Elizabeth Lopatto
Happy Friday! Here are some cats singing.
I love this trend? More pet videos online please.
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.
A decade later, it’s clear that Slack changed work culture, even at companies that don’t use it.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
The dream of the early internet is alive in PI.FYI, a new app spun out from Perfectly Imperfect.
Kevin Nguyen
Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
How one artist feels about her work being scraped for AI.
Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl (IYKYK) has made a comic about being named as one of the artists used to train Midjourney. Gambrell refers to herself as “small-time” and her discussion of her ambitions may clarify why a lot of creators feel exploited by scraping.
Cat and Girl
[catandgirl.com]
Elizabeth Lopatto
What do you do when men of the internet keep hitting on your bot?
I have often wondered why internet assistants invariably have female names. Anyway, here’s an easy solution to the problem from Ask A Manager:
As for what to do … if you just want it to stop, the easiest answer is to change the name to a very male-sounding one. I will personally pay you thousands of dollars if changing the bot’s name to Wayne doesn’t put an immediate end to this.
Elizabeth Lopatto
“Online returns are such a pain that more than 40% of consumers say they would prefer to sit in rush-hour traffic.”
Online shopping hit a new peak over the 2023 holiday season — and now the returns are upon us. But as online shopping gets increasingly competitive, there are new struggles around return policies. That may be an area for increased competition:
As consumers begin factoring in how time-consuming and costly making returns can be, they skip over buying goods from certain online stores altogether. According to the NRF and Happy Returns survey, 50% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because the return policy was too bothersome.
Richard Lawler
2023 Wrapped culture is out of control.
It’s one thing when it’s Spotify, Apple Music, or SoundCloud, but these recaps from Culver’s, Dunkin (it dropped the “Donuts” from its name in 2019), Chick-fil-A, and Shake Shack are taking the whole year-end recap trend a little too far. Especially when they’re personalized.
It’s a TV. It’s a roller coaster. It’s a 4D Disney World experience. It’s the Sphere, and it’s a lot more fun than my phone.
David Pierce
Elizabeth Lopatto
In honor of the upcoming Festivus, Outdoors has published an airing of the grievances.
Can you guess which national parks these people are reviewing?
Too many people, not enough stores, not enough places to buy food.
Absolutely horrible disappointment. There wasn’t a single pickleball court in sight.
The whole place smelled like farts.
Elizabeth Lopatto
John Herrman is such a good blogger it’s disgusting.
“Partnerships like this should complicate this story of inevitability for companies like OpenAI, the world-beating firm that, before it takes over the economy, and before it must be stopped from taking over the entire world, must first, for some reason, pay for a big subscription to Politico Pro.”
What Do AI Companies Want With the Media?
[Intelligencer]
Nilay Patel
Verge Staff
Nathan Edwards
Shhhh. Listen to Wikipedia.
Ten years old, but new to me: a website that plays a tone every time a Wikipedia page is updated. It’s a soothing antidote to ... basically every other browser tab, at this point.
The bell-like sounds of a celesta correspond to edits with a net addition of content to Wikipedia, and the strums of a clavichord correspond to net subtractions of content.
That, of course, is from Wikipedia.
Hatnote Listen to Wikipedia
[listen.hatnote.com]
Richard Lawler
Is Threads signing a major free agent away from Elon Musk?
Even as big advertisers exit, sports Twitter has continued going strong. But now the official Threads account announced that sports/NBA Twitter’s newsbreaker Adrian Wojnarowski “has landed” and is doing a Q&A Friday.
If “woj bombs” are on the move, it might be about more than hashtags — Wojnarowski works at ESPN, which is still owned by Disney. Musk singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger with his “go f yourself” comments last week, then followed up with more attacks and accusations today while misspelling Iger’s name and saying “He should be fired immediately.”
Amrita Khalid
Famous deaths, cricket… and ChatGPT dominated Wikipedia in 2023.
Wikipedia has released its top articles of the year, and numero uno is one on ChatGPT. In a morbid twist, “Deaths in 2023” came in second.
Finally, India’s vast English-language speaking population just can’t log-off — articles on the 2023 Cricket World Cup and the Indian Premier League come next in the ranking. You can see the full list of popular Wikipedia articles below.
Announcing Wikipedia's most popular articles of 2023 – Wikimedia Foundation
[Wikimedia Foundation]
Umar Shakir
Mastodon tries to mediate awkward replies before they happen.
Its Android app is testing a new feature that’ll warn users before replying to old posts or posts from people they don’t follow, asking them to make a great first impression.
Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says the goal is to “curb unnecessary negativity” that’s common on the internet. Mastodon is your new think before you reply coach.
Improving the quality of conversations on Mastodon
[Mastodon Blog]
The social network failed to hit the growth targets its new owner set in 2019. But were they ever compatible with what Tumblr does best?
Allegra Rosenberg
Wes Davis
The radio stations of the world, visualized.
Last night, a friend pointed me to Radio Garden. The site (or iOS app) is simple, presenting a swipe-able digital Earth covered in green dots. Some represent collections of local stations, and some, like the lonely, all-shellac-78s Arctic Outpost AM1270, solemnly broadcast into the Earth’s farthest reaches.
James did a good job documenting the unexpectedly simple, nostalgic joy of Radio Garden in his Verge story years ago.
Radio Garden
[radio.garden]
Richard Lawler
For Android’s 15th birthday, Google revisited the great cheeseburger emoji debate.
After 15 years of Android, Google’s blog post walking down memory lane didn’t do much for me beyond one note about 2017’s Android 8 (Oreo) launch and the big emoji problem that was so important that CEO Sundar Pichai got involved.
For some reason, the Android 8.0 emoji for cheeseburger and beer had some odd mistakes (the originals are on top, see if you can spot the differences) that were fixed a few months later with the release of Android 8.1.
Image: Google
Elizabeth Lopatto
Wes Davis
The Pico 4 store is getting VRChat soon.
UploadVR spotted a “coming soon” listing for VRChat, the virtual reality social platform, in the app store for the ByteDance-owned Pico 4 headset.
I wonder if that Four Seasons Total Landscaping hangout is still around.
VRChat Is 'Coming Soon' To Pico 4
[UploadVR]
Alex Cranz
Star Wars jizz is now called jatz.
In a galaxy far, far, away, jazz doesn’t exist. Instead, when you want to really blow on that horn you’re jizzing or jatzing. As AVClub recently noted, both words have technically been used to describe the musical stylings of the Star Wars universe over the years, with jizz gaining in popularity for extremely obvious reasons.
But in a recent short story collection based around Return of the Jedi characters, Max Rebo, the blue alien front man for the band that plays at Jabba the Hutt’s palace thinks back to other times he’s performed “jatz standards”. That means jatz is the official Disney-approved name for the music.
Wookiepedia, meanwhile, continues to embrace jizz.
Elizabeth Lopatto
Wellness influencers sued.
Consumers, states, and the FTC are taking marketing claims from wellness companies more seriously — and, increasingly, there are legal consequences.
The lawsuits come as online promoters move from endorsing other companies’ products to creating and pushing their own. Meanwhile regulators are looking more closely at influencer marketing, which is expected to exceed $21 billion this year, according to an industry report.
Elizabeth Lopatto
TikTok stars Mixie and Munchie are performance artists for the post-social media world.
Perhaps you’ve seen them: two girls, one wordlessly mixing a drink while the other one snacks. Why don’t they talk?
Honestly, the internet is too loud. The feed is too loud. TikTok is too loud. I’m scrolling and I just want everyone to shut the fuck up.
Turns out it’s still possible to have mystique on social media.
Who the hell are 2girls1bottl3?
[The Face]