose followers as it does another bot sweep | TechCrunch

April 14, 2024 7:42 PM0


X is warning users they may see a reduction in their follower counts as the company attempts to clear the network of some spammers and bots in a large sweep. Via an announcement published by X’s Safety account, the company on Thursday will begin a “significant, proactive initiative” to eliminate accounts that violate X’s rules about platform manipulation and spam.

The move comes shortly after X announced the appointment of two new leaders to its safety team: Kylie McRoberts, an existing X employee who’s now head of Safety, and Yale Cohen, previously of Publicis Media, who is joining as the head of Brand Safety and Advertiser solutions.

Spam has been an area that Elon Musk has longed to tackle at X, telling employees in November 2022 that he aimed to make fighting spam a priority going forward.

However, spam has proved more difficult to combat than he likely hoped, especially after extensive job cuts left Twitter’s Trust & Safety team short-staffed, while the role of head of Safety sat vacant for 10 months after the earlier departures of Ella Irwin and Yoel Roth under Musk’s tenure.

Advancements in AI have also made it more difficult to reign in the spam.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Musk’s plan to require users to pay for Verification did not seem to have stopped spammers from participating on the platform. A number of bots with Verified blue checks were found to be replying to posts on X with a variation of the phrase, “I’m sorry, I cannot provide a response as it goes against OpenAI’s use case policy” — an indication that they were not people, but bots.

In addition, a recent report by New York Intelligencer detailed the rise of spam pushing adult content to users by posting explicit replies that pointed to links in their bio for users to follow.

The scale of spam on the network was one of the sticking points for Musk when he originally tried to back out of the $44 billion Twitter deal, saying that the company had not been honest about the number of bots. But these days, Musk is touting how X is seeing record traffic, without clarifying if his own numbers include bots and spam.

According to the X Safety team’s announcement, the company will be “casting a wide net” in its attempt to remove spam and bots from the platform, which may result in follower count reductions. This is par for the course for bot sweeps on its platform. 

X also shared a link to a form where users inadvertently affected by the bot sweep could appeal.




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LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 11:31 AM0


Two weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that LinkedIn was getting into games, helping users “deepen relationships” through puzzle-based interactions. And on Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that the Microsoft-owned social network was experimenting with short-form videos.

It’s as if LinkedIn is targeting a whole new “type” of user — one caught in limbo somewhere between two other well-known social networks.

Wordle’s viral growth kicked off on Twitter, leading The New York Times to dole out a reported seven-figure sum for the web-based word game. And TikTok is well past the billion-user mark, recently becoming the first non-game app to hit $10 billion in consumer spending, all for short-form video.

Splintering

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X, things haven’t quite been the same — latest figures suggest that in the U.S. alone, daily users of the app formerly known as Twitter have fallen by nearly a quarter in the months since becoming a plaything for one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.

Federated competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky have jostled for mindshare among ex-X users, and the mighty Meta has thrown its hat into the ring with Threads. But this disaggregation has left millions jumping half-heartedly between myriad different social networks, not quite sure where they should be hanging out.

TikTok can be likened to a next-gen version of Twitter, replete with short-form content, influencers, hashtags and trending topics — an obvious place to jump in some regards, but it’s simply too alien for many of those that grew up on Twitter.

Like just about every successful social network, Twitter grew organically — a combination of the right people, at the right time, with the right backers and the right technology to make it a scalable product in the hands of millions. It’s not possible to lift-and-shift that community onto a new platform at the drop of a hat, and the audience splintering we’ve seen in the aftermath was inevitable.

Twitter-sized hole

This is where LinkedIn is filling a giant hole in many people’s lives. Sure, we’ve all mocked the “professional social network” through the years and scoffed at the self-aggrandizing hustle culture that permeates the billion-plus community, but we’ve all got LinkedIn accounts and we’ve all turned to it at various times when we needed to, like when we’re looking for a new job or trying to network. And now it is serving as the obvious fallback as the bird app flounders.

This all takes us back to LinkedIn’s latest efforts to move with the times. Microsoft doled out north of $26 billion for LinkedIn seven years ago, and it has largely been quiet about its performance in the years since — however, it has been making sounds about its growth rate of late. It revealed that LinkedIn made $15 billion for its 2023 fiscal year, with almost half of that coming from corporate recruitment software. And a few weeks back, LinkedIn said that premium subscriptions brought in $1.7 billion last year (the kinds of numbers that Musk can only dream of over at X).

The notion that LinkedIn has been something of a salvation for Twitter-ditchers is nothing new, but we’re starting to see LinkedIn jump on its latent potential as something more than what most people think it is. Obviously LinkedIn can’t shake off its “business” shackles completely, and you shouldn’t expect to see Taylor Swift or Ronaldo promoting themselves on there any time soon (fingers crossed), but it’s clear that LinkedIn wants to ditch its “stuffy social network for jobseekers” reputation.

This isn’t to say that LinkedIn will see a surge of Gen Zers looking for a dose of thought-leadership delivered via pithy 10-second skits. And LinkedIn shouldn’t try to be Twitter or TikTok — it’s aimed at an entirely different audience. But it can certainly borrow some of their special sauce and appeal to a broader demographic.

As other social networks abandon news, and X no longer the force it once was for keeping on top of global events, LinkedIn was already capitalizing on this sea-change with more investment. And now with games and short-form videos in the mix, LinkedIn wants even more of the action.


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X confirms plans for NSFW Communities | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 3:36 AM0


A day after researchers surfaced X’s plans to test NSFW adult communities on the platform formerly known as Twitter, the company confirmed that Community admins can now set an “Adult Content” label in their settings to avoid having their communities’ content auto-filtered. Otherwise, all NSFW content will be soon filtered across X’s Communities by default. Communities are X’s smaller groups with their own feeds outside of the main timeline.

The changes appear to confirm the earlier tests of NSFW communities spotted by various researchers and reverse engineers, and point to a social network that will now more directly embrace the adult content that has always been present on the platform.

NSFW (not safe for work) content plays a major role on X, which has been a primary advertising venue for sex workers as well as home to a large amount of adult content-focused bots and spam. According to internal documents obtained by Reuters in 2022, roughly 13% of all Twitter posts included NSFW content, like nude and explicit photos, videos and other pornography. What’s more, the documents indicated that adult content was one of the fastest-growing genres on the platform, even as news and sports were declining.

New York Intelligencer also recently detailed the rise of spam bots on the service now known as X, which promoted NSFW content with links in their profiles, or bios, leading them to regularly reply to posts with messages like “nudes in bio,” “pics in bio” and other more explicit terms.

Now included in a long list of updates to X’s Communities is the confirmation that NSFW-focused communities will be allowed to designate themselves as such to keep from having their content filtered automatically, as in other Communities.

The changes, posted on X by an engineer, were reshared by Musk, who commented, “Many upgrades to X Communities!”

Communities are something that owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino promoted during an all-hands last fall as being key to X’s growth plans.

According to a transcript acquired by The Verge, Musk explained that the Communities product was growing fast but “there’s a lot of work to do to make Communities compelling.” He also shared that X was seeing “rapid percentage growth” in Communities, and had been adding new features, like the ability to include any X account’s feed in the Community feed. For example, a video game-focused community may want to include the X accounts of notable video game reviewers or commentators, he said. The X executives had not shared any plans for NSFW Communities at that time.

If X were able to make Communities a successful product, it could potentially serve as a competitor to larger forum sites like Reddit and host training data for Musk’s xAI-run chatbot Grok, which has exclusive access to X content.

Alongside the news that Community admins could now label themselves as including adult content, X will also introduce a Ban button alongside Keep and Hide buttons on the Reported posts page along with more detailed messages explaining why you’re not eligible to join a given Community, plus temporary and permanent bans for spammers; tools to sort posts by Trending, Most recent and Most liked; a Media tab for Communities on Android; and more, including a range of bug fixes and minor improvements.

The list of what’s ahead for Communities was fairly extensive, too, noting that users will soon be able to explore top posts and top communities across all Communities and tools to discover top communities and posts by topic. Communities will also be promoted and recommended to potentially interested users on the For You tab, allowing them to grow more of a following. Mods will have access to Community Analytics and will be able to pin multiple members’ posts. There will also be support for spam filter levels set by admins, simplified reporting and moderation pages, and audio Spaces in Communities, among other things.

The post suggests a new user interface for posts, and replies may be on the way, too.

X did not return requests for comment about an ETA for any of the items listed as coming “soon.”




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