Back in the day, parents braced themselves for The Talk, which we all know covered one topic, one time: Sex. But these days, largely thanks to both the internet and what we all love to refer to as our political climate, parents are having all kinds of serious…
Billy Ad 2000
By Lonnie Frost
Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, and the death of the good internet era
With just a few weeks left in the decade, there will inevitably be countdowns and lists marking the best and worst moments of the 2010s. But the end of good internet didn’t make it to the end of 2019. The good internet died on Dec 1. 2019, when the internet-f…
The 8 Most Important Memes of 2019
Nowadays, memes go through the internet like excrement through the titular character of the The Untitled Goose Game. As were rocketing through this information superhighway like fish in a tube (remember when the people of Twitter longed to be salmon?), claspi…
How The Dodo Became the Warmest, Fuzziest Corner of the Web
Frog is a rooster. Every weekday, he speeds down his familys dusty driveway, rocking back and forth as he goes, like a feathery wind-up toy. Seconds later, a yellow school bus whines to a halt in front of him, just as Frog knew it would. For the last two year…
A Sick U.K. Boy’s Story Was True. But False Posts Followed.
Very interesting, the message reads. A friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital. It then goes on to say that the mother had deliberately put the boy on the floor. It is not clear how widely the false claims were seen, especially because F…
Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Twitter is funding a small team of researchers to build an “open and decentralized standard for social media,” with the goal of making Twitter a client for that standard. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the news and laid …
Flickr owner SmugMug emails subscribers with an urgent request: help us find more paying users
When in April of last year, the photo hosting service SmugMug acquired the photo-hosting service Flickr from Verizon’s digital media subsidiary, SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill said he was committed to breathing new life into the service, calling it “core to the en…
Peloton’s perplexing new holiday ad has incensed the internet
(CNN)Peloton, the indoor bike start-up, released a new holiday ad that in another time may not have made a dent in the cultural conversation. But this is 2019, and once the internet found the ad and pulled at its seams, there was no turning back. Social media…
Lesbian Culture Went Viral, Finally, in 2019
Hear the phrase gay culture and youll likely think of gay male culture, and the elements of it thatve been normalized and celebrated. Thats been the way of things for decades now. From Brokeback Mountain’s Oscar wins to Queer Eye, gay male culture has histori…
I’m Anil Dash, and This Is How I Work
Glitch wants to do for web apps what YouTube did for videos, Flickr and Imgur did for pictures, and Twitter did for bad opinions: make them easy to create, share, and embed, and give them the chance to reach the right audience or even go viral. I talked to CE…