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.
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.
‘Reddit has plugged its ears and refuses to listen to anybody but themselves. And I think there’s some very minor concessions that they can make to make people a lot happier.’
Please enjoy this delightful gem about the problem with email by Daniel Lavery. Personally, I think an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style erasure tool for our inboxes is in order. Until that arrives, the last line of this piece sums it up neatly: “Good luck.”
[The Stopgap]
A new website called Reddark has a list of subreddits (with their subscriber counts) going dark to protest Reddit’s recent API pricing changes that prompted third-party Reddit apps like Apollo to announce they’re shutting down.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hosted an AMA yesterday about the changes, and it went as well as you could expect.
So far, 160 subreddits have gone dark.
[reddark.untone.uk]
By the time I click, the email’s usually gone. It’s fascinating how Google can reach into your inbox to delete stuff.
But I can testify that the Dick’s keep getting through Gmail’s spam filters — they’ve seemingly been penetrated for good.
Whether you’ve snagged an invite code or not, the User FAQ for Bluesky is here to explain what you need to know about the Twitter-like service, the AT protocol, and even how to find your friends from other networks once you’re in.
But we will have to fact-check a section that is incorrect:
What is a post on Bluesky called?
The official term is “post.”
Liz Lopatto already told you, they’re skeets now. They even have a song.
[blueskyweb.xyz]
Here’s a profile of a 34-year-old social network, ECHO, run by a woman named Stacy Horn:
At its peak in the late ’90s, ECHO had 3,500 members. Among them: writers, artists, musicians, actors, therapists, and even, briefly, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Now it has just 43 users.
[MIT Technology Review]
Anyone else remember playing Tetris on a graphing calculator against a schoolmate with another graphing calculator using a 3.5mm audio jack “link cable” — all while your geometry teacher kindly looked the other way?
We are so far past that now, people. (via Gizmodo)
People are getting arrested at the airport for smuggling hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into the country! Incredible.
In late April, the agency said, an American couple were caught, each carrying a suitcase filled with more than 185 pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups, part of a haul of nearly 375 pounds. The Tax Authority also shared a video of the unusual discovery, which appeared to show a customs official sifting through several suitcases filled only with hundreds of the small silver and red foil packets. […]
A man’s voice in the video can be heard answering why he had filled two checked bags with Fruit Roll-Ups. “It has something to do with ice cream,” he said, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
[The New York Times]
Online pop music fans have been in a tizzy the past few days over rumors that Flatiron Books was planning to publish a high-profile book about, as the Times put it, “a pop culture phenomenon.” A leading theory was that Taylor Swift might be the subject. The book’s release date of July 9th is, as the Swifties will know, featured prominently in Swift’s song Last Kiss.
Alas, Flatiron has quashed that rumor: The July 9th release is called Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS, and it’s about — you guessed it — BTS. (July 9th is also a significant day for the BTS Army; it’s the day of the fandom’s official founding.)
[The New York Times]
Heather Armstrong, who started the Dooce.com blog in 2001, has died at the age of 47.
A 2019 Vox profile recounts that her blog grew into a business earning $40,000 per month from banner ads in 2009. It spawned an entire industry of influencer copycats.
Andy Baio writes about Armstrong on Waxy:
Heather was the consummate poster, sharp and hilarious, famously sharing her personal life on her blog, finding early fame getting fired (“dooced”) for writing about her coworkers, and later writing extensively about motherhood while raising her two children. She was a well-documented pioneer in how to make a living writing independently online.
The cult hit web comic sprawled in literary scope, pushing author Chris Onstad to burnout. Now, he thinks an AI might help him manage it.
