Author: M.Karatas

If you were accustomed to a time when Twitter — while far from perfect — was a place where you could dependably digest a wide range of breaking news, politics, celebrity gossip, or personal musings, it’s time to accept a new reality. Twitter is becoming a degraded product. In the four months since Elon Musk took over the company, the app has experienced major glitches — such as when, last week, users around the world couldn’t post tweets, send messages, or follow new accounts for several hours. While Twitter, like other social media networks, has always had periodic outages, under…

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has led the world’s largest video site for the last nine years, is stepping down from her role. She’ll be replaced by Neal Mohan, her longtime lieutenant. In a letter sent to YouTube’s employees, Wojcicki said she was leaving in order to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.” During her tenure, YouTube became increasingly important to the business for Google, which bought the site in 2006, and Alphabet, the holding company that houses both of them: In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ad sales —…

It looks like the big bipartisan push against Big Tech in the new Congress will be about protecting kids. While antitrust and privacy efforts seem to be languishing for now, several child-focused online safety bills are being introduced this session. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has reportedly signaled that passing them is a priority for him. President Joe Biden recently said the same. And they just might pass, if this week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about protecting children online is any indication. Witnesses testified about how children are harmed by online content and the platforms that help push it to…

Meta had an abysmal 2022. The value of its stock fell by 65 percent year over year, it laid off 11,000 people, and employee morale has suffered. There are signs things are turning around, though: Earlier this month, the company reported stronger-than-expected Q4 earnings and saw its stock price jump by more than 20 percent in a single day. While almost every other major tech company is continuing to struggle and has also laid off thousands from their workforces, none has seen a stock market rebound anywhere close to Meta’s. That progress could be overstated and the company isn’t out…

Kelsey can’t do her job without her medication. The resident physician in Wisconsin, who is in her early 30s, takes the generic version of a stimulant called Concerta to treat her narcolepsy as well as her attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Untreated, her ADHD makes it difficult to keep focus and do routine tasks, and the narcolepsy makes it impossible to stay awake. “If I sit down for any length of time, like to read a book or emails, I’ll pretty much fall asleep within five minutes or so,” Kelsey said. “Around noon, I get this heaviness, that feeling…

Let’s say I want to take myself to see Magic Mike’s Last Dance on Friday at the AMC 34th Street theater in Manhattan. Could happen! And if it does, I have two options: I can buy a regular ticket for $26.88. Or I can pick a seat in the middle of the theater and pay … $1 more. If this was a Knicks game or a Broadway show, this would be no big deal: Consumers are very familiar with the idea of paying more, or less, for seats based on desirability and demand: Front-row tickets for Taylor Swift cost thousands…

When Rob Fishman, a former account executive at a tech startup, was laid off in January, he wasn’t sure how to talk about it. Even though tens of thousands of tech employees at startups like his — and at major tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn) — were being laid off, there was still, he said, a stigma attached to talking about it. But he wanted people to know he was in the market for a new job, so he decided to post on LinkedIn. Fishman wrote a lighthearted, self-deprecating post listing out everything he did…

Super Bowl LVI was only a year ago, but when you look at some of the ads we saw then, it feels like a much different time: one where the future of the internet was all about cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the metaverse. Companies that hadn’t even existed 10 or even three years prior spent big money promoting themselves as major Web3 players, and older, established companies tried to stake their claim in the same world. That world wouldn’t last long. In the past year, Web3 fumbled, Big Tech stocks turned over, and AI is currently charging down the field as…

Christine Ruiz left her 9-to-5 job last summer to do the same work as a contractor instead. In both places, she’s a compliance manager, the person who makes sure a company’s software doesn’t run afoul of any policies. But Ruiz wanted to pursue an advanced degree and believed that switching from regular employment to freelance would give her more flexibility. She, like many of the independent workers we spoke with, was also lucky enough to maintain health care coverage through her spouse. “In years past, it maybe would have stressed me out a little bit more,” Ruiz said, “It’s worked…

Joe Biden mentioned hamburgers in his 2023 State of the Union address. Specifically, the president wondered why the person who rings up your burger order may have signed a noncompete agreement preventing them from working at a nearby burger restaurant that pays better — the kind of agreement that 30 million workers in the US are also beholden to. Biden vowed that these agreements will soon be banned. That’s the current job of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan, who announced last January that the agency had proposed a rule to ban the practice of forcing workers to sign noncompete…