Techmeme
November 1, 2022, 7:25 PM

Top News

Elon Musk / @elonmusk:
Musk says the blue checkmark system is “bullshit” and Twitter Blue will cost $8/month with half the ads, priority in replies, mentions, and search, and more  —  Twitter's current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn't have a blue checkmark is bullshit. Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
New York Times:
Twitter Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette resigns; sources: top ad company IPG recommended that clients pause spending on Twitter over moderation concerns  —  At least three Twitter executives have left in recent days, as one of the world's largest ad companies said clients should pause spending on the social media platform.
Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Twitter is planning to end letting Twitter Blue subscribers access ad-free articles from hundreds of publishers while raising the price to $20/month  —  Move comes as company's new owner, Elon Musk, continues to make changes to social-media platform
James Ball / New Statesman:
Elon Musk's plan to monetize Twitter verification would generate little revenue and create a myriad of issues, including becoming a hacker and spammer paradise  —  Elon Musk's latest brainwave risks alienating the users Twitter depends on and would expose it to lawsuits.
Bloomberg:
Sources: Twitter froze some staff access to content moderation and policy enforcement tools, raising worries about a misinformation spike before the US midterms  —  Twitter Inc., the social network being overhauled by new owner Elon Musk, has frozen some employee access to internal tools used …
Matt Levine / Bloomberg:
David Pierce / The Verge:
YouTube rolls out Primetime Channels in the US, offering shows and movies from 35 partners, including Paramount+ and Epix, and plans to add NBA League Pass soon  —  Streaming services are coming to YouTube.  The company is rolling out a new feature called Primetime Channels that will bring shows …
Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Amazon Music VP Steve Boom on offering Prime users the company's ~100M song catalog without ads, running the unit, the music industry, labels, and more  —  Apple Music raised its rates.  Will Amazon Music follow suit? … Steve Boom is the VP of Amazon Music, and he has a great name for the music business.
Ewen Callaway / Nature:
Meta researchers create ESMFold, an LLM to predict the structures of 617M+ metagenomic proteins that is less accurate than DeepMind's AlphaFold but ~60x faster  —  You can also search for this author in  —  PubMed Google Scholar  —  When London-based Deep Mind unveiled predicted structures …
Andy Robinson / Video Games Chronicle:
Sony reports PlayStation Plus subscribers fell from 47.3M in Q1 to 45.4M in Q2 despite its revamp as PlayStation Network MAUs fell from 103M in Q1 to 102M in Q2  —  PlayStation Plus subscribers have dropped by nearly 2 million users since the revamped service launched in June.
Steve Dent / Engadget:
Financial Times:
Sources: Morgan Stanley and six other banks plan to hold the $12.7B in debt from Elon Musk's Twitter buyout until early 2023, pending a clearer business plan  —  Lenders concede they will struggle to drum up demand until Elon Musk unveils detailed strategy  —  Banks that lent $12.7bn …
Taylor Soper / GeekWire:
Twilio plans to sunset Zipwhip's business texting service on December 1, 2023, after acquiring the Seattle-based startup in May 2021 for $850M in cash and stock  —  Twilio will sunset Zipwhip's software after acquiring the Seattle startup for $850 million last year.

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Earlier Picks

Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk: