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.
“No journalist is going to catch Swift in her sweatpants backstage and write about it.” I loved this profile of Tree Paine, perhaps the most influential celebrity publicist in the game.
How did the N64’s Legacy of Darkness hide the ability to instantly unlock all its characters for a quarter-century? Well, this particular Up, Up, Down, Down required four Ups and four Downs, used C-buttons instead of D-pad, and you’ve gotta hit Z (not Start) at the end. Have yourself more Konami Code stories.
Though Truth Social has lost $3.5 billion in value, its shareholders say they aren’t worried. “This isn’t just another stock to me. … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap,” says Jerry Dean McLain, who’s invested “$25,000 — pretty much his ‘whole nest egg.’”
[The Washington Post]
At least, that’s what I’m assuming after looking at CNN’s landing page for the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. They clearly knew the page needed to be visually interesting but also load relatively quickly on a 56k modem. Why not clipart!
Here’s a profile of the guy who created the long-running website where people make visual confessions. Twenty years in, it’s still going — and this profile reveals the surprising religious roots of Frank Warren’s community art project.
[Hazlitt]
Aloha Browser says EU users jumped 250 percent in March after the Digital Markets Act forced Apple to display a new default browser choice screen. It joins Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Opera in reporting user spikes, according to Reuters.
Nevertheless, the EU is investigating Apple’s implementation over complaints that it’s too complicated.
Coudflare’s data showed an eight percent drop in US traffic at the time of yesterday’s eclipse compared to the week prior. What it doesn’t show is the deluge of crappy photos that followed.
Big Sean shouted out the blog era of music during an NPR Tiny Desk appearance this week, which is a reminder of so many outlets from that time that have disappeared or changed drastically.
That includes Pitchfork (even if Big Sean’s best review there was probably for a track that wasn’t on any of his albums), which was folded into GQ after a round of layoffs early this year, and was profiled more recently here by Liz Lopatto.
The head of Threads and Mastodon competitor Bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-Twitter internet.
For more on why, Aftermath (a new gaming site started by several former Kotaku writers) has several enlightening quotes from Glennon’s letter of resignation that was sent to G/O Media execs Lea Goldman and Jim Spanfeller.
I firmly believe that the decision to ‘invert’ Kotaku’s editorial strategy to deprioritize news in favor of guides is fundamentally misguided given the current infrastructure of the site... [This decision is] directly contradicted by months of traffic data, and shows an astonishing disregard for the livelihoods of the remaining writers and editors who work here
What’s the definition of a “baddie” that’s being “found” by this bot? “I just gathered some photos of girls I thought were hot, attached a small sample.”
If you aren’t picky about personality and your tastes align with this guy’s, you too can be flagged by Tinder for Captchas to prove you’re human!
[404 Media]
How a bad Photoshop job turned into an existential crisis for the British monarchy.
Jim Spanfeller, known for his sensitivity about being called a “herb,” has sold sports site Deadspin to Lineup Publishing. Every person who worked at the site has been fired.
Spanfeller’s management has had some benefits; when he bungled Deadspin’s editorial tone, a mass quit resulted in the founding of the excellent new website Defector.
In countries like Argentina, where physical games are exorbitantly expensive, services like Game Pass present a more affordable — but flawed — alternative.
The nerd haven isn’t what it once was, but its importance is arguably greater than ever.
With Christopher Nolan praising the benefits of 4K Blu-ray, is now the time to revisit physical media?
The Vergecast team threw out some ideas yesterday for what random names Google will use for future chatbots. I like “Fancy Geoff.”
Give it a listen if you want to catch up on stuff like Gemini’s first big controversy, The adventures of Apple and the post-quantum cryptography, and your place in Reddit’s AI-training corpus. Also, two lightning rounds!
An interview with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost reveals a fateful conversation with Nintendo in 1990.
I’ve mused before on the correct number of posters and influencers vs lurkers required on text-based social networks — but refrained from commentary on video. (I don’t watch much.) Anyway this survey data suggests my theory applies there too: most people don’t post. That means posters are weird outliers who should be studied in a lab.
About half of TikTok’s users have never uploaded a video; a normal user hasn’t so much as updated their bio. Why, then, is TikTok successful? Posters.
There are rumors the Reddit IPO is happening soon. Some of the most active Redditors may get the opportunity to buy in at the IPO price. Is a new meme stock in the making? Maybe!
In the 2020s, some companies are owned in large part by retail investors, and some of those investors are more interested in being part of an online community of investors, and trading jokes and memes, than they are in financial analysis. And you can make those investors happy in less traditional ways, like by giving them popcorn or buying a gold mine or doing a YouTube interview with no pants on.
[Bloomberg]
This TikTok video from Tawny Platis is making the rounds, and for very good reason! It seems she’s the robotic voice behind a few of the most infuriating automated voices in our lives — and despite her incredible range, companies apparently still ask for these specific tones. Don’t miss this video from her as well.
A decade later, Spike Jonze’s sci-fi love story is still a better depiction of AI than many of its contemporaries.
AI used to be weird. Now ‘sounds like a bot’ is just shorthand for boring.
