Techmeme
January 30, 2021, 9:50 PM

Top News

Under the Hood:
Robinhood explains why it placed restrictions on certain securities over the past week, says its clearinghouse-mandated deposit for equities increased tenfold  —  With the extraordinary market activity this week, and the temporary restrictions we put in place on certain securities …
Jesse Westbrook / Bloomberg:
SEC says it “will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors” in trading certain securities  —  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, making its most specific comments about the recent mania in the stock market …
John Herrman / New York Times:
Reddit's uncommon qualities as a community platform, inspiring nihilism and humor, may explain why r/WallStreetBets' growth feels reminiscent of r/The_Donald  —  Reddit communities grow powerful in plain sight.  Why do they keep taking the world by surprise?
New York Times:
Ryan Browne / CNBC:
Wall Street Journal:
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Kashmir Hill / New York Times:
How one disgruntled person destroyed the online reputations of 145+ people, aided by “complaint sites” in the US and platforms like Google that rarely intervene  —  Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock's online reputation.  When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined.
Corbin Davenport / Android Police:
Google has reinstated federated chat app Element on the Play Store after briefly pulling it over abusive content, which is now removed, on Element's servers  —  Element is a popular client for the federated chat protocol Matrix, and we highlighted it in our roundup of the best open-source alternatives …
Cat Ferguson / MIT Technology Review:
VAMS, a CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M to manage rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, has been abandoned by states due to bugs and problems  —  The CDC ordered software that was meant to manage the vaccine rollout.  Instead, it has been plagued by problems and abandoned by most states.
Wall Street Journal:
Experts say Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature will damage Facebook's core business; the feature will limit Facebook's data collection from 85K+ iOS apps  —  New feature on iPhones will limit Facebook's ability to collect data from apps and prove that ads work
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Canalys: smartphone shipments in China fell 4% YoY to 84M in Q4 2020 and shipments for 2020 fell 11% YoY to 330M, as iPhone's share jumped from 15% to 18% YoY  —  The impact of United States government sanctions on Huawei is continuing to hurt the company and dampen overall smartphone shipments in China …
Bloomberg:
Current and former staff say much of Amazon's struggles in gaming rest with the leadership of its gaming division, which reportedly has a budget of $500M/year  —  Mike Frazzini had never made a video game when he helped start Amazon Game Studios.  Eight years later, he has released two duds …
Lara O'Reilly / Business Insider:
Verizon Media says it is planning personalized features for Yahoo Mail, and around 500K users watched NFL streams in the Yahoo Mail app in tests in Q4 2020  —  - Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan tells Insider the unit is preparing a “mega” product launch in the coming weeks.

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More News

Prachir Singh / Counterpoint Research:
Chloe Sorvino / Forbes:

Earlier Picks

Adam Satariano / New York Times:
Reuters: