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.
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.
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?
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.
A decade later, it’s clear that Slack changed work culture, even at companies that don’t use it.
The dream of the early internet is alive in PI.FYI, a new app spun out from Perfectly Imperfect.
I love this trend? More pet videos online please.
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.
[catandgirl.com]
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
[Intelligencer]
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.
[listen.hatnote.com]
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.”
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.
[Wikimedia Foundation]
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.
[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?
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]
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.
