Big changes are happening and bigger changes will happen soon all due to technology. The information age helped us reach what is being seen as a technological revolution and we are currently living through it. 1/6

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Hey, who wants to read a story about @Upwork fucking over freelancers in order to upsell their clients on unnecessary services the clients don't want and can't afford? Strap in!

So after my marketing agency closed I started freelancing again. A marketing company that wanted to work with me only hires freelance writers through @Upwork. So I signed up. I wasn't thrilled about it, but that's who they contract with and it's their marketing company.

I've been receiving regular assignments from this company, thru @Upwork, for over a month now. I've written dozens of articles for them. My work has been exemplary. I've been handling repeated rush jobs and delivering. The client was and is very happy. That's coming from them.

While I was wrapping up several assignments this week I was contacted by the marketing company. They asked if I had taken a new full-time job and wasn't available anymore. It seems @Upwork's talent group told them I was no longer available to take assignments.

I was very surprised. Nothing had changed on my end. I still needed the freelance work very much. I told them so. So the marketing company pressed @Upwork and were told there were "compliance" issues that were preventing the marketing company from giving me any more work.

For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵

1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.

2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)

3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”

4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
◻️"Customers who viewed also viewed"

Have been replaced w/ ads:

◻️ "Sponsored products related to"
◻️ "Brands related to this category"

Following up last year’s surprisingly popular "10 things you likely didn’t know about Darkroom" and your many requests for more tips, we put together a second edition that focuses on workflows in Darkroom. Click through to read it all right here in this thread.

1/10 Copy & Paste your Edits in Batch. Skip the hassles of re-applying each edit over and over again by copying your edits from the tap-and-hold library menu, History tool, or the Actions (•••) menu. Go to your other photos, and paste your edits onto them.

2/10 The joy of seeing your wonderful shot in motion is why we love Live Photos so much, and why we fully support editing and exporting them! While editing, Tap the “LIVE” button at the left top when viewing a Live Photo for playback.

3/10 Turn your iPhone to landscape for an iPad like editing experience, bringing some iPad exclusive functionality to iPhone. In the library grid we show the Library Sidebar, when viewing or editing we show the Photo Strip, and in the color tool we show our Color Histogram.

4/10 Manage while editing with the Photostrip. With the photo strip available on all devices in landscape orientation, you can skip & hop through your library while editing, or quickly compare multiple photos to find the one with the perfect expression or the perfect light.