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Recode Daily: Snapchat’s radical redesign spurred thousands of outraged teen users to online activism

Plus, Amazon lays off hundreds, Blockbuster vs. Netflix: The Podcast, and which Winter Olympics sport is best for you?

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel Snapchat

You may have noticed that today’s Recode Daily newsletter arrived in your inbox a bit later than usual. That’s because Recode’s East Coast squad of reporters and editors has flown west to join the rest of us today for Code Media in Huntington Beach, Calif. Here’s how to watch today’s interviews, including a rare appearance by Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz, live; you can catch up on who said what on Day One here. We’ll be back to our usual delivery time later this week.

Kylie Jenner and Chrissy Teigen joined more than 700,000 people in signing an online petition calling for Snap to reverse the recent radical redesign of its Snapchat app. Last week, the company split the app into two sections, consolidating friend content on the left side, media content on the right, outraging its massive teenage user base. A fake tweet claiming that Snapchat would revert back to its old design if it got enough retweets received 1.3 million retweets as of Sunday afternoon, and has become the sixth-most retweeted tweet of all time. Meanwhile, Snap’s VP of sales, Jeff Lucas, has left the company after joining less than two years ago; he’s the seventh Snap exec to leave since the company’s IPO in February 2017. [Taylor Lorenz / Daily Beast]

Amazon laid off a few hundred employees at its Seattle headquarters yesterday. It’s a rare pullback for the $668 billion e-commerce giant, which has more than 500,000 employees. As Amazon reaches into new industries like media, grocery retail and logistics, it is recalibrating its staffing while hiring heavily in fast-growing business units like Alexa and Amazon Web Services. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]

Facebook has resolved a dispute with Apple that prevented the social network from launching a subscription tool for publishers on iOS devices. During her appearance onstage at Code Media yesterday, Campbell Brown, head of Facebook’s news partnerships, said that a version of the paywall tool, which has already been available on Android phones, will roll out in March to Apple phones. Brown also said that Facebook plans to highlight breaking news in its Watch section, the tab on the Facebook app that houses original video. Watch the interview with Brown and News Feed head Adam Mosseri here. [Peter Kafka / Recode]

A new serial podcast called Business Wars digs into the epic corporate drama, industrial espionage and internal blood feuds that fueled the Blockbuster vs. Netflix battle for supremacy. Blockbuster was eventually forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010, roughly a decade after Netflix’s launch. Former Marketplace anchor David Brown hosts the first eight episodes. [Zach Brooke / AV Club]

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Which Olympic sport is best for you?


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.