Welcome to yet another edition of the weekly app roundup!
This week we will be covering the dramatic changes
Twitter brought to its platform, review a new music app going up against
Spotify and
Apple Music nicknamed “Tidal”, and share other bits of news around the internet
that will help you stay informed on the ins and outs of the app world around
the globe.
اضافة اعلان
Twitter rolls out downvote feature; the internet split on
opinion
Unlike YouTube, which recently decided to withdraw the
ability to downvote videos due to concerns over smaller creators, Twitter has
agreed to go in the complete opposite direction and bring them onto the
platform.
Twitter has, at times, been regarded as an echo chamber due
to the platform’s inability to allow users to give quick critique — which is
typically through the presence of a downvote button — but always featured a way
to quickly share positive reactions onwards a post with the like button.
Throughout Twitter’s existence
Jack Dorsey, the founder,
frequently mentioned that they never planned to add a dislike button as it went
against the foundational belief systems of the platform. However, with his
recent departure from Twitter, it appears that the first swooping change
incoming to the platform would be to add the infamous downvote button.
This change has been one of the most polarizing to date.
While a majority of the users agree that this will increase transparency across
the board and provide a quick visual representation of sentiment towards a
particular topic or post, others fear that waves of downvoters maliciously seek
to either troll or bury certain posts would prevail across the platform.
Arguably both sides have a point.
Reddit, a long-time
standing platform that has always had the feature to upvote and downvote posts,
recently made it so that highly downvoted posts would be “hidden” from view and
thus would be pushed down into the abyss at the bottom of a reply chain.
It could be argued that this gives opportunities to maintain
healthy conversations on a topic rather than bickering with those that have
highly downvoted opinions. However, this does tend to create, ironically
enough, echo chambers — the very thing that Twitter potentially tried to solve
with this change.
While it is unclear how exactly the downvote feature will
end up looking, and whether or not downvote numbers will reduce or increase the
chances of a particular post being seen, it is evident that the internet is
split in half between users that are avidly defending the move and others who
see the potentially dreadful pitfalls that such a feature may impose.
Twitter is also exploring articles
Twitter is one of the more unique social media platforms,
giving its users the ability to converse through text that is not longer than
280 characters as of the time of writing this article. Despite the fact that
previously the text limit was shorter and the fact that “threads” now can be
created out of independent tweets to tweet in a longer format, no one expected
Twitter to go all out and actually consider implementing a tool that would
allow posting in long-form text.
As a result of a recent leak, it has come to the Twitter
community’s attention that Twitter is right around the corner from testing out
a “journal” feature, which is a presumed long-form posting format that would
enable users of the platform to post full-blown articles.
While it is still uncertain in what direction this feature
may go, users were quick to point out that with the potential rise of Facebook
news in the future — where independent reporters would be able to post stories
on the fly — Twitter’s “journals” would potentially enable journalists to do
much of the same on the competing platform.
While to most outsiders, this may not seem a radical
feature, for those that have been avid users of the short-form narrative
posting platform, this has created a genuine foundation of concern about where
the platform is heading under the new management.
The feature, while officially unannounced, is predicted to
launch in late 2022 to grab some of the market share of journalism that
Facebook seeks to gain later this year.
Music, in HiFi: The Tidal app
While Spotify and
Apple Music remain to be key leaders in
the music listening space, Tidal has decided to go up against the monoliths
through its unique value proposition to both users and artists.
Tidal, now sitting at around 80 million songs and 350,000
videos from a wide variety of artists around the world, offers its users an
elevated music experience through high-definition audio and, more importantly,
allows you to directly contribute to your favorite artists by paying out a
portion of your subscription to your top listened artists.
While the platform most definitively keeps a significant
portion of the subscription proceeds, its spokespeople argue that their
services offer significantly more value to all stakeholders; be it the users
through their unique high-definition audio or the artists who gain an extra
source of revenue.
The app comes with two subscription models, HiFi and HiFi
Plus, with the former offering up to 1,411kb lossless audio, and the latter
Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 reality audio. In other words, Tidal is perfect for
audiophiles that enjoy pure, unadulterated music quality. This feature is even
more prevalent on HiFi Plus, which even offers a part of its music in FLAC —
one of the best formats for musical quality to date.
The app is available in 61 countries, and a subscription
starts at JD7 per month for the HiFi package and around JD14 for the HiFi Plus.
The service does have a 30-day trial period where users can determine whether
the service is worth their money or not, and we do recommend hopping on board
and giving it a try before you commit to the service.
Overall, however, if you’re a fan of blasting tunes on your
quality speakers at home, this app is a definite must-have.
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