More than a feeling

Late December is a time for thoughtfulness and reflection -- a chance to tally wtf we've done in the past 52 weeks. And as I learned (to my elation) roughly two weeks ago, we've done quite a lot on the Internet beat! There was the Ashley Madison hack that terrified millions. There was The Dress, which terrified millions more. There was the Reddit Revolt, which seemed to augur major changes for online speech and digital labor.

Point IS, it's hard to sum up a year in Internet, but I attempted it for WNYC's "Note to Self." They are legitimately the greatest and going on there was a dream, aside from the part where I sort of broke (?) their ISDN. I know *a lot* of people are new here because of the podcast. (To whom I say: It gets better! Give me a chance!) To all the rest of you, this newsletter is only a thing because you've been kind enough to share it with friends. Excuse some late December sappiness, but I legit appreciate that.

... Now ahem go listen to the damn podcast.

1. Meet the guy behind "the most disgusting things on the Internet." His name is K. Thor Jensen, and he did it to pay his rent! Over at New York, Jensen recounts his decade-plus running a site called "Portal of Evil," which specialized in gore, weird fetishes ... and all things fecal. :-/

2. Social media is only making the debate on Trump worse. Research shows that the Internet tends to silo us into hyper-polarized groups. (The solution could be to forge more ties across ideological divides -- although when I suggested that, I got Gawkered, soooo lol/sigh.)

3. The group that gave you emoji wants to save the Internet's languages. Unicode supports 130 writing systems -- but at least 150 still have yet to be encoded.

Remember 2014? Simpler times. I miss them. (Link)

Postscripts: Don't trust my year in review -- here's Google, Wikipedia and Facebook's. Goats sing holiday carols and Mariah's carols through MIDI. You can buy guns on Amazon (?!) and rent frat houses on Airbnb. In search of old-fashioned human assistants. We've already found YouTube's next big pop star. A mere 23 memes that need to die soon -- because "all the memes" goes too far. The best Twitter bots of 2015 and the best comments on YouTube's "More Than a Feeling." Lol, another year, but we still didn't learn anything.

Until tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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