This Was A Thing: The Retro Podcast This Was A Thing

Our final stop down defunct social media memory lane: take six seconds (give or take a few hundred) and give a listen to our classic all about Vine!
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Can you put together a meaningful thought or idea in six seconds or less? What about a moderately funny video? It’s hard! But there was some GOLD in them there Vine hills!
Ray teaches Rob about how Vine helped launch the careers of Shawn Mendes, King Bach, and yes, even Jake and Logan Paul. We also revisit some of our favorite Vines of years past including Rob’s favorite – a teacher’s reaction to having a piece of paper thrown at them. “Whoever threw that paper, your mom’s a…”
If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.
 
TEAM:
Ray Hebel
Robert W Schneider
Mark Schroeder
Billy Recce
Daniel Schwartzberg
Gabe Crawford
Natalie DeSavia
 
 
ARTICLES
The Verge
BBC
The Guardian
Pitchfork
Ad Week
Media Post
Medium
a...

Next up in our social platform retrospective: Napster! TikTok may currently be the place where up-and-coming musicians are finding their audience and where labels like Universal have banned their artists from sharing music. But rewind a couple decades and there was one indisputable home of music on the internet: Napster. Only one problem: it was probably all illegal.
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Ah, to be 19 again. It's a time of possibilities, insecurities, of worrying about what adulthood is really going to be like. On the other hand, if you're Shawn Fanning or Sean Parker, your worries at 19 were a little bigger. As in, "multimillion-dollar legal battles with the entire music industry" bigger. And all because of a piece of software that let you listen to and download music from all across the internet...without paying the artists. What could go wrong?
Ray teaches Rob about how a crazy idea on an Internet chat forum grew into the software start-up Napster; how Ray can trace his love of Monty Python to the early days of digital music downloads; how the music industry was forced to reckon with the reality that physical media had become a relic of the past; why pissing off Lars Ulrich is a bad idea; and why Napster's brief and shining moment in the world of online music streaming was the beginning of a trend that completely changed the way the world listens to music.
If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.
TEAMRay Hebel
Robert W. Schneider
Mark Schroeder
Billy Recce
Daniel Schwartzberg
Gabe Crawford
Natalie DeSavia
ARTICLESThe Guardian
Time
Vanity FairEPISODE CLIPSa...

With all this hubbub about TikTok possibly getting banned, we're revisiting three of our episodes about social media platforms that burned bright and burned out fast. And up first - MySpace!
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Friendster, SixDegrees, Makeoutclub - if you're a 90s kid, then you probably remember at least some of those websites (and may they all rest in peace). But there could only be one top dog, and MySpace was it. Hillary Duff, Harry Styles, Kim Kardashian - everyone had a MySpace page, and you better pray your friends put you in their Top 8. So with all the hype, how did the site go from being a 12-billion-dollar gorilla to an Internet has-been?
Rob teaches Ray about how this small, music-centric social site evolved into a global behemoth; why "the honor system" isn't exactly an enforceable privacy policy; the tragic betrayal of Tila Tequila; and why we could all use a little more Tom in our lives.
If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon. 
TEAMRay Hebel
Robert W Schneider
Mark Schroeder
Billy Recce
Daniel Schwartzberg
Gabe Crawford
Natalie DeSavia
ARTICLESTom Anderson's Instagram
AUDIO/VISUALEpisode Clips
Tom Anderson Interview
SNL MySpace Sketch
"Leave Britney Alone" Video
Music & Sound Effects
Additional Sound Effects from Final Cut Pro, iLife, and Logic Pro

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This week, Rob teaches Ray and Daniel about the storied biography of Mr. Carlos Irwin Estevez, better known as Charlie Sheen, including: Sheen’s origins as a child star and teen heartthrob; his breakout role in “Platoon”; Sheen’s struggles with substances and his highly publicized firing from the sitcom that revitalized his career; and how the news media all seized on Sheen’s apparent mental collapse as an opportunity to drive ratings, regardless of the impact it might have had on his state of mind.
If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media. 
TEAMRay Hebel
Robert W. Schneider
Mark Schroeder
Billy Recce
Daniel Schwartzberg
Natalie DeSavia
EPISODE CLIPSCharlie Sheen On Alex Jones
Sheen’s Korner
ABC Interview with Charlie Sheen (02.28.11)
Charlie Sheen Rants Compilation
Chuck Lorre on Replacing Charlie Sheen on "Two and a Half Men”
ADDITIONAL MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS“This Was A Thing” Theme Songs composed by Billy Recce
"Happy Bee,” “Light Awash,” “Study and Relax” • Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
• Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Additional Sound Effects from Final Cut Pro, a...

It's Earth Day and we want to celebrate one of the finest gifts that this pretty planet has to offer. No, not Fred Silverman - everyone's best bud, cannabis! But things haven't always looked as bright for MJ as they do nowadays with modern legalization efforts, and so we're looking back at a time when the hype around marijuana was more about the insanity it caused than its many benefits. And that insanity had a special name - Reefer Madness!
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REEFER MADNESS! It’s taken over this fine country, so we decided it was time to cover it! Run for your life, marijuana is polluting the minds of America’s youths!
“Reefer Madness”, originally titled “Tell Your Children”, was an exploitation and propaganda film released in 1936, 1938, or 1939…. Seriously, they didn’t keep an accurate record of the film’s release. It was meant to teach about the dangers of grass, dope, ganja, that sticky icky icky icky… And the film worked! People were terrified!
What’s even more interesting than the film is The Marihuana Act of 1937. (Yes, that’s how it was spelt.) Passed by the government and backed by William Randolph Hearst, it was the first step in making cannabis as illegal as illegal could be!
This week Ray teaches Rob all about the history of hemp and its many uses, how this film fell into public domain, which ultimately led to some of the first midnight screenings and opened the door for showings of movies like “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “The Room”
…and how that wacky tabacky could make you go insane and beat your acquaintance with a stick. (It’s in the movie.) Be careful out there, folks.
If you like what we’re doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we’d love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you’d like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media.
 TEAM
Ray Hebel
Robert W Schneider
Mark Schroeder
Billy Recce
Daniel Schwartzberg
Gabe Crawford
Natalie DeSavia
 WEBSITES
IMDb
Rotten...