“I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…”— Peter Thiel, amazon.com
“There was a time (still in living memory) when “virtual” was a free word in the English language. It meant “almost true” or “for all intents and purposes, but not completely, not truly.” One could say, “I was virtually happy.” Were you truly happy? No, you weren’t, because adhering to the “virtually…”— Ellen Ullman, amazon.com
“What is it about the Internet, with its pretty graphics and simple clicks, that makes users feel so inundated; and about the spreadsheet—so complicated a tool—that makes them bold? The received wisdom about user-friendliness is challenged here. Human beings, I think, do not like to be condescended t…”— Ellen Ullman, amazon.com
“It's hard to overstate how much the Internet has changed in the past 10 years.”— Anthony Volodkin, noisey.vice.com
“There’s this illusion that the internet is a democracy or a meritocracy, and that if your voice isn’t rising to the top immediately, it’s some problem with you.”— Tavi Gevinson, thecut.com
“Posting on Facebook, no matter what issue, can feel like walking across a minefield.”— Taylor Lorenz, thedailybeast.com
“Women had accounts banned from Facebook for responding to male trolls with sentences like ‘men are trash,’ in part because the company classifies white men as a protected group.”— Taylor Lorenz, thedailybeast.com
“If email is dead, then why does every social network ask for an email address before you can create an account?”— Jeff Goins, goinswriter.com
“Though they can be, strangers aren’t always strange. They’re often just people, a lot like you.”— Giancarlo DiTrapano, thoughtcatalog.com
“I never got tired of coming across a writerly style that seemed to exist for no good reason. I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.”— Jia Tolentino, newyorker.com
“An ad-based publishing model built around maximizing page views quickly and cheaply creates uncomfortable incentives for writers, editors, and readers alike.”— Jia Tolentino, newyorker.com
“I want to encourage people to talk about mostly anything other than themselves.”— Silvia Killingsworth, newyorker.com
“In the age of algorithms and social media, can we create an enclave where creative and intellectual sophistication still matter?”— Chris Lavergne, techcrunch.com
“We wanted readers, not just visitors; artistic appreciation, not just social likes.”— Chris Lavergne, techcrunch.com
“I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.”— LCD Soundsystem, open.spotify.com
“Then I sweetened the pot with traffic-generating stunts like snorting a huge line of Napoleon Perdis jasmine bath salts off a mirror at the office -- a joke on "bath salts" the drug, then trending worldwide -- while my delighted boss filmed me on her iPhone. A week later, Say gave me a twenty-thousa…”— Cat Marnell, amazon.com
“Different outlets have been publishing sensationalist, less-than-true stories in order to sell copies since the dawn of print media. In the late-19th/early-20th century they called it yellow journalism, and after that there were tabloids, and after that attention-grabbing radio and TV stories design…”— Zachary Kagan, medium.com
“This is the state of truth on the internet in 2016, now that it is as easy for a Macedonian teenager to create a website as it is for The New York Times, and now that the information most likely to find a large audience is that which is most alarming, not most correct.”— Jessi Hempel, backchannel.com