Author: Recode & The Verge

When Tinder launched in 2012, it changed dating culture and our expectations around dating forever by leveraging the iPhone and gamifying the dating experience. But did the rise of dating apps make finding romance easier or harder, and what are the consequences of playing a game that never ends?

• Hosted by Sangeeta Singh Kurtz (@sangeetaskurtz) and Lakshmi Rengarajan (@Shmi_So_Far)
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This season, The Verge and New York Magazine's The Cut trace the evolution of the multi-billion dollar dating app industry. Through conversations with industry leaders, experts, and users, hosts Sangeeta Singh Kurtz and Lakshmi Rengarajan explore the modern dating landscape forged by companies like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and their impact on our hopes for connection. Looking at the past decade of dating, we're asking the question: are the goals of dating app companies aligned with our romantic aspirations? New episodes begin Wednesday, January 11th.

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Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for the future -- that in a few years, we’ll be living our digital lives in a blend of augmented and virtual reality. The metaverse. To pursue that vision, Zuckerberg’s renamed his entire company and invested billions of dollars in a bid to make Meta the leader of the next tech platform. In our season finale: what are the chances his bet pays off, and why it would give Meta more power than ever.

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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• Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech

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Meta’s most expensive acquisition ever and one of the most used communication apps in the world: WhatsApp. With over 2 billion users, WhatsApp is embedded in the social, economic, and political infrastructure of countries across the globe. For better and worse. The story of WhatsApp’s incredible power, as told through its largest market: India.

NOTE: There are descriptions of graphic acts of violence in this episode. If you want to skip these descriptions, the section begins at 20:45 and ends at 22:05.

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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• Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech

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Facebook defined an era of social media built on our connections, our social lives. We’re watching that era come to a close. Now, your main feeds of both Facebook and Instagram will use AI to start increasingly recommending content from people you don't follow. Kind of like another major app you may have heard of – TikTok.

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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• Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech

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Facebook used to brag about how its tools helped politicians swing elections. Now, the platform’s relationship to politics is much more complicated. Today: the story of how one politician again and again forced Zuckerberg to confront his own role in democracy.

• This episode hosted by Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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When Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram in 2012, he promised he would be hands-off with the company’s curated aesthetic and simple features. But as Facebook scaled the startup into a social media juggernaut, tensions flared. Instagram’s founders would leave, and it’s now a very different app than when it first started. But are the changes setting the company up to compete in the future? Or is Instagram losing the magic that made it great in the first place? 

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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If our first episode brought you into the beginning of Zuckerberg’s vision for connecting at scale, this story is about the consequences of pursuing that vision at full speed. In the 2000s, Facebook made a big bet to become a platform for developers – and all social activity across the web. It would bring us FarmVille and “Log In With Facebook.” But years later, it would lead the company into one of its biggest scandals: Cambridge Analytica.

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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• Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech

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Long before Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook Meta and made an unprecedented pivot into the metaverse, he invented a feature that turned Facebook into a social network behemoth. The News Feed, which put your friends’ status updates onto your homepage, changed the way we interact online. It was a strong statement of Zuckerberg’s values: that connecting, and sharing, at scale would be de-facto good for the world. It was also his first public controversy.

• Hosted by Shirin Ghaffary (@shiringhaffary) and Alex Heath (@alexeheath)
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• Follow @recode and @verge for more coverage of Meta and Big Tech

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Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption explores how the social media juggernaut has arrived at this unprecedented moment of transition. Senior reporters Shirin Ghaffary of Recode and Alex Heath of The Verge speak with top Meta executives and some of its biggest critics and ask how the company has shaped our lives, and what lies ahead. New episodes begin Wednesday, July 13th. 

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