How TikTok Became the App That Rewired Global Attention
Five years ago, almost nobody outside East Asia could pronounce ByteDance. Today, the Beijing-based company controls the most downloaded application…
WhatsApp’s Quiet Empire: How the Emerging-Market Super-App Was Built One Group Chat at a Time
In Silicon Valley, WhatsApp is usually filed under “Meta’s other messenger.” In São Paulo, Mumbai, Jakarta, Lagos and Mexico City,…
Instagram Reels and the Most Expensive Pivot in Meta’s History
For more than a decade, Instagram defined what aspirational social media looked like: square photographs, perfectly composed grids, an interface…
Telegram, the Power-User Messenger That Became a Geopolitical Object
Telegram is not, in the strictest sense, a private messenger. Its default chats are not end-to-end encrypted; only its opt-in…
CapCut: How ByteDance Quietly Became the World’s Most-Used Video Editor
The most consequential creative tool of the short-form video era was not developed in Cupertino, San Jose or San Francisco.…
WeChat: The Original Super-App That the Rest of the World Has Spent a Decade Trying to Copy
Outside Asia, “super-app” is a phrase Silicon Valley product managers use in pitch decks. Inside China, it is the unremarkable…
Discord’s Transformation From Gamer VoIP to Everyone-Has-a-Server Community Platform
If you had described Discord to a Silicon Valley investor in 2014, you would have been ignored. Voice-over-IP for gamers…
Spotify and the Economics of Streaming, Twenty Years On
Two decades after Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon registered Spotify Technology S.A. in Sweden, the company they founded is the…
Roblox and the Generation That Grew Up Inside a Game Engine
If you have spent any time around a child between the ages of eight and fourteen since 2018, you already…
How a Korean Children’s Channel Made the Most-Viewed Video in the History of YouTube
When YouTube was founded in 2005, no human being alive could have predicted that the most-viewed video on the platform…