Latest news with #MaxTani
Fast Company
3 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Bluesky is most definitely alive and kicking
Last weekend, an ugly rumor of a tragic death spread began rocketing around Bluesky. What made it odd was the identity of the dearly departed: Bluesky itself. It's not entirely clear what prompted this discussion, which ultimately seemed to be dominated by Bluesky fans rejecting the possibility that the social network had died (or at least jumped the shark). According to one theory, a story by Semafor's Max Tani ignited the debate by mentioning Democratic congressional staffers who'd given up on Bluesky 'after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.' That doesn't sound like evidence of death to me. Another contributing factor might have been slowing user growth after millions of disaffected Twitter users arrived en masse in the wake of the U.S. November presidential election results and Elon Musk's Trump boosterism. The service grew from 11 million users to 25 million between late October and mid-December, but has added only about 10 million more since then. Again, not a sign of rigor mortis or even a dreaded vibe shift. For a social network, being prematurely written off is a rite of passage. It's even a compliment of sorts—a sign that people are paying attention and care. Way back in 2014, for instance, when Twitter was still ascendant, I wrote about the fact that cranky users had started predicting its demise less than a year after it launched in 2006. So when I chatted with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, I wasn't surprised that she didn't seem fazed by the debate on her platform and saw the parallels with early-days Twitter. 'Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,' she told me. 'It's a similar thing, because with social sites, it's not straight up all the time. [Growth] comes in waves, and at each stage, there's a new era of communities being established and formed. We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is. It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner takes all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents.' I spoke with Graber backstage at the Web Summit conference in Vancouver, shortly after she'd been interviewed by Wired's Katie Drummond during the event's Tuesday night opening session. (I should note that she's also appearing at a Fast Company event next week.) Her assertion that social networking's days of corporatized centralization are over seems manifestly true to me, and it's a phenomenon bigger than Bluesky itself. In November, I stopped posting to Twitter and began using a wonderful multi-network app called OpenVibe to post to three alternatives. Bluesky is one of them. So is Mastodon, an even more grass-roots operation that makes Bluesky, with its 25 employees, look like a tech giant. And the third—Meta's Threads—actually does hail from a tech giant. I've had rewarding experiences on all three, though Threads, which has around 10 times as many users as Bluesky, feels too much like a purposefully sterile planned community to me. I prefer havens for wandering conversations and playful weirdness, which Bluesky and Mastodon both provide at their best. All three show every sign of remaining relevant for the long haul, unlike some of the Twitter wannabes that didn't make it (RIP, T2 and Post) or turned out not to matter all that much (hello, Substack Notes). Like The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, I'm surprised that so many reasonable people remain active on Twitter, which has come to resemble a dystopian carnival ride. (Exhibit A, for the moment: The bizarre recent incident in which Musk's Grok bot wouldn't shut up about supposed white genocide in South Africa.) But I wouldn't argue that Twitter is dying—just that it's a disfigured shell of its former self. I don't expect any social network to replace the Twitter of yore as the internet's uncontested go-to destination for real-time chatter about current events and pop culture. Bluesky, however, is still making progress in its quest to fill the hole left by Musk's dismantling act. A new Pew Research Center study confirms that the presidential election results led to a major influx of news influencers at Bluesky, though even more are still on Twitter. Moreover, Bluesky is beginning to build functionality to cultivate conversations around the day's events. Earlier this month, for example, the service began beta testing a feature that lets the NBA use its Bluesky profile picture as a portal that sends users to live content. The company says the WNBA account will also get the capability, which—if deployed more widely—would be pretty useful for anybody who offers live video, including individuals on YouTube and Twitch. In a roundabout way, this new Live Now feature reminds me of Twitter's pricey 2016 gambit to turn itself into a live-event platform by streaming NFL games. Except all Bluesky is doing is facilitating users leaving the service to consume video elsewhere, which is both infinitely cheaper than buying sporting rights and more in line with its philosophy of knocking down social media's walled gardens. 'We are a pass-through so that, as a content creator, you can get users onto your site more easily,' says Graber. If Bluesky is still in the process of becoming as conducive to community as Twitter once was, it's also avoided some of the problems that have long dogged the older service. The Pew study showed that its news-influencer presence skews to the left, a finding that won't startle anyone who's spent time there. Any broadening of its political spectrum could result in its tenor growing more fraught. Already, it can have a snappish quality, as reflected in the congressional drubbing reported by Semafor and software kingpin Adobe's hostile reception after it began posting in April. (Overly brand safe Bluesky is not.) What happens if Bluesky ever gets overrun with trolls, as Twitter was years before Musk took charge? I asked Graber about its approach to moderation, especially in a period when Meta seems quite proud of its Twitter-like decision to dramatically scale back attempts to keep the conversation on its platforms accurate and civil. 'We've always stayed lean, but we've always had human moderators, and we think that humans always need to be in the loop,' she told me. 'Because ultimately, you're dealing with humans. On the other hand, there are automated systems that are constantly attacking social networks and you have to have automated systems to keep up with that. So we use a combination.' The company also leverages the work of third parties who use open-source moderation tools to block spammers, she says. One other challenge that Bluesky has not yet fully confronted is monetizing itself. Onstage at Web Summit, Graber emphasized that it's working on subscription services, a healthier revenue source than stuffing feeds with ads, though potentially a tougher one to scale up to sustainability. The company announced a $15 million Series A funding round last October. Graber isn't the type to declare her intention to crush the competition. In a previous conversation I had with her, she said nice things about Mastodon. Even her digs at Meta are a principled stance against social media being dominated by a few monolithic companies. But neither is she satisfied to operate a social network that may never grow to the size of a Twitter or Threads. In both her onstage interview and our subsequent chat, she was at her most passionate when discussing the company's aspiration to decentralize social networking via its open AT Protocol. It powers Bluesky—and variants such as the Pinksky photo-sharing app, which she praised onstage—but could also provide the infrastructure for further-flung social experiences. Maybe even ones catering to folks who have zero interest in participating in the Bluesky community. 'The goal is to really get through that this is a choose your own adventure and Bluesky's just the beginning,' she says. 'The sky's the limit.' Whether she'll fulfill her grandest ambitions, I'm not sure. But I already like this era of social networking better than the one when a handful of winners really did take all.
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New York Times Encourages Staff to Create Headlines Using AI
The so-called "paper of record" is now encouraging staff to use generative AI tools to write headlines and summarize articles. As Semafor reports, the New York Times recently informed employees that they now have a whole suite of AI tools at their disposal to write search headlines — the version of headlines that appear on search engines like Google — as well as code, social copy, quizzes, and more. Along with models from Google, Github, and Amazon, NYT staff will also have access to Echo, a bespoke tool currently in beta that's designed to condense articles into shorter summaries. It's unclear whether these tools are the same ones that the paper was experimenting with last year, when leaked data revealed that the NYT was already using AI to write headlines. "Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world," the newspaper's new editorial guidelines for AI read, per internal documentation shared with Semafor. Those new guidelines — which the paper refused to comment on when Semafor's Max Tani asked for on-record confirmation — suggested that employees use the new suite of AI tools to make articles "tighter," write promoted social media posts, and summarize articles "in a concise, conversational voice" for newsletters. Despite those example use cases, and others shared with staff by the company, the guidelines also warn employees not to employ generative AI in article writing or revision, or when inputting copyrighted material from outside sources. Employees are also barred from using the technology to get around paywalls. For months, a small internal pilot group of journalists, designers, and machine-learning experts have been, per a May 2024 announcement, "charged with leveraging generative artificial intelligence" in the NYT newsroom. As Tani notes, this new suite of tools is the result of that effort. News of these updated AI guidelines and the introduction of this suite of tools also comes more than a year after the paper announced that it was suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement — a claim that the larger tech firm scoffed at in counter-filings. Though that company's non-ChatGPT API will also be accessible to NYT staffers, they will only be able to use it with approval from the newspaper's legal department. Despite the cheery announcement, some of the paper's staff are less than thrilled about the higher-ups' full-throated endorsement of the technology. Employees at the NYT told Semafor that some of their colleagues may be reticent to use the technology because they're concerned it might inspire laziness or a lack of creativity — or, perhaps more importantly, result in the sort of inaccuracies that generative AI has become known for. From the outside, it certainly sets an unsettling precedent for such a prestigious paper to be embracing AI — nevermind the bizarre optics of the NYT leaning into the tech while it's still locked in a legal battle with OpenAI. More on AI and media: Jonah Peretti, Who Filled BuzzFeed With AI Slop, Now Says AI Is Threatening Human Agency
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Analysis: The Wall Street Journal's editorial page takes on Trump
The big media story of the year kicked off with a vestigial piece of content: the unsigned newspaper editorial. Nobody would have noticed a Los Angeles Times endorsement of Kamala Harris — until Max Tani revealed that its owner had spiked it. Ditto the Washington Post. Their rush decisions, much more than the substance of those choices, are emblematic of a generation of power brokers unused to politics. It's contagious. The powerful executives gathered in Davos last week would literally run away when you asked them about the president's new cryptocurrency, $TRUMP. Those would-be moguls could take a lesson from a real one: Rupert Murdoch. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is saying what even the business leaders excited by Donald Trump's economic promise haven't — that they are worried about the rule of law and the Trump family money chase. The Jan. 6 pardons, the Journal wrote, were 'a stain.' The TikTok extension was 'illegal.' The 'crypto caper' was the 'howling' product of 'cowed' advisers. Newspapers will probably stop running editorials. Publishing and journalism don't need to be entwined in power politics. But if you want to be a mogul, as the Murdochs have learned over the decades, you can't make yourself quite that easy to bully.
