Culture encompasses books, movies, television, music, video games, internet memes, and thousands of branches of art. And sure, culture includes the latest entertainment news too. At The Verge, we construct entry points both into the mainstream and the niche, the tentpoles and the hidden gems, to help make the most notable and discussed parts of the cultural conversation understandable and accessible to everyone.
Apollo app developer Christian Selig dropped new wallpaper art of a cute hybrid of Clippy and the Reddit alien today.
Selig has been hawking fun wallpapers for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS via the Apollo app since Reddit started down a dark path of hostile changes earlier this year and Selig shuttered the popular third-party Reddit client. He’s also selling the wallpapers outside the app.
And the German flag apparently expanded to fill the new space within under three minutes. How did they do it? According to Redditor HellsOnWheels45, a Discord server with 50,000 users in active coordination.
Also, protest messages have made a comeback on r/place after largely disappearing by Friday evening, with more “fuck spez’ messages near the center of the canvas.
What if we made the Internet Archive the real internet and let the machines have Google?
This wouldn’t solve the online shopping problem, and it would make it hard to read the newspapers. But if you wanted to learn about something by looking it up online, you could do it just like you used to. The browser would have a search engine that actually searched its contents, and if you clicked on a result from it, it would take you to the earliest version of the page. A little slider, like on Google Earth, could move you through subsequent versions.
[indignity.substack.com]
Wiby, a search engine that only indexes the most basic of webpages, gives you something Google is almost completely unwilling to these days: websites made by regular people.
Wiby’s “surprise me” page redirects you to a random web 1.0-style site (via Hacker News). So far, among others, I’ve encountered a site devoted to retro tech, a shareware capture the flag game, and Sixties City, which proudly proclaims it’s a British website.
Perhaps reacting to Threads’ 100 million user milestone, Elon Musk tweeted today that “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime... may hit an all-time record this week.” He noted that stat, “as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game.”
Anyway, here’s a probably-unrelated video.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a graph to both Threads and Twitter today (Cloudflare’s communications VP Daniella Vallurupalli confirmed it was him) showing what he says is Twitter’s DNS ranking from January to now.
It’s, uh, not a great story!
Twitter alternative Threads, meanwhile, has been growing explosively — it’s less than three million from the 100 million user mark. It debuted on Wednesday.
Windows Central shows you how to get the Threads app installed using Windows Subsystem for Android, a feature that allows you to install and use Android apps on your Windows 11 machine.
Threads, sort of a spin-off of Instagram that wants to be the new Twitter, reached 95 million users overnight after less than a week, wildly outpacing other, similar clones.
Following word that the good version of TweetDeck is back, an update from Harpy developer Roberto Doering said they were able to get the app functioning again by switching user profiles to use the old v1 API, but they don’t expect to begin maintaining the app again:
Please note that this doesn’t mean that harpy will be maintained again, seeing as Twitter will most likely shut down access to their legacy api (again) soon and third party apps are still against their TOS.
Threads has quickly blown past the other Twitter alternatives in terms of registered accounts. The highest account number badge I’ve seen on Instagram so far this morning puts its count at over 86 million.
At the current pace, it’s likely Threads will hit 100 million today.
The Wall Street Journal wrote about the iOS-only app Spill, which was founded by two former Twitter employees and calls itself “visual conversation at the speed of culture.” On Spill, large text captions over pictures, GIFs, or video clips add the conversational pace of Twitter to the look of Instagram or TikTok.
The future for Twitter alternatives can range from Mastodon to Hive, but Spill’s founders tossing around AI and blockchain buzzwords right out of the gate is probably more impressive to investors than potential users.
Software Engineer PJ Evans put a bot on Mastodon that posts a single frame from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey once an hour, and has been for a month. 1,300 toots in, it just reached the title card yesterday.
Evans says it’ll take, oh, about five years to complete. That’s quite an odyssey.
I feel Epic CEO Tim Sweeney very strongly on this. But there’s an way for web browsing to feel much less horrible: RSS.
What if, say, a big internet company facing an existential crisis and growing trust issues decided to reverse its mistake and bring the beloved product back? What if they built in — I don’t know, not like they’ve ever done this before — a way to pay creators?
Imagine the goodwill Google would get just by trying it.
Three Reddit moderators have just told me that Reddit is sending a message to closed communities asking if they plan to reopen.
Here’s the full message, taken from screenshots I’ve seen:
The last time we messaged you, you were still discussing your mod team’s plans to re-open your community, had decided to close your community indefinitely, or had not responded to us. Per Rule 4 of the Moderator Code of Conduct, moderators are required to be active and engaged within their communities. Given this, we encourage you to reopen. Please let us know within the next 48 hours if you plan on re-opening.
The 48-hour timing is notable; Reddit mods had asked the company for a response to an open letter by June 29th (which would be 48 hours from now), and that means that this deadline would be up just a day before many popular Reddit apps are set to shut down on June 30th.
This creepypasta-esque story by merritt k is fiction — think “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by way of NeoGAF. But it may strike a chord in anyone who’s fallen way too deep into a real internet in-joke.
[Other Strangeness]
Some users on the Sync for Reddit subreddit reported running into rate limits on Tuesday, and Apollo for Reddit developer Christian Selig tells The Verge he’s been seeing rate limits, too.
While that might sound like an early rollout ahead of the official July 1st start date, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge that the company hasn’t implemented the rate limits ahead of schedule and that Reddit had a bug on its end on Monday. “Folks shouldn’t be experiencing issues anymore, as it was resolved yesterday,” Rathschmidt says.
Update June 27th, 2:31PM ET: Added further comment from Reddit.
A Friday blog post details the Bluesky team’s moderation proposals for “a shared public commons,” using things like lists, hashtags, and even “per-thread” tools that would give moderation power to each poster.
The latter treats threads like a mini-forum: if you don’t like a reply, you can yeet that skeet (or just hide it). The post acknowledges why this might be problematic:
If a thread contains misinformation, then giving reply controls to the author means they might use it to suppress corrections from other users. Our hypothesis... is that giving users more tools to protect themselves from harassment is worth some downsides like not always having the record corrected in the replies.
Along with algorithms, hands-off moderation fits right into Jack Dorsey’s original concept for decentralized social media.
A write-up in The Washington Post says the Zuck’s latest attempt at image rehabilitation (remember the “only eating meat from animals he’d personally killed” phase?) is, in part, a bid to win over Musk stans.
Zuckerberg has appeared on podcasts hosted by provocateur Joe Rogan and AI researcher Lex Fridman, both popular among fans of Twitter owner Musk. He has posted sweaty action shots on Instagram displaying his jujitsu skills. And this week, he accepted Musk’s challenge to a cage fight after news reports on Meta creating a Twitter competitor.
But Zuckerberg has really ramped it up over the past year, one of the people said, courting the same “tech bros” who have been captivated by Musk — who is suddenly Zuckerberg’s competition in more ways than one.
The cage match between him and Musk may just be the most recent part of his new pitch, even before Instagram’s “sane” Twitter alternative arrives.
Of course, that means the entirety of Gen Z is cringe...
[embedded.substack.com]
Yesterday, two of Reddit’s biggest communities that had previously gone dark in protest of Reddit’s API changes — r/pics and r/gifs — reopened as John Oliver stan communities following a user poll on whether they should do that or resume business as usual.
Today, r/aww announced it had done the same:
It was only fair to let you determine what r/aww should be about... and you overwhelmingly chose to only allow adorable content featuring John Oliver, Chiijohn, and anything else that closely resembles them.
Someone told him about the technically-compliant re-opening of two popular subreddits — that is, that users at both r/pics and r/gifs voted to re-open, but as John Oliver image repositories — and he has tweeted his approval.
The subreddit blackout may have ended for many, but data from SimilarWeb may show that it has had a real impact, according to Engadget today — one that could explain threatening messages mods received this week.
The outlet saw documents showing a total 6.6 percent drop in daily visits from the day before the blackout’s June 12th start to the end of June 13th (about 57 million down to 52 million) as well as falling engagement time that Engadget says is a three-year low.
