Musk at a 2022 Halloween party.Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Since taking over Twitter, Musk has said Twitter’s active users have surged to new highs.
New data from SensorTower found that smaller rivals like Mastodon and Tumblr have also seen an explosion of growth.
Twitter installs have grown by 21% since Musk’s takeover, while Mastodon’s have grown by 657%, according to the data.
Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has boasted that the platform’s active users have surged to record highs.
The claim is unverified, though perhaps a rising tide is lifting all boats.
New data shows that while more people have downloaded Twitter on Apple’s app store and Google’s play store since Musk’s takeover, its growth is minimal compared to the explosion in downloads of smaller upstart rivals like Mastodon and Tumblr, as some Twitter users appear to be searching for alternatives.
Mastodon, which is a decentralized microblogging platform, saw downloads grow 657% in the 12 days following Musk’s ownership of Twitter, according to SensorTower.
According to the data, Tumblr, another microblogging service once owned by Yahoo, saw adoption surge by 96% in the US and 77% worldwide.
Twitter installs climbed 21% during the same time period.
To be sure, overall user numbers on Twitter eclipse those of Tumblr and Mastodon. Mastodon has 1 million global downloads, according to SensorTower, while Twitter had 238 million daily active users as of July.
However, the recent interest in smaller microblogging sites points to some users’ discontent with the recent chaos on Elon Musk’s Twitter and the growing demand for a replacement.
Many popular users on Twitter have encouraged their followers to move over to Mastodon, with some even adding “also on Mastodon” to their names on Twitter.
The app’s surge in popularity has even taken its founder, Eugen Rochko, off guard. He recently told NPR he has been pulling all-nighters to meet demand.
Tumblr has taken advantage of the newfound attention, trolling Elon Musk’s recent blue checkmark fiasco by offering to sell two blue checks for $7.99.
Amid fervor for news on The Sims 5 at today’s Sims Summit event,The Sims 4 team announced it would create a new hub for custom content in its current-generation game.
Custom content, or CC to die-hard Simmers, is a core part of the most popular Sims games. It can be in the form of hair, clothes, nails, or skin textures in the Create-a-Sim maker, or it can look like Build Mode features, such as furniture, wall and floor styles, plants, or other items. Bigger mods can change how the entire game is played. There is an enormous amount of The Sims CC out there, but it’s often scattered across sites, something Electronic Arts hopes to change.
Currently, The Sims Resource stands as one of the biggest destinations for CC of all kinds. But others utilize Tumblr or follow the websites of well-known creators like Deaderpool, who makes the ubiquitous MC Command Center mod.
While many players use CC and mods on PC (console users can’t use CC), others continue to shy away from it. Sometimes that’s because of the lacking user experience at ad-laden sites like The Sims Resource, which offers a monthly subscription to remove both ads and download wait times. (The site is free to use otherwise.) In other cases, people worry about malware and spyware that may be tacked onto their virtual goods. In its presentation, EA promised a CC utopia where players could download “safe” content. It should be noted that many sites do check what’s uploaded. The Sims Resource, for example, says it has a submissions team that makes sure content is appropriate, virus-free, and of decent quality.
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However, this wonderful place comes with a major caveat: You have to be invited to upload your work and join what EA calls “The Mod Squad.” What criteria the team is looking for exactly or whether that will continue after launch, no one knows yet. (It seems likely that more risque CC will be excluded.) Existing sites are much more open, which is crucial for those just getting started.
This seems even more exclusive than EA-operated The Sims 3 Exchange, which shut down in 2018. That also served as a hub for custom content uploads and downloads but wasn’t invite-only.
The Mod Squad and its CC haven isn’t here yet, and we don’t know when it’ll come (The Sims 4 team only vaguely said players can keep checking back for updates). But when it does, it’ll be interesting to see what ripple effects it might have on the independent and creator-driven Sims modding sites.
When I first saw Ana, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds publisher Krafton’s attempt to put a face on its artificial “virtual human” technology, I was disappointed to see that this supposed Web 3.0 innovation was really just another pretty, pale girl. She’s airbrushed, but still tangible. She’s biting her tongue, looking at you. And I fear she exists only to be looked at, and not much else.
Krafton released its first images of Ana on June 15. We got two tight close-ups of a vaguely East Asian woman with all of the expected egirl accoutrements, dyed hair and adventurous ear piercings. Ana, who was created with Unreal Engine, has a lightning bolt tattooed on her finger. It’s clearly visible when she puts her pinky up to her lips to stare at you with clear, amorous intent.
Krafton revealed its “virtual human” technology in February with a technical demonstration displaying “motion-capture-based vivid movements, pupil movements enabled by rigging technique, colorful facial expressions, and even the soft and baby hairs on the skin.” The publisher announced its intent to use carefully designed virtual humans not just in its games but in its Esports demonstrations, and in the hope of creating more virtual influencers and singers like “robot” Instagrammer Miquela.
That’s influencers and singers, plural, so Ana is likely only the start of what I can only imagine to be a circus troupe of PUBG robot babes. Robot babes are particularly trendy right now, because we haven’t grown at all since watching the movie Herin 2013. Before that, we got used to the idea of robots being malleable, unemotional women. In other words, “perfect” women.
Back in 2011, deferential, female-coded virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa started to live in our devices and corroborate the popular image of a loving, supportive electronic woman most recently informed by future-focused Y2K media—think Cortanain Halo in 2001, or the virtual popstar in Disney’s 2004 movie Pixel Perfect. In 2016, a man in Hong Kong spent $50,000 to build a robot that looked like Scarlett Johansson, who coincidentally voices the virtual assistant in the movie Her. We really haven’t learned anything from that movie.
We also haven’t learned much from real artificial intelligence experts, who, over the years, have emphasized that female-coded robots alienate human women tech users and reward harmful stereotypes about women being servile and dedicated through whatever abuse they suffer. In 2019, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a publication arguing that “Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness—and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women—provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.” But tech companies like Krafton continue to create within these gender biases, sewing them tighter and deeper into our societal fabric.
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Partially, that’s because of gaming’s conflicted but addicted relationship to sex, and the evil eye of the merciless, always appraising male gaze. Mainstream developers have, on occasion, attempted to move beyond the archetypal video game woman to embrace more realistic depictions (to Reddit’s great disappointment), but character designs of women in video games at large remain recursive: buxom and flexible. I love embracing my inner bimbo as much as anyone else, but when stiletto-heeled women with nipped waists are the only representation we have in video games, it reduces an entire gender into a repressive stereotype.
But even more than they are for pliant women, tech and video game companies are horny for the ill-defined terms “Web 3.0” and the “Metaverse.” Both are meant to invoke the idea of an empowered online individual but, in practice, are usually just ways to rehabilitate and market out-of-date virtues (prioritizing work productivity, individual ownership) for a fresh audience. Perhaps to take cover from quickly crumbling blockchain “innovations” like pay-to-win video games, new Web3 proponents cling to comforting images of technological progress, which includes those ethereal, buxom digital women who might be capable of a roundhouse kick in Mortal Kombat, but would never nag you about your dumbass NFT investment. Criticism isn’t in their source code.
Krafton invoked all the right buzzwords for its Ana news, writing in a press release that “ANA is designed to engage a global audience and help establish KRAFTON’s Web 3.0 ecosystem” that will “attract the interest and popularity of Gen Z” through music and a foray into influencer-dom.
The company declined to answer any of my questions (“Do you think Ana’s design will alienate female gamers? “Is Krafton doing anything to prevent Ana from relying on stereotypes?” “Can you describe how Ana’s design and capabilities might appeal to Gen Z specifically?”), saying in an email to me that “there will be more announcements/details in the coming weeks!”
Ideally, in the coming weeks, we’ll be lucky enough to receive another close-up of Ana giving the camera meaningful bedroom eyes, except with a little more forehead. Speaking on behalf of my generation, we can’t get enough of a poreless forehead.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be wholly pessimistic about Krafton’s intentions. It’s possible that, below her neck, Ana will contain some messaging that indicates she is not another iteration of male developers conquering technology by shaping it into their preferred future—a thin, pale, obedient woman. Who, by the way, also wants to sing with “advanced voice synthesis” and become a social media phenom, which you’d be forgiven for mistaking as the only two career paths open to a beautiful woman.
OK, so maybe I do mean to be pessimistic. It’s eternally frustrating to be a woman excited by video games and the internet only to have their potential routinely diluted to the same tedious tropes a straight man depends on to get off. Making AI women that represent the same qualities Victorians found in the restrained angel in the house is not “Web 3.0,” it’s bog-standard, traditionally sexist. An AI-assisted voice can be represented by any visual, any blob or creature, but the best Krafton can come up with is a woman I’ve seen on advertisements and thinspiration Tumblr since I could go online.
But I should put up with it, shouldn’t I? This is how we live, regurgitating the same images and rewriting the same opinions that no one listens to and yet still finds time to disagree with. I just don’t want Krafton to act like this is the future. Sometimes I feel like we’ve been stuck in history for as long as we’ve been recording it.