Fifth Nessie Sighting of 2022 Recorded – Coast to Coast
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Snap is reportedly preparing to lay off around 20 percent of its staff. The company, which has more than 6,400 employees, will start letting people go on Wednesday, according to The Verge. Snap declined to comment to Engadget.
There will reportedly be cuts among the company’s hardware division, which recently halted development on the Pixy selfie drone. The report suggests a group that was working on tools to help developers build games and mini apps on Snapchat will be among the hardest hit by the cuts. Social mapping app Zenly, which Snap bought in 2017 and kept running independently, is expected to be heavily impacted. The advertising sales team will also be restructured, according to the report.
It’s been a rough year for Snap, which has seen its stock price fall by 80 percent since January amid a broader economic slowdown that has affectedmanynotabletech companies. Snap has said it would look to cut costs while bringing in fewer new hires. The company posted weak earnings results for the April-June quarter, which led to its stock dropping by 40 percent.
One recent bright spot for Snap is the $4 per month Snapchat+ subscription service, which offers early access to new features, such as seeing who re-watched a story and pinning a friend to the top of the chat history. More than 1 million people signed up in the first month or so.
The much improved fourth season of HBO’s sci-fi series Westworld concluded last night with a cliffhanger for the ages. A cliffhanger that does, in fact, set up the end of the series. We just may never get to see it.
Pew Research has published a new report that examines social media usage trends among US teens. The organization found that a whopping 95 percent of them use YouTube, while 19 percent are on the platform “almost constantly.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-thirds (67 percent) said they used TikTok, with 16 percent claiming they are on the app “almost constantly.” The third most-popular social media platform among teens is Instagram, per Pew, with 62 percent using it. A tenth say they use it almost all the time — despite the app occasionally telling them to take a break. A previous poll conducted in 2014-15 found that 52 percent were using Instagram (Pew didn’t ask about YouTube usage for that survey and TikTok didn’t exist at the time).
Snapchat also rose among teens, with 59 percent using it in 2022, compared with 41 percent in the previous poll. Facebook was the top social media app among teens seven years ago, with 71 percent of them using it, but that figure has dropped to 32 percent. Teen adoption of Twitter (down from 33 percent to 23 percent) and Tumblr (14 percent to five percent) has fallen over the same period too.
The 2014-15 poll didn’t ask about Twitch, WhatsApp or Reddit. These days, a fifth of teens use Twitch, 17 percent are on WhatsApp and 14 percent are accessing Reddit. For what it’s worth, the earlier poll suggested 33 percent of teens used Google+, while a quarter used Vine. This time around, Pew did not ask teens about their use of Discord or social gaming spaces such as Fortnite.
Pew surveyed 1,316 teens aged 13 to 17 (as well as one of their parents) in April and May. It found that boys were more likely to use YouTube, Twitch and Reddit and girls were more likely to say they access TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. More Black and Hispanic teens said they used TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp than white teens.
Even though over half (54 percent) of teens said they’d find it hard to give up social media, 36 percent admitted they spent too much time on the platforms. Around 55 percent said their usage levels were “about right.” Meanwhile, 97 percent of teens now use the internet every day, with 46 percent saying they’re online almost all the time.
The poll found that 95 percent of teens have access to a smartphone (up from 73 percent in 2014-15), while 90 percent can access a desktop or laptop computer, up from 87 percent in the previous survey. Curiously, the percentage of teens who say they have access to a gaming console has fallen slightly, from 81 percent to 80 percent.