3

The First Iteration Of Gmail Was For Garfield Fans

When Gmail launched in 2004, it provided an invaluable service to countless Internet denizens looking to upgrade their addresses from sparkledemoncookieprincess@hotmail.com to something vaguely professional. But the service you route all of your Bed Bath & Beyond newsletters to holds a dark and terrible secret. In 1998, gmail.com was an email service for Garfield enthusiasts.

Sadly, this "email with catittude" program was never run by Google, despite our best attempts to prove otherwise. But the URL offered eight-year-olds and sassy grandmas alike a free @catsrule.garfield.com email address, at least a few of which we really hope ended up on job applications and business cards. You could find catsrule emails at early internet bastions like Tripod, Angelfire, GameFAQs, and Fanfiction.net, where Garfield demonstrated how deep his love for lasagna truly ran.

The service eventually migrated to the now-defunct e-garfield.com in 2001. (Modern fans should head straight to garfield.com for all their many Garfield needs.) While the opportunity to score cracked@catsrule.garfield.com has sadly long passed us by, as of early 2018, the service appeared to still be active for whatever legacy users are clinging to it. Weirder still, an @catsrule.garfield.com email appeared in Wikileaks' 2010 Syrian government dump, as one of Bashar al-Assad's lackeys was apparently hit with an offer for cheap software from a Russian spammer using such an address.

WikiLeaksOf course, it's possible that this is simply how Jim Davis is paying the bills these days.

Does this prove that the seemingly innocent Garfield has ties to the Kremlin? Does he hate Mondays and freedom? We're still investigating. But in the meantime, if anyone reading this is still telling the world that cats rule via email, please get in touch and let us know what it's like to be trapped in 1998.

2

LinkedIn Has A Thriving MAGA Scene

LinkedIn is mostly where people with MBAs use run-on sentences to tell one another that they're passionate about being experts in creating paradigm strategies, but it also allows its users to post articles. LinkedIn's blogging platform is formatted like a serial killer's taunting note, but hardcore Trump supporters have found a home there amidst marketing executives talking about how they're remortgaging their homes to buy Ethereum.

For all the crap we give Twitter and Facebook for letting trolls proliferate, they've done enough to crack down on hate and anger that the most vitriolic posters have felt the need to abandon ship and resurface at LinkedIn. We're talking hardcore "Obama was born in Kenya, CNN is run by communists, and oh by the way, if you disagree with me you should kill yourself" Trump supporters here. Throw in all the platform's hippies looking to sell their crystal oil running into these posts, and the comments get ugly in a hurry.

LinkedIn isn't exactly a fan of this development, because they don't want their platform to be viewed as political, beyond their implicit endorsement of the endless grind of capitalism's crushing gears. But they're also not doing much to combat the problem. They'll ban the nastiest users, but the rest are free to go on about how Muslims need to be exterminated before they reach the final stages of their nefarious climate change hoax. Again, all on a platform designed to let accountants tell each other how much #hustle they have.

Most people still use LinkedIn for its original purpose, if they're unfortunate enough to have the need to. But there's been a clear increase in extreme politics and toxicity, so don't be surprised if a bunch of people screaming about the need to Make America Great Again show up in the comments of your post about learning some new Excel tricks.

Related: 6 WTF Reasons Websites Go From Being Awesome To Terrible

1

Vice Skewed Its Traffic Stats With Boobs And Dumb Scams

You know those ads for shitty video games that feature half-naked anime girls destined to develop back pain declaring, "Come save the kingdom from Orcs, My Lord, and maybe I'll show you my improbable bosoms"? Vice, the giant media conglomerate whose only rule is "Don't write sober," used the exact same strategy.

Vice's director of marketing, tasked with boosting traffic, said to hell with carefully promoting their unique brand of journalism and just slapped ads featuring "photos of some hot chick with big boobs bouncing up and down" on torrent sites and other sleazy corners of the web. Vice's traffic did see a significant spike -- from hundreds of thousands of hits a month to millions -- but no one told investors that most of that was coming from disappointed men looking to masturbate. Presumably, most of them did not stick around to read any articles while holding their dicks.

ViceStuff like this does make it hard to claim that you're stopping by for the latest political commentary.

That was in 2008. By 2016, Vice had moved on to a new trick where over half of their supposed traffic came from sites like Ranker, Distractify, and OMGFacts -- your top sources for whatever the writers saw on Reddit this morning. Vice sold ads on their behalf, then claimed their traffic as their own, because nothing says stable, trendsetting publication like being forced to claim the clicks of a bunch of 14-year-olds getting into arguments about which Supernatural episode is the thirstiest.

Anyway, Vice recently fired 250 hardworking people, because you can only move shells around for so long before people realize that there's nothing under them. And now you know how the internet economy works!

Mark is on Twitter and wrote a book.

Support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out Where Are They Now: 90s Websites:

The first-ever Cracked Podcast LIVE TOUR is coming to a city near (some of) you this spring! Tickets on sale now for Chicago IL (April 11th) and St. Paul MN (April 12th).

Hey, you, follow us on Facebook!