Twitter’s new virtual reality project manager Gregory Gopman lasted around 48 hours at the company before being shown the door.
It seems Gopman secured his downfall due to an opinionated rant shared on Facebook almost two years ago. The original post, which Gopman has long deleted, saw the then AngelHack CEO describe San Francisco’s Market Street as “overrun by crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash. He also called the city’s displaced citizens “degenerates” that “gather like hyenas.”
The rant inevitably resurfaced courtesy of TechCrunch. And, sure enough, Twitter gave Gopman the boot. “Anddd I’m fired. Thanks TechCrunch,” he wrote on Facebook. “They wrote a smash piece on me last night and comms didn’t want to deal with it,” he later clarified in a reply to one of the comments on the post.
The company’s knee-jerk reaction has only made matters worse, raising more questions in relation to an embarrassing scenario it would probably much rather forget. For one, did Twitter know of the post when it made the hire? Gopman had extensively written about his changing attitude toward homelessness in a number of Medium blog posts. He even discussed it in a long-form Backchannel article published earlier this year, which came across as an attempt at redemption by SF’s “most reviled tech bro.”
With income inequality reportedly on the rise in San Francisco — the city ranks first in California for economic disparity — Twitter likely wanted to avoid any further controversy that could have stemmed from Gopman’s prior comments.
The company’s prominent hire came after a period of silence regarding its VR ambitions. The last time we heard of any VR rumblings at the social platform was back in June when it recruited ex-Apple designer Alessandro Sabatelli to lead its Twitter Cortex engineering team.
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?