🆕 Never Post! Mailbag #6

Who on the staff spent the most time at the mall as a teen!

And also: what ruins fun on the internet? The answer will not surprise you one bit!

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Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show's host is Mike Rugnetta. 

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure.

Friends, hello, and welcome to the Never Post Mailbag episode for early twenty twenty five in which we respond to listener emails, comments, voicemails, and voice messages about our segments. Do you want to get in touch and tell us your thoughts about segments? We would love to hear those thoughts. All the ways that you can get a hold of us are in the show notes. Please please drop us a line.

I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta, joining me today in order of how much time I assume they spent at the mall as a teenager descending. So most first are Georgia Hampton, never post producer.

I know that's right. I know that's right.

This feels right in

my soul.

Big risk here, Jason Oberholtzer, never post executive producer.

Now I like to walk around the mall with girls.

Unfamiliar? This is unfamiliar. I don't know anything about this.

So I clock some time, but I never, like, hung out there on my own volition.

And finally, Hans Buetow never posts senior producer.

I recently rewatched Mallrats because it had been a lot of years, and it felt so foreign to me because it was not not my experience. My one mall, my local mall, actually. Not really my local, but the one that I did go spend time at was the Mall of America, which is just down the Wow. First opened.

Yeah.

So you were closest to the best mall and just opted out.

The most mall.

And I still woke up. The

I spent, like, Georgia, just a huge amount of time at the mall. Just a massive

yeah. Oh, yeah. Every week. From you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did you

have, like, a pattern that you would do? Did you have, like, a path you would follow and go, like, first, the Sephora? I actually don't know what story what what what first, the Delia's.

Well, I I mean, Mike is a self described mall goth. So

True. I don't

know where the Sephora ranks on the hits for mall goth.

I was gonna say, Mike, I feel like you and I are the the meme of the two buff hands together because I was her handshake? I would yes. Yes. Because I was deep in the emo minds

Yeah.

As a tween teen.

It would have been, so at the at the mall that I grew up going to, which is the Natick Mall in Natick, Massachusetts, I hear cheering outside. All at one side, all in, like, one corner, of the mall was the Hot Topic, the arcade, and the food court. So it's like

Oh, boy.

That's all

it is. Right? It's all and the, I forget what it was. It might have been at one point a Sam Goody and then a Strawberries and then an HMV and then an f, but like the CD store, you know? Mhmm.

And then across the street was the, this will only be meaningful to people who, have lived in the Northeast for a certain amount of time. Across the street from the mall was I think it's not there anymore, the Newbury Comics, the Funkoland, and the Guitar Center.

Guitar Center, of course. I haven't

thought about Funkoland in forever.

So it's just all right there. It's just like when you're 16, that's everything you need.

Team, I'm taking a live look at our demographic data right here, and this is hurting.

We should stop talking about this. Okay. So, on with the mailbag. First things first, some mood setting. Tov sent us a message that simply read, this is a video of fifteen seconds of the Icelandic waterfall.

I'm gonna mess this up. Got the fossil. Waterfall of the gods. Wow. Jason, can you tell us what we're seeing and listening to here?

Yeah. It's sort of a crater waterfall, I guess, in the vein of a Niagara fall. Probably, like, three quarters of a circle dripping into a fairly light blue lagoon. It's nice. This is good stuff.

The thing about Iceland is that every picture of it just looks like an alien planet from a movie. Yes.

God, it's so gorgeous.

You can almost smell the mist.

So, you know, in the theme of send us your funniest graffiti, which we are gonna get to. We have submissions for. We're gonna talk about at the end of this mailbag. If anybody wants to send timeline cleansing things like this, we will very gladly accept them.

Please. Now more than ever.

What's the, fuss in your life?

Nailed it, Jason. Good job. I'm looking at, demographics data. Right. That's disconcerting.

Is that we lost some people over there. Alright. In our previous mailbag, a friend of the show, Sam Tindall wrote in, and he wanted to relate something, that concerned our conversation about the relative quality of various Internet, social algorithms, which we talked about. And Sam said, I just listened to the Mailbag episode and wanted to drop a story regarding the lauded Spotify algo. My band Cuneiform, which is great and we'll put a link to their release in the show notes.

Very good.

Very good. Very, very good, new record. Recently released a full, a full length record. This isn't my first release through Spotify, but it is the first release to be plucked from obscurity by the algorithm. Specifically, one song, Red Flowers.

For whatever reason, the recommendation engines started serving this song up to thousands and thousands of people a day. And now this song is our most popular song on Spotify by an order of magnitude. This song is the final song on a fairly wide ranging record and if I had to pick one of our songs that is the least representative of the record and the band itself, it would be, you guessed it folks, Red Flowers. We will probably never know why Spotify picked this song, but I think it's an interesting slash concerning event from the creative standpoint that I haven't heard many people talk about. Now that this is far and away our most popular song on Spotify, the most popular music delivery system in the world, will this affect our future creative endeavors?

Our future creative decisions? Has this in some subtle way changed what the band is? Are we now the Red Flowers Band? It's a totally normal thing for artists to have a song become popular and then keep giving their new fans more of what they want, but this isn't that. This is an arbitrary decision by a non person, not a viral sensation.

It's weird exclamation mark. And for the record, fuck Spotify. They can't tell me what to do. Lol.

Sam. Love you, Sam. Yeah.

I I mean, as Sam says, I have never heard anybody talk about this. And, man, what a hall of mirrors feeling this must be.

Yeah. Especially because you like you don't know if you can replicate it.

Right.

You don't know why they did it. If

yeah.

Yeah. If they told you, like, we like this for this, you could make a, like, a human choice on whether or not to pursue this, but you're chasing ghosts.

Or if you got, like, an editor from an an email from an editor. Right? Like, you you imagine Spotify employs some number of human editors, and they're like, hey. We're gonna lift this one, and we liked it for, like, this reason.

Sure. I mean, you have sort of the example of, like, The Middle by Jimmy World being very not representational of the other music they made, really. But that being kind of the burden they have to carry and this thing that a lot of beleaguered fans have to say.

But also like a self selected burden. At some point, they sat down to, like, this is gonna hit. Let's put it out. Let's put promotion to it and then live with that.

Yeah. But now, I I mean, to this point of a non person, like, it is so arbitrary, but has so much weight.

Also not knowing, like, if a human decided this was good or if something decided that, like, men aged 16 to 22 in this region are listening to sounds that AI tells me sound very similar to something that came out five minutes ago and boom, it's on the front page. Like, what is the decision making?

Being a musician right now seems like hell on earth. Yes. That's sort of what I am gathering from just all the things that I see online.

A famously simple and remunerative pastime.

Yeah. It used to be so good. Yeah.

We got more messages in response to our previous mailbag, including one from Bence Peraji who writes, On the last Mailbag episode, Mike mentioned that he noticed people, quote, speaking in posts. And I think there's a bit more there. Social media has a distancing effect where it is harder to realize the humanity of the other users. Also, posting and commenting became basically frictionless and this causes people to do it without thought. Long term, I think this kind of eroded the ability for people to anticipate the possible social responses to the comments not only online but IRL.

An example of this is the Will Smith slap incident where a joke didn't land as expected and resulted in violence. What do you think? Did social media destroy the ability to anticipate response, or do people just not care?

I think it's almost both, honestly. Because, yeah, I think there's an anonymity with posting online where you're not really saying anything to anyone's face, really. You're saying it to their username, if that. They might not even see it. So I think there's a lack of tact that is more permissible online, but also then a kind of not really caring about the tact.

Like, not even pausing to be like, this is tactless.

I think one of the main markers of posting disease is someone who thinks really hard about how their post will be received by an imagined online audience and does not think at all about how that post would be received by, like, a normal person on the street.

Real people

Yeah.

In real life.

And also thinks of those two groups of people as different people.

Well, I mean, that's sort of the way the structure of being online encourages us to behave. Yeah. It encourages you to kind of forget that these are real interactions with real people and to designate it as different.

This supposed to be mind actually of something that, happens a lot on reality TV when people say, I'm just being brutally honest.

Oh my god.

Which is like, to me, like, it feels like an excuse to say whatever you want, but also, like, is that really the most creative form of honesty you can come up with? Like, is brutal really? It's like how

Why is it gotta be brutal?

It's like how the phrase with all due respect usually means the opposite.

Literally. Zero yeah. Zero respect.

Yeah. And so I think in some ways, it's the point.

Yeah. I'd like to start signifying when I'm massaging the truth now. I'm I'm just being tactfully honest, but I need to guess where I'm omitting detail.

I so I think, like, did social media destroy the ability to anticipate response? I think that it maybe makes people hyper attuned to a certain very narrow kind of response. Yes. And then, yes, the ability to anticipate other responses outside of that one. Yep.

Yeah. You know, I have to think about it while we're talking. I'm not sure the Will Smith incident is the analog I would pick here. I would pick January 6. And I don't wanna talk about it anymore, but I think that I'm right and you can all think about that and maybe right for the next meal bag.

But No.

Yeah. No challenge provided. Yeah.

The final calorie I wanna burn. So moving right along.

Jan from Holland had this to say about our Sound of Podcasting segment with Dallas Taylor, where Dallas and I talked about why it is podcasts sound the way they do.

I must say, I found your discussion a bit US centric. Yes. A lot of American podcasts sound like they've been strongly informed by NPR. And yes, I do agree that the NPR sound is normally what we think of when somebody says podcast, if the podcast is in English. But I would argue that every language and every market comes with a distinct way of how a podcast sounds.

I currently live in The Netherlands, but my roots are in The Balkans. And in The Balkans, the general public has only discovered podcasts in the mid to late two thousand tens. Not in a podcast app, but on YouTube. So today, every podcast coming out of that region sounds like Joe Rogan and not like NPR. If you listen to podcasts from different parts of the world, you'll notice that they all sound different.

And that's usually determined by different factors like when did podcasts even arrive to that part of the world? Was it through a public broadcaster or a commercial broadcaster or the people who started making them out of the sheer enthusiasm.

I

mean, this is a great point, and it's something that we actually talk a lot about, like, in the background of the show, like, when we're talking about segments and when we're talking about, like, what it is that we're doing. But, like, there are all kinds of perspectives that we are not gonna take because we're, you know, we're making this in The US. We all live in The US. All of our experience is all through US media, and I think it would be, it would be hard for us to capture every single perspective. And so it's great to hear people say things like, you know, you say podcasts sound like this.

In my experience as someone who lives somewhere else in the world, they actually sound like this. So, Jan, thank you for for sharing this. What I would be curious about I don't actually know, like, how I would go about this, so maybe I just rely on people writing in and telling me. But, like, one of the things that Dallas and I talked about is this idea that even though podcast is defined by technology, it has adopted many sort of, like, genre markers that there are essentially, like, very formal structural characteristics that define what a podcast is even though the only thing it is necessarily is audio delivered via RSS to a certain subset of apps usually for free. And so I wonder like even if other podcasts maybe sound more like, you know, just two people talking a la Joe Rogan, or have a certain level of a shared level or understanding of of quality, be it, like, vis a vis audio quality or, you know, rhetorical quality that, like, they probably all do still share those broad formal characteristics where it is, like, mostly people talking about ideas.

And I think that's the thing that's really interesting. It's like why have we settled on that is the podcast? That is what a podcast is.

Alright. I'm sold. No more ideas on this show.

The end.

Yeah. Vibes only.

Yeah. It's funny to hear

you say that because as soon as you say

that, Jason, I'm like, wait. What else would we talk about? Like, you get so into it. I'm like, I can't imagine another format of it.

I have yet to encounter, and I've always sort of dreamt of the platonic ideal of a music podcast or a podcast that is treated purely as music that releases on an RSS feed and gives me an explicitly musical experience. Listeners, if you know anything that approximates this, please send it to me. I would be so interested.

I can send you I know of one, and it is it has a purpose. Like, it's made to for meditation and sleep, which feels like, insofar as this idea has been instantiated in the world of podcasting, that is where it that is used. Right? This is

a little more utility than I would want out

of this. Yeah. Right.

Like, I want composition, like, musical composition for its own sake, somehow deciding this is the way to deliver it.

Would that just be a song? Jason, I think you accidentally reinvented music.

Did I just do the when tech bros reinvent the bus to bring their employees to work thing?

There's a there's a a technological protocol that delivers music over the airwaves to a device that you have. Yeah.

It's free, completely free, completely free. It's

always on.

But can I get this in my car?

Just flick a button, flick a button, and you go from, like, curated stream to curated stream.

So there is a museum in Madrid, I believe, called Macba, m a c b a, and they used to have a program called Radio Web Macba. And every I believe it was two weeks, they would release two pieces of experimental music on the podcast. They don't know they no longer do it, But it was for a while my favorite show because it would be a great way to discover, like, you know, off the beaten path electronic and experimental, like music and composition stuff. But it is the only thing like that that I have ever encountered. Right?

And you would call I mean, I would call that a podcast. I just did. Right? That's a podcast. Yeah.

Yeah.

We are moving from reinventing the concept of music to the TikTok shop and, specifically, my segment back in the XOXO live show that we recorded back in August. As a reminder, this segment was me examining how commerce has wormed its way into every corner of the Internet content ecosystem. And about all of this, Thales Barreto writes in to say, hi, Neverpost. Shout outs from Brazil. Cool.

While listening to the segment about online shopping and the TikTok shop at x x o live, I couldn't help but be reminded of the evolution of parasites, of all things. I'll explain. It's a known tendency for parasites to reduce or even lose some structures or organs as they evolve. For example, fleas and lice have no wings, even though their ancestors did. Strangleweed is yellow from the lack of chlorophyll because it doesn't photosynthesize.

In extreme cases, like tapeworms, the animal doesn't even have a mouth or gut. It just absorbs nutrients through its skin. The host provides for the needs of the parasite. Now I'm not saying that some online businesses are parasites, though I'm not necessarily saying they're not, but there's an undeniable evolutionary convergence there. Uber doesn't need to hire drivers.

The TikTok shop doesn't need a warehouse. They can just outsource those functions to the host society, so to speak. If this theory makes any sense, which online business do you think has reached the perfection of form? Which one is able to profit while being the least it can be? I think this is amazing.

Yeah. I think this is spot on. I think, like, the structure of the TikTok shop really has done a very good job of of serving this purpose of doing the least to receive the most. I think of brands, you know, like Shein and and websites like Timoo as as huge creators of something like this. But also just, honestly, I I almost am more creeped out by the endless number of what we would call, like, quote, unquote Instagram brands or brands that otherwise exist kind of only on social platforms that have no discernible source or real tangible existence other than this weird little presence they have on social media to be like, here's a dress and it's $11 and, like, don't worry about where it's from.

The first two things that came to mind reading this are two two things that I already don't like. So when you say like Parasite, I'm like ready to be like, Yeah, these guys suck. Yeah. But it's definitely the first two that come right to mind are like delivery middlemen services, like seamless, who, like, don't

Oh, yeah.

Really employ anyone. I mean, you know, like, they have dry they have drivers, but they don't need to. And they're kind of just like a middleman service. And Yelp. Fuck Yelp.

All my homies hate Yelp. You know, all they are is a place for people to complain about a restaurant. Yeah. And yet somehow managed to exert a sort of mafia like control over their, like, advertising program.

The phrase, which one is able to profit while being the least it can be is delicious.

Oh, yeah.

I guess the other question is, like, how many of these also are actually profitable in any way? Yeah. Right? As opposed to just money fires.

How do you manage to employ nobody, have nothing, and yet not turn a profit when you're a monopoly?

And yet Uber has somehow cracked some load.

So next on the docket is responses to the segment David Social where contributing producer Noah Hertz, came to us to discuss the small size bespoke social network David Social, especially in the context of Twitter collapsing and all of the morass that was is has been x. And we got a response from Hearn Sushi who said, quite a lot of the segment on David's social feels like my experience of being on a small Mastodon instance for the past two years. The experience is fundamentally curated by two people running it and their block list. There's no algorithm either, but the admins can decide to highlight posts slash hashtags. There's a local timeline, local to the instance, and optionally local only posting.

I've spent quite a some time on that TL just getting a feel for what the people I share the space with are up to. You leave a like slash comment like waving your neighbor hello. There's a sense of community. It's a home occupied by actual humans. I went from being on Twitter for well over a decade and talking to basically no one to an actual social network that works for introverts like me.

The instance is shutting down now soon. Like David's social, that's always a possibility. But I've already found a new small home and new lovely neighbors.

I think this is like the blessing and the curse of Mastodon, which I also I joined a pretty small instance for, anarchists, which will, I think, come up later in this, in this meeting. And, yeah, it was really great. I think, you know, the thing about it is that, like, you if you can spend the time figuring out what instance has a local feed that is pleasant and full of things that you wanna look at, it's great. It's just that does take that takes time. And people are so used to I go to the website where the posting happens and I look at the posts.

Right. And, like, that's it. That's the that's the end of the thinking.

Shortly after we published that actually, Noah got a responses, some several responses from people on David's social who, Noah shared the piece with. And their responses are very similar to this actually, talking a lot about communities. So there's, I'll just read a few of them here. Somebody posted, I sent the David section to my mom and she said this. And then it's a text message with for with mom, a little photo of a of a mom.

And mom

says Moms be doing it.

David Social is a good model for real community, which I think is really nice.

Hell, yeah. Mom.

Thanks, mom.

There's no mom. There's another one that says, o m g, David. Mention exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point. It's always nice to hear yourself mentioned. Just listened, and this is so nice.

Braving Twitter was worth it because it led me to this little oasis of whimsy in the desert of web two point o. Thank you for making this podcast segment. Thank David for making David.

Heck, yeah. We've mentioned it recently. We will mention it again. Small local instances of Internet are the best, and they need a little bit of work to do. But please try to do that work or ask who's doing that work and how you can be helpful.

Moving from social to the wider Internet, we have the segment on COSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, and Cyber Panics where I talked with Avery Dame Griff about the predator handshake, Georgia, that is moral panics about kids on the Internet, alongside moral panics about anyone LGBTQIA or anything LGBTQIA on the Internet. And we got something from Kurt, who we actually all know because I actually help him make another show. And Kurt is a psychotherapist and social worker and had this to say about cyberpanics.

Hello. Never post. This is Kurt White. I found it interesting that one of the purported, goals of the legislation was to reduce, youth suicide, but that one of the effects that this piece of legislation might have could be to disconnect young people, especially in the LGBTQIA plus community from online sources of support. From a mental health perspective, there could really be nothing worse than this.

We know actually that people are more likely to die by suicide when they are disconnected from, significant social supports or feel pressured to conform to a reality that is simply not true for them. This is part of why there is an LGBTQIA youth suicide crisis in this country. And I just wanted to to underline that point from a a mental health point of view. We talk about this a little bit on our cousin podcast, Unraveling, and a couple of episodes there.

We have talked multiple times about doing a style of interstitial called ask an expert, where we pose a very loaded and complicated question to an expert who answers it very definitively and quickly. And I feel like we should just get Kurt on to talk about this kind of thing every once in a while. Or it's like, Kurt, is this bad? And then Kurt can just come on and be like, yeah.

Yes. Yes. Obviously. Yes. Studies say.

Yeah. My professional my extremely professional opinion. Yes.

I think that underline that Kurt is doing is is really appreciated and an excellent thing to pull out of that. That the the the the evidence that these things are often based on are not backed up, and the things that they're trying to protect are not the people who they claim are the victims of the thing that's happening. The way that they speak about them, exist outside of a context that is very necessary because these are often layered and nuanced and they're taking the shortest, quickest, most aggressive, solution to it, which often eliminates a lot of that nuance and harms the very people that they're looking to, protect. So I think it's great that Kurt could offer some some real psychotherapy backup to this and say, yes, indeed. Turns out we were right.

We also got a message from Toby.

Shane of Riposte. My name is Toby. My pronouns are he, him. And last week's episode of moral panic really got me thinking about my own experience on the Internet and being trans. And something that I've noticed in the last year is that my social media algorithm has changed.

Like, what I get recommended has changed since I have been longer medically transitioning, especially since top surgery. And I'm just really curious about, you know, maybe

Toby. Go ahead. Toby. Woman. Toby, something happened.

Toby. You got cut off.

Send us another voice mail, please.

Please. Or email anything.

Yeah. Please. This is so interesting, and I was so excited to share it. And I kept opening this on different browsers thinking that maybe the issue was on my end, but it wasn't. I want I wanna hear so much more about this.

Please send us something.

And the final little nugget from this episode here, we were celebrating the continued persistence of the Internet Archive and pulling some sounds from its depths as our interstitials. And we pulled something that was an Irish language learning tape, which has been identified by an eagle eared listener.

I'm gonna I think this is this person's name, and I'm gonna get it very wrong. Jake? G I Jake? G g Jake. J e a I c.

Okay. I mean, you are are saying names expert,

and that's what he can do, so I'm gonna let you do it.

So he identified this as a tape called Learning Irish, which is apparently highly regarded, but they had not actually listened to. The cool thing about this, other than that Jake speaks Irish and sent us an email with a bunch of Irish in it, which I could not parse, was that Jake sent a link for duchess.ieduchas.ie, home to the digitized material from the National Folklore Collection

Cool.

Which recently published a bunch of audio material collected mostly from the early forties on acetate discs, mostly in Irish, some in English. And I went and listened. It's just rad to stumble into more audio libraries of cool stuff. So, the nerds who listen to this show, I imagine, will enjoy this. So that's d u c has.ie.

Go listen to some fun stuff.

Oh, ye, co screen and cred you, though, the gall of skin in the air. It's common air. It's comin' now, merriest together there. Keep

and to answer the question, does someone on the team have Irish? The answer is no. We I just thought it was an interesting thing. Though I did ask, listener to the show, Owen, who does, speak some Gaelic. If he could go through it and just make sure that the audio didn't say anything that we would regret saying.

No challenging ideas. And Owen was like, are you are you actually worried about this? And I was like, I bet in our audience, there is literally one person other than you who will be able to understand this, and I think we may have been right. We've been we've.

Boys, we got them.

So, thank you to Jake. Thank you, Dylan.

So next up, Erin left this voice mail about my segment about personalization versus customization online, about a very particular component of at least my early online experience that I did not get to talk about during the segment.

The conversation reminds me of a very specific, maybe microgenerational, art form that definitely existed on the Internet when I was a tween, which was the aim away message. There were so many crucial things that could be done with an away message. It was, like, truly the peak of word art.

Sad lyrics. Sad lyrics.

Sad lyrics.

Sad lyrics. The saddest lyrics constantly.

Oh, yeah.

I agree. The amount of artistic range in a way message could handle was kind of breathtaking.

Yeah. And there isn't really anything comparable to this now because we don't go away anymore.

Yes. In order for me to miss you, you must leave. You have

to go.

Yeah. The closest thing I saw was when, Instagram Yes. Initiated their stories. People kind of used it in that vein, but then you'd always see the little green light of them still being there.

Well, Instagram does have statuses, but it's it's garbage. It's horrible.

It's it's nobody uses it or it's just like it doesn't mean anything because you're still there. Like, you're not saying, like, catch me later anyway.

Yeah.

Here's a death cab lyric. Gotta go. Like, it's present. That doesn't mean anything.

Should we all agree to start put to start putting sad lyrics in our Slack statuses?

Yes, Mike.

That's what

now we're talking about. I just gotta

know from, like, the kids, where do you cryptically leave little bread crumbs for your crushes?

Where does vague posting happening?

Instagram story, Snapchat.

Got it. Okay. Great. Okay.

It's a has an answer. There

you go. Done.

We aim for efficiency on this show.

We also got some comments in response to our leaving social media roundtable that are all about the platforms of yore, so this is a good transition here. First off, Doug did write in to clarify that the pre messages app on Mac computers was iChat.

IChat. It was iChat. Oh, yes.

Thank you, Doug.

Yes. Thank you, Doug.

I looked it up. I saw this, and I looked it up to see to be able to look at

what it used

to look like.

So old. I

but it it it felt like coming home.

It felt like coming home.

I forgot about the era of Mac design where everything was a shiny bubble.

Oh, yes. Even the computers themselves.

Oh, yeah. That's true. Oh my god. Thank you, Doug. You freed me.

And then and then b wrote in to remind us that we skipped IRC. I never used IRC. Do we have IRCers in here?

I never used IRC a lot. And I think that's a good it's a good shout. It's a good pull. I don't necessarily think of it as, like, a social platform. I think of it as more like a almost like iMessage or iChat or Google Chat or whatever.

Like, it's it it sort of feels like more of a protocol, but I do yeah. I agree. And yeah. Good good point.

Can you remind me what this is? I don't even know if I know what this is.

IRC is a free to use text based chat protocol. You join servers, and then within those within those servers, you join channels.

Interesting. Can

you put sad song lyrics on it?

You oh, can you ever.

Fantastic. B also went on to highlight that they're using an alias email, which they imagine Georgia will recognize as being inspired by Neopets.

Yes. Shoyru.

Shoryu. What is a Shoryu? A Shoryu.

Shoryu was one of the Neopets you could get. It was a dragon. It was a little cute dragon. There were two kinds of dragon Neopets. This one and something called Croc, a Croc, but, like, spelled k r a w k.

Oh, yeah. That rules.

That was very hard to get. That was it was like a whole thing you had to sort of jailbreak to get, but the Shoeiru was much more accessible and is very cute and round and has, like, big eyes.

Sabrina wrote in to talk about their relationship to Instagram saying that it's a bit like the smartphone itself and that you can technically live without it, but your life will be far more inconvenient. Sabrina says, I don't like Instagram at all and I stopped using it about a year ago. I did not delete my account though because I still need to log in occasionally. For example, to do research and booking if I've decided to get a tattoo or to look up a local restaurant that has no web presence other than an Instagram page. I'd love to delete my account entirely, but it feels like I'd be shooting myself in the foot.

I imagine I can't be the only person who feels this way. You are not.

We all feel this way.

Yes.

This uses words that, I feel very strongly about. I love the use the invocation of inconvenience, that life would be a bit far more inconvenient. And I think this is a good moment to remind ourselves the difference between an inconvenience and an emergency. The inconvenience of not using versus the emergency of using.

But, Hans, it's so annoying. I don't want But I don't wanna I hear you.

I hear you. I think so I agree with you generally, Hans, but I think we shouldn't trod over the reality that for these, in this example tattoo artists and restaurants, this is the method in which they make their living and to leave the platform is to leave the way in which we interact with them and perhaps impact their accessibility to making a living. Now is it inconvenient or an emergency for them to find other ways to exist online and communicate with us? I'm not entirely sure.

Yeah.

This to me feels like it's related to something that we were talking about in our writing meeting earlier this morning, which is like the capture by social media of so much of the like practical information ecosystem where people should just have a website. You should just you should just have a website and you shouldn't like give your business over to a walled garden, like an Instagram, like a Facebook, like a Yelp. Hate them. And like, you should just be in charge of your own like your own thing. But instead, we spent so long being, like, you have to build an audience.

You have to build an audience. The only way to be successful is building an audience. And how do you do that? You go on social media platforms to build an audience. That's where your business is.

And that's how you get books open, queen. Books open tonight? Books open queen?

Books open queen?

Books open when? I mean, god. I think virtually every single one of the tattoos I have, and I have, like, maybe 30, I've gotten through booking basically because I saw the artists I work with posting on Instagram, like, easily. Easily. That's real.

But it's not an emergency. We also got, voicemail from Talia, our friend Talia. Hello, Talia.

I genuinely really like the mental contrivance of posting as going out into peak hour traffic. It puts into very sharp relief the things that I am subjecting myself when to when I post. But it also highlights to me why I might go out. The sheer variety and density of it all is very appealing and amongst the common Corollas, the cabs and the Commerce, I have seen some absolute bloody specimens. People, to borrow the phrase, with a hard poster.

Some of these people are brilliant, some dickheads some brilliant dickheads, but importantly many of the most exciting netizens who I've come across are decidedly not professional posters. Not media professionals, not artists. They don't need to build a profile. They're not securing the bag. And to me, those people seem vital to the Internet, and I think they're probably the reason I made a habit of using the Internet twenty five years ago.

The Internet that talks amongst itself has always been the most exciting part to me because I've had the opportunity to see and hear perspectives I never would have imagined. So my question is, and this is so subjective I know, but how do we keep the cool people posting? Blogging or commenting or just simply in the chat?

So I have the answer. Oh, great.

Thank god.

Yeah. Take all of the money out.

Honestly Yeah. That is it.

Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Actually. Wow.

It is a it is it is absolutely a question about information ecology and the ecology is poisoned by money. The end.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I really don't have anything else to say about it.

The one other thing I can say is that I think, like, you need to have spaces and interactions online that do not require things of you. Yeah. Otherwise, it just becomes a job, and it becomes work. And the things that are the most fun about the Internet are the things that get that allow you to have fun and, like, be creative and engage in, you know, collaborative creative relationships and, become familiar with other people's creative output. And those things get harder and harder to do when they have increasingly, like when they yeah.

When they become work work, when they become work. And I think it's like there's a delicate balance there because people who make good things, who generate the desire for people to stick around, you know, they should realize whatever for them is a reasonable remuneration for their work. Right? And for as long as the environment is not toxic, it might literally be what Talia is talking about. Just like, appreciation and conversation.

And I think for a lot of people, that is literally what it is. But then, yeah, that gets that gets complicated when the money comes in.

The money.

Ads. Ads. Ads. Ads are bad. Just ads are bad.

So, Mike, say, speaking of money. Yeah.

Speaking of ads.

Here you go. Break one. Here it is.

And we're back. And next on the docket is a very interesting submission from George Dawson about my segment about self care and skin care and the moralization of taking care of your skin, the conversation I had with Jessica Defino. And George has this to say. I wanted to respond to the request for listeners who have managed to turn skin care into self care because I feel like that has been my approach. I've struggled with skin picking since at least my teens, I'm 27 now, and have had many awkward conversations about it while squashing my self esteem and bolding my issues with my self image.

I've been asked if I hurt myself, if I'm okay. Sometimes I pick at myself in public, and people have been alarmed by the blood. Needless to say, it's been hard. In more recent years, I've been taking my mental health seriously, focusing on therapy, medication, improving my self confidence, and have started to really improve. The medication mix I'm finally on has greatly reduced my anxiety, which has helped me pick much less often.

In conjunction with this, I follow some very basic routines to help my skin look better and break out less often so that I'm less tempted to pick at anything in the first place. I'm still improving, but I don't have to worry about scabs on my face or arms as nearly as much. It helps me feel more comfortable around people at work and with friends. Like, I don't have to hide or cover anything. I can just exist.

This is, like, perfect. This is exactly to me what taking care of your skin as self care would look like. I mean, this is amazing. I'm very excited for you.

Oh, yeah. George. Right, George? This is yes.

Fabulous. I'm I'm really proud of you. This is really hard. And yeah. I mean, to me, this is this is so much how skin care can actually serve as self care where this is literally you taking care of yourself and taking care of your skin as an extension of taking care of yourself and having a strong relationship with yourself, which involves your skin and your body.

That's amazing, and I'm so excited to hear this. So congratulations.

Hell, yeah. Cosine. A %. Alright. Erica had this to say about our segment touching trail, where Rusty and I spoke about his time on the Appalachian Trail and what it's like for someone who's very online to log off.

Hello, Mike, and everyone at Never Post. I'm Erica. I'm from Brazil. I was listening to the discussion about being offline, and I actually have, an offline weekly day that I that I try to keep, which is usually Tuesday. And I started that, when

I was doing my research for my doctoral dissertation, and I needed the time. And I realized it was really good for my mental

health. It's not entirely offline. I'm on my email, but I'm off WhatsApp, which is really big in Brazil. It's basically what we use to talk to everybody. And I'm off all social media, and it's it does, like, great things for my mental health.

And I try to do when I travel, like, usually during New Year's vacation, which is summer here in Brazil, I go to a beach,

whereas there's very little phone signal, my phone especially. Some of my friends have phone signal there, but I don't. And I get there, and I I did that this year. And I get there, and I I put my phone on airplane mode, and I'm really happy about it. And and I just use it.

Like, I used it for

ten days only as a camera this year. So that was amazing. And I it actually fit makes me feel really good. I don't get anxious. What I wanted to comment about is the fact that I think for me, it's less about news.

I think I missed a lot of new news, which may be considered important when I

was offline for these ten days this year.

But it's more about people for me. I think I feel like I have to be in communication with people all

the time.

And I travel with a bunch of friends, so I have people around me all the time. So I don't need my phone to do that. And the other thing is that what I find difficult is the balance. Like, so being totally offline makes me feel really good. But the rest of the days of the week, I have a really hard time finding a balance, so I can't be a little online.

I'm either a % online or I'm almost a % offline. Anyway, that's that's my story with that, and I found it really interesting. Great show.

It's so tough. It's so tough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love offline day is great.

I've never thought of that.

That's so smart. Also, Tuesday. Way to go. Yeah.

Like, yeah. Not even a Sunday. A two?

Not even a Sunday.

Well, I feel like a Sunday would be harder. You have more free time.

Yeah. I I mean, I think it's and I think especially now, we're like, Internet weather is bad. The Internet weather is bad at the moment. And I think being proactive about developing these strategies for just protecting your mental health, but maintaining a sort of level of knowledge ability for your, material circumstances or just like that's those are gonna be two very important things to do increasingly right now.

Well, I'm interested in this idea of finding balance because I I've never tried one of those apps that locks you out of

Oh, right.

Things after a certain amount of time, but a lot of my friends use them. And at least in my lived experience, that seems like the closest thing to finding some kind of middle place between either I am scrolling forever or I am on airplane mode. I feel like I would just override it.

I have a crown job that runs on my computer. So, like, it like, it's from, like, two to five every weekday. Social media websites are blocked from my computer. So if I go to them, it just redirects to local where there's nothing. If I need to turn it off, it's just a button to turn it off, to go look at something, and then I turn it back on.

But it's like it's a reminder. And really, the most important thing is that it interrupts the habit

Mhmm.

Where I like Small impediment.

Yeah. Yeah. Like not even thinking I open up a tab. Exactly. Yeah.

And in my phone I have screen time or whatever that's set to fifteen minutes for every social media app and it's fifteen minutes for a day. And I don't use it as a way to be like, Oh, my fifteen minutes are up. I no longer use it. I use it as a way to be like, how many times have I said remind me again in fifteen minutes? And once and then once that once I start to feel like I've pushed that button a lot for the day is when I'm like, you know what?

I could probably just the next time it pops up, I'm like, you know what phone? Good point. It's a way for me to take just a brief moment to check-in with myself and be like, am I being a little bit self destructive at the moment? Don't you feel silly? Don't you feel kinda bad right now?

And, like, honestly, the answer is sometimes yes. And I wouldn't take that very brief moment if my phone wasn't like, hey. What are you doing? Yeah.

I introduced so many new digital practices to my phone at the beginning of this year to try to help me breathe intention back into the things that I do in a day. There's perhaps more to this conversation we could have at a later date because I like, dozens of things, and we'll see how they're working. Some of them are working great. Some of them I've already blown through the security tape of. But I think now is a time we're all kind of thinking that way.

Alex wrote in, and had this to say about our state of the podcast episode where me, Hans, and Jason talk about what making Never Post was like, for the first year. Alex writes, I wanted to highlight areas of podcasting that didn't get recognition during the discussion. There are a lot of podcasts I listen to and love that are kids or grandkids of NPR, which y'all did discuss. I do kinda wanna push back on the idea that all of podcasting is descended from NPR because there are a few different routes folks took to podcasting. Starting with nonfiction, I I wanted to talk about iHeart podcasts and specifically zero in on Cool Zone Media.

The origin story for them is that they have gotten their genesis from being writers at crack.com's pivot to video, but then going on to release really great work after that bubble burst. Talking about Cool Zone is tipping my hand as one of your anarchist fans who seem to call in a disproportionate amount for a show that is not explicitly anarchist. That is correct. This show is not explicitly anarchist.

The show is not explicitly anarchist.

I also wanted to talk about the extremely niche Channel Zero network. I don't think it's profitable, but it's run by anarchists. So I don't think it's meant to be. When you talk about indie nonfiction podcasts, this is what comes to mind. And I wonder if they or others like them are part of the discussion like this, Or are they so small they're irrelevant?

I also wanna ask about fiction podcasting, audio dramas. There's the big ones like Welcome to Night Vale Magnus Archives and slightly smaller ones that got turned into canceled too soon Netflix shows like Archive 81. It's a very queer space, and it seems to be paid for by Patreon or Indiegogo as well as ads. Also, there's the listening to people play t t r p g's genre, which I absolutely love. I listen to every app of Fun City, for instance.

Hey. Are fiction podcasts, outside of the famous ones big enough to matter? So these are all great points, and I I actually don't know the Channel Zero Network, which I'm gonna go check out. But I think, like, the cool zone media people are a great shout out. The welcome to Night Vale, Night Vale presents a great shout out.

All the people who do great AP stuff. I think maybe the unstated thing that we were talking about in the state of the pod episode that we did was like both because we imagine ourselves to be and various entities outside of our show seem to appreciate us as within that larger group of NPR descended podcasts, that like there are all of these other traditions, that exist within the format, within the style, within the media, things like Welcome to Night Vale, things like AP shows. But we can't help but put ourselves alongside the reply alls, the search engines, the this American life, the etcetera, etcetera. And also because when we talk to other people who work in the industry, the things that you hear the most about when people talk about how they build audience are their relationship to the, like, basically the public media, public radio tradition of podcasting. And so, no, we do not mean to suggest that that is the only way you can make it.

It absolutely is not. I think we have maybe for better and maybe worse, have assumed that that is the only way that we can make it.

Yeah. But if you think that audio drama is the only way we can make it, I'll pivot.

I'll pivot. I'll do it.

Don't make me go back there.

Listen. The only progenitor I recognize is you talk and you two to

me. The last segment specific feedback that we got, was from a recent one, actually, from one that we just published. Our previous episode when I did a story about how many cameras are there, I got pinged by Chad Koholik on Blue Sky who pointed me towards the traffic cam photo booth, which is an art project by Maury Coleman, who's an artist in Brooklyn, who created a feed, took the NYT, the Department of Transportation, cam traffic cameras that we mentioned in the piece, and made a feed so you can go open up the app, find the one that you're standing in front of, and push a button to take a selfie with it. This is a thing that we had thought about doing. Mike got sick and we weren't able to send him, but we had been scheming to send Mike out to be able to stand in front of a camera that I would then take a picture of from Minnesota to illustrate how insidious this is.

But turns out somebody did that. Somebody's already done it. Of course, somebody has already done it. And you two could go do that. Traffic cam photo booth, you can check it out, and they've got lists.

They've got links to other art projects that have made use of public data feeds of security cameras as well.

Okay. The final group of things to talk about is the update for cool graffiti. Harold

Graham. So

excited. Jason,

I need you to describe the first one.

Anyone who isn't me. You, specifically.

Okay. Alright. Alright.

This is largely my fault. Alex Poston wrote in and said, you've heard of the cool s. Have you heard of the cool d? This beautiful piece is probably six feet tall on a highway overpass support pillar. It's gone now, though judging by many layers of paint behind it.

It might be back again. I can only hope. And what is pictured is in the style of the cool s, the interlocking foreground and background coming to resemble some oroboros of an s, we instead have a d. Mhmm. It's not the letter, but instead the thing for which that letter has become a signifier complete with tip and base with hair.

Is this sufficient? It's so good.

But okay. There's a crucial part of this that I wanna point out Uh-huh. Which is that next to that is a slash 86 as if this is like an artist print, like, iteration.

This is the 80 the 80 I wanna know a lot.

Out of 86. Yeah. Right. Out of 86.

So, yeah. So, yeah, if you live near where Alex lives, go find the other 85 instances of the Cool Dee. Complete the set.

We want pictures of all of them.

Lewis Minsky writes in and sends, a piece of graffiti that, Molly and I really enjoy. I have seen a bunch. Lewis writes, I finally found a photo of my favorite graffiti. It was on the corner of Second And Third Avenue in Brooklyn, but it's been covered up. It's thin black text spray paint on, brick wall.

The brick wall has been painted red, and over it, it says, Jodie Foster Judge Judy erotica 200.

Let's go. Let's go.

It's really good. It really it really just conjures a very specific set of search results on a o three. Doesn't it?

Why is the 200 there? Is this another, first pressing?

That's the number of pages if you go and search.

So that's yeah. And counting.

That's a page count.

Finally, Thomas writes in. Says, I'm a bit late to the party. No. You're not. By the way, nobody is late to this party.

If you find more good graffiti, send it forever.

Yeah. This part yeah. This party is infinite. Yes.

But Thomas sent in his favorite graffiti that he found in Vienna, Italastrisa Italastrisi porno cock mafia. Classic. Italastrisi porno cock mafia.

It's actually Cox Mafia.

A Tallus Juicy Ponocock Mafia. I think.

Jason's even doing an offensive hand gesture.

I cannot say it without moving my hand like this. Thomas suggests this is kind of translatable as Italian pimp porn Coke mafia.

Coke the drug. The drug. Of course. Italian pimp porn Coke mafia.

Italianistress Sapona Cox Mafia.

And I'm always saying that.

We can't folks, we can't get her to stop.

No one will talk to me about this.

And no number next to this one.

Yeah. This one is a, this is a

one of one. Yes.

One of one single edition.

Cannot be repeated.

Please, please, more funny graffiti. Yes. We love to see it. Alright. That is our mailbag for early twenty twenty five.

We will be back in no time with more of your, comments if you wanna get a hold of us. All of the ways to send us your thoughts about our segments are in the show notes. We love hearing from you and, we'll see you in the feed real soon with our next episode. Alright.

Thank you everybody. Thanks friends.

Thank you.

You.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye. Bye.