The Press Box - The New Online | Damage Control (Ep. 550)

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Tumblr announced this week that they are going to ban all adult content from the site (2:00), and many believe this signals the end for the social platform (9:25). The millennial-focused news site Mic laid off the majority of their staff this week ahead of a sale to Bustle Digital Group (21:10); the company may be a parable of what not to do as a young digital media company (30:06). Hosts: Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up guys, it's Liz Kelly. All month long, The Ringer will be breaking down 2018's highs and lows in music, pop culture, sports, TV, and film. Some of the things we've hit so far are the best TV show episodes and the best rap albums of the year. And this week, we are writing about the best performances

and the 10 best action movies of 2018. Plus, we'll be reacting to both the Golden Globes and Grammy nominations on the site. You can check all of these things out on The Ringer.com. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture.

It's been a tough month for the media, including a mass layoff at Mike, a once up-and-coming company that built itself as a news site for millennials. Mike had a large staff, deluxe offices in the New World Trade Center, and a cozy relationship with Facebook. This month, Mike fired all but two of their staff and are now being sold to bustle. We're going to talk about what this means for the industry in general. But first, porn. This is the porn app.

This week, Tumblr said it's banning nudity from its iconically porn-filled website. We're going to talk about Tumblr's porn problem and what it says about the evolution of internet culture and social media culture and the gentrification of the web. Meanwhile, it's just been announced that the website Tumblr will be banning porn. starting on December 17th. And if you do not know what Tumblr is, you have until December 17th to find out. Let's talk about Tumblr. Once an early social media stronghold for millennials,

now a website in jeopardy. And that's because Tumblr has a porn problem. I should specify it has a child porn problem. So in November, Apple evicted Tumblr from the Apple. app store after finding child pornography on the site and finding that Tumblr was having a hard time filtering child pornography out of its adult content otherwise. So Tumblr started removing the offending content and it took another step. As of December 17, Tumblr is banning all nudity from the site and a sort of desperate last-ditch attempt to salvage the website's commercial potential

and its reputation. So to be clear, though, Tumblr's users don't all see Tumblr's porn problem as a problem per se. They say nudity and adult content are legitimate and there's sort of like these definitive important components of various subcultures on Tumblr. And Tumblr users have pretty strong opinions about this stuff,

about nudity, sex, and the freedom to depict these things. So Tumblr was really one of the last mainstream places on the internet where people would come to talk openly about sex and sexuality. I want to quote from a recent piece at BuzzFeed talking about this about the culture of Tumblr. Tumblr sex sites created spaces for all kinds of people who don't have access to sexual community elsewhere, wrote Stephen Thrasher. It has always been a safe haven for young people exploring and expressing their sexuality. There is tasteful erotica, supportive places for people to post their own bodies, including those that don't look like typical porn bodies, and to consume and engage with the wide swath

of human sexual experience that can't be replicated by logging on to ex-hamster and being greeted with the blast of extremely aggressive heterosexual facials. Great imagery there. There's another... Very vivid writing. Right, right. To summarize the importance of Tumblr, or at least the importance of Tumblr, There's another good quote from a piece in motherboard. It's sort of a comfort that despite most of the internet being colonized by anodyne corporate platforms, people are still incredibly horny online. Right.

And so this is, this is, these are journalists and users who are writing about adult content on Tumblr in general. They're not talking about child porn. They're just talking about the fact that there's lots of explicit. nude images and, like, erotic art on Tumblr. And those are the things that are, like, important to the culture of Tumblr. That's like, whenever I hear people talk about Tumblr, like, in the past few years, it's been porn related. Right. Or just, like, something gross and weird.

But it was a very popular use case. Right. That's actually really strange to me. We can get into that in a second. But the fact that there is at this stage in Tumblr, this reflexive. association of porn in Tumblr when that was not always the case but we can we can get to that so like I said the users on Tumblr weren't necessarily the people who saw the permissiveness of adult content on Tumblr is the problem it's really like their

corporate overlords right because like Tumblr is at one point owned by Yahoo is now owned by Verizon and it seems like Tumblr is having like chronic profitability problems and And like getting banned from the app store is not like a great. No, that's very bad. Yeah, that's, it's very bad. And it's very bad for an app that has never really made the most sense. If you're just looking at it in commercial terms of like, how does this app generate money? Considering that it's like a free website for teens or largely for like younger people who, you know.

And it was like late to like advertising. Is it teens now that? that are using Tumblr. I feel like it's like 32 year old sex positive activists and people who like really want Sonic and Tales to kiss. Right. Well, the Sonic Entails probably, I feel like it was always a part of Tumblr. It's just sort of spiraled into extremes from there.

Yeah. But yeah. So it's this weird thing where like the commercial viability of Tumblr feels fundamentally at odds with what the users of Tumblr, or like a lot of users of Tumblr, think the site should be and think the site definitively is. Tumblr isn't just a commercial product. It's a social space. It's where a lot of people forge online identities

and they form communities. And I read a quote from one Tumblr user, a woman named Kat who talked to Vice about the nudity band. So the passage here, Kat E, who runs a not safe for work, Rick and Morty-themed blog, says, I'm disappointed. Not because it's another website banning adult content that I can handle.

It's how they're banning it that's truly disappointing. Painting adult content is harmful, unsafe, and unwelcome is really insulting. It's almost as if we're getting punished alongside genuinely harmful people. So that's a lot to unpack. And I mean literally in Pax as in we have to unpack the child pornography from the other adult content on Tumblr. But I do want to go back to what you reference Kate, which is a lot of. like this reflexive association of Tumblr and Po it's the one website it's the one big social media platform that I think people just instinctively associate with like its most lewd images

yeah I guess Twitter still allows nudity but it just doesn't function as well for people who are looking for that sort of thing right right um well Twitter that like the thing I find weird about Tumblr's reputation is that and maybe it's just because I don't I haven't used Tumblr a lot in recent years, but I see plenty of porn on Twitter, frankly. And I see definitely like, mostly because I follow a lot of, like, weird. I get DM'd it sometimes. Excuse me? Yeah.

Oh, no. Part of being a woman on the internet. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's okay. That's garbage. I don't really see a lot of porn on Twitter, though. Oh, okay.

I definitely. I'm always, like, slightly taken aback when there's just, like, boobs in my feed. Yeah. Right. But yeah, so, like, it is important to distinguish between why Tumblr got banned from the app store. That's a real problem. It was not removing child pornography in an efficient way. It needed to be better.

And then what it's done now is like a crazy overcorrection situation where it's like actually nothing sexual on here anymore, which seems like so old. overblown. It's like, no, just take away the heinous criminal images. Don't throw the bathwater out with the sexy baby. Oh, no. I guess what I'm getting at, though, is like, okay, imagine there's an overnight controversy where you wake up and Twitter is besieged by a proliferation of child pornography, right? If Twitter's response to that was, okay, this is the straw that broke the camel's back, we're going to ban all adult images. We're going to moderate for and ban all adult images. In Twitter's case, I don't think anybody would care because it's like, I just can't

imagine there being a backlash against Twitter for that policy because I don't think that the communities and the images are essential to the cultures of Twitter. I just don't think nudity is like... I think people who use it for those purposes would be pissed. Right, but I guess what I'm asking is, like, would those people amount to this sort of backlash that we're seeing against Tumblr? Well, I think it's just that Twitter is a lot more popular than Tumblr. It has a lot more use cases. Tumblr just has a really thriving adult content community that makes up a larger percentage of, like, the content that it disseminates.

Right. Yeah. Or even communities. Because it seems like there are a lot of different types of porn on Tumblr. I feel bad for all those people who just want to post horny things about Rick and Morty. Because where are they going to go? That's not like the sort of thing. Obviously, the internet has no shortage of porn like anyone who is just looking for porn isn't going to have a problem finding it.

But like people who are interested in very specific types of adult content are going to have to reestablish their communities elsewhere. and there's not that many places for them to go because, you know, Instagram doesn't allow nudity. Facebook doesn't. I'm sure there are closed groups on Facebook where this stuff is flourishing because, like, it's just impossible to moderate closed groups. But I think one of the sort of reasons why people are so upset about this is because it's just another example of the Internet sort of losing its stranger pockets. becoming all homogenized and optimized for like mass appeal instead of appeal to these niche subcultures.

Obviously anyone who's not a demon wants there not to be child pornography on the internet. It's just that there's a lot being lost by the decision to ban adult content writ large. Also, wait, can we just talk for a second about the only good thing that's come out of this is that it's introduced like one of the most ridiculous phrases I've ever heard into the public, which is female presenting nipples. Nice. Explain. No, elaborate.

No one's going to know what you're talking about. When Tumblr announced that it was banning adult content and it sort of laid out what specifically was allowed and not allowed. And it said that female presenting nipples are no longer allowed. Right. Which really has provoked. some thoughts because I don't know what female are presenting nipples are.

I think you're right. I think that the Tumblr is this sort of rare last unscrubbed corner of the internet in a certain way. I mean, look, there are like forums. Yeah. There are strange corners of the internet, but I'm talking about in terms of like big name, social media brands, Tumblr is sort of like

the last room in the house to get. cleaned. That's a good metaphor. But it's also strange to me because it's like, I feel like a theme when you and I talk on this podcast whenever we're talking about like big tech companies is moderation. And we're usually, I feel like in most other instances, we are typically like clamoring for some sort of moderation. Like we're talking about Facebook and we're talking about how Facebook should do a better job of like finding like Russian hackers and bots and fake news and stuff like that. We're talking about Twitter and we're talking about Twitter struggles to like, or not even struggles, like Twitter's refusal to try to figure out who the neo-Nazis are on Twitter and get

rid of them. And like you could describe those things ideally as part of an effort to clean up the internet and make it less weird. Like, Alex Jones, getting kicked off of Facebook is an effort to make the internet less weird. And it's just strange to me that in Tumblr's case, it seems like I'm inclined to treat Tumblr with a different and, in fact, opposite standard that I think of Facebook and Twitter. Well, I wouldn't say my standards are different platform by platform. I think that moderation is a really complex topic. It's very tricky because I do think that Facebook and Twitter in particular have done a lot of damage to society by refusing to moderate certain types of content.

That said, I've always been uncomfortable with blanket statements about moderation. Basically, moderation is super, super tricky and hard and difficult. and I don't think it's contradictory to feel ambivalent and conflicting thoughts about how to approach it. Yeah. Like I really, I think that's a normal response because it's really hard to wrap your head around. And it is super important to think seriously about how much control you want these companies to have over what you're allowed to say and what you're allowed to express. It always seems like these companies are bad at moderation. Like when they finally take up the mantle of doing it.

They're all terrible. They all suck at it. But I must say like it's so hard. I do sympathize because like to be good at moderation that hasn't happened yet because it's really hard when you're at this scale and there's like millions of people expressing themselves on your platform, it's hard to come up with a coherent theory of how to like police that in a way that like allows for free speech but doesn't like disseminate. false information and cause genocides.

Right. It's extreme. Yeah. So they need to do a better job, but I do, it's only fair to say that the task is insanely difficult. Do you buy the, I feel like a lot of columns written about Tumblr are all positing that. Well, Tumblr's banning porn.

Okay, well, Tumblr is done. I don't know. Like, do you buy that? I feel like Tumblr has been dying for a long time anyways. Yeah. Like, I think if this had happened to a prospering web property, it wouldn't be, it would be a different story. I don't even know if Tumblr would have taken these actions had it not been in trouble and desperate. Right.

Like, it's been, it's been sort of waning and influence. And, you know, David Carpett's founder left. The sale to Yahoo was really not, it was a bad fit. Verizon's also a bad fit. It strikes me as odd because for all the doom saying about how, like, Tumblr might be toast because of it or, like, how they might just terminally alienate a lot of their user communities. I remembered Tumblr before it was a porn website. You know what I mean? Like, I remember it and loved it.

I had, like, a Tumblr, which I sadly deleted that I used to, like, blog about my adventures abroad. Right. Totally. That's it. It's totally it. And I don't think it's smart or fair to pin any one reason on why Tumblr dies if it even dies. Right. Totally, totally. It is kind of strange to me that Apple could just sort of wreck Tumblr's shit. Just like wrecked Tumblr's whole shit and like maybe bring the whole thing crashing down. It is messed up that Apple has that much power.

I think that Tumblr could have found a way out of this that wasn't. banning all adult content. Like, it could have just done a better job of moderating its child pornography. There's a lot of the major social networks work with an organization that sort of provides a sort of like AI child porn filtering thing. I've written about it before, so I really should remember it better. But it's like NECMAC, like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Right, okay.

Yeah. Like, I don't know if Tumblr was just not. not using that, but that's sort of how, like, Facebook uses it, Microsoft uses it, Google uses it. It's sort of a baseline to, like, make sure you're getting child porn off. And if they would have, like, tried to use that, that would have been a good first step. I think they went way too far. And it is pretty disturbing that this one company can sort of make or break whether a platform succeeds or not and that it has

like there's like morality involved it's like imposed morality I'll put it like this Apple booted Tumblr but Apple also booted gab you know what I mean like that's sort of what I mean by how complicated and ambivalent I feel about a lot of this stuff it's like Apple has this outsized power

you know these big companies Google Apple like they have this outsized power and them using it to ban child porn or discouraged child porn, I guess, is good. If they were using it to ban Nazis, that would be good. But, yeah, it seems to me as much about Apple's authority in this situation as the fact that Tumblr was so intimidated by Apple that it chose an over corrective policy is the thing that underscores what's so worrisome about it. because banning all adult content is a way more, that's just a way more fraught decision than like banning a messaging app that Nazis exclusively use, you know.

But yeah, I think the outsized authority of big tech companies has created a lot of cultural problems on the internet and it's created commercial problems that I think we're going to get into in our next segment about more. mike.com. Yes, because mike.com is another digital company whose fate has been sort of seemingly decided or if not decided at least heavily shaped by a tech giant. Yeah, your founder and editor at Mike, which is a magazine, online magazine for millennials. So what is your special angle on millennials? What kind of stories do you choose to get to the millennials? Yeah, so we're focused on

telling the stories that young people care about that are on substantive important issues and that resonate deeply across all these new distribution channels. So you can think of us like the next New York Times, the next CNN for our generation. In 2011, two high school friends founded a website they called Policy Mike. It targeted millennials and focus on having young writers blog about politics. Over the years, they shortened that name to Mike, and they expanded the company's scope to include over 100 staffers. They landed high-profile interviews, including one with Barack Obama when he was the president, and they raised over $52 million from investors by 2017.

It was a big deal. For several years, they were the potential next big thing in media. However, Mike's success was closely tied to Facebook. Facebook was its primary way of getting an audience. A lot of its web traffic came from viral Facebook stories. it tended to optimize its headlines with the intention of grabbing eyes from Facebook users. It was basically a company propped up by its success on Facebook. And the company was very, very good at getting its content to go viral on Facebook.

So when the social media company encouraged publishers to go all in on video, Mike pivoted to video hard. And it let go of many of its writing focus. staffers and bulked up its video offerings. You know, it had a lot of its employees doing Facebook Live videos, making like long, detailed scripted videos. It was really, really trying to nail that pivot to video. It also leased a fancy and expensive office space in one world trade. And it seemed like it was working, but the strategy ended up failing. Word that Mike had money Troubles leaked earlier this year. And this month, the company laid off all but two of its staff.

The only remaining staff are its two founders. And it was sold for $5 million to Brian Goldberg's bustle. This is a company. The Bustle Empire. The Nasson Media Empire. And so this was a company that was once valued at like over $100 million. So to have it be sold for $5 million is just a disaster. And the story of Mike involves a lot of different strands of modern media fuckery. So I feel like it's very important that we discuss this because it's like a parable of what not to do as a young digital media company. It shows how precarious the fate of independent media companies are no matter how much money they raise. Sometimes because of how much money they raise, because then they become beholden to VC expectations and sort of chase this impossible dream.

of like scaling up and up and up. It shows the dangers of relying too heavily on Facebook for reaching an audience and it demonstrates how much control Facebook can have over one news outlets fate. The sort of fatal blow to Mike came after Facebook decided to cancel a video partnership. So I'm going to read a quote from Bill Gruskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School. He said, most newsrooms have come to regret making hiring investment decisions based on the whims of a company that really doesn't care that much about journalism. Harsh, but not as harsh as Mike's own union, which released a statement after the layoff calling the company a new low in corporate mendacity.

Okay, so for listeners, I think it's really important to establish what Mike, formerly known as Policy Mike, was. So, Kate, do you remember Kim Kardashian's visit to the Trump White House a few months ago? I stumbled across the story of Alice Marie Johnson. She's been behind bars for 22 years. The only person that can grant her clemency would be the president. The White House has agreed to set up a meeting. I know we have one shot to plead our case, knowing that someone's life is in my hands.

It's a really scary feeling. So Kim Kardashian was talking to Trump about Alice Marie Johnson. who is a woman who had spent a couple decades in prison for non-violent drug offense, and she was lobbying for Trump to pardon Alice Marie Johnson so she could get released. And this is a huge thing, both because, you know, there's a photo of Kim and Trump meeting. This is also related to Kanye's meetings with Trump. It's related to Kim Kardashian, apparently being a prison reform advocate. but this whole story of Kim Kardashian meeting with Trump.

And getting clemency for Alice, right, right, right. That story, though, which takes place over the course of a year and some change, that story begins with the Mike video. That story begins with Kim Kardashian seeing a video online that happened to be produced by Mike, probably on Facebook, that Mike had produced about Alice Marie Johnson.

And it's sort of the style of the video is there's no spoken. So there's no spoken narration of the news piece. It's all sort of these these dynamic subtitles that are playing out or a footage of Alice Marie Johnson. And it's this very somber music. And it's just this, it's a news piece that's also a mood piece. And that's sort of, to me, like late phase mic, that's what they did. they, when you say they leaned into the, they pivoted into video, it's like, they pivoted into video,

but they were trying to tell the line between like writing that industry trend, but also doing like, I should call them like video essays. And so the Alice Marie Johnson video is like a testament to the period when it made sense. It may be made sense for Mike to be like, yeah, we could just produce videos like this on like the biggest social media platform in the world. And like, that's where we'll find our audience. And that seems maybe innocuous enough except for the fact that like every publication we've worked for and also Mike is forced to engage with what Facebook the company wants and how Facebook users behave. Right. And that sucks because it's like a bunch of publications from like.

the ringer to like the New York Times all scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to game like one social media platforms system of like attention. It's economy of attention. And then it's that frustration is multiplied by the fact that Facebook seems to change very rapidly. Do you remember that story that came out earlier this year sort of looking at how Facebook really inflated the numbers for how many people were even watching its videos? Right. Like the whole idea that you needed to pivot to video to get eyes was sort of based on a lie that Facebook told. Right. And because Facebook is Facebook and we're all sort of just on the outside trying to look in, like there's no real accountability for that.

Like the fact that we found out that, oh, wow, a lot of the information that we had, that companies had that they were trying to strategize around wasn't even like real. and like a single company made it. You know what I mean? It sort of makes it hard for any company, whether it's Mike or whether it's whoever, to think about like what they're supposed to be doing to like be popular on Facebook. I mean, I really see Mike's story

is a cautionary tale about relying too heavily on Facebook as a media company. Because before they pivoted to video, they were already seeing a lot of their web traffic dropping. And that's because, I think it was last year. Basically, I believe it was 2017. Facebook announced that it was going to deprioritize like quote unquote clickbait and news articles and then prioritize posts from people that were in like people that people actually knew. Right, right.

And local news and stuff like that. So basically when Facebook rejiggered its algorithm, it fucked Mike. And instead of sort of looking for other ways to gain an audience outside of Facebook, Mike went and just listened to what Facebook told it about what it could do to sort of regain that audience. Right. And now it belongs to Brian Goldberg. Right, right. And it's weird because Mike is not the only, Mike is not the only media company that's been responsive to Facebook.

But it's just Mike was the extreme case of a company that was like, oh, we're going all in. It reminds me, like, the other cautionary tale for Facebook is Upworthy. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. TBT. TBT. And I'm sorry.

I'm not laughing because I feel bad for everyone who worked at Upworthy and got laid off. It's very sad. I'm just laughing about TBT. Right. It's just Upworthy was a long, like, Upworthy is the, it's almost like the biblical cautionary tale. That's how long ago Upworthy feels, you know? It's like Upworthy seems like it should have been an example to Moore website. of like how not to go about sustaining long-term viability.

It worked for a brief period of time really well, though. But they had one very specific strategy for promoting stories. And again, it's like Facebook is a dynamic enough company and also not a very transparent company. So it's like you could have the brightest minds in your company spend a year. year coming up with a strategy that's designed to successfully game Facebook, but then Facebook makes some inane tweak to how its newsfeed appears, and you just wasted a year and like, however much money you paid all of your ad salespeople. One thing I wanted to talk to you about is so, did you read when BuzzFeed's Jonah Preddy was interviewed by the New York Times recently, and he

sort of discussed the idea of a multi-company merger as a sort of remedy to like fight Facebook and Google's duopoly of the internet. Yeah, the imagery I got from that was basically like the Avengers, but from media companies. What were the companies? Like, Peretti wanted to assemble like the New York Times, BuzzFeed. I don't think New York Times. Oh, really? Okay. But Vice, Vox, I don't know, a bunch. Like, 10, like 10 different unrelated companies into a single. Yeah. And when I read that, I was like, that's never going to happen.

Like, cute idea. But now I'm kind of thinking that Brian Goldberg read that and was like, I'm going to do that with, I'm going to scoop up all the failing media companies and like make them strong again by unifying them into one like big pop a blog. How do you pop a blog? That's it. Pop-a-Blog. So he has Bustle, which he's always had. He founded it. He's got Rompter, which is like the mom website version of Bustle.

Elite Daily, Gawker, and now Mike. That's like a lot of, he's like making a little... Infinity Stones, right? He's doing the Thanos thing. He's making the big Papa Blog. Against the Papa Blog to fight Feet. Do you think this idea of mergers as a way to fight the duopoly makes any sense? No.

Of course I don't. I don't. But the thing is I can't like anyone else. I can't outthink. I still can't wrap my head around Facebook and its reach and its size. And so like I obviously get why media companies care about like Facebook as this portal. to just like massive user engagement. I get it.

But I think even things that Zuckerberg has said about like media companies and like things Zuckerberg has said about media companies and their their feelings about Facebook and advertisers, they just sound hostile. Like Zuckerberg himself just sounds hostile to media in a way that like I'm not going to look to that guy and be like he's going to be a partner for me. If I'm like media head just in charity, I'm not going to look to Mark Zuckerberg and be like, that's a guy who I can sort of work with to build long-term sustainability for my company and live happily ever after.

He's not the guy. He's the wrong guy. He does not like media, I feel like. But do you think that how do you succeed in media without engaging with Facebook? So you don't believe that the idea of a. merger makes much sense. I don't either. But what's the way around it? You make really beautiful. Solve the media, Justin. You just make just the most gripping podcast content. Yeah, Mike was called Mike and it didn't have podcast. That's crazy. That's so wild to be, yes.

That's a nice opportunity. Yeah, Mike. Come on, Mike. Money podcast. Trillion dollar, boom. We were talking before about how Mike, like, around the time of its founding, one, it had a different name. It was policy mic. And two, it was just a very different website than what it grew into. I knew someone who was like a very early policy mic writer. Oh, what did they write about specifically? What was their beat? Like women's rights stuff.

She actually works. Her name's Elizabeth Plank. She's like a Vox personality now. Okay. Yeah. but she was like an OG policy mic person. What kind of, so what style of writing? Because I associate that era of policy mic with blogging.

Yeah, it was blogging. Right. It was bloggy. And that sort of like, even that, that transition from policy mic being a very bloggy. Like, it was obviously like going for newsy smart content, but it still wanted to have the, I felt like a lot of that content felt very capsuly and bloggy. And, you know, obviously they transitioned to producing, like, video essays, and that's very different. Well, you could also, like, anyone could post on policy mic when it started.

So it really was a blogging platform. Right. And that just makes me think of our conversation about Tumblr, right? Where it's just like these websites that were way more, they were way more friendly to user-generated content and sort of letting users determine. the fate of the website and the flavors of the website. And I don't know. I think that's what seems lost in this ecosystem now where any news website, entertainment website does not exist with that sort of hyper localized,

bloggy sense of like what users want, what readers want. It all seems to be overdetermined by like, what do Facebook and Google want? And not even like Facebook as a like a social media platform. What does the corporate leadership of Facebook want to see in a website? Oh, I think it's more like what is the algorithm. Right. What is the algorithm? Right.

But that's very much not what the internet was like a decade ago. I didn't know what the algorithm was a decade ago. I used to type in URLs and go to websites for fun. Totally. I still do. Imagine having fun on the internet. Imagine having fun on the internet. Yeah, and I don't really go to blogs anymore because blogs don't really exist anymore.

Like, I also used to get my music from MP3 blogs. Do you remember those? Of course I really. Probably dating myself. Come on, no. And now I get it from Spotify. Right. And on Spotify is, again, another platform that really grew into the idea of like suggesting things to you and playlisting things for you.

You could be consuming music. You could be consuming news. And it does feel like we have become slaves to the algorithm. But the algorithm, like I said, the algorithm is just a euphemism for like a handful of big tech companies. That's all the algorithm really means. And so it feels like there are these levels of alienation that are always growing between users of a given platform and like the leadership of those platforms or the algorithm. And I don't know how you saw for that. And I certainly don't know how you solve for like, how do you found a successful media company that isn't just.

Right. That isn't, right. That isn't basically like playing basketball against Mark Zuckerberg as a business model. I think the answer to your question is that we should just do our best to bring blogs back. Honestly, Kate, I'm over blogs. You know what I'm into? I'm into podcast. This is a podcast.

I'm into podcasting. I question your commitment to podcasting you're talking about blogs. I think you can like more than one thing. I want to blog about podcasts. Circle the square or whatever the expression is. Square the circle. Okay.

All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. This has been Damage Control. Thank you for listening. You'll hear from us again in two weeks.