Platformer | The Verge

Inside Discord’s reform movement for banned users

2023-10-20T10:30:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today, let's talk about how the traditional platform justice system is seeing signs of a new reform movement. If it's successful at Discord, its backers hope that the initiative could lead to better behavior around the web.

Discord's San Francisco campus is a tech company headquarters like many others, with its open-plan office, well stocked micro-kitchens and employees bustling in and out of over-booked conference rooms.

But step through the glass doors at its entrance and it is immediately apparent …

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How the attacks in Israel are changing Threads

2023-10-10T09:30:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today, after a long weekend of awful terrorist violence in Israel, let's talk about the shifting landscape for social networks amid the current crisis - and consider the path ahead for Meta's Threads app.

For more than a decade, whenever calamity struck, hundreds of millions of people flocked to Twitter. Its blend of first-person accounts, verified journalists sharing reporting and context, and a broad range of commentary made it the best app for understanding what was going on in the world at any given …

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Taylor Lorenz on her extremely online history of the internet

2023-10-05T09:30:00-04:00

The cover art for Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online.

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

When Taylor Lorenz turned in the draft of her new book, Extremely Online, she found that she had written 60,000 words on the history of Vine.

"My editor was like, what the hell," she says, laughing. Lorenz's incisive commentary on the app's rise and fall captures the fundamental tension between social platforms and the creators they rely on - a dynamic that's been a central focus of her reporting over the past decade. "Vine was TikTok before TikTok," Lorenz writes. "In 2014, Vine owned the market despite ch …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The synthetic social network is coming

2023-09-29T09:30:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today, let's consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.

On Monday, OpenAI announced the latest updates for ChatGPT. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one t …

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How Google taught AI to doubt itself

2023-09-20T09:15:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today let's talk about an advance in Bard, Google's answer to ChatGPT, and how it addresses one of the most pressing problems with today's chatbots: their tendency to make things up.

From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive - making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underl …

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Nine wild details from the new Elon Musk biography

2023-09-13T10:00:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Over the weekend, a highly anticipated book arrived in the mail. Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson's first biography of a tech titan since his comprehensive take on Steve Jobs, followed from two years of Isaacson shadowing Musk in his travels around the world. Given Musk's general antipathy toward the press, the book promised to offer the sort of fly-on-the-wall accounts of Musk's recent life like no other.

Over more than 600 pages, Isaacson details the improbable arc of Musk's life, from his early childhood under …

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How Google plans to win its antitrust trial

2023-09-08T09:30:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today, let's talk about the US government's first major antitrust trial against a tech giant in a generation. If the Justice Department succeeds in its case against Google, it could lead to radical change around the web. But almost three years after the case was filed, it's not clear that the government lawyers will be able to bend antitrust law far enough to secure a victory.

On October 20th, 2020, the US government formally accused Google of illegally maintaining a monopoly on its search and search ad …

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Meta’s Oversight Board is too slow to matter

2023-08-30T09:30:00-04:00

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today let's talk about one of the most important cases that Meta's Oversight Board has heard to date - and how the process ultimately revealed a fundamental problem with with the board's operations.

Our story takes place in Cambodia, which for the past 38 years has been ruled by a dictator named Hun Sen. Since first taking office, the Cambodian leader has gradually consolidated power, regularly using violence and intimidation to suppress any opposition. This year, his party stood for an election that bo …

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Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter

2023-08-25T10:30:00-04:00

Screenshots of the note-taking app Obsidian. | Image: Obsidian

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today let's step outside the news cycle and turn our attention toward a topic I'm deeply invested in but only rarely write about: productivity platforms. For decades now, software tools have promised to make working life easier. But on one critical dimension - their ability to improve our thinking - they don't seem to be making much progress at all.

Meanwhile, the arrival of generative artificial intelligence could make the tools we use more powerful than ever - or they could turn out to be just another mir …

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Elon Musk keeps getting creepier

2023-08-15T12:30:00-04:00

Elon Musk. | Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge

This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer. Sign up here.

Today let's talk - for the last time, I hope - about the derailed martial arts bout between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and the latter's reckless threats to visit the Meta CEO at his home and broadcast it to the world.

Part of me hesitates to spill yet more ink on a battle that no part of me has ever believed would take place. Last week I wrote here about the importance of bringing skepticism to Musk's posts on X, the former Twitter, and encouraged my peers in the press to consider not covering them …

Read the full story at The Verge.