Peter Hagen

Twitter is not a Silicon Valley giant. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are tremendously attractive to the average person; Twitter never was and never will be. But it loomed large in the lives of journalists and was over-represented in activist circles as well. Images, videos, and stories about unrest, protests, riots, and police crackdowns reached... See more

Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part 2 was created at $220 million with nearly 200 staffers. Meanwhile, Guerrilla Games' Horizon Forbidden West set back Sony $212 million with 300 employees on the project.

This is not a place I ever expected to be. True for so much of my life.

Ben Smith, who ran BuzzFeed News during the height of the Twitter era, describes the moment in simple terms. The platform “was a kind of central, essentially elite conversation where political and tech leaders and journalists and activists and others talked to one another,” he says. “It was never complete or ‘real life,’ but it was actually a more... See more

That split between the big audience on Facebook and the influential audience on Twitter was instantly obvious to anyone in any newsroom who ever cared to look. Sicha is right to note that Twitter never sent any amount of meaningful traffic to any website — it was Facebook traffic that warped most digital media executives into futile aspirations of... See more

the search team wasn’t able to finely optimize engagement on Google without “hacking engagement,” a term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time on a site, and that doing so would lead them to “abandon work on efficient journeys.” In one email, Fox adds that there was a “pretty big disconnect between what finance and ads want”... See more

if nothing else, video game development is a series of concessions and tough decisions. There's that perfect game you WANT to make... and then there's the game you CAN make. Sometimes, if the gods smile on you, those two are very close.