TikTok Glitches and Facebook Meet Cutes
reclaiming brain rot
AwesomenessTV is developing a series adaptation of influencer Sabrina Brier’s audiobook “That Friend,” which just debuted this week; Ming Lee Simmons made her debut as Sports Illustrated’s new rookie; F1 needs an American star, and Jak Crawford’s ready; and at long last, my dream is coming true — we’re getting a Little House on the Prairie reboot.
YOUNG FEMALE, SEEKING SAME, curbed
Every day, women in the nearly 120,000-member “Young Females: New York City, NYC Apartments, Sublets, Roommates” Facebook group advertise themselves to each other as potential roommates, dating app-style, sharing details about their jobs and photos of themselves “at restaurants, out with friends, on hikes, attending music festivals, hoisting up marathon medals, and the like.” Wild that there’s no better way to meet potential roommates than a Facebook group that’s been around for a decade, though I can still remember when we used to meet roommates the good old-fashioned way: on Craigslist.
THE COLLEGE KIDS TRACKING YOUR DECONGESTED COMMUTE, newyorker
Two college-age brothers from Massachusetts built the Congestion Pricing Tracker, a website that collects data on commute times in Manhattan and displays them in a series of before-and-after line graphs that’s now used by hundreds of thousands of people. I wonder how many VCs are in these guys’ DMs.
WHY DO TIKTOK USERS THINK A GLITCH IN THE APP IS POLITICALLY MOTIVATED?, rollingstone
TikTok users are discovering that they‘ve unfollowed AOC without intending to and are attributing it to the app’s relationship with President Trump. “This is fucking ridiculous,” said user autumnandcats. “They are having us unfollow accounts against our will and this is complete censorship. TikTok is not the same platform it was.”
THE HANDMAID’S TALE FOR GEN Z, thecut
Since its re-release in 2022, but “especially since the election,” the 1995 dystopian novel "I Who Have Never Known Men" by Jacqueline Harpman has become a bestseller among Gen Zers on TikTok. The book — about a group of women who escape from captivity; can’t imagine why that’s suddenly striking a chord — has seen sales increase exponentially, with over 138,000 ratings on Goodreads and 100,000 copies sold in the US last year.
IS INTERNET-INDUCED BRAIN ROT A MYTH?, dazed
As a screen time apologist who values every second spent scrolling, I’m not surprised (though am admittedly relieved) to hear that Oxford professor Andrew Przybylski and his colleagues analyzed data from almost 12,000 children in the US, aged between nine and 12, and found no link between screen time and brain connectivity or well-being.
LIKE ANY MILLENNIAL, YAHOO WANTS TO BE SEEN AS COOL AGAIN, businessinsider
Could Yahoo become…cool? Ahead of its 30th anniversary, the tech company has been on a “nostalgia-washing blitz, making memes about AIM and using dial-up-internet sounds and Microsoft WordArt in unhinged posts on Instagram and TikTok.” Through this new campaign, Yahoo is hoping to reach younger people “who knew little of a time when interactions online were more fleeting, anonymous, and, frankly, more fun.” It seems to be working: Somewhat unbelievably, millennials and Gen Zers combined make up more than 45% of visitors to Yahoo in the US.
P.S. Please know I sincerely love celebrity offspring and I only use “nepo baby” as a term of endearment! 🫶
One last thought:
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No joke the z'er pouring my wine last night told me all about how tik tok is now being run by Trump and all the social media is. That's why she doesn't care about the Chinese app. Crazy!