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Internet Culture

The Verge’s Internet Culture section is the home for daily coverage of how our online lives influence and are influenced by pop culture and the world around us. The ways in which we communicate, create, and live with each other have been radically altered by the internet’s powerful connective tissues, from the platforms we inhabit, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; to the policies, laws and guidelines that govern them (or don’t); to the subcultures, communities, and memes that bring us together there — for better or worse. Here you’ll find our coverage of life on the web, with an eye on what’s next.

Something Awful is racing to save the best and worst of web history

A long-running web community enlisted its goons to stop an Imgur extinction event.

Adi Robertson
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Guess who’s back?

Us, after a long holiday weekend, but also Billy McFarland, the tech bro influencer / fraudster behind Fyre Festival, aka one of the worst pop culture moments that you’d maybe just started to forget about.

McFarland was released last fall after serving a few years in prison and is apparently ready to sell people on another dream to pay off the millions in restitution he still owes for the old one — a disaster big enough that it made our lists for worst pop culture moments of 2017 and tech flops from the last decade.

The poop emoji: a legal historyThe poop emoji: a legal history
Sarah Jeong
The revenge of the pop-up

Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them. Why is the worst UI element of all time ubiquitous again?

s.e. smith
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Now there are more than 10 million users registered on Mastodon.

Over the years, Mastodon has occasionally seen the number of incoming users shift from a flood to a trickle and back again.

While the flow of people jumping over from Twitter now is slower than it was shortly after Musk’s takeover, as of this weekend the “fediverse” microblogging platform now has over 10 million registered accounts across known server instances.

Some Verge writers are among those registered — if you’re looking for someone to follow then here you go.

Mastodon Users, 10,040,058 accounts  +1,755 in the last hour +38,939 in the last day +186,521 in the last week. Four time-based charts: Upper blue area, Number of Mastodon users. Upper cyan area, Hourly increases of number of users. Lower orange area, Number of active instances. Lower yellow area, Thousand toots per hour.
A Mastodon count of accounts registered across known instances showing 10,040,058 as of March 20th.
Image: mastodonuserscount@mastodon.social
Pornhub is under new ownershipPornhub is under new ownership
Adi Robertson and Sean Hollister
David Pierce
David Pierce
Three hours on the past, present, and future of blogging.

On The Talk Show, John Gruber and Jason Kottke got way down in the weeds on the evolution of blogging, what it means to be A Blogger, how social media changed what it means to write on the internet, and much more. There’s like a whole hour just about headlines! It’s super nerdy and super fun.

Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon

A revealing look at the threats posted by AI junk

James Vincent
Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Do you happen to own a 20-year-old forum for sex workers?

The community over at Stripperweb has questions for the forum’s anonymous owner after a banner appeared last week announcing that, for reasons unknown, it would be shutting down on February 1st.

Described as the “Holy Grail of strippers’ knowledge,” some sex workers are offering to buy the site, while others have swiftly learned Python in order to preserve the forum’s vast resources and history.

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
Ugh, it’s February.

So it’s time to break out the lotions, carbs, and the internet’s favorite local news report. At least we have Samsung Unpacked, the big Mobile World Congress show, and death to look forward to.

Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
The five-minute Tumblr warlord saga Eminem song you didn’t know you needed.

Tumblr connoisseurs may remember the tale of the Second Century Warlord. If you’re one of them, I promise you’ve never heard it like this.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
From “Popeyes kid” meme to Popeyes NIL athlete.

At nine years old, Dieunerst Collin entered meme immortality via this 2013 Vine clip comparing the side-eyeing youth to Lil Terrio, and since he was at a Popeyes, he became the “Popeyes Kid.”

Now Collin is a redshirt freshman at center on the football team for Lake Erie College, and — with a little pressure from social media — has signed a “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) sponsorship deal with Popeyes.

Bring back personal blogging

Twitter is creaking. Social media seems less fun than ever. Maybe it’s time to get a little more personal.

Monique Judge
The real fantasy in Final Fantasy XIV is owning a damn house

Finding a place to call your own in Eorzea is a bureaucratic nightmare.

Alexis Ong
Where to find Verge staff on MastodonWhere to find Verge staff on Mastodon
Adi Robertson
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
After a break to deal with some serious security issues, Hive Social is back.

One of the services we mentioned in our article about the race to build a better Twitter was Hive Social; however, at the time, you couldn’t use it after the operators shut down to fix a few security flaws.

Hive is now back online, with an updated app available for iOS, and an update coming for its beta app on Android.

Still, it’s not a great sign that the best place to find updates on Hive’s service status is its Twitter account.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Ripping off AIM away messages is the best feature Instagram has added in a long, long time.

If you’re old enough to remember the words “via Hiptop,” then you’ll recognize that instead of being tweet-like, the new Instagram Notes feature takes inspiration from Twitter’s predecessor — AOL Instant Messenger away messages.

The pop-up statuses are hidden away (for now) in the Instagram messages window, but for the Elder Millennial / Young Gen X generation, it’s a return to the days of flirting via vague but also specifically targeted song lyrics.

Sean Hollister
Sean Hollister
That kid who crashed The Game Awards? It’s not his first rodeo.

Motherboard writes that the kid — who says his name is Matan Even — also famously flashed a pro-Hong Kong T-shirt at a Clippers game, crashed a Blizzcon World of Warcraft panel, and appeared on InfoWars when he was younger.

Oh, and the LAPD apparently didn’t actually arrest him for this latest stunt — a person was detained, not arrested, for “theatrical exhibition,” LAPD told Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter. Polygon has an interview with him too.

James Vincent
James Vincent
Dril predicts the end of Twitter will be a “cleansing fire.”

Twitter’s greatest poster has shared his thoughts on the platform’s new owner in an interview with The Washington Post. Here’s Dril on Musk:

“Everything he does is a comedic bit. He’s always trying to get a laugh, that’s why he makes all his cars suicidal. Just watching everything burn, it’s entertaining, that’s for sure.”

Wise words.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Twitter lost Captain Sully, aka, that man knows when to ditch.

In this 2013 CNBC video, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey calls the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 water landing in the Hudson River a moment that “changed everything.”

Suddenly the world turned its attention, because we were the source of news. And, it wasn’t us; it was this person in the boat using the service, which was even more amazing.

On Wednesday, the pilot of that plane, Capt. Sully Sullenberger announced, “To my friends on Twitter, I will be taking a step back from the platform for now.” He invited fans to follow him on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook instead.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Web3 is going great.

Current FTX implosion notwithstanding, how seriously should you take crypto, NFTs, and everything else blockchain? Molly White, who runs Web3 is Going Just Great, gave a 15-minute presentation at Web Summit 2022 on exactly that topic — you should watch it (or read the transcript).
Here’s a small snippet:

There will be a web3. The web has been evolving ever since its inception, and there is no doubt in my mind that we are overdue for a fundamental shift. Will it be blockchains and crypto? Venture capitalists and blockchain startup founders really hope that you think so.

I hope that the rest of us will continue working towards utopian goals like the ones I mentioned earlier—the ones that many people who are working in web3 and on web3 projects share—without necessarily being shackled to a technology that holds little promise for the web.

Fanfiction was the guilty pleasure that helped me unlock the internet

My taboo teenage pastime introduced me to the wide world of internet subcultures.

Victoria Song
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
The MCU continues to mine the liminal space between memes and canon.

The character Wonder Man in Marvel’s comics was the source of the brain patterns used to build the android Vision.

Separately, the TV show Wandavision provided the source material for endless Vishawn memes, and these two things are apparently nearing a crossover point.