Culture

After days of explosive growth on the platform, the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours (versus 360,000 in all of 2023).

The team added that it’s working to bring on new members and asks users to help by reporting troll, spam, and scam accounts. Bluesky has also implemented email verification for new signups.

A live-updating tracker using Bluesky’s API puts the site at over 14,980,000 users right now.

The site has been growing fast lately, possibly spurred most recently by the US presidential election.

Verge staffers review election.omg.lol: “Both horrifying and kinda helpful.” “This is a hell site.” “This rules.”

Mariah Carey has once again emerged from the Halloween cobwebs with an elaborately produced video reminding us the holiday season — and nonstop replays of “All I Want for Christmas is You” — is upon us.

As far as celebrity memes and bits go, I respect the dedication and raw capitalism with this one.

Last year the YouTuber sued his business partner in charge of MrBeast Burgers, after customers complained about “inedible” and “revolting” food. Undeterred, this year MrBeast partnered with Logan Paul and KSI to launch Lunchly, a line of Lunchables-style snack boxes — that are apparently full of mold. If your kid asks for them maybe show them these pictures.

New fear unlocked: that even death will not release me from the Zoom meetings.

So The Bear Cave, a newsletter popular among shortsellers, is claiming the short-sellers at Hindenburg Research are ripping it off. “This is the essence of plagiarism: taking the heart of someone else’s work without acknowledgement and repurposing it for your own audience.” Nate Anderson of Hindenburg has responded on Twitter, Edwin Dorsey, of The Bear Cave, isn’t having it.

If you have FOMO about missing out on the very last XOXO festival, the official video recordings have begun rolling out one by one.

Here’s my own talk, mostly about the harassment campaign that upended my life. I previously wrote about the experience as part of The Verge’s The Year Twitter Died package.

Think Shot Spotter, but for songs. There’s a “crappy Android phone” that’s set up in the Mission in San Francisco that’s just on Shazam all day. “This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes.”

Tegan and Sara (pop stars, iykyk) were known for their online presence and cultivating a fan community. But a catfish hacked Tegan’s accounts, and clearly had access to an awful lot of her personal information... turning her life upside down.

Gates critic Tim Schwab says when he was approached by the production company for What’s Next: The Future with Bill Gates, the people he spoke to misrepresented what the documentary was about. He also notes that Jen Krajicek, one of the producers, appears to work for Gates Ventures.

PBS News spent a few minutes with GeoGuessr superstar Trevor Rainbolt, who made a name for himself on TikTok by being really good at the game of guessing where a random Google Maps Street View photo was taken, based on small clues and the occasional “vibe guess.”

We do love it when a news segment digs into a niche internet subculture.

Former US President Donald Trump, who posted AI-generated images of Taylor Swift implying that she had endorsed him for President, now says he hates her, in a post on Truth Social.

(Swift has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the office.)

In an interview with The New York Times, former model Leticia Sarda — better known to some as “Celebrity Number Six” — revealed she had no idea that thousands of people online have spent years trying to identify her because of some unusual curtains.

“I never expected this would show up 20 years later,” Sarda said.

Your folding phone’s screen isn’t anywhere near this flexible, in case you’re wondering. They said we’d see the twistable, stretchable display at Seoul Fashion Week, and sure enough:

In January 2020, a Reddit user requested help identifying the celebrities illustrated on some decade-old curtains, and the internet quickly matched all but one to their original photograph.

That remaining figure, dubbed “Celebrity Number Six,” remained a complete mystery until yesterday when the reference image of Spanish model Leticia Sardá was finally uncovered. Guess it's time to retire the subreddit?

Activist investors are circling Match, including the terror machines at Elliott Management. But 79 percent of women say they don’t want to use apps ever again. The shift away from dating apps is happening as Match is trying to squeeze more money from its users.

Someone go get David Hume — we’re trying to figure out what blue is. I scored 174, true neutral.

The creator of “One Million Checkboxes” has shared some heartwarming stories about the creative ways that teens interacted with the now-shuttered website. Check out the below video, this X thread, or Eieio’s blog for some feel-good Friday vibes about concealing URLs in binary and creating pixelated Rick-Rolls.

Help. Help help help.

But for those of us doomed to remember what the Obama years were like the first time around — the turbo-pop, the undercuts, the novelty Twitter accounts, the Internet Boyfriends, the girlbosses, the hashtags, the precise shades of pink — there is one last bracing thought. For better or worse, these were our ’60s, and we’re all just going to have to come to terms with that.

You can pay to see if your partner will respond to a stranger’s flirty DM — and TikTok has turned this into a thriving subculture.

“On one hand, it’s like, fuck yeah, we got this guy,” Monzon told me. “But on the other hand, it’s like, ‘Fuck.’ This girl’s life is…she’s heartbroken now.”

She played both Ash’s companion and Team Rocket’s female lead from 1997 to 2015 across TV, film, and commercials. She also voiced some Pokémon like Jigglypuff and Goldeen, including in the Smash Bros. games.

Her sister Laurie Orr and her “Ash” co-star Veronica Taylor both confirmed the news. Here’s her IMDB page with other roles, including Your Lie in April and Hunter x Hunter.

Correction: Lillis was 55, not 46.

A placard at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture used the internet-speak term “un-alive” to describe Cobain’s suicide, according to Billboard. The museum elsewhere reportedly said it used it as a “gesture of respect.”

People use terms like “un-alive” online to try to get around moderation algorithms that they believe may suppress or remove their content. MoPOP didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.