What happens when social media is your 9-5? And nights? And weekends?
We recently spoke with Taylor Lorenz on Product Hunt Radio to find out. As part of her day-to-day as a staff writer at The Atlantic, Taylor cruises around different social platforms and follows crazy ideas down rabbit holes to find her stories. Most recently, she’s written about the financials behind the world-record Instagram egg, pretty Instagram meme accounts and the Instagram-husband revolution.
The overall theme to Taylor’s reporting is how tech affects people’s ability to communicate. We asked her about her favorite products right now and any sage advice she may have for alllll the social media dwellers.
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I’m a reporter at The Atlantic and I write about internet culture. That includes things like social media-related coverage, trends, influencers, communities and any weird emerging things on the internet.
Overall, I have a very love/hate relationship with social media. In a sense, I feel like I owe my entire career and success to social media. I also feel like I found myself through social media — specifically on Tumblr. But then watching what Tumblr became and watching the company fall apart made me depressed about a lot of things on the internet.
I think I have more of an unhealthy relationship with social media because I spend too much time on it and don’t have a way to turn it off. But it is also good. I join everything — I’ll join whatever platform is out there.
Where I spend my time: My life is basically Instagram now and I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I’m a journalist. I’m also into a lot of other communities, specifically ones that are accessible to people. I like a lot of the Discord communities I’m in.
Where I spend my (free) time: I love horror movies. It’s the only thing I watch. But I’ve watched everything in the horror and sci-fi category on Netflix. So I use Shudder, which is a streaming service just for horror.
Product I love: Google Maps. Google Maps has built in all of these discovery mechanisms over the past year and they are amazing. It’s where I go to find everything. They have an explore tab where you can see lists and search by category. I location share too so I can see where people are.
Try this product: Lately I can't get enough of FlowState, a free daily newsletter that sends you two hours of perfect working music every morning. It gives you tons of background information on the artist and music genre. A paid membership gets you access to in-house custom mixes on Mondays and a searchable database of songs too. It's upped my productivity in a major way.
Request for product: A dumb phone that also has Google Maps.
Internet fun: I think TikTok is a fun place to spend time on the internet. If you haven’t been on there, you should try it out.
Social media advice: I think the most important thing is to recognize that sometimes it can feel like the entire internet hates you, or is ganging up on you, or is angry at you. It’s really important to remember that that’s not true, and that’s why you have to have a lot of good offline friendships too.
Product News! 😻
Ja Rule launched a new startup. Tesla is selling some *different* merchandise. Ideas hidden in Apple's HomePod patent include: an emoji version of Siri, LED lights that display the weather and Face ID. Dixa, a 'customer friendship' platform scored $14M. Opera is building a free VPN directly into its Android browser. And a 10-minute 'unsend' window is coming to Facebook Messenger.
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