Culture encompasses books, movies, television, music, video games, internet memes, and thousands of branches of art. And sure, culture includes the latest entertainment news too. At The Verge, we construct entry points both into the mainstream and the niche, the tentpoles and the hidden gems, to help make the most notable and discussed parts of the cultural conversation understandable and accessible to everyone.
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.
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
No further comment.
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]
Why the Kate Middleton scandal just won’t die
How a bad Photoshop job turned into an existential crisis for the British monarchy.
The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare — and consequential — flub
A wave of wire services retracting a doctored image of the Princess of Wales and her kids set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories.
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.
How to save culture from the algorithms, with Filterworld author Kyle Chayka
The author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture discusses how we might be able to cultivate our own tastes once more.
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Subscription services are changing our relationship to gaming
In countries like Argentina, where physical games are exorbitantly expensive, services like Game Pass present a more affordable — but flawed — alternative.
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Limited Run gives digital games a physical legacy
CEO Josh Fairhurst believes that people will still care about physical media, even if the future looks bleak.
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Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene
Floppy disks are facing extinction, but musicians are still pumping out DIY music projects.
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!
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.
Spike Jonze’s Her holds up a decade later
A decade later, Spike Jonze’s sci-fi love story is still a better depiction of AI than many of its contemporaries.
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How AI can make history
Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?
“Linkifying them is the logical next step,” CEO Jay Graber said while discussing the use of hashtags on the Twitter alternative platform on the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast,
Graber also said Bluesky, which recently opened, now has nearly 5 million users and will soon roll out moderation services, enabling “any third-party service that wants to build, you know, a labeler or an annotator some way of giving input to the network.”
The doodle is a combination dating app and high school chemistry lesson. Answer a few questions and find out what element you are, then swipe left and right to bond or deny other elements.
It’s an annoyingly good time. I love the chemistry jokes, but did it really have to do me like that?
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The text file that runs the internet
For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.