BONUS PREVIEW: Is social media actually "dead" now?

Will we ever get another new platform to communicate with on the internet? Today, we’re talking about the various eras of social media platforms — from Myspace to Facebook, Twitter to Instagram, and Vine to TikTok — and their biggest moments in culture, like Fred, Shit My Dad Says, Wendy’s Twitter, and Kombucha Girl. Some have stood the test of time so far, but mostly, we’re all beholden to platforms that have so much power and money now that they can control where we post and how we do it. Musician Connor Musarra joins us to help Ryan define when a social media platform’s dominance begins, when it wanes, and when we might just get something new. Our guest Connor Musarra is a musician and self-described “nonstop poster” whose work you can find everywhere @connormusarra. Want to hear the rest of our conversation? And more Panic World content, like ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for just five bucks a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The wheel had roads, electricity had the grid. Innovation needs infrastructure. Plaid makes AI work in finance. Visit plaid.com/ai to learn more.

• 0:15Ryan Broderick?

  MySpace, Vine, they both definitely died. But what about Facebook or TikTok or Instagram? Are those still important? Are people still on them? Does it even matter anymore? That's what we're talking about today. The rise and the fall of your favorite social media platforms.

• 0:35Ryan Broderick?

  Hi there, Ryan Broderick here. Welcome to Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. With me as always is my producer, Grant Irving. We have been gone for a while. I'm very sorry. I've been seeing your messages. Yes, we are alive. We did not die. We've been busy all summer. We are recording this from our lovely new studio, which is currently being built. And Grant and I both went on vacation. How are you feeling, Grant?

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Refreshed. There's nothing like the beats of Berlin to re-inspire a producer who lives in Bushwick.

• 1:03Ryan Broderick?

  Must have felt so good going on a very expensive staycation. I went camping. I also saw My Chemical Romance live in London. I've had a great summer. I'm feeling very refreshed and I'm back. As I said, we have been hard at work building out this studio. We have a lot of new things coming for you very soon. We're going to be on a bit of an irregular schedule, but we are here. We are back. Things are happening. Do not worry.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Don't unsubscribe. Please don't unsubscribe.

• 1:30Ryan Broderick?

  Please don't unsubscribe. We love you very much.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Fall, regular cadence come fall soon enough. We're so excited to be bringing you a bunch of new stuff.

• 1:39Ryan Broderick?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:41Ryan Broderick?

  And we're going to be experimenting with how the show looks and sounds and feels, getting the most out of our brand new studio that we are hard at work putting together for you. And all that will be coming very soon. Please enjoy today's episode. Today's episode is a bonus episode, which means only the first half will be free for all of you who do not pay. For those of you who do pay, you can hear, listen to the whole thing on your premium feed. For those of you who do not, please go to our Patreon and give us $5 a month or $50 a year, and you'll hear the whole thing. And you're going to hear a reminder from us about doing that in about 30 minutes. We're going to pop back up. So, uh, see you then.

• 2:21Ryan Broderick?

  Question for you, Connor. When was the last time you like saw something on the internet that was like inspiring or interesting?

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Almost every day I would see something that is genuinely inspiring to me, but maybe it's not,

• 2:55Speaker 03

  I don't know, it's within the context of like internet stuff that's inspiring me as an internet person more than like life inspiring, if that makes sense?

• 3:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it does. You know, I asked that question, but actually like, I find cool stuff on the internet all the time. I feel like the attitude for most people is that that sort of thing is not happening more. But like, for instance, like, I think music videos are really good again. Like, I feel like I'm seeing like a cool music video like every day now.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  There's a sentiment going towards more DIY music videos, which is cool. Where, I mean, I think that's also just born out of how fucked the music industry is, but, and also the nature of like, all of music promotion is now just like front-facing TikToks. But I do think that did birth an interesting trend of music videos going more towards like, oh, wait, maybe we don't need to like, it doesn't need to be this crazy, uh, like, high-budget thing. It just needs to be very high-concept and executed, right?

• 3:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I was just watching the like Generation dance video with Young Lean. I don't know if you saw that?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  No, I didn't. Oh, wait, is that the one, he's like surrounded by all the dancers and shit?

• 4:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I did. I saw a clip of that. That was sick.

• 4:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I finally watched the whole thing this morning and it like kind of blew my mind. I was like, damn, music videos are back, back.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Young Lean has always had insane videos, though, to be fair.

• 4:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he's sort of a creature of the internet from the very beginning of his career. But let me back up real quick. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is my producer, Grant Irving, who inspires me on the internet every day. And this is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us today is musician, content creator, internet person, Connor Musar. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me. I'm doing well.

• 4:39Ryan Broderick?

  You've been making stuff on the internet for a really long time. For people who aren't familiar, like, when was like the first time you were like, oh, like, the internet's like my place to put stuff?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Like, I started putting music out on MySpace when I was in middle school.

• 4:52Ryan Broderick?

  Hell, yeah, brother.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  I, I've kind of like gone and evolved with whatever was the thing at the time. It's cool, I'm 33 and despite my, my gray hair.

• 5:05Ryan Broderick?

  I'm 26 despite mine, so don't worry about it.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Ryan is 26.

• 5:10Ryan Broderick?

  That's right.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Everyone should invest in this podcast because Ryan is 26 at the peak.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah. It turned into a thing where I was like, I am going to figure this out and conquer this. That started in 2019. I, I did like these really like high-concept, sort of like memified music videos that were like insanely high-effort, multi-month video projects.

• 5:40Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  First time I like went viral per se was this Law and Order sample theme song. I sampled the theme song and like rapped over the Law and Order thing in this like stupid character. That gave me more of an insight into like, okay, I understand the internet is, is, your existence on the internet is entirely predicated upon the reactions that you are able to elicit.

• 6:11Ryan Broderick?

  That sounds right, yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  You, you can go from least cynical to the most cynical, but like, it all boils down to like, you want to, to bait people into some sort of reaction. Whether it's like, you were talking about inspiring, whether stuff was inspiring earlier, whether something is going to piss you off, like, you, you have to sensationalize yourself to a certain extent.

• 6:35Ryan Broderick?

  It's interesting you say it that way. Like, um, so I, I spent about a decade in the viral content mines and, you know, I, you know, I came out through digital media, like the peak Facebook era. And like, you're right, but the way that I've always sort of phrased it, and I've tried to explain this to people more recently who like, didn't go through that era by trying to, the way I use your phrase is like, what makes stuff work on the internet is if someone can use it. Traditional legacy media, like on TV or in the newspaper, in the movies, you're, you consume it and you just go like, okay, I've consumed it. Internet, successful internet content has to have a second life via the user.

• 7:17Ryan Broderick?

  So they, they either have to share it, or they have to get mad about it, or they have to screenshot it, or they have to email it around to people like, and if you're making anything that online that doesn't have some sort of thought about like what that secondary, like engagement would be, it's not really, I, I actually can't think of a single example of anything successful on the internet that doesn't have that to some degree. Like, you have to talk about it, you have to share it, you have to, you have to respond to it, you have to fight about it. You like, there's, it's interactive, is what I would say.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  That's a great way to put it. Yeah, that's a good point. My existence on the internet has been a dance between, of course, I, I do need to feed that, and I also have fun feeding into the chaos of it. I wouldn't have done all of the dumb shit I've done if it wasn't fun for me. But I'm, I'm an artist. I, I am very serious about creating art. So I don't look at creating art in a cynical way of just like trying to get reactions, but I do understand like the lens in which it's presented, excuse me, presented, is always gonna have to kind of fit within that. So it's this kind of dance between those.

• 8:35Ryan Broderick?

  I used to work with Jesse McLaren, who I think now writes for Jimmy Kimmel Live, but he, he was massive on Vine. He did like that Vine where it's like an old sitcom intro, but it's just him over and over again, if you know what I'm talking, he did a bunch of like really viral Vines. And we were having a conversation. Yeah, you would definitely know his face. And we were having a conversation about this years ago, and he, he got like really high level with it and he's like, What makes internet content different from everything that's come before it is that it will always be viewed non-linearly. So like, you have to imagine, like, the perfect

• 9:16Ryan Broderick?

  piece of internet content has to be completely understandable from every different angle. And like, and basically stripped of context, it has to work 10 years from now and 10 years ago. Like, it has, it's this, like, weird timelessness that, like, a lot of evergreen successful internet stuff has to it. I think he did get kind of insane. I love him to death and I, one day want him on this show, like, trying to think about this stuff because it, it is so different. But we're talking all about this. And I should say, I can go down the weeds on this stuff for hours. Um, so thank, I'm glad you're here. But we're talking about this today because today's episode is trying to do something that I

• 9:58Ryan Broderick?

  think is kind of fun, hopefully, and won't piss everybody off. My researcher, Adam, and I have been trying to figure out how you tell when a social network starts and when a social network is over, which I feel like is like very, very topical idea right now. So I wanted to start with MySpace. And I wanted to ask you, you know, you said you were using MySpace in middle school. I was on there, like, probably by 13 or 14, uploading terrible music from bands I was in. What do you think would be like the first moment where, like, MySpace was a thing? Like, like, the first breakout moment for MySpace? Because we weren't really using that language back then to think about the internet. But does anything come to mind for you?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  For me, a lot of the timeline of it was kind of through, like, vicariously through, so my older brother is 12 years older than me. But my brother specifically was, was in the music industry, he was an artist. And he worked really closely with Girl Talk, if you remember.

• 10:58Ryan Broderick?

  I, huge fan. We talk about Girl Talk all the time on this show.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. So, yeah, I have a whole lore, like, my first shows were, like, opening for him when I was, like, 14.

• 11:08Ryan Broderick?

  The day that I drank six Four Loko's in a 14-hour period. I went to Comic Con, and then I went to Girl Talk after, and I drank a Four Loko on the train to Comic Con, drank a Four Loko covertly during Comic Con, drank a Four Loko on the train back from Comic Con, drank a Four Loko before the Girl Talk concert, drank a Four Loko during the Girl Talk concert, and then drank a Four Loko after the Girl Talk concert.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Holy shit.

• 11:33Ryan Broderick?

  What color was your urine? You know that episode of Futurama where Fry drinks, like, 100 cups of coffee and goes into, like, hyper time? That's what it felt like.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Holy shit, bro. I mean, that sounds like the perfect context in which to do that.

• 11:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I honestly, it was like one of the greatest days of my

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Holy fuck. Wow. But anyway, my lens of, like, how the music industry worked and stuff, and like, how the internet was popping off, was through, like, oh shit, I know Girl Talk personally, and like, he's blowing the fuck up on MySpace. Like, oh my god, this is crazy. It was all kind of through that lens of, of me, like, going to, like, Girl Talk's MySpace page and being like, wow, like, it's, there's so many people, he has so many friends on MySpace, or whatever, like, so many people are listening to this. That was like my, I

• 12:31Speaker 03

  guess, my first perception of the internet affecting pop culture, I guess. And of course, it had done it before that, but that was like, a direct internet to pop culture correlation. Yeah.

• 12:45Ryan Broderick?

  And I think that's the way to think about this. So like, there were obviously influencers, if anyone remembers, Jack Skellington, a male model that dressed up like Jack Skellington from Night Before Christmas. He was very popular on MySpace at its peak. But I tried to, like, I wanted to come up with a timestamp for, like, okay, like, when did, like, when did MySpace, like, break through? Girl Talk is a good one. That, you're talking about, like, the Knight Ripper era, right? That would have been 2000 and, oh, no, yeah, Unstoppable, 2004, probably. He had Secret Diary in 2002, which was pre-Myspace, and then Unstoppable, Knight Ripper, and

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Oh, right, Secret Diary, yeah, yeah.

• 13:23Ryan Broderick?

  During the MySpace era.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, Knight Ripper was, was the one that, where he was, like, then he was famous, like, that was

• 13:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, that album is, like, unbelievable.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:32Ryan Broderick?

  I tried to answer this question before the show, and I came up with two guesses that seem to kind of put it around 2004, when, like, MySpace is, like, about to be massive.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:43Ryan Broderick?

  And so you have the massive, massive success of both The Arctic Monkeys and Panic at the Disco.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:50Ryan Broderick?

  And they're kind of weird cases, because The Arctic Monkeys, they're a band before MySpace, but fan pages start spreading their demos around 2005, and that starts to blow up huge. And then Panic at the Disco was a band on MySpace that basically jumped into Pete Wentz's DMs for, around 2004, 2005. So

• 14:11Speaker 03

  I did not know that was the lore of it. Holy shit.

• 14:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I saw them on their first, their first tour, the Nintendo Fusion Tour in 2006, and they were actual children. And they, they sounded pretty good. The big moment of the night, though, was when the lead singer of the Starting Line, I think, got too drunk and fell off the stage. But anyways, this, this episode, we're gonna be going with, like, okay, what defined the platform, and then what made the platform feel like it was over? And I actually think the easiest way to answer, like, when did MySpace feel over, is to figure out when Facebook felt like it had actually taken off.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:45Ryan Broderick?

  And I found a fascinating article about a thing I have no memory of. Do you remember in 2009, the "Here are 25 things about me" meme on Facebook?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Hmm, no.

• 15:01Ryan Broderick?

  So this is from an article in 2009 on the New York Times. Ah, yes, "More about me, here are 25 random things." And it's about a meme that was going around Facebook titled "25 Random Things About Me." And, uh, the New York Times is really funny writing about this, because, like, they don't know how to, like, contextualize this. So they have a paragraph explaining how a Facebook meme works, which is kind of an amazing artifact. "Here's how it works. Friends send you an email message, or on Facebook, tag, quote unquote, you in a note posted to their profile with 25 heartfelt observations about themselves, like, 'I named my son after a man I've never met,' or, 'I once paid good money to see Whitesnake

• 15:43Ryan Broderick?

  in concert,' along with instructions for you to follow suit. You are then expected to gin up your own clever list and foist it upon 25 people, including the friend who asked you for it in the first place. Unlike the chain letters of yesteryear, no money changes hands and no one is threatened with apocalyptic bad luck for refusing to comply. Yet the practice has spread so far and so fast that a Google search for '25 Random Things About Me' yields 3, yields 35,700 pages of results, almost all of which seem to have been created in the last two weeks."

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 16:18Ryan Broderick?

  I have no memory of this.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Okay, here's a couple of things on that. That is a direct lift from the MySpace About Me lists.

• 16:30Ryan Broderick?

  That one I remember. I remember the MySpace one.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  And also, it will, and also, fun fact, still on my personal website, I still have the MySpace About Me questionnaire, the original one that I filled out. Or, and then I, I, like, update it every so often. Another thing there, their little thing about, like, not being threatened by doom, or whatever, like, like, a curse or something, that's also not true, because that was also a MySpace thing, and then into a Facebook thing, where it was so common for people to be like, you have 10 years of bad luck if you're, whatever, if you don't reshare this, like,

• 17:10Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah, the "share this post, or something bad will happen to you" kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  That's, that's almost like Facebook trying to rewrite the history of MySpace with their PR, it seems like, yeah.

• 17:21Ryan Broderick?

  And, you know, as we know, it unfortunately worked. And now we live in a Facebook era. Trying to define when Facebook died is really tricky, because it's still very popular.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:35Ryan Broderick?

  And trying to measure, like, when its cultural relevance ended is also really tricky, but I'm gonna cheat slightly and say that it ended, kind of thanks to me. Um, do you remember when people were putting gross food videos on Facebook during the pandemic? Like, eating out of toilets? And like, do you remember any of this?

• 18:00Speaker 03

  I mean, I have seen videos like that, but I didn't see that as, like, a trend. That's crazy.

• 18:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, so in 2021, I did a story for Eater, basically about, like, a magician named Rick Lacks, who had a network of unemployed magicians from Las Vegas that were making, like, rage bait video content on Facebook. And

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Because they were all home because of the pandemic?

• 18:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they were all out of work because of the pandemic. And so they were, like, eating out of toilets, and like, making, like, gross, one woman made, like, a Sprite pie, like, a pie out of Sprite and stuff, and like, all their videos were, like, insane and annoying. And I wrote about it, and they, Facebook kind of crushed the entire operation and has sort of replaced it with kind of nothing. Like, there's not, there's not a lot going on on Facebook. And so I'm gonna say Facebook kind of lost its final gasp of cultural relevancy in 2021.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  Unless you can think of anything after 2021, or, or something bigger, maybe, before 2021. Because my other thought was, maybe it's when Instagram got Instagram Stories from Snapchat in 2016.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  That, I think, is one of the biggest turning points that I always cite as, like, the downfall. But, well, it depends on how you define cultural relevance, though, because Facebook is extremely important to, I mean, some millennials, and then everyone above that. So

• 19:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, the marketplace is still very huge.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  And Facebook Marketplace, yeah.

• 19:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, well, you know, you could also say 2021, because Facebook events were used to organize the insurrection.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 19:37Ryan Broderick?

  It is crazy going through this list of, like, everything else, I think, has, like, a much shorter lifespan.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  But Facebook has survived, yeah.

• 19:48Ryan Broderick?

  Facebook survives because every, because they are, because they've reached an order generation. They were usable by an order generation, so it can never die. Because it's, like, switching your parents off of, like, an AOL email.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. They're just not gonna switch. Yeah.

• 20:05Ryan Broderick?

  If you would like to hear the rest of this episode.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 20:08Ryan Broderick?

  You can go to patreon.com/panicworld.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 20:11Ryan Broderick?

  Where not only do you hear Ryan and Connor, and a little bit from me, talk about when other moments of the internet died, but you get some premium Ryan lore, like, top-tier Ryan lore that Ryan has no recollection of recording.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  None whatsoever. Very excited to find out what that means. Very excited and terrified to find out what that means. So you can listen to that at patreon.com/panicworld. For $5 a month or $50 a year, Panic World, patreon.com/panicworld.

• 20:41Ryan Broderick?

  We'll be back regularly.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Regular schedule soon.

• 20:44Ryan Broderick?

  Soon.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Bye-bye.