Medium and Twitter founder: ‘We put junk food in front of them and they eat it’

What can news publishers learn from creators? Interview with Simon Owens

Don't leave money on the table and think outside the box about business models

How Twitter Found Its Money Mojo

The not-so-dismal science of Twitternomics

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky

Synopsis Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.

Medium's Evan Williams To Publishers: Your Website Is Toast

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Websites are in about the same place as dinosaurs were at the tail end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. Which is to say, about to go extinct. So says Evan Williams, a confounder of Twitter and Blogger and now CEO of Medium, the publishing platform he [...]

The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web - Zsolt's pckt blog

We have known this for years. We have known that the major platforms are bad for our attention, our sleep, our politics, our children, and our sense of reality....

Becoming the Product - Set Margins'

€24.00 In stock Becoming the Product quantity Add to cart Category: Books Tags: #designwriting, #institutionalcritique, #internetcritique Description Additional information Description In Becoming the Product: The Critical Internet Researcher as a Virtual Intellectual, the evolution of critical internet research takes center stage. By examining the pioneering work of early net critic Geert Lovink and the influencer-style […]

The Press Release Is Dead — Use This Instead – Mike Butcher

I’m QUITE TIRED of dealing with MILLIONS of tech entrepreneurs (these days there are a HELL of a lot of you) and (some) PR people who have ZERO clue how to pitch me/TechCrunch/the media. Their pitches are long-winded and rambling. They ask if they could ‘send some more information’. Listen, I have no idea if it’s interesting or not until you send it! Many just ask me out to lunch or coffee. (Thanks, but I prefer hanging out with my *actual friends*). Even worse, they haven’t read this post or seen my presentation on how to deal with tech media. [2021 update: This is a basic outline for super-early startups. If you want something for Post Series A / later stage startups go here].

A quick and dirty guide to making custom feeds on Bluesky

So, you’ve made it! The remnants of science twitter have at last begun to coalesce around a new microblogging platformed owned by questionable individuals with inadequate content moderation t…

Death by a thousand likes: How Facebook and Twitter are killing the open web

Here’s one way to understand the symbiotic relationship between publications and platforms in the digital age. Publications depend on advertising dollars to keep producing content, so they need to hold readers’ attention. Big platforms like Facebook and Twitter already have plenty of attention, but they need vast quantities of content to fill up their newsfeeds. It seems natural, then, that publications have started relying on platforms to drive readership.

How Graze Social’s Devin Gaffney wants to build a better internet

Graze Social’s Bluesky curation tool, which is poised to expand thanks to a recent Flipboard acquisition, allows users to build (and monetize) their own feeds.

The Truth About Social Media as an "Advertising Industry," Bluesky's Gamble, and "Reclaiming Conversation" - Nightflight

Welcome to the next Renaissance

"We'd love a byline in Big Media. But we'll also be everything from baristas, booksellers, Etsy artists, and TikTok news creators to dog walkers, ice cream scoopers, copywriters, and marketers."