Things don't look great

🙁 Creators: Losing Brand Deals

👻 Product: Snapchat Spotlight Replies

🪑 Crypto: Commandeering a Whale’s Wallet

How Creators Are Also Affected by the Downturn

Companies have conducted layoffs, slowed hiring, cut costs, and reduced ad and marketing spend. Given that these organizations spend on influencer marketing and sponsorships, we’d expect the creators to be affected. Well, we don’t have to extrapolate any longer. Ezra Cooperstein — the president of Night, a media talent management company and venture studio, which works with creators like Mr. Beast — confirmed their creators were affected: “We had several brands cancel signed deals with creators. Buckle up.”

Replies in Snapchat Spotlight

Axios reported that Snap is testing text replies for Snapchat Spotlight, its TikTok competitor. It’s wild to me that replies as a feature are now coming out for the platform that was released in 2020. It’s one of the most engaging parts of TikTok, seeing how people respond to the video. There is definitely comedy gold in TikTok comments. I do respect Snap’s approach to slowing down and being intentional about moderation, but dang, so much engagement missed over the last 1-2 years.

Interesting tidbit: in screencaps from their earlier newsrooms (Dec 2021), you can see replies were already designed (at least mocked up) - see the rightmost image here:

WTF, you can take over wallets?

Solend, a Solana DeFi product, submitted a now approved proposal in their DAO to temporarily take over a wallet with a massively leveraged position. The Solend team indicated that if liquidated, the account would put a huge strain on the network and they themselves would liquidate the account in a way to avoid battering the Solana network.

TBH, I don’t understand what happens now that the proposal is approved. How are they getting this emergency power, I imagine not the secret key of the wallet? Do they hardcode and deploy a new contract that lets them act as this wallet? Can this every happen at the Solana level if something unsafe was ongoing on the network?

Looks like I have some reading to do.