Many marketers juggle multiple Instagram accounts on their phone — one for themselves, maybe a finsta, and one or more for the brand they work for. On Instagram, you don’t need to manually log out of one account and into another to manage them; it has a quick-switcher, where you tap and hold the profile icon, and you can quickly switch to another account.
That functionality is now in Threads.
The company didn’t specify if there was a limit on the number of accounts you could quick-switch with.
This was announced yesterday, the same day Facebook said they’d permit people to create multiple fake profiles and use them on the site — a peculiar shift from their policy on authentic identity, a policy the company claims is still somehow in effect, despite giving the official nod to inauthentic identities.
So certainly welcome news for people who switch accounts often. Hopefully next up on marketers’ wish list: Hashtag discovery and an API.
In Brief:
Snapchat says its premium subscription now has 5 million users — that’s up 20% since just this past June, and is about five times as many as Twitter’s premium subscription has. read more
Meta has introduced animated avatar stickers to WhatsApp. Users can now add moving versions of their digital selves in chats. This is part of Meta’s ongoing effort to integrate avatars everywhere across its platforms. read more
And finally…
No doubt you’ve heard about Amazon’s problem with auto-generated, low-effort books being sold on its platform. The stories are endless — travel guides recommending you visit places that don’t exist; cooking books that give you recipes which include highly toxic mushrooms.
Enterprising shisters are having ChatGPT write terrible books, then upload them to Amazon — hundreds of them at a time.
They are, of course, a mix of nonsense and regurgitated blog posts — some of which, I’m sure, themselves written by AI.
To combat this, Amazon says it will limit the number of books an author can upload in a specific time period. Which is a great idea, really. Even the fastest author can only churn out a decent book — what, once every week (if it’s a really small book)?
A totally human number amirite?
Amazon’s new book upload limit: Three books…. A day.
Because that’s a totally human-achievable number of books you could write?
More than anything, the new limit signals Amazon’s acceptance of AI-generated books. The reason why should be obvious — they make money money on them.
Amazon still hasn’t really figured any of this out.
Just last week, they said authors must disclose to Amazon when AI was used to write a book, but there wasn’t anything about enforcement or disclosure to consumers. On the other hand, they pulled down some books that had been written by AI after media reports about the trend surfaced.
Source: A Totally Human-Achievable Number