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 …

Inside Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s alcohol- and snacks-saturated battle for Oscar buzz

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A month out from the 2021 Academy Awards telecast—which airs on April 25—the battle to win the love of Hollywood has turned into the year of the crate. Over the past few weeks, everyone from the indie studio A24 to indie stalwart Fox Searchlight (now a division within Disney) to Universal have dispatched across town crates of artisanal food to woo their way into the hearts—and stomachs—of the Hollywood press corps, the influential body of scribes who feverishly chronicle every twist and turn in the jostle leading up to the Oscars. Netflix, which leads this year’s nominations haul with a whopping 35 nominations for films, including Mank , The Trial of the Chicago 7 , and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , has also been lavishing edible swag on reporters, but has become more known for gifting booze. To support Malcolm & Marie , a moody art film starring Zendaya and John David Washington—which looked like an early contender but ended up not nabbing any nominations—Netflix sent out bottles of top-drawer scotch. (I’m sure it didn’t go to waste.) Swag and Oscar campaigning have always gone hand in hand during awards season—the three (to six) month swirl of parties, dinners, brunches, and getaways sponsored by the studios and streamers to stir up buzz for their contenders. But in a season that has been turned on its head due to COVID-19—in-person screenings have been verboten , along with glad-handling galas—studios and screening companies have had to be more creative about how to get the word out about their films. Even the fall film festivals, such as Venice and Telluride, which are traditionally relied on to build early buzz and critical acclaim for films, went virtual in 2020, lessening their ability to fuel word of mouth and serve as showboating opportunities for stars and filmmakers. As a result, studios and streamers are coming up with new ways to transform their projects into events. Take Nomadland . The Best Picture frontrunner—it cemented this position by nabbing the top award at the Producers Guild Awards—stars Frances McDormand as a peripatetic Amazon worker who finds beauty and serenity amongst fellow RV dwellers in the American Southwest. The film premiered at festivals last fall, but when it launched on Hulu in late February and officially came out in theaters, Fox Searchlight announced a virtual global premiere. The tactic, in part, was to keep the film feeling fresh so far along in its run, and with the delayed Oscars still a ways off. (During campaign season, the fear of peaking too soon—what many believed killed A Star is Born ‘s Best Picture chances in 2019—haunts all awards publicists.) Invitees to the event were sent the aforementioned crate—stuffed with gourmet cheese, “humanly raised” salami, and trail mix—to enjoy while watching the film. This at-home viewing party atmosphere has become de rigeur this season in an attempt to replicate the feeling and fun of an Oscar screening/gala, and to elevate the living room viewing experience beyond turning on the tube in your pajamas (though you can still do that, of course). One publicist attributed the format to Netflix, which has been throwing “virtual premieres” ever since COVID-19 hit. Invitees who RSVP “yes” to a Netflix premiere see the film show up in their Netflix preview row, and are then sent popcorn or a DoorDash coupon to enjoy with the show Read More …

Republicans have a new line of attack against the social media giants

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In past Congressional hearings about the content moderation practices of big tech companies, Republican lawmakers have been fixated on complaints that Silicon Valley censors conservative viewpoints, a claim that studies have revealed to be false . But a very different GOP showed up Thursday to question the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter in a hearing on misinformation in front of the joint subcommittees of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Republicans questioned the witnesses on a far wider variety of issues, many of which aligned with the interests of Democrats. This certainly wasn’t apparent from the get-go. Ranking minority member Robert Latta of Ohio read this from his opening remarks: “We are all aware of Big Tech’s ever increasing censorship of conservative voices and their commitment to serve the radical progressive agenda by influencing a generation of children by either shutting down or cancelling any news, books, or even toys that aren’t considered woke.” But it soon became apparent that other Republicans were interested in moving on from this well-worn non-starter. Instead, a new theme emerged to connect many of the Republicans’ comments and questions: that Big Tech companies’ services are harmful to families Read More …

This viral TikTok perfectly explains how the COVID-19 vaccines work

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A few weeks ago, several epidemiologists and doctors who usually take to Twitter to share news articles, studies, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began sharing the same TikTok meme. The TikTok video is a short skit by an actor named Vick Krishna who turns the mundane process of vaccination into a good-versus-evil thriller to explain how the mRNA vaccine works. It’s been viewed 6 million times on TikTok alone, and has been shared on other social platforms and in text messages where it’s harder to measure its reach. I immediately sent the video to everyone in my life who had displayed even the slightest tone of skepticism in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Most people who show a little wariness toward the new vaccines are not anti-vaccine, per se, they just want to fully understand what it is they’re having injected into their body. Unfortunately, there are few resources that plainly explain vaccine technology . And in the absence of good and easily understood explainers , misinformation thrives. But Krishna’s video isn’t just a good explainer of how the technology works. It’s also entertaining enough to go viral, a rare achievement for wholesome health information on social platforms that are designed to promote salacious, outrageous, and enraging content—the very stuff that pandemic-related misinformation is made of. Last May, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University and an expert on disinformation, eloquently laid out the problem : Algorithms enable COVID-19 misinformation to spread quickly and reach millions, while facts about the pandemic and health languish, seen by a only a few. “Do we need to have an enormous pro-vaccine movement waste tons of resources on that [content] just because social media has decided to preference the voices and positions of people who will go online and advocate for dangerous or mistaken points of view? What would be the value in that?” Donovan said. “Nevertheless, that’s one of the only solutions on the table.” More commonly, memes about the vaccine tend to play on negative tropes. For instance, there is a seemingly harmless TikTok meme, best identified as “me after I get the COVID-19 vaccine,” where people show videos of themselves rhythmically convulsing or barking like a dog or feigning other strange side effects. These are meant to be playful, but they actually play on anti-vaccine ideas that the shots are in some way harmful. This meme has been replicated and reposted an incalculable number of times on TikTok and Instagram Reels, then reposted on YouTube and Twitter Read More …

How the Tesla of chicken hit a ludicrous growth mode thanks to ghost kitchens

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Ben Pasternak had a problem. The founder and CEO of alt-meat startup Nuggs had seen plenty of initial buzz and success for his plant-based chicken nuggets, signing on investors that include AgFunder, McCain Foods, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and former Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb since its founding in 2019. But as of mid-2020, the company wasn’t yet in retail stores or sold in any fast-food outlets. Pasternak began brainstorming about how he could get Nuggs into people’s hands, beyond the company’s direct-to-consumer online sales. One idea was to have pop-up food trucks near college campuses, but he quickly realized that would be very tough to scale. “We were just thinking about the customer experience, and the A-plus experience would be to order Nuggs, it arrives 15 minutes later, you can spend $10, and it gets there with french fries and other sides, a drink, and some ketchup,” says chief operating officer Sam Terris. “So we worked backwards from there.” That’s when they landed on ghost kitchens. Euromonitor has estimated that ghost kitchens could be a $1 trillion industry by 2030. The concept has not only been used by established restaurant brands like McDonald’s and Chick-Fil-A experimenting with delivery and food prep efficiency, but it’s also launched a new wave of delivery-only restaurant brands in cities around the country. In Canada, Walmart is testing in-store ghost kitchens that offer restaurant meals from established brands like Quiznos, as well as items from well-known CPG brands like Beyond Meat and Ben & Jerry’s. [Photo: Simulate] Nuggs, however, doesn’t fit into any of those categories. It’s not a new or established restaurant, nor a well-known CPG brand. But the company launched its own ghost kitchen operation in San Francisco last September and has since seen explosive growth. Not only is Nuggs now among UberEats users’ 10 favorite delivery spots in that region, but its delivery orders have increased by more than four times. That’s consistent with everything we’ve been reading about ghost kitchens over the last year, particularly with a pandemic-fueled boost in app-based food delivery, but traffic to the company’s site is also up more than 300%. The company, which is now known as Simulate and whose mission is to develop “advanced nutrition technology,” has its products in retail stores around the country, most notably Whole Foods. Pasternak says the progression from DTC to ghost kitchens to retail gives the brand an advantage over brands trying to just launch in a single sales channel. “We got so much traction over the past year, now launching into retail, it seems that companies that don’t have their own platform first find it very difficult to find traction,” says Pasternak. “Whereas for us, with DTC and cloud kitchens, we have this existing user base, and retail is just another way for them to get the product they’re already familiar with.” Nuggs has now expanded its ghost kitchen options to Los Angeles (with New York coming soon), and both Pasternak and Terris say perhaps the biggest lesson so far has been how the ghost kitchen has emerged as a product-research platform and brand-awareness tool. “With retail and food service, the necessary evil is having these large distributors that aren’t agile at all, which doesn’t allow you to iterate quickly within their systems,” says Pasternak. Read More …