Instagram is touting the success of its recent stream of updates as an important factor in helping it snap up an additional 100 million users over the past six months. As a result, Facebook’s photo-sharing platform now has a total user base of 600 million.
That’s almost double the amount of users Twitter currently has (317 million). Although, Snapchat is a better comparison, considering the similar features the two now boast — especially since Instagram started cloning its younger rival’s sharing functions — the temporal messaging app has thus far only disclosed its daily active users, which at last count stood at 150 million. Instagram, on the other hand, boasts 300 million daily users. This time round, however, it did not disclose if those figures received a bump, instead focusing on its monthly active user base.
So, what’s behind the continuing interest in the photo-sharing app? According to Instagram: “a lot has changed this year … with more ways to share than ever before.” Chief among the social-sharing updates the company has released in 2016 was its infamous take on Snapchat’s Stories feature, allowing users to share slideshow-style collections of disappearing images and videos. The platform revealed in October that Stories had quickly amassed 100 million daily views. The figure sounds impressive, but comprised just one-fifth of Instagram’s total user base (now one-sixth) and one-third of its daily user base. Overall, it remains unclear if Stories (as a general sharing function) is versatile enough to make the jump to other platforms.
Instagram also brought temporal sharing to its direct messaging function. Most recently, Instagram took after its parent company and rolled out live video, it also borrowed from Pinterest by adding a photo bookmarking function. And that’s not to mention the comment control and safety tools it announced at the start of this month.
Finally, Instagram gave an indication of its future monetization prospects with a new shopping feature that allowed select companies to sell their products within its app.
With that kind of variety, it’s no wonder tens of millions of additional users are joining the app on a monthly basis. At this rate, it’s only a matter of time till it ends up joining Facebook’s other properties (such as WhatsApp, Messenger, and its flagship social network) in the billion user club.
Discord is trying to push more visibility on the internet for some of its biggest communities, and there's a good chance your messages could end up in a Google Search. The platform is preparing to make conversations from certain public servers searchable on the web, so there's a privacy setting you might want to check before the rollout begins.
According to Discord's official announcement, the changes will roll out in two stages. Starting November 16, qualifying servers will have public web pages featuring automated summaries of conversations. By mid-December, individual messages from eligible public channels could also appear word-for-word in Google and other search engines.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?