The newsletter

#114 - Thumbnails at Youtube, Strike at Reddit & Zuck vs Musk

Greg Taieb · · 5 min read

Hello,

This week we're going to talk about an innovation that Youtubers will love, the impacts of the strike at Reddit, Zuckerberg's crazy proposal to Musk.

By the way, if you're interested in generative AI and their impacts on the world of work, I'm speaking this evening in a new Live for the Digital Ball.

See the live on 06/27 at 6 p.m.

💥Youtube puts A/B testing in its miniatures

When you browse YouTube, what immediately catches your attention? Miniatures, of course! As you may have noticed, these thumbnails play a crucial role in your decision whether or not to click on a video.

YouTube is well aware of the importance of thumbnails, which is why they are constantly updating their tools to help creators choose the best possible thumbnails.

The next development will allow A/B testing for thumbnails.

Source: Youtube

You can download several different thumbnails for a video and see which one works best. Thanks to this A/B test, you will have concrete data to make informed decisions and optimize your thumbnails.

This feature is currently in testing and will be available more widely next year.

🪧Strike at Reddit: AI and the balance of content platforms in question

Reddit is an incredible application where every interest finds its community. With millions of posts and answers to niche questions, it's a gold mine for training artificial intelligence.

However, Reddit's CEO of Reddit decided to charge for its API, sparking protests from moderators and users who rely on these tools to manage communities.

In this episode we explain to you with Remi, why this strike raises essential questions about the balance between companies, content creators and moderators in the ecosystem of content platforms and social networks.

🥊 Musk vs Zuck soon in the octagon?

This one I must admit that I didn't see it coming!
Mark Zuckerberg is ready to face Elon Musk in a cage fight.
After Elon Musk recently tweetedthat he would be "up for a cage fight" with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO fired back by posting a screenshot of Musk's tweet with the caption "send me the coordinates."

Source: Midjourney

Since we know that Meta is preparing to release a competitor of Instagram (which could be called "thread") Musk teases Zuckerberg on Twitter with punchlines. At an internal meeting at Meta last week, chief product officer Chris Cox told employees that the company believes creators want a version of Twitter that is "run in a healthy way," drawing cheers. "I always thought Twitter should have a billion users," Zuckerberg said during a recent podcast interview with Lex Fridman.

When looking at the forces involved, Musk, 51, has the advantage over Zuckerberg in terms of raw physical size, and he talked about his "really hardcore street fights" when he grew up in South Africa. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, 39, is an aspiring MMA fighter who is already winning Jiu-Jitsu tournaments.

Whoever wins, we can bet that a fight between Musk and Zuckerberg would be quite entertaining.
It has to happen. Don't back down now, Musk!

🪦 The end of Skyblogs

In the series "well, I didn't think it still existed" I learned last week from a tweet from Jerôme Aguesse the DGA of Skyrock, the announced end of Skyblogs next August.

If you are under 30, it is possible that the term does not speak to you but Skyblogs are a part of the history of the French web created by the famous Skyrock radio. Half blogging platform, half social network, Skyblogs which appeared in the early 2000s truly democratized content creation and sharing before Wordpress and other social networks.

To give you an idea of ​​the phenomena, you have to imagine that at their peak, there were more than 30 million blogs. The platform will end up becoming outdated in the 2010s with the arrival of behemoths in the sector such as the social network Facebook, made globally accessible in 2006.

To preserve this digital heritage, the INA and the BnF undertook to collect and archive the content of the site. They use bots to save the source codes, texts and images of blogs, in order to preserve this part of digital history.

🔥 In brief

And that's it for this week!
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