Discussion and news-sharing site Reddit has invested $1 million in Community Funds, a program that supports Reddit users in bringing their best ideas to life. For the past six months, Reddit has been experimenting with the initiative, supporting 13 projects nominated by communities on the platform including a comics tournament, a digital conference for history buffs and a musical artist billboard in Times Square. Starting in June, Reddit will be accepting nominations for projects needing from $1,000 to $50,000 in funding for anything from events and contests to giving and “almost anything you can think of to bring people together.” Read more

Online game world Roblox draws about 50 million daily active users worldwide. Launched in 2006, the company lets users create their own games and play games created by others. As such, a generation has grown up using the Roblox Studio game engine, and now some of those Millennials are competing with professionally trained coders for jobs designing for the platform, which runs on the beginner programming language Lua. Designed for use in embedded applications, Lua is cross platform, and the Roblox API allows it to be played on anything from an Xbox to a PC, laptop or Android or iOS phone. Read more

Twitter’s board has accepted billionaire Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the social media company for $44 billion, a financial value that reflects his April 14th offer of $54.20 per share. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, who earlier revealed a desire to make Twitter a private company. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” Read more

The European Parliament and EU member states reached agreement Saturday on the proposed Digital Services Act, which aims to hold Big Tech accountable for “illegal and harmful content” and “provide better protection for Internet users and their fundamental rights, as well as define a single set of rules in the internal market.” Calling the DSA “historic, both in terms of speed and of substance,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen added, “the greater the size, the greater the responsibilities of online platforms.” Companies like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and others will be forced to hold the line against dangerous content and misinformation or face stiff fines. Read more

Snap has grown daily users to 332 million, an 18 percent increase in Q1 according to an earnings report. The January through March period reflects a 38 percent year-over-year revenue increase, but also documents a net loss of $360 million. The deficit — attributed to digital advertising circumstances including Apple’s new privacy policies, the war in Ukraine and the effects of inflation — comes on the heels of Snap’s first-ever quarterly profit in Q4 2021. The Q1 results reflect “underlying momentum” against “a challenging operating environment,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Read more