The evolution of Musk’s X network is complete; why Reddit is profitable; and niche Halloween costumes * Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at Guardian US. Today in the newsletter: X’s final form, learnings from a packed week of earnings, and niche online Halloween costumes. Thank you for joining me. With the US election, X’s transformation into Elon Musk’s weapon reaches its peak. He has succeeded in bending his social network to his will. Continue reading...

Monthly users rose by nearly half thanks to AI translation feature, and deals for AI training with Google and OpenAI boosted revenue Reddit on Tuesday reported a quarterly profit for the first time in its 20-year history. Shares of the company, popular for its user-led communities known as subreddits, rose more than 35% as markets opened the next day. The company reported nearly 100 million monthly users, an increase of 47% from the year prior, and a profit of $29.9m. Its revenue reached $348.4m, a year-over-year increase of 68%, handily beating analysts’ expectations. Continue reading...

Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms. The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states. Continue reading...