Netflix’s attempts to crack down on password sharing is starting to pay off. The company reported substantial growth in subscribers in the months following its push to stop users from sharing accounts with people outside of their household.

The streaming company added nearly 6 million paying subscribers, an increase of 8 percent, during the second quarter of 2023. The results confirm earlier reports from third-party data that suggested the tightened restrictions were working.

In a letter to shareholders, the company said that its push to stop password sharing hasn’t resulted in mass cancellations and has instead encouraged more people to sign up for their own account. “The cancel reaction was low and while we’re still in the early stages of monetization, we’re seeing healthy conversion of borrower households into full paying Netflix memberships as well as the uptake of our extra member feature,” the company wrote.

In addition to restricting account sharing, the company has started offering “paid sharing,” which allows subscribers to pay to add an “extra member” to their account for $8 a month. That option is now available in more than 100 countries, according to Netflix. The company has also been streamlining its plans, confirming that it canceled its $10 “basic” plan in the United States and UK after first axing the plan in Canada.

Now, Netflix says it will continue to restrict password sharing in the few remaining countries where it hasn’t already done so, including India, Indonesia, Kenya and Croatia. The company notes it won’t be offering its “extra member” option in these regions as it’s already slashed prices in many of these countries. Instead, the company says people can use its tool to transfer their profile to a fresh account.

Developing…

Meta’s Threads app is coming back down to Earth after a blockbuster first week that saw the app become the fastest growing of all time. New data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests that the app’s engagement has since declined from initial highs despite its status as the fastest-growing app of all time.

Threads saw daily active users decline from 49 million on July 7th, to 23.6 million on July 14th, SimilarWeb writes in a new report. And in the United States, which reportedly saw the highest engagement, usage declined from 21 minutes per day to just over six minutes in the same time period.

While SimilarWeb cautions that its data is based only on Android usage of Threads, its findings line up with those of other companies. Market intelligence firm Sensor Tower reported a similar decline in engagement, writing in a report that the app “has experienced a double-digit decline in DAUs [daily active users] and user engagement since launch.”

On some level, the drop-off is expected. Threads launched at a moment when many Twitter users were seeking alternatives, and its ties to Instagram made it extraordinarily easy for users to sign up and port over their existing social graph. At the same time, the app is missing a lot of basic features, including a non-algorithmic feed not easily dominated by brands and influencers.

In a Threads post on Friday, Instagram’s top exec, Adam Mosseri, suggested the company wasn’t particularly focused on engagement metrics at this stage. “Our focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product, and building new features, dialing in performance, and improving ranking,” he wrote.

Whether or not Meta is able to fully take advantage of those conditions though will likely depend on how quickly it can add new features to keep its users coming back, as well as whether it’s able to launch within the European Union. The company is also dealing with issues around spam, according to Mosseri, who said Threads would be putting rate limits and other protections. “Spam attacks have picked up so we're going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” he wrote.

While the declining engagement with Threads may seem like good news for Twitter, the company still has plenty of reasons to worry about its latest competitor. As SimilarWeb’s Senior Insights Manager David Carr writes, there are “some signs” that at least some of Threads’ engagement has come at the expense of Twitter’s. “In the first two full days that Threads was generally available, Thursday and Friday, web traffic to twitter.com was down 5% compared with the same days of the previous week and Android app usage, by time spent, was down 4.3%,” Carr says. He also notes that “Twitter user retention has been on the decline” since last year.

Facebook is revamping its in-app video hub to give its content an Instagram-style makeover. The changes will bring Reels’ editing tools to all Facebook videos, as well as a new “Explore” section to highlight trending clips and other recommendations.

It also comes with a new name. The tab previously known as “Facebook Watch” will now simply be called “Video.” The section, which will host short-form clips like Reels as well as live video and longer form content, will continue to live at the top of the Facebook app.

The new branding comes as Facebook’s video strategy has changed dramatically since the “Watch” section debuted in 2017. At the time, the company was heavily pushing TV shows and other longform content created for Facebook. Now, much of Meta’s video ambitions center around its TikTok competitor, Reels, and other algorithmically-recommended clips. Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for the last year that his goal is to shift Facebook into becoming more of a “discovery engine” that surfaces more content outside of users’ social graphs.

Some of those themes are apparent in Facebook’s new video tab, which has a new “Explore” section similar to the Explore grid on Instagram. There, users will find clusters of trending video and other recommendations grouped by hashtag.

Meta is also taking steps to integrate Reels on Facebook more closely with those Instagram. Facebook has encouraged users to cross-post Reels from Instagram to Facebook for some time. Now, the company is also unifying comments across the two apps so users no longer need to switch to the Instagram app in order to comment on a Reel that originated on Instagram.

The changes are beginning to roll out now to the Facebook app and website.

Twitter has gotten worse in a number of ways since Elon Musk introduced paid verification. But one of the most consistently annoying has been the sharp uptick in DM spam. Now, Twitter says it’s making a change to cut down on the amount of spammy messages in users’ inboxes.

The company is adding a new setting that will route messages from verified accounts you’re not following to the “message requests” inbox, rather than the primary inbox. The new setting will be automatically enabled for anyone who previously had their DMs open to everyone, though they’ll be able to “switch back at any time,” according to Twitter.

That’s a notable reversal from a change Musk recently endorsed that allowed paid Twitter Blue subscribers to direct message any user regardless of following status. But while Musk suggested the change would cut down on “AI bots,” it resulted in more DM spam.

In a post announcing the latest change, Twitter’s support account seemed to acknowledge the prevalence of spammy DMs from verified accounts. “We’re adding a new messages setting that should help reduce the number of spam messages in DMs,” it wrote.

The updated setting is expected to start rolling out July 14th.

Meta’s Twitter rival, Threads, has unquestionably had the best first-week imaginable. After immediately racing to the top of app store charts, it became the fastest growing app of all time. In just five days, it grew to more than 100 million users, beating out chatGPT and TikTok which both previously held the record.

That’s even more impressive considering the app isn’t available in the European Union, one of Meta’s most important markets. And while Threads clearly borrowed some moves from Meta’s growth-hacking playbook, like sending would-be users notifications on Instagram and pre-populating their feeds with content and followers, Mark Zuckerberg called most of the early growth “organic.”

“That's mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet,” he wrote in a celebratory post on Threads. However you spin it, it's clearly bad news for Twitter.

While it’s too soon to know if Threads’ early success will translate in the long term, it has succeeded in utterly dominating Twitter in its first week. Every available metric suggests that Threads is not just a viral hit in its own right, but is doing so at the direct expense of Twitter.

Just days after Threads launched, Matthew Prince, CEO of DNS service Cloudflare, said that Twitter’s traffic was “tanking.” He shared a graph showing that visits to twitter.com had sharply dipped since the end of June, around the time Elon Musk began restricting how many tweets users could view, and a few days later when Threads launched.

Data from analytics firm SimilarWeb suggests the same pattern. According to the company, traffic to twitter.com dipped 5 percent in the two days following Threads' launch, compared with the same period the previous week. The firm notes that this is in addition to an “overall decline” in traffic that predates Threads.

There are other signs that Threads may be succeeding in luring away current Twitter users. A recent poll from Ipsos found that 58% of American Twitter users said they were likely to try, or have already tried, Threads.. And 46% of American Twitter users said they were “likely to move or have already moved the activity they used to do on Twitter to Threads.”

It’s worth noting that these are all very early metrics. Early virality for an app doesn’t necessarily equate to long-term success or sustained growth. Google+ was once praised for “meteoric” growth when it hit 100 million users less than a year after its launch more than a decade ago. In the more recent past, social audio app Clubhouse was heralded as a sensation when it grew to a few million users in its first months of existence. Both eventually fizzled out. 

And there are signs that Twitter does have a core group of dedicated, blue-checkmark-buying users. The same Ipsos poll found that more than half of American Twitter users were uninterested in migrating to Threads, at least in the near term. And data recently released by app analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests that Twitter’s engagement held steady in the days following Threads’ launch, while average time spent in Threads actually dipped.

Elon Musk and newly-installed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino seem eager to bolster this narrative. The two touted their own — somewhat dubious — metric following Threads' launch, claiming that the same week saw the “largest usage day since February” on the platform. “Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game,” Musk wrote. (It’s unclear how he was measuring “cumulative user-seconds” of screen time as neither Apple or Google report screen time metrics to app developers.)

Twitter’s leadership has more than enough reason to be rattled by Threads’ overnight success. While a wave of Twitter alternatives has cropped up in the wake of Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, none have come even close to 100 million. Mastodon, its most entrenched rival, reports 2 million monthly users. Bluesky, the much-hyped invite-only service, has about 300,000 sign-ups. 

Even more importantly, Threads has succeeded in nabbing a key demographic many of its predecessors haven’t: brands. Threads has been an all-out brands bonanza. And as much as that’s made for cringey, milquetoast content on the app, it’s very, very good for Meta. For now, brands are getting the kind of organic engagement most social media managers only dream about. As Website Plant recently pointed out in a report, big brands are attracting significantly more engagement on Threads, compared with Twitter. This is true even for brands that have far more followers on Twitter than on Threads.

According to the report, 87% of brands got more likes on Threads posts than on Twitter. “The vast majority of the posts we went through generated significantly higher engagement on the new platform — no matter if the content itself was the same as on Twitter,” the company wrote.

Again, these are early stats. It’s entirely possible that users on Threads are engaging more with brands simply because that what was shoved into their feeds, not because Meta somehow made the content more appealing. But that kind of early engagement will certainly make brands more willing to give Meta ad dollars whenever they do open advertising on the platform.

Zuckerberg has said the company won’t introduce ads to Threads until there’s a “clear path to 1 billion people” on the app. But that doesn’t mean Threads will be ad-free for long. According to Axios, the company has already begun to work on branded content tools for the service, and “is working to quickly make them available.” It should come as no surprise, then, that Wall Street analysts are also enthused about Threads’ prospects. The week-old platform could add up to $8 billion in revenue for Meta by 2025, according to an estimate from one analyst, reported by Bloomberg.

All this is especially bleak for Musk and Twitter, which is facing a financial outlook so dire the company has stopped paying numerous bills. According to a report from The New York Timeslast month, Twitter’s ad sales — its primary source of revenue — have plummeted 59% compared with last year, with performance “unlikely to improve anytime soon.” And, now, Meta has swooped in, pretty much overnight, with a huge new platform poised to gobble up Twitter’s missing ad dollars and then some.

While this likely brings some satisfaction to Musk and Twitter’s biggest critics, it’s worth noting that there are significant implications to an online ecosystem where yet another Meta-owned platform dominates its closest rivals. Meta, and Instagram specifically, has very different norms and standards about what kind of speech is acceptable on its service. And there are still more questions than answers about Meta’s plans to integrate Threads into the broader Fediverse.

But it’s impossible to ignore just how much momentum Threads has gained in its first week, and how much of it has come at the direct expense of Twitter.

Tumblr could be the latest platform to borrow from TikTok’s playbook. The company is planning a major revamp of its platform that will bring algorithmic recommendations to users’ feeds, according to a memo published on the Tumblr Staff blog.

The memo is notably frank about the reasons for the upcoming changes and what it describes as Tumblr’s current shortcomings. “The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use,” the company writes. “Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr.”

While Tumblr doesn’t provide exact details about new features, it offers some pretty big hints about what’s to come. The company says that one of its primary goals will be to “deliver great content each time the app is opened” and refers to its current “following” feed as “outdated.”

To address this, the Automattic-owned platform says it’s working to “improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds” and “make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are.” The company also notes that building more creator-friendly features, including improvements to the way replies and reblogs work, will also be key to attracting new users.

“Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback,” the company writes. “The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators.”

Taken together, the changes Tumblr is describing sound a lot like TikTok (or even Instagram): algorithmic recommendations in users’ primary feeds, creator-friendly features that encourage sharing, and more streamlined commenting and conversation tools. As a strategy, that all may sound pretty straightforward in 2023, when users increasingly expect these kinds of features from social platforms anyway. But considering Tumblr’s core interface hasn’t changed that much in its decade and a half of existence, the new direction could bring significant changes to the overall dynamics of the platform.

The coming redesign isn’t the only way Automatic has tried to breathe new life into the platform it acquired in 2019. The company has also experimented with subscriptions and other paid features, introducing Post+ in 2021, though there was some backlash against the feature from longtime users. More recently, the company began selling “completely useless” checkmarks to users soon after Elon Musk’s botched rollout of Twitter’s new paid verification.

Threads, Meta’s text-based Twitter rival, is finally out in the world (most of it, anyway). Compared with other would-be Twitter challengers, Threads has absolutely exploded. By the morning after its launch, the Instagram offshoot had already attracted more than 30 million new sign-ups, according to Mark Zuckerberg.

The momentum seems to have spooked Elon Musk, whose personal lawyer has reportedly threatened to sue Meta over unspecified “trade secrets.” But while the Meta vs. Twitter rivalry continues to play out, there are still some major questions about the new platform and how Meta intends to run it.

Why the relentless focus on brands and influencers?

It’s no secret that Meta began testing Threads with a relatively small group of creators and celebrities ahead of its official launch. The group provided some early feedback to the company, and helped ensure that when the floodgates did eventually open, new users were greeted with more than an empty feed.

The ploy worked. New Threads users found a lively feed filled with posts upon joining. But it’s also led to the main feed feeling a bit… underwhelming. Finding posts from friends, particularly recent posts, can be difficult as the current feed algorithm seems to heavily favor influencers, celebrities, brands and other higher profile accounts. Which leads us to..

What about a non-algorithmic feed?

If you know anything about Twitter, it’s that the original, reverse chronological feed is sacred to many longtime users. The same is true in some corners of Instagram, which brought back its chronological feed last year following a five-year hiatus.

So it can feel a bit jarring that Threads currently has a single algorithmic feed that seems to lean quite heavily on recommended posts from accounts you’re not already following. Not only is there no chronological feed, but there’s no way to view a feed of posts from only accounts you follow (though some have devised a workaround by messing with the app’s notification settings.)

Both Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Zuckerberg have since confirmed that a “following” feed — that is a feed dedicated solely to accounts you follow — is in the works, though it’’s unclear if this feed will be chronological or algorithmic) That should help address the “garbage hose” problem, as Slate’s Alex Kirshner described it,

How will Threads tie into the broader Fediverse?

One of the more intriguing aspects of Threads is Meta’s promise to integrate ActivityPub, the open-source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized platforms that make up the “Fediverse.”

Mosseri told The Verge that Threads launched without ActivityPub due to the complexity involved. “It requires a bunch more work,” he said. But the company seems committed to the idea.

In its announcement, the company suggested it was all-in on the open standard, and what it represents for the future of social networks. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks,” Meta wrote.

But the prospect of eventual Fediverse integration raises all kinds of new questions as well. How will the app, which is currently an offshoot of Instagram, handle interoperability with other federated platforms? Right now, Threads requires an Instagram account, which is neither decentralized or open-source, much less compatible with ActivityPub. Users can’t even delete their Threads account without also deleting their Instagram. So how will Threads users take their audience with them if they decide to leave? (Even on Mastodon, the process is far from simple.)

How will people on the thousands of Mastodon servers view and interact with posts on Threads? Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko has suggested it will be up to individual server admins to enable compatibility, but it’s still far from clear how this functionality would work. And that doesn’t address what might be possible on other platforms that pledged to support ActivityPub, like Tumblr and Flipboard, which may be less enthused about their platforms’ content being accessible a Meta-owned service.

Fediverse support also raises all kinds of questions about content moderation. Officially, Threads has the same community guidelines as Instagram, but federated platforms are free to set their own standards and norms. How will Meta keep content from other platforms that goes against its rules from Threads once posts are interoperable?

What about content moderation?

Speaking of content moderation, Meta hasn’t really addressed how it plans to scale its content moderation operation to handle the sudden influx of new users to a brand new platform. Up to now, the company has been clear that Instagram’s existing community guidelines apply on Threads and that it’s hoping to foster a more “positive” environment.

But it’s unclear how the company is handling enforcement internally. And as much as Meta execs try to emphasize the good vibes, history has taught us that where there are millions of users there will inevitably be bad actors spreading hate speech, misinformation and all the familiar ills of giant social media platforms.

For now, it seems like Threads is largely relying on Instagram’s moderation infrastructure. For example, the app will warn you before attempting to follow a user that’s repeatedly shared misinformation. The company is also pushing users to carry over their block, restrict and word filtering settings from Instagram. But with more than 95 million posts on its first day of existence, Threads will at some point likely need its own moderation resources.

Where are all the... other features?

More immediately, the most pressing question for most Threads users is when Meta will start adding a bunch of basic features that could make Threads more functionally like Twitter and other services. For now, many have raised the absence of a number of basic capabilities.

Direct Messages: Unlike Twitter and Instagram, Threads has no private messaging. And so far, it’s unclear if that could change. Mosseri seems cautious about the idea, telling The Verge he was hesitant to contribute to “inbox fatigue.”

Web interface: For a lot of Twitter power users, one of the more frustrating aspects of Threads is the lack of a proper web interface. For now, you can manually view Threads posts by navigating to user’s public profiles, but there’s no way to view your feed or interact with posts. Here, again, Mosseri says that’s in the works. “The priority is the mobile apps, but we are working on www,” he wrote.

Search and hashtags: While Threads makes it easy enough to find people from your existing social graph, Threads doesn’t allow you to search posts or even use basic filtering tools like hashtags.

Accessibility: Unfortunately, as with so many other new platforms, Threads so far has ignored some basic accessibility features. There’s no support for alt text for photos, for example, which feels like a pretty glaring omission given Threads ties to Instagram.

Ads: Most users (brands, aside) probably aren’t clamoring for ads in their new feeds. But the launch of Threads has prompted questions about what Meta’s eventual plan for advertising is. According to Zuckerberg, the ads won’t be coming any time soon. “Our approach will be the same as all our other products: make the product work well first, then see if we can get it on a clear path to 1 billion people, and only then think about monetization at that point,” he wrote on Threads.

While we don’t know exactly which features Meta is prioritizing first, it seems safe to say we won’t have to wait too long for at least some of these features. One advantage Threads has over many of its upstart competitors is that Meta has infinitely more engineers it can dedicate to these issues. And new features will be key if the company wants Threads to be a long term success and not just a novelty.

Threads, Meta’s text-based app to challenge Twitter, is now official. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new service one day ahead of the July 6th launch date that appeared in app stores earlier this week. Meta has begun rolling out the new service around the world, though it won’t be available within the European Union until the company addresses potential regulatory concerns.

In a blog post announcing the Twitter rival, the company described Threads as a “separate space for real-time updates and public conversations” that relies on users’ Instagram credentials but will eventually be compatible with a wider swath of decentralized services like Mastodon.For now though, Threads users log into the app and website with their existing Instagram account. The company will “carry over” existing usernames and verification status to Threads, though users have the option to further customize their profiles.

Like on Instagram, the company will rely heavily on recommendations to help people discover new accounts to follow. And Meta has been quietly testing the service with a small group of celebrities and creators, as well as its own employees, so new users won’t be greeted with an empty social network.

The service itself looks remarkably similar to Twitter though its design will feel familiar to Instagram users. It supports text posts up to 500 characters, as well as photos and videos up to five minutes. Threads will also support reposts — its version of a retweet — as well as quote posts. Users can also limit their replies, block and report other users. And posts from Threads can be easily shared to users’ Instagram Story for added visibility.

Meta

The launch comes at a particularly chaotic moment for Twitter, just days after Elon Musk announced strict rate limits that severely restricted the number of posts many users could view on the platform. The company also stopped showing tweets to logged-out users, before quietly backtracking. Musk, who has complained about AI companies training their platforms on Twitter data, blamed both unpopular moves on “data scraping.”

With Threads, Meta is challenging not just Twitter but the growing wave of Twitter alternatives like Mastodon. The company is planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open source protocol that powers Mastodon and other decentralized services sometimes collectively referred to as the “Fediverse.”

“Our plan is to work with ActivityPub to provide you the option to stop using Threads and transfer your content to another service,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks.”

As Meta explains, this means that users from Mastodon and other services that support ActivityPub will be able to follow and interact with public-facing posts on Threads. (Private accounts on threads will still be able to manually approve new followers from other services.) And other developers could one day create their own Threads-compatible features and services.

For now, it’s not clear how long it will take for Meta to fully integrate ActivityPub into Threads. In an early post on the service that was briefly viewable ahead of its official launch, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the company was “committed” to the protocol, but didn’t provide a timeline. It’s also not clear how ActivityPub integration could affect content moderation and other safety issues. While Meta’s Threads app has the same content moderation policies as Instagram, services built by other developers are able to set their own standards and policies just as different instances on Mastodon have their own guidelines and norms. Meta notes that this will give users “the freedom to choose spaces that align with their values.”

At the moment, the biggest question facing Threads, though, is whether it has a chance at becoming a viable Twitter alternative. Since Musk took over the company last year, Twitter users have flocked to alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, T2, and others. But so far none have achieved anything close to the scale of Twitter, much less Meta. But, with more than 1 billion Instagram users, Zuckerberg and Meta are clearly hoping that they can gather momentum much more quickly than other decentralized upstarts.

It’s now clear that the Reddit blackout will have a significant impact on the platform, but perhaps not in the way its organizers intended. Rather than walk back the API policy changes that will force third-party apps like Apollo to shut down, the company’s leadership has repeatedly doubled down on its position.

"I think it's time we grow up and behave like an adult company,” CEO Steve Huffman toldNPR. “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free,” he said in an interview with The Verge. Reddit also used the media blitz to downplay the impact of the blackout, which at its peak saw more than 8,000 subreddits go dark in a move that was so destabilizing it temporarily took down the whole platform.

While the initial 48-hour blackout period has passed, the protest is far from over. Thousands of subreddits remain private or restricted. These include the massively popular r/funny, which has more than 40 million subscribers, as well as r/aww, r/Music and others with tens of millions of subscribers. Many of these subreddits’ moderators say they plan to continue their protests indefinitely.

In the short term, massive Reddit communities going dark doesn’t just affect Redditors. It also has an outsize impact on search results because so many people rely on the collective advice, conversations and shared knowledge of the discussions that are central to the platform. As many have pointed out, one of the biggest immediate impacts of the blackout was not a vastly different front page, but search results that lead to dead ends rather than answers.

But there are other, longer term effects we’re only just beginning to get a hint of. For one, the blackout could lead to significant changes in Reddit’s own policies and its dealings with moderators. In an interview with NBC News, Huffman suggested he was considering changing the site’s rules to make it easier to remove moderators.

From NBC:

Huffman, also a Reddit co-founder, said he plans to pursue changes to Reddit’s moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren’t popular. He said the new system would be more democratic and allow a wider set of people to hold moderators accountable.

One change that is “really important,” he said, “is making sure that, for example, the protests, now or in the future, are actually representative of their communities. And I think that may have been the case for many at the beginning of this week, but that’s less and less the case as time goes on.

A post from Reddit admins also alluded to such a change. In response to a question on r/ModSuport, a company representative raised a similar point. “Active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active,” the unnamed employee wrote. “If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod who wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.”

While the post cited Reddit’s existing policies for moderators, the comment has been interpreted by some longtime moderators as a direct threat. For now, it’s unclear exactly how Reddit’s policies may change for its legions of volunteer moderators. The company didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether it plans to change its moderator removal policy. But at the very least, it seems that Reddit is at least interested in shifting the power dynamics that have historically given its unpaid moderators an outsize influence over the platform

Meanwhile, the blackout has affected Reddit in other important ways. There’s been a small, but growing push among some power users to federated Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and kbin. These decentralized platforms are still niche, and have many of the same challenges as Mastodon and other Twitter alternatives. Yet there seems to be growing interest from some corners of Reddit in recent weeks. Other large communities are simply moving to a more familiar platform: Discord.

And, as much as Reddit’s leadership tries to downplay the impact of the blackout, advertisers have noticed. According to AdWeek, some ad buyers have at least temporarily paused advertising while they wait for the blackout to play out. And while Huffman has suggested that the company’s ad revenue hasn’t taken a significant hit from the protest, that could change if it drags on indefinitely in communities advertisers are particularly interested in reaching. “[Advertisers] didn’t want to become the subject of users’ opinions about Reddit’s decisions,” one unnamed ad buyer told the publication.

All of this could ultimately leave Reddit in a much different place than it was before the blackout. As Rory Mir, the associate director of community organizing for digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recently wrote, Reddit seems to be following a familiar pattern. “What we see time and time again, though, is that when a platform turns its back on the community, it doesn’t end well,” Mir said. “They’ll revolt and they’ll flee, and the platform will be left trying to squeeze dwindling profits from a colossal wreck.”

Twitter has yet another major lawsuit to contend with. A group of more than a dozen music publishers has filed a $250 million lawsuit against the company over allegations of “massive” copyright infringement on the platform.

The suit, filed by the National Music Publishers Association, alleges Twitter users have violated artists’ copyrights on thousands of occasions and that the company has done little to stop it. It notes that Twitter is among the only major social platforms that doesn’t have licensing agreements in place.

According to The New York Times, Twitter had been in negotiations for such a deal but those talks eventually broke down. “While numerous Twitter competitors recognize the need for proper licenses and agreements for the use of musical compositions on their platforms, Twitter does not, and instead breeds massive copyright infringement that harms music creators,” the filing states.

The lawsuit also accuses Twitter of ignoring music publishers’ requests to take copyright infringing material off its platform despite weekly notices from publishers.“The reality is that Twitter routinely ignores known repeat infringers and known infringements, refusing to take simple steps that are available to Twitter to stop these specific instances of infringement of which it is aware,” the lawsuit says,

The suit also claims many offending tweets are now shared by verified users, and that Twitter is likely to take action against verified accounts. “Twitter suspended virtually none of the verified accounts identified in the NMPA Notices and which have large follower bases,” the suit says. “Twitter gives them preferential treatment, viewing accounts that are verified and have large follower bases as more valuable and monetizable than accounts that are unverified and have a small number of followers.”

Though the lawsuit says that copyright infringement has been a problem at Twitter for years, it says things have gotten worse since Elon Musk took over the company and that things are in “disarray” internally. Of note, the suit also cites tweets from Musk himself, in which he criticized copyright law, calling the “overzealous DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act]” a “plague on humanity.”

“This statement and others like it exert pressure on Twitter employees, including those in its trust and safety team, on issues relating to copyright and infringement,” the music publishers say.

Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.