In 2018, Disney fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn over tweets he wrote between 2008 and 2012. While the company later rehired Gunn, he’s just one of many people for whom an old social media post came back to haunt him. In recent years, some Twitter users have turned to tools like TweetDelete.net to avoid something similar happening to them. Twitter could soon also offer its own solution to the problem.
Sharing part of its product roadmap with Bloomberg, the company said it plans to eventually test a feature that would allow people to automatically archive their tweets after a predetermined amount of time. The tool is currently in the concept phase and doesn’t have a release date, but Twitter said it’s considering a number of time options, including 30, 60 and 90 days.
The decision to give people the ability to archive their tweets is part of a broader “social privacy” push Twitter told Bloomberg is about giving people more control over their identity on the platform. To that end, the company plans to test a feature this month that will allow people to remove followers. By the end of the year, it will also trial a tool that gives individuals the option to remove themselves from public conversations people mention them in.
Twitter told Bloomberg many of the above tools come in response to creative workarounds its users have found to make up for missing features. For instance, people have found you can remove someone as a follower by blocking and unblocking them. Building on a concept it shared back in July (seen above), the company also plans to prompt people to review whether their accounts are public or private.
It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to only give some users the option to archive their tweets. After all, the platform acts as a kind of public record, giving people a way to keep politicians accountable for things they said in the past.
It didn't take long for YouTube to claim another milestone for its music services, although its significant isn't quite so clear. The Google-owned brand said it had racked up a combined 50 million YouTube Premium and Music subscribers roughly a year and a half after reaching the 20 million mark. It's also the "fastest growing" music subscription service, according to YouTube's music chief Lyor Cohen.
Certain markets were stronger than others. Cohen touted "impressive growth" in Brazil, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea. He didn't provide numbers for those countries or the US.
That figure still makes YouTube smaller than Spotify, which claimed 165 million Premium subscribers as of June 2021. Apple hasn't divulged its Music subscriber numbers since June 2019, when it had 60 million, while Amazon last touted 55 million Music customers (only some of them paying for Unlimited) in January 2020. Still, these figures in isolation would suggest YouTube is quickly becoming a major force in music streaming.
There are concerns about the claims, though. YouTube didn't indicate how many were Music or Premium subscribers, or how they used it. While you get YouTube Music with a Premium subscription, that doesn't mean you're using Premium for music — you might just want to get rid of ads and download videos. YouTube's tally also includes people using free trials, so the number of paying customers is likely lower. Samsung offers two to four months of free YouTube Premium access with new phones, for instance, but many of those users will drop Premium after the trial is over.
The data still hints competition in the music streaming world is heating up, with relatively small outfits like YouTube and Amazon Music posing more of a threat to incumbents like Spotify and Apple. However, it could take a long while before YouTube is large enough to make the heavyweights nervous.
This post contains minor spoilers for season two, episode four of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks.’
If you were a Star Trek newbie, today’s episode of Lower Decks, “Mugato, Gumato,” is not a good place to start. It’s packed full of references across the franchise, including Beckett Mariner, Sam Rutherford and Brad Boimler engaging in a not-so-friendly match of anbo-jyutsu, the appearance of not-so-enlightened Ferengi and even the episode name, which references how no one can seem to agree on how to pronounce the creature whose name is spelled “mugato.”
CBS
However, after a season and a half, the show has already settled into a groove, and as a streaming program there’s no reason why “Mugato, Gumato” would be anyone’s first episode. Paramount+ would only pull up this one if last week’s “We’ll Always Have Tom Paris” had recently been watched. With less need to be accessible, that leaves a show like Lower Decks free to dabble in continuity and in-jokes for the long-time fans.
Fan service is often derided for being gratuitous at best, and an act of gatekeeping at worst. After nearly 55 years and over 800 episodes aired, Star Trek has a lot of baggage that can be intimidating to a newcomer. The Abrams reboot in 2009 tried to wipe the slate clean but was still bogged down by decades of cultural knowledge, with even Trek casuals expecting to hear phrases like “beam me up” and “I’m a doctor!” It found itself trying to appease multiple groups of fans and ultimately thrilling few.
And yet, despite its deep dives into Star Trek lore, Lower Decks can still be a great entryway for new fans in how it chooses to subvert so many long-time franchise tropes. Both newcomers and hardcore Trekkies get to be on the same page when it comes to the all-important question: What comes next?
In that vein, “Mugato, Gumato” is a fun ride. The main plot revolves around the re-discovery of a rare species only previously seen in a rather forgettable TOS episode, with the USS Cerritos charged with finding out how the animals got so far from their home planet. It’s not the most thrilling adventure on the surface, which makes it a perfect assignment for the crew of the lower-tier ship. Boimler and Rutherford are assigned to the away team, which would normally spell doom for a pair of chronically unlucky ensigns.
CBS
Instead, the rest of the group is captured by a group of Ferengi poachers, leaving Brad and Sam in the unlikely and awkward position of saviors. But rather than have them step into the role of “action-oriented leading men,” they instead embrace their unique skills as “nerdy supporting characters.” Meanwhile, it’s the captain and bridge crew who get stuck with the b-plot of helping out a stranded trader whose ship they accidentally destroyed.
After Boimler and Rutherford save the day with a well-thought-out PowerPoint (yes, really) it ends up being the senior staff who isn’t fully informed of what happened on the planet. This is in direct contrast to a previous episode where Boimler has pointed out that it’s not their place to know what’s going on. Captain Freeman just shrugs the whole incident off as some “environmentally conscious Ferengi,” apparently unaware of the two ensigns’ key role in getting the ultra-capitalist Ferengi to change their ways in favor of a more profitable path without resorting to violence.
CBS
It also ends up being good for continuity, in how it reconciles the two versions of Ferengi we’ve seen throughout the franchise. Here, it argues, they really are the same species in the end, just that the offensive, retrograde Ferengi from “The Last Outpost” hadn’t found a less overtly evil way to make money.
“Mugato, Gumato” may have trafficked in old tropes, but it also twisted them in a way to teach the characters and audience something new about themselves and the franchise. Or, as Boimler and Rutherford would say, “If we’re both unhappy, it means we’ve reached… a compromise!”
Twitter is finally flipping the switch on “Super Follows,” its new subscription feature that allows creators to charge their followers for exclusive content. Starting today, the company is making the feature available to a “small group” of creators, with plans to expand the lineup in the coming weeks (Twitter has been taking applications for Super Follows since June).
For now, creators can set monthly rates of $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 in order to access “subscriber-only” tweets. Twitter says it will eventually incorporate other features, such as Spaces and newsletters. But until then the feature essentially amounts to.. paying for tweets, which might explain why the company is trying it out with just a few people to start. The initial lineup includes:
@MakeupforWOC who will offer “client-level treatment” for subscribers with skincare questions
@myeshachou who will provide exclusive “behind-the-scenes stories”
@KingJosiah54 who will offer “in-depth sports analysis”
@tarotbybronx who will provide Super Followers with “astrology, tarot, and intuitive healing advice” and “extra spiritual guidance”
Of course, if you’re especially interested in one of these topics or just a dedicated fan, there is an upside to buying a subscription. You’ll be able to interact with creators in a smaller, and slightly more private, forum. That could be useful if, for example, you’re hoping to get some personalized skincare advice. On the other hand, asking fans to pay for the kind of content they’re used to getting for free might be a tough sell.
Super Follows is one piece of Twitter’s strategy to reshape its platform as a destination for creators. Outside of subscriptions, the company is also experimenting with letting creators sell tickets to audio chats in Spaces. Twitter is also working on a newsletter platform — it acquired Revue earlier this year — and has opened up tipping features in its app.
The following contains spoilers for episodes three and four of 'What If...?'
There’s a Twilight Zone episode I’m particularly fond of called “A World of His Own,” where a writer discovers that everything he speaks into his dictaphone comes true, and he can undo it by simply burning the tape. By the end, even narrator Rod Serling is shown to be a creation of this character’s imagination, making this one of the few TZ episodes where the fourth wall is firmly broken. It took an entire season for that classic program to feel comfortable enough to play around with its format and premise like that. However, we’re only on the fourth installment of What If…? and it’s employing similar tactics, though with a less comedic tone.
The first two episodes of What If…? revolved around a simple switch, trading one character for another and seeing how things play out as a result. Last week’s hinged on a minor change — Hope Pym joining SHIELD — that spiraled out with huge consequences. This week shows us a simple substitution again, putting Dr. Christine Palmer in the car with Stephen Strange and killing her off in the accident that in another timeline, destroyed the gifted surgeon’s hands instead.
Her death ends up being the catalyst for Strange studying the mystic arts, and the events shown here pretty much follow the same lines as they did in the film. It’s kind of unlikely, given that a motive to fix one’s injured hands is small peanuts compared to an attempt to undo death. But we still see Stephen training in Kamar-Taj, learning about the Eye of Agamotto and eventually fighting Dormammu. As far as the timeline is concerned, everything is pretty much the same.
Marvel Studios
Except Stephen, who can’t get Christine’s death out of his head. He ends up going back to the moment of the crash and trying to save his girlfriend’s life, only to fail again and again. Since her death was the catalyst for him to learn magic, he can’t use his powers to save her. She is a fixed point, an unchangeable event (something Doctor Who fans will be well acquainted with).
For the viewer, this raises a big question: If Christine’s death is really such a concrete event in the time stream, how did we end up with “our” Stephen Strange back over in the regular MCU timeline? Here, the episode inspired an intriguing possibility: that perhaps this Doctor Strange will succeed in changing the timeline so that Christine isn’t in the car and he destroys his hands, in fact making this episode a prequel to the 2016 film. That would have been a rather mind bending twist that certainly would have made this series more important, though still not essential, to the MCU.
Alas, it was not to be, with Strange descending further and further into his obsession to the point where even our narrator is concerned. And for the first time, a character becomes aware that they are being observed and actually calls the Watcher out. Like in the Twilight Zone episode, the sequence is intended as a demonstration of power, showing that Strange has reached the level of awareness to notice the fourth wall. But still his powers are limited; he’s not cognizant of the audience (though Uatu the Watcher is, having addressed us directly earlier in the episode) and his pleas for assistance ultimately go unheeded.
Marvel Studios
Compared with the first three episodes, this one ends on a dark note. That’s actually truer to the original comic series the show is based on where, freed from the constraints of long-term continuity, the writers could take the story in whatever direction they wanted. If they wanted to kill everyone they could and would, since the main timeline was to go unaffected and future issues of What If…? would just hit the reset button.
Whether the animated version will go the same way remains to be seen, but with the fourth episode an underlying sense of continuity has started to develop: The tentacled creature from "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?" makes a reappearance, and Uatu acknowledges to the audience the stories he’s already told, which at the bare minimum hints that these episodes are meant to be viewed in a specific order. What If…? may be a diversion, but there seems to be a destination on the horizon.
There are secrets buried in the first video from Eyes Out. It’s just two minutes long and filled with overlapping shots of drums, mics, guitars and snakelike cables packed into a lonely desert hideaway, all while an unsettling, ambient score gathers layers of sound. Over time, the scenes are flooded with red and the film is overcome by a horrendous groaning scream. Thin white text flashes across the screen, telling a disjointed story about burying bones and walking with the bloom of a burgeoning universe.
Among this vibrating chaos, there are hints about the kind of studio Eyes Out will be and even what the team’s first game might look like. Or, more aptly, what it might sound like.
Eyes Out is the new video game studio founded by Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck and veteran AAA director Cory Davis, and the team is already hard at work on its first title, a mysterious horror game with an emphasis on experimental audio.
“We want to create mind-bending experiences that cause you to question reality,” Davis said. “That's what we're really excited about. We’re all fans of horror, but specifically this kind of — it's a new and emerging space that doesn't just sit within the extremely violent and dark and terrifying, but also reaches into the vibrant and even surprises you with moments of bliss or self-reflection. Horror really has a lot of room to grow.”
Finck added on to that thought, saying, “We're playing in this field that provides an emotional and psychological response, which really, I feel, is heightened as a singular experience. And we're really fortunate to be attracting developers who are so genuinely passionate about these types of conversations.”
Davis has built a successful career as a video game designer, directing and crafting high-profile titles including Spec Ops: The Line and Here They Lie, but he’s also a composer. In fact, the first word of his Twitter bio reads, “musician.” Meanwhile, Finck’s Twitter bio has just two tags, both of which speak for themselves: @eyesoutofficial and @nineinchnails.
Note which one comes first.
Eyes Out
Finck got involved in the video game industry about six years ago, after striking up a friendship with Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson at Burning Man. Finck ended up handling the soundtrack for Noct, a top-down horror game published by Devolver in 2015, and his interest in development was piqued. He dove further into the video game industry, attending conventions and connecting with creators.
“I was just really inspired by people and their enthusiasm, the forward tech of it all, and the collision of art and music, design, agency, narrative, and also the experience of really becoming immersed in all of this,” Finck said. “It really feels like the most focused and the most highly attuned experience to imbibe this sort of storytelling. And that continues to turn me on. And this led me, fortunately enough for me, to meet Cory as he and his team were completing Here They Lie.”
Eventually, Finck found himself at Sony Santa Monica, playing an early version of Davis’ VR horror title, Here They Lie. He was floored by it. Finck and Davis got to talking, and they haven’t stopped since.
“We immediately were talking about sound and music and the weight of that and the experience,” Finck said. “And we kept on in the coming days and weeks and months. And then eventually were working together on music for projects that Cory was heralding. We have a simpatico workflow and creatively sync in a lot of ways.”
Davis remembered feeling a spark at that first meeting, too.
“We started to go down the rabbit hole of distortion pedals and different synthesizers and stuff like that,” he said. “But that led us to this other type of discussion where I really felt this connection in terms of an understanding of the power of games as a medium and the impact and the possibility of what the medium holds for the future.”
Davis and Finck were both interested in building a single-player experience around music and tone, rather than starting with a narrative or visual style and applying sound later on in the process.
“From the first conversation with Robin, I could feel that he's this other type of creator that wants to be driven by his passion and his soul, rather than maybe what's trendy or what's even necessarily gratifying,” Davis said. “I just felt this kind of depth of possibility of what we could do together. I had other prototypes going on at the time at my old studio, but every time I got back together with Robin, our conversations would go deeper. And they'd go beyond the music and they'd go to places where I'd been hoping to go my whole journey as a game developer.”
Eyes Out is the result of this creative magnetism between Davis and Finck. They’ve attracted other developers, too, and have hired 15 collaborators from the industries of visual art, film and games to work on their first project.
“That's really what I've been looking for since way back in the Spec Ops: The Line days, was to build a team that has a diverse enough approach to both things like the difficulties in game development, as well as their acceptance and embrace of people that are from different parts of the world, from different backgrounds, that are of any kind of personality, and especially people that have been downtrodden and haven't had opportunities in the past,” Davis said. “We see those opportunities allowing us to have so much more depth in the types of stories that we're able to tell.”
There’s no name or release window for the studio’s first game, but Davis and Finck are dropping hints about how it’ll play and what they want players to feel. It’s not a VR game, it’s designed with complete immersion in mind, and it features creatures that behave strangely in response to generative audio cues. The team is playing around with rhythm mechanics and figuring out how to build creeping tension through sound.
“The type of horror that we're building has a lot to do with the horrors of the universe and the horrors that you kind of go to sleep with at night, the ones that are just around the corner and outside of our purview, but exist,” Davis said. “And the technology for building those types of soundscapes, the localized audio and reverb and the realism behind that, coming from VR before, I had a lot of opportunity to work with that stuff.”
The debut game from Eyes Out will be a focused, single-player horror experience built around sound — and silence.
“I'm really excited about the nuance and the subtlety of coming from silence, like a really impactful silence, and beginning to emerge from that silence towards an impactful embellishment of some sort, however great or greater,” Finck said. “And that play between the diegetic soundscape of the world within the tangible, physical space inside the game, and where it blurs with the score, the music of the game, can be really challenging and inspiring.”
Eyes Out's first project is poised to be otherworldly, introspective and experimental, just like the studio itself.
Facebook wants in on the predictive games trend. The social media giant has launched a Fantasy Games feature in the US and Canada with "free, simple" sports and pop culture prediction titles. The fantasy sports offerings let you predict winners for matches, top players and other stats. MLB Home Run Picks asks you to predict the team with the most home runs in a given day, for instance, while La Liga Winning Streak challenges you to predict daily wins in the Spanish soccer league for as long as possible.
You can also guess the victors in reality TV shows like Survivor and The Bachelorette. There are promises of other pop culture games, although Facebook didn't cite examples.
Fantasy Games are currently available through Facebook's Android and iOS apps. You'll find them both through the bookmarks menu as well as through notifications in the News Feed.
Facebook clearly isn't interested in direct competition with for-money fantasy game services like DraftKings and FanDuel, at least not right now. However, there are still plenty of incentives for the social network to launch Fantasy Games. The feature could keep you coming back, boosting ad revenue as well as your overall engagement with Facebook. It also opens the door to paid fantasy games in the future. Still, this might hit the spot if you've been tempted by fantasy sports but don't want to spend real money.
Traveling with young children is like trying to turn a cruise ship: It’s cumbersome, takes a significant amount of planning and requires a team effort. Because I apparently lack any amount of common sense, I recently took a 3,000-mile RV trip with my partner and two toddlers. Traveling with little ones can be stressful because they rely so much on their established routines; anything that deviates from that is going to be hard for them and you.
While we tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy by bringing along familiar toys and blankets, we also took the advice of a close friend who is an early childhood development specialist. She recommended keeping our twins engaged and entertained by grouping toys or activities together and rotating them throughout the day. Here are a few things that we tried that we’ll be returning to the next time we travel.
Music
Depending on how you’re traveling, music can be a great way to entertain tiny travelers. The repetition in children’s songs help kids learn patterns and expand their vocabulary. What’s more, musical play encourages movement along with both fine and gross motor skills. That’s great if you’re in a car where you can clap, sing and wiggle, but gets more challenging when you’re stuck on an aircraft with dozens of other people who don’t want to hear “Old MacDonald” seven(-ty-seven) times in a row.
Instruments
Sesame Street
My mom bought us this “CD player” for our trip and weeks later, the twins are still fighting over it. My daughter really likes the music, my son really likes taking the “CD” out repeatedly to figure out how the player works, and they both like the colorful book of lyrics. Fisher Price has a similar option with light-up buttons, which is perfect for occupying little hands.
Another cool gadget we’ve recommended in the past is the Blipbox, an entry-level synthesizer that comes with 300 melodies and a synchronized light show. It contains a digital synth engine that includes an amp envelope, two LFOs, a modulation envelope and a low-pass filter — perfect for teaching kids about creating music while also entertaining their caretakers.
When my twins were infants, the only thing that got them to sleep was playing Maxence Cyrin’s version of “Where is my mind?” on repeat. We still have a classical playlist of songs for when it’s time to sleep, but I also keep a playlist of songs that are entertaining for adult passengers as well (think: “Yellow Submarine” and songs by They Might Be Giants). It’s nice both to switch up the endless parade of nursery rhymes and expose them to different types of music.
YouTube playlists
On the other hand, kids respond to nursery rhymes because they incorporate simple melodies, repetition and actions (some of which can be easy to do while seated). YouTube has dozens of long playlists of classic nursery rhymes, some of which include the lyrics, which is helpful if you’re like me and have long forgotten the words to “Three Blind Mice.”
Podcasts
Older kids might enjoy one of the many educational podcasts out there. As a bonus, if they’re able to keep headphones on for a decent stretch of time, this makes for a good airplane option, too. As an avid podcast fan myself, I’m excited for my twins to be old enough to enjoy them with me, and I’ve already bookmarked several to try out. The But Why? podcast from NPR answers questions that kids send in themselves from “how do you make ice cream?” to “why do we wear clothes?” If your kid is into science, try Brains On or Tumble to explore topics like “how far can a cloud travel?’ and “how to become an astronaut.”
Being stuck in a car or plane seat for long periods of time can make it challenging to find activities that involve younger kids’ need to explore, but there are still a few options. Most notably, a kids camera, like the Action Cam or the Creator Cam from VTech, can help them stay amused. They can document the trip with photos, videos and use stop-motion or time-lapse effects. The Action Cam can be mounted on a bike and comes with a waterproof case, while the Creator Cam comes with a small tripod and includes more than 20 animated backgrounds that the kids can use to spice up their photos and videos.
For kids younger than the recommended age for a camera, I like busy boards. Car time with my twins has become a lot easier since we got a few of the soft, zippered activity books that feature a variety of buckles, zippers and clasps for them to fiddle with.
If your child is into arts and crafts, you’re not out of luck when traveling (although maybe leave the glitter at home). There are a few easy ways to travel with a crafty kid, like bringing along a trusty Etch a Sketch, which never needs batteries, or investing in an airplane busy box, which includes coloring books as well as activities like creating a puppet show or superhero mask.
If you’d like something a little more high-tech and easy to pack, try a color by numbers app for your phone or tablet, which are engrossing even for adults. Or there’s the Osmo kit for Fire tablets which incorporates games, drawing and problem solving via various games and animations.
My kids enjoy reading as much as I do, which means there are always at least a few books included when we travel. They’re not quite old enough for a Kindle Kids Edition yet, but it will be a great option when they graduate from board books. I honestly can’t wait to load up the Harry Potter series and a selection of Roald Dahl onto an e-reader for them.
In the meantime, I compromised by taking short videos of me reading through some of their favorites, like the Grumpy Monkey, and brought a selection of others like their Indestructible books. Not only are the Indestructible books rip-proof and chew-proof but they’re also washable so you don’t have to worry about them getting wet. My favorite part is that they’re very slim, so it was easy to pack several of them at once without adding a lot of bulk.
Of course, there are a few gadgets that will help make your life easier as a traveling parent. I’m thinking specifically of the Baby’s Brew portable bottle warmer I recently invested in, which made our trip significantly easier since my daughter refuses to have a cold bottle. It did take me a few tries to get the hang of the controls, which is embarrassing to admit since there is a single button on it, but it did the job well and solved my cold bottle problem.
I also brought along the Munchkin 59s portable sterilizer which uses UV to clean a pacifier in under a minute; that’s helpful since every pacifier winds up on the floor in under a minute. Lastly, if your kiddo has a prized blanket, pacifier or toy that is essential for soothing or sleeping, consider tagging it with a Tile or Chipolo tracker. If I had thought about it in time, I would have thrown one on my daughter’s fox lovey to save myself from constantly worrying that she’d left it in Nebraska.
A company purporting to improve access to local TV stations for people who can’t access the signal via traditional means has been dealt a blow by a New York Court. Locast has lost the courtroom skirmish started by CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox, which said that the company was violating their copyright. Deadline reports that the quartet’s request for summary judgment was granted, saying that it couldn’t use its non-profit status as a defense against further action.
The big four, of course, don’t believe Locast’s aims were anywhere near as public-minded as the company made out. The body was reportedly backed, in part, by AT&T and Dish Network, and the networks feel that the whole project was set up as a way of dodging carriage fees. Part of Locast’s defense was that US copyright law allows third parties to boost local signals, and that it acted like a signal booster station.
It’s worth noting that Locast’s founder David Goodfriend, a lawyer and former FCC legal advisor, conceived of Locast in the wake of Aero’s destruction at the hands of the big networks. A 2019 New York Times profile explained that he had designed the legal situation to be “compliant within the law.” The profile is even titled that the company would “love to get sued” to act as a test-case for the rules.
The court found that Locast’s policy of expanding into new markets runs contrary to the aim of a non-profit, where cash should be used to cover running costs only. Judge Louis Stanton said that the cash raised from Locast’s $5-per-month (don’t call it a) subscription was being used to bankroll further expansion and earned “far more money from user charges than was necessary.”
It didn’t help, that when some TV providers have entered into carriage disputes, Locast has been cited as a way of still accessing that content. As The Wall Street Journal wrote back in 2019, DirecTV and Dish customers were directed to access Locast, although Dish and AT&T both said that this was only because it felt that it was obliged to offer the choice to its users.
By removing Locast’s major legal shield, it’s certainly likely that the project will soon have yet more lawyers on their door. After all, were it to survive, it would be a challenge both to the profitability of the major TV players and encouragement to any future upstarts looking to disrupt the space.
In a statement, Locast said that the ruling was “disappointing,” citing commentary from the EFF adding that the “court interpreted the law in an artificially-narrow way.” The EFF added that “over three million people use Locast to access local TV, including many who can’t afford cable and can’t pick up their local stations with an antenna. This ruling threatens their access to local news and vital information during a global pandemic.” It closed by saying that the ruling “treats copyright law not as an engine of progress but a moat protecting the most privileged position of the four giant broadcasting networks.”
LinkedIn is ditching Stories. The company will shut down the feature by the end of September, a year after rolling it out. As it turns out, ephemeral posts aren't a perfect fit for every social network. Perhaps with ROI and KPIs in mind, LinkedIn says its users want videos that stay on their profiles permanently, not ones that vanish.
"In developing Stories, we assumed people wouldn’t want informal videos attached to their profile, and that ephemerality would reduce barriers that people feel about posting," Liz Li, LinkedIn's senior director of product wrote. "Turns out, you want to create lasting videos that tell your professional story in a more personal way and that showcase both your personality and expertise."
As such, the company's going back to the whiteboard. It's taking what it learned from Stories (such as users wanting creative tools to liven up videos in a professional way) to create a "reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational."
Just about every major social network hopped on the Stories bandwagon after the likes of Snapchat and Instagram found huge success with the format. Although the feature has proven a hit on the likes of YouTube and Facebook, Stories haven't taken off on every platform. Twitter recently shut down Fleets, its take on Stories, less than nine months after launching the feature.
