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You know when you’re in a real deep Snapchat creep session where you’re just rolling along watching someone’s story before – BAM! – you’re on your ex-girlfriend’s story and you don’t want her to know you still care (even though you do)? Well, you can deny feeling like that, but you and I both know that you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Somewhere in Snapchat’s update from earlier this year, it went from exiting out of the stories you’ve watched to actually just going to the next story. It spawned two awful feelings: the first is what I described above, and the second was the lingering letdown of, “Damn, who watched my first story but didn’t find it captivating enough to continue?” Social media is all about acceptance and looking cool and nothing screams “I suck” like knowing people don’t want to dedicate 28 seconds of their life to watching your complete story.
But now, that’s all changed. They’ve done a new update where the Auto Advance feature is gone. They’re calling it the “Story Playlist” and it allows you to choose just exactly which stories you actually want to see.
Per Snapchat:
Starting today for select Snapchatters in our Android community and rolling out soon across all Android and iOS, the Auto Advance feature will be removed to give you control of your Story viewing experience once again!
Simply tap on a Story to view it. We won’t automatically advance you to the next Story in recent updates.
Creeping just got a lot less stressful and the views on your first story are definitely about to go down. But at least you don’t look like the psycho ex who still wants to see their old flame taking a club selfie while Desiigner plays on full blast. .
Respond
Will
Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.
@willdefries
@willdefries
defriewf
will@grandex.co
A little irrelevant to the topic – but why did y’all fire half of the Grandex staff and writers?!
It’s a restructuring of our media department. Not my call, and it’s something I’m still processing. I really do believe in transparency, even for something as trivial as a comedy website, but that’s really as deep as I’ll get. I’m still getting used to the fact that I no longer work with a number of people I call friends, but we’re doing our best to get through it. I appreciate the kind words and even the snark because it means we have readers who actually give a shit about the site.
“Restructuring of our media department” sounds like it could be straight out of an article on here making fun of corporate lingo. Ironic.
Y’all hired Action Jack Barker as you’re new CEO didn’t you?
Dave, I give lots of shits about this shit. Let me shoot a lookbook for Man Outfitters or Rowdy Gentleman because that’s what I do. Get at me, you guys need dope photography content.
email me. david@grandex.co. also, i’m still waiting on that silicon valley column.
What do you guys pay nowadays?
If y’all need a remote numbers person, holla.
Thanks for the info Dave, have a lot of respect for you coming out and saying this.
Not that they actually owe us an explanation, but telling us yes they did let 90% of the content staff go and they’re sad because everyone is friends isn’t exactly a stunning revelation.
Better then nothing
Pretty shitty the writers that got fired have to find out why by reading PGP comment sections, at least email them or something.
Something tells me they got a little more information than postgradsloth and Randy Magnum.
Hey man, it was hard enough on Dave to throw on a smile when crossing paths for weeks with all the people he was about to fire without your bullshit.
Keep being awesome Dave
Hmmm. Cause I saw a blurb on your website very recently about hiring in all departments. Something about staffing up in your Austin office.
Thanks for the honesty, Dave. As a fan of all 3 sites, its sad to see some of the best go, but business is business.
I know you’re bitter now but you’re gonna have to move on and do it rather quickly. This is the best advice you’re ever going to get.
Okay, bye.
Dammit, Grandex. Get your shit together. If you need an accountant to help with your books, there’s a shitload of us on here.
Make Grandex Great Again
Exactly. I applied for a position in the finance/accounting department. Guess my numbers weren’t funny enough.
I made an account just to voice my disappointment so here I am disappointed. Sincerely, someone who has read the site for months and is sad now.
Sup?
Not right now I’m too sad
Story of my life.
LOL DUDA LEFT CHICAGO FOR THIS?!?!
It’s been nice knowing you guys, farewell. Except you ATL Guy, fuck you.
I’m still left wondering what happened to Brian and Knox.
Duda is gone…all of the TSM girls are gone…Boosh and Dan from TFM are out. Even Kayla their Office Manager is gone.
New episode of Dudes Doing Business: “Downsizing”
TFM and TSM haven’t had a post in over 24 hours. There’s either internal rift on where the sites are headed, or Grandex lost too much on the movies and can’t pay the bills. Or both, but we’ll likely never know. Been nice gettin’ to know everybody.
Rico
I didn’t need these changes today.
Jesus, on the Grandex site the only two people left who are strictly writers/content people are Will and Jared.
You know it’s bad when Employed and Depressed is doing 50% better than most of our writers.
If you guys need #content I submitted a pretty good story a few weeks back, and my fee is gratis. And I bet Nived has some unpublished works in your fault as well.
I miss Nived
I’m here, my son!
I submitted my first piece this morning…even with recent events I have no confidence it’ll be published.
we should all just start submitting articles randomly over this week. I’m sure we can get some interesting reads out of it.
Picturing this as a content version of “The Purge.” All content posted whether it’s good or not. Would be an interesting free-for-all.
I wrote a column back in July about how I got fired a week after my second kid was born. She was still in the NICU. I’m actually taking today’s events a little harder than I did losing my own job in a way.
My thoughts, which is worthless, is that the retail side of the business is starting to outshine the media side. My bet is that they are cutting down on the media to amp up the retail. Really the media dollars have probably plateaued a while ago, you can only make so much online from ads without expanding into other avenues; like movies and TV. Both of which are extremely difficult industries to work in. I just am assuming the company decided to focus where the money is and that is on the store.
100% accurate. If you look at the staff that they kept on board, they are all marketing, strategy and merchandising people. Yet so much of their advertising for the stores falls through their existing TFM/TSM/PGP platforms.
You’re right I don’t think the media side is going anywhere, it’s too good of a marketing platform to throw away. What I think they are doing is setting everything up for maintenance mode. They will hold a few writers on staff but then just expand their freelance staff which is easy and cheap. I just think their plan will be to maintain the sites to hold on to the audience but not do much else to expand the brands.
I agree with you, but my fear is that a larger remote staff getting paid $25 per article means a whole lot more buzzfeed shit and not original content. Look at J-Tas and Kendra and the “quality” work they pumped out. Hope Bostonian and Arcadia put out a few pieces per week to keep things entertaining.
Maybe we will have to see, like I said I don’t know shit. Their has to be a way to maintain quality among freelance people. Now that the computer is officially going that way, I would bet the guys will experiment with some ideas to do that. Also the fired guys Twitter’s today are just sad, I want to buy them all a beer.
I will venmo them $5. And/or invited for drinks in Charlotte tonight. Thanks for the content, y’all.
Same you boys make your way to KC the beers are on me.
company*
It has outshone it for a long time. Grandex makes almost all of its money from selling apparel from Rowdy Gentleman and their other retail lines. TFM/TSM/PGP and all of the content therein is little more than a promotional vehicle for these clothing brands. There are a number of other humor/lifestyle websites on the internet (such as Thrillist) that use the same business model: the media content of the business is just a loss-leader that draws visitors to the website, who then see then buy shit from the in-house retail brand that’s promoted in the articles.
Grandex may have decided (based on clickthrough analytics or whatever) that the clothing brands are established enough in their own right now that pouring money into lots of media content isn’t necessary anymore.
Staff writers are expensive.
Completely agree- why bring them on full time in the first place? Just pay them by column so that you still have content
I mean… you get what you pay for at that point.
$25 for an article isn’t competitive (if you spent 2 hours writing it, congrats! You’ve officially made $12.50/hr!), so what you see are people who try to submit articles that take the least amount of time. That means curated content (aka, “Here’s what Reddit said this week”), reactions to other articles, and godawful listicles. Maybe you’ll have a few people stick around and write a few articles that are either newbies trying to build up their portfolio or “build their brand,” but you’ll lack enough of the reliable submissions to be successful.
Shit, they don’t even have to pay their freelancers actual money. Bleacher Report and HuffPo became billion-dollar media companies by convincing aspiring writers to submit nearly all of their content for free. Literally free. They pay these people these people nothing, and keep them hooked by giving them meaningless “promotional titles”, tell them that they are getting great “exposure”, and dangle vague promises of an eventual paid gig if they establish enough of a reader base to merit it. Of course this paid gig never materializes. Bleacher report has had thousands of unpaid contributors and maybe a few dozen of them have ever actually transitioned into a paid gig with the company.
Exactly this. At $25 an article, you’re basically courting people who are dedicated to the site and want to try their hand at it, or freelancers who are willing to work for peanuts to get experience and visibility. Neither of which can buy groceries. Really curious if they up that amount to try attracting better quality writers, or if we do see a decline in articles that aren’t written by Will.
Good lord. I miss an entire morning of PGP and log on after lunch and see the entire staff gutted. What in the world?
Yeah can we get like a press release on this
Duda got the axe? Fuckin a that didn’t last long
I know you all hate him, but this sucks the guy just moved to Austin. I feel really bad for him.
Agreed. As someone who started a new job only to get laid off 6 months later, that shit stings. A lot. I wouldn’t wish that feeling of helplessness on my worst enemy, and I didn’t even have to move for my job.
To be fair, it was a poor career decision. His wheelhouse was writing about his personal experiences once or twice a week, not trying to produce 3 pieces on a daily basis.
Yeah but he probably didn’t know that until he tried it, I can’t blame the guy for taking the risk.
His new twitter bio is great though.
“Unemployed as fuck.” PGP.
What is his twitter username?
@dudaronomy
It’s probably good for him. He can move back to Chicago and become his old self, again.
Getting coaxed to uproot your life 1200 miles with promises of fun and improvement only to have it snatched away 4 months later isn’t good for anyone.
Nope. Lucky Jo moved here only 2 months ago as well
I hope Grandex at least bought out the remainder of his lease. Barton Creek just turned Shit Creek for Duda.
And try to convince his ex he’s not the shit boyfriend he actually is.
Since it’s October I say we get a new series “October Scares” this week’s edition could be the massacre at Grandex.
Gotta say for PGP going with mainly freelance writers seems to make sense. Since we’re all hear to basically to bitch about work life and how shitty coworkers and managers can be. It’s pretty hard for multiple people who all work in the same office, which has seemed like a really relaxed office, to be able to keep writing about that aspect of life. Will’s been able to lockdown a couple certain pieces he writes routinely and supplement it with random other articles.
Some of TFM’s best writers from the old days like Roger Sterling Jr. were never even in a fraternity.
Messed up, man. Been a Sigma Chi for a decade.
You’re not dead? Who knew
No podcasts or tweets from anybody in a few days either.
Yeah, why?
That was a truly terrible idea. Not surprised they are going back to how it should be.
But I have to ask the serious question here, With all the lay-offs, will we still get a new TGDAG tomorrow? Can’t leave us on edge Will!
Now if they would just bring back the viewing other people’s best friends feature all would be well
So many boyfriends are glad that feature is gone, though.
TGDAG – Watch coworkers get fired
Starting with Todd. #teamclaire
You guys going to reply to anyone about why you gutted half your staff or continue like everything is completely normal? If you want to get people listening to the podcasts do a short episode on what is going on.
They did the same thing to Brian and Knox. Reminds me of when I came home from school that day in 5th grade and the family dog “went to go live out in the country”.
I was around for that too. It’s pretty frustrating when they don’t let out a peep of what happened. They probably should have fired some of the merchandise people too. I bought a hat a few months ago and received 3 t-shirts, a hat and a pair of sunglasses. Hell of a deal
I think it’s all a hoax to direct more traffic to merchandising- a marketing ploit is all.
Johnny D is chillen in his cube right now, fine tuning his ‘Welcome Back Duda’ article as he sips his Original Donut Shop Keurig cup of joe…#conspiracytheory
They’re not going to fire the merch people. That’s where all of their money is made. The actual media/content wing of Grandex only exists as a loss-leader to drive traffic to Rowdy Gentleman and the other retail brands.
I wish they would roll back out the daily local “City” snapstory. Not a huge story guy, but I did like checking the city story at the end of the day.
It was nice seeing what I was missing out on
I was wondering why there were 90 comments on this column.
this is perfect for Duda