Crowdsourcing

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania stars (L-R) Paul Rudd, Kathryn Newton, and Evangeline Lily, and opened on February 17 to mixed reviews.Image: DisneyMarvel’s latest entry to its superhero empire, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, opened last month to mixed reviews from both critics and diehard MCU fans alike. But a polarizing reception is the least of Marvel’s worries surrounding the film as the studio tries to pin down the scoundrels that leaked the movie’s script on Reddit. As detailed by TorrentFreak, Marvel is not…

The days of wading through pages of comments on a Reddit post to find exactly what you’re looking for are no more. The internet forum has added a new feature to posts. Users can now search for specific words or terms within a posts’ comment section without having to rely on ctrl+F or cmd+F, the company announced on Monday.Almost a year ago, Reddit introduced the ability to perform a site-wide search focusing on comments with the introduction of a dedicated comment tab to the search bar. With the new update though,…

WallStreetBets upended the stock market just a few years ago, but control over both the subreddit and the trademark around the name has been hotly contested.Photo: Jaime Rogozinski (Shutterstock)Meme stocks, “stonks,” “hold the line,” were among the words and phrases popularized by the WallStreetBets community. But a new lawsuit challenges the very idea of ownership over that community, or more specifically, who should be able to monetize the very name of the famed subreddit.On Wednesday, the original creator and mod of…

Image: Andrea Verdelli (Getty Images)Users on Reddit are speaking out after the Replika AI companion reportedly stopped responding to their sexual advances. There is now a petition to the company asking them to bring that part of the interaction back, and the experience has left users voicing their frustration online with many saying they feel lost or lonely.“This is not a story about people being angry they lost their ‘SextBot,’” one person wrote on Reddit. “It’s a story about people who found a refuge from loneliness,…

Photo: Alphabet Workers UnionOver its 25 year history, Google has amassed a fortune and conquered the top layer of the internet thanks, in no small part, to human workers who test and oversee the company’s numerous search and ranking algorithm The proper functioning of those tools are paramount to the tech giant’s success, but the laborer responsible for that work are often contractors lacking the same pay and protections afforded to other full time Googlers. These members of the company, according to the Alphabet Workers…

When most people think of Reddit, they don’t usually think of physical objects. That’s why the project from r/analog was so interesting to me. It was Reddit, which is synonymous with the internet, in physical form.r/analog used its Community Funds money to create a zine featuring the film photography created by its members. The 200-plus page book showcases member photos of nature, landscapes, architecture, buildings, and more. In an interesting crossover between the online and offline, some photos identify their…

Reddit’s Recap 2022 video was a strange mixture of images, including gyrating bananas and heartening messages of conquering cancer.Screenshot: RedditOn Thursday, Reddit revealed what the biggest trending topics and subreddits were for 2022, and if you guessed that it was a forum for internet haranguing, then you would be correct—but also—you should probably take a break from the internet for a few days. As if advice columns weren’t popular enough for all the vicarious shade digital users get to throw at people’s life…

That annoying friend who’s constantly telling you how superior Waze is over your crappy navigation app during road trips may soon have to put their money where their mouth is. For the first time, the Google-owned social navigation app is getting its own dedicated in-car app, though it will only work with two new Renault cars for now.Waze announced the new feature in a blog post Tuesday, saying the built-in app, which will run through Google Built-In, would let users take advantage of Waze’s real time routine, navigation,…

Unlike Polis, Twitter’s project has to find consensus not for one question at a time but for any conceivable controversy on the platform. Community Notes does that by estimating the diversity of viewpoints among participants, based on how different users rate the helpfulness of notes from others. Twitter’s version of bridging the divide is to find notes considered useful by raters who don’t usually agree on much, suggesting they have different viewpoints. This technique at the heart of Polis and Community Notes is called …

Maintaining bridges is expensive. There are 600,000 of them in the US, and the organizations that own and maintain them can easily pay $50,000 for sensor equipment alone, with further costs incurred by the need to maintain them and analyze the data they generate. Smartphones are a much cheaper option. However, work still needs to be done to make this technique a reality, says Ahmet Emin Aktan, a professor of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at Drexel University, who was not involved in the study. He…