I Still <3 The InternetCelebrating 10 Years of Deez Links — and the best of the internet — with Yahoo.
Last Thursday, we threw a party with Yahoo called “I Still <3 The Internet” to celebrate the 10th “birthday” of Deez Links. It was everything I ever wanted a media party to be: free-flowing sparkling cosmos (thank you Nightmoves!); purple lychee martini-flavored Solid Wiggles shots; piles of Chrissy’s Pizza; a giant Wegmans sheet cake, snowy and immaculate as a new iPhone screen; and about a millionish mutuals making merry. For me, it was an incredible excuse to gather together so many people from the last decade of my life in New York media: writers I continue to feel inspired by, editors I want to measure up to some day. There were the DC friends from the Atlantic Media internship trenches who’d encouraged me to start that TinyLetter in February 2016; bosses from The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, and Vanity Fair who’d seen something in all that manic blogging and taught me so much since; the roommates and mentors and internet friends who’d spent so many years opening emails and forwarding them and generally humoring me when I started talking real fast about “the discourse.” You can lurk/find yourself in the party photos from Lyss Lester here; Natasha Stagg also wrote about it here. But I wanted to use the occasion to celebrate not just a single newsletter, but also a bigger moment in indie and digital media. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 10 years, it’s that media is always in upheaval (and that’s putting it politely) — and yet there are always still interesting people doing interesting things, telling worthwhile stories, reinventing business models, and giving us something to talk about. It’s a dramatic and ambitious time to be in the mix, made all the more exciting by the fact that I get to witness so many friends and colleagues doing it at the top of their game (and not a few mastheads!). To honor their work, and to remind us of all the parts of the “good internet” that got us this online in the first place, I invited a few friends and mentors I admire so much to give a toast at the party on specifically why they still <3 the internet. They all generously let me print the text below in this recap; I hope you’ll find these toasts as life-affirming as I did. From Madison Feller, managing editor of the indie publishing sensation 831 Stories — and the first columnist I got to hire when we both worked for the MOVE Magazine at Mizzou :) I still love the internet, because I still love Cup of Jo, the blog that I have read nearly every day since I was a teenager. For anyone who doesn’t know the lore surrounding this blog, it was started by a magazine editor named Joanna Goddard back in 2007 and is considered as, if not the first, then at least one of the best of the OG early-aughts women’s lifestyle blogs. I have no idea how I even found it, but I had a few similar blogs in rotation at the time, so I figure one must have led me to it. And then I settled into a routine: Every morning before high school, I would eat my cereal and read Cup of Jo, where Joanna wrote about fashion and home design and books and her marriage and becoming a mom. Joanna is about 15 years older than me, and so when I was that teenage, early-20s person, her site felt like this window into what life could or might look like one day. I remember she wrote about how to support a friend who’s going through a hard time, that kind of classic, service-y magazine-y story that could feel cliché in less deft hands. It sounds small, but when I became a slightly older person and had a close friend going through an unimaginable time, I know I could’ve felt lost about how best to be there for her. And instead, I just did what Joanna told me to do, and it became one of the most profound periods of friendship I have ever experienced. Joanna was my gateway to clothing brands beyond your standard mall fare; she introduced me to books and podcasts and writers I came to love. And when I finally moved to New York post-college to try to also become a magazine editor, I was like, maybe I should visit this magical neighborhood that Joanna always talks about called Cobble Hill?? (Cut to me moving there with Delia in 2018.) So, I love the internet because I love that a random set of clicks I made as a teenager led me to a blog that has become one of the few constants in my life. I love the internet because, even though I might not read every Cup of Jo post with the same rigor I used to, I still check her site almost every day—partly out of habit; partly because it still really hits; and partly because I love that there’s a place that so many versions of myself have visited. Now the true lore is that, in 2024, I got the chance to interview Joanna and tell her how much her work has meant to me. She was incredible and everything I imagined her to be — turns out you should sometimes meet your heroes — but I also quickly realized I didn’t need her to be anything more to me than she already was: my longest internet relationship. As everything else seems to constantly be shifting and dissolving and combusting around us, it felt like a comfort to know that maybe at least one thing in life, and online, could stay exactly the same. From Brian Park, comedian and co-host of the Middlebrow podcast — whose podcasting and observational humor have been pivotal to my identity as a NY media snob. I still love the internet because it’s where I go for community. And I’m not talking about Reddit, Substack, or the class booking portal of a third-wave immersive sauna and ice bath experience. I’m talking about an online tennis forum hosted by a tennis equipment retailer headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California. I have visited this forum every single day for the past 27 years. I have literally spent more time arguing on this forum than with my own family. And my only regret is that it wasn’t more. And if you’re thinking it’s all tennis talk, you’d be out six-love. This is where I, a gangly teen, learned what to look for in a tuxedo rental for prom, the pant break, the shirt cuff peeking out from under the sleeve, and whether the jacket pulled when the top button was closed. It’s where a poster named ‘Baseline223’ told me that if I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I should check out The Smiths. And goddammit, he was right. And it’s where I wished best of luck to ‘Baseline223’ when he said he’d be offline for a couple months to care for his newborn son. Sadly, he never posted again, but I like to think he lurks now as an empty nester, wondering whatever happened to that gangly teen who loved Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Today, I browse the forum whenever I’m on the subway. It’s not as active as it used to be, but there’s a younger crop of tennis players keeping it alive, asking which pros play with a grip size 2 aside from Jannik Sinner, sharing photos of Carlos Alcaraz framemogging other players, and debating whether you would watch a movie that is AI-generated. I still love the internet because despite all the brain rot and soul-sucking algorithms, you can still find your people. The ones who obsessively care about a 0.05mm difference in string width and whether the fluorescent orange soles of the Nike Vapor 12s wear out faster than the burnt orange ones. And they will make you the best dressed person at your Senior Prom. And the reason you can show The Smiths to your niece. And I look forward to being there, 27 years from now. From Kiara Barrow, co-founder and co-editor of The Drift — the magazine whose rigor I’m always awed by, and whose parties I always have a good time at. I still love the internet because I still love Reddit: in a changing and uncertain world, it remains reliably and blissfully itself. I know many of us have been having a moment with Brick, and I, too, decided to spend the winter holidays completely off Instagram and Twitter. Rather than keep me away from my phone, what this did was clear the decks for me to renew my love affair with Reddit. I flung myself into its warm embrace, comforted by my conviction that the old-fashioned interface represented an earlier, better, purer version of the internet — something more wholesome, more democratic, more like what the Bay Area hippies imagined before they sold themselves, and us, out to the dopamine harvesters and the national security state. It’s by now a truism that no question is too niche or specific not to have a designated subreddit; no situation too outlandish or too embarrassing not to recount in the endless search for advice or recognition or at least an answer to the perennial question of who is the asshole. Of course, Reddit is not entirely wholesome, though I usually manage to avert my eyes from its darkest corners, which is easy enough if you prefer communities like r/JapaneseFood, which recently gave me tips on how to defrost the fermented soybean superfood natto, and r/NYCinfluencersnark, where I found out that an elderly influencer I follow actually has a terrible relationship with her daughter-in-law, or r/ContemporaryArt, where I looked for guidance about how to snag a ticket to visit Michael Heizer’s City, the Nevada land art installation that allows six visitors per day and books out for the year within several minutes. (I failed this year, and I honestly shouldn’t be telling any of you about it since I will try again next time.) But I did once have a friend confess that he had used Reddit to cheat on his girlfriend — not a function I had previously considered, but on Reddit anything is possible, which is entirely the point. You will never reach the limit, it is simply too vast and too varied, a one-to-one-scale map of the human experience much like the one Borges imagined when he wrote about “a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire.” Naturally, r/empire provides a directory of subreddits dedicated to the history of colonialism. But Reddit is practically an empire unto itself; it reported $2.2 billion in revenue last year. You may recall that Condé Nast bought Reddit back in 2006, though for reasons that elude me, decided not to turn it into a flagship Condé property with a celebrity EIC and an annual gala. (I mean, can you imagine the Reddit Man of the Year Awards?) The site is now a sibling company under Advance Publications, presumably because Global Chief Content Officer Anna Wintour can do every job at the company except that of a Reddit mod. From Mi-Anne Chan, the newly appointed creative editorial director at Teen Vogue, founding editor of the perfect Mixed Feelings newsletter — and my Kyoto travel buddy for life. I still love the internet because without it, we wouldn’t have the Omegaverse. Have you heard of Rule 34? Raise of hands please. It’s this concept that if it exists, there’s smut about it online. Whether it’s dragons getting it on with cars on Reddit, or really anything you can possibly imagine. But I’ll take it a step further: I love the internet because if the fandom is big enough there is going to be omegaverse fiction about it. Heated Rivalry, yes. Twilight? Absolutely. Jujutsu Kaisen? You already know I’ve read an A/B/O-fic about alpha Gojo Satoru. Now, if you aren’t a freak like me, you may not know much about the omegaverse. I will share my knowledge. The Omegaverse, also known as A/B/O (for alpha, beta, omega) is a genre of erotic fiction that employs the pack organizational structure of wolves and applies it to humans. That means, if we were all in an Omegaverse we’d all have an assigned “primary gender,” and a “secondary” gender: Alpha, Beta, or Omega. Alphas are…what you’d expect, as are the betas. But Omegas, they’re special. They are typically the most oppressed class in this world and they also go into heat, and Alphas go into rut, making them absolutely feral for each other. Omegas can also be impregnated regardless of their primary gender…that’s where all the mpreg stuff you’ve been seeing comes from. There are almost 250k works tagged Omegaverse on Archive of our Own, and we can thank the Supernatural fandom for that, as they are widely credited as creating the first Omegaverse fics. It is a genre purely born of the internet and to me, that makes it great. And while, yes, it’s a lot of smut, many of the stories also have great character arcs I swear!!!! Shameless plug but we did an entire story on this for mixed feelings that I am so proud of, so if this piqued your interest at all I’d suggest you take a gander. Now that I’ve said it, you are welcome for the onslaught of Omegaverse TikToks you are sure to get tonight and for the rest of your lives. And tell me, are you an Alpha, Beta, or Omega? From Jasper Wang, the co-founder and VP of revenue and operations at Defector (AKA why Defector exists) — my font of wisdom and the most delicious media gossip. I still love the internet, because good tweets never die. Last month, my Defector colleague and good friend Dan McQuade passed away from cancer at age 43. He was a blogger online for 20 years, literally. In 2006, a magazine called Philadelphia People crowned him a HOT 6 OF ’06 since he was Philadelphia’s preeminent blogger. He left a meaningful journalistic legacy, one that was both very serious and very fun. His obituary in the New York Times highlighted his role in Bill Cosby eventually going to prison for his crimes against women. He wrote a stunt blog in 2013, tracking the training run that Rocky Balboa takes during Rocky II, which was immediately turned into an official race that tens of thousands of people run every year. He was a Philadelphia icon, and when he died, the Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers both held moments of silence in his honor. On Sunday, The Simpsons set their 800th episode in Philadelphia, and Dan McQuade was drawn in as a background character. You may have seen some people posting remembrances of Dan on Twitter and Bluesky, and in addition to talking about his journalism, and what a kind and unique person he was, a lot of people mentioned what a good poster he was. People were retweeting his greatest tweets. Now, I firmly believe that one of the least charismatic things you can do in real life is to make someone listen to you describe a tweet you liked. And yet I am now going to do that several times, to this entire party. Dan McQuade’s best tweet, for my money, was when he posted a photo of Vince and Linda McMahon visiting Donald Trump in the White House with their family, and he captioned it 46% of the people in this photo, including the president, have been stunnered by Stone Cold Steve Austin. Dan also did a lot of video editing that would go viral. People were retweeting his montage of Philadelphia local news, where a man in handcuffs was being perp-walked, and when the reporter asked if there was anything he wanted to say, he thought for a moment and yelled, “GO BIRDS”. A lot of people were reposting a hilarious tweet ABOUT Dan. At the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in 2016, a political reporter took a photo of Dan and said, “First DNC celebrity spotted, I think that’s Brad Pitt.” Imagine Brad Pitt hunched over a macbook, composing directly in a CMS. This is a crowd of terminally online media people, so I want you to think about your favorite tweet. Maybe it’s a @dril tweet, or the one about the grink, or a Matt Yglesias one that caused everyone to go insane for a week, I don’t know how your brain works. For me, it’s probably Osama shouldve hooped instead of tryna kill ppl cause he tall as hell! I think about that every time I see someone who’s tall as hell. The popular wisdom is that posting online is a waste of time, it’s lightweight, it’s ephemeral, it’s lost to the wind as soon as you post. But think about your favorite tweets, and how important and emotionally resonant those tweets were to you, how much joy they brought you. And you may realize that a perfect tweet may be the true nexus of human connection online. When I say good tweets never die, I’m not saying that these tweets will be accessible forever online. Probably some day soon, Elon Musk will paywall the best tweets only for Nazis and people who want to go to space. But even if that happens, the good tweets will live on, in groupchats, as screenshots in Instagram carousels for the @iamthirtyaf account, and most importantly they’ll live on in all of our hearts. And maybe that’s about as good of a legacy as anyone’s going to get in this world. So, please join me in raising a glass. RIP to Dan McQuade, happy birthday to Deez Links, and long live good tweets! Thank you to Yahoo for being such a great partner for the night. Let’s keep the celebrations going! For anyone heading to SXSW, Yahoo will be taking over Austin’s Historic Scoot Inn, including an exclusive concert headlined by Jessie Murph. You can check it out and register here. Thank you also to the Daly team for making it all happen, and to my wonderful friend and event producer Rachel Yang. Special thanks also to Seth Magoon and the Nightmoves team, Lyss Lester for the amazing photographs, and DJ Ja-vu. And thank you for reading Deez Links. I hope the next 10 years are just as sweet. Thank you for supporting Deez Links! For classified advertising + sponsorships, lmk at delia@deezlinks.com
|
