John Herrman And Jonah Peretti Play F*ck Marry Kill For The Future Of The Internet

Are websites going to be a thing of a past? And is that even a bad thing?

Listen to John Herrman and Jonah Peretti on the Internet Explorer podcast:

w.soundcloud.com

John Herrman, the co-editor of The Awl, has been writing a column called "The Content Wars," a freakishly insightful series about how the changes in technology platforms like Facebook are changing media and the internet.

John also used to work at BuzzFeed.

He's also our buddy.

Jonah Peretti is the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, and is our boss. Also used to be John's boss.

So look: Yeah, it's kind of weird to have these guys together to talk on a podcast from BuzzFeed. But they're kind of the two smartest people Ryan and I know who love talking and thinking really deeply about what the internet IS and WAS and What It May Be Later. It's our podcast and we wanted to make these guys talk about ~the internet~ because fuck it, we want to hear it. If you care about what's going on with what you read on the internet and how you consume media, you will want to hear this, too.

As Jonah says, "There's a lot of uncertainty about where this is all headed. John's writing on this has been really influential and a lot of people in Silicon Valley are reading it. There's a lot of smart analysis in it and it's in an area where a lot of people are thinking about it, both on the tech platforms and the publishers."

Jonah also reveals the secret of why a bug in the post "Which State Do You Actually Belong In?" worked in tandem with a change in Facebook's algorithm to make it one of the most popular BuzzFeed posts of all time. The bug was that all answers that were ties gave people the last alphabetical answer (Wyoming). Jonah suspects in retrospect that Facebook had just changed its algorithm to favor posts with comments. Since so many people (hundreds of thousands more people than the population of Wyoming) were shocked to get Wyoming as an answer, they made lots of comments, which boosted the post.

Last month, when Facebook announced its new Instant Articles feature (BuzzFeed was one of its launch partners), John's analysis on The Awl was skeptical. On the podcast, he explains, "the container that you consume your media from matters a lot. It shapes how that media looks, what it references, what it's interested in."

"The most fun thing about the internet is how it feels like its accelerating all the time, like you're heading toward some sort of explosion or something," says John. "And that extends to the very biggest industries. I have to imagine if you're in a management position at a huge internet platform now, you're optimistic about your prospects because you have a lot of resources and insights and plans now. But you're also thinking, Man, three years ago we didn't really matter and now we're important in all these ways, and someone's going to do that to us and it's probably going be a lot faster this time."

As far as the new Apple News app that was recently announced, John was optimistic about signing up The Awl for it. However, they ran into a problem. "We tried to sign up and it asked for an Apple ID," he says. "So we were going to make a new Apple ID for the site but it asked 'What was your first car?' so we had all these really difficult discussions of what The Awl's first car would be and we sort of stopped there."

Unfortunately, neither Jonah nor John would actually answer the question for Fuck/Marry/Kill: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. But fair enough: I suppose a true thinkfluencer doesn't show his or her hand that easily. Also, I think both of them would vomit if they heard me using the term "thinkfluencer," but that's just payback for not playing along in our F/M/K game.

Thanks to Tanlines for the music for Internet Explorer as always!

Subscribe to BuzzFeed's Internet Explorer on iTunes and review it to tell us what you think!

Skip to footer