Creators

Following a preview earlier this year, developers can now fully build, launch, and monetize their Activities apps directly on Discord. The apps all appear as an embedded iframe inside Discord, and we’ve seen YouTube and a variety of minigames available through Activities so far. Discord is also enabling in-app purchases in Activities this week.

That’s from Meta’s Mark Rabkin, who wants to assure developers that the Meta Quest 3 and 3S are great platforms to develop VR experiences for.

Zuckerberg says that Meta is experimenting with automatic video dubbing and lip-syncing on Reels so that your videos can reach people in more languages. We didn’t get a live video of this, but he showed a video onstage of Spanish Reels dubbed into English.

YouTube has been exploring auto-dubbing, too.

The service will be shut down on November 28th according to a post on the streaming site, with subscription renewals being automatically canceled.

TikTok Music launched in 2023 as a rival to services like Spotify and Apple Music, but was only available in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. Users have until October 28th to transfer their TikTok Music playlists to other platforms.

The tool, announced last year, is now available to all Premium subscribers in the US on Android, the company says. This doesn’t personally sound like something I’d use, but it’s there if you want it.

TikTok’s subscriptions feature is rolling out to eligible non-Live creators. The platform first launched its Twitch-like subscriptions in 2022, but it was only available to TikTokers who livestream.

This means more creators can offer subscriber-only chats and videos for their fans, who can also get things like custom badges, emotes, and maybe a role on a private Discord.

The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, alleges “multiple causes of action related to the chronic mistreatment of and neglect suffered by participants” of the show, Variety reports.

In August, The New York Times reported that conditions on the show, Beast Games, have been pretty bad.

The company is ending its Mozilla.social Fediverse experiment in content moderation and will remove all content and accounts — but you still have time to move elsewhere:

At any point before Dec 17, 2024, you can migrate your account to another instance on Mastodon by following these instructions.

TechCrunch notes that Mozilla had about 270 active Mastodon users as of Tuesday. A tracker based on the Mastodon API reports about 8 million accounts and 1 million or so active users overall.

Patreon teased this feature earlier this year, but the company is now making it available widely for creators. The company announced other new updates today, including that it will let creators offer discounts on their products.

Judge Sri Srinivasan brought up the Supreme Court’s decisions in NetChoice and another case, Murthy v. Missouri, while questioning DOJ attorney Daniel Tenny.

“Under Netchoice, if we were talking about a US company, that’s heartland First Amendment-protected curation,” Srinivasan said. “So everything on under the government’s perspective turns on the fact that ByteDance is subject to Chinese control.”

Attorney Daniel Tenny frames the government’s objection to TikTok. “It gathers a lot of information” and “it uses that information to try to assess what sorts of videos and other content is going to be of interest,” Tenny says. “That same data is extremely valuable to a foreign adversary.”

A report from The Information details the China-based ByteDance’s plans to mass produce two new AI chips by 2026 with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The move would help ByteDance save “billions of dollars” as opposed to buying chips from Nvidia.

TikTok’s lawyer is off the stage, and Judge Noemi Rao is questioning Jeffrey Fisher, who represents a lawsuit from users of TikTok. Fisher’s argument so far centers on the claim that American media creators have a right to work with publishers of their choosing. Rao is questioning how far that right should stretch — emphasizing the judges’ focus on TikTok’s Chinese ownership.

Andrew Pincus, the attorney representing TikTok and ByteDance in an appeals court hearing today, didn’t outright mention the DOJ’s attempt to introduce classified evidence. But he did suggest there’s no public rationale for the potential ban.

“We don’t really know what was determined here, because this was Congress enacting statute that has no findings, that doesn’t say why Congress did what it did.”