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Contract employees of ride sharing apps and services arent known for having the steadiest or even sanest of pay rates. Lyft just announced some new earnings improvements for its drivers that will help cover their expenses when rides take longer than they should and show them how much theyll earn before they pick up a fare. Lyft announced the new driver earnings improvements on its official blog. The new earnings improvements aim to tackle drivers biggest frustrations, and make it more rewarding for Lyft drivers. One of the biggest improvements affects how drivers are paid if they are stuck in traffic or go out of their way to help a rider. Lyft is implementing a new 5-minute-delay pay structure that will increase a drivers pay if any ride takes five minutes longer than expected. Out-of-your-way pay covers drivers who have to drive out of the normal coverage area only to turn around and drive all the way back without any fares. Lyft is also implementing a new earnings dashboard on the mobile app for drivers. The new interface will also show drivers daily, weekly and yearly earnings and the estimated hourly rate for each ride so drivers dont have to make the mental calculation, according to the post. Drivers who drive electric vehicles for Lyft are also seeing some new benefits. EV drivers can choose only to receive rides that fall within their vehicles battery range and find nearby charging stations on the Lyft drivers app. Of course, these new policies and changes wont solve Lyft drivers problems overnight. Itll take time to see if they make a dent (the good kind of dent).This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/lyft-promises-upfront-hourly-rates-and-traffic-delay-pay-for-its-drivers-220142458.html?src=rss
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Following 11 months of testing, Mastodon is releasing one of its biggest updates of the year. In a blog post attributed to CEO and founder Eugen Rochko, the non-profit detailed its 4.3 release on Tuesday, promising improvements for nearly every part of the social media experience. Perhaps most significantly, Mastodon has overhauled how notifications work. To start, the platform will now group boosts and favorites together so that users arent bombarded with notifications when one of their posts goes viral. At the same time, Mastodon is introducing new filters to make it easier to ignore notifications from people you dont follow, newly created accounts and those who send you unsolicited private mentions. With the new feature, you can choose to see those notifications, prevent them from ever reaching your phone or send them to a separate inbox for later viewing. Separately, Mastodon is introducing a new set of notifications designed to inform users if a server moderator made a decision that affects their account. Specifically, if a mod takes direct action against your account, you receive an in-app message you cant miss. The platform will also notify users when they lose followers due to moderator decisions and offer the option to export a list of affected accounts. Alongside those changes, Mastodon has redesigned a few different parts of its app. Starting with the compose window, the company says the new interface makes it easier to rearrange media, as well as see content warnings and word filters. Elsewhere, Mastodon has refreshed its web client, tweaking the softwares color palette, iconography and link previews. Utility emails, including those users receive following a password reset, have gotten a once-over, too. On the interface front, Mastodon has reworked confirmation dialogues to better describe how muting and blocking will affect the user. For example, if youre about to block a server, the app will detail exactly how many followers you stand to lose from that decision. On the subject of followers, Mastodon has added a new recommendation carousel that users will see after scrolling past the first post on their feed thats older than four hours. At the same time, the company has tweaked recommendations to make them more relevant to people. Rounding things out, Mastodon has refreshed website embeds and made it easier to follow the author of a trending news article. The enhancements come after X recently changed how its block button works, a move some have argued has made the platform even less desirable to use. Rochko doesnt mention X specifically or Meta and Bluesky, for that matter but does point to a general desire to make Mastodon more attractive to everyday users. One of [our] ongoing efforts is to make Mastodon easy and delightful to use. Weve invested a significant amount of money and time into working with professional designers and performing user testing over the last few years, but we really ramped up our efforts in 2023, he wrote. Mastodon is quite a large application, and our resources remain very constrained compared to our corporate competitors, but weve made significant progress on improving the look and feel of Mastodon across the board.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mastodons-new-notifications-wont-blow-up-your-phone-after-a-viral-post-anymore-211215016.html?src=rss
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A research company published a damning report about Roblox on Tuesday, accusing the company of inflating its active user counts and enabling predatory behavior on the platform. Although Hindenburg Research has a somewhat notorious reputation, the report at least raises questions about the platforms safety and viability. First, Hindenburg Research is known for taking deep dives into public companies practices, finding sketchy behavior and publishing it. However, as noted by Simon Carless, a gaming industry veteran and author of the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, Hindenburg also tends to short-sell the companies downfalls, literally betting that its research will lead to their failures. Reuters notes that Hindenburg has previously sunk the share prices of Super Micro Computer and stocks owned by investor Carl Icahn, Indias Gautam Adani. So, despite making some eyebrow-raising points in the report, you may want to take Hindenburg with more than a few grains of salt. On the other hand, some of its investigations have led to SEC investigations. As for the specific claims, the researchers say Robloxs stock price is partly based on misleading data. Hindenburg states that Roblox is inflating stats like user numbers and engagement, conflating daily active users with visitors. Our research indicates that Roblox is lying to investors, regulators, and advertisers about the number of people on its platform, inflating the key metric by 25-42%+, Hindenburg Research wrote. We also show how engagement hours, another key metric, is inflated by an estimated 100%+. Hindenburg quotes former Roblox employees in its report. One claims the company can track users with alt accounts, but its public user tracking doesnt adjust for those. If I have 10 alts [alternate accounts], because Im farming Pet Simulator on 10 accounts and all of those are running a script on different virtual machines in my computer theyre all still coming out of the same IP address, Hindenburg quotes the former employee as saying. I made all 10 of those accounts. Their names are similar. Their account creation times are similarIm still one player, not 10. De-alting Robloxs numbers, which means adjusting for alt accounts to get a more accurate picture of player count, would allegedly lead to much lower numbers. One of the former Roblox employees reportedly told Hindenburg, Lets say if that number [DAUs] is not de-alted, I think the actual one would be like anywhere between 30 to 20% lower A Roblox spokesperson provided Engadget with a published statement denying Hindenburgs claims. The company noted that it regularly includes a note to investors explaining how its operating metrics are calculated and has done so since its initial public filing. The financial claims made by Hindenburg are misleading, Roblox wrote. The authors are short sellers and have an agenda irrespective of the substance of Robloxs business model and results. Carless also advises taking the researchers claims with grains of salt. Our view on this is that theres no systemic bad behavior by Roblox here, the former game developer and GDC co-runner wrote. The game is giant and chaotic, so of course there are going to be bots and weird behavior all over the place. Speaking with Reuters, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter went even further, accusing Hindenburg of getting gaming metrics all wrong. There are many interesting points in that report, but they seem to misunderstand a lot about how games work, Pachter reportedly said. He said the research firm measured engagement based on a session. However, gamers typically log on multiple times daily, playing various games. The Hindenburg test looks like it measured session length for a single game for each user, Pachter said. Hindenburgs report also accuses Roblox of compromising child safety in order to report growth to investors. It even goes as far as accusing the platform of allowing pedophiles to flourish on the platform. For the second quarter of 2024, in a push toward profitability, Roblox reported a 2% year-over-year decline in its trust and safety expenses, Hindenburg wrote, highlighting the companys shift to AI moderation. Core to the problem is that Robloxs social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform. Robloxs child safety problems have been reported before. Hindenburg said it tried to set up an account under Jeffrey Epstein, only to find the username was taken, along with 900+ variations. One account, JeffEpsteinSupporter, reportedly had multiple badges for spending time in childrens games. Others had disturbing usernames alluding to grooming or raping minors. Even if those accounts were made by attention-starved teens or young adults using edgelord attempts at humor, those allegations, if true, represent a colossal moderation failure. Roblox wrote that it takes user trust and child safety seriously. Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages have safe and positive experiences on Roblox, abiding by the companys Community Standards, the company wrote in a statement. Roblox takes any content or behavior on the platform that doesnt abide by its standards extremely seriously, and Roblox has a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent malicious or harmful activity on the platform.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/short-sellers-accuse-roblox-of-inflating-user-stats-and-enabling-child-exploitation-205635537.html?src=rss
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