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The Twitch streamers fighting to keep minority languages alive

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Minority languages are often associated with aging rural communities, thought to have fallen out of use or confined to textbooks. Defined simply as a language spoken by less than half of the population in a country, they adapt with the times like any living language, often due to the efforts of enterprising young people.

Recently, many of these languages have found new life from an unexpected source: video game streamers.

On Twitch, streamers from around the world are showcasing indigenous languages as a form of entertainment and activism. Estimates show that we lose one language every two weeks, and half of our 7,000 languages will be extinct by the end of the century, so preserving these tongues and the cultural identities that go with them is crucial. With its easy access, potential for a huge audience, and creators’ ability to combine hobbies and language promotion, it’s easy to see why young minority language speakers have turned to Twitch.

Many minority language streamers lack an official language tag for their streams, and these creators see their content lost in the miscellany of the “Other” tag, making it hard for other speakers to find, connect with, and enjoy gaming in their own language. Good news arrived for some on May 26th when Twitch announced that it would add over 350 new stream tags, encompassing different ethnic groups and underrepresented communities. The platform was frank about how it has been slow to act on adding the tags users want. However, not all streamers received the opportunity for visibility they’d been hoping for.

Two groups who missed out were Basque and Galician streamers. Basque, which is native to the semi-autonomous Basque Country straddling southwestern France and northern Spain, is one of the oldest languages still spoken and unrelated to any other in the world. Further along the Iberian Peninsula, the Galician language is spoken by around 2.4 million people in a tiny corner of Spain.

Inspired by the success of the #CatalanLoveTwitch campaign, which saw the minority Romance language added as a streaming language tag, a group of Basque streamers launched #3000Twitz last December, a campaign to see their language achieve the same status. Despite a petition, which is by far the most voted in the Twitch User Voice forums and having now surpassed the number of votes the Catalan petition received, Basque streamers are still awaiting a response from the streaming giant.

Iruñe, who streams as arkkuso, is one of the founding members of the campaign. For her, the addition of Basque as a streaming language has broader implications for the survival and visibility of the language. “It is very important that Basque has a presence online and therefore on social networks,” she says. “Nowadays, if you’re not on the internet, you don’t exist. The same will happen very soon with languages.”

Without the help of a tag to identify streamers, Iruñe feels that Twitch has made Basque creators invisible. As a result, the growth of the Basque streaming community has been entirely grassroots, and language activism is part and parcel of her channel. “I believe that at the end of the day, all of us who create content in Basque are [activists],” she says. “For many of us, the relationship we have with our mother tongue is fundamental for us when it comes to enjoying what we do.”

Fellow streamer and native Basque speaker Eneko found himself in a similar situation. “At first, I started streaming without knowing anyone on Twitch. And since there was no Basque language tag, I didn’t know if there were more people or if they were just very difficult to find. I hit a roadblock because I wanted to stream in Basque, but it meant not reaching anyone,” he says. The current camaraderie between Basque streamers and the popular support their campaign enjoys would have seemed like a fantasy when he first started out.

“When you meet people, it is through raids and not by randomly finding someone streaming the type of content you like. There are campaigns calling for double labeling because today, many of us speak several languages, and choosing only one (especially when one is a minority) greatly reduces your ability to reach people. In these circumstances, either you participate in the digital disappearance of your language or you remain visible only to a very small part of Twitch.”

The collective Galician Gamers launched a language tag petition around the same time as their Basque neighbors, with the aim of “promoting the use of Galician, not only as a home life language, but as a language for culture and entertainment as well.” Dubbed “Twitch en Galego” (“Twitch in Galician”), the movement’s social media accounts announce when any Galician-speaking streamer is going live and has exploded from a small group of four or five streamers to having a Discord server with over 200 members with 58 Twitch channels registered.

Given that other less popular language petitions such as Ukrainian have now been added as official streaming languages, Iruñe is understandably frustrated. “We are going to continue creating varied content in Basque, quality content that we want to use to reach more people as we are still a small community. Likewise, we want to create channels of dialogue with Twitch, and for this, we want to work together with the Basque government as well as get Basque streamers who have lots of followers to help us achieve this.”

Adrián, who goes by Dinav in the Galician Gamers team, is equally undeterred. CRTVG, a regional TV network in Galicia, recently created a Twitch channel and invited the Galician Gamers on to discuss their cause. “Though we’ll still act independently, organising events on certain dates to generate movement on the internet and get more people to sign the request, getting the support of Galician public institutions is a path we are open to explore.”

On the other side of the world, a community of streamers of te reo Māori, the indigenous language of New Zealand, is thriving. Despite suffering a decline after the Second World War, it has been enjoying a renaissance due to revitalization efforts in recent years, including national Māori Language Week and Māori immersion schools. According to the 2018 census, 4 percent of the population speaks the language.

Twitch creator Rangiora has lived his whole life through teo reo Māori. Combining his two passions, he streams under the moniker PrideLandz, and it’s only natural that he would do so in his native tongue. “Te reo Māori is what connects me to my culture, my ancestors, my family, my environment, and helps to navigate the world I live in,” he shares. “In the last five years, I noticed I was speaking next to no Māori because I wasn’t surrounded by confident speakers. Streaming in Māori has provided a space where I can practice, share, and learn about the language more often.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of Māori streamers’ content is their incorporation of an ancestral language into modern gaming. As he lays waste to beasts on the screen superimposed behind him, Rangiora explains how game titles are translated into te reo Māori. Call of Duty is composed using the name of the Māori god of war, translating as something like “a call to arms in the realm of Tūmatauenga.”

His streams are open to speakers of all levels and even those just interested in learning more about the culture. “I don’t stream entirely in Māori, but I try to share some knowledge such as having Māori word of the week or Māori phrase or saying as something viewers can redeem with their channel points. Hopefully we can inspire more people to speak [the language] because I’m aware that a lot of Māori [people] aren’t confident due to colonization and the suppression in the past. I feel as if people are learning something every time I stream as we try to normalize Māori in this space.”

The community of Māori and Pacific Islander streamers on Twitch have been a huge motivator for Rangiora, so much so that he’s launched a campaign to achieve Partner status on the platform. Spurred on by support from Ngati Gaming, a Discord community of Māori streamers, the ultimate goal is to launch a Māori esports organization.

Multiplayer online gaming has been a lifeline for speakers of regional tongues to stay connected over the course of the pandemic. YnChwarae, meaning “In Play,” is a group of Welsh language streamers. Pre-COVID, they met monthly to livestream games while chatting in Welsh; for the time being, they’ve brought their club online on a weekly basis. “I feel it’s important to be able to express yourself in the language you feel most comfortable. For Welsh as a language to grow quicker, there has to be a space for people to do everything in Welsh and this includes the digital realm,” says Morgan from the group. “Gaming can be an extremely sociable activity and the majority of our streams reflect this.”

Despite a gradually increasing amount Welsh speakers over the last decade, there’s still work to be done in maintaining its survival. “A lot of the crew are not able to use Welsh in their everyday jobs, so streaming with YnChwarae gives them the opportunity to use the language meaningfully doing something they love and not forget it,” Morgan explains. “We are allowing other Welsh speakers to access Welsh language content on Twitch and be a part of our streams through communicating with us in the chat.”

Lacking in the community size of their Welsh counterparts, streamers of other Celtic languages have pioneered the use of their tongue on Twitch. Gwenn, a streamer from Brittany in the northwest of France, is the only person on Twitch who regularly streams in Breton, the traditional language of the region. As a severely endangered language, Breton faces more challenges than just visibility online. Having lost around 800,000 speakers since 1950, the language is not recognized at a national level by the French state, and so it receives little government support in media or public services.

“I think it is important for Breton to be everywhere Breton speakers are,” Gwenn says. “There are a lot of young Breton speakers, and they use what young people use: Discord, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram… I think it’s a good thing to grow minority language communities on those platforms.”

Like YnChwarae, the interactive aspect of Twitch is a huge draw. Although happy to help learners, Gwenn’s target audience is advanced speakers. “When I stream, the beginners can take their time to write out sentences that I will read and correct, and the people who are fluent are happy with just meeting other Breton-speaking people, which could be already rare in the pre-lockdown world and is even rarer now. That is why I usually stream chill games like GeoGuessr that allow [people] to read the chat and have subjects to talk about.”

Twitch’s addition of new tags is bittersweet. “I think it’s good for the communities that will benefit from those new tags. I wasn’t expecting Twitch to add minority languages, so I’m not really disappointed. I will follow what happens for more active language communities like Basque to see if it is something that can be achievable for Breton before trying to spend energy on this.”

Cluicheamaid, the brainchild of Scottish streamer Robbie, is an award-nominated Scots Gaelic video game streaming series including Fall Guys, Among Us, and Dark Souls III all in the ancient Scottish tongue. Classed as definitely endangered on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Robbie’s channel is an opportunity for speakers to use their Gaelic in a world without English subtitles. “Streaming is such a new form of entertainment, and I like giving Gaelic representation on the cutting edge,” he says.

Existing in a linguistic niche has given him a different perspective of what success on Twitch looks like. “There are fewer folk I can get watching my stream in terms of total numbers, but also I am not in competition with thousands of other video game streamers at the same time. I think when you grow up speaking a minoritised language, you have to adjust your expectations of success. Every stream that I get four or five folk all talking Gaelic in the chat feels like a massive win because that is what it is.”

Included in Twitch’s recent launch of new tags is “Scottish,” referring streamers from Scotland as opposed to those speaking Scots Gaelic. Irish, Welsh, and Māori creators found themselves with a new national identifier for their streams. For minority language speakers who fall into these groups, the reaction in terms of linguistic visibility has been ambivalent. “Language tags would be more useful to me than nationality tags,” Robbie says. “My stream will have more in common with Irish-language streamers than most generic ‘Scottish’ streams. So I am hopeful but not expectant that the addition of the new tags is a step towards more easy identification.”

Across the sea in Ireland, Úna-Minh — or yunitex as she is known on Twitch — has brought the Irish national language to an audience of over 2,500 followers. Like Gwenn and Robbie, she is the only person regularly creating content in her language, but the main aim of her bilingual channel isn’t activism. “Ultimately, I’m using it [Irish] as I would in my everyday life, and if that inspires people to become more interested, then that’s a welcome bonus,” she explains.

She has partnered with language-learning app Duolingo to bring a little more Gaeilge to the world through her streams, be that through livestreaming Final Fantasy or painting and sketching. However, she believes that minority language Twitch creators like herself can’t be at the forefront of language revival alone. “Too many times do I see people treating people like me, fluent speakers, like their personal teachers or translators, and it’s not fair. I’m not a teacher, I’m just me. I think it’s important that communities don’t rely on one person ever to be a beacon, they need to work together to keep the language alive.”

With or without formal support from Twitch, those who stream in minority languages are doing the important work of ensuring that their mother tongue is used among young people, outside of the classroom, and within a modern context — the key ingredients for survival.

Aurélie Joubert, assistant professor of Language and Society at the University of Groningen, is all too aware of this. “The problem is that for languages to survive, they need to be considered as equal in their function and their communicative value for their own community. Language planners have realized that if kids nowadays speak more Irish, Breton, or Basque at school, it doesn’t mean that they use it in the playground. The reality is that a language needs to be perceived positively everywhere. This type of modern online interaction attracts the younger generation who needs to see and hear their minority language being used in modern online platforms.”

Across linguistic groups, one thing remains clear: minority language movements on Twitch are grassroots, community-centric, and driven by small gains. Visibility is essential for minority language creators to grow and thrive. “We sometimes see minority languages as not fit for modern technology but if they are not part of it in the first place, they cannot develop the corresponding vocabulary needed for it,” Joubert explains. “Linguists increasingly adopt a holistic approach towards language planning and that includes all modes of interaction, social media, and video gaming. It is a battle to lead on all fronts.”

IRL is a new social network taking on Facebook groups

Do people want an app specifically for discovering events and messaging as a group? That’s the bet behind IRL, a young social network that has been quietly growing over the past year and just attracted an eye-popping amount of money to take on Facebook.

The two-year-old startup is betting that a post-pandemic world will fuel its mission to help people “do more together,” usually by meeting up in real life — you know, IRL. The idea has attracted the deep pockets of the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, which is the biggest investor in a new $170 million round of funding that values IRL at roughly $1 billion.

That’s a remarkable amount of money for an app with roughly 12 million monthly users and no revenue. Even still, IRL is finding early traction primarily with people under the age of 18 in the United States, and the app has already facilitated more than 1 billion messages in barely a year. A handful of universities have now let students enter their school emails to gain access to virtual events and group chats.

What a paid IRL group looks like.

Image: IRL

“We’re building Facebook groups and events for the generation that doesn’t use Facebook,” IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi told The Verge. “There just happens to be no other product really focused on this space for the next generation.”

It’s true that Facebook’s users are getting older — look no further than Instagram preparing an app for kids as a sign that the company is desperate to attract young people. And Shafi is right to identify groups as a critical area in social networking, as people are increasingly moving away from communicating primarily in public feeds to private chats.

IRL is also starting to experiment with allowing groups to charge for access to for things like tutoring or music lessons, though it hasn’t rolled the feature out broadly. Eventually, it also plans to let brands promote events on its main discovery page.

According to Shafi, the goal is to become “a super messaging social network” over time. “We have the opportunity to build WeChat for the rest of the world,” he said in reference to the messaging app that over 1 billion people use in China to do everything from pay bills to hail taxis. “The combination of messaging and events creates the conditions for a platform,” said the venture capitalist Mike Maples, an IRL board member and investor who was also an early backer of Twitter.

For now, the vast majority of IRL’s users are teenagers that live in middle America, but Shafi plans to use SoftBank’s money to help grow in other countries. Besides paying some creators on TikTok to promote their IRL chats early on, the startup hasn’t spent money on marketing. Instead, it’s finding new users in apps where young people are already spending time, like Snapchat, Roblox, and TikTok — the latter of which is also working on a product integration with IRL. (SoftBank’s only other known investment in the social media industry is ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company.)

As part of this fundraiser, IRL is setting up a creator fund that will pay people to organize events in major cities using its app, like an outdoor movie night or a block party. Up to $100,000 in grant money will be earmarked for each city in the application program, which will start in the US this year and move to other countries sometime in 2022. The initiative is application only and IRL hasn’t specified the list of cities yet.

IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi.

Giving its young audience exposure to group chats with strangers opens up the potential for problems, and IRL will have to contend with moderating its growing network. The startup has already had to battle spam, and it’s just now starting to ramp up hiring for its trust and safety team. It plans to give group moderators adjustable tools for proactively weeding out bad messages through Hive, an automated content moderation platform that Reddit also uses. Group chats that aren’t invite-only will be reviewed by IRL staff before they are promoted on the app’s explore page.

Even with all the money it has raised, IRL faces tough odds against tech giant incumbents. Aside from the audio social app Clubhouse, which has already seen its growth stall as people emerge from pandemic lockdowns, only a small handful of social networks have managed to reach hundreds of millions of people since Snapchat debuted almost a decade ago. Unlike Clubhouse, IRL has yet to crack the top of the App Store’s free downloads chart, according to the research firm Apptopia.

Thanks to its new fundraiser, IRL doesn’t need to make money in the near term, but it certainly needs to prove it can keep growing, according to Shafi. “The pressure is to become a global phenomena as quickly as possible.”

Apple is trying to dominate watch parties, but it needs more help

Apple is bringing one of streaming’s trendiest features to iPhone users with the debut of SharePlay in iOS 15 later this year, allowing FaceTime users to stream music, online videos, and movies together with friends. The move positions FaceTime to compete more directly with platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Houseparty, which all offer ways to video chat while watching things as a group. It offers Apple a chance to hook a new generation of users on FaceTime — but the service is still missing some key integrations to make that happen, particularly for the teens most likely to use it.

SharePlay, announced earlier this week and likely arriving in the fall, will allow FaceTime users to share and stream media in real time from an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV. It’s a neat tool for the pandemic era, and it takes inspiration from the watch party modes that many major streaming platforms — including Disney Plus, Hulu, and Prime Video, among others — added themselves in the last year. For services where it’s not supported, like Netflix, there are popular extensions that enable simultaneous streaming and chatting as well.

The goal isn’t to compete with those native platforms, though. After all, you’re still watching Hulu, just in a different space. Instead, the update puts FaceTime square against services like Facebook Messenger that dominate messaging and have already been trying to build out co-watching experiences, but without as robust of a service list as Apple has the ability to line up.

SharePlay particularly makes sense for the next generation of iPhone users, as teens are more inclined to watch videos on their phones. Video-based social media apps like Instagram and TikTok are immensely popular among teens, and an overwhelming majority of teens have access to these apps on their own personal smartphones. Video chatting is hugely popular, too, with a 2015 survey from Pew Research finding that 59 percent of US teens video chatted with their friends.

The introduction of SharePlay also jibes with Apple’s reported plans to make iMessage compete more directly with Facebook-owned WhatsApp by becoming more of a social network. It makes a lot of sense that the company would similarly invest in developments for its video-calling product as well, which is just a couple of taps away.

But if Apple wants SharePlay to be a success among the demographic of consumers most likely to use it, it’ll need to expand the number of apps that support it.

Apple said that at launch, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, HBO Max, Hulu, MasterClass, Paramount Plus, Pluto TV, TikTok, and Twitch will be supported on SharePlay, which is a somewhat limited grab bag of streaming options. Granted, there’s plenty of time for that list to get longer before iOS 15 officially rolls out to users in the fall. And Apple told The Verge that SharePlay will be available to any streaming app that wants to support it, so we’re likely to see wider adoption down the road.

Some of the best applications of this feature failed to make their way into Apple’s initial slide of supported services, though. Netflix is perhaps the most obvious of these simply on the basis that virtually everyone has a Netflix login, whether they’re actually paying for it or not (at least until the inevitable password crackdown). But YouTube was not mentioned either, and neither company had comment to share about potential support down the line when contacted by The Verge this week. A spokesperson for Peacock, however, told The Verge that SharePlay support was on its “roadmap.”

YouTube, in particular, seems like a huge miss for Apple, especially where teens are concerned. YouTube hosts just about every digital media format imaginable — music, movies, news, personalities, tutorials, live feeds, etc. — but most importantly, it’s free. As video callers tend to skew younger already, apps with highly shareable content like livestreams seem like the best use case for SharePlay outside of live sporting events. That’s particularly true given that for paid services, each participant in a SharePlay streaming session will need a login for the app. After all, if the tool didn’t require credentials and allowed just anyone to drop in a FaceTime stream of content from a paid service, SharePlay would be a piracy nightmare.

But that’s part of what makes the practical application of SharePlay a bit of a puzzler. Streaming the game or a movie premiere could get expensive fast. If your friends are watching NFL coverage on Sling TV, you’ll need a $35 subscription to join in (assuming the content is included in one of the service’s base plans). If you wanted to watch a Premier Access release like Cruella on Disney Plus, you’d need to pay the $8 monthly subscription cost on top of an additional $30 early access ticket fee. (A spokesperson for Disney Plus confirmed to The Verge that SharePlay users still need to pay for access to watch.)

It’s hard to imagine that most users would pay for a service just to be able to FaceTime while they’re watching a title. Then again, based on recent media consumption trends among teens, maybe SharePlay is part of the future of how entertainment is consumed, at least for the younger subset of Apple users.

It makes sense that a company investing heavily in its services offerings would jump on the watch party trend, if not a little late, and it does feel like a natural way for Apple to not only stay relevant but also sell subscriptions and hardware — even if right now, SharePlay alone seems unlikely to balloon numbers for streaming services. Free, social-leaning services and streaming titans are most likely to see success with this feature, and livestreaming apps seem likely to perform best. But they’ll actually have to be on SharePlay for that to work. As it currently stands, many are not.

Inside the cryptocurrency scam vortex

On May 22nd, a crypto finance project called DeFi100 posted a message to its website: “We scammed you guys and you can’t do shit about it. HA HA. All you moon bois have been scammed and you can’t do shit about it.”

Screenshots of the message immediately went viral on crypto Twitter (always anarchic, easily risible). A popular anonymous crypto-tracking Twitter account called Mr. Whale estimated that DeFi100 had run off with $32 million. Cryptocurrency news outlets, as well as Yahoo Finance, ran with the number. The project owners denied any foul play, and it soon became clear the message was a website hack rather than a serious warning — but by then, it was too late. Panic had set in, and the price of the underlying coin was in free fall.

“We never stole any funds,” a representative for the project told The Verge. “DeFi100 was a very small project, and we were not holding any investors’ funds, so there are no questions of scamming people or running away with their funds.”

DeFi100’s problems are a small part of the picture, but they’re a reminder of the dangers of the ongoing crypto boom. Despite billions of dollars pouring into the space in recent months, there’s still little recourse when investments turn out to be scams. Most importantly, the radical decentralization of the blockchain means there is simply no way to get your money back — and few assurances that an unproven vendor will keep their promises once the transaction goes through. The result is a new gold rush in crypto scams, as speculators seek ever more obscure opportunities and riskier bets.

The DeFi100 project’s website is now back online, but rumors persist about what actually happened. Certik, a popular blockchain security leaderboard, does currently list DeFi100 as a “rug pull,” which is a term for a scam where the founders of a project raise investment money and run. (The project owners say a rug pull would be impossible since they never held investor funds.) It’s just one of a string of scams that today’s crypto holders need to watch out for, along with sketchy altcoins, Discord pump-and-dumps, Elon Musk impersonators, and more malicious forms of cybercrime.

According to Maren Altman, a TikTok influencer with over a million followers who creates videos about cryptocurrency and astrology, there are three kinds of risk that crypto holders should be wary of: bad investments, collapsing projects, and outright scams.

The first and most common kind of risk is simple bad investments in obscure coins. Outside of major players like Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are thousands of smaller coins built on the blockchain technology, promising huge rewards if the coin ever comes to prominence. Subreddits like r/cryptocurrency are awash with accusations of “scam coins.”

“I mean, I’m in a handful of those myself, where it’s just the investment, it was a promise, the development didn’t go through, and I’m still waiting,” she said.

Trying to research obscure altcoins can be confusing for inexperienced traders. Links to cryptocurrency Discord servers often pop up on Twitter, promising an easy pump-and-dump of a smaller crypto coin. Or more confusingly, Twitter bots will accuse Discord servers that don’t exist of pump-and-dumps, hoping to drive up value for a separate coin. But while they promise easy money, the reality is less enticing.

Another risk is the oftentimes innocent but unfortunate mismanagement of funds. In a bullish crypto market, everyone thinks they have a revolutionary idea involving cryptocurrency. And, obviously, a lot of them don’t pan out.

“Things not being clarified, errors in contract, or just a weak link in the development circle,” Altman explained, “leading to mismanagement of money and people not having their investment turn out as expected.”

One extremely well-known example of this was the DAO project. It launched in the spring of 2016 to huge fanfare, only to be completely defunct by the fall of the same year. The project was created by the Decentralized Autonomous Organization and was an attempt to build a venture capital fund on the Ethereum blockchain. Only a month or two in, a hacker found a vulnerability in the token’s code and made off with $50 million. Traders started selling off DAO tokens en masse and the price never recovered.

Sometimes this chaos can end in outright fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission, crypto-based financial scams are at an all-time high thanks to the surging interest in cryptocurrency. And the line between well-meaning blunder and crypto Ponzi scheme is blurry. Just ask investors of OneCoin or PayCoin.

OneCoin launched in the mid-2010s and was billed as an educational crypto trading service. It turns out the OneCoin tokens being purchased by investors weren’t actually on the blockchain. It was accused of being a Ponzi scheme and its founders ran off with close to $4 billion. It has been called one of the biggest financial scams in history. One of its founders, Ruja Ignatova, is still missing.

In 2019, PayCoin founder Homero Joshua Garza was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay restitution after he created his own cryptocurrency and offered it to investors with the assurance that he had secured a $100 million reserve of capital. There was no reserve, and the whole project ended up losing $9 million.

But even with May 2021’s sizable dip in value for big coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum, cryptocurrency is more popular than ever, and legions of inexperienced traders are learning the hard way what a peer-to-peer financial service actually means.

Neeraj Agrawal, the director of communications for Coin Center, one of the US’s biggest cryptocurrency advocacy groups, told The Verge that wildly speculative coins (known colloquially as “shitcoins”) are now a permanent part of the cryptocurrency space.

“The insane speculative garbage coins are not going to go away,” Agrawal says. “That’s just part of the world now. And it sort of remains to us to show that the really good projects are worth their existence, that there is actual value here.”

That’s particularly hard when crypto celebrities like Elon Musk are driving interest toward the wackier end of the crypto space. Musk recently fueled the massive spike in interest around Dogecoin, a failed crypto coin invented as a joke that’s named after the famous Shiba Inu meme. Musk’s tweets have also been blamed for this month’s massive market downturn. It’s still unclear what effect Musk has on the market, but his recent branding as the main character of crypto has led to a litany of Musk-themed scams. According to the FTC, people impersonating Musk have managed to scam at least $2 million from traders this year.

“Maybe that’s the biggest risk to crypto users — your own stupidity,” joked Meltem Demirors, the chief strategy officer of digital-asset investment firm CoinShares. “I think people just aren’t accustomed to taking responsibility for their financial lives.”

In fact, I was asked by both a family member and a close friend this month about an obscure cryptocurrency called Dogelon Mars. It’s currently worth $0.00000016 USD, but the two people close to me were considering buying a bunch of it because they mistakenly believed that, due to the name and its frankly confusing description, it was a coin launched by Musk himself.

Demirors told The Verge that Dogelon Mars was actually one of her favorite meme coins. “We have to remember, right, the whole point of a lot of this is permission-less financial innovation,” she says. “And a market really only requires two things. It requires a seller and a buyer.”

She said this was the main explanation behind the recent NFT explosion. People had crypto coins on hand and wanted to see what they could spend them on. Turns out what they wanted to buy was surreal internet art for millions of dollars.

“I always think it’s really funny when people are all about crypto and permission-less financial innovation, but then the minute they lose money, they become like the most statist people imaginable,” Demirors said. “You really can’t have it both ways. Like you bought this shitcoin. You now need to make your bed and lie in it.”

TikTok hired some of its best animators for an anti-bullying campaign

Starting today, you might see some beautiful new animations posted to TikTok’s accounts. The company has partnered with six of its platform’s popular animators — several of whom were featured in The Verge last year — to make videos for a campaign against bullying. The videos were all written and created by the animators and are meant to offer their perspective on the pressures faced by creators on the platform, even ones who are blowing up.

The spots also highlight TikTok’s vibrant animation community. The platform has been a boon for animators, who have found that its short format makes it possible for them to create good and consistent output that stands apart from the pack and hooks viewers. One of the creators, King Science, has 11.6 million followers, putting him among the platform’s most followed users. The campaign also features AmyRightMeow, Recokh, Kelly Emmrich, Rosie.gif, and milkymichii.

TikTok views the campaign as one part of its strategy to combat harassment. While teams of moderators may be the first thing that comes to mind, TikTok says another flank is the tone and expectations the company sets for its community. The company wants to make sure that users know the rules, so that if your video gets taken down it’s “not the only time you’re thinking of what community guidelines are, so it’s not like you’re in the principal’s office,” Tara Wadhwa, director of policy for TikTok US, told The Verge.

The company has made a number of updates to its app over the past year to improve its anti-harassment measures. There’s now a pop-up that’ll warn users if it detects they’re posting a mean comment, and creators now have the ability to report and block users and delete comments in bulk.

Those measures aren’t necessarily going to protect every creator — the platform is filled with amorphous communities sharing vulnerable stories, and it can rocket someone to stardom overnight. “None of this is gonna be the silver bullet,” Wadhwa says. “It’s where do we want our community to go … and what are the range of strategies we can use to get there?”

Instagram chief explains how the service decides what you see

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri shed some light on how the social network decides what you see in a new blog post published on Tuesday. The explanation seems to be meant at least in part to combat persistent rumors that Instagram intentionally hides or disfavors certain posts, which Instagram says isn’t exactly true.

The short answer to how Instagram works is that it’s complicated. Instagram uses “thousands” of signals to determine what you see in your feed, according to Mosseri, and there isn’t just one algorithm that decides what shows up for you. But the company is also committed to better explaining why content is taken down and how the service surfaces posts, he writes. One of the more surprising revelations: most Instagram followers won’t see your posts anyway because “most people look at less than half of their Feed.”

Tuesday’s blog is just the first of a series that “will shed more light on how Instagram’s technology works and how it impacts the experiences that people have across the app,” for example, so it seems we can expect more detailed breakdowns in the future.

In this first blog, Mosseri explained that Instagram uses “a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose” to determine what to show you. He then broke down the “signals” Instagram uses to surface something in your feed or in stories. Here are the “most important” signals, “roughly in order of importance:”

Information about the post. These are signals both about how popular a post is – think how many people have liked it – and more mundane information about the content itself, like when it was posted, how long it is if it’s a video, and what location, if any, was attached to it.

Information about the person who posted. This helps us get a sense for how interesting the person might be to you, and includes signals like how many times people have interacted with that person in the past few weeks.

Your activity. This helps us understand what you might be interested in and includes signals such as how many posts you’ve liked.

Your history of interacting with someone. This gives us a sense of how interested you are generally in seeing posts from a particular person. An example is whether or not you comment on each other’s posts.

Instagram will then predict how you might interact with a post, such as commenting or liking it. “The more likely you are to take an action, and the more heavily we weigh that action, the higher up you’ll see the post,” Mosseri said.

Mosseri also addressed how people accuse the service of silencing or “shadowbanning” users and said the company will do a better job of explaining why content is removed. “We’re developing better in-app notifications so people know in the moment why, for instance, their post was taken down, and exploring ways to let people know when what they post goes against our Recommendations Guidelines,” Mosseri said. Instagram will have “more to share soon” on those updates.

The blog post also details the signals the company uses to show you content in the Explore tab and on Reels (Instagram’s TikTok-like video service) — which, notably, primarily show you content from accounts you don’t follow.

Mosseri’s explanation hits as Instagram is kicking off its Creator Week event, designed to help creators build their brands on the platform.

Apple is building video and music sharing into FaceTime

Apple is bringing video and music sharing to FaceTime through a feature it’s calling SharePlay. Using SharePlay, people will be able to watch or listen to content in sync with everyone else on the call, either by casting the content to an Apple TV device while staying on the call or by watching both on the same screen using Picture in Picture.

SharePlay won’t be limited to just Apple TV Plus and Music, though — it’s an API that other developers can integrate their services into, and Disney Plus, Hulu, TikTok, and more are already on board (though Netflix is notably absent).

These services will support SharePlay.

The feature will even be supported for users who are joining the call using the newly announced FaceTime for the web.

Developing… we’re adding more to this post, but you can follow along with our WWDC 2021 live blog to get the news even faster.

YouTube’s TikTok competitor Shorts will soon let users sample audio from any YouTube video

Being able to sample audio from other users’ videos is one of TikTok’s greatest strengths. It allows memes to percolate across the platform and lets users discover new content by watching videos with the same sound. Soon, YouTube will expand this feature in its TikTok competitor, Shorts, letting users sample sounds from any content uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube officially announced this feature last month in a community support post, but tells The Verge it should now be available for the first time in new markets as part of the launch of Shorts in the UK, Canada, and a number of Latin American countries (including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela). The YouTube-sampling tool will then roll out to other Shorts markets including the US in the coming weeks.

Shorts users can already sample sounds from other Shorts videos (as well as from a library of licensed music). But this update will greatly expand the audio they have easy access to. The feature will funnel YouTube users into its Shorts feature via a new “Create” button in the mobile app. This will appear underneath videos next to the like and dislike buttons. Clicking it will give users the option to sample the video’s audio in Shorts. Shorts viewers will also be able to tap the audio in any video to head back to the original source in YouTube proper.

Shorts videos sampling audio from YouTube will link back to the original source.

Image: YouTube

This feature will allow longform creators “to benefit by allowing the community to find something interesting in their video,” YouTube’s product lead for Shorts, Todd Sherman, tells The Verge. Shorts users can create something with the sample audio, he says, and the creators of the audio will “get perhaps inbound traffic or exposure from that. From the longform creator perspective I think a lot of folks are excited to have their things remixed.”

Not all creators are happy about this, though. After YouTubers noticed a new check-box in the settings for their video uploads that gives Shorts users access to their audio, many complained that this would let people “steal” their content. Search for “YouTube Shorts permissions” on YouTube itself and you’ll find plenty of videos worrying about exactly this scenario, with thumbnails posing questions like: “YouTube legalized video stealing?”.

The permissions box seems to have been introduced before Shorts users were actually able to sample audio from YouTube videos. Right now it has to be unticked manually for each video, but Sherman tells The Verge the company is working on a bulk opt-out option.

IMPORTANT:

YouTube suddenly automatically checked “Yes” on EVERY YouTube video to allow them to be re-uploaded as Shorts on OTHER channels ???

Please let your YouTuber friends know that they have to go through and uncheck this setting on every video or risk stolen content… pic.twitter.com/b4rjiwmE2c

— Mysticat #Mysty200k (@MysticatLive) April 30, 2021

A YouTube-sampling feature could create other problems, too. A huge array of content has been uploaded to YouTube over the years, much of it sensitive or personal in nature. The uploaders of this content won’t necessarily want their videos to be sampled as this could enable harassment or abuse. Despite this, the sampling feature will be opt-out rather than opt-in. That means all YouTube videos will be sampleable by default, and creators will have to specify which videos they don’t want to be used in Shorts.

Sherman says YouTube is aware of these potential problems, but that the company’s discussions with creators has indicated more excitement. “There is some concern about examples of videos that you might think are personal or sensitive and that’s why creators have asked for the ability to opt out. But they also seem to recognize that it sort of doesn’t work if it’s very selectively an opt-in,” he says.

YouTube originally launched Shorts last September in India before bringing the feature to the US in March. Last month, the company announced plans to pay $100 million to creators to use the app, though exactly how much individual creators can earn isn’t clear.

TikTok updates US privacy policy to collect ‘faceprints and voiceprints’ (but won’t explain what they are)

TikTok has updated its privacy policy in the US to notify users that the app might, in future, collect new types of biometric information including “faceprints and voiceprints.” But when reached by The Verge, TikTok was unable to explain what types of data these terms referred to, or why the app might need to access this information in the first place.

The company’s privacy policy was updated on June 2nd, as spotted by TechCrunch. (An archived version of the old policy can be read here.) The new policy lays out in some detail the ways in which the TikTok app now has permission to analyze users’ content.

The policy states:

“We may collect information about the images and audio that are a part of your User Content, such as identifying the objects and scenery that appear, the existence and location within an image of face and body features and attributes, the nature of the audio, and the text of the words spoken in your User Content. We may collect this information to enable special video effects, for content moderation, for demographic classification, for content and ad recommendations, and for other non-personally-identifying operations.”

As is often the case with privacy policies, there’s a lot of conflation here between outcomes that users are probably fine with (like adding video effects) and outcomes they might think are more invasive (like ad targeting and “demographic classification.”) There’s also a lot of broad language used in order to cover any future updates TikTok might add to the platform.

The new privacy policy is more explicit that the app can now collect biometric data — that is, the measurement of physical characteristics, including the aforementioned “faceprints and voiceprints.” The policy says TikTok will seek consent from users before collecting this information, but only when it is required to do so by the law. As TechCrunch notes, this doesn’t mean an awful lot in the US, given that only a few states (including Illinois, Texas, and California) offer these sorts of legal protections. And indeed, TikTok might think that agreeing to its terms of service constitutes all the consent it will need.

It’s possible that the changes to TikTok’s privacy policy are a response to a recent national class action lawsuit against the company, in which it agreed to pay $92 million to claimants alleging a variety of privacy violations. As we reported on the case in February: “As part of the settlement, TikTok has agreed to avoid several behaviors that could compromise user privacy unless it specifically discloses those behaviors in its privacy policy.” When asked if these changes were a response to the class action lawsuit, though, TikTok declined to comment on the record.

In response to various questions about what data the company is now collecting on users, how it defines “faceprints and voiceprints,” what data it might collect in the future, and what it might do with that information, a spokesperson said only: “As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, we recently updated our Privacy Policy to provide more clarity on the information we may collect.”

There’s more information, yes, but still not a lot of clarity. For an app that has struggled with various privacy issues (the perception of which is often exacerbated by political paranoia), it seems there’s more work yet to do.

How to watch Netflix’s Geeked Week

Netflix is holding its first “Geeked” virtual event starting on June 7th, an entire week dedicated to genre stories across film and TV. That means sci-fi and fantasy, and shows based on comic books and video games.

The company says that more than 50 projects will be featured, including big names like The Witcher, Sandman, Lucifer, Cowboy Bebop, Arcane (the League of Legends animated series), The Cuphead Show, and more. In addition to big announcements and trailers, the event will also include “first looks, behind-the-scenes footage, cast interviews, celebrity games, script table reads, live performances, and much more,” according to Netflix.

It’s a lot to spread across five days. Here’s how you can keep up with everything.

What time is Netflix’s Geeked Week?

The event takes place from June 7th to the 11th, and Netflix says that things will kick off at 9AM PT / 12PM ET. The company will also be posting daily recaps at 10AM PT / 1PM ET, suggesting that things will last around an hour each day. There isn’t an exact schedule, but Netflix says that “each day will be broadly themed to different genres: film, comic books, fantasy, anime / animation, and gaming.”

Where can I watch the event?

If you want to watch everything, it seems like it’ll be hard to miss, as Netflix will be utilizing just about every video platform imaginable. That means you can watch and follow the daily events on YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, and TikTok. And be sure to stay tuned to The Verge for coverage of the biggest announcements.

If you play Fortnite right now, you might get abducted by aliens

If you hop into a game of Fortnite right now, you might get teleported across the map by a mysterious laser beam that appears out of the sky.

Yes, seriously. Watch it happen in this video from streamer Ali “SypherPK” Hassan, which I’ve also embedded below at the right timestamp.

While it’s hard to tell exactly where the laser beam is coming from, it’s hard to think that it isn’t coming from some kind of UFO or alien… thing.

The abductions started happening in Fortnite Tuesday evening, just one week before the game’s next season begins on June 8th. And a few other hints seem to indicate that Chapter 2 Season 7 could be alien-themed in some way, too.

Check out this video teaser that apparently is on TikTok, for example, which features the tagline “they’re coming” and mysterious alien-like sounds (headphone warning, the sound is a little harsh):

And you can see an image that’s similar to what’s in that TikTok ad on Epic Games’ Fortnite website:

It’s also not out of the ordinary for Epic to change things up at the end of a season. In May 2019, a volcano erupted and destroyed Tilted Towers, one of the most beloved spots on the map. And last June, a mysterious device blew up the island’s central landmark and transformed the ever-present storm into a wall of water.

So far, these new abductions don’t seem to have quite the map-shifting impact that those changes did — but with a few days left in the season, who knows what else Epic might have up its sleeve?

Twitter’s Fleets are getting Stories-like ads

Twitter said Tuesday it will start adding full-screen ads to Fleets, its disappearing tweets that sit in a row at the top of users’ mobile Twitter interface. Introduced last November, the Fleet format — a clone of Instagram and Snap’s Stories — has apparently been successful enough that Twitter now wants to try to make money from it.

“Fleet ads are full-screen billboards for advertisers,” Twitter senior product manager Justin Hoang and global product marketing manager Austin Evers wrote in a post announcing the ads. It’s partnering with a “handful” of advertisers in what it calls an “experiment,” making the Fleet ads visible to a limited group of US users on iOS and Android.

The ads support images and video in 9:16, and videos can be up to 30 seconds long. Brands can choose to add a “swipe up” call-to-action and will be able to access standard Twitter ad metrics, including impressions, profile visits, clicks, website visits, and other information.

Example of a Fleet ad from Wendy’s.

Image: Twitter

In April, Twitter reported that its ad revenue grew 32 percent year over year to $899 million, and total ad engagement rose 11 percent. Expanding its ads beyond users’ timelines, where people can easily scroll past without engaging, seems like the logical next step. Instagram, after all, has had ads in its Stories since 2017 and started putting ads in its TikTok clone Reels last month.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said during April’s Q1 earnings call with analysts that the company was still learning about who uses Fleets. “We started this product not to build a storage product within Twitter, but to solve the problem of people not wanting to tweet because they appear to be staying around too long,” he said, adding “we certainly have seen a different audience than we normally see, but we still have much to learn and a lot to figure out in terms of like, where it goes from here.”

Twitter is planning to closely study how vertical full-screen ads perform, not just for Fleet ads but possible future iterations of other full-screen formats, according to Hoang and Evers.

“We also believe that ads should be non-intrusive and bring value to people, so we’re focused on learning more about how people feel about and engage with this new placement,” the blog post states, adding that the company is planning to launch more Fleet updates soon to stickers and backgrounds.

Twitter has been on a tear announcing new features this spring, updating its warnings for potentially offensive tweets, improving its photo cropping algorithm to allow “taller” images, adding the ability for Android users to search their direct messages, and rolling out a Tip Jar feature for donations.

Twitter also acquired Scroll, the $5-per-month subscription service that removes ads from participating websites. And its long-awaited paid subscription service Twitter Blue may be coming soon as well.

Social media companies, here are some free theme park ideas to comply with Florida’s deplatforming law

The Verge is deeply invested in doing service journalism; we report on companies’ misdeeds, we review expensive products to tell you whether they’re worth your hard-earned money, and speak to industry leaders to get their insights on the issues affecting their companies and their customers.

It is in that vein that we brainstormed some ideas for social media theme parks in Florida.

See, the Sunshine State passed a law this week that blocks social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter from “knowingly” deplatforming politicians and even algorithmically ranking content, with fine ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 per day (The law, which is a mish-mash of broad speech regulations, has already been challenged in court by the tech companies’ trade organizations, which called it “a frontal assault on the First Amendment.”)

But there’s an easier way. The law has a hilariously corrupt exemption for any company that owns or operates a theme park or large entertainment complex in the state of Florida. Republican state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia said that exemption was included so that the Disney Plus streaming service “isn’t caught up in this.” The Disney World park in Orlando brings in significant tax revenue for Florida, of course, a state which relies heavily on tourism dollars.

So all Twitter, Facebook, TikTok et al have to do to comply with the law and avoid the knotty First Amendment issue of government speech regulations is build their own Floridian theme parks.

Here are our suggestions for the parks including some ideas for appropriately themed rides that the venues might offer:

Twitterland

Has a secret nightclub called Slides
Sells drinks called Canoes
The Ratio is a dunk tank where you get dropped into water for your bad takes
Whac-A-Mole is instead Block-A-Troll
A water-themed ride where you’re sailing along and random guys try to pull you into the water: Reply Guys, the ride
Rollercoaster goes sideways

The only problem with Twitterland is that it keeps opening amazing rides and then letting them completely fall apart.

Facebook World

All the rides suddenly pivot to video without warning
A haunted house attraction called Facebook Moderation
Instagram and WhatsApp once had separate parks, but they have been annexed into the main Facebook park and turned into shopping malls
The water park has a slide into radicalism
If you get detained by security, they put you in the Racist Uncle Time Out Room
An Instagram hall of mirrors that features mirrors that give you an Insta-ready body with lighting made for photos and then leaves you feeling terrible when you come to the last mirror, which has heavy shadows for lighting and no body editing whatsoever

TikTokLand

A hall of mirrors that shunts you through random rides with absolutely no information or warning, gradually tuning your experience using the sophisticated biometric monitor in your admission wristband
Alternately, the whole park is just the set from the Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show where a Backyardigans song plays on a loop

Pinterest Park

It’s just a bunch of themed photo booths that produce those little photo strips, but you have to wait in line and read 200 words before you can ride the Recipe Rollercoaster.

The GooglePlusPlex

A giant haunted house which closed eight years ago but high school kids still break into at night
The entire park littered with discontinued Google products

Clubhouse Clubhouse

It’s just one big infinity room where you enter and hear men talking at you and over each other about Bitcoin.

Reddit Faire

A Renaissance fair that ended up sharing its property lease with a prison, thanks to an awkward misunderstanding in the C-suite. Many guests are incredibly devoted cosplayers in delightful historically accurate costumes. Many are petty criminals. A few are serial killers. Try to guess which ones!

YouTubeLand

Has a ride where you appear to climb higher and higher forever, but then perilously fall to Earth after a botched apology
To enter the park you have to smash the like button
The Thumbnail Ride promises nonstop conflict but is really just a pretty chill afternoon
Every ride is at least 10 minutes long so it can include a midroll break
If you make a wrong turn at the bathrooms, you’ll occasionally run into an off-brand superhero ride that ends in a spike pit. No one knows who paid for or designed these rides, but children find them inexplicably compelling
You can’t leave unless you ring a bell, and then you will be sent notifications reminding you to return to YouTubeLand for the rest of your life
Really big and expensive and in many ways the gold standard for all the other parks, but no one appears to be in charge at all?

Snapchat Studios

Rides disappear after you go on them once
All the vending machines sell Spectacles, but no one buys them
Unfortunately the park’s been kind of struggling because all its best rides get cloned by Facebook World within six months
Temporarily closed because it accidentally opened another racist ride

TikTok changes text-to-speech voice after voice actor sues

TikTok has changed the voice on its text-to-speech feature, just weeks after an actor claiming to be the original voice filed a lawsuit claiming she never agreed to be featured in the app.

The new voice has been showing up in TikToks over the past day — often in videos of people commenting on the change. It sounds a bit more energetic and upbeat, creating a very different vibe than the droll monotone of the prior voice. The feature allows TikTok users to type out text and then have it read aloud over their videos, and it’s often used as a narrator.

This new voice appears to be a response to a lawsuit filed against TikTok owner ByteDance earlier this month. Voice actor Bev Standing claimed that she was the voice behind TikTok’s text-to-speech feature and that she had never agreed to work with the company. Standing said she had done voice recordings meant to be used for translations, but that she hadn’t authorized use of her voice beyond that specific instance.

The lawsuit concerns the English-language voice used in North America. Videos made prior to the change still feature the old tone.

TikTok has yet to comment on Standing’s lawsuit or the new voice. But this week’s change suggests the company is taking her lawsuit seriously.

Apple’s new iMac brings M1 goodness to the desktop

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This is an iMac unlike any other iMac we’ve seen before, and it all comes down to the M1 chip.

Sure, there are some other differences between this 24-inch iMac and the 21.5-inch model from 2019 that it’s replacing. There are better microphones and better speakers. There are fewer ports, and some of them have moved around. The screen is bigger and better. The keyboard now has TouchID. But the M1 is the star of the show.

It’s not just the performance increase. It’s not just the fact that you can run iOS and iPadOS apps natively on the system. It’s not just the new advanced image signal processor, which helps create better low-light images than I’ve ever seen from an integrated webcam. It’s also the groundbreaking efficiency with which this processor runs, which has enabled Apple to create a slim, sleek, and quite unique iMac chassis.

Whether you actually get every upgrade here depends on the configuration you choose. The entry-level iMac is $1,299 for 256GB of SSD storage, two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports, 8GB of unified memory, and a seven-core GPU — but that’s only available in four colors and doesn’t come with TouchID. The model I tested bumps the storage up to 512GB and the memory up to 16GB. It has two USB-3 ports in addition to the two Thunderbolt, an eight-core GPU, Touch ID, and a gigabit Ethernet port (which is in the power brick). I also received both the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad with my model. You’d need to pay a total of $2,028 to get everything Apple sent me (and which I’ll be sending back, for the record).

In short, this device costs money. And it’s true that you’d get similar performance and save a few hundred bucks, if you just plugged a Mac Mini into an external display. But this iMac has almost everything that most people need in one package: processing power, sure, but also a camera, speakers, microphones, a keyboard, a mouse, a trackpad, and a display. And they’re all good. This is a computer you can plonk on your desk and never think about again. And for some of the iMac’s target audience, that’s probably worth the extra money. You’re paying for simplicity.

The new iMac is completely redesigned, but instantly recognizable

The M1 processor uses what’s called a “hybrid” configuration. The easiest way to conceive of this is that most competing Intel and AMD chips have a number of equally “okay” cores, where Apple’s M1 has four very fast cores and four lower-powered high-efficiency cores. This allows M1 devices to deliver arguably the best performance-per-watt in the world. It also means that they’re nearly unbeatable in single-core workloads.

That advantage bore out in our benchmark testing. This iMac model achieved a higher score on the Geekbench 5 single-core benchmark than any Mac we’ve ever seen before — even the iMac Pro. That means if you’re looking for a device for simpler everyday tasks that don’t scale to every available CPU core (and that largely seems to be the demographic that Apple is trying to sell this machine to), there has literally never been a better iMac for you to buy.

You can see the rest of our benchmarks below:

Apple iMac 24 (2021) benchmarks

Benchmark	Score
Benchmark	Score
PugetBench for Premiere Pro	372
Cinebench R23 Multi	7782
Cinebench R23 Single	1505
Geekbench Multi	7668
Geekbench Single	1739
Geekbench OpenCL	19114

These results help illuminate where this iMac fits into Apple’s all-in-one lineup, and where its limitations are. The 24-incher is a significant improvement over the 21.5-inch iMac in both single-core and multi-core workloads. And it’s very comparable in graphics tasks — which is quite impressive, given that the 21.5-inch iMac has a discrete GPU and this one relies on what’s integrated with the M1.

On the other end, these results (with the exception of single-core performance) are not close to what we’d expect from the 27-inch Intel iMac with discrete graphics. In this comparison, multi-core results are more important. They indicate that the 27-inch iMac is going to do much better on the types of tasks that owners (or prospective buyers) are likely to be doing: intense multitasking, computations, design, video work, and other more complex loads that may leverage the GPU.

There are other limitations that may put some workloads out of reach. As is the case with the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini, you can’t configure the iMac with more than 16GB of memory and 2TB of storage; we wouldn’t recommend those specs to anyone who regularly edits 4K or 8K video, for example. The memory and storage are soldered, so you can’t upgrade them after purchase. Only one external display is supported (up to 6K resolution at 60Hz). Ports are also bizarrely limited; the base model has just two Thunderbolt / USB-4 ports and a headphone jack, while more expensive models have an additional two USB-3 ports and Gigabit Ethernet. These all may be reasons Apple is pushing this iMac as a “home and family” PC, even though its processor is clearly capable of all kinds of professional work.

The M1 processor’s efficiency allows the iMac to get away with a thin design and minimal fan noise, and still maintain performance

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Another way to interpret these numbers is that I was getting effectively the same performance out of this machine as we got from the M1 MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini. That’s completely unsurprising, since these devices all use the same processor. But it’s a good proxy for gauging whether the iMac can handle your work: if you expect you could get a task done with the M1 MacBook Pro, you should be able to do it on this.

More anecdotally, I was able to use my test unit for all kinds of daily tasks, from emailing to YouTube to amateur photo and video work. I was able to hop between over 25 Chrome tabs with Cinebench looping in the background, with no stutter or slowdown whatsoever. If you’re buying the iMac for this kind of thing, I can’t imagine you’ll see too many spinning wheels.

During this testing process, I also got a sense of just how well cooled this chassis is. On thinner laptops that I test often (including the fanless MacBook Air), you’ll see performance decrease if you run heavy tasks over and over again. None of that on this iMac: I looped Cinebench R23 as well as a Premiere Pro 4K video export several times over and never saw scores go down. It took a lot to get the fans going — they were checked out during my daily office multitasking. When they did spin up, mostly while I was working in Premiere, I could barely hear them. They were quieter than the background hum of my refrigerator. That’s quite a quality-of-life improvement over prior Intel iMacs.

The M1’s advantage, after all, has never been raw power; it’s the combination of power and efficiency. We saw much better battery life in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro than we did in their Intel predecessors. Battery life obviously isn’t a concern with the iMac, but efficiency certainly is. Chips are limited by two things: the power available and how well their systems can keep them cool. They vent almost all the energy they use as heat, and because the M1 has such incredibly high performance per watt, Apple doesn’t need a heavy-duty cooling system to keep it from frying itself. Because it doesn’t need that heavy-duty cooling system, Apple has finally been able to redesign the iMac from the ground up.

The iMac’s chassis is so thin it looks like a big iPad minus the touchscreen

This iMac is sleek. Even though it has a 24-inch screen, it’s close in size to its 21.5-inch predecessor. Apple reduced the screen’s borders by close to 50 percent in order to squeeze the bigger screen into the compact chassis. This device is also 11.5 millimeters thick, or just under half an inch — which is quite thin as all-in-ones go. Next to the 27-inch iMac, it looks like a tablet on a stand.

Size isn’t everything; this iMac also comes in seven colors. There’s blue, green, pink, orange, purple, yellow, and the boring silver we know and love. I’m not quite convinced that the jazzier models will fit in outside of especially stylish homes and offices. But I will say: I’ve never seen so many of my friends, or so many people on TikTok, as excited about a tech product as they seem to be about the colored iMacs. The hues are a nice change, aren’t obnoxious, and are clearly a hit with certain crowds.

Some traditional iMac touches remain, of course. The bezels are still substantial compared to those of some modern monitors. You can’t raise or lower the display height — the built-in stand only allows tilt adjustments. (You can also buy it with a built-in VESA mount adapter.) And there’s still that pesky chin, though it’s no longer emblazoned with the Apple logo.

Pretty much every other notable part of the iMac has been upgraded in some way. There’s a 4.5K (4480 x 2520) Retina display, a step up from the predecessor’s 4096 x 2304 Retina display (though both have effectively the same pixel density). It has Apple’s True Tone technology, which automatically adjusts colors and intensity based on your surroundings.

But the screen is also another reminder that this iMac doesn’t have “Pro” in its name. Twenty-four inches is on the small side as screens go; most of the best external monitors are 27 inches or larger these days. Professionals on The Verge’s video team also noticed some vignetting on the sides of the screen, which caused issues with off-angle viewing — we had a similar issue with Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Of course, neither of these limitations were a problem for my untrained eye; I thought the display looked great, with sharp details and plenty of room for my Chrome tabs and apps.

Elsewhere, Apple has upgraded the camera, microphones, and speakers. The company claims that they’re the best camera, mic system, and speaker system that have ever appeared in a Mac. I’d believe it. The six-speaker sound system is easily on par with a good external speaker. I played some music in my kitchen, and it was audible all over the house. Percussion and bass were strong, and I felt very immersed in the songs. It also supports spatial audio when playing video with Dolby Atmos.

The new camera has a higher resolution and better picture quality for video calls

I don’t have too much to say about the three-mic array except that nobody on my Zoom calls had any trouble hearing me. But the webcam was a very pleasant surprise. The iMac has a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, which has a higher resolution than the 720p shooter that lives in the 21.5-inch iMac (as well as the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and many other AIOs). The M1 also lends a hand here: its built-in image signal processor and neural engines help optimize your picture in low-light settings.

I wouldn’t say I looked amazing on my Zoom calls — parts of my background were sometimes washed out, and the image looked processed in some dimmer areas. But I was visible and clear, which is better than you get from most webcams these days. And the difference between this webcam and the grainy mess the MacBook Pro has is night and day.

The iMac is the computer to get if you just want to buy it and not think about it for the next five to ten years

When I review a computer, my task is usually to figure out for whom that computer is made.

But all kinds of people use iMacs, from college students to accountants to podcast producers to retired grandparents. And this model has arguably the most widespread consumer appeal of any iMac that Apple has made in recent years. So it’s much easier to figure out for whom this iMac isn’t made.

It’s not for people who can’t handle dongles and docks; I kept a USB-C to USB-A dongle next to me on my desk while I was testing the iMac, and I used it very frequently. It’s not for people who already own a 27-inch iMac, because it would be a downgrade in display size and quality, port selection, upgradability, and raw power. And it’s not for people with serious performance needs.

It’s not for people who are looking for the very best value for their money. Most folks won’t need the specs and accessories that I tested here, but even $1,299, the base price, is certainly more than plenty of people want to spend on a computer. The base Mac Mini is $600 cheaper than the base iMac; plug that into a monitor and some speakers (you can find plenty of good ones for well under $600), and you’ll get the same M1 performance at a massive discount.

And that, right there, is the biggest reason that this iMac, despite its power, is primarily targeting the family market. Because it’s asking you to pay more in order to do less. You’re paying $600 not to have to research and budget out monitors, speakers, webcams, docks, keyboards, and mice. You’re paying not to have to arrange thousands of things on your desk. You’re paying for a device where everything, out of the box, works well. You’re paying to eliminate fuss.

Tech enthusiasts (especially those who want to pop their machines open and make their own upgrades) may see that as a waste of money. And for them, it probably is. But they’re not the target audience for this Mac — even if its specs might suit their needs.

Could Apple have done more with this iMac? Of course. I was hoping to see a 30-inch, 6K iMac with a powerhouse 12-core workstation chip this month as much as the next person. But I have faith that we’ll get one in the future — and in the meantime, I’m glad Apple released this. It’s not earth-shattering in its design; it doesn’t redefine its category. But it’s fun. It improves upon the 21.5-inch iMac to offer a simple, attractive, and very functional device for users across all kinds of categories. It’s not the iMac to beat — but it is the iMac for most people to buy.