Like this Insider story points out, The World Cup is the biggest thing on Twitter. By a wide margin. If the next few weeks can go well for Musk and co. it could be a big step toward getting the platform back to normal. But if Twitter crashes, or has huge moderation issues, or can’t keep up with the pirated highlights, it won’t have anywhere to hide.
Freakonomics has a whole episode looking at why (and whether) Google seems to be getting worse at finding and delivering search results. As ever, the truth is complicated, but there are a lot of reasons Google feels worse than it used to. And most of those reasons are ads.
Quitting Twitter: maybe a good idea for lots of reasons! Also really hard to do, because in addition to being a horrifying hellscape it’s also an irreplaceable way to share information. Like, say, trying to get your Senator’s message some coverage:
If you’re trying to reach Americans, says one Senate Democratic staffer, “one way is to spend a million dollars on TV ads.” Another way, says the aide, is to “talk to the people who talk to people” — that is, reporters. “Twitter is good for that.”
Arc isn’t perfect, and it takes some getting used to. But it’s full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web — and it’s right about most of them.
We covered all that on the latest episode of The Vergecast, along with what Dall-E and other platforms will mean for copyright law, the difference between CMYK and RGB, and much more. AI art is coming, y’all!
Is it all perfect science? Definitely not. But there’s a ton of interesting info in here about how blue lights and infinite algorithms change our sleep — plus some helpfully simple advice. Watch bad TV, not bad TikTok!
The worst types of media to absorb before bed are those that have no “stopping point” — Instagram, TikTok, shows designed to be binge-watched. If you intend to binge a show, that might be fine: “Making a plan and sticking to it seems to matter,” she says.
[Vulture]
I love this explanation of group chat dynamics, even though I feel personally victimized by most of it. “Be the thumbs-up-and-move-on responder” is my new life goal.
It’s been a week, friends. Twitter is melting down before our eyes, Meta laid off 11,000 people, the crypto world is facing yet another scandal, and we couldn’t even record a whole podcast without a bunch of news breaking. Things are only getting wilder, too, so stick around.
What if you had access to everything the internet knows about you, and what if you could use it to make your life better? That’s what Mem is trying to figure out.
