Why'd You Push That Button?

On this special throwback episode of Why’d You Push That Button, Kaitlyn and Ashley revisit an old, one-off podcast episode from Verge Extras about saving phone numbers of people they meet online. They call one of Ashley’s exes to learn how he’s been doing since they dated. They and The Verge ’s Lizzie Plaugic then evaluate all the options for saving a phone number and whether it’s weird to ask for someone’s last name.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re chugging along with Why’d You Push That Button. We’ve got a few more episodes left in the season, and today’s is about music social networks. Kaitlyn loves stalking her friends’ Spotify feeds, whereas I keep my account hidden from everyone. I just want to listen to Britney Spears in peace. I can’t have Kaitlyn texting me every time I listen, you know? Spotify used to let people direct message tracks, but it has since removed that feature, which just leaves us with the friend feed. Why isn’t Spotify building out its social features? Does the company hate us?We brought Jordan McMahon, a social music fan, as well as The Verge’s own Micah Singleton onto the show to discuss why they like seeing their friends’ activity. Then we talk to Charlie Kaplan, the CEO of Cymbal, a social music app, about why his company is shutting down and why it’s so hard to make a sticky social music experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kaitlyn and I love food; take that above photo of us as proof. We’re often conflicted about leaving reviews for restaurants, however. Kaitlyn has never written a Yelp review, whereas I’ve written only one. We worry about reviews as a whole. Should everyone be a reviewer? Are people good? Do they want to intentionally ruin each others’ livelihoods?For this week’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button, we look into restaurant reviews and why people leave them. We talk to a Yelp Elite member, Dominek, as well as a restaurant owner named Benham about how Yelp affects their lives. Then we take our questions to Brian Boshes, product manager of contributions and community, who explains why he thinks people leave reviews and whether they’re tearing apart the fabric of our society.(sent via text by Ashley Carman)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on Why’d You Push That Button, Kaitlyn and Ashley analyze fake Instagrams, aka finstas, to find some truth. We talk to a teen, a model, and a reporter to get answers about why people keep a finsta. I don’t want to spoil anything, but we basically learned that finstas are probably the most authentic social media platform, aside from Venmo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know you only have a Facebook account for event invites, and I get it. This week on Why’d You Push That Button, Kaitlyn and I explore ignored Facebook events. More specifically, we talk about the check mark and “seen” that Facebook puts under any guest’s name who has opened an invite but not responded. Why do people hate to RSVP? Why do we get hurt when they ignore us? Why are we all so rude? What can Facebook do to fix this problem?We’ve got answers. I talked to a woman named Carrie who tells us about a time she tried to host a bachelorette party, only to have her guests ignore her invite completely. Then Kaitlyn talks to one of my high school friends, Jon, about his notorious reputation for ignoring events. Finally, we chat with Aditya Koolwal, a senior product manager at Facebook, who explains why the “seen” exists. Apparently it’s not just to punish us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you take selfies? Do you take them in public? Do you watch other people take selfies in public and judge them harshly, as if it is any of your business?Or, uh, why does anyone have an opinion on the selfie behaviors of others? I don’t take them; Ashley does. Who cares?This is our question on Why’d You Push That Button this week — with a long detour to defend Kim Kardashian, the tryingest social media pioneer and performance artist of our time — and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. We spoke to Alicia Eler, author of the brand-new book The Selfie Generation, and she broke down the subtle misogyny of maligning young women for making their own records of their lives. We discussed the Super Bowl “selfie kid” and those very annoying sports announcers from 2015.Then we chatted with Racked executive editor Julia Rubin, who does not allow anyone to take photos of her at any time — never mind taking them of herself. Selfies are embarrassing, she says! As a fashion editor, Julia has had other jobs that required her to maintain a meticulous and glamorous Instagram, and that’s just not the life she wants to live anymore.Finally, we spoke to Dr. Sarah Diefenbach, a professor of market and consumer psychology at the University of Munich. Earlier this year, she co-published a paper called “The Selfie Paradox: Nobody Seems to Like Them Yet Everyone Has Reasons to Take Them.” There’s a lot of gold in there, but we were fascinated by her finding that people who take selfies are likely to justify it to themselves as a “situational” decision — e.g. “I’m at the opening of Jake Gyllenhaal’s first Broadway musical, I need a photo of me having this incredible experience, even though I don’t normally take selfies,” or “I’m having a special, unique drunk night with a dear friend and I look good and I need to document it just this once.” When they see other people take selfies, they assume the reason behind it is that the person is a selfie-taker, by nature. This is called the fundamental attribution error, and I vaguely recall learning about it in one of the many “communication” classes I slept or read Jezebel through in college. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kaitlyn and I went to Texas, ate breakfast tacos, each gained five pounds of happy weight, and more or less became certified brands. We had a good time together. We also successfully pulled off our first live episode of Why’d You Push That Button.We tried to figure out why people ghost and ended up learning that humans are lazy and need a manager-type hanging over their heads to keep them accountable at all times. Still, I’d like to think this is just a rough patch in our collective dating experience, so hopefully ghosting will clear itself up after we’re all sufficiently hurt enough to want to stop the cycle.(sent via text by Ashley Carman)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our first episode of season 2 is about memes and the law, which sounds both boring and scary and is neither. First, we chatted with Vox Media’s Sara Reinis, who told us an unsettling story about her first viral tweet. In short: Her life was turned a little upside down because she made a meme using a photo of some birds, and did not realize the birds were someone’s family. Fair enough, Sara, but maybe all of our listeners will learn from your mistakes!Then we talked to Drew Scanlon, best known as the “white guy blinking meme.” He told us all about how his life has changed since his eyelids became the most famous ones on the whole internet. Honestly, it doesn’t sound that bad! But I would probably have less patience with my friends and acquaintances than Drew does. He says it doesn’t even bother him when they introduce him to people as “the blinking guy.”Finally, we talked to Tim Hwang about all the legal issues buzzing around these stories. He’s a lawyer, as well as the founder of the meme convention ROFLCon, and the director of Harvard and MIT’s Ethics and Governance of AI initiative. You can listen and read the transcript below, or find us anywhere else you find podcasts, including on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, and our RSS feed. And get caught up on season 1 if you’re late to the party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've done it, fam. We've finished season one of the podcast. Because it's also the season of giving, and because we love you all, today's episode is dedicated to you. In today's Holiday Spectacular — I told you it was coming — Kaitlyn and I listen to the audio clips you've sent us over the past few months. We also sit by the fireplace here in our podcast studio to look back at the season. We've learned so much, mainly how tech companies manipulate our minds :) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We only have a week left in season one of Why'd You Push That Button?. So savor this episode. Really, soak it up. It's all you'll have to get through winter, other than our Holiday Spectacular episode next week.This week, we're asking why you share your location. Do you share with your boyfriend? Does your mom make you do it? Maybe you've gotten lost in a park because your friend didn't know how to drop a pin and you wished they'd share their location. We get it. Our guests include a woman named Michelle Suconick who shares her location with her besties and her boyfriend; a mom who's also named Michelle and her son Alec; and Brian Feldman, an associate editor at Select All, who doesn't use location sharing for anything other than to lurk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices