Latest news with #SezUs
Miami Herald
29-03-2025
- Automotive
- Miami Herald
New app poses problems for Elon Musk and Zuckerberg
Well, folks, it's been another fascinating week for the tech sector but not a great week for some CEOs. One week ago, Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting for Tesla's (TSLA) staff and likely surprised absolutely no one. He touted the company's EV sales without mentioning numbers that show sales are declining in key markets. He also didn't mention the missing $1.4 billion that no one seems to be able to explain. Get expert insights and actionable trade alerts from veteran investing experts and hedge fund managers. Join TheStreet Pro today and get the first month FREE Meanwhile, at Meta Platforms (META) , things haven't been going so well for Mark Zuckerberg. His company recently tried to acquire FuriosaAI for $810 million, but the Korean artificial intelligence (AI) startup has reportedly turned it down. As the dust settles, the message is undeniable: gone are the days in which no tech startup would even think of rejecting Zuckerberg's offer. META stock has performed well this year, but its leader clearly doesn't hold the sway he used to. What's Happening: Most people probably won't be surprised to learn that Tesla sells more EVs in California than in any other state. However, recent data shows that this may be changing as consumer sentiment shifts in a direction that doesn't favor Musk's company. Specifically, they have dropped 35% in San Diego, California's second-most-populous county and a key market for trendy, highly priced cars. Related: Elon Musk leaves out key question at Tesla all-hands meeting Why it Matters: It's no secret that sentiment toward Tesla is sharply declining in Europe, primarily due to Elon Musk's political stances. However, data indicates that Tesla sales are also trending down in the U.S.; a market the company cannot afford to lose. What it Means: Tesla's prospects may be worse than they previously appeared. Some experts speculate that losing European market share won't matter much, but now data shows it is losing favor in parts of the U.S. key to revenue and profit. What's Happening: For years, social media platforms have come under fire for algorithms that prioritize rage-baiting content or text and video posts designed to drive engagement by inciting negative a new app called Sez Us is poised to disrupt the social media ecosystem by prioritizing the opposite. Why it Matters: As Rolling Stone reports, rage-baiting has been a highly lucrative business model, both for social media platforms and content creators. Sez Us represents a dramatic shift in the social media landscape. Essentially, it rewards content from users who engage in respectful discourse and pushes down posts aimed at rage-baiting and provoking - something that many people have probably wished Facebook and X would do for years. More tech news AI chip startup snubs surprising offer from Mark ZuckerbergCybersecurity CEO has a surprising take on the recent DOGE cutsFormer big tech CEO issues grave warning on the impact of tariffs What it Means: Sez Us may be a bold idea with the potential to disrupt an entire industry. Other platforms have tried similar approaches, though, and those failed to garner real traction. Still, as more people express displeasure toward the industry, the market seems ripe for a platform where posters are incentivized to be respectful. This could severely impact Musk, who owns "X", and Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram. In the past, those apps appear to have heavily prioritized rage-baiting content. What's Happening: AI models are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, changing the ways in which humans do many things, including writing and research. However, recent developments indicate AI writing tools still aren't able to help students get a college scholarship. More high school students are using chatbots to write scholarship essays, but according to The Hechinger Report, the people reading them aren't fooled. Related: The Digital Dispatch: Elon Musk (and Tesla) have a TikTok problem Why it Matters: Skilled news editors are trained to detect when writers are using AI tools, and as it turns out, the people reading scholarship essays are no different. When the founder of scholarship platform Scholarships360 realized that essays seemed increasingly sterile and full of technical terms, his team deployed an AI tool called GPTZero, which found that almost half the students applying for scholarships are using generative AI to help write their essays. What it Means: These days, it's impossible to avoid commentary on how much AI can help everyone, from workers to students. However, as this college study shows, there are still some instances where human intelligence gives people an edge over AI systems. Scholarship essays allow students to stand out and show who they are as people. Advanced AI tools can do many things, but they still can't write in a way that feels human. Related: Veteran fund manager unveils eye-popping S&P 500 forecast The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
New app poses problems for Elon Musk and Zuckerberg
Well, folks, it's been another fascinating week for the tech sector but not a great week for some CEOs. One week ago, Elon Musk held an all-hands meeting for Tesla's () staff and likely surprised absolutely no one. He touted the company's EV sales without mentioning numbers that show sales are declining in key markets. He also didn't mention the missing $1.4 billion that no one seems to be able to explain. ⏰Get expert insights and actionable trade alerts from veteran investing experts and hedge fund managers. Join TheStreet Pro today and get the first month FREE 🤑 Meanwhile, at Meta Platforms () , things haven't been going so well for Mark Zuckerberg. His company recently tried to acquire FuriosaAI for $810 million, but the Korean artificial intelligence (AI) startup has reportedly turned it down. As the dust settles, the message is undeniable: gone are the days in which no tech startup would even think of rejecting Zuckerberg's offer. META stock has performed well this year, but its leader clearly doesn't hold the sway he used to. What's Happening: Most people probably won't be surprised to learn that Tesla sells more EVs in California than in any other state. However, recent data shows that this may be changing as consumer sentiment shifts in a direction that doesn't favor Musk's company. Specifically, they have dropped 35% in San Diego, California's second-most-populous county and a key market for trendy, highly priced it Matters: It's no secret that sentiment toward Tesla is sharply declining in Europe, primarily due to Elon Musk's political stances. However, data indicates that Tesla sales are also trending down in the U.S.; a market the company cannot afford to lose. 'For context, last January and February, Tesla sold more vehicles in San Diego — 3,687 — than it did in the Netherlands, Norway, or Spain. In the first two months of 2025, the Southern California county sold nearly as many Teslas as Germany, Europe's biggest car market. Of course, sales have declined steeply there, too,' reports Sherwood News. What it Means: Tesla's prospects may be worse than they previously appeared. Some experts speculate that losing European market share won't matter much, but now data shows it is losing favor in parts of the U.S. key to revenue and profit. What's Happening: For years, social media platforms have come under fire for algorithms that prioritize rage-baiting content or text and video posts designed to drive engagement by inciting negative a new app called Sez Us is poised to disrupt the social media ecosystem by prioritizing the opposite. Why it Matters: As Rolling Stone reports, rage-baiting has been a highly lucrative business model, both for social media platforms and content creators. Sez Us represents a dramatic shift in the social media landscape. Essentially, it rewards content from users who engage in respectful discourse and pushes down posts aimed at rage-baiting and provoking - something that many people have probably wished Facebook and X would do for years. More tech news AI chip startup snubs surprising offer from Mark Zuckerberg Cybersecurity CEO has a surprising take on the recent DOGE cuts Former big tech CEO issues grave warning on the impact of tariffs What it Means: Sez Us may be a bold idea with the potential to disrupt an entire industry. Other platforms have tried similar approaches, though, and those failed to garner real traction. Still, as more people express displeasure toward the industry, the market seems ripe for a platform where posters are incentivized to be respectful. This could severely impact Musk, who owns "X", and Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram. In the past, those apps appear to have heavily prioritized rage-baiting content. What's Happening: AI models are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, changing the ways in which humans do many things, including writing and research. However, recent developments indicate AI writing tools still aren't able to help students get a college scholarship. More high school students are using chatbots to write scholarship essays, but according to The Hechinger Report, the people reading them aren't it Matters: Skilled news editors are trained to detect when writers are using AI tools, and as it turns out, the people reading scholarship essays are no different. When the founder of scholarship platform Scholarships360 realized that essays seemed increasingly sterile and full of technical terms, his team deployed an AI tool called GPTZero, which found that almost half the students applying for scholarships are using generative AI to help write their essays. What it Means: These days, it's impossible to avoid commentary on how much AI can help everyone, from workers to students. However, as this college study shows, there are still some instances where human intelligence gives people an edge over AI systems. Scholarship essays allow students to stand out and show who they are as people. Advanced AI tools can do many things, but they still can't write in a way that feels human.
WIRED
26-03-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
A New Social Media App Punishes Users for Rage-Baiting
Mar 26, 2025 10:28 AM On Sez Us, users who are intentionally inflammatory may score lower than those who gain influence through respectful dialogue. Photo-Illustration:If there is one certainty of social media in 2025, it's this: rage clicks rule. Hyperbole, hate, brash deception—it's all par for the course—and often rewarded with virality. But Sez Us, an app just launched by veteran Democratic strategist Joe Trippi, believes it's possible to change that, by punishing users who shitpost for the sake of provocation. The timing may be just right. America is entering an age of oligarchy with a rising wave of right-wing extremism taking hold of global politics. Platforms like Truth Social and X now operate as effective propaganda machines, recasting culture-war issues over immigration, DEI, and trans rights as boogeymen in President Trump's new vision of America, which is really just a very old version of America. As the next era of social media comes into view, emerging platforms also have an opportunity to rise to the moment. Can Sez Us, which is positioning itself as the antithesis to X, facilitate a better way forward? 'If you bring back responsibility, ownership, and reputation, then suddenly all the incentives that we have in the real world are back,' says Yevgeny Simkin, Sez Us' cofounder and chief product officer. Even as online discourse has devolved into rabid spectacle, platforms like Bluesky have shown there is an appetite for a more civil kind of conversation. Rather than boosting any post that's getting rage clicks, Sez Us uses what its creators call a 'reputation engine,' a feature that allows you to rate another user's posts on the platform across five key areas: approval, influence, insightfulness, relevance, and politeness. On the app, ratings determine a user's reputation score and overall visibility. The higher the score, the more reach you have in the community. Users can also control who replies to them based on a person's score, with low-scoring users penalized by having less influence. All posts are visible but you can block users from replying, for example, if they don't have high-approval ratings. Ultimately, ratings are designed to deprioritize engagement based around viral moments. 'It's not about the moderators coming in and saying 'you're bad,'' Simkin says. 'It's about the community saying 'we don't like what you're saying.' Then I know that I have to temper how I say things. I have to be more polite. I have to be less bombastic.' In the race to perfect social media, there has never been a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderation—for those who still bother with it. Scale can make this task even more difficult as a platform's user base grows. For Simkin and his team, the idea was to build a platform that would 'bring to the fore all the ways in which social media should be running rather than the way it has been,' he says. 'The camel's back was broken by the straw of Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,' and suddenly a whole new world seemed possible. The fracturing of Twitter, since rebranded as X, kicked off an arms race among techies who had all sorts of ideas about the next phase of social media, and how to define it. It was during this period, in 2022, that the concept for Sez Us was born, grounded in the lofty goal of bringing back civil discourse. Returning constructive debate to online discourse is important to Simkin. 'I have a particular view on freedom of expression and freedom of freedom because I'm familiar with what it means not to have either,' he says. In 2022, as the Russia-Ukraine war escalated, Simkin, who was raised in Soviet Russia before immigrating to Canada, built Samizdat Online, an anti-censorship platform that allows citizens in totalitarian societies to read news by banned outlets without fear of being tracked and persecuted. Similar to Bluesky, another new-ish app that has emerged as an alternative to Elon Musk's X, Sez Us does not own any of your data. It was built using a decentralized social networking protocol (DSNP), which allows users to move their assets and content across platforms. Bots are kept off the app through mobile verification. Low scores likewise prevent bots and individuals with bad intentions from gaining traction. 'Numbers aren't the holy grail of this thing,' says Akshay Gupta, the chief operations officer. 'Just because you have a massive score doesn't mean you're winning on the platform. It just allows people to know what type of reputation you have.' Even if that is true, reputation scores do ultimately matter in the end. The lower the number, the less reach a user is allowed. When I mention to Simkin and Gupta that the idea behind its moderation-based scoring reminds me of an episode of Black Mirror , they push back. 'We're not defining what's civil. It's the Overton window of the community. Whoever is there gets to participate and then those metrics will move,' Simkin says. Many startup founders have tried, and failed, to design their own version of a digital Elysium. The main obstacle working against emerging social platforms that have launched in the last three years is TikTok. They don't have its cool, reach, or strange wonder. But that is also their advantage. What the next age of social connection calls for—one of the many things, at least—is not more super platforms but instead purpose-driven communities. It calls for digital rallying grounds of all sorts, ones like Reddit but also like BlackSky, a Bluesky community for Black users, which already mirrors a version of what Sez Us wants to accomplish. 'No new endeavor is going to be dead on out the gate,' Gupta adds. 'We've got an intention. We have a North Star. And we're starting to see the behavioral elements of it work. Disagreements are great. We're not stopping anyone from coming on the platform.' All backgrounds, religious affiliations, and political perspectives are welcome, they say. It's hard to know if any of this will work. Right now, Sez Us only has 10,000 active users. And Simkin has measured expectations for what they can accomplish. 'I'm not looking to improve humanity,' he says. 'That's somebody else's job.' By incentivizing healthy discussion, he says, the plan is 'to move technological discourse to a level where people can engage as themselves. The key is to help everybody recognize that we're actually not enemies.' Whether a critical mass of people actually wants that remains to be seen.
