Techmeme
November 5, 2022, 8:50 AM

Top News

Platformer:
Sources describe Twitter after mass layoffs: key teams gutted, severance packages account for WARN Act, ad hoc directories of remaining workers in Google Docs  —  I. The Snap  —  The email went out at 5:21 PT PT on Thursday.  —  For a full week, Twitter employees had waited in hopes …
The Verge:
Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
Wall Street Journal:
Elon Musk says Twitter suffered “a massive drop in revenue” due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, despite doing “everything” to “appease the activists”  —  Chief of social-media company cites activist groups pressuring advertisers, as many staffers brace to lose jobs
More: Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Verge, CNBC, Adweek, VICE, Forrester, NBC News, Watcher Guru, Android Central, Associated Press, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Forbes
J.D. Capelouto / Semafor:
A Birdwatch note adding context to Elon Musk's tweet about Twitter's revenue drop is gone; Musk called the community notes feature “awesome” earlier this week  —  Sign up for Semafor Tech, led by Reed Albergotti, to get our scoops and coverage of the industry's biggest stories in your inbox twice a week.
Brian Morrissey / The Rebooting:
Elon Musk's focus on Twitter Blue is part of a trend in which consumer tech platforms pivot from advertising in favor of recurring revenue through subscriptions  —  Tech's marriage of convenience to the ad industry hits the rocks  —  Request: Please fill out this survey as I think through …
Lily Hay Newman / Wired:
A look at the Rust programming language after 12 years, evolving from side project to robust ecosystem, as developers praise its security, ease, and performance  —  Rust makes it impossible to introduce some of the most common security vulnerabilities.  And its adoption can't come soon enough.
Jordan Pearson / VICE:
As chess explodes on Twitch, a look at Chess.com's Global Championship, its first in-person event since 2018, and “fair play” measures amid a cheating scandal  —  Cheating allegations have changed how chess is played, just as the game is shifting into looking a lot more like esports.
New York Times:
Sources: Elon Musk weighs adding paid DMs to let users privately message “Very Important Tweeters”; docs show Twitter Blue checks won't require ID verification  —  The billionaire and his advisers have discussed adding paid direct messages, fees to watch videos and other features to the service.
Casey Newton / Platformer:
Deepsekhar Choudhury / Moneycontrol:
Source: Indian B2B marketplace Udaan plans to lay off 325 to 350 employees, or about 10% of its workforce, a week after raising $120M in convertible debt  —  Up to 350 on-payroll employees to get impacted, apart from a number of contractual workers  —  A week after securing $120 million …
Zeke Faux / Bloomberg:
El Salvador's Bitcoin “revolution” is failing miserably and behind the debacle are crypto evangelists from wealthier countries who cheered on President Bukele  —  On an estuary along the coast of El Salvador, a few miles west of the Conchagua volcano, about 70 families live in a settlement called Flor de Mangle.
Jack Daleo / FreightWaves:
Loop, a logistics payments startup that matches shipping invoices to pricing, raised $30M across a seed and a Series A from Founders Fund, Flexport, and others  —  Company handled $1B in payment volume in its 1st year … Here's a wild stat: Between 20% and 30% of all invoices today contain some form of exception or error.

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Reed Albergotti / Semafor: