Techmeme
December 28, 2019, 3:20 PM

Top News

David Porter / 8tracks blog:
As 8tracks prepares to shut down on December 31, its co-founder shares a post-mortem of what went wrong with the once-promising music streaming startup  —  8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun.  We're sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind …
George P. Slefo / Ad Age:
Spotify will suspend political ads in early 2020, citing the lack of tools to review them; source: political ads are not a significant source of its revenue  —  Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders and the RNC are among Spotify advertisers  —  Spotify is suspending the sale of political advertising …
Mark Ledwich / Medium:
A new study finds that YouTube's late 2019 algorithm actively discourages users from watching radicalizing content, directing them to more mainstream videos  —  In 2018, Kevin Roose published a piece in the New York Times in which Caleb Cain, a liberal college dropout, described his experience …
Sarah J. Jackson / New York Times:
In 2010s, Twitter enabled young and marginalized people to be heard, held news organizations accountable, and pushed largely ignored issues into the mainstream  —  It's impossible to avoid news about how harmful social media can be.  The Cambridge Analytica scandal.  The ubiquitous Russian bots.
Constance Grady / Vox:
With print books often cheaper than ebooks, whose sales stabilized at ~20% of total book sales, a look at the aftermath of Apple's ebook price fixing lawsuit  —  Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks.  There were unintended consequences.

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More News

Benedict Evans:

Earlier Picks

Jasper Jolly / The Guardian:
Amanda Keton / Wikimedia Foundation: