🤣 Timothée Chalamet didn’t mean to drag marketers, but he did.

💸 LinkedIn’s case for its pricey ad prices.

🤖 Meta’s AI-based Vibes feed is struggling to hold attention.

🛍️ A shorter shopping window complicates retail’s already challenging holiday season.

🥪 The role of the “human sandwich” in integrating conversational AI.

🍔 Ad: Two minutes of a guy eating Burger King, ASMR-style.

New data from Buffer confirms and illuminates the obvious: replying to comments lifts your overall reach.

When you interact with your audience, algorithms pick up on those signals, surface your activity to more users, and nudge the conversation forward. Plus, replies spark more replies, compounding total engagement.

Posts where the creator replied to comments generated up to 42% more engagement overall, with Threads showing the biggest lift of all.

Here’s how the comment-reply lift looks by platform:

• LinkedIn: +30%
• Instagram: +21%
• Facebook: +9%
• X (Twitter): +8%
• Threads: 42%

With social posting declining and lurkers outnumbering active contributors, engagement remains the strongest signal of interest for platform algorithms. Replying is one of the easiest ways to spark it.

Check out Buffer’s study for more.

Let’s swap SaaS for silly today.

Tiny Mario is a fully playable, side-scrolling Mario tribute that runs inside your browser’s URL bar.

It was built using Unicode Braille characters and fits movement, enemies, coins, and a hidden underground world into a 4×100-pixel strip.

You use arrow keys or WASD to dodge pits, collect coins, and race the clock for bonus points.

Reuters’ first brand campaign in 175 years, “Pure News, Straight from the Source,” makes a timely case for why truth still matters.

Created with Gravity Road, the film uses cloudy water as its central metaphor to illustrate how misinformation muddies what we consume.

There’s an interesting and intentional choice to use AI here in order to showcase how easily imagery can be manipulated.

But of course, Reuters doesn’t use gen AI in its journalism, so the film pivots to unaltered footage captured by the organization’s 2,600 reporters across 200 locations.