Social – Page 353 – Product Management Confabulation

June 21, 2019

YouTube confirms a test where the comments are hidden by default

YouTube’s comments section has a bad reputation. It’s even been called “the worst on the internet,” and a reflection of YouTube’s overall toxic culture where creators are rewarded for outrageous behavior — whether that’s tormenting and exploiting their children, filming footage of a suicide victim, promoting dangerous “miracle cures” or sharing conspiracies, to name a few high-profile examples. Now, the company is considering a design change that hides the comments by default.

The website XDA Developers first spotted the test on Android devices in India.

Today, YouTube’s comments don’t have a prominent position on its mobile app. On both iOS and Android devices, the YouTube video itself appears at the top of the screen, followed by engagement buttons for sharing, liking, disliking, downloading and saving the video. Below that are recommendations from YouTube’s algorithm in a section titled “Up Next.” If you actually want to visit the comments, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.

In the test, the comments have been removed from this bottom section of the page entirely.

Instead, they’ve been relocated to a new section that users can only view after clicking a button.

The new Comments button is found between the Thumbs Down and Share buttons, right below the video.

It’s unclear if this change will reduce or increase user engagement with comments, or if engagement will remain flat — something that YouTube likely wants to find out, too.

On the one hand, comments are hidden unless the user manually taps on the button to reveal them — users won’t happen upon them by scrolling down. On the other hand, putting the comments button behind a click at top of the page instead of forcing users to scroll could make them easier to access.

As XDA Developers reports, when you’ve loaded up this new Comments section, you can pull to refresh the page to see the newly-added comments appear. To exit, you tap the “X” button at the top of the window to close the section.

While it reported the test was underway in Android devices in India, we’ve confirmed it’s also appearing on iOS and is not limited to a particular region. That means it’s something YouTube wants to test on a broader scale, rather than a feature it’s considering for a localized version of its app for Indian users.

The change comes at a time when YouTube’s comments section has been discovered to be more than just the home to bullying, abuse, arguments, and other unhelpful content, but also a tool that was exploited by pedophiles. A ring of pedophiles had communicated through the comments to share videos and timestamps with one another.

YouTube reacted then by disabling comments on videos with kids. More recently, it’s been considering moving kids content to a separate app. (Unfortunately, it will never consider the appropriateness of having built a platform where young children can be put on public display for the whole world to see.)

A YouTube spokesperson confirmed the Comments test, in a statement, but downplayed its importance by referring to it as one of many small experiments the company is running.

“We’re always experimenting with ways to help people more easily find, watch, share and interact with the videos that matter most to them,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are testing a few different options on how to display comments on the watch page. This is one of many small experiments we run all the time on YouTube, and we’ll consider rolling features out more broadly based on feedback on these experiments.”

June 21, 2019

eBay and Facebook told to tackle trade in fake reviews

Facebook and eBay have been warned by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to do more to tackle the sale of fake reviews on their platforms.

Fake reviews are illegal under UK consumer protection law.

The CMA said today it has found “trouble evidence” of a “thriving marketplace for fake and misleading online reviews”. Though it also writes that it does not believe the platforms themselves are intentionally allowing such content to appear on their sites.

The regulator says it crawled content on eBay and Facebook between November 2018 and June 2019 — finding more than 100 eBay listings offering fake reviews for sale during that time.

Over the same period it also identified 26 Facebook groups where people offered to write fake reviews or where businesses recruited people to write fake and misleading reviews on popular shopping and review sites.

The CMA cites estimates that more than three-quarters of UK Internet users consider online reviews before making a purchase decision — with “billions” of pounds’ worth of people’s spending being influenced by such content. So the incentives driving a market to trade reviews for money is clear.

Commenting in a statement, the CMA’s CEO, Andrea Coscelli, said: “We want Facebook and eBay to conduct an urgent review of their sites to prevent fake and misleading online reviews from being bought and sold.”

“Lots of us rely on reviews when shopping online to decide what to buy. It is important that people are able to trust that reviews are genuine, rather than something someone has been paid to write,” he added. “Fake reviews mean that people might make the wrong choice and end up with a product or service that’s not right for them. They’re also unfair to businesses who do the right thing.”

The regulator says that after it wrote to eBay and Facebook to inform them of its findings they have both “indicated that they will cooperate”.

Facebook also told the CMA that “most” of the 26 groups it identified have now been removed.

The regulator says expects the sites to put measures in place to ensure all the identified content is removed — and stop it from reappearing.

At the time of writing a search of ebay.co.uk for “reviews” returned sellers offering 5 star media reviews, 5 star Google reviews and 5 star Trustpilot reviews as the top three results — one of which was also a sponsored post:

Additional eBay listings included one offering “1/2/3/4/5 Star Freeindex Customer Service Review for business”, priced at £10 and sold by a UK based seller who has been an eBay member since Feb 2011; one 5 star review “on Google” which the seller touts with the line “Boost your business and get new Customers” — at a cost of £2.69; one “100% positive FAST” review for £1; and five 5 Star Reviews on Google priced at £15 — offered by a seller apparently based in Portugal who has been an eBay member since March 2014.

A search of UK Facebook groups returned multiple examples of closed groups where sellers appear to be soliciting reviews, either in exchange for goods and/or payment…

Reached for a response to the CMA’s call for measures to be put in place tgo tackle the illegal trade of fake reviews, Facebook sent us the following statement — attributed to a spokesperson:

Fraudulent activity is not allowed on Facebook, including the trading of fake reviews. We have removed 24 of the 26 groups and pages that the CMA reported to us yesterday and had already removed a number of them prior to the CMA flagging them to us. We know there is more to do which is why we’ve tripled the size of our safety and security team to 30,000 and continue to invest in technology to help proactively prevent abuse of our platform.

An eBay spokesperson also told us:

We have zero tolerance for fake or misleading reviews. We have informed the CMA that all of the sellers they identified have been suspended. The listings have been removed. Listings such as these are strictly against our policy on illegal activity and we will act where our rules are broken. We welcome the report from the CMA and will work closely with them in reviewing its findings.

June 21, 2019

Facebook adds new limits to address the spread of hate speech in Sri Lanka and Myanmar

As Facebook grapples with the spread of hate speech on its platform, it is introducing changes that limit the spread of messages in two countries where it has come under fire in recent years: Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

In a blog post on Thursday evening, Facebook said that it was “adding friction” to message forwarding for Messenger users in Sri Lanka so that people could only share a particular message a certain number of times. The limit is currently set to five people.

This is similar to a limit that Facebook introduced to WhatsApp last year. In India, a user can forward a message to only five other people on WhatsApp . In other markets, the limit kicks in at 20. Facebook said some users had also requested this feature because they are sick of receiving chain messages.

In early March, Sri Lanka grappled with mob violence directed at its Muslim minority. In the midst of it, hate speech and rumors started to spread like wildfire on social media services, including those operated by Facebook. The government in the country then briefly shut down citizen’s access to social media services.

In Myanmar, social media platforms have faced a similar, long-lasting challenge. Facebook, in particular, has been blamed for allowing hate speech to spread that stoked violence against the Rohingya ethnic group. Critics have claimed that the company’s efforts in the country, where did does not have a local office or employees, are simply not enough.

In its blog post, Facebook said it has started to reduce the distribution of content from people in Myanmar who have consistently violated its community standards with previous posts. Facebook said it will use learnings to explore expanding this approach to other markets in the future.

“By limiting visibility in this way, we hope to mitigate against the risk of offline harm and violence,” Facebook’s Samidh Chakrabarti, director of product management and civic integrity, and Rosa Birch, director of strategic response, wrote in the blog post.

In cases where it identifies individuals or organizations “more directly promote or engage violence”, the company said it would ban those accounts. Facebook is also extending the use of AI to recognize posts that may contain graphic violence and comments that are “potentially violent or dehumanizing.”

The social network has, in the past, banned armed groups and accounts run by the military in Myanmar, but it has been criticized for reacting slowly and, also, for promoting a false narrative that suggested its AI systems handle the work.

Last month, Facebook said it was able to detect 65% of the hate speech content that it proactively removed (relying on users’ reporting for the rest), up from 24% just over a year ago. In the quarter that ended in March this year, Facebook said it had taken down 4 million hate speech posts.

Facebook continues to face similar challenges in other markets, including India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Following a riot last month, Indonesia restricted the usage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in an attempt to contain the flow of false information.

June 20, 2019

A chat with Niantic CEO John Hanke on the launch of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Just shy of three years ago, Pokémon GO took over the world. Players filled the sidewalks, and crowds of trainers flooded parks and landmarks. Anywhere you looked, people were throwing Pokéballs and chasing Snorlax.

As the game grew, so did the company behind it. Niantic had started its life as an experimental “lab” within Google — an effort on Google’s part to keep the team’s founder, John Hanke, from heading out to start his own thing. In the months surrounding GO’s launch, Niantic’s team shrank dramatically, spun out of Google, and then rapidly expanded… all while trying to keep GO’s servers from buckling under demand and to keep this massive influx of players happy. Want to know more about the company’s story so far? Check out the Niantic EC-1 on ExtraCrunch here.

Now Niantic is back with its next title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Built in collaboration with WB Games, it’s a reimagining of Pokémon GO’s real-world, location-based gaming concept through the lens of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter universe.

I got a chance to catch up with John Hanke for a few minutes earlier this week — just ahead of the game’s US/UK launch this morning. We talked about how they prepared for this game’s launch, how it’s built upon a platform they’ve been developing across their other titles for years, and how Niantic’s partnership with WB Games works creatively and financially. Heres the transcript:

Greg Kumparak: Can you tell me a bit about how all this came to be?

John Hanke: Yeah, you know.. we did Ingress first, and we were thinking about other projects we could build. Pokémon was one that came up early, so we jumped on that — but the other one that was always there from the beginning, of the projects we wanted to do, was Harry Potter. I mean, it’s universally beloved. My kids love the books and movies, so it’s something I always wanted to do.

Like Pokémon, it was an IP we felt was a great fit for [augmented reality]. That line between the “muggle” world and the “magic” world was paper thin in the fiction, so imagining breaking through that fourth wall and experiencing that magic through AR seemed like a great way to use the technology to fulfill an awesome fan fantasy.

June 20, 2019

Slack opens at $38.50, a pop of 48% on its first day of trading on NYSE as WORK

Slack, the workplace messaging platform that has helped define a key category of enterprise IT, made its debut as a public company today with a pop. Trading as “WORK” on the New York Stock Exchange, it opened at $38.50 after setting a reference price last night of $26, valuing it at $15.7 billion, and then setting a bid/asking price of $37 this morning.

The trading climbed up quickly in its opening minutes and is now nearly at $42. We’ll continue to update this as the day goes on.

Note: there was no “money raised” with this IPO ahead of today because Slack’s move into being a publicly traded company is coming by way of a direct listing — meaning the shares went directly on the market with no pre-sale. This is a less conventional route that doesn’t involve bankers underwriting the listing (nor all the costs that come along with the roadshow and the rest). It also means Slack does not raise a large sum ahead of public trading. But it does let existing shareholders trade shares without dilution and is an efficient way of going public if you’re not in need of an immediate, large cash injection. It’s a route that Spotify also took when it went public last year, and, from the front-page article on NYSE.com, it seems that there might be growing interest in this process — or at least, that the NYSE would like to promote it as an option.

Slack’s decision to go slightly off-script is in keeping with some of ethos that it has cultivated over the last several years as one of the undisputed juggernauts of the tech world. Its rocket ship has been a product that has touched on not one but three different hot growth areas: enterprise software-as-a-service, messaging apps and platform plays that, by way of APIs, can become the touchstone and nerve center for a seemingly limitless number of other services.

What’s interesting about Slack is that — contrary to how some might think of tech — the journey here didn’t start as rocket science.

Slack was nearly an accidental creation, a byproduct that came out of how a previous business, Tiny Speck, was able to keep its geographically spread-out team communicating while building its product, the game Glitch. Glitch and Tiny Speck failed to gain traction, so after they got shut down, the ever-resourceful co-founder Stewart Butterfield did what many founders who still have some money in the bank and fire in their bellies do: a pivot. He took the basic channel they were using and built it (with some help) into the earliest public version of what came to be known as Slack.

But from that unlikely start something almost surprising happened: the right mix of ease of use, efficient responsiveness and functionality — in aid of those already-important areas of workplace communication, messaging and app integration — made Slack into a huge hit. Quickly, Slack became the fastest-growing piece of enterprise software ever in terms of adding users, with a rapid succession of funding rounds (raising over $1.2 billion in total), valuation hikes, and multiple product improvements along the way to help it grow.

Today, like many a software-as-a-service business that is less than 10 years old and investing returns to keep up with its fast-growing business, Slack is not profitable.

In the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2019, it reported revenues in its S-1 of $400.6 million, but with a net loss of $138.9 million. That was a slight improvement on its net loss from the previous fiscal of $140.1 million, with a big jump on revenue, which was $220.5 million.

But its growth and the buzz it has amassed has given it a big push. As of January 31, it clocked up over 10 million daily active users across 600,000 organizations, with 88,000 of them on paid plans and 550,000 using the free version of the app. It will be interesting to see how and if that goodwill and excitement outweigh some of those financial bum notes.

Or, in some cases, possibly other bum notes. The company has made “Work” not just its ticker but its mantra. Its slogan is “Where work happens” and it focuses on how its platform helps make people more productive. But as you might expect, not everyone feels that way about it, with the endless streams of notifications, the slightly clumsy way of handling threaded conversations, and certain other distracting features raising the ire of some people. (Google “Slack is a distraction” and you can see some examples of those dissenting opinions.)

Slack has had its suitors over the years, unsurprisingly, and at least one of them has in the interim made a product to compete with it. Teams, from Microsoft, is one of the many rival platforms on the market looking to capitalise on the surge of interest for chat and collaboration platforms that Slack has helped to usher in. Other competitors include Workplace from Facebook, Mattermost and Flock, along with Threads and more.

June 18, 2019

Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: NoGood

NoGood CEO Mostafa Elbermawy describes how they evaluate a client’s growth challenges by quoting Zen teacher Hunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are only a few.” Rather than deferring to in-house playbooks, NoGood adopts an open mind combined with a methodical, data-driven approach to find untapped growth opportunities for its clients. Learn more about how NoGood came to be and why they’re willing to say no to potential clients.

On NoGood’s approach to growth:

“Our work is methodical. It’s intentional. We have to talk about it. We are very transparent about what we do and it’s completely process oriented. Hacking is a misnomer. Growth is not about clever shortcuts. It has to be sustainable and repeatable, and if it’s not, we won’t do it.”

On NoGood’s proudest accomplishment:

“They helped us launch our business. They are our CMO and our CTO. Would recommend to anyone.” Erica Tsypin, Washington D.C., Co-Founder & COO, Steer

“Our success in jumpstarting Steer’s business is one of our proudest accomplishments this year. Steer is an electric car subscription startup that asked us to increase their activations. Basically, our job was to generate new active members, which not only meant encouraging more users to download the app, upload a license, and get approved, but it also meant delivering a car to a member’s door, having them drive that car and leaving a review. We were able to demonstrate signup traction for Steer and help them launch in under three months.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with NoGood CEO and Growth Lead Mostafa Elbermawy

Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, how did you get into growth?

Mostafa Elbermawy: Well, I went to school for archaeology, but hieroglyphics weren’t paying the bills, so I taught myself how to code and started a web design studio after college. I started building websites for clients, and they started asking me how to drive more users to their sites to help grow their business.

I started tinkering with growth out of curiosity, and eventually joined the digital experience team at American Express. That job helped me gain some marketing and growth experience, and I ended up falling in love with that part of the job.

June 18, 2019

Amazon’s Twitch acquired social networking platform Bebo for $25M to bolster its esports efforts

While Facebook makes a bold move into cryptocurrency to capitalise on its multi-billion user base, a social network that was once a credible competitor to it has quietly been snapped up by a subsidiary of Amazon. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Bebo, one of the earlier platforms to let people share thoughts and media with their friends, has been acquired by Twitch, the streaming video platform owned by Amazon. Together the two will be working on building out Twitch’s esports business, and specifically Twitch Rivals.

A spokesperson for Twitch confirmed the acquisition, which includes both people (around 10 employees) and IP, but declined to provide further comment.

From what we understand from our sources, Twitch paid $25 million for the company earlier this month, after beating out at least one other bidder, Discord (which itself has been building out its own esports business). Indeed, LinkedIn profiles for ex-Bebo employees — see here, here, and here — now at Twitch note June as the changeover date.

It has been a long and winding road for Bebo over the years. Starting out way back in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch as an early social networking site, Bebo quickly became the market leader in a couple of English-speaking countries, specifically UK and Ireland.

Bebo’s growth trajectory and the bigger opportunity in social were enough to get it acquired for about $850 million by AOL back in 2008, apparently beating out a number of other interested large tech and media companies interested in getting their own social media platform and the audience that would come with it (disclaimer: AOL eventually also acquired TechCrunch, too).

But the deal was a certifiable dud, with Bebo never managing to build on its early traction, and AOL not being in a position to know how to fix that. Less than two years later, it was sold on to Criterion Capital for $25 million.

Yet as the social wheels continued to turn, and even once-global market leader MySpace also fell back as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mobile-friendly platforms pulled out ahead, even that $25 million price turned out to be too high. After Bebo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the original founders, the Birches, bought it back in 2013 for $1 million with a pledge to reinvent it.

And so they did, putting in place a small team led by Shaan Puri, who worked on a number of ideas to see which of them could fly. (And I don’t know if this was a tongue in cheek joke about how challenging they knew the task would be, but it seems that the holding company set up to house some of the IP and legal aspects of the endeavor was called “Pigs in Flight.”)

The new app studio effort, which went by the name Monkey Inferno (another great one), came out of the gates with “Blab”, a “walkie-talkie” ephemeral video messaging service, which picked up millions of users quickly but found it hard to retain them. It shut down a year later, and it looks like Monkey Inferno dabbled in a few other things before coming to esports.

From social networking to socialising esports

In that last pivot, Bebo first tried out streaming services for esports players, but that proved to be tough competition against dominant platforms like OBS and Xsplit. Then, in an interesting nod to its earlier history in social networking and organising groups of friends, it shifted once more, into organising and running tournaments for streamers, with leagues and more: the streams ran on Twitch and Bebo organised viewers, leagues and other things around that.

That site, Bebo.com, is now offline, and all its tweets seem to have been deleted, but the idea was to build out leagues and tournaments for any and all kinds of groups and players, for example complete beginners, or high school students.

It was the last of these that turned out to line up with a growing market segment.

According to a report in eMarketer, esports attracted some 400 million users in 2018 and pulled in revenues of $869 million from sponsorships, player fees and advertising, and it is projected to be worth between $1.58 billion and $2.96 billion by 2022. And Bebo was helping organise and build those communities.

And that is now linking up neatly with Twitch, which had been developing its own casual esports operation in the form of Twitch Rivals. This launched in beta in 2018 and is now widely available wherever Twitch is.

The Bebo tech and its team are now both being put to use on Twitch Rivals, to help continue expanding it with more features and more users. To be clear, though, it seems there is no intention — from what I understand — to parlay Bebo’s past efforts in social networking into a wider social networking play at Twitch: the focus is on esports.

Still, the acquisition comes at a key moment. Since January, there have been reports that Amazon is working on a new game streaming service (just like Apple, Google and others), which likely won’t be out until next year. While there is no news on that today, you can see how expanding the variety and breadth of content on Twitch by way of esports leagues and tournaments fits in with a wider effort to bring more regular, engaged users into the Amazon fold, using this as one of the big draws.

We’ll update this as and if we learn more.

June 15, 2019

Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down

Amazon’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, Amazon Spark, is no more.

Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and tap into the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own take on Instagram with a shoppable feed of stories and photos aimed at Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has now come to an end. However, the learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool Interesting Finds are being blended into a new social-inspired product, #FindItOnAmazon.

Amazon Spark had been a fairly bland service, if truth be told. Unlike on Instagram, where people follow their friend, interests, brands like they like, and people they find engaging or inspiring, Spark was focused on the shopping and the sale. While it tried to mock the Instagram aesthetic at times with fashion inspiration images or highly posed travel photos, it lacked Instagram’s broader appeal. Your friends weren’t there and there weren’t any Instagram Stories, for example. Everything felt too transactional.

Amazon declined to comment on the apparent shutdown of Spark, but the service is gone from the website and app.

The URL amazon.com/spark, meanwhile, redirects to the new #FoundItOnAmazon site — a site which also greatly resembles another Amazon product discovery tool, Interesting Finds.

Interesting Finds has been around since 2016, offering consumers a way to browse an almost Pinterest-like board of products across a number of categories. It features curated “shops” focused on niche themes, like a “Daily Carry” shop for toteable items, a “Mid Century” shop filled with furniture and décor, a shop for “Star Wars” fans, one for someone who loves the color pink, and so on. Interesting Finds later added a layer of personalization with the introduction of a My Mix shop filled with recommendations tailored to your interactions and likes.

The Interesting Finds site had a modern, clean look-and-feel that made it a more pleasurable way to browse Amazon’s products. Products photos appeared on white backgrounds while the clutter of a traditional product detail page was removed.

We understand from people familiar with the products that Interesting Finds is not shutting down as Spark has. But the new #FoundItOnAmazon site will take inspiration from what worked with Interesting Finds and Spark to turn it into a new shopping discovery tool.

Interesting Finds covers a wide range of categories, but #FoundItOnAmazon will focus more directly on fashion and home décor. Similar to Interesting Finds, you can heart to favorites items and revisit them later.

The #FoundItOnAmazon site is very new and isn’t currently appearing for all Amazon customers at this time. If you have it, the amazon.com/spark URL will take you there.

Though Amazon won’t talk about why its Instagram experiment is ending, it’s not too hard to make some guesses. Beyond its lack of originality and transactional nature, Instagram itself has grown into a far more formidable competitor since Spark first launched.

Last fall, Instagram fully embraced its shoppable nature with the introduction of shopping features across its app that let people more easily discover products from Instagram photos. It also added a new shopping channel and in March, Instagram launched its own in-app checkout option to turn product inspiration into actual conversions.

It was certainly a big move into Amazon territory. And while that led to headlines about Instagram as the future of shopping, it’s not going to upset Amazon’s overall dominance any time soon.

That said, Instagram’s changes may have prompted Amazon to give up trying to build its own Instagram clone, so it could instead focus on building out better and more differentiated tools for product discovery, like the new site.