Internet Culture

Inaccurate AI-generated stories were an important part of the BNN business model — “churning out hundreds, even thousands, of stories a day.” Some of BNN’s stories were republished by MSN.com or linked by reputable outlets.

What happens when remote villages get Starlink and all the good and bad that comes with unfettered internet access? The New York Times traveled deep into the Amazon rainforest to find out:

Modern society has dealt with these issues over decades as the internet continued its relentless march. The Marubo and other Indigenous tribes, who have resisted modernity for generations, are now confronting the internet’s potential and peril all at once, while debating what it will mean for their identity and culture.

The contrast and familiarity of the NYT’s photography is striking, seeing people hunched over their brightly lit rectangles hoping for just one more hit of dopamine.

It debuted on June 1st, 1999, and shut down two years later.

Its name lived on as a Best Buy brand, a re-named Rhapsody streaming service, and an attempt to cash in on NFT hype. But in my heart, it will always be a search engine for poorly-labeled, low-quality MP3s that take hours to download over AOL dial-up internet.

And yet, Matty Benedetto has amassed millions of subscribers with his Unnecessary Inventions. Tune into my new video series, Full Frame: Creators, where I spend a day with a creator to see how they have found success on the internet.

Despite Google’s AI expertise, it drastically overestimates how good its tech is — as anyone can see in its search results. And that’s with expertise. This doesn’t bode well for everyone else’s use of AI!

FTX lieutenant Ryan Salame, sentenced to 7.5 years in jail earlier today, has logged on to yell at people online. That’s some real poster game, folks. You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. (via Molly White)

Remember this? I’ve been waiting for a good reason to share it on The Verge, and all of Kingdom Hearts coming to Steam seems like a good enough one to me! Spoilers, obviously.

The indie rock icon, Steely Dan hater, and prolific shitposter died of a heart attack. Among the records he engineered were Nirvana’s In Utero and Pixies’ Surfer Rosa. Here’s Albini on the recording industry in 1993, and a more recent feature on his growth since then.

G/O Media sold Deadspin, The A.V. Club, and The Takeout last month. Now Global Tetrahedron, which includes Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson and former NBC News reporter Ben Collins, has acquired The Onion.

Taking over as CEO, Collins told the NYT:

We’re keeping all the writers, we’re going to work with the union, we’re going to make it so they can hopefully get paid a little bit more money, and we’re going to give them the room to grow.

The first article published? Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.

“No journalist is going to catch Swift in her sweatpants backstage and write about it.” I loved this profile of Tree Paine, perhaps the most influential celebrity publicist in the game. 

How did the N64’s Legacy of Darkness hide the ability to instantly unlock all its characters for a quarter-century? Well, this particular Up, Up, Down, Down required four Ups and four Downs, used C-buttons instead of D-pad, and you’ve gotta hit Z (not Start) at the end. Have yourself more Konami Code stories.

Though Truth Social has lost $3.5 billion in value, its shareholders say they aren’t worried. “This isn’t just another stock to me. … I feel like it was God Almighty that put it in my lap,” says Jerry Dean McLain, who’s invested “$25,000 — pretty much his ‘whole nest egg.’”

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.

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