Don’t miss: Google Maps Cheat Sheet: The Most Useful Tricks You Need to Know

Eventually, after hours of trying different roads, we managed to get to our cabin, but we could have avoided all that trouble by simply downloading Google Maps offline (and also by not taking that “shortcut”). Even without internet service, Google Maps can still help you navigate where you need to go — you just have to download the correct map.

If you’re planning a trip somewhere you may not have internet service, you should download a map (or several) offline on Google Maps. Here’s what you need to know.

Want to check out other Google Maps tips and tricks? Check out how to blur your house on Google Maps and three new Google Maps features you’ll definitely want to know about.

How to download Google Maps offline

First off, you don’t need to download Google Maps in its entirety. Instead, before your trip, you’ll want to download a specific area, which could be a city, county or region where you’ll be spending time and might not have service on your phone.

To download a map in Google Maps offline, open the Google Maps application on iOS or Android and tap your profile picture on the top right (you must be logged in to your Google account for this to work). In the menu that appears, tap Offline maps > Select Your Own Map.

Use your fingers to place the map you want to download within the confines of the rectangle border. Use one finger to move across the map, and a two-finger pinch to zoom in and out. As you move around the map, you’ll see how much storage space the download will take up on your phone. Once you’re happy with the area, tap Download.

Note: Alternatively, you can type a city or other area into Google Maps and then hit the Download button that appears in the pull-up window to download the map offline, but this only works on the iPhone.

You must be connected to Wi-Fi to download the map. If you want to download over cellular, go to the Offline maps page, tap the gear icon on the top right, tap When to download offline maps and select Over Wi-Fi or mobile network. Once your map is downloaded, you’ll be sent back to the Offline maps page, where you can see all your offline maps.

Now you’ll be able to use Google Maps even when you’re offline in the area you downloaded — and in that area only. You won’t get extremely accurate travel times or alternate route options because traffic and other road issues are not accounted for, but you will get a general ballpark of how long your trip should take. Transit, bicycling and walking directions are also not available offline — only driving directions.

If you want more tips on Google in general, make sure to read which Google Home settings you need to change ASAP and this deep dive on Google’s Pixel 7 and the settings you should customize.

According to Elon Musk, the re-launch of the feature should happen on Nov. 29, “to make sure that it is rock solid.”

Punting relaunch of Blue Verified to November 29th to make sure that it is rock solid

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022

Twitter’s blue checkmarks used to prove a person or an organization’s identity. Then, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, the checkmarks were made available for $8 a month via a subscription to Twitter’s paid tier, Twitter Blue. This immediately caused absolute mayhem on Twitter, with numerous accounts impersonating other accounts and sharing fake news. The secondary, gray checkmark, that actually does prove one’s identity but there’s no precise criteria on who can get it, went on, then off, then on again.

Then, to make things even more complicated, Twitter Blue subscription disappeared, taking some (but not all) blue checkmarks with it. Now, finally, we know what happened: Twitter took the feature down to think things through.

The entire saga is a consequence of Musk’s insistence to launch or change features quickly and see what sticks. As he himself tweeted, “Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.”

Another recent issue that remains unsolved is two-factor authentication on Twitter, which hasn’t been working properly lately.

Some of the issues might be related to mass layoffs on Twitter. Following Musk’s acquisition, the company fired roughly half of its full-time employees and, reportedly, a large number of its contract employees. The layoffs themselves were chaotic, with Musk firing people who criticized him publicly, and Twitter reportedly asking some ex-workers to come back.

Welcoming back Ligma & Johnson! pic.twitter.com/LEhXV95Njj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2022

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As for legacy blue checkmarks – the ones Twitter gave away as a means of verification before you could buy them for $8 – they’re definitely going away. In a tweet, Musk said that “all unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months.”

Surely you know what I’m talking about: those banners or pop-ups that often appear, unbidden, when you go to a website you’ve never been to before. They’re supposed to tell you that a website is tracking you using tiny pieces of code called cookies and give you a way to refuse those cookies, as required by law in certain places (England, for instance). What the pop-ups usually do is tell you the page you’re visiting uses cookies to give you a better experience but you can — and then at this point you’ve probably stopped reading the fine print and just hit the big bright button that says “ACCEPT” because you don’t have time for this. Now you’ve done exactly what the website wants you to do: agreed to be tracked.

“You’re forced to spend excess time having to engage with this thing, to hunt and find the setting that you may wish is just readily available to you,” Jennifer King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, told Recode. “They are annoying.”

If you’re sick of it being such a chore to preserve your privacy, I have some good news for you: There are ways to reject cookies and block those pop-ups from appearing at all. A new one, called Never-Consent, was announced today. It comes to us from Ghostery, which specializes in privacy-centric web tools. If it does as Ghostery promises, it will make preserving your privacy as easy and fast as it is to click “accept” on those pop-ups now. The cost will be the “personalized” experience that marketers say their cookies provide.

While some cookies are necessary for a website to function and do, in fact, make your experience better, a lot of them are simply there to track you across the internet and collect data about you, usually by companies you had no idea were embedded in that website in the first place. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was supposed to tell users that they were being tracked and give them a way to opt out of that tracking.

GDPR is well-meaning in theory. But in practice, many companies have perverted the rules to give us these deceivingly worded banners that no one understands and everyone hates. If you’re looking for examples of dark patterns, or designs meant to manipulate people into doing or choosing certain things, you can usually find them in your nearest cookie consent pop-up.

“They make it really super easy to click the button that says ‘Yes, I accept all forms of tracking,’ and they make it super hard to say no,” said Harry Brignull, who coined the term “dark patterns” and tracks them on his website. “For example, perhaps they’ll have a maze of menus and dozens of things to click on different pages. None of this stuff really needs to exist — its only purpose is to trick you or frustrate you into giving up and just clicking the big shiny accept button.”

You may have noticed that a lot of US-based websites have them, too. Maybe you’ve also noticed that many more of them have added banners in the last few years. That’s probably because of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect in the beginning of 2020. CCPA says websites must at least tell users that they’re being tracked. Unlike GDPR, it doesn’t require sites to give users an option to reject cookies unless the users are under 16 years old. Rather than try to figure out the relevant details — which visitors are teens and which are adults, which users are Europe-based and which aren’t, and which users are in California and which aren’t — many sites have just gone with an opt-in consent banner to cover their bases. And then most of them make rejecting cookies the path of most resistance.

That’s where Never-Consent comes in. It both blocks pop-ups and rejects cookies automatically. Never-Consent will be added to Ghostery’s browser extension in the coming weeks. All you have to do is install the extension and it will do the work for you, the company says.

Krzysztof Modras, director of engineering and product at Ghostery, said that the company basically looked at about 100 existing cookie consent frameworks and figured out a way to automatically reject and block them. The Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe’s framework, for example, is on about 80 percent of European websites, but it was also recently found to be in violation of the GDPR. (Oops!) That means there may be some sites that slip by if they’re not using a third-party cookie consent mechanism known to Ghostery. But users can report those sites to Ghostery, and those frameworks will be added.

There are a few other extensions you can try that do something similar to Never-Consent. If you don’t want to bother with finding and installing browser extensions — and Brignull points out that browser extensions and the companies that make them can also be tracking you, so be careful whom you trust — you can always use a browser that blocks tracking cookies by default. At this point, almost all of them do except Chrome, which is by far the most popular and also made by a company with a vested interest in tracking you across the internet, which is surely a coincidence.

There’s also Global Privacy Control, which automatically tells websites not to sell or share a user’s data. But GPC isn’t available on all browsers (Chrome and Safari, most notably), and websites are only compelled to respect it for California’s users, per the CCPA. The United Kingdom is working on ways to get rid of cookie pop-ups and replace them with a browser-based tool as well. Ghostery’s extension blocked third-party cookies before Never-Consent. But now you’ll also be able to actively tell those websites you don’t want to be tracked in addition to passively blocking their cookies.

“I think the big picture is that it is important to have a tool that not only blocks these things but actively sends a no consent back to the publishers,” Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, said.

How much does that really matter to websites that deploy pop-ups designed to confuse and annoy you into submission? I’m not so sure. Especially if, like me, you live in a place that doesn’t have privacy laws requiring companies to respect your preferences. But at the very least, it’ll give you a sense of advocating for yourself.

Just don’t think that your days of annoying pop-ups or being tracked are over forever. Companies are using them more and more to encourage you to sign up for newsletters and marketing emails. That’s their way of still collecting data about you now that cookies are on their way out. As we’ve seen from the proliferation of cookie pop-ups, companies are always looking for — and will likely find — a new way to track you as their current way gets shut down.

Have you ever been in the middle of an important Zoom meeting and suddenly your internet connection glitches? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve nearly lost my mind because of this exact situation. Proper internet connectivity is essential, especially as many of us continue to work from home. But despite paying monthly fees to an internet service provider and having my router professionally installed, I still find myself spending too much time watching my computer grind… and I bet you’ve been there too.

The good news is there’s an easy fix to these issues that will take you just a few, short minutes.

There are a lot of factors that determine internet speeds and while there’s a few tricks or guidelines you can follow
to improve the overall wireless speeds and coverage in your home, one of the most crucial factors is the location of your router. And note, it’s not always where the technician set it up. So keep reading to learn about the best place in your home for your router and other tricks for faster Wi-Fi.

Start with the right router

First things first: It all starts with choosing the right router or other equipment. Not all routers are made equal and the size and layout of your home will determine what type of wireless network you need.

For most apartments and smaller homes (under 1,500 square feet), a single wireless access point should suffice. That said, if your router is several years old, you may want to consider upgrading to a newer model with support for wireless 802.11ac and dual-band support. This will give you the fastest wireless speeds possible and the best overall coverage.

For bigger, multilevel homes, it’s worth considering making the upgrade to a mesh network to offer consistent coverage throughout the entire house. Once the main access point is installed, if you find a far corner of your home doesn’t have solid wireless coverage, just add another node to that area. Problem solved.

To learn more, check out our list of the best mesh routers of the year and if you’re not sure where to begin in choosing your next router, consult our buying guide.

Regardless of whether you have a single access point or a mesh network, where you place the primary access point still matters.

Where should you place your router?

When you first move into a new home or apartment, the modem is usually installed along the wall in one of the far reaches of the house. This is simply because that is where the line comes into the house and the technician’s job is to set up the connection — not optimize your network. That part is on you.

It’s tempting to just leave everything where the technician set it up. But it’s unlikely that this is an optimal location to have your router.

Choose a central location

Routers send the signal out in all directions, so if it’s left in the corner of your home, a significant percentage of your wireless coverage is being sent outside your home. It’s best to move the router to a central location to optimize the signal.

Installing a router across the house from the modem may prove troublesome. It may require manually running a CAT5 cable under the floor or enlisting the help of powerline network adapters. But the improved wireless coverage will be worth it.

Raise the router

Routers tend to spread signals downward, so it’s best to mount the router as high as possible to maximize coverage. Try placing it high on a bookshelf or mounting it on the wall
in an inconspicuous place.

Avoid other electronics

Try to pick a location that’s away from other electronics and large metal objects. The more walls, large obstructions and electronics near your router, the higher the chances are that something will interfere with the signal.

One electronic to especially avoid is the microwave, which emits a strong signal in the 2.4GHz band, the same wireless band your router operates in.

Those funny-looking antennas actually matter

Some routers have no antenna at all, but some have up to eight. These antennas help direct the signal. If there are two or more antennas on your router, don’t position them all in the same direction.

Instead, make them perpendicular to one another — position one horizontally and the other vertically. Or slightly change the position of all the antennas to cover a wide range of angles.

Try mapping the signal

In worst-case scenario situations, it may prove useful to map out the signal in your home to see where there might be gaps or problems areas in your coverage.

If you’re considering upgrading your router, be sure to check out CNET’s best routers of 2022.

For homes with children, make sure to explore the parental controls of your router, too.

More on home internet, Wi-Fi, ISPs and routers:

What was originally a 500-pound piece of machinery on top of a van is now a set of high tech cameras atop snowmobiles, backpacks and, yes, even camels. This has allowed tons of more places to be showcased on Google Street View — like tight corridors and alleyways that cars can’t drive through, and underwater at the Great Barrier Reef.

Now, they even have algorithms that automatically blur peoples’ faces and car license plates. Google’s newest Street View camera weighs less than 15 pounds, and it can be mounted to any vehicle.

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It isn’t clear exactly what caused the outage, with Cloudflare’s official Twitter saying only that the “issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” According to Cloudflare’s incident report, the issue was reported at approximately 6:34 a.m. UTC, the problem identified just over 20 minutes later around 6:57 a.m., and the fix implemented at around 7:20 a.m.

“Connectivity in Cloudflare’s network has been disrupted in broad regions,” wrote Cloudflare in the initial report. “Eyeballs attempting to reach Cloudflare sites in impacted regions will observe 500 errors. The incident impacts all data plane services in our network.”

Affected websites included Crunchyroll, Amazon Web Services, Google Services, NordVPN, Coinbase, Grindr, and Fur Affinity — among many, many more.

Of course, the denizens of Twitter were very quick to tweet about it, reveling in the “dog in the school” energy the entire internet was giving off.

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An unsullied For You page whose only knowledge is that you are human will serve you a disorienting combination of two things: hot girls’ butts, and advice on how to steal other people’s viral video ideas.

Why the butts are there is self-explanatory (they get the most views). The latter phenomenon, however, reveals a much darker side of the human condition. What they’re offering are “tips” or “hacks” on how to go viral on TikTok, which is embarrassing in itself but even worse in practice: titles range from “How to Grow Your Account to 1k Followers in 1 Week,” to “10 Video Ideas Anyone Can Use,” or “How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok.” That last one gives the following advice: “Find somebody else’s TikTok that inspires you and then literally copy it. You don’t need to copy it completely, but you can get pretty close.”

While the creator behind it is condoning pretty sleazy, algorithm-brained behavior, I have to appreciate his honesty about a practice that has plagued the internet since it’s existed: plagiarism, both the intentional kind that can fall anywhere on the spectrum of “pretty shitty” to “actively evil,” and the kind you do when you’re making content in a system of increasingly lucrative rewards for stealing successful people’s stuff. Though plagiarism is arguably most prevalent on TikTok, it’s even harder to police the plagiarism that happens between different platforms.

Brenden Koerner is used to people using his work as source material. This is typically a good thing: About once a week, he’ll field inquiries from producers hoping to interview him for a documentary or adapt one of his books into a film or a podcast. If they option one of his works, he’ll get a cut of that sale. Earlier this year, the bad kind happened: Someone published a podcast based exclusively on a story he’d spent nine years reporting for The Atlantic, with zero credit or acknowledgment of the source material. “Situations like this have become all too common amid the podcast boom,” he wrote in a now-viral Twitter thread last month.

Amidst the growing thirst for captivating or sensationalist narratives, several true crime and history podcasts have been accused of plagiarizing written articles without credit over the past few years. Koerner has had this happen to him several times. “If something’s easy or free to access, there’s maybe a general assumption that it’s free to use,” he says. “There are a lot of people who’ve had their hard work repackaged for profit, and I fear it’s ultimately going to be a net negative for the whole ecosystem of people who create and tell stories.”

Plagiarism, it should be noted, is perfectly legal in the United States, provided it doesn’t cross the (often nebulous) definition of intellectual property theft. Movies, music, or works of fiction have robust legal protections against this (recall the zillions of lawsuits between artists for stealing each other’s samples), and Koerner’s Atlantic story is protected under the law as well (in works where the originality or artistry of the author is sufficiently evident, courts will side with the creator), but it often isn’t worth the time and money to pursue legal action.

Yet the definitions of what constitutes IP get murky quickly. You can’t copyright a dance or a recipe or a yoga pose, for instance, and it’s really hard to copyright a joke. You also, for obvious reasons, can’t copyright a fact, which means that in industries where IP law can only do so much, social and professional norms dictate your reputation: journalism, comedy, and academia, for instance, fields in which plagiarism is the among the most cardinal of sins.

So what of the average influencer, YouTuber, or podcaster? Internet posts are, for the most part, not copyrightable intellectual property. Instead, they’re more like a hybrid of journalism and comedy, meaning that social media typically must police itself against thieves.

Meme theft has been the subject of debate for as long as they’ve been around; back in 2015, popular Instagram meme pages like @TheFatJewish and @FuckJerry faced a reckoning over joke stealing, largely from comedians but also from random people who’d made viral tweets and later saw them reposted elsewhere. Fast forward seven years, and the problem hasn’t gone away — in fact, it’s gotten worse. The meme pages, or accounts that curate mostly other people’s content, won. Some have even successfully argued that what they do is an art form in itself.

Jonathan Bailey became interested in the subject of plagiarism in the early 2000s, when he ran a goth literary blog devoted to his poetry and fiction. After a reader pointed him to another blog that was stealing his work, he did some digging and found hundreds of others in the online goth community republishing his writing as their own. “I actually won a crap ton of contests on AllPoetry.com despite never having an account there,” he says. For the past decade, he’s been focused on his blog Plagiarism Today, which tracks current events relating to the subject and advice for what to do if you’ve been plagiarized.

He posits that there are three main eras of internet plagiarism. The first was in the ’90s and early 2000s, when people stole each other’s work because they wanted to pass it off on their own, but didn’t necessarily have a profit motive. The second was in the mid-2000s, when search engine optimization became a widespread practice and sites could make money from crappy, AI-written work that capitalized on the strategic placement of certain keywords. “That came to a halt when Google really started clamping down on low-quality content,” Bailey explains. The third era is made up of the kind that flourishes on social media, where users compete for the most attention-grabbing content in the hopes they might make ad revenue or score a brand deal.

“[Social media] puts a lot of pressure on what is fundamentally a creative process,” he says. “I’ve talked to repeated plagiarists who say ‘I felt pressure to put up this many articles or podcasts or videos.”

It’s easy to argue that social media platforms practically beg their users to plagiarize each other. “The way that YouTube works is that [people] create trends, and those trends are meant to be followed by everyone else,” explains Faithe Day, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies Research who works with students on data science and digital platform ethics. “But there’s a fine line between following a trend and copying what someone else is doing and saying it’s your own.”

Determining who copied who is a convoluted and often unsolvable problem, particularly when people exist in such varied digital spaces. “A lot of people who plagiarize don’t know that they’re plagiarizing. They don’t know that the thing they’re talking about someone else has already discovered,” Day says.

It’s difficult to name a platform where plagiarism is more pronounced than TikTok, whose technology encourages people to react and build off each other’s work, often with little or no acknowledgment of the original creator. It’s become such an issue that last week TikTok announced a new feature that allows its users to credit an existing video when posting their own. “These features are an important step in our ongoing commitment to investing in resources and product experiences that support a culture of credit, which is central to ensuring TikTok remains a home for creative expression,” wrote Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s director of creator community, in the announcement.

TikTok’s new crediting feature.

TikTok

Day sees this most often in instances where popular TikTok creators hop on a trending dance or audio without knowing who the original creator is, thus spreading it to more people for whom the popular creator was the de facto origin. Nowhere was this more clear than in late 2019 and early 2020 when the Renegade dance took over TikTok, despite its choreographer, a 14-year-old in Atlanta named Jalaiah Harmon, receiving none of the credit or clout until months later.

The instance sparked a reckoning on the platform, culminating in a Black creator strike to protest rampant co-opting of the community’s dances and slang. “Recommendation algorithms are engineered to ensure that people who have large followings are being recommended to other users, so there aren’t a lot of possibilities for smaller creators to get recognition,” Day explains.

There has never been quite so much to gain, potentially, by being widely credited as a true originator of a viral moment. Coin a term? Sell it as an NFT. Appeared on a reality show? Launch an OnlyFans. Get a ton of followers for whatever reason? Put your Venmo handle in your bio. Shill for a shady galaxy lights brand or sign with an agent who specializes in squeezing cash out of small bursts of attention.

In a climate like this, people have understandably grown quite protective over their ideas, sometimes to the point of being obnoxious (a fellow journalist recalls a time when a TikToker was angry that she had offhandedly linked to one of their videos without mentioning them by name). There are incentives to passing other people’s work off as your own — incentives, even, to avoid researching whether anyone has done the work before.

“Everybody’s looking for a side hustle, and an easy way to make money is aggregating content,” says Chris Stokel-Walker, a UK-based journalist who’s experienced several of the kind of muddy is-is-actually-plagiarism moments where you end up feeling used and exploited but unsure of whether it’s worth starting trouble. “It does hurt, in a way. It’s like, well why did I spend months researching a story or a book only for someone to saunter along, cherry-pick the best bits, present it in a different format, and claim all the credit? What’s the point?”

While the technology to detect it has improved, it’s far more difficult to weed out plagiarism when it happens in different forms of media: written work that’s turned into a video, a podcast that’s turned into a book. Rather than relying on data systems to tell us when something is stolen, then, plagiarism experts acknowledge that the shift about proper idea attribution needs to happen culturally. “We have to answer that question as a collective society,” Bailey says.

“We need greater understanding about media literacy and internet ethics,” Day says. “It’s about doing the extra legwork, doing a Google search before you reproduce something. But people don’t do that extra work because there’s an assumption that what they’re seeing is a direct reflection of reality, which of course is not always true.”

They also might not be doing it because they have a monetary incentive to remain ignorant. But that’s a more complicated problem, one that can’t be solved with a platform tweak or new crediting system. It has to be widely understood that plagiarism is, for lack of a clearer term, loser behavior. And that begins with all of us.

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

But after posting a coming out video in 2019 called “Basically I’m Gay,” Howell went completely silent on the platform. That was until last week, when he returned with a feature film-length monologue on why he quit YouTube in the first place.

For years, digital creators have been trying to convey the ennui of this supposed dream job: they’re lonely, they’re burnt out, they’re built up then tossed aside by unfeeling algorithms and corporate bureaucracy. They feel stuck between the kinds of content that makes them money and the content they actually want to produce.

Howell enumerated these reasons and more, all of which are good reasons to quit a job you hate. Another, less discussed one, however, is something I’ve come to call “YouTube brain.” Compare it to “Twitter brain,” in which spending too much time on Twitter results in someone becoming argumentative and perpetually outraged, or “Instagram brain,” (image-obsessed and overly materialistic), or “TikTok brain,” (unquestioningly devoted to the latest slang or trend before moving on to the next one). YouTube brain, from the perspective of the YouTuber as opposed to the viewer, is what happens when you are both creatively and financially subject to the whims of other people’s attention spans for years at a time, weighed down by neverending demand for more content for dwindling returns.

Chronic YouTube brain can land you in some bizarre circumstances. Take Michelle Phan, the longtime beauty YouTuber who last week claimed that she had “healed a man who had been in a wheelchair for years” through the power of “Divine Love.” This supposedly took place at a retreat in San Diego hosted by influencer Joe Dispenza, who’s best known for falsely presenting himself as a medical doctor while peddling vague “healing” workshops. It’s only the latest in a long history of Phan amplifying pseudoscience: In 2010 she claimed that a “sign from God” saved her from being murdered by a homeless man; she’s previously hired employees based on their astrological sign. While not exactly “pseudoscience,” she’s famously done things like use (clean) cat litter as a facial mask, which I would argue is the perfect manifestation of YouTube brain: unconventional thinking amped up by shock value.

The YouTube celebrity pipeline typically looks something like this: A creator might start out within a particular niche (gaming, makeup, daily vlogging, sketch comedy), and through their onscreen charisma, develops a following made up of fans who come less for, say, the games, and more to feel as though they’re hanging out with a friend. At this point, at least one of three things will happen: Either the creator will achieve such a level of success that they’ll no longer feel “relatable” to audiences and must reckon with their persona (see: Emma Chamberlain), the creator will be subject to some level of cancellation for past actions (see: basically all of them), or the job will create such a pressure-cooker environment that the creator quits altogether — but only for a while.

Consider Shane Dawson, the controversial vlogger known for his popular conspiracy theory videos and “documentaries” about fellow YouTubers, who was quasi-canceled along with many others in June 2020 for past racist slurs and offensive jokes. After a 15-month hiatus, he returned in October 2021 with a 40-minute video called “The Haunting of Shane Dawson” and has since followed it up with other personal updates and ghost story theories. 2020 alone saw so many creator reckonings that Vulture compiled a list of 16 of the most notable; it’s become such a standard rinse-and-repeat cycle that the YouTuber apology was skewered by SNL.

There are anomalies, of course. Having grown an enormous cult following from her comedic Vines (“Merry Chrysler!” is her doing) and later her YouTube channel, Christine Sydelko left the internet in 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. “I just don’t like being famous,” she told NBC News earlier this year. “You’re lying to people to try to make them seem like you’re their friend for the sole purpose of selling things to them.” Another anomaly is Jenna Marbles, who apologized for old videos in which she wore blackface to impersonate Nicki Minaj and rapped in an offensive parody of an Asian accent in June 2020. Her account, which had 20 million subscribers, has been dormant since then.

For the most part, though, once a YouTuber reaches a certain level of success, they’re a YouTuber for life. I’m less convinced this has anything to do with the platform itself and more about the kind of person it attracts and who ends up succeeding. In my years of interviewing them, I’m always struck by the way YouTubers — and creators writ large — make sense of the world, which tends to be fervently individualistic and, at times, a little bitter. This is an understandable attitude to have when your livelihood is dependent on the creator economy, in which individuals compete against one another for the most attention possible.

Vloggers tend to be keenly, almost freakishly attuned to the in-depth analytics YouTube provides for them. “It is brilliant and terrifying how much information YouTube gives you about your content and your audience,” explains Howell. “If you’re making a video from the heart, truly expressing yourself … you are greeted with a wall of red lines saying ‘Sorry, nobody likes this, sweetie.’” He makes an apt comparison to children’s programming: Public television, for instance, can put out shows like Arthur or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood not because they’re cash cows, but because they provide a service to the public. Meanwhile, the most popular kids’ programming on YouTube seems to be a mess of LOL Surprise or Kinder egg unboxings and glitter slime ASMR videos.

Most of all, I’ve found that YouTubers tend to view other people and situations in black and white, divided between what’s good for themselves as individual creators and outside forces that wish them harm. They are often distrustful of institutions and organizations, particularly the media, whom they feel antagonize creators because newsrooms are scared they’ll be replaced by them (though PewDiePie is known most for this belief, Howell’s latest video also includes references to it). In this, they are not dissimilar to the attitudes of the wider public, who are increasingly skeptical of established institutions but quick to believe that Satanic forces are present at music festivals, for instance, and that despite evidence to the contrary, they will be among the 1 percent who makes money from joining an MLM or, say, an NFT project.

Fittingly, Phan has become something of a crypto evangelist over the past few years, shilling for an industry best known for its sky-high promises and unpredictable outcomes. After all, this isn’t so different from YouTube, where the chance to become a famous millionaire is vanishingly small but exists nonetheless. It’s such an alluring fantasy that even the YouTubers who have experienced (and been a part of) the ugliest aspects of it — Jeffree Star, James Charles, Shane Dawson, Tana Mongeau, Trisha Paytas, Gabbie Hanna — can’t truly log off. The same is true for Howell: At the end of his 90-minute monologue, in which he describes his experiences with YouTube as traumatic and terrifying, he announced he would continue to make videos, and that he would be going on a world tour called “We’re All Doomed!”

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Rumors are flying about the next Google Pixel phones, a possible Pixel Watch and Android 13, Google’s presumed follow-up to its Android 12 operating system. Though it’s all speculation, it’s safe to say Google has some big announcements in store for I/O 2022. Here’s what you need to know before the conference.

How to watch Google I/O 2022 live

Google I/O will be free to watch live at io.google/2022, and the event will also be recorded and available to stream afterward. In the meantime, you can register for a free Google developer profile if you’re interested in getting email updates about the conference and keeping track of the events you’ll attend virtually.

What we expect Google to announce

Android 13

It’s highly probable that Google will give us a look at the next Android mobile operating system, Android 13. By the time I/O begins, the new Android OS will still be in the midst of beta testing, but we’ll likely learn some key details at the conference. The Android Developers Blog has already shown us a number of new settings and features, plus improvements on Android 12’s Material You design framework. Here’s everything we know about Android 13 ahead of its wide release, which is expected later in August or September.

Pixel 6A

Three years ago at I/O 2019, Google introduced the first budget “A” version of its Pixel phone: the Pixel 3A. Then, for the next two years, Google pushed the Pixel 4A and 5A releases from May to August due to pandemic-related delays. Rumors suggest that Google might resume the original “A” release schedule for 2022, debuting the 6A at I/O this year. (However, tech leaker Jon Prosser says the actual launch will be delayed until July 28 for most markets.) According to leaks from industry tipsters, the 6A might get the 6 and 6 Pro’s powerful Google Tensor chip, along with a 6.2-inch OLED display and a punch-hole front camera.

Pixel Watch

Though Google already owns Fitbit and builds Wear OS in partnership with Samsung, this year’s I/O event could see the company finally dive into the smartwatch waters once and for all with the rumored Pixel Watch. Pixel Watch speculation includes a potential Wear OS interface, a minimalist design, health-tracking features and three different versions. A leak from a carrier’s inventory surfaced in early March, showing the Pixel Watch in gold, gray and black options with 32GB of storage.

Pixel Fold and Android 12L developments that support foldable phones

Android 13 isn’t the only Android OS update we could see at I/O this year: Google has been teasing Android 12L, a version of Android 12 adapted for tablets and foldable phones (like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3). Speaking of which, Google is expected to launch its own foldable (a Pixel Fold?) later this year. Maybe we’ll get a glimpse during I/O.

Changes for Google Stadia

It’s possible that the Google-owned cloud gaming platform Stadia could make an appearance in some form. Rumors suggest that Google will offer Stadia’s streaming tech to other companies, including Peloton, under the name “Google Stream.” If this proves true, we just might see a rebranding announcement at I/O.