• Feature: The Long & Rainbow Road To 'Mario Kart World' Part 3 - Final Lap

    Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeAnd we're back, once again, on the road to Mario Kart World - and we're in the final stretch.
    On the two previous laps we've looked at every console Mario Kart game from the Super NES up to the Wii. For this final go-round, we're looking at two console entries which span a massive 14-year period.
    MK8 got some significant expansions across two consoles, so we've split that into two separate sections. And if you're keen to hear more about Mario's non-console karting exploits, we'll take a quick look at those next week before starting our engines up for Mario Kart World on 5th June.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube813kWatch on YouTube
    This week's Nintendo developer interviews delved into the game in much more depth than the lacklustre Mario Kart Direct back in April, firing up our excitement once more. Once we've been able to leave the tracks, we wonder what it'll feel like to return to the restrictive circuits in these past games...but that's another article.
    Let's kick off this final lap with lucky number seven...

    Lap 1 - SMK, MK64 & Super Circuit

    Double Dash, DS, Wii

    Mario Kart 7Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life

    Ah yes, seven entries in and we finally arrive at the first numbered game in the series. There was always something that made me laugh about this being called 'Mario Kart 7', made all the more hilarious by Mario Kart World not being called 'Mario Kart 9'. After cool names like Super Circuit and Double Dash!!, '7' felt decidedly uncool. Which is ironic because the game was anything but.
    Image: Nintendo
    Sure, it lacked the local multiplayer pull of the home console releases, but I got to drive a kart that could fly and go underwater, which I'd say is a fair trade-off. I distinctly remember driving around Cheep Cheep Lagoon for the first time and its aquatic appeal blowing my little mind. I played with the 3D slider cranked up to the max, you see, and drifting around that seaweed felt like the future.
    You know what else was cool? Customisable karts. I didn't particularly care for stats at the time and would instead set out to build the most horrific abomination ever committed to the track. Not getting to see my masterpiece was one of the main reasons why I rarely used the game's first-person driving mode — that and the fact that I tried it out in the back of the car once and it made me sick. - Jim Norman

    Standout tracks: DK Jungle, Rock Rock Mountain, Cheep Cheep Lagoon
    Fun fact: Despite the Nintendo Network servers shutting down in April 2024, it wasn't until November that year that the final Mario Kart 7 player finally crashed out of the last-standing game lobby. That's quite the victory lap!
    What does Mario Kart World take from this? Gliding has had a winged makeover in World, but it's the same fundamentals that we first saw in MK7. Underwater driving is another obvious one, although from what we've seen so far, racing atop the waves is the only option in MKW. The Fire Flower appears to still be going strong after making its series debut in the 3DS entry, though.

    What score would you give Mario Kart 7?10 - Outstanding14%9 - Excellent28%8 - Great35%7 - Good17%6 - Not Bad5%5 - Average1%4 - Poor1%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1%

    Mario Kart 8Images: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life, Nintendo
    There was an audible gasp when I told my colleagues that I'd spent more time playing Mario Kart 8 on Wii U than I have 8 Deluxe. It has nothing to do with preference — Deluxe is clearly the version to play now. But my life was pretty different between 2014 and 2017.
    Other than a few Virtual Console RPGs and Xenoblade X, Mario Kart 8 was one of the few games I actually played on the Wii U, a console I don't have a lot of love for otherwise. I was at university and barely in my 20s at that point; I also preferred playing stuff on the big screen, so I'd sort of skipped over MK7.
    Image: Nintendo

    8's extravagantly bright courses and colourful worlds were like revisiting my childhood, except now we have anti-gravity and huge courses that look like they stretch for miles and miles. Gorgeous sky-high races and crowded city streets were back on the menu, and I got that old Mario Kart Wii feeling back.
    The biggest thing I remember was the downloadable content. Nintendo had been dabbling in DLC for a few years then, but I was still a sceptical student who only wanted to spend money on things I thought I would love. Then, Mario Kart 8 dangled the ol' Animal Crossing carrot. Oh gosh.
    Look, a free Mercedes-Benz was all well and good, but Zelda, Animal Crossing, and F-Zero courses coming to a Mario Kart game? It's like Smash Bros. but Mario Kart. Oh, Baby Park's back? No, thank you - Hyrule Circuit awaits.
    I really like all of the DLC courses, but I admit I was a little disappointed by the Animal Crossing one. It's a little basic and while the seasonal changes are beautiful, I'd have loved a little more variety in the course obstacles per season. The big surprise were the F-Zero ones, a series I never really got into. It took Mario Kart to make me want a new F-Zero game. Big Blue on 200cc? It's pure magic. - Alana Hagues

    Standout tracks: Toad Harbour, Sunshine Airport, Cloudtop Cruise, Big BlueFun fact: Firehopping, or frogging, was a common technique used online to maintain longer boosts from a mini-boost. Nintendo removed this in Deluxe, meaning it was probably an unintentional glitch.
    What does Mario Kart World take from this? Hmmm... okay, well, since 8 Deluxe is essentially MK8 but better, maybe let's save this...

    Second Lap
    It's natural that the Switch version has totally supplanted the original in most players' memories - which is why I was keen to break out the Wii U version in its own section here.
    Besides disappointment around the Battle offering, this was a substantial, massively satisfying racer with a fun anti-grav hook, and there's something homely and attractive about MK8 on that chunky GamePad minus the bloat and the 'more, more, MOAARRRR'.
    I say 'bloat' - the Deluxe additions were great, I just quite enjoy the comparative simplicity and 'strangeness' of this version after eight long years with the upgrade. Deluxe is better, but it was all armour over this game's brilliant body.
    Gavin Lane
    Editor, Nintendo Life

    What score would you give Mario Kart 8?10 - Outstanding33%9 - Excellent42%8 - Great18%7 - Good5%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average1%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1%

    Mario Kart 8 Deluxe & Booster Course PassImage: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life

    It's the best-selling game on the Switch, although I wonder where it stands in the Most Played rankings. Even if you were one of the Nintendo faithful who'd bought a Wii U and unlocked every Cup, got the DLC, and played MK8 to absolute death, you still had to buy 8 Deluxe.
    The proper Battle Mode and the ability to hold two items were major boons, but it was really the convenience of having full-fledged Mario Kart on the go with two pads that made MK8D indispensable for any Switch owner. You just had to have it.
    Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life
    It was interesting to hear the devs discuss "kicking the can down the road" and using the Booster Course Pass as a stopgap. Still, what a stopgap! 48 new tracks, with returning courses, some reimagined, some borrowed from Tour, a couple of totally new ones - with so many new courses, it was tough to get upset with the odd dud, especially if you were getting access to all these via an Expansion Pack sub. And the real-world locales added a different flavour to the mayhem - they generally weren't up there with the best of the other courses, but I liked seeing Nintendo's take on London and Madrid.
    Throw in all the oddities from before, plus a host of new onesand no wonder it's taken Nintendo eight years to come up with a sequel. - Gavin Lane

    Standout tracks: Bone-Dry Dunes, Mount Wario, Yoshi's IslandFun fact: As of 31st March 2025, this has sold 68.2 million copies and is Switch's best-selling game - that's 59.74 million copies more than the original sold on Wii U, although MK8 was also that system's bestseller.
    What does Mario Kart World take from this? In some ways it feels like the end of the road for old-style Mario Kart on self-contained tracks - MK8D's completeness gave Nintendo the impetus to push beyond the bounds of the circuits into a bigger world. You might even say a Mario Kart W— *blue shell explodes*

    What score would you give Mario Kart 8 Deluxe?10 - Outstanding43%9 - Excellent34%8 - Great17%7 - Good4%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average  0%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1%

    Image: Nintendo

    And that brings us up to date!... Or does it? In fact, there are a few byways to travel before we hit the highway in Mario Kart World. Join us next week for a lap of honour where we take a quick look at the side-games and also-rans in the Mario Kart series.

    The sweat, the tears, the evil babies

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    Gavin first wrote for Nintendo Life in 2018 before joining the site full-time the following year, rising through the ranks to become Editor. He can currently be found squashed beneath a Switch backlog the size of Normandy.

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    #feature #long #ampamp #rainbow #road
    Feature: The Long & Rainbow Road To 'Mario Kart World' Part 3 - Final Lap
    Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeAnd we're back, once again, on the road to Mario Kart World - and we're in the final stretch. On the two previous laps we've looked at every console Mario Kart game from the Super NES up to the Wii. For this final go-round, we're looking at two console entries which span a massive 14-year period. MK8 got some significant expansions across two consoles, so we've split that into two separate sections. And if you're keen to hear more about Mario's non-console karting exploits, we'll take a quick look at those next week before starting our engines up for Mario Kart World on 5th June.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube813kWatch on YouTube This week's Nintendo developer interviews delved into the game in much more depth than the lacklustre Mario Kart Direct back in April, firing up our excitement once more. Once we've been able to leave the tracks, we wonder what it'll feel like to return to the restrictive circuits in these past games...but that's another article. Let's kick off this final lap with lucky number seven... Lap 1 - SMK, MK64 & Super Circuit Double Dash, DS, Wii Mario Kart 7Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life Ah yes, seven entries in and we finally arrive at the first numbered game in the series. There was always something that made me laugh about this being called 'Mario Kart 7', made all the more hilarious by Mario Kart World not being called 'Mario Kart 9'. After cool names like Super Circuit and Double Dash!!, '7' felt decidedly uncool. Which is ironic because the game was anything but. Image: Nintendo Sure, it lacked the local multiplayer pull of the home console releases, but I got to drive a kart that could fly and go underwater, which I'd say is a fair trade-off. I distinctly remember driving around Cheep Cheep Lagoon for the first time and its aquatic appeal blowing my little mind. I played with the 3D slider cranked up to the max, you see, and drifting around that seaweed felt like the future. You know what else was cool? Customisable karts. I didn't particularly care for stats at the time and would instead set out to build the most horrific abomination ever committed to the track. Not getting to see my masterpiece was one of the main reasons why I rarely used the game's first-person driving mode — that and the fact that I tried it out in the back of the car once and it made me sick. - Jim Norman Standout tracks: DK Jungle, Rock Rock Mountain, Cheep Cheep Lagoon Fun fact: Despite the Nintendo Network servers shutting down in April 2024, it wasn't until November that year that the final Mario Kart 7 player finally crashed out of the last-standing game lobby. That's quite the victory lap! What does Mario Kart World take from this? Gliding has had a winged makeover in World, but it's the same fundamentals that we first saw in MK7. Underwater driving is another obvious one, although from what we've seen so far, racing atop the waves is the only option in MKW. The Fire Flower appears to still be going strong after making its series debut in the 3DS entry, though. What score would you give Mario Kart 7?10 - Outstanding14%9 - Excellent28%8 - Great35%7 - Good17%6 - Not Bad5%5 - Average1%4 - Poor1%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Mario Kart 8Images: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life, Nintendo There was an audible gasp when I told my colleagues that I'd spent more time playing Mario Kart 8 on Wii U than I have 8 Deluxe. It has nothing to do with preference — Deluxe is clearly the version to play now. But my life was pretty different between 2014 and 2017. Other than a few Virtual Console RPGs and Xenoblade X, Mario Kart 8 was one of the few games I actually played on the Wii U, a console I don't have a lot of love for otherwise. I was at university and barely in my 20s at that point; I also preferred playing stuff on the big screen, so I'd sort of skipped over MK7. Image: Nintendo 8's extravagantly bright courses and colourful worlds were like revisiting my childhood, except now we have anti-gravity and huge courses that look like they stretch for miles and miles. Gorgeous sky-high races and crowded city streets were back on the menu, and I got that old Mario Kart Wii feeling back. The biggest thing I remember was the downloadable content. Nintendo had been dabbling in DLC for a few years then, but I was still a sceptical student who only wanted to spend money on things I thought I would love. Then, Mario Kart 8 dangled the ol' Animal Crossing carrot. Oh gosh. Look, a free Mercedes-Benz was all well and good, but Zelda, Animal Crossing, and F-Zero courses coming to a Mario Kart game? It's like Smash Bros. but Mario Kart. Oh, Baby Park's back? No, thank you - Hyrule Circuit awaits. I really like all of the DLC courses, but I admit I was a little disappointed by the Animal Crossing one. It's a little basic and while the seasonal changes are beautiful, I'd have loved a little more variety in the course obstacles per season. The big surprise were the F-Zero ones, a series I never really got into. It took Mario Kart to make me want a new F-Zero game. Big Blue on 200cc? It's pure magic. - Alana Hagues Standout tracks: Toad Harbour, Sunshine Airport, Cloudtop Cruise, Big BlueFun fact: Firehopping, or frogging, was a common technique used online to maintain longer boosts from a mini-boost. Nintendo removed this in Deluxe, meaning it was probably an unintentional glitch. What does Mario Kart World take from this? Hmmm... okay, well, since 8 Deluxe is essentially MK8 but better, maybe let's save this... Second Lap It's natural that the Switch version has totally supplanted the original in most players' memories - which is why I was keen to break out the Wii U version in its own section here. Besides disappointment around the Battle offering, this was a substantial, massively satisfying racer with a fun anti-grav hook, and there's something homely and attractive about MK8 on that chunky GamePad minus the bloat and the 'more, more, MOAARRRR'. I say 'bloat' - the Deluxe additions were great, I just quite enjoy the comparative simplicity and 'strangeness' of this version after eight long years with the upgrade. Deluxe is better, but it was all armour over this game's brilliant body. Gavin Lane Editor, Nintendo Life What score would you give Mario Kart 8?10 - Outstanding33%9 - Excellent42%8 - Great18%7 - Good5%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average1%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Mario Kart 8 Deluxe & Booster Course PassImage: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life It's the best-selling game on the Switch, although I wonder where it stands in the Most Played rankings. Even if you were one of the Nintendo faithful who'd bought a Wii U and unlocked every Cup, got the DLC, and played MK8 to absolute death, you still had to buy 8 Deluxe. The proper Battle Mode and the ability to hold two items were major boons, but it was really the convenience of having full-fledged Mario Kart on the go with two pads that made MK8D indispensable for any Switch owner. You just had to have it. Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life It was interesting to hear the devs discuss "kicking the can down the road" and using the Booster Course Pass as a stopgap. Still, what a stopgap! 48 new tracks, with returning courses, some reimagined, some borrowed from Tour, a couple of totally new ones - with so many new courses, it was tough to get upset with the odd dud, especially if you were getting access to all these via an Expansion Pack sub. And the real-world locales added a different flavour to the mayhem - they generally weren't up there with the best of the other courses, but I liked seeing Nintendo's take on London and Madrid. Throw in all the oddities from before, plus a host of new onesand no wonder it's taken Nintendo eight years to come up with a sequel. - Gavin Lane Standout tracks: Bone-Dry Dunes, Mount Wario, Yoshi's IslandFun fact: As of 31st March 2025, this has sold 68.2 million copies and is Switch's best-selling game - that's 59.74 million copies more than the original sold on Wii U, although MK8 was also that system's bestseller. What does Mario Kart World take from this? In some ways it feels like the end of the road for old-style Mario Kart on self-contained tracks - MK8D's completeness gave Nintendo the impetus to push beyond the bounds of the circuits into a bigger world. You might even say a Mario Kart W— *blue shell explodes* What score would you give Mario Kart 8 Deluxe?10 - Outstanding43%9 - Excellent34%8 - Great17%7 - Good4%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average  0%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Image: Nintendo And that brings us up to date!... Or does it? In fact, there are a few byways to travel before we hit the highway in Mario Kart World. Join us next week for a lap of honour where we take a quick look at the side-games and also-rans in the Mario Kart series. The sweat, the tears, the evil babies Related Games See Also Share:0 1 Gavin first wrote for Nintendo Life in 2018 before joining the site full-time the following year, rising through the ranks to become Editor. He can currently be found squashed beneath a Switch backlog the size of Normandy. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Shigeru Miyamoto Explains Why Donkey Kong Has Been Redesigned You want expressive? You got it Here's A Look At The Size And Inside Of Switch 2 Game Cases Arriving in store next month Talking Point: The Switch 2 Pre-Order Situation Sucks, But Can Nintendo Do Anything About It? 503sier said than done Random: Miyamoto Can't Talk About Switch 2, Talks About Switch 2 Anyway I do what I want, bruv! #feature #long #ampamp #rainbow #road
    WWW.NINTENDOLIFE.COM
    Feature: The Long & Rainbow Road To 'Mario Kart World' Part 3 - Final Lap
    Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo LifeAnd we're back, once again, on the road to Mario Kart World - and we're in the final stretch. On the two previous laps we've looked at every console Mario Kart game from the Super NES up to the Wii. For this final go-round, we're looking at two console entries which span a massive 14-year period. MK8 got some significant expansions across two consoles, so we've split that into two separate sections. And if you're keen to hear more about Mario's non-console karting exploits, we'll take a quick look at those next week before starting our engines up for Mario Kart World on 5th June.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube813kWatch on YouTube This week's Nintendo developer interviews delved into the game in much more depth than the lacklustre Mario Kart Direct back in April, firing up our excitement once more. Once we've been able to leave the tracks, we wonder what it'll feel like to return to the restrictive circuits in these past games...but that's another article. Let's kick off this final lap with lucky number seven... Lap 1 - SMK, MK64 & Super Circuit Double Dash, DS, Wii Mario Kart 7 (2011) Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life Ah yes, seven entries in and we finally arrive at the first numbered game in the series (pipe down, MK64). There was always something that made me laugh about this being called 'Mario Kart 7', made all the more hilarious by Mario Kart World not being called 'Mario Kart 9'. After cool names like Super Circuit and Double Dash!!, '7' felt decidedly uncool. Which is ironic because the game was anything but. Image: Nintendo Sure, it lacked the local multiplayer pull of the home console releases, but I got to drive a kart that could fly and go underwater, which I'd say is a fair trade-off. I distinctly remember driving around Cheep Cheep Lagoon for the first time and its aquatic appeal blowing my little mind. I played with the 3D slider cranked up to the max, you see, and drifting around that seaweed felt like the future. You know what else was cool? Customisable karts. I didn't particularly care for stats at the time and would instead set out to build the most horrific abomination ever committed to the track. Not getting to see my masterpiece was one of the main reasons why I rarely used the game's first-person driving mode — that and the fact that I tried it out in the back of the car once and it made me sick. - Jim Norman Standout tracks: DK Jungle, Rock Rock Mountain, Cheep Cheep Lagoon Fun fact: Despite the Nintendo Network servers shutting down in April 2024, it wasn't until November that year that the final Mario Kart 7 player finally crashed out of the last-standing game lobby. That's quite the victory lap! What does Mario Kart World take from this? Gliding has had a winged makeover in World, but it's the same fundamentals that we first saw in MK7. Underwater driving is another obvious one, although from what we've seen so far, racing atop the waves is the only option in MKW. The Fire Flower appears to still be going strong after making its series debut in the 3DS entry, though. What score would you give Mario Kart 7 (3DS)? (1,329 ratings) 10 - Outstanding14%9 - Excellent28%8 - Great35%7 - Good17%6 - Not Bad5%5 - Average1%4 - Poor1%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Mario Kart 8 (2014) Images: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life, Nintendo There was an audible gasp when I told my colleagues that I'd spent more time playing Mario Kart 8 on Wii U than I have 8 Deluxe. It has nothing to do with preference — Deluxe is clearly the version to play now. But my life was pretty different between 2014 and 2017. Other than a few Virtual Console RPGs and Xenoblade X, Mario Kart 8 was one of the few games I actually played on the Wii U, a console I don't have a lot of love for otherwise. I was at university and barely in my 20s at that point; I also preferred playing stuff on the big screen, so I'd sort of skipped over MK7. Image: Nintendo 8's extravagantly bright courses and colourful worlds were like revisiting my childhood, except now we have anti-gravity and huge courses that look like they stretch for miles and miles. Gorgeous sky-high races and crowded city streets were back on the menu, and I got that old Mario Kart Wii feeling back. The biggest thing I remember was the downloadable content. Nintendo had been dabbling in DLC for a few years then, but I was still a sceptical student who only wanted to spend money on things I thought I would love. Then, Mario Kart 8 dangled the ol' Animal Crossing carrot. Oh gosh. Look, a free Mercedes-Benz was all well and good (though a bit weird), but Zelda, Animal Crossing, and F-Zero courses coming to a Mario Kart game? It's like Smash Bros. but Mario Kart. Oh, Baby Park's back? No, thank you - Hyrule Circuit awaits. I really like all of the DLC courses, but I admit I was a little disappointed by the Animal Crossing one. It's a little basic and while the seasonal changes are beautiful, I'd have loved a little more variety in the course obstacles per season. The big surprise were the F-Zero ones, a series I never really got into. It took Mario Kart to make me want a new F-Zero game. Big Blue on 200cc? It's pure magic. - Alana Hagues Standout tracks: Toad Harbour, Sunshine Airport, Cloudtop Cruise, Big Blue (DLC) Fun fact: Firehopping, or frogging, was a common technique used online to maintain longer boosts from a mini-boost. Nintendo removed this in Deluxe, meaning it was probably an unintentional glitch. What does Mario Kart World take from this? Hmmm... okay, well, since 8 Deluxe is essentially MK8 but better, maybe let's save this... Second Lap It's natural that the Switch version has totally supplanted the original in most players' memories - which is why I was keen to break out the Wii U version in its own section here. Besides disappointment around the Battle offering, this was a substantial, massively satisfying racer with a fun anti-grav hook, and there's something homely and attractive about MK8 on that chunky GamePad minus the bloat and the 'more, more, MOAARRRR'. I say 'bloat' - the Deluxe additions were great, I just quite enjoy the comparative simplicity and 'strangeness' of this version after eight long years with the upgrade. Deluxe is better, but it was all armour over this game's brilliant body. Gavin Lane Editor, Nintendo Life What score would you give Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)? (1,085 ratings) 10 - Outstanding33%9 - Excellent42%8 - Great18%7 - Good5%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average1%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Mario Kart 8 Deluxe & Booster Course Pass (2017, 2022-2023) Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life It's the best-selling game on the Switch, although I wonder where it stands in the Most Played rankings. Even if you were one of the Nintendo faithful who'd bought a Wii U and unlocked every Cup, got the DLC, and played MK8 to absolute death, you still had to buy 8 Deluxe. The proper Battle Mode and the ability to hold two items were major boons (although I still miss the strategy that comes with being able to switch between the items à la Double Dash), but it was really the convenience of having full-fledged Mario Kart on the go with two pads that made MK8D indispensable for any Switch owner. You just had to have it. Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life It was interesting to hear the devs discuss "kicking the can down the road" and using the Booster Course Pass as a stopgap. Still, what a stopgap! 48 new tracks, with returning courses, some reimagined, some borrowed from Tour, a couple of totally new ones - with so many new courses, it was tough to get upset with the odd dud, especially if you were getting access to all these via an Expansion Pack sub. And the real-world locales added a different flavour to the mayhem - they generally weren't up there with the best of the other courses, but I liked seeing Nintendo's take on London and Madrid. Throw in all the oddities from before (I loved the amiibo Mii outfits), plus a host of new ones (Labo controls, anyone?) and no wonder it's taken Nintendo eight years to come up with a sequel. - Gavin Lane Standout tracks: Bone-Dry Dunes, Mount Wario, Yoshi's Island (DLC) Fun fact: As of 31st March 2025, this has sold 68.2 million copies and is Switch's best-selling game - that's 59.74 million copies more than the original sold on Wii U, although MK8 was also that system's bestseller. What does Mario Kart World take from this? In some ways it feels like the end of the road for old-style Mario Kart on self-contained tracks - MK8D's completeness gave Nintendo the impetus to push beyond the bounds of the circuits into a bigger world. You might even say a Mario Kart W— *blue shell explodes* What score would you give Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch)? (2,863 ratings) 10 - Outstanding43%9 - Excellent34%8 - Great17%7 - Good4%6 - Not Bad1%5 - Average  0%4 - Poor  0%3 - Bad  0%2 - Terrible  0%1 - Abysmal1% Image: Nintendo And that brings us up to date!... Or does it? In fact, there are a few byways to travel before we hit the highway in Mario Kart World. Join us next week for a lap of honour where we take a quick look at the side-games and also-rans in the Mario Kart series. The sweat, the tears, the evil babies Related Games See Also Share:0 1 Gavin first wrote for Nintendo Life in 2018 before joining the site full-time the following year, rising through the ranks to become Editor. He can currently be found squashed beneath a Switch backlog the size of Normandy. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Shigeru Miyamoto Explains Why Donkey Kong Has Been Redesigned You want expressive? You got it Here's A Look At The Size And Inside Of Switch 2 Game Cases Arriving in store next month Talking Point: The Switch 2 Pre-Order Situation Sucks, But Can Nintendo Do Anything About It? 503sier said than done Random: Miyamoto Can't Talk About Switch 2, Talks About Switch 2 Anyway I do what I want, bruv!
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  • A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test

    resistance is futile

    A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test

    Younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children.

    Jennifer Ouellette



    May 15, 2025 9:46 am

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    0

    For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced.

    Credit:

    Igniter Media

    For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced.

    Credit:

    Igniter Media

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    You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it.
    As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next.
    Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in lifeand their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation.
    Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can't hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered in a 2018 study that replicated the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth. Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor, according to a 2019 paper.

    There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children's ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test.

    An online paradigm
    Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages five to six, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group.
    Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment."Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods," they wrote.
    The type of treat was chosen by each child's parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a "confederate child" who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat.Then the scientist running the experiment would leave the Zoom meeting for an undisclosed period of time, after telling the child that if both of them resisted eating the treat, they would each receive a second one; if one of them failed, neither would be rewarded. Children could not see or communicate with their paired confederates for the duration of the experiment. The scientist returned after ten minutes to see if the child had managed to delay gratification. Once the experiment had ended, the team actually did reward the participant child regardless of the outcome, "to end the study on a positive note."
    The results were controlled for unavoidable accidental distractions, so the paper includes the results from both the full dataset of all 68 participants and a subset of 48 children, excluding those who experienced some type of disruption during the ten-minute experiment. In both cases, children whose confederate clearly promised not to eat their treat waited longer to eat their treat compared to the more ambiguous "social risk" condition. And younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children, although this result was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this small difference may be due to the fact that older children are more likely to have experienced broken promises, thereby learning "that commitments are not always fulfilled."
    Of course, there are always caveats. For instance, while specific demographic data was not collected, all the children had predominantly white middle-class backgrounds, so the results reflect how typical children in northern England behave in such situations. The authors would like to see their online experiment repeated cross-culturally in the future. And the limitation of one-way communication "likely prevented partners from establishing common ground, namely their mutual commitment to fulfilling their respective roles, which is thought to be a key principle of interdependence," the authors wrote.
    DOI: Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.250392  .

    Jennifer Ouellette
    Senior Writer

    Jennifer Ouellette
    Senior Writer

    Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

    0 Comments
    #peers #promise #can #help #kids
    A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test
    resistance is futile A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test Younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children. Jennifer Ouellette – May 15, 2025 9:46 am | 0 For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it. As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next. Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in lifeand their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation. Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can't hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered in a 2018 study that replicated the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth. Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor, according to a 2019 paper. There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children's ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test. An online paradigm Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages five to six, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group. Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment."Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods," they wrote. The type of treat was chosen by each child's parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a "confederate child" who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat.Then the scientist running the experiment would leave the Zoom meeting for an undisclosed period of time, after telling the child that if both of them resisted eating the treat, they would each receive a second one; if one of them failed, neither would be rewarded. Children could not see or communicate with their paired confederates for the duration of the experiment. The scientist returned after ten minutes to see if the child had managed to delay gratification. Once the experiment had ended, the team actually did reward the participant child regardless of the outcome, "to end the study on a positive note." The results were controlled for unavoidable accidental distractions, so the paper includes the results from both the full dataset of all 68 participants and a subset of 48 children, excluding those who experienced some type of disruption during the ten-minute experiment. In both cases, children whose confederate clearly promised not to eat their treat waited longer to eat their treat compared to the more ambiguous "social risk" condition. And younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children, although this result was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this small difference may be due to the fact that older children are more likely to have experienced broken promises, thereby learning "that commitments are not always fulfilled." Of course, there are always caveats. For instance, while specific demographic data was not collected, all the children had predominantly white middle-class backgrounds, so the results reflect how typical children in northern England behave in such situations. The authors would like to see their online experiment repeated cross-culturally in the future. And the limitation of one-way communication "likely prevented partners from establishing common ground, namely their mutual commitment to fulfilling their respective roles, which is thought to be a key principle of interdependence," the authors wrote. DOI: Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.250392  . Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments #peers #promise #can #help #kids
    ARSTECHNICA.COM
    A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test
    resistance is futile A peer’s promise can help kids pass the marshmallow test Younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children. Jennifer Ouellette – May 15, 2025 9:46 am | 0 For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media For decades, Walter Mischel's "marshmallow test" was viewed as a key predictor for children's future success, but reality is a bit more nuanced. Credit: Igniter Media Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more You've probably heard of the infamous "marshmallow test," in which young children are asked to wait to eat a yummy marshmallow placed in front of them while left alone in a room for 10 to 15 minutes. If they successfully do so, they get a second marshmallow; if not, they don't. The test has become a useful paradigm for scientists interested in studying the various factors that might influence one's ability to delay gratification, thereby promoting social cooperation. According to a paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, one factor is trust: If children are paired in a marshmallow test and one promises not to eat their treat for the specified time, the other is much more likely to also refrain from eating it. As previously reported, psychologist Walter Mischel's landmark behavioral study involved 600 kids between the ages of four and six, all culled from Stanford University's Bing Nursery School. He would give each child a marshmallow and give them the option of eating it immediately if they chose. But if they could wait 15 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow as a reward. Then Mischel would leave the room, and a hidden video camera would tape what happened next. Some kids just ate the marshmallow right away. Others found a handy distraction: covering their eyes, kicking the desk, or poking at the marshmallow with their fingers. Some smelled it, licked it, or took tiny nibbles around the edges. Roughly one-third of the kids held out long enough to earn a second marshmallow. Several years later, Mischel noticed a strong correlation between the success of some of those kids later in life (better grades, higher self-confidence) and their ability to delay gratification in nursery school. Mischel's follow-up study confirmed the correlation. Mischel himself cautioned against over-interpreting the results, emphasizing that children who simply can't hold out for that second marshmallow are not necessarily doomed to a life of failure. A more nuanced picture was offered in a 2018 study that replicated the marshmallow test with preschoolers. It found the same correlation between later achievement and the ability to resist temptation in preschool, but that correlation was much less significant after the researchers factored in such aspects as family background, home environment, and so forth. Attentiveness might be yet another contributing factor, according to a 2019 paper. There have also been several studies examining the effects of social interdependence and similar social contexts on children's ability to delay gratification, using variations of the marshmallow test paradigm. For instance, in 2020, a team of German researchers adapted the classic experimental setup using Oreos and vanilla cookies with German and Kenyan schoolchildren, respectively. If both children waited to eat their treat, they received a second cookie as a reward; if one did not wait, neither child received a second cookie. They found that the kids were more likely to delay gratification when they depended on each other, compared to the standard marshmallow test. An online paradigm Rebecca Koomen, a psychologist now at the University of Manchester, co-authored the 2020 study as well as this latest one, which sought to build on those findings. Koomen et al. structured their experiments similarly, this time recruiting 66 UK children, ages five to six, as subjects. They focused on how promising a partner not to eat a favorite treat could inspire sufficient trust to delay gratification, compared to the social risk of one or both partners breaking that promise. Any parent could tell you that children of this age are really big on the importance of promises, and science largely concurs; a promise has been shown to enhance interdependent cooperation in this age group. Koomen and her Manchester colleagues added an extra twist: They conducted their version of the marshmallow test online to test the effectiveness compared to lab-based versions of the experiment. (Prior results from similar online studies have been mixed.) "Given face-to-face testing restrictions during the COVID pandemic, this, to our knowledge, represents the first cooperative marshmallow study to be conducted online, thereby adding to the growing body of literature concerning the validity of remote testing methods," they wrote. The type of treat was chosen by each child's parents, ensuring it was a favorite: chocolate, candy, biscuits, and marshmallows, mostly, although three kids loved potato chips, fruit, and nuts, respectively. Parents were asked to set up the experiment in a quiet room with minimal potential distractions, outfitted with a webcam to monitor the experiment. Each child was shown a video of a "confederate child" who either clearly promised not to eat the treat or more ambiguously suggested they might succumb and eat their treat. (The confederate child refrained from eating the treat in both conditions, although the participant child did not know that.) Then the scientist running the experiment would leave the Zoom meeting for an undisclosed period of time, after telling the child that if both of them resisted eating the treat (including licking or nibbling at it), they would each receive a second one; if one of them failed, neither would be rewarded. Children could not see or communicate with their paired confederates for the duration of the experiment. The scientist returned after ten minutes to see if the child had managed to delay gratification. Once the experiment had ended, the team actually did reward the participant child regardless of the outcome, "to end the study on a positive note." The results were controlled for unavoidable accidental distractions, so the paper includes the results from both the full dataset of all 68 participants and a subset of 48 children, excluding those who experienced some type of disruption during the ten-minute experiment. In both cases, children whose confederate clearly promised not to eat their treat waited longer to eat their treat compared to the more ambiguous "social risk" condition. And younger children were slightly more likely to successfully delay gratification than older children, although this result was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this small difference may be due to the fact that older children are more likely to have experienced broken promises, thereby learning "that commitments are not always fulfilled." Of course, there are always caveats. For instance, while specific demographic data was not collected, all the children had predominantly white middle-class backgrounds, so the results reflect how typical children in northern England behave in such situations. The authors would like to see their online experiment repeated cross-culturally in the future. And the limitation of one-way communication "likely prevented partners from establishing common ground, namely their mutual commitment to fulfilling their respective roles, which is thought to be a key principle of interdependence," the authors wrote. DOI: Royal Society Open Science, 2025. 10.1098/rsos.250392  (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri 0 önizleme
  • Bad Boys directors making the least-expected movie for Ubisoft

    One of the least-expected titles in Ubisoft’s game lineup, Riders Republic, is getting a feature film adaptation, with Bad Boys for Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah set to helm the project, Ubisoft announced Wednesday.

    Riders Republic is a Ubisoft’s 2021 extreme sports game that features mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuit flying in an open world that combines several landscapes in the Western United States into one location.

    In a news release, Ubisoft said the Riders Republic adaptation is “poised to be an electrifying action movie, delivering non-stop thrills, humor, and spectacular stunts on the snowy slopes of the Alps.”

    Adil and Bilall first made waves in their home country of Belgium with their 2018 hit Gangsta, before achieving international acclaim with the third and fourth installments of the Bad Boys franchise — Bad Boys for Lifeand Bad Boys: Ride or Die— which collectively earned over million at the global box office.

    The script for Riders Republic is being penned by award-winning screenwriter Noé Debré.

    Ubisoft Film and Television is looking to bring Ubisoft’s hit games to new entertainment platforms while creating original stories rooted in gaming culture. Its original series Mythic Quest and Side Quest are streaming on Apple TV Plus, with the animated Splinter Cell: Deathwatch set to debut on Netflix in 2025. Ubisoft is also developing a Watch Dogs live-action movie, which is slated for release in 2026.
    #bad #boys #directors #making #leastexpected
    Bad Boys directors making the least-expected movie for Ubisoft
    One of the least-expected titles in Ubisoft’s game lineup, Riders Republic, is getting a feature film adaptation, with Bad Boys for Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah set to helm the project, Ubisoft announced Wednesday. Riders Republic is a Ubisoft’s 2021 extreme sports game that features mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuit flying in an open world that combines several landscapes in the Western United States into one location. In a news release, Ubisoft said the Riders Republic adaptation is “poised to be an electrifying action movie, delivering non-stop thrills, humor, and spectacular stunts on the snowy slopes of the Alps.” Adil and Bilall first made waves in their home country of Belgium with their 2018 hit Gangsta, before achieving international acclaim with the third and fourth installments of the Bad Boys franchise — Bad Boys for Lifeand Bad Boys: Ride or Die— which collectively earned over million at the global box office. The script for Riders Republic is being penned by award-winning screenwriter Noé Debré. Ubisoft Film and Television is looking to bring Ubisoft’s hit games to new entertainment platforms while creating original stories rooted in gaming culture. Its original series Mythic Quest and Side Quest are streaming on Apple TV Plus, with the animated Splinter Cell: Deathwatch set to debut on Netflix in 2025. Ubisoft is also developing a Watch Dogs live-action movie, which is slated for release in 2026. #bad #boys #directors #making #leastexpected
    WWW.POLYGON.COM
    Bad Boys directors making the least-expected movie for Ubisoft
    One of the least-expected titles in Ubisoft’s game lineup, Riders Republic, is getting a feature film adaptation, with Bad Boys for Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah set to helm the project, Ubisoft announced Wednesday. Riders Republic is a Ubisoft’s 2021 extreme sports game that features mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, and wingsuit flying in an open world that combines several landscapes in the Western United States into one location. In a news release, Ubisoft said the Riders Republic adaptation is “poised to be an electrifying action movie, delivering non-stop thrills, humor, and spectacular stunts on the snowy slopes of the Alps.” Adil and Bilall first made waves in their home country of Belgium with their 2018 hit Gangsta, before achieving international acclaim with the third and fourth installments of the Bad Boys franchise — Bad Boys for Life (2020) and Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) — which collectively earned over $830 million at the global box office. The script for Riders Republic is being penned by award-winning screenwriter Noé Debré (Stillwater, Zorro). Ubisoft Film and Television is looking to bring Ubisoft’s hit games to new entertainment platforms while creating original stories rooted in gaming culture. Its original series Mythic Quest and Side Quest are streaming on Apple TV Plus, with the animated Splinter Cell: Deathwatch set to debut on Netflix in 2025. Ubisoft is also developing a Watch Dogs live-action movie, which is slated for release in 2026.
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri 0 önizleme
  • #333;">Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer.
    In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe.
    MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency.
    The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short.
    I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint.
    Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed.
    But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic.
    Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market.
    The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family.
    While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market.
    If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe.
    Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests.
    Users can look up and find people they know in real life.
    And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service.
    It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point.
    In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends.
    The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram.
    While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there.
    And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it.
    Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point.
    Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated.
    The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche.
    In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic.
    In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online.
    To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users.
    Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller.
    “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said.
    “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms.
    Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other.
    But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there.
    The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified.
    And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities.
    When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing.
    But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms.
    Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing.
    It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations.
    It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level.
    That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
    They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way.
    Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform.
    Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said.
    “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said.
    Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
    They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here.
    Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead.
    But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist.
    The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic.
    ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says.
    “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder.
    In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention.
    But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space.
    In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment.
    And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok.
    But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize.
    It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v.
    Microsoft.
    In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law.
    “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says.
    “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
    #666;">المصدر: https://www.theverge.com/antitrust/665308/meta-ftc-antitrust-trial-market-definition-tiktok-mewe-snap" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.theverge.com
    #0066cc;">#why #one #obscure #app #could #help #crumble #metas #empire #the #question #who #biggest #rival #were #family #feud #survey #tiktok #would #likely #winning #answerin #federal #trade #commissions #antitrust #case #against #facebook #and #instagram #owner #governments #response #probably #wouldnt #even #make #top #small #blockchainbased #platform #called #mewemewe #looks #fair #amount #like #first #glance #except #that #you #account #using #frequency #blockchain #which #company #explains #decentralized #protocol #lets #move #your #social #connections #other #mostly #hypothetical #this #point #apps #support #frequencythe #says #million #users #have #joined #but #when #mewe #log #scroll #through #autopopulated #feed #think #are #these #people #search #for #few #verge #colleagues #figuring #anyone #has #tried #might #them #come #shorti #try #some #public #figures #tim #cook #jeff #bezos #mark #zuckerberg #there #accounts #with #names #seems #unlikely #theyre #ones #mindthe 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#view #essentially #business #includes #stories #often #contain #least #friendsat #times #crossexamination #showed #limits #similaritieswhen #questioning #apple #director #marketing #ronak #shah #sought #group #chats #apples #messaging #sharingbut #limited #others #profiles #platformsstill #pointed #messages #listed #under #storehowever #made #arguments #should #framingit #documents #google #claiming #products #very #different #submitted #foreign #officials #avoid #getting #drafted #potentially #frustrating #regulationsit #briefly #went #dark #ahead #nowaborted #ban #flocked #showing #consumers #levelthats #argued #really #attentioncompanies #sometimes #mistakesthey #misjudge #arebut #keith #coleman #wayinstead #helpful #understand #accomplish #lives #jack #dorsey #thentwitter #leaned #focusing #news #interests #platformcoleman #later #surprised #website #characterized #center #service #coworkers #communicate #stay #exchange #quick #frequent #believe #saidthats #pretty #wackythis #caution #everything #writes #down #necessarily #decisive #establishing #boundary #kovacic #saidcompanies #arethere #ramifications #heregoing #netflixs #streaming #video #happy #play #game #hours #shuteye #insteadbut #frustrated #couldnt #movie #good #hulu #hbo #amazon #prime #existthe #isnt #owns #faces #little #specifically #fact #dont #sort #pointhow #decideultimately #boasbergs #intuition #kovacicnotice #been #basis #saysdoes #story #courtroom #match #far #shown #clocked #had #looking #over #shoulderin #september #told #board #revenue #meaningfully #lower #planned #second #half #fiscal #year #drawing #attentionbut #aware #worriedly #took #note #entering #spacein #presentation #found #highest #percentage #surveyed #snap #daily #casual #moments #special #contrast #came #twitters #youtubes #entertainmentand #expands #entertainment #notes #advertises #signup #page #place #friendsinstagram #always #focus #friendsin #email #changed #landscape #since #experience #may #fewer #admitted #two #talking #comments #counts #interaction #between #actively #tries #facilitatemeta #makes #shrinking #offerings #fierce #rivals #tiktokbut #enough #monopolizeits #scenario #another #major #monopolization #late1990s #lawsuit #vmicrosoftin #microsoft #justice #department #ignoring #computing #soon #beyond #computer #meaning #truly #lock #ecosystem #government #allegedjudge #jackson #yeah #happening #fast #deny #power #laptopbased #emphasizing #saysstill #adds #niche #become #longer #eyes #lawyou #process #change #ultimately #renders #segment #unimportant #saysand #hard #task #analysis #happenedsee
    Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
    المصدر: www.theverge.com
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    WWW.THEVERGE.COM
    Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
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  • #333;">By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption

    New Research
    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption
    Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus

    A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade.
    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii.
    Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city.
    Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park.
    Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments.
    When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak.
    “Many thought the end of the world had come.”
    A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption.
    The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed.

    As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram.


    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall.
    In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece.
    While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea.
    The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue.
    The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise.
    Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection.
    But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium.
    At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room.
    They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape.
    Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room.
    “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal.
    “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.”
    Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce.

    Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris.


    Pompeii Archaeological Park
    Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus.
    The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times.
    Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life.
    For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood.
    Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation.
    As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.”
    Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
    #0066cc;">#shoving #bed #frame #against #the #door #this #pompeii #family #tried #survive #mount #vesuvius039 #eruption #new #researchby #vesuvius #eruptionarchaeologists #are #learning #details #about #four #individuals #futile #attempt #hide #inside #ancient #residence #called #house #helle #and #phrixus #shoved #served #makeshift #barricade #archaeological #parkin #vesuviuserupted #spewing #ash #small #volcanic #pellets #known #aslapilli #over #city #ofpompeiinearly #years #later #archaeologists #still #sifting #through #layers #debris #making #remarkable #discoveries #lifeand #deathin #cityresearchers #recently #discovered #members #including #child #who #attempted #escape #barricading #themselves #bedroom #according #astatement #from #thepompeii #parkthough #their #efforts #were #remains #provide #insight #into #doomed #citys #final #momentswhen #began #most #residents #had #clue #what #was #happeninggabriel #zuchtriegel #director #park #coauthor #study #published #journalscavi #pompei #tells #thenew #york #times #sara #novakmany #thought #end #world #comea #majority #nearby #herculaneumfled #survived #eruptionthe #among #roughly #pompeians #remained #when #destroyed #struggles #seaphrixus #reaches #out #his #sister #atop #flying #ram #parkarchaeologists #found #familys #but #stately #named #after #afresco #mythological #siblings #dining #room #wallin #greek #myth #stepmothers #sacrifice #them #gods #away #with #golden #fleecewhile #escapes #falls #off #seathe #fresco #captures #reaching #each #otherhelle #sea #ramin #fittingly #rescuethe #architectural #features #may #have #accelerated #demiselike #many #roman #houses #featured #openroofed #atrium #intended #aid #rainwater #collectionbut #lapilli #fell #sky #during #first #phase #rock #which #reached #nine #feet #some #locations #quickly #flooded #atriumat #evidence #shows #protect #packing #roomthey #even #pushed #wooden #hoping #that #would #prevent #enteringwhen #failed #researchers #think #they #pulled #back #escapebased #location #only #got #far #triclinium #roomthis #its #decorations #objects #people #save #says #statement #per #translation #byla #brújula #verdes #guillermo #carvajalthey #didnt #succeed #story #here #beneath #ashesover #centuries #preserved #other #items #bronze #amulet #abulla #stash #amphorae #filled #garum #apopular #fish #sauce #burying #parkresearchers #dont #know #particular #owned #phrixusthe #group #taken #refuge #there #owners #fled #marcello #mogetta #archaeologist #art #historian #university #missouri #wasnt #involved #timesstill #recovered #offer #glimpse #pompeian #lifefor #instance #likely #one #wearing #bulla #tradition #dictated #boys #wear #such #amulets #for #protection #until #adulthoodadditionally #traces #masonry #materials #suggest #under #renovationas #excavating #means #confronting #beauty #also #fragility #lifeget #latest #stories #your #inbox #every #weekday
    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption
    New Research By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade. Pompeii Archaeological Park In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii. Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city. Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park. Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments. When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak. “Many thought the end of the world had come.” A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption. The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed. As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram. Pompeii Archaeological Park Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall. In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece. While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea. The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue. The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise. Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection. But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium. At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room. They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape. Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room. “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal. “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.” Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce. Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris. Pompeii Archaeological Park Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus. The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times. Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life. For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood. Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation. As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
    #shoving #bed #frame #against #the #door #this #pompeii #family #tried #survive #mount #vesuvius039 #eruption #new #researchby #vesuvius #eruptionarchaeologists #are #learning #details #about #four #individuals #futile #attempt #hide #inside #ancient #residence #called #house #helle #and #phrixus #shoved #served #makeshift #barricade #archaeological #parkin #vesuviuserupted #spewing #ash #small #volcanic #pellets #known #aslapilli #over #city #ofpompeiinearly #years #later #archaeologists #still #sifting #through #layers #debris #making #remarkable #discoveries #lifeand #deathin #cityresearchers #recently #discovered #members #including #child #who #attempted #escape #barricading #themselves #bedroom #according #astatement #from #thepompeii #parkthough #their #efforts #were #remains #provide #insight #into #doomed #citys #final #momentswhen #began #most #residents #had #clue #what #was #happeninggabriel #zuchtriegel #director #park #coauthor #study #published #journalscavi #pompei #tells #thenew #york #times #sara #novakmany #thought #end #world #comea #majority #nearby #herculaneumfled #survived #eruptionthe #among #roughly #pompeians #remained #when #destroyed #struggles #seaphrixus #reaches #out #his #sister #atop #flying #ram #parkarchaeologists #found #familys #but #stately #named #after #afresco #mythological #siblings #dining #room #wallin #greek #myth #stepmothers #sacrifice #them #gods #away #with #golden #fleecewhile #escapes #falls #off #seathe #fresco #captures #reaching #each #otherhelle #sea #ramin #fittingly #rescuethe #architectural #features #may #have #accelerated #demiselike #many #roman #houses #featured #openroofed #atrium #intended #aid #rainwater #collectionbut #lapilli #fell #sky #during #first #phase #rock #which #reached #nine #feet #some #locations #quickly #flooded #atriumat #evidence #shows #protect #packing #roomthey #even #pushed #wooden #hoping #that #would #prevent #enteringwhen #failed #researchers #think #they #pulled #back #escapebased #location #only #got #far #triclinium #roomthis #its #decorations #objects #people #save #says #statement #per #translation #byla #brújula #verdes #guillermo #carvajalthey #didnt #succeed #story #here #beneath #ashesover #centuries #preserved #other #items #bronze #amulet #abulla #stash #amphorae #filled #garum #apopular #fish #sauce #burying #parkresearchers #dont #know #particular #owned #phrixusthe #group #taken #refuge #there #owners #fled #marcello #mogetta #archaeologist #art #historian #university #missouri #wasnt #involved #timesstill #recovered #offer #glimpse #pompeian #lifefor #instance #likely #one #wearing #bulla #tradition #dictated #boys #wear #such #amulets #for #protection #until #adulthoodadditionally #traces #masonry #materials #suggest #under #renovationas #excavating #means #confronting #beauty #also #fragility #lifeget #latest #stories #your #inbox #every #weekday
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    By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius' Eruption
    New Research By Shoving a Bed Frame Against the Door, This Pompeii Family Tried to Survive Mount Vesuvius’ Eruption Archaeologists are learning new details about the four individuals’ futile attempt to hide inside an ancient residence called the House of Helle and Phrixus A bed frame shoved against the door served as a makeshift barricade. Pompeii Archaeological Park In 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, spewing ash and small volcanic pellets known as lapilli over the city of Pompeii. Nearly 1,950 years later, archaeologists are still sifting through the layers of debris and making remarkable discoveries about life—and death—in the ancient city. Researchers recently discovered four members of a family, including a child, who attempted to escape the eruption by barricading themselves inside a bedroom, according to a statement from the Pompeii Archaeological Park. Though their efforts were futile, their remains provide remarkable insight into the doomed city’s final moments. When the eruption began, most residents of Pompeii “had no clue what was happening,” Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the park and co-author of a new study published in the journal Scavi di Pompei, tells the New York Times’ Sara Novak. “Many thought the end of the world had come.” A majority of the 15,000 to 20,000 residents of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum fled and survived the eruption. The four family members were among the roughly 2,000 Pompeians who remained when the city was destroyed. As Helle struggles in the sea, Phrixus reaches out to his sister from atop a flying ram. Pompeii Archaeological Park Archaeologists found the family’s remains in a small but stately residence known as the House of Helle and Phrixus, named after a fresco of the mythological siblings discovered on the dining room wall. In Greek myth, the siblings survive their stepmother’s attempt to sacrifice them to the gods by flying away on a ram with a golden fleece. While Phrixus escapes, Helle falls off the ram into the sea. The fresco captures the siblings reaching out to each other—Helle in the sea, Phrixus on the ram—in a fittingly futile attempt at rescue. The architectural features of the house may have accelerated the family’s demise. Like many Roman houses, the House of Helle and Phrixus featured an open-roofed atrium, intended to aid rainwater collection. But as lapilli fell from the sky during the first phase of the eruption, the rock debris, which reached up to nine feet in some locations, quickly flooded the house through the atrium. At first, the archaeological evidence shows, the four individuals tried to protect themselves by packing into a small room. They even pushed a wooden bed frame against the door, hoping that it would prevent the lapilli from entering.When that failed, the researchers think they pulled back the barricade and attempted to escape. Based on the location of the remains, they only got as far as the triclinium, or dining room. “This house, with its decorations and its objects, shows us people who tried to save themselves,” says Zuchtriegel in the statement, per a translation by La Brújula Verde’s Guillermo Carvajal. “They didn’t succeed, but their story is still here, beneath the ashes.” Over the centuries, the ash preserved the remains of the family, the wooden bed frame and other items, including a bronze amulet known as a bulla and a stash of amphorae filled with garum, a popular Roman fish sauce. Ash and lapilli flooded into through the open-roofed atrium, burying the house in up to nine feet of debris. Pompeii Archaeological Park Researchers don’t know that this particular family owned the House of Helle and Phrixus. The group may have taken refuge there after the owners fled, as Marcello Mogetta, an archaeologist and Roman art historian at the University of Missouri who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times. Still, the recovered objects offer a glimpse into Pompeian family life. For instance, the child was likely the one wearing the bronze bulla, as tradition dictated that boys wear such amulets for protection until adulthood. Additionally, traces of masonry materials suggest that the house was under renovation. As Zuchtriegel says in the statement, “Excavating Pompeii means confronting the beauty of art, but also the fragility of life.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
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