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Month: August 2016

Gawker.com to Shut Down

Jason Tate

Gawker is shutting down:

After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.

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‘Sausage Party’ Animators Allege Studio Used Unpaid Overtime

Jason Tate

Variety:

Instead of basking in the success, the makers of “Sausage Party” are finding themselves embroiled in a controversy that’s being fueled by anonymous comments on a series of blogs and news outlets. The formula used to deliver the film on time and on budget is now drawing unwanted attention, as animators who worked on the film in Canada are complaining they did not get overtime pay or the screen credits they deserved.

Ugh.

Uber to Begin Testing Self-Driving Cars in Pittsburgh

Uber
Jason Tate

Max Chafkin, reporting for Bloomberg, on Uber’s announcement that they will begin testing “self-driving” cars in Pittsburgh:

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.

There will be two “safety drivers” that sit in the car and can take over at any time, but this is a step toward our driverless future. A future generation will look back on the days where we all manually drove cars around as barbaric.

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Twitter Rolls Out Abuse Filters

Twitter
Jason Tate

Twitter has finally rolled out some content filters to help curb abusive behavior on the service.

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

NPR Gets Rid of Comments Section

Jason Tate

NPR are removing comments from their website:

In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, [managing editor Scott] Montgomery said. That’s 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. […] When viewed purely from the perspective of whether the comments were fostering constructive conversations, the change should come as no surprise. The number of complaints to NPR about the current comment system has been growing — complaints that comments were censored by the outside moderators, and that commenters were behaving inappropriately and harassing other commenters.

Good for them. Moving all comments to our forums was the best decision I ever made.

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