Katie Notopolous
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard May 2024
Katie Notopolous’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I am a senior correspondent, a business insider covering tech and culture.
Oh, gosh. I find that a very flattering assessment of my work. I'm trying to think of some of the human guinea pig things I've done. I one time was really interested in like how sort of tech bros and finance bros all wear like fleece vests or puffer vests to the office. Yeah. Sort of like a uniform.
And it was kind of like boring to just write about because literally, hey, have you noticed finance guys wear fleece vests? That's about it. Like there's not that much more to it. So I... I tried for a week, I wore a fleece vest to the office every day to see if it made me feel more powerful.
It made me feel more comfortable, I'll be honest. It is very comfortable, especially compared to normal women's business casual attire.
But I also felt deeply ashamed and unfashionable. And, you know, when you have a bad outfit on and you feel like bad about it.
Yeah. I once unfollowed all men on Twitter. I will say this is, I think, coming up on the 10-year anniversary of this.
It doesn't quite hold up, I'll say.
I mean, I know what people are saying, which is that the nature of SEO and the SEO industry has made it such that the stuff you are actually looking for tends to be more and more buried. There's more frequently the sort of drop-down boxes of related questions to what you're looking for that's not necessarily it.
There's a lot more on the page than like, hey, how do I get to the website that has the information? SEO is... is big and vast and like connecting me to the right information about the question I'm asking is not the only thing that Google has broken in a way. I think it's worth remembering that a lot of SEO money goes into like, if you're Walmart, You can pay for the keyword target.
So when someone wants to type in target.com, but they don't want to type the whole.com and they just put in target, your ad for Walmart comes up top in front of them. And then target also has to pay for its own name. So there's like a lot of money of companies being held ransom and having to pay for their own names because someone else is going to run an ad against them.
And that's just genuinely a terrible experience. Like, I think a lot of people have had the kind of thing where they search a specific company or name and the first three ads on top are something completely different. Like, that is genuinely, like, very bad experience and kind of broken. Yeah.
So anyone who uses search a lot probably has their own sort of interior tips and tricks of like how they do it. Like I know that a lot of people put Reddit at the end because often Reddit is a source of great information if you're looking for how to change the light bulb in my refrigerator kind of thing. Everyone does have their own like secret how do I actually use Google model going on.
The earlier versions of it were like, in its first, I don't know, five years of existence, it was known as like the trash fire of the internet. Like it was akin to 4chan. It was just full of terrible, awful people. And a lot of that had to do with the way it was being run from the top, which was this sort of laissez-faire system. free speech.
We're not going to get rid of the bad people because, hey, it's the internet and you're allowed to say whatever you want. Eventually, after a series of crises, they decided, hey, maybe if we want to run a successful business, we should ban the Nazis or like all these really awful subreddits they had.
I didn't post. I would look at it. It also had a very distinct... It was this, like, nerdy web comics. Like, when you think about the sort of early teens, late 2000s internet memes, like, to say someone is a Redditor had a very distinct... It's a neckbeard and a fedora who thinks advice animal memes are funny and loves web comics and has an anime body pillow.
And that, like, very specific kind of... Early internet humor. I mean, I feel like I still sort of use Reddit in this sort of derogatory way to be like, if some restaurant has like an overly meme-y food, here's the hamburger with like a hundred kinds of bacon or whatever. It's all, that's such Reddit food or something like that.
No. And I think that with any sort of large platform group, there's like a flywheel effect, right? Of like the mix between moderation and users and who wants to be on it and what kind of...
community they're making right so like when you have a thing that's like a garbage fire thing you're going to scare off the normies and if you're constantly seeing people say certain things it's going to raise the tolerance for that right so then you come in you like lay down the ban hammer you ban a bunch of these bad subreddits you make it a little bit more palatable for like
Normal people who just want to discuss what kind of air filter should I buy to come on. And then you sort of create this flywheel. Okay, now people know that you have to behave like a normal human on here. And also there's more normal humans who would never even think to, like, say something awful or join an awful subreddit or, like, do these bad things.
And so you actually do sort of grow a healthier community that is more usable, frankly. Yeah.
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