Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth announced today that he is joining Match Group, the parent company of several popular dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge.
Yoel, who shared the move on LinkedIn, is now the company’s Vice President of Trust and Safety.
I swiped right on Match Group,” Roth said in his announcement post.
Roth is now taking his trust and safety expertise to Match’s family of dating apps, which includes Tinder, Match.com, Meetic, OkCupid, Hinge, Plenty of Fish, OurTime, and more.
Although dating apps have built-in features to keep users safe, there is still a lot of toxic behavior on these apps, and not everyone trusts them.
In a new SEC filing, Reddit says it’s planning to sell around 22 million shares, priced between $31 to $34, potentially raising around $748 million at the high end of that range.
But the IPO could be volatile given that Reddit will allow its community members to sell their shares immediately, instead of being subject to the usual lock-up agreements that typically prevent investors from selling shares for six months after the IPO.
The move sets up Reddit to become a meme stock — a term coined in reference to the wild GameStop short squeeze of 2021, which was driven by a group of Reddit users on its community r/WallStreetBets.
The users had taken on the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop’s stock by over 100% by working collectively to buy the stock.
By allowing the Reddit community to buy into the IPO, there’s again potential for the stock to be manipulated — this time, possibly in Reddit’s favor — by Redditors’ collective action.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that the company expects to hit profitability next year with eyes on going public in the future.
While Telegram is not looking to raise a mega round, the company is open to investment in exchange for smaller equity.
The company also offers ad solutions for one-to-many channels and plans to launch ad revenue sharing with channel owners this month.
Durov told FT that ad solutions currently are limited to certain geographies and the company mandates agencies to spend between €1mn and €10mn.
Apart from these solutions, Telegram has also experimented with blockchain-based projects through the TON foundation.
What’s going on with the new bill that could ban TikTok?
Congress wants to force TikTok to part with its Chinese parent companyTikTok faces an uncertain fate in the U.S. once again.
The bill, which many of its detractors reasonably describe as a “ban,” would force ByteDance to sell TikTok within six months in order for the app to continue operating here.
The campaign to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. company originated with an executive order during the Trump administration.
We may learn more next week if senators begin weighing in on the prospect of creating their own version of the house bill.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Meanwhile, you wait for months for a good acquisition story, and then a ton of them come along all at once!
The company just bagged a cool $430 million, hitting a lofty $5 billion valuation and making the financial world do a double take.
A bit rich, if you ask yours truly, given everything else we know about Musk, but there you go.
The underachievers — the bottom 10% — get their own badge of shame, a digital dunce cap signaling to travelers to swipe left.
Meta’s newest app Threads, a would-be Twitter/X rival, may not want politics on its platform, but it’s coming to the app anyway — or so Threads’ search trends indicate.
And with the expansion, it seems the topics that Threads users are talking the most are, in fact, political in nature.
In 2016, the company made a change to Facebook’s Feed, to prioritize posts from family and friends over news.
Creators who post about laws and legislation, elections or other political and social issues, were not happy about this change.
But there’s one area where Threads isn’t (yet) suppressing politics, and that’s in its Trends feature.
X announced a new long-form post format called Articles today.
The feature, which is only available to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations, lets users publish posts with text formatting, other X posts, and embedded videos and images — akin to a post on a WordPress-like content management system or an article on Medium.
Last year, the Elon Musk-owned social network increased the limit for long posts to 25,000 characters for paying users.
And yet, in July 2023, Musk noted that the company is working on a way for creators to post long-form articles with mixed media.
Musk has long pushed creators like MrBeast and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson to post on X directly.
Apple released VisionOS 1.1 on Thursday with the most notable feature being improved personas of users.
Additionally, users can also now set up their personas without holding the device through Settings>Persona and selecting “Hands-free Capture” mode after initial steps for setup.
The new version of VisionOS also introduces Mobile Device Management (MDM), for enterprises to manage their devices.
This enables admins to set up devices for custom configuration, install apps at scale, and perform a remote erase of the device.
“We know that in order to unlock all of [the power of the Apple Vision Pro], businesses are going to want to manage these devices at scale.
Sea is “still making changes” and has yet to launch its popular mobile game Free Fire in India, more than six months after announcing plans to do so.
Garena, the gaming unit of Sea, announced plans to relaunch Free Fire in India in August last year.
At the time, Garena said Free Fire India will be made available in the country on September 5.
India banned Free Fire and dozens of other Chinese apps in 2022.
Days later, Sea said it was shutting down Shopee’s operations in India, months into testing the social commerce service in the country.
Apple says it plans to make it easier for customers to switch to Android as a result of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which went into force today.
This solution is not yet available, but Apple is committing to having it ready by fall 2025, the company says.
On this front, Apple’s Data & Privacy website is being updated to allow users to export their App Store data to authorized third parties, the document says.
Today, would-be Android users can use Google’s “Switch to Android” iOS app to migrate important content, like contacts, calendars, photos, videos, messages, and more to a new Android device.
It’s unclear if Apple’s new solution will address these areas as Apple hasn’t yet said what, specifically, it aims to improve.
