
Feb 4, 2026

One of the first “internet things” that reached beyond a bunch of inevitably really cool people who hung out in chatrooms, was YouTube. Today, we’re going back in time to look back at a potential progenitor of our current era: lonelygirl15. Willa Paskin joins us from Decoder Ring to reminisce about the earliest vloggers and how they have continued to influence us across all other platforms, ever since the first video on YouTube hit a million views in 2005.
Our guest Willa Paskin is a writer and the host of Decoder Ring. You can listen to that podcast here or anywhere you find them.
Panic World