Internet & Websites News - Page 2

Millions of people have taken to alternative social media platforms to report a glitch with Facebook's news feed.

In the early hours of August 24, thousands of people have taken to Twitter to report a strange bug in their Facebook news feed, with many Twitter posts featuring screenshots or screen recordings of their entire news feed being memes random Facebook users have posted to celebrity Facebook pages such as Joe Rogan, President Joe Biden, Harry Styles, Eminem, Ariana Grande, The Weekend and more.

It seems that the homepage has glitched for a certain percentage of users, as I can personally report no changes in my Facebook news feed. However, the glitch does seem to be widespread and is affecting a large percentage of people with hashtags such as "#Facebook" growing on Twitter. According to Down Detector, the problems are spread across desktop and apps, with 76% of the bug-reporting participants indicating problems with the News Feed, 18% with the app, and 6% with the website.

Google is down right now, I repeat: Google is DOWN.

I use the search engine hundreds of times per day for my job, so the very nanosecond that there was a blip in the Google radar, I felt it. Google seems to be down in some parts of the world, after a quick search on Twitter I noticed that #GoogleDown was in the top tweets, so I knew it wasn't just me.

People are getting "500. That's an error" that continues "the server encountered an error and could not complete your request. If the problem persists, please report your problem and mention this error message and the query that caused it. That's all we know", explains one of the largest companies in the world. Google.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has announced that Instagram is testing a new subscription service that allows creators to monetize their followers.

Mosseri took to his personal Instagram account to announce that the new subscription service that has been in testing since January 2022 will be getting an expansion of features. For those who don't know, Instagram has tested a subscription service similar to OnlyFans or Patreon, where followers can pay for access to a creator's exclusive content. In January, the service was only being tested on ten creators but has now rolled out to more than 10,000 creators.

Twitter is experiencing some issues across the world right now, with users in multiple countries including the US, UK, Mexico, Brazil, and Italy experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

Down here in Australia, I've got no problems on both accessing Twitter.com on my desktop PC, or on my Android smartphone. But there are over 50,000+ people with issues in the US along according to DownDetector. The outage kicked off at around 8AM ET, where people were having issues logging into the site, or accessing it from their phone.

Some users are getting error messages like "Tweets aren't loading right now. Try again" while others have no issues at all. Twitter doesn't get outages often, so when they happen they are headlines across the world. I'm sure that once you even read this news, Twitter will be back and operational.

The iconic music livestream stopped on July 10th, 2022.

The stream had amassed over 688 million views after starting on February 23rd, 2020. The Lofi Girl channel received a DMCA takedown request by FMC Music, a Malaysian company, leading YouTube to take the video down and issue one copyright strike to the channel. A second stream by the channel was also taken down on the same day, which had amassed 129 million views, and began streaming only three days after the other, back in 2020.

Lofi Girl claims they are "false copyright strikes," marking another episode in the ongoing saga of abuse of YouTube's copyright system. YouTube confirmed on July 11th that the takedown requests were malicious and subsequently terminated FMC Music's account. Though the strike has been removed from Lofi Girl's channel, and the videos will be reinstated, a new stream will need to begin, marking the end of an era for one of the platform's biggest ongoing livestreams. The new live stream will be going live here, if you're interested.

Joe Rogan, the host of the largest podcast in the world, "The Joe Rogan Experience," appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, where he discussed various topics, including what he experienced at the height of his controversy.

The UFO commentator and host of the Joe Rogan experience sat down with his good friend Lex Fridman for a lengthy discussion that ranges across various topics such as the role discipline plays in Rogan's life, what he did to manage with his attempted cancellation following interviews with polarizing medical professionals, UFOs, Putin, the CIA and more.

At the beginning of the nearly two-hour discussion, Fridman asks Rogan how he survived being publicly attacked over publishing podcasts with medical professionals that gave a controversial opinion on the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the n-word highlight video.

If you've been itching to watch every single episode of Seinfeld, well then we have just the website for you: Watch Seinfeld Online is a dedicated website to streaming every episode of Seinfeld.

As each episode of Seinfeld is streaming, you won't have any options of rewinding or skipping through episodes, but you also don't have to put up with ads flashing up or any commercials. That's not bad considering the same can't be said for TV or anywhere online: although, Netflix did secure themselves a 5-year streaming deal for one of the most successful TV shows in history.

Personally, I've finished the latest season of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, written and stars Larry David... the co-creator of Seinfeld along with comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Curb Your Enthusiasm is fantastic, but I have to admit: I haven't watched Seinfeld. I couldn't do it... but I really want to, and need to start from the very beginning.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO took a several-day hiatus from Twitter but how now returned in a series of tweets following his birthday celebrations.

Musk recently celebrated his 51st birthday on June 28, and coincidently the world's richest individual managed to pass a milestone number of Twitter followers on the same day - a nice little birthday present. Musk's official Twitter account reached 100 million followers on June 28, and has since climbed to 100.2 million followers, a gain of approximately 200,000 new followers in just four days.

Musk stopped posting on Twitter on June 22 and seemingly took several days to himself to enjoy his birthday and work on his myriad of other projects. He has now returned on June 2 by firstly posting a meme followed by a simple, "Feeling... perhaps... a little bored?"

Mark Zuckerberg has informed Meta employees that company performance goals will be increasing in order to discover underperforming staff.

Reuters has learned that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken to Meta staff during a recent Q&A meeting where he said that Meta will be focusing on plugging any financial holes following slower than anticipated revenue growth. Zuckerberg explained that he will be introducing new performance targets for employees that will be harsh as the company will axe employees that cannot meet them. The Meta CEO said that, realistically speaking, "there are probably a bunch of people at the company that shouldn't be here".

Audio from the Q&A was heard by Reuters, and Zuckerberg described the increasing performance goals will be "turning up the heat a little bit" where employees may realize that Meta isn't the right place for them, "and that self-selection is OK with me," said Zuckerberg. To illustrate how Zuckerberg is reeling back Meta's aggressive growth amid unexpectedly reduced revenue, the company brought its hiring target of 10,000 workers all the way down to 6,000/7,000.

A study on Facebook clickbait titled "Click me...! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging" has been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Researchers from the University of Duisburg-Essen studied four thousand Facebook posts from various news organizations to gauge what constituted clickbait and how effective various techniques were than others. Though clickbait increases attention to certain articles, some previous studies have suggested that it erodes readers' trust in a given source.

The team collected the posts over seven consecutive days in 2017 from ten news outlets' Facebook pages based in the United States and the United Kingdom, which included "reputable" and "tabloid" sources. They found headlines including typical clickbait phrases were associated with about a quarter of reactions, shares, and comments compared to those without, e.g. "this will blow your mind."