Is Meta’s new network worth it?

We hope you had a good day and now we want to give you some exciting information to take with you into the evening. t3n Daily is also available as a newsletter. Here are the topics of the day.

The t3n editorial team actively followed the first hours of the new threads meta-network. To do this, a restriction had to be circumvented first, because the app is not yet available in the EU due to data exchange legislation. After successful registration, however, it quickly became clear: Twitter boss Elon Musk had to dress warmly in view of the competition.

In the first eight hours, ten million users have already registered on the platform. Because you can import the follower list from Instagram directly after registration, the feed also fills up very quickly with relevant postings. It is easy to use and should not be a problem for previous Twitter users. A function for sharing posts between threads and Instagram is currently still missing, and there are still a few small things. In fact, Threads is good enough that it could herald the end of Twitter.

The James Webb Telescope has taken pictures of very distant galaxies that researchers are using to understand more about the evolution of the universe. The scientists have now come across the supermassive black hole, which is the furthest away from Earth to date. It was created “only” 570 million years after the Big Bang, which accounts for just four percent of the total age of all existence.

What is special about the discovered phenomenon is that the black hole has a relatively low mass, which could shed light on how black holes with masses millions of times higher are formed. Such “lightweights” are currently still very rarely found in the universe and the scientists hope that they will discover more of them among the 100,000 ancient galaxies in the James Webb images.

Comedian Alasdair Beckett-King sparked a discussion among game developers with a humorous tweet about the nonsense of loading bars in games. The comments not only exchanged preferences – for example that a stuttering loading bar gives the feeling that the computer is working – but also claimed that the percentage displays that are filling up are sometimes specially artificially programmed to do exactly that. Some industry professionals have even admitted to putting unnecessary loading bars in their games because it looks professional.

How serious the Twitter discussion is, however, is questionable. The Youtuber Tom Scott explains that it is not possible to program smooth loading bars. This has to do with the different parts that are loaded and which also require access to different parts of the hardware.

In San Francisco, where autonomous taxis repeatedly cause traffic chaos due to their immature technology, activists have found a bizarre way to temporarily disable the cars. They simply put a traffic cone on the hood of cars from companies like Cruise or Waymo. The safety software then prevents you from continuing your journey.

Known as the “Week of Cone,” the protest has quickly spread across social media against the expansion of Robotaxi services. The citizens of San Francisco also welcome the action, as many of them feel disturbed in everyday life by the autonomous driving services. Cruise and Waymo condemn the action as vandalism.

As Spotify announced in an email to its premium subscribers, the company no longer allows payment via Apple’s App Store for existing subscriptions. Anyone who does not change their payment method to Paypal or credit card in time will have their account downgraded until the change is made. It is not yet known whether downloaded content will be lost in the process.

In the final analysis, Spotify is reacting to the fact that Apple, like all providers, claims 30 percent of all revenue from the streaming service in the App Store. Since 2016 it has therefore no longer been possible to take out subscriptions in the App Store at all. According to one statistic, the ban on payment methods affects less than one percent of Spotify subscribers.

That’s it for today’s t3n daily. You can find much more about all aspects of digital life, working life and the future around the clock at t3n.de.