On June 4th, Rachel Kelly and Matt Saunders set off on the adventure of a lifetime: driving the Pan American Highway. The couple from a small town in Surrey, England, went to the same school but matched on Tinder during the pandemic lockdowns. On their third date, Saunders planted the …
Read More »Scammers Are Ruining Facebook Marketplace
This year, I decided to get rid of my Amazon starter couch and buy a real one. So I listed the generic, velvet-green futon on Facebook Marketplace, thinking some college students or recent New York transplants would happily scoop it up at a discounted price. Since September, I have received …
Read More »First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go
A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media has changed in recent …
Read More »How to Make Reddit Suck Less on Your Phone
It's been a few months since Reddit shut down the vast majority of third-party clients, and the protests have mostly died down. But using Reddit on mobile is a nightmare—it’s slow, riddled with prompts, and constantly asks if you want notifications. Fans of third-party clients were trying to avoid exactly …
Read More »X Challenger Pebble Thinks AI-Generated Posts Can Help Lure Users Away From Elon Musk
Every text-centric social platform has its own way of nudging people to write the content needed to keep other users engaged. “What is happening?!” yelps the compose box on Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter. Meta’s equivalent on Facebook wonders, “What’s on your mind?” No matter what the question, it’s always …
Read More »How to Move Your Instagram Feed to Pixelfed, the Photo App That Doesn't Track Your Every Move
Instagram hasn't been a photography app for a while. Sure, you can upload photos to the app; a few people might even see it. The focus of Instagram, these days, is squarely on stories and videos. And if you want a public archive of your photos, Instagram only kind of …
Read More »The Best Substack Alternatives
If your plan is to run a newsletter as a hobby, Substack is perfect—it’s free, easy to set up, and makes sending out emails and building a subscriber base fairly straightforward. The problem comes if you want to make a living publishing your newsletter, at which point Substack can quickly …
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