Recode Daily: How much would you pay to avoid ads?

Would you pay $35 a month to surf the internet without ads? That’s what Recode’s Rani Molla calculates American adults would need to spend per month to make up for the digital ad revenue taken in by websites like Facebook, Google, and Vox if their businesses stopped relying on ads. How much our personal data and the advertising it fuels are “worth” is in the news because of a bill proposed Monday by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mark Warner (D-VA) that would require companies to publicly disclose how much their users’ data is worth. This is a look into an unlikely, but possible, alternative to our current data-hungry, advertising-powered internet.
[Rani Molla / Recode]

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TikTok users are trying to fight back against predators on the platform. Sexual predators are flooding the social media app and creating an unsafe environment for creators who post videos where they lip sync. According to many in the largely young, female audience of makers who upload videos to the social platform, TikTok isn’t doing enough to address this problem. So these users are taking action on their own. “The result: a Lord of the Flies free-for-all where young users weaponize dubious screenshots, defamatory callout videos, and whisper campaigns via group chats to deliver vigilante justice at dizzying speeds.”
[Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed]

If Slack is so good, why are so many companies trying to fix it? With almost 600,000 organizations using Slack, you might think that everyone is happy with the service. But a number of anti-Slack and Slack-improving apps have sprung up that try to improve on the problems they see with the platform. Here’s a look at how some companies are trying to rethink — and improve — workplace communication.
[Rani Molla / Recode]

Republicans have launched their rival to ActBlue ahead of 2020. Thanks to the nonprofit ActBlue, Democrats have long had top-notch software for processing small-dollar digital donations. Now Republicans think they’ve found their answer with WinRed, which President Donald Trump welcomed on Monday, saying that it would “allow my campaign and other Republicans to compete with the Democrats’ money machine.” The launch of the platform was delayed, Politico reports, by “a factionalized ecosystem of vendors that stymied efforts to unify behind a single fundraising vehicle.”
[Alex Isenstadt / Politico]

Top Stories from Recode

Kara Swisher: In Facebook we trust? (All others pay cash) ”I wouldn’t trust Facebook to hold my house keys, and yet I think its libra cryptocurrency effort is exactly the right move for it to make.”
[Kara Swisher]

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