Every time that I see news about Xitter, I immediately think "Elon Muppet must have a 4D chess plan, that's why he's sinking that xithole, it's to further his other goals". But then I remember Hanlon's Razor: if both idiocy and malice can explain the same phenomenon, idiocy is more likely.
So... yeah, he ruined a public service. That bloody Mark Zuckenberg would be smiling from ear to ear at that, if he was a human instead of an android.
This is so funny to me. Destroying Twitter aside, why does he think a payments app is something anyone wants?
Americans have Facebook Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, CashApp, Zelle and probably a dozen others that I don’t know about.
Canada has Interac e-transfer to any from any bank account for free, so these payment apps don’t even try to expand here. China has WeChat, Japan has Suica and a couple others, I just don’t get it.
This is a solved problem in basically every country. Giving Americans one more payment app they won’t use tied to a dying service that even at its peak very few used doesn’t seem like it will have any impact at all.
I honestly believe he thinks re-creating PayPal will lead to success like it has for him in the past. I don't understand why he believes that, or why anyone would use (yet) another online payment platform when PayPal and several others are available.
Online "high yield savings" tend to be scam companies looking to get access to liquid capital.
Ehhh there's a bunch of online high yield saving companies from real banks out there. Places like Marcus which is Goldman Sachs, Ally which is what GMAC rebranded as after they helped crash the world economy in 08, and Capital one all offer high yield savings over 4.5% interest.
“People can now publish posts via the API, fetch their own content, and leverage our reply management capabilities to set reply and quote controls, retrieve replies to their posts, hide, unhide or respond to specific replies,” explains Jesse Chen, director of engineering at Threads.
Developers can potentially even use this to make 3rd party apps.
Meta has been testing the Threads API with a small number of developers: Grabyo, Hootsuite, Social News Desk, Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and Techmeme. These test integrations have allowed sites like Techmeme to automate posting to Threads, or Sprout and Hootsuite customers to feed Threads posts into the social media management platform.
We’re now waiting to see if developers will be able to easily build a third-party Threads app with this new API that’s not connected to a social media management platform. The existing fediverse beta could help with that, allowing Threads users to access posts through Mastodon clients and share content to Mastodon servers. The current beta of the fediverse integration doesn’t let users view replies and follows from the fediverse though
Up until this exact story, I was of the opinion that "honestly what's the big deal, like what can they really do."
After reading that hooking Threads into the spam-engines that so thoroughly fucked up Facebook was a big priority, but letting Threads people read Fediverse replies is still on the we'll-get-to-it list, I am for the first time of the opinion "Oh. I see. You guys were right. Everyone needs to steer pretty clear of this."
I'm having a hard time replying to this without sounding like a shill for them, but fediverse integration is still in beta. Full fediverse integration is under active development, and that takes time. Flipboard is also working on fediverse integration, and it's taking an equally long time to get up and running. The API is undoubtedly being developed by a separate team, and is also probably a significantly easier task to tackle.
I also wouldn't say access to an API is what destroyed Facebook either though.
I get that, but in what world do you release a feature incomplete beta for a messaging platform integration where the "reading other people's messages" part is one of the features you're waiting until later in the cycle to develop?
And I'm not saying API access killed Facebook, I'm saying bot-scheduled inorganic content coming in a flood into everyone's feed even though literally 0 people want it there is what killed Facebook. And that by specifically calling out that stuff as what they want to bring to Threads (above and ahead of reading the Mastodon people's messages), they're showing that their priorities are so toxic that no good can come of interacting with them. It's the types of posting they want to create that is the problem, not the API that let those postings come into existence.
It's a public beta, so by the nature of things it's going to be incomplete. Flipboard is doing the same thing with one-way federation and only federating certain profiles during the test period.
They also didn't say they want bot-scheduled inorganic content coming in a flood into everyone’s feed though, they said they're releasing an API. An API could be used by a developer with ill-intentions to automate spam posting, but the alternative is to not have an API and never support third-party apps.
I can see your point. I might have to change my headline.
The „unique“ extensions do have a certain ring to it though. Imagine, you make a mastodon fork with your trillion dollar marketing machine and motivate people to make plugins and extensions for it - not mastodon or the ap protocol. Isnt this just an extension of the extension then?
If people want to use this plugin, they have to use threads…
The full quote adds some important context to what they meant by "unique".
Today at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, we announced that the Threads API is now available to all developers. We believe it will enable creators, developers and brands to build their own unique integrations, manage their Threads presence at scale, and easily share inspiring content with their communities.
These "unique integrations" aren't features or plugins exclusive to Threads in comparison to the larger fediverse, they're the types of features that would be unique to the applications developers who use the API will create, but aren't available in the default Threads app. For example, one app's "unique" feature might be collating data on interactions with your posts (like to track brand growth), while another's might be built for scheduled or automated posting (like a streamer who sends out automatic Tweets when they go live on Twitch).
These sorts of things are all available currently through Mastodon's API, Threads is playing catch-up here.
There is no rule anywhere that says you are not allowed to talk about your pay. I openly talk about my salary at work, I will tell literally anybody who asks - i’d say about half my company (a few dozen employees) knows what I make. If we all operate that way it will save us a lot of trouble. This nonsense where it’s considered impolite to talk about your salary is purely to the benefit of companies and is designed so that revelations like the one this employee experienced don’t happen.
One job I held had an employee handbook that included a blurb about how and individual's salary is their own business, and in order to foster collaboration and unity, it was best to avoid the topic entirely (I'm paraphrasing; I don't remember the wording).
Hogwash, of course, for the reasons you mentioned.
It's fine at work. Frankly it's a problem socially: everyone wants to judge- if you earn more then they resent it, if you earn less, they sneer at you, if you earn 'about the same' then people want to calculate how you spend your money and criticise something about that.
If we low-ball that estimate at $200 per pay period per person, someone who worked there the full 5 years would get $26,000. Their north America operations were 33.6% women in 2022, but no clue how many women total that translates to. They have 161,000 employees globally. If they have 20,000 women in the US, that would translate to $520,000,000. If it's 40,000, then $1 billion. Yes, they could afford it, but they're not going to like it.
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