An NYC culture reporter on YouTube’s influence and the tab that got away

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and how they would design their own corner of the web.

We caught up with Adlan Jackson, the culture reporter and editor at Hell Gate, a reader-supported New York City news site owned and run by journalists. He talks about YouTube’s cultural influence, the browser tab he shouldn’t have closed and joining his first online forum at age 11 (with parental permission).

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

I’m a millennial, so I still think YouTube is maybe the most important and underrated social network. I feel like so much culture runs downstream from YouTube. 

I’ve got a few different niches. One is “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the “Game of Thrones” book series. I’m into the deep lore and theory videos, especially the esoteric stuff decoding symbolism. That’s my “chew through some hours” zone.

I also love watching performance videos. The YouTube of the late 2000s and early 2010s had this thriving music community. People would post covers, concert footage, TV performances — all of it. I feel like I developed my entire music taste and sensibility from those videos. That scene has kind of dropped off in the Instagram era, which is a shame, because Instagram just doesn’t archive like YouTube does.

There are still some people out there doing it, though. There’s someone on YouTube right now who’s super active in New York — they go to a ton of indie shows and tape them. I’ve actually been DMing them to ask for an interview, but they haven’t responded.

And yeah, I read the comments. YouTube comments on music videos are famously sentimental and mostly pretty positive. But I like the arguments, too. There’s a lot of generational overlap in the YouTube community, so you’ll see these debates play out that don’t really happen on other platforms.

What is an internet deep dive that you can’t wait to jump back into?

I’ve been really trying to understand online gambling.

I’m not a sports person, so the whole legalization and mainstreaming of sports betting completely passed me by. But it feels like it’s everywhere now — so pervasive that I feel like I’m missing out by not understanding the culture, how it works and why it seems to have hooked people so universally. Lately, I’ve been trying to spend more time in online gambling communities to figure it out.

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

I kind of have this eternal regret that there was some tab I closed that I shouldn’t have — and if I hadn’t, my life would be completely different and better. I have no idea what it was, but I’m sure it mattered.

I used to have hundreds of tabs open all the time. I’ve recently resolved to stop doing that and just close everything out regularly. But back then, I definitely felt like there were essays and Substack posts that were going to lead me to my next big story — and now they’re just gone.

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I try to avoid posting [on social media] too much. I used to tweet a lot.  Now, in my capacity as a blogger at Hell Gate, I can’t stop talking about the local music scene.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

It was probably this MMO RPG I used to play called “MapleStory” — a Korean side-scrolling, action-adventure, anime-style RPG. There was a forum called sleepywood.net. Sleepywood was a town in MapleStory, so that’s what the website was named after.

I was in there at 11 years old. I remember signing up for the forum — it was just an old style web forum. You had to be 13 or older, and I wasn’t. So I asked my mom, “Can you give me permission to be on this forum?” She wrote a thing, and they let me on.

What’s funny is, I could have just made it up. But I specifically remember that I didn’t. I really got my mom’s permission.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

I think it would be a place where people feel empowered to create on their own terms. A space where independent media is thriving, and where people are more motivated to pay for work created by people they personally value — not by large conglomerates.

So, someone who skips a Netflix subscription but pays for their friend’s blog. Or someone who doesn’t have Amazon Prime, but subscribes to a local newspaper. 

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

Let me look. What do I have opened? The first thing on my YouTube is a Lord of the Rings lore video by In Deep Geek, which is a channel I follow pretty regularly. It’s about the Dead Men of Dunharrow,  the ghost warriors who join Aragorn at the gates of Mordor. I’ll probably watch that later today.

If the internet were designed to strengthen local news, what would that look like? Who should be responsible for making that happen?

I think the government should give money to local news outlets because we’re an important part of civil society. Mostly, I think the government should support local media. But it’s also nice when people really believe in it, too.

As for tech companies — it depends on the company. Some shouldn’t play a role at all. But unconditional cash? That would be great. Cash with no conditions attached.

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Adlan Jackson is a writer, editor and worker-owner at Hell Gate, a New York City news publication founded as a journalist-run cooperative. He joined the team in 2023 to focus on arts and culture coverage — a beat Hell Gate has always embraced, but Adlan is the first staffer dedicated specifically to it. He covers what’s happening around the city and keeps readers up to date on the local art scene. His work has also appeared on Pitchfork, the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.