Very Fine Day #48: Katie Notopoulos
Very Fine Day #48: Katie Notopoulos
"I like to think I'm an optimist. Right?"
VERY FINE DAY features weekly interviews with writers, creators, reporters, and internet explorers. Learn more about the people who keep the internet humming – and check out previous editions here. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter, or just follow Brad. Subscribe now and never miss an edition.
“Like anyone who has been on the internet a long time… I think I’m a little scared to go back and look at everything that’s ever been posted.”
Consistently, when I speak with people who spend too much time online, or people who have – for whatever broken reason – decided to make being online part of their full-time job, they’ll point towards two pros as inspiration: Choire Sicha, formerly of the NYT and The Awl (haven’t contacted, haven’t interviewed), and Katie Notopoulos (did contact, did interview). These are, in my mind, the kinds of people who understand not just the internet but the way to frame it for the masses. There is a class of professional writer / internet-er / editor from the early to mid 2000s who were all incredibly influential to the way you are told about internet things now.
And that’s not to say they did it all. We all have our own little bubbles of influence. But I’ve heard enough people say both of those names now to at least call it a trend. Katie Notopoulos, for example, was called out by Taylor Lorenz (congrats on the new gig) as being a major inspiration for her early reporting in Very Fine Day #2.
Anyway, all of this is to say that KATIE NOTOPOULOS is our guest for VERY FINE DAY #48. And we talk about a lot of wild and fun stuff. I’m not super sure on the complete make-up of the VFD audience, but I know that after reading this you’ll either experience a bit of a blast through the past of internet culture, or send me an email saying “thanks Brad, I really didn’t need to know what Goatse is.” (I recommend googling the definition, not the damn thing itself).
I wanted to catch up with Katie to talk about all of that sorta stuff, but to also ask her how she stays so… positive about the internet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not some Power of Positivity bullshit. But in a world where it’s easy (and often, default) to just be completely negative and depressed about the internet, I think Katie does a good job of pointing out: hang on a minute, there’s people behind all of this.
That’s all from me – enjoy the read. As always, love hearing from you with thoughts, ideas, etc. Be in touch.
See you down the road.
INTERVIEW BEGINS
VFD: I know this sounds like I have this in the bag ready to go – which I kind of do – but I also genuinely went to katienotopoulos.com and the first thing I saw was a My Little Pony turned into a bong and then a man, naked, standing in front of graffiti that says “BENIS.”
Katie Notopoulos: Y’know, I have not looked at that. That’s probably a good reminder. I should go check out what’s on there and maybe clean it up a little bit. No, I have not looked at katienotopoulos.com in quite some time.
It’s sort of a personal website, but I had it powered by Tumblr because it was a little bit earlier when other free website-making software wasn’t easily available. But it wasn’t like I had professional stuff on it. Occasionally what would happen when I’d be on Tumblr – and I don’t use Tumblr that much anymore – but I had tonnes and tonnes of different Tumblrs back in the day and I would want to repost something to one of the other Tumblrs, like “a collection of men in front of a wall that says “BENIS” or whatever, and I would accidentally send it to the katienotopoulos.com one by accident.
So it’s possible that there’s some dark stuff going on there.
VFD: Some dark stuff going on.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, I’m sort of scared to go. Like anyone who has been on the internet a long time, or Tumblr, I think I’m a little scared to go back and look at everything that’s ever been posted – or most likely reposted or reblogged from my Tumblr. Because I’m sure there’s some horrifying and gross stuff. To be fair, the worst of it is probably gone because I had probably reblogged a lot of nudity stuff that got deleted in the Great Tumblr nudity ban.
VFD: How long were you on Tumblr? Were you a big Tumblr person?
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, I guess. 2008-2009 was sort of when Tumblr was getting started for me.
VFD: It was kind of like Dark Myspace, to me.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah. So this was back in this phase of Tumblr where you’d have these “single serve” Tumblrs as a genre. And it would be like “Cats in Sunglasses” and then just solely pictures of cats in sunglasses.
And the idea was that the more niche you could go, like “Ripped from the Headlines” or “Joe Biden Drinking Water From A Bottle,” really specific and niche, that was the height of internet comedy in 2009. And I had a bunch of those. Some better than others. A lot of them probably are.
VFD: What are you doing now to get cool internet shit? I feel like Tumblr was… not quite a cheat code. But it was the backend of some parts of the internet. There was Tumblr, there was 4chan. And now Tumblr is – and I might get a bunch of people being very upset with me – but now Tumblr feels less like that. Or you have to look a bit harder to find it.
Katie Notopoulos: My guess would be that Tumblr is less relevant to internet culture than it was, or is less central to it than it once was. And that other things, like TikTok, probably have filled that space. But then again: I’m not on it every day. And I do know that there’s still very passionate, active users. And there's also a lot of stuff that you don't realise actually came from Tumblr that for sure came from Tumblr. And you just don’t see it until you see it on Twitter. And I might also be wrong – for all I know they’ve gained users in the last five years.
VFD: Yeah, I think I could also – and much more likely – be aging out of understanding the internet in that way. And I’m just like: who uses this? This is for kids!
Katie Notopoulos: I think it was an article I saw recently about someone logging into Tumblr for the first time in years. And it was sort of weird because maybe they used to follow 100 accounts, but now only two of those are still active. So it's a weird not-quite-Ghost Town. But if you haven't updated with fresh people your social graph has atrophied. And you're experiencing a really weird version of it.
VFD: Yeah, yeah.
Katie Notopoulos: But that's sort of the same if I was only following the accounts on Twitter that I followed in 2009. I would also have a really weird experience.
VFD: Yeah, I remember logging onto Myspace a few years ago when Justin Timberlake had bought it. And they were just like: We’re a music blog now! And I had three or four people who were still kind of using it. I think.
Katie Notopoulos: Really?
VFD: Yeah, not now. But back then. Maybe they got an email and they clicked through and they were like: sure. I’ll give it a crack.
Katie Notopoulos: As long as I possibly could, I kept my Myspace credentials logged in. And because – for professional purposes of being a tech reporter it’s relevant – but I was also curious. But I think that maybe two or three years before that they had some sort of data blip and they were like: we regret to inform everyone that we were migrating data servers and we've lost everything. They just lost everybody's photos that they had saved up.
I'm a little sad about that. I lost some of those photos. I probably had downloaded them at some point, but some of those photos are probably things that only ever existed on MySpace.
VFD: Oh, yeah. I'd agree. But the pure percentages of it all. The thing on Myspace was that you’d upload 1000 photos and they’d all be named after the file code like “1.000.4.05”.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah.
VFD: And maybe there’d be one or two there that I’d be sad about. But the rest of them are just terrible.
Katie Notopoulos: I feel passionately about the way that personal data, specifically photos – people are very attached to photos – that tech companies have just wholescale deleted. It's the kind of thing where people think: Oh, if my house was on fire, I would grab the album of family photos. That would be the most important thing, right? And then Flickr will just do an announcement like: We’re just going to delete all of your photos unless you log in next week! And people don’t really notice that.
VFD: You were big on Flickr, right? I remember you loving it.
Katie Notopoulos: I love Flickr. I wouldn’t say I was big on it. That’s not to say that I had an account, but I was a huge enthusiast. I loved it. This is a very different internet era to that. I loved going through it and lurking and looking at stranger's pictures. And I could just sit there for hours and hours just scrolling through random pictures of whatever.
A lot of the single-serve Tumblr things I did, I would find people's pictures on Flickr, and then just post them to Tumblr, which is now not considered… ethical. But at the time it was within the realm of more acceptable internet usage. It was kind of like: Well, you posted it on Flickr! That’s fine. Anyone can take it! But things have changed.
It’s weird. It was really like a search base. If you wanted to find stuff you would type in words and keywords into the search box and that's very much not how people use Instagram, which I guess is the replacement to it: Search on Instagram sucks, right?
VFD: Like, yeah, deliberately.
Katie Notopoulos: People don’t find stuff on Instagram because they searched for it.
VFD: Yeah, it’s old-time. Well, that makes me sad. It’s hard, because Instagram is just like a magazine now. Just a really big magazine that everyone gets to contribute to, but no one enjoys it and only a few people get paid. So everyone’s more beautiful and stronger and cooler and doing fun things.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, Instagram is really one platform where, man, I look at Instagram every day. But it literally never occurs to me to post. I’ve gone through phases where I have said I’m gonna set a goal for myself and I’m gonna post at least once a week! Y’know, just to keep this account active.
And the only reason I care about doing that is that I use Instagram a lot to reach out to people. I use it as a messaging function. And I want people who might be total strangers to me – a young person, or a person I’m reaching out to – I want them to know that I’m a real person and not a weird fake account or some troll account trying to trick them. Like: I am who I say I am. I’m Katie Notopoulos, I’m a reporter with BuzzFeed News, I have a question for you.
So my only goal is to seem legitimate for that purpose. But I just cannot bring myself to post pictures to Instagram.
I feel the same way about it that I think a lot of people feel about tweeting. Which is: What would I post? Who cares?
VFD: Yeah, yeah. But as we know, tweeting comes a bit easier.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, but I also think that if I hadn’t ever tweeted I would be like: Why do this? Tweet out a sentence? That’s ridiculous.
VFD: I think if the whole media scene of 2012-2018 had decided that: no, Instagram is the one where we are all going to hang out and say dumb shit, then it’d probably be reversed. I think most of Twitter exists now because a bunch of reporters, media folks, and a few cool kids in NYC decided: Yeah, this is it. This is how we can make careers for ourselves. And it kind of worked out for some people.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah.
VFD: To a lot of people you’re quite influential. Not to talk about you too much, but that’s what this whole thing is.
Katie Notopoulos: Wow, I love that. I mean: part of me is like I hope not.
VFD: I think they are, though. Even without realising it. And I was trying to think about how to say this without being like: You’re old. But for over a decade the internet has gone through so many phases and you’ve been a part of all of those, documenting it from Flickr and on Tumblr. Writing about Instagram and Trump’s internet and everything – you’ve been there the whole way, recently.
And when I talk to younger people or anyone that’s trying to write online, or do anything with the internet, they often talk about Choire from The Awl and they often talk about you. Why do you think that is? Is that something you think about at all?
Katie Notopoulos: I think part of it is purely that I have just stuck around. I don’t know if that’s good advice. When I started at BuzzFeed in 2012 I was given the opportunity to write about things that I was interested in, and a lot of free rein to do that. And I was interested in things that were happening on the internet. So I was allowed to post about them.
And people were writing about internet culture. I think about people who, when I started at BuzzFeed in 2012, people who I thought were super influential to me - and still are - like Adrian Chen, who was at Gawker at the time. I think he’s an incredibly influential person and someone who actually covered things that happened on the internet with serious journalistic chops. Which is not necessarily what I was doing.
VFD: Well he discovered the troll farms, right?
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, he was the first person to write about the internet troll farms. And at the time it was this explosive controversy – it’s funny to think of how different the world is now – but he essentially unmasked this massive troll on Reddit. Someone who was a really influential moderator of a bunch of different horrible subreddits. Like, the kind of stuff that Reddit has pretty much cleaned up. There were all of these subreddits that were just terrible, awful. I don’t know. Vaguely child-porny. Very racist. Just awful. And there was this one guy who was the moderator of a lot of this stuff. And Adrian figured out who he was and unmasked him. That was a big deal.
At the time, he also found the guy who was the Goatse guy. Like, that’s fucking Watergate man! And Adrian is currently writing a book so he hasn’t been publishing regularly for the last couple years, because he’s working on this big long book. And so I think that some people who were really influential when I was starting out in 2012 have moved on to other avenues where they’re maybe not published as regularly. Like, now – instead of a reporter – they’re writing a book. Which obviously takes a lot longer.
VFD: Yeah, I think it’s probably a generation or two – maybe just the people who I talk to directly – who are inspired by Katie Notopoulos and like her picture collections of Flickr. I think also that you’re quite positive about the internet in almost every way. Like, I can’t really recall you buying into that meme that the internet is an evil, bad place and it sucks now. You always seem to be quite, for lack of a better description, positive.
Katie Notopoulos: I like to think I'm an optimist. Right? But I feel like that's one of the mistakes of early tech reporting: to be totally optimistic about the tech industry. Like: Have you heard of this new Facebook thing? This is gonna be awesome. This is so cool. There's this guy who started this company in his dorm room, and now it's amazing.
VFD: It's connecting people.
Katie Notopoulos: But the internet is a really bad place for a lot of people. It makes a lot of people feel bad. And it has been designed in a way that has not created safety for a lot of people.
I honestly do feel like a lot of stuff has gotten better in some ways. Like, I feel like Twitter is a really good example where Twitter has actually done a pretty good job of cleaning up its harassment and abuse problem. It's obviously not solved. But if you think back to 2015, when it was truly a cesspool of actual Nazis and stuff, they made a lot of changes that actually made it better. So things can change like a trend in an upward direction.
VFD: I guess it’s actually not an internet question. It’s a subculture question. And that you have that optimism moreso for the subcultures that exist online in a way that people regularly point and laugh at in an aggressive and mean way. And I just have never felt that way about anything you've written. It's more like: people are living their lives, and if they choose to do it this way this person chooses to do so.
Katie Notopoulos: Y’know, my feelings on that have evolved in a positive way. And I think I probably have come to that over time – people's opinions about life should change.
I remember one time I made a post on BuzzFeed that was kind of making fun of people who are adult baby diaper lovers. And a bunch of them – diaper lover fans – reached out to me and were like: This was really hurtful. And I was like: Yeah, you know what, Fuck. I fucked up there.
That was wrong. But I mean, there is something funny about being an adult baby diaper lover.
VFD: Right.
Katie Notopoulos: And I think that even adult baby diaper lovers know that to some degree.
I feel like the group that I have such a complicated relationship with is furries.
VFD: Yeah, I think that’s like a lot of people.
Katie Notopoulos: Because they’re the perennial underdogs of the internet, right? No pun intended. But people have been making fun of furries for so long. And to be pro-furry is a more fun stance in a way, right?
But furries also can be kind of annoying. And I've been to a couple furry conventions. But one thing that they do is they just insist, so hard, that it has nothing to do with sex. And it's like: I'm sorry, you can't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Like, it doesn't only have to do with sex, but I would direct you to a website called deviantart.com and you can see that there are clearly plenty of people who are interested in a sex version of this. It’s not everyone, I get it. Not all furries are in it for that. But some of them are. There is a lot of that material out there.
And I get it because they're coming from a place where they feel really persecuted for it. And that people have the wrong impression that it's only a sex thing. And that furries only exist to do this. And so I get it.
I love furries. I think the furry community has revealed itself to be a force for good.
VFD: Yeah, definitely.
Katie Notopoulos: I think it also took time and it took a lot of different waves of participating in whatever is going on. If there's mainstream internet culture, there's always this sidewave of what furries are up to.
VFD: Specifically furries.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, around the heyday of the alt-right stuff there was a whole contingent of alt-right furries. And then there'd be these huge blow ups where some alt-right furry person was planning to attend a furry convention and they got banned. All the drama around that. So they were sort of having their own version of things. Fighting, or wrestling, with the same issues that the rest of the internet was.. but they’re in fur-suits.
VFD: I’m just thinking about how my parents read this. They’re gonna be like: hmmm, My Little Pony Bong…Furries… Goatse… What…
Which is fine. It’s kind of where I expected this conversation to head.
Katie Notopoulos: Look: furries are ultimately people with a sort of unusual hobby and that is what it is. It’s the inverse of: on the internet no one knows you’re a dog.
VFD: Ha, yeah. Almost quite literally.
How did you get started in terms of what you write about? And when did you realise that you could make a living or do that as a job: talk about stuff that’s happening on the internet and with tech?
Katie Notopoulos: I think many people who have worked at BuzzFeed have had a non-traditional path to journalism. I started at BuzzFeed a month before I turned 31. So I had a whole different career for my entire ‘20s. I worked in e-commerce. And for the longest portion of that I worked at Warner Brothers, with their website where they would sell merchandise and DVDs and stuff. There were aspects of that that I really enjoyed. Working in a business is interesting.
And I would do all these Tumblrs and blogs on the side, for fun, as a creative outlet. I was like: I really wish that I had a career that had some level of creativity in it. Then some of those Tumblrs were popular, and based on that I ended up getting a job at BuzzFeed. Based on stuff I was doing on the side, on weekends. And I truly was not doing it during the workday because I didn't want people at work to know that I was doing that stuff. And that’s how I ended up at BuzzFeed.
VFD: How did that happen? I imagine Jonah Peretti didn’t message you on Tumblr.
Katie Notopoulos: I think it was Doree Shafrir, who was at the time the executive editor and she knew about my blogs.
BuzzFeed was very different then. For the first two years that I was there I was mainly doing posts like: 27 Cats In Sunglasses. And not so much writing articles. Although I did some of that too – it was a mix.
And then I eventually transitioned into being part of the tech news stuff full-time.
VFD: How did you find that comparison? The tech world, I think, has this weird relationship of existing with the internet but being very Corporate Internet.
Katie Notopoulos: I think an advantage of covering the tech industry is that I have always approached coverage as: I’m interested in the user experience and what people on the internet are doing. Y’know: what regular people are doing.
I’m less interested in stuff like: what does the average CEO eat for breakfast? So I think there’s an advantage in all different angles of reporting topics. I’m not trying to compete with anyone else to get an interview with Jeff Bezos. I don’t care about that.
VFD: Right, sure. Except when there’s weird photos of him going around suddenly muscly on the internet.
Katie Notopoulos: Right, I’m very interested in his muscles….
VFD: Like, and whatever weird shit those CEOs are doing.
Katie Notopoulos: And I guess to some degree that I have felt like, in that sense, that I have approached it with an outsider angle. Although that’s probably overselling it a bit.
VFD: Well, also I think it’s like what we were talking about before - the optimism in the reporting - Here’s a fun thing. Here’s a thing that happened.
Katie Notopoulos: I mean, I don’t think that if you think the tech industry and the internet is all doom and gloom that you’re going to find the best stories. If you think about it that way you’re not gonna be able to cover things accurately.
VFD: Are you from New York?
Katie Notopoulos: No, I grew up in a suburb of Boston and then I moved to New York for college. So I was 18-years-old.
VFD: What’s Boston like? All of my references are movies.
Katie Notopoulos: To be clear: I did not grow up in the city of Boston. I grew up in a suburb and the suburb was very much like many suburbs.
VFD: There’s trees, big roads…
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah. It’s funny. I was also a child for the time that I lived there, right? So people have asked me what’s a cool bar to go to in Boston? And I have no idea. I was 17 when I left. And that was many years ago.
Boston has this new mayor who is like the first time in – I think – Boston’s entire history where it hasn’t had an Irish or Italian mayor. It’s an Asian woman (Michelle Wu). And that seems like maybe a cool new chapter for Boston. One of the bad things about Boston is that it is a very racist city.
VFD: Did not know that.
Katie Notopoulos: Well, it’s a very white city.
VFD: Right, sure. I also just thought you were gonna be like: one of the bad things about Boston is that they have Italian and Irish mayors all of the time.
Katie Notopoulos: I had this brief moment where I had this fantasy for a second and Boston had become cool, right? Like: what if Boston was the next Portland or Austin, where it’s a cool city where young people want to move to and it’s very chill. But it’s very not chill. People are aggressive. It’s a difficult and aggressive place.
VFD: You’re really selling it.
Katie Notopoulos: It’s funny: during the beginning of the pandemic, I left the city and I stayed with my parents in the suburbs for three months, or four months. I had a baby there. I was eight months pregnant when the pandemic started and we had a three year old already, and I was just like: this is not going to work. So we spent a lot of time there. And my husband learned something. One day he just said: wow, Boston drivers are the most aggressive and asshole drivers I’ve ever encountered in any city.
VFD: I like that.
Katie Notopoulos: It’s true. They really are aggressive. Way more than New York. Aggressive, angry drivers. And I feel like I don’t live there anymore and I can’t really describe Boston - apologies to anyone in Boston – everyone has hometown pride or whatever.
VFD: Yeah, good save.
Katie Notopoulos: Like, you have to hear people from the Mid-West where they say stuff like there’s Minnesota Nice, which is when you’re really a sweeping asshole being polite. But I feel like people from Boston are just assholes.
VFD: That’s kind of pure though, right? I kind of like that. At least they’re telling you who they are. You want them to be honest.
Did you want to escape? Was it like that?
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, I think as a teenager I was really excited about leaving my suburb and going to live in New York City. And it was great. Y’know: New York City is awesome – especially if you’re young.
Being a teenager in a boring, sleepy suburb, you’re bored. And you’re like: I want to go live in the big city. And I think that trajectory feels pretty straightforward to me.
VFD: Yeah. It’s interesting to me, from the outside, to see how many people go to NYC. I don’t think in Australia there’s one big place that is the ultimate go-to. Maybe Sydney, Melbourne, for rural kids. But in America it’s California or New York City. Everyone I talk to they’re like: I went to New York City to make a name for myself.
Katie Notopoulos: When I moved to New York, in 1999, it was just coming out of this early ‘90s, crime-filled bad place. And it was becoming something again. I feel like someone is going to read this and be like: Oh, if you thought ‘99 was cool… it was already cool in ‘91!
But I feel like it became much more desirable in the subsequent decade as a place for people to move from all over. But at the same time, it's New York. It has always been New York. It's always gonna be the best city in the world.
VFD: Yeah, it’s pretty fun. They’ve got everything. City that never sleeps and all that. Last, quick, question: how would you describe what you do now? With all of that in context. And I know that we were talking about how, when you started, it was lists and not so much investigative stuff, but I feel like you’ve become that over time.
Katie Notopoulos: Yeah, I feel like it’s a lot easier to tell people now I’m a tech reporter. That’s a job that makes sense. It was a lot harder to explain when you’re like: I make lists. There’s this site called BuzzFeed…
It’s certainly easier to describe it. But I think that I feel grateful for people like Ben Smith, who were very good about not gatekeeping journalism as this pristine thing that you must have a degree to practice. And he was willing to hire someone who didn’t have a background in journalism even though they were doing something that was not exactly journalism, either. He would just be like: yeah, just write an article. Whatever.
VFD: That’s exactly what he sounds like.
Katie Notopoulos: Hahah. I think that there were many instances where Ben would regret doing that. I don’t think it always worked out. But as someone who didn’t study journalism, I didn’t do internships, but it’s not rocket science. You just go and do it. You ask questions. And I think that many years of my life not being in journalism has been very helpful. Because journalism is like a fake job, in the sense that it’s really fucking fun.
You get to go ask questions and then you write a little story. Like, work is meant to be crazy. Work is where you sit at the computer and you’re watching the clock until 5PM hits, or you’re doing physical labour. That’s work.
So having the perspective of having a job before this that was a little more like that, and actually working in business as opposed to reporting on it. I think that’s a helpful perspective.
But in terms of the gatekeeping of the industry, I think it’s an unhealthy thing that people don’t necessarily leave and come back very much. And I know you have done that. But I think that’s an unusual move. Like, you went and you worked in the business world and had a real job. And now you’re back.
VFD: Yeah I was like: I don’t like work. This fuckin’ sucks.
But I agree with what you’re saying about the business stuff. I was in a tech company, but really I was only there for two years, and in that time it went from like six people to 120 people. It was a very classic startup growth thing. And we know that works well. I hope it works well.
But it definitely made me think back to when I was younger and irritated with things that happened at BuzzFeed, or that happened at any business, and be like: OH, I actually understand why that was happening. From a business perspective. It’s not fair, but I completely understand the logic of these board members, or VC guys, or investors.
And at a minimum that was helpful for my own unpacking of things. To just be like: It wasn’t you. It’s nothing personal.
When BuzzFeed did the redundancies in Australia, one of the sales dudes turned to us and said: It’s nothing personal - it’s just capitalism. And at the time I was like: What the fuck?? But now… he was kind of right. That’s kind of how it goes sometimes.
Katie Notopoulos: I think that’s a good and healthy perspective to have. I mean, I imagine there were a lot of people who are former employees of BuzzFeed who have a lot of trauma and anger towards from their time spent there, or the manner in which they left.
VFD: Some of it valid!
Katie Notopoulos: But that’s a healthy way of understanding things. I think. For yourself.
VFD: Yeah. Well, let’s end it there. Thanks so much, Katie.
Katie Notopoulos: Of course.