Category: Features

5 things people are getting wrong about NFTs

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NFTs (nonfungible tokens) are having a moment right now. Tons of digital collectibles have been traded, including Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot , which raked in $1.05 million for just one recent pack of basketball videos, and Everydays: The First 5000 Days , a digital image by artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), which sold for $69.3 million at high-end auction house Christie’s. NFT transactions tripled in 2020, reaching more than $250 million, according to the Non-Fungible Tokens 2020 Yearly Report from NonFungible and L’Atelier. And they show no sign of slowing in 2021. But the big money currently being thrown around for single pieces leads to overall misconceptions about the cost and value of NFTs and their place in the market. Read More …

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

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Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …

The NSFW future of OnlyFans, where celebs, influencers, and sex workers post side by side

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Vex Ashley began working as a cam girl to pay her way through art school. Whatever reservations she had about being a “little weird goth kid” doing porn melted away as she met other performers online who also had a more alternative approach to mainstream adult content. “I thought that to do porn, you had to fit a very rigid stereotype,” Ashley says. “I never was interested in fitting into that mold.” Ashley wanted to infuse porn with a higher level of aesthetics and concepts, using it as a medium to explore ideas rather than purely for viewing pleasure. And if ever there was a tenet of the creator economy, it’s that niche interests can always find an audience. Ashley uploaded experimental videos to Tumblr and quickly gained a following that she took to Patreon in 2014 to better monetize her art and support her production company, Four Chambers . At the height of her success on Patreon, Ashley had more than 3,000 subscribers and was pulling in around $25,000 per month. But after the platform changed its policies in 2018, she effectively lost it all. Vex Ashley [Photo: courtesy of Four Chambers] Like many other adult content creators whose Patreon revenue was decimated, Ashley migrated to OnlyFans in 2018. And like many of her peers, she’s now wary of meeting the same fate on the platform. OnlyFans, which allows creators to charge users a monthly or pay-per-view fee to access content, launched in 2016 with the intention of being for all types of creators but has become a nexus for adult entertainment. Amateur and professionals alike have flocked to OnlyFans as a safe haven to monetize NSFW (not safe for work) content, becoming the key drivers of the platform’s early growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that momentum as more creators looked to OnlyFans as a source of income during record rates of unemployment. Between March and April of last year, OnlyFans experienced a 75% spike in new user and creator registrations. To date, OnlyFans has more than 120 million users and 1 million creators who have earned more than $3 billion collectively (the company takes a 20% cut). Read More …

The clothes we wear are about to undergo a wild digital revolution

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Imagine an article of clothing that could tell your washing machine how to keep its colors from fading. Imagine a piece of clothing that could warm your body in the winter and cool it down in the summer. Imagine wearing clothes that weren’t designed last year, or last season, but yesterday, in response to that day’s buying patterns. Imagine being able to fully customize every article of clothing in your wardrobe for the same cost as mass-produced items. And imagine a clothing industry that could do all of this while significantly reducing emissions and retaining most of its workforce. Thanks to new advancements in manufacturing, you won’t have to imagine forever. While the clothing we wear today is largely designed, manufactured, and sold in the same way it was 100 years ago, what we wear is expected to change dramatically in the not-so-distant future, thanks to advancements in manufacturing technology. Read More …

These 7 tips will make you a Chromebook power user

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Part of the appeal of handy-dandy Chromebooks is that they’re so easy to use. Boot one up, sign in to your Google account, and . . . well, that’s about it. But if you use a Chromebook regularly, there are a handful of pretty cool and useful features you might not have discovered yet. Let’s take a look at some tips and tricks that make life with a Chromebook more rewarding. Terrific touchpad tricks You’ve moused around. You’ve clicked. Maybe you’ve even clicked and dragged. But wait! There’s more. To perform a right-click—say, to bring up a context menu—you can either click two fingers on the touchpad at the same time or hold down the Alt key and click with one finger. You can also use two fingers at a time to scroll up and down or left and right. If you’ve got an active webpage open in Chrome, swiping left or right acts like clicking the back or forward buttons in the browser. To open a link in a new Chrome tab, click it with three fingers at once. Read More …