Techmeme
November 5, 2022, 5:10 AM

Top News

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, The Verge, TIME, CNBC, Adweek, New York Times, Forrester, VICE, NBC News, CNBC, Forbes, Watcher Guru, Bloomberg, Android Central, Associated Press, USA Today, Insider, BGR, Axios, and Mashable
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.
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:
Sources: Twitter teams hit hardest by the layoffs span communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, ML, and some core engineering teams  —  About half of Twitter's 7,500 employees are now gone, with teams focused on trust and safety issues hit the hardest.
Faiz Siddiqui / Washington Post:
More: Wired, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, Gizmodo, Insider, TechCrunch, NBC News, CNN, The Guardian, TYT Network, Politico, Gizchina, Wired, BBC, Washington Post, Insider, Reuters, Crunchbase News, Silicon Valley Business …, Bloomberg, Protocol, Deadline, and The Register
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 …
Reed Albergotti / Semafor:
A profile of Twitter Head of Safety & Integrity Yoel Roth, who joined in 2015 and is one of few executives to gain Elon Musk's public support after the takeover  —  Reed is Semafor's Technology Editor, joining us from the Washington Post.  Louise is a Technology Reporter for Semafor, joining us from NBC News.
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 Founder's 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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Reuters: