Quick Question with Soren and Daniel - Don’t Go on the Internet | Ep. 344

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Daniel discovers that the Cracked archive is disappearing, which sends the guys back through the internet they grew up with and the strange problem of preserving something that was never built to last. Soren argues that younger people should reclaim the abandoned corners of the web, while Daniel has another idea—treat the internet like a dead mall, get a churro somewhere else, and maybe pave the whole thing.Thanks to ASPCA for sponsoring this episode. To explore coverage, visit http://SPCApetinsurance.com/QUESTION.  The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance.Follow the guys on Bluesky!https://bsky.app/profile/danielobrien.bsky.socialhttps://bsky.app/profile/sorenbowie.bsky.socialBonus episodes 2x/month at patreon.com/quickquestion OR Apple Podcasts

Hello, if you're hearing, that you're trying, or what's on your mind? I'm just glad that we can talk tonight. So what's your favorite? It's here. It's here. It's here. That means this podcast has survived

the test of time. Or if you're watching this, this video has survived the test of time. It hasn't been wiped out. It's here. There's proof that Soren and I exist, and we are making things. Isn't that incredible?

Isn't it crazy? At some point, it won't exist. I bet at some point somebody will go, when we get bought out by IHas Cheeseburger, this podcast gets bought, then we'll make a bunch of money, we'll escape, and then they'll be like,

you know what, it's not actually super valuable for us to have the backlog of episodes. It would be much better for us to just, every once in a while, put up a graphic that says Muhammad Ali once met Gandhi or whatever.

Some factoid of dubious provenance. If everyone's not familiar with what Dan and I are talking about, it became evident recently to Jason Pargin first, or maybe somebody else, the little bird told him, but he's the one who really disseminated the information to all of us, that our life's work, everything that we had done at Cracked and built there, the house that Cracked built,

it is gone. All of our backlog of articles. So not just like Dan's in my fuck you columns like whatever we were doing. I believe the main thing that has been lost is the column section. And just like to as

quickly as we can give some like technical background as we can. A difference that was probably imperceptible to the reader who are regularly going to crack.com, the website. You know, when you cranked up your computer and went to www.crak.crat.com a hundred years ago, you would just see like a bunch of things, and some of them would be words and some of them would be videos. There were articles which were written by our freelancers and were edited by our team of editors.

And there were columns that were, that underwent less edits. scrutiny because they were just written by writers that we trusted so much so that they had access to their own back end of the website where they would upload their columns and they would get like a copy editing pass and that's about it. Everything else that was an article went through a different back end procedure including a different CMS, the software that you used to upload articles onto the internet. I bring this up as the quickest way possible to say anything that was uploaded through the blog portal, the columnist portal, that has been wiped out in the latest update, upgrade at crack.com. It's the kind of thing that happens with websites. It doesn't, I don't think it's particularly malicious behavior on the part of the,

the current owners, I think it's more indifference or ignorance. They're updating their website, which is itself a bear of a task, and a really silly thing to do because nobody goes to websites anymore. And I'm sure to port over everything that was ever on the website would require time and resources that the parent company very likely doesn't have and instead of just going through a decade of old code and figuring out how to make the old code work with the new updates instead of doing that I think they just let it all die so anything that lived as a column which was I want to say 98% of what Soren wrote for the site and probably 90% of what I wrote for the site because I would go back and forth between articles and

columns, uh, is just gone. And I, I, I say gone, uh, and like the normal internet user version of gone. Cause when I say something's gone, someone will very helpfully will say, you can go to internet archive.org or the way back machine. I'm like, I don't know what the fuck any of that is. Leave me alone. I, the, the, the, the quickest way into it is I used to be able to say go to crack.com slash members slash Daniel and you could see a decades worth of my writing all living in one place and now you can't now it's gone and so if I want another job one day or I want to show an agent or someone else the not just the the articles that I think were good but

if I wanted to just show that I did in fact exist. and produce things for 10 years. I don't have a simple way to do that. I'm not going to go to a literary agent and use the phrase way back machine. I'm not going to go to a showrunner and say, if you go to Internet Archive, you can find my work.

I'm not going to do any of that shit. So my living online resume is gone, along with Sorens and Sean Babies and Robert Rockways and Christy Harrison's and on and on and on and on and on. No, no, no, no. Right. Jason brought this to our attention.

When he told us this, my first thought was, oh, damn, that's a bummer. Because it was like the trajectory of you growing up as a writer, too. Like, you can watch, you get better. Because you're doing a weekly column. And that's the thing we would stress about most in the entire world at that time, was this thing exclusively has my name on it. No one else is touching it. It sinks or swims because of me.

Like, it does well, or it fails because I'm the only one who's touching this. And so we had a tremendous amount of pride around our columns. And so I liked it. I mean, I really liked, I think I had some really great writing in there. And I was like, wow, that's a bummer. Oh, well, and then just moved on with my life because I was like, I'm not sure at this point, I'm going to be sending people, if I had to prove that I was a writer to another boss, some point. And I'm not sure I would be sending them there anyway because over time,

they've broken that website. If you were to have gone to one of your columns, that old HTML that we uploaded ourselves and coded ourselves, it looks like shit now. The images are all out of place and weirdly justified and where the words break doesn't always match anymore where it used to because there'd be a banner ad or whatever. So it's, looked like shit. It looked like a fake website almost. And so I was like, oh, well, then I watched Jason's video about it. Jason did a short video. I think maybe on TikTok, but I'm catching it obviously downstream on Facebook. And you're so strange. I watched that video on Instagram. And he was really upset. I mean, he was pretty sad about the whole thing because also,

and I guess this is, this isn't a thing. I take any consideration. You, Jason, Jack. And I think probably even Jason more than any sent to you is that they, you guys started this website. You were there at the very, very, very, very beginning and determining what the voice of it was going to be in the shape of it and how it's going to sound. And Jason poured it over stuff from pointless waste of time, which was his previous website. And I think he was pretty sad that that was all just didn't exist anymore, that the internet, we. They always say the internet is forever.

Not true. I was pretty shocked to learn it was just gone. It was just, it's very jarring. And I think I kind of took for granted that was going to just always be there. Even though you're right, I probably would not submit it to a future employer and be like, look at, look at this stuff that I did. Even though it was like handy to have it all in one place and especially with like page views associated with it. was certainly helpful if I'm trying to sell anything to anyone someday. And I could say, like, look how many millions of people were reliably reading my stuff.

That was a helpful metric to have that is now just gone. It's funny to be all the point to you to the show, the television show that you write and be like, yeah, based on Nielsen ratings, like, this is about how many people watched it. But the thing that actually got most traction was a cracked article. Yeah. Billions of more people read that than 100%. watched last week tonight. Hey, everybody. You may feel like this if you're a pet owner.

I've got a cat, Bethany, and what of the wishes that I have? Every time I have an eyelash on my cheek, I get to blow up birthday candles, one of the wishes that I have is that I could just communicate with my pet for like 24 hours so that we could come up with some sort of system where we can tell each other stuff

because there are moments where my cat will just be walking around the house limping. And I'm like, what happened to you? And the cat just can just stare at me because there's no communication. or she goes and she hides because she's feeling sick. But I can't put a hand on her forehead and tell that she's sick. I'm out of ideas because I've only ever dealt with children and humans before.

So when they're not feeling well, I feel so helpless. So if you've ever found yourself awake at 2 a.m., phone and hand, Googling things like, is it normal for dogs, or do I need to call the vet right now, you're not alone. Those unexpected moments are part of having a pet, which is exactly why the ASPCA, pet health insurance, exists. It helps take some of the financial stress out of vet care so you can focus on your pet and less on the cost. The ASPCA Pet Health Insurance Program offers customizable accident and illness plans that can fit your budget, your lifestyle, even your pet's particular quirks.

To explore coverage, visit ASPCApetinsurance.com slash question. That's ASPCA pet insurance.com slash question. Again, that's ASPCA pet insurance.com slash question. This is a paid advertisement. Insurance is underwritten by either Independence American Insurance Company or United States Fire Insurance Company and produced by PTZ Insurance Agency Limited. The ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of insurance. So it was drawing to see everything go and there was a tiny bit of relief for me as well because I started writing columns for Cracked and I was 21 years old and I was not just a worse. writer back then, uh, certain social mores have evolved and I have as well. And like, I think I'm in pretty safe territory for most things. But I'm, I'm not confident that all of the language I was using in 2007 and 2008 is language that I, I would be happy to see today, not language

that I would use today. So part of me is like, well, good, that's gone. We didn't need all of that. Probably. But it's still, again, it's jarring. And I think based on TikTok darling Jason's video, I think one of the other things that made it sadder for him and certainly for me was just the, not that you, not that we needed this to be a scoop or a news story that got like picked up by the times or by variety or anything. but when Jason says, hey, my columns and Brockway's columns and Sean Baby's columns, they're all gone. And that is met with kind of like a very muted response from people. Like no one's saying good riddance or anything. There were a bunch of passionate people who are like, that sucks. Oh, no. You could find it on the way back machine.

But just to give a perspective on the, the, changing of times when in 2017 when there was a great purge it cracked and they laid off my entire department and a bunch of other staff members and reduced the site to like a skeleton crew that news was trending on twitter for 24 hours it was notable that these people lost their jobs at this comedy website and that that felt good and it felt like the right thing like it was a world that made sense to me too. It was like, yeah, this is, the Twitter is a very internet place. This is internet news. And then fast forward to today when you could say, Brockway and Sean Baby's columns are gone. And that is just met with like a mix of indifference and

confusion and just sort of like, I mean, yeah, sure, of course. Why? What does that matter to the average internet goer today that there's, oh, you, I can't, you mean I, there's not a, a place for 10 years of 4,000 word articles and you're just telling me now, oh, now am I going to get through my day? Yeah. Just nobody, I think the indifference is probably what took Jason back a little bit. I was, I was pretty indifferent in the text that he had given us. And I think maybe that was not the response he was looking for because I was like, oh, no,

how is anyone going to know that I threatened to fight a turkey, you know, Ben against Parking lot or whatever. And I think maybe I look at the same ways I look at old journals and stuff. At the time, I remember thinking, this is it, Soren. This is some of the best writing you've ever done. But there's no way I'm going to go look through old journals because I'm going to be embarrassed by what I see there. And I think that if I went back and looked at my articles, there might be some like fun little jewels in there and like turns of phrases. I'm like, oh, fuck yeah. Nice job, Soren. But for the most part, I think I'd be like, this this sense of humor this writing style was very specific to this time yeah and i don't need i don't care to see it anymore yeah and we're we're kind of holding on to the thing we built

but even if the columns were still standing today that's not a representation of of the thing that we built. That doesn't show the community, not just of readers, but of writers that came there. And it doesn't show like the, how big and popular it was. It doesn't capture what it was like writing for one of the, depending on the month, top two or three comedy websites on the planet. None of that is like reflected in crack.com slash blog at this point but there's still like a nostalgic part of me

that is like I want I want this period of time preserved and reflected and reflected somewhere somehow it's not the blog section and it was never going to be

the blog section but just the fact that the blog section is gone is like you're chipping away you're chipping away even further at this thing that like that we we built that I'm not at a Zen enough place in my life that I could be like, yeah,

water on the shores and all, it's nothing is supposed to last. There's no permanence anywhere. I'm not there yet. I would like to be there at some point, but it's fine. That's, yeah, I mean, it doesn't, it's not going to affect you every day very much. No. It's, but it is like, it is a, it's a piece of you that has disappeared. Yeah.

And that's hard. That's, I understand that. Yeah. It's not that it was ever easy to explain cracked, even when it was popular. And I was telling people, if you didn't know what cracked was when it was popular, it was still like, so you know how there are lists that you see in your Facebook feed and you sometimes click on them and you sometimes laugh. That's made in-house at like a site run by people. You know, if you don't know it, then I'm not going to impress you by telling you how the sausage is made. When Jason had talked about it on Facebook and I saw responses to it, somebody had responded in a way that I thought was really articulate where they were like it's it was the only clickbait site where they fulfilled on all of the clickbait where like you.

That's not bad. Yeah, you had this promise in an article of like what it could of like these things that will blow your mind. And then you'd read it and it did man. That was forever. We were the sole proprietor of today I learned on Reddit. because everyone would read it on cracked, immediately go over to today I learned and start putting in all the stuff they just learned in a cracked article that day. And when we talk about how the articles are, the feature articles are still there that were

brought in by contributors, the edits that are done on that, I'd say there's an overlap with the columnist of about 80 to 90 percent of those columnists were the ones editing those articles. So like it was, the site was yours. and now it's just disappearing and disappearing. I think it's harder for Jason also because his columns existed on a different level where they changed people's lives. I'm just going for jokes. And I think you were too, for the most part. Jason had was writing to try to change people's minds about the world.

Yeah. And he would. Or he helped people see it more clearly or like more coherently. and people would talk all the time about going back and revisiting his columns. John Cheese, people would go back and like, because he would write about thoughts of suicide or things like that. Depression being poor. And when people would go back and just like get courage or whatever they needed from those articles and those are gone. It's true.

The first time Trump got elected, Jason stayed up all night drafting an article that was like, that was don't panic. And it was like, I'm going to, I, people, people need a voice of reason. People need me to tell them why this isn't as bad as it seems. And when Trump got elected, I was bummed. But I was also like, this is going to be harder for me to write articles about how I want to fuck one of the Muppets. This is really going to get in the way. I have to talk about this. Yeah.

I'm going to talk about this for a while before I can go back to that thing I like doing. Yeah, it's sad. It's sad. my drunk columns will be gone. It's also, here's the thing that egotistically, the thing that was most troubling about it to me was that there are things in

those columns. We had our finger on the pulse at that point. And in a way that we were not to get too big for our bridges, but we're shaping some cultural things at the time. And things that you said in a column could have been maybe a joke that started, originated there.

And then it was used across the internet. And if anyone wanted to do the work to go back and figure out where that joke started. They could have, and now they can't. I think you're worried about that getting big for the bridges. I think we literally influenced writers in the ways that you're talking about. And also, like, you can conclusively prove that chat GPT and cloud and all. these large language learning machine things have all the AI that you're that that talks to you

have been trained ruthlessly on our articles not like we're not singling us out because we're special but we were the dummies who put thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of words and articles on the internet for a decade that could then just be fed into machines and teach the machines this is what an article sounds like, this is what comedy sounds like, enough that you can go to these machines as someone has done for me, and you could ask it to write an article about bees in the style of Daniel O'Brien, and it will do that. Like we've influenced writers,

and we've also trained an entire generation of AI against our will, how to write for the internet. And then they got rid of our words. and now the internet is just going to be bots. It's just going to be AI talking to each other, which is the other thing that I wanted to talk to you about, SORN, because it's the thing that the timing just worked out that I was sad about the cracked news,

and then I was hanging out at my favorite website, Instagram, just scrolling through Instagram like I do, and I've scrolled, so much at this point that I don't even see the posts by people that I like anymore because I've seen them all. And so now I'm just scrolling ads and like algorithm content that they think I would like. And I'm sitting there scrolling on my website and thinking about how the internet used to be better. And like I used to own a piece of the internet. And now I don't anymore.

And what does that mean? And I came, I scroll through and I came across a clip of the movie Monument Men, Monuments Men. monuments, men's. Monuments, man's. Men's humans. It's a clip from this movie that I saw when it came out in theaters because it had a rock star cast of character actors. And I was like, sure. I'll see this movie.

I've got nothing better to do with my time. I have not thought about it since. And then a clip comes up on my Instagram feed. And there's like the superimposed text on the top of the clip that was like, one smoke break started a war. and you see John Goodman having a smoke break and then he looks over into the bushes and there's some soldiers who are like trying to wave him off

and then he sees what's going on and then he signals to his buddy John Dujardine who was an actor that we used to put in movies we even gave him an Oscar and they get into a car and they drive away and a firefight happens and I'm watching the scene and being like man I sure don't remember

this movie but I know the actor I know that it's monuments men I know that those actors are in it And then I read the caption of this video. And it is just a summary of the movie Kong Skull Island, which is a movie that John Goodman was also in. Yeah, he was. And there were trees in that movie, too.

And guns. And it's very obvious that it was a mistake. And it's also very obvious that like, this is, this is a fully AI driven account. You pull a clip from a movie and it does its best to generate some text that can go over the clip. And then it does its best to do a caption that makes sense. And it, like, it scrubbed enough context clues that the algorithm was like, I'm pretty sure this is Kong Skull Island. And like, close, but you're not. And instead of doing anything like meeting with the.

captioning they again it's just like it's just a summary of the movie kong skull island it's it's one of the things that makes instagram so crazy to me is that the the distance between what you see and the caption when it's all i i'm looking at this and getting kind of a chuckle and thinking like i want to is this is this part of what the internet is now where is this maybe even clever is this done to get engagement because sometimes i think some accounts will do something wrong on purpose so people will comment correcting them and if you get a lot of comments it looks like you're really doing something great so let me go to the comments just to confirm this theory and the comments are nothing but porn bots talking to each other i went in there thinking like this isn't this

isn't kong skull island it's monuments men let me see if anyone agrees with me and it's a bunch of anime avatars of schoolgirls and they're like definitely don't click on my links if you're a kid because it's not for children and then someone's responding to it is like definitely don't click on mine daddy and i'm like the i mean i'm gonna click on what is any of the internet for it it's it's fucking i i i content for an audience of a i sex robots talking to each other just doing fishing scams at each other. And I'm just like, what am I, what am I trying to preserve with the columnist archives it cracked? It's the people that we were writing columns for 15, 20 years ago, they're not on the internet anymore. I don't know where that audience is now, but like, I don't have to,

I don't have to feel bad that they're not getting serviced or not getting reached. Because the internet is, it's just for you anymore. It's not for people anymore. That's what I mean. You're walking through an apocalyptic wasteland when you're on the internet where it's like everything, there's not a true thing anymore. And it's not really clear what the lies are in service of. Have you ever played the game Horizon Zero Dawn, Dan? Yeah.

So I love this game. But I did have a real cathartic moment while I was playing it, realizing, oh, I feel, I felt this. before where I'm just walking along a bunch of, I'm like sneaking along between a bunch of different robots that all fight each other and just do whatever they think they're supposed to be doing, digging up ground

or whatever. Yeah. But I, this isn't, I don't belong here anymore. Like, this isn't for me. Right, you're wandering around and you wonder out loud, like, does anyone else think it's strange that the raptors are armed? And then you turn and it's like a turkey with a metal exoskeleton and you're like, I don't think it's weird.

Oh, that's right. Of course you don't. Yeah, you guys fight each other. I have the same experience on Facebook where I spend time on Facebook Reels, as I've embarrassingly said on this podcast before, where I treat it like my television channels where I just flip through it. And I'm like, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, let's see what's going on here. Oh, it's a little piece of some show, I assume, called Vikings. Let's watch it. And I've noticed the same thing. It's also, if there is custom me, you know, for the internet content as opposed to just scraping pieces of movies,

that whole process has changed as well. It's like somebody's going to be like, all right, I'm going to cut open this gem. I think that this is a geode. This is like a giant rock that I have. Inside, I'm pretty confident that there's a geode in here. Well, guess but, brother, buckle up because that's a six-part series you're about to watch. You've got to go. If you wanted to actually see with inside of that geode, you got to go to their page.

You got to go through, go down to just watched on their page. Then go ahead through all of the videos that they're going to, they made in the meantime of getting into this stone. And also, there's times where they just fucked off from that plan for a little while and then came back to it. Or they're like, also, I'm going to try to make crows into my friends so that they can chase away the hawks from getting my chickens. You're like, that's not even rock related.

And so even the people, even the people have created a system where it's like, this is a worse experience and I don't enjoy it, not having any fun here anymore. I think I want to just leave. It's very funny that we've created, we, humans, we've created like art and music and movies and books and websites. And it had been fun to imagine future archaeologists or aliens 10,000 years from now, stumbling across things and trying to figure out what we were like and what we were into and what purpose these things served. I was always like a fun thought experiment. It's crazy that it's happening right now by robots on the internet. We're just like, this is this, this, this, this, this, this, a clip of a movie that I've found in the back of my computer brain.

I guess I'm going to assume was that this movie called Cold Strings, uh, that came out in 20203, starring some freaks from Vancouver. I'm going to just say is the most popular movie of 2023. three and I'm going to post it on Instagram and share it with the world. Like this is what people were like and like, no, aliens, we're all still here. We could tell you that that's not that we've not heard of this strange cold strings movie. And I'm, I think people can be listening to this and be like, well, get off fucking Instagram or get off Facebook. Those are, these places are dead.

Well, I ask you this, ladies and gentlemen, where is the heart still beating? like I don't that when you when a site would die when like a social media site would die like my space it's because there was some other place that was so much better and like they were doing it right and so my space had gotten to the point where it was it was growing growing growing it had to make some changes that weren't so hot for the user but they in order to keep making money they had to make some changes and everyone was eventually people became fed up with those changes like, well, I'm just going to go over to this other site. And then that site became big.

And whatever I was getting from Facebook or whatever I'm getting from it when I'm using it, which is an embarrassing thing. I accept that that's embarrassing that I'm still there and then I'm getting something out of it. But there's nowhere for me to go that solves these problems. These problems are across the internet now,

and it's not going to get better. It's not like there's some site that's like, oh, no, we're going to do it right. If you wanted to watch just clips of monument, men, it's going to be very easy for you to do that. And we're going to just pull out the really fun stuff too. Like, we're going to pull out the pieces of the movie that are going to make you nostalgic for the movie. Somebody is actually going through and using their human brain to be like, there was a real touchstone here in this movie. And I'm going to just pull that out and everyone can watch it whenever they want or stumble across it.

You don't stumble across good stuff anymore. You will never again stumble across good stuff. stuff. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Cracked was a site that people came to because they felt like they had found it on their own. They felt like it was this underground thing and they were like, I, you know this used to be a magazine. I love this place now. They've turned it into something incredible and I barely want to tell you about it because it's mine. And that was how the internet existed. The internet was like you had these pockets where you're like, this is the place that I go because these are, this fits me the best. And those places are fucking dead. Can I tell you my favorite, I think the most effective piece of clickbait I've ever seen in my entire life? Yeah. You called cracked clickbait earlier, or you were quoting someone calling it that. And I suppose we are in a sense guilty of that. I think it's got kind of a pejorative association because.

Yeah. Well, I'm happy to talk about that too. Yeah. You know, like BuzzFeed was a great perpetrator of clickbait in terms of just like, we have presented an image and a sequence of words that are so desirable, that promise something so great, you'll have to click on it. And they didn't, they didn't never care if they delivered on that or not. But like, so people would go and click on these, they would take the bait and get there and be like, oh, this is, this is a rugpole. This is a bait switch. This is not, this, the, the,

article doesn't live up to, to the link. And I'm unhappy about that. When we were making cracked, we weren't really thinking about clickbait. We were certainly wanted the headlines and the images, the thumbnails to be enticing. But we're always like, let's make a great article or video and then come up with a title that best fits it later. And I think our imitators did that process in the other direction where they came up with the most inflammatory title, salacious title. And then let the column sort of be whatever it was going to be. So that's a difference in clickbait, but the most effective clickbait I've ever seen in my entire life that I think about all the time is an article, and it pops up every once in a while,

an article will be titled something like the surprising uses for pieces of everyday products or whatever and the thumbnail will be you know when you open a thing of deodorant and there's that little plastic do dad above the actual deodorant bar that's got like a little yeah it like fits perfectly the ridge over the deodorant and also the cap under the cap the cap under the cap yeah uh that's in every deodorant i've never known what it does that is in the picture under the headline the surprising uses for 10 everyday products. And, man, nothing has got me more excited to learn something in my life than finding out what that piece of, like, what's the fun use for that piece of plastic?

Because I'm not using it for anything. And I can't wait to find out, like, what am I supposed to do with this? And it is not discussed in the article because there's no use for it, because it's just a cap within a cap. But I, the amount of times that I've been fooled by that was like, man, that is, you can't, you can't beat that. You can't get better clickbait than that because it's so, it's so enticing. It's so, I'm so fucking hooked to learn what that thing is that I clicked on your stupid article for, for a website that is called like weirdbiz dot fuck or whatever it is. and now I'm trapped in this thing,

learning about everyday uses for things that are not good. It's such a bad article, but I'm like, when am I going to get to the thing? When am I going to get to the thing in the thumbnail? Oh, I've been tricked. Good trick.

I'm not mad. Not mad about it. You knew what I wanted. Yeah, I think that we were at least partially responsible for a lot. I don't know the click bake was a term when Cracked was like in its, certainly by the end of its golden era. We're partially responsible for the idea.

of even click big because we would have these promises in a title that were so insane. Some really big promises. And the whole point of the website and what we would do as editors was try and fulfill on that and be like, look, just trust us. This is some crazy as shit you're about to learn in this article. And I want to, there's all I need you to do is click on it and see what I'm talking about. And you will agree. You're going to keep coming back now to crack because we fulfilled. and then other sites saw that and saw that these insane promises could be made in a headline.

And they were like, well, we should be making insane promises. And then, yeah, like you said, worked it backwards, where they were just like, let's come up with a crazy title and then didn't fulfill on it. And that ended up hurting crack too, because by once everyone started doing it, once the market was flooded in crazy-ass list titles, then no one tries to, rested cracked either. It was just like it looked just like one of the other ones and people would gloss right over it. Especially once your favorite, uh, your, your favorite local bar, Facebook, when they ate up the entire internet and they convinced all of the different websites that,

that you needed to upload things directly to Facebook and that was the only place to survive and that's where the audience is. So don't you want your articles to live on Facebook? Wouldn't you rather people spend time where they are instead of go to your website? Once Facebook, did that and then you're on an infinite scroll of articles that all kind of look the same and titles that all kind of sound the same they're all the five most literally insane things that a president has ever said or the six craziest but true coincidences that have ever happened that all kinds of blends together for the audience it's just another part of their infinite Facebook scroll and there's no one who there were probably a few people but for the most part

no one is going through and like looking at a headline on Facebook and then squinting to see the byline of the article that it comes from to say like oh this is this is a this is a this is a buzzfeed one I can skip this oh this is a cracked one this is one of the good ones this they're going to deliver right it all just becomes like Facebook slop to them listicle clickbait slop I think that's true I think yeah it's where you're actually getting the information from matters very little to the user's credit I think it all Also, other than the people who realized where they were and liked the site, there were a lot of people who were going to crack and never knew they were going to crack. Yes.

At the time. I mean, to this day, having worked at that site is a curse because people will constantly at parties and stuff come up with information that they think is interesting for a party and like tell you stuff. And you're like, motherfucker, we taught you that. Where do you think you learn that? And it's they, they, the piece of information stuck, but the tracks to get there. disappeared in the snow. And so they're just like, they've got this cool thing that they want people to know. And they want you to know it?

And you're like, yeah, you know how long we worked on that article? We worked forever on that. Try and get five other pieces of information that were just as interesting and put them all on one spot. Yeah. Make it funny. Yeah. I don't know.

I think that it's in the long run, the fact that my column is gone. And maybe this speaks to how. How poorly written my column was. I think it's fine that it's gone. I think I'm not really broken up about it. I think it speaks to how your column was always the best written shit on the website. I think it speaks to, no, not a majority of shit. Shit like, come on, that's good shit.

I just didn't want to say stuff, I guess. I think it speaks to how healthy you are, what a good attitude you have. And also how well you're doing right now. I think that's, I think that's, that's fair in my case too. We're just like, you know, yeah, this, this is, it's. There's a lot of privilege here that it's, it's a,

it's fine that that's gone. Yeah. I think it's tougher. Yeah, I think if you, if that was the thing that you are most proud of and should have, I mean, for all intense purposes, should have been. The, the, the, the people that were writing for that site were incredible fucking writers. They were so good. And so if that was the thing in your life where you're like, there,

that's, I did it. That's proof that I did it. And that I was like, I made amazing things that were worthy of publishing and that millions of people read all the time. And then all of a sudden that all just disappeared. I could see how that would be very, very difficult. Fortunately, no more than 100,000 people would read each column that I wrote. So it's very easy for me to let that go. Well, that was Dan and I complaining about being old men. And how things aren't how they used to be and how the world has moved on. Once again, we'd like you to know that the internet is different. And we're asking the youth to fix Facebook and Instagram for us.

And if not that, asking the youth, where, where's the cool party now? Where do I go? I'm on blue sky. It's not there. Why don't you come hang out with me on Instagram? Come on. It's great. I, um, you got monuments, Ben.

I mean, there are still, to be fair, there are websites I do go to. Barely any, but there are some. And I go there for the writing. Like Defector, I think, is awesome. That's a great place where you could still go and you could still see really great writing. And after that, I really have to think hard about it. I don't know what comes after that. But the only...

The alt text in a Swanboy comment is... Comic is pretty good. Yeah, Swanboy, yeah. That's a great one. But yeah, try and find those. I would say if there's anything to take from this, it's please go out into the world of the internet and find the good stuff and fucking just hang out there.

Give them what they need. Like, spend your time at those watering holes and get off of the shit that we're talking about, like Facebook that I use and Instagram that Daniel uses. And go directly to those sites and support them. because, man, it is not, it was so much, so much easier long ago, so much easier for us at the beginning when it was all just unclaimed land. Yeah.

Or counter to Soren's point, I don't know, we're trying to wrap up here, don't go to those places. There's a part of me that just don't go to the internet. It's worse now and it's bad. And don't spend your time on there to fulfill some aging, millennial. nostalgia boner. There's a part of it that feels a little bit like when I came back to New Jersey years ago and all of the malls, New Jersey loves its malls, all the malls were like ghost malls. They're former shells of themselves and the stores are closing and because nobody goes there. And I look at that and it was like, kids, what the fuck are you doing? We loved malls

growing up. Go to malls. Go to malls. There's Hot Topic. There's Spencers. There's like fun, weird, stupid stuff. Get a churn. Waste some fucking time. Go to the arcade at the movie theater that's attached to the mall. But I'm realizing I would be sending kids to a place that was like 80% closed and really sad and the lighting is bad. And the stuff is worse. You can get better stuff elsewhere. and I'm just trying to send kids there

because it was cool when I was young and wouldn't it be great if it was cool again? Don't go to the internet. Don't do it. It's a dead mall. It's a, I wish someone would pave the internet and tell me what they were going to replace it with

so I could get excited about that. But in the meantime, just don't go to the internet. Ignore what Soren said. You heard him, ladies and gentlemen. ignore, don't go to the internet. Don't go to the internet. Don't go to TV to fill some hole in your heart either. Stop, get off TV.

TV's a dying animal as well. Get away from shows. What is the show anyway? Let's stop all of this. Go outside. Get a life. Don't go to band camp slash me rex to listen to the guy who made her theme song. Don't support McKenzie Mazzell and her podcast.

Don't make it worse Don't follow us on Blue Sky Don't email the show Quick Question at QQ with Soren Daniel at gmail.com Don't watch it on YouTube Don't join the Patreon There is nothing for you there

Bye Bye I think you'll have a great time here I think you love a great time here I think you love a