I love the Internet, and I also love podcasting. So why did it take me so long to fall in love with a podcast whose tagline is "a show about the Internet" ? I don’t have a good answer. But 2015 is finally the year that I’ve become a regular listener of Reply All.

The show, hosted by the affable Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt, takes elements of Internet culture that maybe you’ve seen or read about and makes them more human. You hear the voices of people on different corners of the Internet.

Given that I am a podcast subscriber of Vogt and Goldman’s former employer (WNYC’s On The Media), you would think that I would have been a regular listener to the show’s earlier incarnation, TLDR. But for some reason, I only caught episodes here or there (I loved the Sgt. Star story, about the US Army’s online chat bot.) But since being re-launched as Reply All, the show has been all killer and no filler.

Other Reply All listeners and I have heard from a guy who used an artist-conceived app to receive an in-person message from his ex-girlfriend by a complete stranger. We’ve heard from the guy who invented the pop-up ad. We’ve heard about what Venmo can tell us about romance, and the weird One Direction obsessives on social media. As someone who pens articles daily about various Internet-related shenanigans, I’ve yet to hear an episode of Reply All that felt stale. (To be fair, I haven’t yet listened to the entire TLDR back catalog.)

The dominion of domains

Take a recent episode posted on New Year’s Eve: #7 This Website is For Sale.

Now, anyone who’s ever tried to buy a domain name knows how frustrating it can be when the .com domain you want is unavailable. Years ago, back when I first was interested in buying domain names, I figured that I’m not a corporation, so I should buy a .org domain—cfarivar.org-—instead of cfarivar.com. Then some years later someone else bought cfarivar.com, who wanted to sell me at one point for $500. I eventually acquired it for $20.

So sure, I was familiar with the various famous domain name auctions (sex.com comes to mind), but it was great to really dive into journalism site Longform’s tale to acquire longform.com. It involved a multi-thousand dollar bidding war, topping out at $25,000, and hearing from the Derek Jeter of domain names.

What I fully didn’t understand is how much money can be made via brokering domain names. This is why the economics of domain names is still baffling to me: people are willing to pay vast sums of money for crazy-weird domains! And yet, no one wants a .cc domain name! Still, the story rounds out really well, especially because it involves a "domain name spirit guide."

A pre-social media Internet star

But probably the most fascinating piece so far has been a revisiting of Jennicam, who they dubbed "the Internet’s first real celebrity." Jennicam was a 90s-era webcam star, who famously put her entire life online for seven years from 1996 until 2003, when she abruptly stopped. Curiously, she's now largely absent from the modern Internet.

As host Alex Goldman intones:

Jenni started to seem like someone who might have some special insight. Someone who’s already gone through what we’re living through today. She was one of the first people to live her life in public. She was one of the first people to become a celebrity simply because she was on camera. She was one of the first people to share her most vulnerable moments with complete strangers online. … Looking at Jennicam as an Internet user in 2014, it’s kinda hard to see the appeal. But there’s something magnetic about watching it. It was easy to sit there and stare at the screen. Anticipating the next picture—another next link in a chain that could be assembled into a narrative. Jenni’s on her bed in thigh-high boots, so she’s going out. Jenni’s in a tank top and sweatpants in front of her computer, so she’s staying home and chatting on IRC. Jenni and a guy are laying next to one another in bed so they’ll fall asleep reading, or they’ll end up having sex. This of course—the possibility of seeing nudity or sex—was also a huge part of the appeal. Maybe it would happen in the next image. Or the next image. Or the next.

But it wasn’t just the risqué exhibitionism that was why Jenni wanted to have her webcam site. The best part of the show is where we hear from Jenni in the present day reflecting on her experience.

I was in my dorm room Saturday night doing laundry. I was a nerd! And I got an email from someone who said: ‘I’m doing laundry too, and I looked and I saw you’re doing laundry too. And I felt like a loser, and I saw you were too, so now I don’t feel so bad.’ That’s what did it for me. … I’m glad to hear that somehow I gave somebody permission to just be themselves and to be ok with that.

The entire episode runs 17 minutes and 45 seconds—but Goldman says that they talked for three hours. I hope that at some point, they release the unedited audio. I’d love to hear more from Jenni, whom co-host Vogt dubs as the "oracle of the Internet." But Jenni, as a humble person, deflects any inkling of gained wisdom. She knows that if there’s one thing that the Internet is good at, it’s over-reacting to everything, both positively and negatively.

She concludes:

I was exhausted at the end. I had to develop a pretty thick skin for the good stuff and the bad stuff. I don’t want to distrust every stranger. I don’t want every good thing or bad thing to make me defensive or proud. It gave me too thick of a skin.

As someone who fully sympathizes with that sentiment, I now especially look forward to Wednesdays, when new episodes of Reply All drop.