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South Florida police department officials recently removed a senior citizen from a local park — and the “resident” happened to be a massive alligator, estimated to be 100 years old. The gargantuan gator […]
The post 750-Pound Alligator Believed to Be 100 Years Old Removed From Florida Park appeared first on Geek.com.
Elon Musk has sent rockets to space, designed electric cars, and now, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO just teased a new creative project: “RIP Harambe,” a bizarre rap remix available on SoundCloud. On […]
The post SpaceX, Tesla CEO Elon Musk Drops Rap Remix ‘RIP Harambe’ appeared first on Geek.com.
Saturday Night Live recently parodied Jordan Peele’s Us with a hilarious Discover Card skit, and it explores the creepy side of identity theft. The SNL skit, which debuted on Saturday, March 30, has […]
The post SNL Spoofs Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ With ‘Horrifying’ Discover Card Skit appeared first on Geek.com.
For April Fool’s this year, Google Maps is serving a dose of ’90s nostalgia — in the form of the OG arcade game Snake (with a twist, of course). Starting today, users can […]
The post Google Maps Celebrates April Fool’s With Twist on Classic ‘Snake’ Game appeared first on Geek.com.
Officials say a flashing fireball witnessed by drivers and captured on dash cam footage on Saturday night turned out to be a meteor that was picked up on weather radar. Videos captured by stunned […]
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For a few decades now, the leading edge of science and especially astronomy has been at least partially dedicated to the search for one of the most fundamental philosophical questions we have — […]
The post Why Haven’t We Found Aliens Yet? appeared first on Geek.com.
What makes Hell such a great video game setting? Is it because demons and monsters provide endlessly creatively foes to violently slaughter without moral dilemma? Is it because fiery hellscapes are visually arresting? […]
The post Go To Hell With ‘Darksiders’ and These Other Nintendo Switch Games appeared first on Geek.com.
Technology is great but sometimes you need the feel of an old fashioned journal or notebook to gather your thoughts. In these cases, though, not just any old drug store notebook will do. […]
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If you find your city, town, or village darker than usual tonight, do not panic: People around the world are taking part in an annual movement called Earth Hour, which involves turning off […]
The post Places Around the World Are Briefly ‘Going Dark’ for Earth Hour 2019 appeared first on Geek.com.
It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and get a seat at the table shaping it.
The founder published a letter simultaneously on his own page and The Washington Post, the latter of which is an ideal way to get your sentiments on every desk inside the beltway. In the wake a couple of years that have come with black eyes and growing pains, Zuckerberg notes that if he had it to do over again, he’d ask for increased external scrutiny in four key areas:
The story of why the letter breaks down each doubles as kind of recent history of the social network. Struggles and missteps have defined much of Facebook’s last few years, with several controversies often swirling around the social network at once. Not every CEO gets asked to testify in front of Congress. Facebook houses and controls an incredible collection of data, playing a key role in everything from ad targeting and interpersonal relationships to news cycles and elections.
“Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree,” Zuckerberg writes, three days after issuing a blanket ban on “white nationalism” and “white separatism.” He goes on to describe the company’s work with various governments, along with its development of independent oversight committee, before anyone can accuse the company of completely passing the buck.
“One idea is for third-party bodies to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and to measure companies against those standards,” Zuckerberg writes, “Regulation could set baselines for what’s prohibited and require companies to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.”
Zuckerberg goes on to encourage increased legislation around election tampering and political advertisements. Notably, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development hit Facebook earlier this week with charges that its targeted ads violate the Fair Housing Act.
The op-ed rings somewhat hollow, though, because there’s plenty that Facebook could do to improve in these four areas without help from the government.
Facebook’s harmful content policies have long been confusing, inconsistent, and isolated. For example, Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was removed from Facebook but not from Instagram. Meanwhile, bad actors can just hop between social networks to spread problematic posts. Facebook should apply enforcement of its policies across its whole family of apps, publicly work through its logic for why it does or doesn’t remove things instead of having those discussions leak, and cooperate better with fellow social networks to coordinate blanket takedowns of the worst offenders.
As for election integrity, Facebook made a big advance this week by placing all active and old inactive political ad campaigns into keyword-searchable Ad Library. But after pressure from news publishers who didn’t want their ads promoting politicized articles to be included beside traditional campaign ads, Facebook exempted them. Those ads can still influence the electorate, and while they should be classified separately, they should still be archived for research.
On privacy, well, there’s a ton to be done. One major area where it could improve is allowing people to more completely opt out of search, including by their phone number, to avoid stalkers. And better controls should be available for how Facebook uses your contact info when uploaded in the address books of other users.
Finally, with data portability, Facebook has been dragging its feet. A year ago, we published a deep dive into how Facebook only lets you export your social graph as a list of friends’ names which can’t be easily used to find them on other social networks. Facebook must make its social graph truely interoperable so users don’t lose their community if they switch apps. That would coerce Facebook to treat users better since leaving would actually be a viable option.
Taking these steps would show regulators that Zuckerberg isn’t just paying lip service in hopes of getting a more lenient sentence. It would demonstrate he’s ready to make change that serves society.
How does a burger taste after it’s been in space? One man decided to find out by launching a McDonald’s Big Mac “100,00 feet, 24 miles high” into space, where temperatures drop to minus […]
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If Avengers: Endgame, which hits theaters in April, is not enough to satisfy your comic-book superhero fix, look to Amazon Prime Video this month. The streaming service has the Blade trilogy, the first installment […]
The post Here’s Everything Coming to Amazon Prime Video in April 2019 appeared first on Geek.com.
Data gathered by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft when it conducted a close flyby to Saturn during the final days of its mission have revealed new details on the planet’s nearby mini ‘ravioli’ moons. The […]
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As we’ve discussed many times before, 2017 was the best year of the current gaming generation. It was hard to keep up with all of the amazing titles released each month. One of […]
The post ‘Nier: Automata – Game of the Yorha Edition’ Is the Complete Package appeared first on Geek.com.
Alfred, Batman’s butler, gets the James Bond treatment in Pennyworth, a new prequel series that takes viewers back to the suave spy’s past. On Friday, Epix dropped a new Pennyworth trailer on YouTube, […]
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Unless you’ve been living under a very large rock for the past three decades, you’ve doubtlessly dabbled with Microsoft Excel—that number-crunching powerhouse that’s used by virtually every company in the western world. But […]
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Bright orange “Garfield” phones have been mysteriously washing up on the French coast for more than 30 years and now, local beach cleaners have found out why they’ve appeared there. The retro landline […]
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An Australian fisherman recently discovered an enormous severed shark head that was mysteriously bitten off by an even larger predator in the ocean. On Friday, Trapman Bermagui, also known as Jason, found the […]
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Researchers have confirmed the first experimental evidence of an infection being transmitted sexually in a wild population of animals, according to a new study. A team of scientists from the Veterinary Medicine University Vienna […]
The post Seabirds With Sexually Transmitted Infections Discovered in the Wild for First Time appeared first on Geek.com.
A rare first edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with typos fetched almost $90,000 in a U.K. auction this week. The book, which went up for sale at Bonhams auction […]
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The weekend is the best for relaxing activities, including binge-watching some Amazon Prime flicks. We’ve rounded up the best movies, TV shows, and documentaries that you can stream on Amazon Prime from March 29 to April 5. Turf […]
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When Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Fold, the smartphone you can fold up like a piece of paper, last year, the company touted a new type of tech dubbed the Infinity Flex Display that […]
The post Watch: Robots Fold Samsung Galaxy Fold Phone 200,000 Times in Durability Test appeared first on Geek.com.
Hulu has a lot to offer, however, deciding what to watch on the platform isn’t always easy. If you need help choosing a flick for your next movie night, you’ve come to the […]
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Rocky, an adorable dog from North Carolina, will not be chasing possums again for a while. Earlier this week, the pup got stuck in a drain pipe, which was about 100-feet-long, after trying […]
The post Cute Dog Chases Possum, Gets Stuck in 100-Foot-Long Drain Pipe appeared first on Geek.com.
If you’d like to play something a little bit sexy, this week’s Humble Hot Date Bundle has you covered. Enjoy over $160 worth of visual novels, dating sims, and more while helping out […]
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The whole point of the Disney live-action remakes is basically another version of making a ride at one of their theme parks: “Remember that thing you like? Here’s an experience of it that’s […]
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TGIF. While you’re planning for the weekend ahead, we’ve rounded up the top movie and TV trailers that you might have missed during the week. Major streaming services, including Netflix, launched new sci-fi […]
The post Top Movie and TV Trailers of the Week: ‘Twilight Zone,’ ‘Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,’ and More appeared first on Geek.com.
By putting you so close to the action, right in the middle of it really, virtual reality games have the ability to elicit strong, immediate emotional reactions like nothing else. And two of […]
The post ‘Trover Saves The Universe’ And ‘Five Nights Freddy’s’ Are Scary Funny on PlayStation VR appeared first on Geek.com.
It’s finally the weekend! If you’re not engaging in spring activities, you might want to binge-watch some flicks on Netflix. We’ve put together must-see documentaries, TV series, and movies to watch on Netflix from March 29 […]
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When it comes to PC gaming, you’re always going to get the best performance out of a big and powerful desktop. If you want to run games at the highest, eye-melting settings you […]
The post Geek Pick: Razer Blade Stealth Is An Ultraportable Dream Gaming PC appeared first on Geek.com.
Rocket Lab successfully blasted DARPA’s R3D2 experimental satellite into orbit and completed its first launch of the year. On Thursday, Rocket Lab’s Electron booster lifted off from the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand at […]
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If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”.
TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised under a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.
Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site– just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” Caroline is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at college at Stanford including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.
The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because i was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women and that’s a big bummer.”
She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze . . . all mainstream porn tells one story . . . You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”
That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn”, which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.'”
Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also married stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.
To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”
As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And since the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.
Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, He’s very supportive.”
Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits “we have a lot of competitors”. There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn, and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.
Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.
But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it’. Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”
Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great, You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”
Well, look at that. An exciting, focused and character-driven episode of Star Trek: Discovery. After last week’s overstuffed word jumble of an episode, it was such a relief to see this one make good […]
The post ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 2, Episode 11 Recap: Are You My Mother? appeared first on Geek.com.
Last year marked the 80th anniversary of DC’s Action Comics, which was certified by Guinness as the world’s longest-running superhero comic book series. Now it’s Batman’s turn to celebrate 80 years. Yes, it’s […]
The post Lego Celebrates Batman’s 80th Birthday with Six New Sets appeared first on Geek.com.
We’re enjoying FOX’s new game show Mental Samurai, which straps contestants into a wildly spinning robotic arm and forces them to flawlessly answer a dozen questions in five minutes for a chance at […]
The post Talking ‘Mental Samurai’ and Robot Arms With Arthur Smith appeared first on Geek.com.
Climate change means more than extreme weather events and mass animal extinction. A new study by the Georgetown University Medical Center suggests global warming will also bring a rise in disease-carrying mosquitoes. As […]
The post Climate Change Puts 1B People At Risk of Mosquito-Borne Diseases appeared first on Geek.com.
A fungal disease has caused dramatic population declines in more than 500 amphibian species. Chytridiomycosis, which eats away at the skin of cold-blooded vertebrates, has completely wiped out some groups of frogs, toads, […]
The post Amphibians Are Dying En Masse, Humans Are to Blame appeared first on Geek.com.
On Earth, helicopters are a staple of action movies, search-and-rescue missions, medical transport, and aerial traffic reports. On the thin atmosphere of Mars, however, they are a novelty. When NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover […]
The post NASA’s Mars Helicopter Passes First Test Flight With Flying Colors appeared first on Geek.com.
The U.S. government is suing Facebook for housing discrimination through advertising. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) this week charged the social network with violating the Fair Housing Act, alleging that […]
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They’ve given us a dynamic humanoid that does parkour and backflips and a robo dog that twerks, and now Boston Dynamics has unveiled a box-stacking bot that could be king of the warehouse. […]
The post Watch: Boston Dynamics’ New Robot Can Stack Boxes Like a Boss appeared first on Geek.com.
Virtual reality is not a flash in the pan. It is, in fact, a viable technology with many practical applications. Discover what all the fuss is about — and save over $57 — […]
The post Get Over 75 Percent Off on High-Quality VR Glasses appeared first on Geek.com.
A revealing cluster of emails leaked to Business Insider offers a glimpse at how Facebook decides what content is objectionable in high profile cases. In this instance, a group of executives at Facebook went hands on in determining if an Alex Jones Instagram post violated the platform’s terms of service or not.
As Business Insider reports, 20 Facebook and Instagram executives hashed it out over the Jones post, which depicted a mural known as “False Profits” by the artist Mear One. Facebook began debating the post after it was flagged by Business Insider for kicking up anti semitic comments on Wednesday.
The company removed 23 of 500 comments on the post that it interpreted to be in clear violation of Facebook policy. Later in the conversation, some of the UK-based Instagram and Facebook executives on the email provided more context for their US-based peers.
Last year, a controversy over the same painting erupted when British politician Jeremy Corbyn argued in support of the mural’s creator after the art was removed from a wall in East London due what many believed to be antisemitic overtones. Because of that, the image and its context are likely better known in the UK, a fact that came up in Facebook’s discussion over how to handle the Jones post.
“This image is widely acknowledged to be anti-Semitic and is a famous image in the UK due to public controversy around it,” one executive said. “If we go back and say it does not violate we will be in for a lot criticism.”
Ultimately, after some back and forth, the post was removed.
According to the emails, Alex Jones’ Instagram account “does not currently violate [the rules]” as “an IG account has to have at least 30% of content violating at any given time as per our regular guidelines.” That fact might prove puzzling once you know that Alex Jones got his main account booted off Facebook itself in 2018 — and the company did another sweep for Jones-linked pages last month.
Whether you agree with Facebook’s content moderation decisions or not, it’s impossible to argue that they are consistently enforced. In the latest example, the company argued over a single depiction of a controversial image even as the same image is literally for sale by the artist elsewhere on both on Instagram and Facebook. (As any Facebook reporter can attest, these inconsistencies will probably be resolved shortly after this story goes live.)
The artist himself sells its likeness on a t-shirt on both Instagram and Facebook and numerous depictions of the same image appear on various hashtags. And even after the post was taken down, Jones displayed it prominently in his Instagram story, declaring that the image “is just about monopoly men and the class struggle” and decrying Facebook’s “crazy-level censorship.”
It’s clear that even as Facebook attempts to make strides, its approach to content moderation remains reactive, haphazard and probably too deeply preoccupied with public perception. Some cases of controversial content are escalated all the way to the top while others languish, undetected. Where the line is drawn isn’t particularly clear. And even when high profile violations are determined, it’s not apparent that those case studies meaningfully trickle down clarify smaller, everyday decisions by content moderators on Facebook’s lower rungs.
As always, the squeaky wheel gets the grease — but two billion users and reactive rather than proactive policy enforcement means that there’s an endless sea of ungreased wheels drifting around. This problem isn’t unique to Facebook, but given its scope, it does make the biggest case study in what can go wrong when a platform scales wildly with little regard for the consequences.
Unfortunately for Facebook, it’s yet another lose-lose situation of its own making. During its intense, extended growth spurt, Facebook allowed all kinds of potentially controversial and dangerous content to flourish for years. Now, when the company abruptly cracks down on accounts that violate its longstanding policies forbidding hate speech, divisive figures like Alex Jones can cry censorship, roiling hundreds of thousands of followers in the process.
Like other tech companies, Facebook is now paying mightily for the worry-free years it enjoyed before coming under intense scrutiny for the toxic side effects of all that growth. And until Facebook develops a more uniform interpretation of its own community standards — one the company enforces from the bottom up rather than the top down — it’s going to keep taking heat on all sides.
Now you can search Facebook for how much Trump has spent on ads in the past year, which Pages’ ads reference immigration, or what a Page’s previous names were. It’s all part of Facebook’s new Ad Library launching today that makes good on its promise to increase transparency after the social network’s ads were used to try to influence the 2016 US presidential elections.
Facebook’s Ads Archive that launched in May 2018 previously only included ads related to politics or policy issues, but now shows all active ads about anything as well as inactive political and issue ads. It displays Page creation dates, mergers with other Pages, Page name changes, and where a Page is managed from, and the option to report an ad for policy violations — all of which will be visible on a new Page Transparency tab on all Pages. Users can search political and issue ads by keyword or other ads by Page name, and Facebook will lend a hand with auto-fill suggestions and previous searches. The Library also displays Pages’ total political ad in the past week or since May 2018. And in mid-May Facebook will move to offering daily downloadable Ad Library reports as well as monthly and quarterly ones instead of just weekly ones as it currently does.
The improved transparency could allow researchers, government investigators, journalists, or anyone play watchdog to ensure ads aren’t being misused to spread misinformation, suppress voting, exacerbate polarization, or otherwise be sketchy.
Facebook stopped short of putting all expired and inactive non-political ads in the archive. It wouldn’t say why, but some advertisers have expressed concern that it could let competitors copy their messaging and targeting strategies. Another exemption will be news publishers, who teamed up to complain that sticking Paid For By labels on their ads promoting their political coverage made them look like they were campaigning for a certain side. Facebook exempted UK publishers in November, and now Facebook will use third-party lists of legitimate US publishers to exempt their ads from the labels and Politics tab of the Ad Library as well.
Facebook is also bringing its political ad labeling to the whole European Union after launching in the UK in October. Political and issue ad buyers will have to submit documents and pass technical checks to verify their location and identity that will be reviewed by automated systems and audited by users who can report ads without proper labels. The goal is to prevent people from outside of a country from using ads to meddle in different nations’ elections. Facebook will also add a “Paid for by” label to all political and issue ads on Facebook and Instagram and place active and inactive ones in the Ad Library. The labels will review who bought the ad, their contact details, the budget for that ad, how many people saw it and the age, location, and gender demographic details.
Facebook notes that it now has transparency tools revving up in Brazil, India, Ukraine, and Israel as those nations prepare for elections. Facebook plans to have political and issue ad transparency tools available globally by the end of June.
Meanwhile, Facebook is expanding researchers’ and developers’ programmatic access to Ad Library API which was previously in closed beta. Now anyone with a Facebook developer account who goes through the Identity Confirmation process and agrees to the platform terms of service can use software to sift through and spot trends in the data. To prevent another Cambridge Analytica situation, Facebook tells TechCrunch it will impost rate limits on the API, but won’t disclose them to ensure bad actors can’t toe the line. When asked how else Facebook would safeguard the API given people don’t necessarily abide by the TOS, __ told me “this is why we have the Identity Verification process in place. we want to know the identity of someone accessign the data so if they do abuse our platform terms of service . . . we have the ability to revoke access.”
One fascinating move here is that the Ad Library and reports can be accessed even if you don’t have a Facebook account. That could ward off some critics and congress members who’ve ragged on Facebook for requiring users sign up access transparency information or stop it from collecting data on them.
Between the depth and convenience of access to Facebook ad data, watchdogs could spot problematic campaigns before influence too much of the electorate. If someone spots a campaign trying to convince people they can vote by text message, that the Pope endorsed Trump, or that are puporsefully stoking anger to boost engagement, they could flag the ads to Facebook for removal.
As Facebook being charged with housing discrimination by the US Department Of Housing And Urban Development today proves, Facebook has repeatedly failed to stop problematic ads on its own. By opening itself up to assistance, it might not alleviate scrutiny, but at least all the eyes on it can help battle election interference and other abuse.
The Hubble Space Telescope recently observed a rare, self-destructing asteroid that is spinning fast, ripping apart, and ejecting dusty material. Hubble Space Telescope images reveal two narrow, comet-shaped tails of dusty debris that […]
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Finding a way to stand out as a Nike athlete must be tough. With so many high-profile athletes affiliated with the company and so many signature sneakers across the brand’s line, players and […]
The post The Dream of the ’90s Is Alive in Nike’s KD12 appeared first on Geek.com.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope recently snapped an infrared image of a “red butterfly” in space and it’s a gorgeous sight with hundreds of baby stars. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), this “red butterfly” is […]
The post NASA Spots Glowing ‘Red Butterfly’ in Space appeared first on Geek.com.
Art conservators cleaning a “fake” Sandro Botticelli painting were in for a major surprise when they discovered that it actually came from the artist’s Florence-based workshop. English Heritage, a U.K.-based conservation charity, recently […]
The post ‘Fake’ Botticelli Painting Turns Out to Be Real appeared first on Geek.com.
Nintendo’s latest installment in the Yoshi series is almost here! Yoshi’s Crafted World makes its way to the Nintendo Switch as of tomorrow, and Prime members can still save $8 off the sticker […]
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As promised back in January by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the company today is rolling out an even darker version of the app’s existing dark mode. Before, Twitter’s dark theme was more of a blue-ish shade instead of a true black, which not everyone seemed to like. Now, there’s an optional setting that makes the current dark mode more of a pitch black.
To use the new feature, you’ll first visit the Twitter app’s “Settings and Privacy” section, then click on “Display and Sound.” From there, you can toggle on the “Dark mode” which enables the current blue-black theme.
A second option, “Lights out” is offered below. If checked, dark mode ditches the blue tones and becomes black instead.
It’s an interesting choice to not just darken the existing theme, but rather introduce a third option. Most apps offering a dark mode don’t do this – they just offer a bright, white theme and another darker one. Twitter – which doesn’t always do things by the book to say the least – has gone a different route.
A tweak to the dark mode may seem like a minor adjustment to be concerned with, but dark modes today have grown in popularity as larger phone screens became the norm – particularly because they can help to conserve battery life on high-end OLED devices. (And especially on apps used as regularly as Twitter!)
Some people also feel a dark mode is just easier on the eyes when apps are used for long stretches of time.
The topic of dark modes even made its way to The Wall Street Journal which made a case for darker themes becoming standard not only for the battery benefits, but also because they may help lessen device addiction and improve sleep.
Today, a number of apps support dark themes including YouTube, Google, Medium, Reddit, Instapaper, Pocket, iBooks, Kindle, Google Maps and Waze, and others. WhatsApp is also reportedly working on a dark mode, according to recent reports.
Dorsey first announced Twitter’s plans for a new dark mode a few months ago, in response to a customer complaint which called Twitter’s dark mode a “weird blue.”
Twitter says the new Lights Out mode is rolling out today.
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