Numlock News: August 5, 2025 • Wattpad, Scams, Lying Prudes

Aug 05, 2025

By Allegra Rosenberg

Walt is out on vacation, and filling in today is Allegra Rosenberg, a writer and editor who you may know from her stories about arctic exploration and her work covering fandom. Allegra can be found at her Substack and on Blue Sky at @tchotchke.

Link Murder

In 2009, Google released its goo.gl link shortening service, which was subsequently adopted by anyone and everyone, including news outlets and academic publishers. Though the service had stopped creating new links in 2018, the old ones still worked — a situation apparently too decent to last for Google as the company announced it would be killing over 10 million links this month. Digital archivist Michael L. Nelson joked that “at best this saves Google dozens of dollars.” After widespread outcry by internet preservationists, Google decided on a compromise that would rescue a fraction of those 10 million links still getting clicks as of 2024. Still, it’s not great news for the patient link that was destined for its first click in years after August 25.

Shira Ovide, The Washington Post

In Their Fan Era

I wrote this article for Walt, so I probably should have explicitly specified that Wattpad users around the world spend an average of 57 minutes per day reading on the site, instead of rounding that number up to an hour. Wattpad, founded in 2006 and acquired by Korean conglomerate Naver in 2021, has been successful as a proving ground for popular romance franchises such as the After film series, based on a romance with bad-boy Harry Styles. Wattpad is looking to embrace its role as a fan mecca, giving its users improved discovery and community tools to help them find fandoms to join as well as build their own fandoms for original works.

Allegra Rosenberg, Sherwood News

Fringe It Up

The Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s biggest arts festival, kicked off this past weekend (I’m headed there on Saturday and having the worst FOMO.) With over 3,000 shows playing in Edinburgh all month across mediums like theatre, comedy, dance, circus and music, it can be overwhelming for visitors to pick what to see. Current-events musical parodies are a reliable mainstay: last year, there were two dueling musicals about Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski accident trial. This year, a musical about Australian viral breakdancing sensation Raygun seems poised to be the critic’s pick. Featuring songs like “Breaking Down” and “I Pulled a Muscle,” the show revolves around a “completely fictional breakdancer from Australia” who is, you’ll find, called Spraygun — a move which managed to deftly dodge threatened legal action from the subject at hand.

Alex Marshall, The New York Times

Mag Mystery

At its peak of popularity during the ’50s and ’60s, the Saturday Evening Post had an estimated circulation of eight million; so why is it better remembered for its covers than for its contents? Substack critic Naomi Kanakia spent an impressive amount of time reading through the muddled Post’s archive and came up bewildered. Unlike the impressive legacy of pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Kanakai determines that the Post’s “middlebrow recurring-character stories” by authors like Clarence Buddington Kelland and Norman Reilly Raine, who earned today’s equivalent of $90,000 (!!!!) for each story, left no trace at all in American culture.

Naomi Kanakia, Woman of Letters

Scam Me Baby

Slate’s Alexander Sammon really took one for the team when he decided to answer one of those Indeed recruiting spam texts we’ve all been getting. In the first six months of 2024, 20,000 of these “task scams” were reported to the Federal Trade Commission, with reported losses topping $220 million. Sammon’s experience with “Cathy,” his possibly Philippines-based WhatsApp taskmaster, and her mysterious assistant CS (“Customer Service”) is a wild ride. It gives us a glimpse into what these task scams, which perhaps you’ve seen people on Reddit or your parents’ friends nearly falling prey to, actually consist of. The intriguing but unconfirmed prospect that the seemingly pointless clicks might actually be serving some unknown purpose elsewhere was particularly dystopian.

Alexander Sammon, Slate

Maeve Moves

“Where’s your shirt from?” “Anthro,” I say. “Where’s your bag from?” “Anthro!” I yelp. At nearly 30, I am proud to say I’ve graduated from Urban Outfitters and become a devotee of her mature older sister, Anthropologie — in particular the sub-brand Maeve, which is a little less frilly than your typical Anthropologie look, and more chic and colorblock-y. Nearly two million customers over the past year have shopped at Maeve, according to Woman’s Wear Daily. As a reward, it’s going to get its own dedicated stores soon, with the pilot location opening in October in Raleigh, NC, and three more in the pipeline. There will also be dedicated Maeve social channels, including a Maeve Substack — so chic.

Lisa Lockwood, Woman’s Wear Daily

Lying Prudes

Samantha Cole (whose book How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex is a must-read) has a great report on the itch.io payment processing kerfuffle and the crusty malcontents behind it. Not only are Collective Shout (the anti-porn crusaders who kicked off the whole thing) probably definitely lying about the 500 rape and incest games they found on the video game platform, but they’re repeating history. It’s basically the same move the prudish undergraduate Marty Rimm pulled in 1995 when he made the exaggerated claim to have surveyed 917,410 pieces of adult content online. That report then contributed directly to the censorious strictures of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Time is a flat circle…

Samantha Cole, 404 Media

Allegra can be found at her Substack and on Blue Sky at @tchotchke.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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