Speaker 1: Coal zone media.
Speaker 2: Clickbait. If I had to define it, clickbait is a
Speaker 2: combination of fake news and a freak show. It was
Speaker 2: a sign of the declining state of reliable journalism in
Speaker 2: the Western world and an early symptom of where American
Speaker 2: journalism finds itself. As I record this, major newsrooms are
Speaker 2: shuddering or vastly reduced during an election year, and most
Speaker 2: major newspapers are owned by billionaires who resist criticism, resulting
Speaker 2: in the remaining papers running on people pleasing fumes that
Speaker 2: encourage their readers to turn their heads from massive human atrocity.
Speaker 2: Ten years ago, things were bad, but not as bad,
Speaker 2: which is something people in the present always say. Ten
Speaker 2: years from now, we'll be pining for the salad days
Speaker 2: of twenty twenty four as we enlist our third graders
Speaker 2: in the water Wars. But for now, it's true. The
Speaker 2: clickbait culture of the mid twenty tens was alarming, it
Speaker 2: worse annoying at best, but it didn't feel existential in
Speaker 2: quite the same way. The word clickbait was a runner
Speaker 2: up for the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, tied with normcore and mansplain, and if there's
Speaker 2: a more twenty fourteen sentence than that, I am not
Speaker 2: aware of it. Here are some major headlines you can
Speaker 2: find at this time. What were in Hillary's emails? We
Speaker 2: have some guesses. The gritty Power Rangers reboot with James
Speaker 2: Vanderbeek is the stuff of nightmares. Thirteen unconventional things to
Speaker 2: do with your gallantine This year you know garbage, And
Speaker 2: you can't say I'm being mean because these are headlines
Speaker 2: I wrote. Come with me if you dare to. Twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: The Big Short Steve Jobs, the movie the Boring One,
Speaker 2: not the hilarious Ashton Kutcher one. Fifty Shades of Gray.
Speaker 2: We're at peak, justin Bieber peak. Fettiwop. The year of
Speaker 2: hotline bling and Hamilton. Obama is rounding out his second term.
Speaker 2: It's the year he allows in air strike on a
Speaker 2: children's hospital in Afghanistan. Gay marriage will be legal across
Speaker 2: the US this June, and ten days after that, a
Speaker 2: dumb bitch named Donald Trump will go down and escalator
Speaker 2: in New York and announce he's wunning for president. I
Speaker 2: have managed to graduate from college as semester early, and
Speaker 2: in fighting for my life at my first proper writing
Speaker 2: job at the Boston Globe. My job, as will become
Speaker 2: relevant to this story, is writing clickbait. Or that's not
Speaker 2: totally right, because yes, I reported to the Boston Globe building.
Speaker 2: I ate my grilled Jesus among them, but very rarely
Speaker 2: was I writing actual news. For the most part, I
Speaker 2: was creating hashtag clickbait content, very little of which required
Speaker 2: original reporting. While I technically worked for the Globe and
Speaker 2: was in their newsroom, I was practically two steps removed.
Speaker 2: Boston dot Com was the Globe's hyperlocal sister site, and
Speaker 2: a now defunct vertical call, BDC Wire was their clickbait site.
Speaker 2: I was one of three writers at BDC Wire, populating
Speaker 2: the site with stories as if there were ten writers,
Speaker 2: and in twenty fifteen, I worked two full time jobs,
Speaker 2: first at this now defunct website, as well as co
Speaker 2: managing a now defunct improv theater and Cards on the Table.
Speaker 2: I was fired from the Globe not six months later
Speaker 2: for refusing to take down a tweet about com I
Speaker 2: don't know you're only twenty two months I'm getting distracted.
Speaker 2: Early twenty fifteen, I did get to do some original
Speaker 2: reporting here and there, but my main gig was sourcing
Speaker 2: viral news and rephrasing my sources with citations that sites
Speaker 2: like these would adorably and deceptively call hat tips. And
Speaker 2: I'd love to tell you what more of these stories were,
Speaker 2: but as any journalist who started working in the age
Speaker 2: of the Internet knows, almost none of it is available
Speaker 2: now without the assistance of the Internet archive. BDC wire
Speaker 2: is gone, along with those articles I wrote, like ten
Speaker 2: reasons Chris Evans being from Massachusetts is the one reason
Speaker 2: not to end at all, or whatever I was reading
Speaker 2: on today's Internet. BBC Wire never existed, so just a
Speaker 2: reminder you are listening to a future piece of lost media.
Speaker 2: But in the mid twenty tens, a lot of writers
Speaker 2: got their start the same way I did. At this time,
Speaker 2: including probably writers you like now, from young Gen xers
Speaker 2: to elderly zoomers. We were tasked with regurgitating stories that
Speaker 2: social media cared about, and regurgitating them to make them
Speaker 2: seem like actual news. We weren't making shit up like tabloids,
Speaker 2: but there was a sense that one writer was vomiting
Speaker 2: into another writer's mouth, and so on and so on
Speaker 2: to maximize site traffic and profit. We the writers never
Speaker 2: got paid equitably, but for places like The Boston Globe
Speaker 2: and other major news organizations who were hemorrhaging money due
Speaker 2: to the inability to adapt to the Internet. When the
Speaker 2: moment came, these click sister sites became a temporary attempt
Speaker 2: at increasing cash flow, or, as I knew it, tricking
Speaker 2: a group of twenty two year olds into thinking they
Speaker 2: were real writers in exchange for bad pay and a
Speaker 2: content mill mentality. So basically, I was working for a
Speaker 2: regional ripoff of early BuzzFeed. And to be clear, I
Speaker 2: am not conflating BuzzFeed the website with BuzzFeed News, which
Speaker 2: is a Pulitzer winning and recently tragically shuttered news division.
Speaker 2: Nor am I saying that working at a BuzzFeed content
Speaker 2: mill was bad or even uncreative. I mean I think
Speaker 2: that my BBC wire magnum opus. I saw Shrek the
Speaker 2: Musical five times colon. This is my story fucking ripped,
Speaker 2: not that you can read it anywhere. What's interesting is
Speaker 2: that this regurgitation media strategy, inspired by BuzzFeed combing the
Speaker 2: Internet to fill their website full of clickable, eccentric hashtag content,
Speaker 2: often legitimized Internet characters of the day as legitimate news figures,
Speaker 2: and this was never more true than in the mid
Speaker 2: twenty tents. A quick brief on BuzzFeed. At this time,
Speaker 2: the company had been around since two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: and its legitimate news arm, BuzzFeed News, wouldn't be launched
Speaker 2: until a year later in twenty sixteen. Founder Jonah Peretti
Speaker 2: had made BuzzFeed an algorithmic project from the start. In
Speaker 2: a twenty thirteen profile of Paretti in New York Magazine,
Speaker 2: early BuzzFeed is described as Peretti's quote algorithm to cold
Speaker 2: stories from around the web that were showing stirring the virality.
Speaker 2: In return for functioning as a sort of early warning system,
Speaker 2: BuzzFeed persuaded partner sites to install programming code that allowed
Speaker 2: the company to monitor their traffic. Like a lot of
Speaker 2: social media we discussed today, Peretti's original project begun while
Speaker 2: he was working at the similarly click minded Huffington Post
Speaker 2: was collecting a shitload of data at best. He wanted
Speaker 2: to know what people were interested in. If I'm being cynical,
Speaker 2: he wanted to sell it back to us in it
Speaker 2: easy to consume package, and we were happy to do it.
Speaker 2: By twenty fifteen, BuzzFeed had grown exponentially and started creating
Speaker 2: original content in addition to their bread and Butter, which
Speaker 2: was both curating and rephrasing viral stories from other corners
Speaker 2: of the Internet to drive traffic. And one thousand different
Speaker 2: quizzes on which ice cream flavor you were based on
Speaker 2: your mental illness diagnosis something like that. I took them all,
Speaker 2: no judgment, min chocolate, chip, OCD, bipolar whatever. Much of
Speaker 2: early BuzzFeed was extremely goofy and what I think is
Speaker 2: now sort of associated as being an embarrassingly millennial thing,
Speaker 2: but there was no shortage of talent there. Quinta Brunson
Speaker 2: produced a lot of her early viral stuff at BuzzFeed,
Speaker 2: and many people in their writing and performance stable ended
Speaker 2: up bailing on BuzzFeed because they were treated like mill
Speaker 2: workers and not artists. Think comedians and writers like Gabe
Speaker 2: Dunn and Alison Raskin. Think super successful YouTubers like Sophia
Speaker 2: and Niguard. Think whether you love them or you hate
Speaker 2: them for cheating on their wives, the try guys. But
Speaker 2: regardless of the level of talent, there's no point in
Speaker 2: denying it. A lot of early BuzzFeed was rehash stuff
Speaker 2: either sent in by users or gently lifted by a
Speaker 2: fleet of young, aspiring writers like myself to proliferate a
Speaker 2: sticky story that someone else had posted online for free already.
Speaker 2: The goal show it to a wider audience with some
Speaker 2: light commentary and yield a massive profit for Daddy BuzzFeed.
Speaker 2: And one of BuzzFeed's greatest main character co signs in
Speaker 2: its history came on February twenty sixth, twenty fifteen, a
Speaker 2: day that launched two huge viral stories. One was about
Speaker 2: a pair of lamas that escaped in an Arizona retirement home.
Speaker 3: In Sun City. Today this may have been the very
Speaker 3: definition of the Wild West, a slow, sometimes high speed
Speaker 3: pursuit of two lamas on the loose, breaking away from
Speaker 3: their owners, at times from each other, seizing their moment,
Speaker 3: and they're shot at freedom.
Speaker 2: And the other one is one whose impact is still
Speaker 2: almost bafflingly still enduring today. The dress. Your sixteenth minute
Speaker 2: starts now. The dress. It's a potent and memorable piece
Speaker 2: of Internet lore. One where your perception mattered was this dress,
Speaker 2: which was first posted by a Scottish mother of the bride,
Speaker 2: Cecilia Bleesdale in this weird blown out photo from a
Speaker 2: designer outlet in England. Was this dress blue and black?
Speaker 2: Or was it white and gold? It was blue and black,
Speaker 2: and I knew that right away because I'm perfect and
Speaker 2: I've never made a mistake. And even though it sounds
Speaker 2: old timey, I mean, after all, we're talking about an
Speaker 2: optical illusion that resulted from an objectively shitty phone camera.
Speaker 2: It's kind of hard to overstate what a sensation the
Speaker 2: dress became. I remember this day so clearly because this
Speaker 2: story broke my second week working as a professional writer
Speaker 2: and as a kid who'd been brought in to write clickbait.
Speaker 2: It was like a gorgeous gift, had to say and
Speaker 2: did from space. As I was reflecting, I wanted to
Speaker 2: make sure I wasn't fluffing the memory in my mind,
Speaker 2: so I reached out to my buddy, Kevin Slain, who
Speaker 2: was one of the other three writers working overtime to
Speaker 2: create hashtag content on BDC wire to be read by
Speaker 2: hashtag nobody for hashtag seventy hours a week, and he
Speaker 2: remembered this day really clearly too.
Speaker 4: My name is Kevin Slain, and I am a staff
Speaker 4: writer at the Boston Globe, covering entertainment and culture.
Speaker 2: Hi, Kevin, what's up?
Speaker 4: Not much, Jamie? How are you?
Speaker 2: I am good after all these years, I'm good.
Speaker 4: Real throw it back talking to you today about this day.
Speaker 2: I know about this historic day that is over nine
Speaker 2: years ago now, which feels not great. Okay. So I
Speaker 2: just wanted to go because I feel like I was
Speaker 2: writing out like how I imagine this day. I think
Speaker 2: it was like, certainly in my first month working at
Speaker 2: bad Wire, do you remember the dress day in our
Speaker 2: little corner?
Speaker 4: So I remember what I did that day, and at
Speaker 4: least in my case, we're talking about Thursday, which was
Speaker 4: kind of like the dress dropped at night, you know.
Speaker 4: It was the wave the day went for me was
Speaker 4: I was at work. I wrote a story about the Lamas,
Speaker 4: which was the big I remember, a predecessor to the dress.
Speaker 2: I dreamed some Lamas. I can't find it on the
Speaker 2: way back machine, but remember I was like, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: Lama's first Lamas are the story.
Speaker 4: I had to go back through my Twitter archive and
Speaker 4: I found that I tweeted out the story that I
Speaker 4: wrote about the Lamas.
Speaker 5: Thank god.
Speaker 4: It was just, you know, our house style at the time,
Speaker 4: lots of gifts, lots of old text, you know, us
Speaker 4: trying to be BuzzFeed. I guess, yeah. But anyway, so
Speaker 4: I did that, and then a bunch of us went
Speaker 4: to have the hour at the Banshee, which was just
Speaker 4: where a lot of us went after work, and I
Speaker 4: proceeded to get really drunk and sing a lot of karaoke,
Speaker 4: and at some point someone pulled out their phone and
Speaker 4: started showing it to everyone, being like, check this out.
Speaker 4: This dress thing is crazy. And I reacted to it
Speaker 4: the way that I think I did to a lot
Speaker 4: of that stuff for the time, because this was like
Speaker 4: our first media job, and I just felt simultaneously like
Speaker 4: enthralled by the conversation but also repulsed, and I felt,
Speaker 4: you know, probably undeservedly above it all. And so the
Speaker 4: thing was that back then they really had like a
Speaker 4: flat hierarchy in terms of like who could say what,
Speaker 4: and everyone would just send all staff emails all the time.
Speaker 4: And I remember pulling out my phone and looking and
Speaker 4: seeing that our old homepage had like three stories on
Speaker 4: the dress right on the top, and there was like
Speaker 4: an active email chain going on about this, and me,
Speaker 4: very drunk.
Speaker 6: Just was like, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 4: I can't believe we have three stories on the dress
Speaker 4: on the homepage. And whoever did that got like, you know,
Speaker 4: offended that I said that rightfully.
Speaker 2: So well, I mean that's a lot. I didn't remember
Speaker 2: there being three stories, but that also makes sense because
Speaker 2: there were like three different verticals sort of all like
Speaker 2: going to the same place, and we were all trying
Speaker 2: to get clicks on the same thing that we were
Speaker 2: all sort of ripping off for a BuzzFeed. It was
Speaker 2: just like weird. It was a weird.
Speaker 4: Time, It really was. And I even went and then
Speaker 4: looked at the like the next day I looked in
Speaker 4: the wayback machine and it was even more of that.
Speaker 4: It was like the night producer who wrote like a
Speaker 4: short little thing, and then our old boss who I
Speaker 4: won't name, wrote this like very ridiculous in his own
Speaker 4: voice style post, and then someone else wrote like their
Speaker 4: take on the dress, and then another of our old
Speaker 4: bosses then asked John Henry to wear about the dress.
Speaker 4: And there's a video I can't find of him talking
Speaker 4: about the dress, which I wish I could find because
Speaker 4: I think that's what I.
Speaker 2: Wish we had. The John Henry funage that's.
Speaker 4: Unanged, right, like, who needed that?
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, thank you for reminiscing with me. This
Speaker 2: was beautiful.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's weird to think about now, and I know
Speaker 4: it's objectively not true. It was a totally different time
Speaker 4: and you can't help but look back at it fondly,
Speaker 4: despite the fact that I was hating myself through the
Speaker 4: entire portion of it.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Kevin, who is a real writer
Speaker 2: for the Boston Globe and has been for years. So
Speaker 2: this day was genuinely a huge day for news on
Speaker 2: and about the Internet. The FCC had just voted to
Speaker 2: classify Internet service providers as public utilities, effectively creating net neutrality,
Speaker 2: but the dress was indisputably the main character. Here's the
Speaker 2: cliff notes of what happened. In February twenty fifteen. A
Speaker 2: Scottish couple was preparing for their wedding and the bride's
Speaker 2: mother texted her daughter a photo of the dress she
Speaker 2: was considering wearing. The dress. It's not a great picture,
Speaker 2: but it is a very mid twenty ten's mother of
Speaker 2: the bride dress. There is this little cropped jacket, some
Speaker 2: color blocking unnecessary lace elements, but the color that was
Speaker 2: the question the bride. Grace posted the photo of the
Speaker 2: dress to her Facebook and explained the dilemma. Her mom
Speaker 2: assured her that the dress was blue with black lace,
Speaker 2: that Grace was seeing it as white with gold lace.
Speaker 2: So she posted the question to her Facebook so her
Speaker 2: friends could weigh in, and a week long debate was sparked.
Speaker 2: So the dress first became a main character in her
Speaker 2: small community in colin Say, Scotland. Then the wedding happened
Speaker 2: and Grace's mom wore the dress. It was a topic
Speaker 2: of discussion at the wedding too, and it's actually members
Speaker 2: of the wedding band that take the dress from a
Speaker 2: local phenomenon into a global one. Singer and guitarist Caitlyn McNeil,
Speaker 2: who was a close friend of the couples, said of
Speaker 2: the dress, iurl we forgot about it until we saw
Speaker 2: it at the wedding, which the mother of the bride
Speaker 2: was wearing, and it was obviously blue and black in
Speaker 2: any other timeline. This would be a footnote that Grace's
Speaker 2: mom would half remember when giving the dress to Goodwill
Speaker 2: a decade later. But this was a time on the
Speaker 2: Internet where viral stories were social currency. And Katelyn McNeil
Speaker 2: had taken up the mantle of the dress. It was
Speaker 2: her who ended up posting what would become the viral
Speaker 2: seed that would take this story global on her tumbler.
Speaker 2: The post, attached to a picture of the dress said, guys,
Speaker 2: please help me. Is this dress white or gold? Or
Speaker 2: blue and black? Me and my friends can't agree and
Speaker 2: we are freaking the fuck out. I can't handle this.
Speaker 2: It got about five thousand notes, and if you aren't
Speaker 2: Tumblr literate, that was a lot of interaction on the
Speaker 2: platform for the time. And here's where BuzzFeed comes in,
Speaker 2: as the legend goes. BuzzFeed writer Kate's Holderness was running
Speaker 2: the BuzzFeed tumbler at that time and was tasked with
Speaker 2: what a lot of writers were back then, finding popular
Speaker 2: garbage to amplify. But this was not petty content.
Speaker 3: Theft.
Speaker 2: Caitlyn McNeil was writing so high on the dress fumes
Speaker 2: that she sent Holderness her post saying, BuzzFeed, please help.
Speaker 2: I posted a picture of this dress. It's the last
Speaker 2: post on my tumbler. Okay, and some people see it
Speaker 2: blue and some people see it white. Can you explain?
Speaker 2: Because we are going crazy Holderness replied, Holy crap, it's
Speaker 2: blue and black. I don't understand. I made a pole,
Speaker 2: and she links to what she posted off of Caitlyn
Speaker 2: McNeil's tip. A classic BuzzFeed post published in the early evening.
Speaker 2: As Kevin correctly recalled, the post was simply titled what
Speaker 2: color is this dress? There was a poll to vote
Speaker 2: black and blue or white and gold. The post started
Speaker 2: doing well right away, but pretty much everything on BuzzFeed
Speaker 2: at that time did. It was after folks left for
Speaker 2: work that things went nuts. The dress was literally an
Speaker 2: overnight success. When the BuzzFeed team returned the next morning,
Speaker 2: Holderness's post had reached eight hundred and forty thousand views
Speaker 2: per minute. At its peak, it had broken BuzzFeed's traffic record,
Speaker 2: becoming its most successful post of all time, and once
Speaker 2: the BuzzFeed post took off, the dress became a popular
Speaker 2: subject of discussion on virtually every social media platform at
Speaker 2: the time. But Twitter tends to be the thing that
Speaker 2: people still talk about these days. Facebook is for moms
Speaker 2: and creepy cousins, but in twenty fifteen, it was Twitter
Speaker 2: where famous people ruined their own lives by weighing in
Speaker 2: like some freaky plebeians just like us. It was right
Speaker 2: before celebrities all realized in Unison that they needed their
Speaker 2: own social media managers, and so you could be pretty
Speaker 2: sure that it was the actual Justin Bieber saying.
Speaker 7: And for everyone asking, I see blue and.
Speaker 2: Black, And it was the real Taylor Swift when she said.
Speaker 1: I don't understand this odd dress debit, and I feel
Speaker 1: like it's a trick somehow, I'm confused and scared.
Speaker 2: Ps it's obviously blue and black, or Mindy kaaling with
Speaker 2: one of the most twenty fifteen tweets of all time,
Speaker 2: the dress is worse than the Sony hack to me,
Speaker 2: Beyonce said nothing, This is all a little pedestrian for Beyonce,
Speaker 2: BuzzFeed was at the top of their game, and so
Speaker 2: of course made more content about the dress. Twenty four
Speaker 2: hours after the first post about the dress went live
Speaker 2: on the site, nine out of ten trending BuzzFeed posts
Speaker 2: were about the same dress. They were fucking relentless. Why
Speaker 2: are people seeing different colors in that damn dress? The
Speaker 2: dress is blue and black, says the person who saw
Speaker 2: it in person. This second photo of the dress definitely
Speaker 2: proves that the dress is blue and black. What the
Speaker 2: dress color you see says about you? And the one
Speaker 2: post that wasn't about the dress. Here's the first picture
Speaker 2: of Eddie Redmain as transgender painter Lily elba Oh twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: And don't forget at this time, buzzfeeds video vertical was
Speaker 2: also really popular on YouTube, and that was also going
Speaker 2: nuts with traffic from the dress.
Speaker 3: You are seeing white and gold?
Speaker 4: Where are you looking at? Oh no, you're kidding.
Speaker 2: You heard correctly, that's Quinta Brunson. I just think that's
Speaker 2: really funny. So yes, the dress is a goofy sensation,
Speaker 2: and it even trickles down to lowly worm regional BuzzFeed
Speaker 2: ripoff writer Jamie Loftus. But keep in mind BuzzFeed is
Speaker 2: a business, and people with any monetary stock in BuzzFeed
Speaker 2: were doing donuts in their Mercedes about this fucking story.
Speaker 2: There was even this bizarre essay by then editor in
Speaker 2: chief Ben Smith saying that the dress phenomenon was this
Speaker 2: sign of BuzzFeed's power.
Speaker 7: He said, the explosion of Kate's holderness is post about
Speaker 7: the dress White and Gold, by the way, is a
Speaker 7: reminder that while we now do so many more things
Speaker 7: We've never moved away from our roots. Indeed, we launched
Speaker 7: the Cute or Not app yesterday.
Speaker 2: Sir, Sure, your underpaid employee reblogged a Tumbler post, but
Speaker 2: by all means, keep talking. This post in particular is
Speaker 2: so weird to reflect on now. It sounds so certain
Speaker 2: that BuzzFeed will be the vanguard of what makes something
Speaker 2: special on the Internet, and that a post like the
Speaker 2: dress is all a part of the game of five
Speaker 2: D chess that BuzzFeed is playing, and that they're the
Speaker 2: reason that the dress succeeded. Smith continued, we are interested
Speaker 2: most of all in what a story does, not just
Speaker 2: in how many people read it, but in what effect
Speaker 2: it has on their lives and on the world. Kate's
Speaker 2: post delighted people and connected them to steal an idea
Speaker 2: from z Frank. Its power was less in the encapsulated
Speaker 2: item itself than in the network around it. That's true
Speaker 2: of a brilliant piece of entertainment. It's true of a
Speaker 2: recipe or a DIY suggestion. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is getting millions
Speaker 2: and millions of impressions from this story, one that Kaitlyn
Speaker 2: McNeil literally handed to them. But it's BuzzFeed that keeps
Speaker 2: the profits from the engagement. At a time where impressions
Speaker 2: were what find your success and your advertising profits, as
Speaker 2: is so common in these stories, it was like everyone
Speaker 2: was benefiting from the dress story, except, of course, anyone
Speaker 2: involved in the actual story. It didn't take long for
Speaker 2: completely unrelated businesses to start commenting on the dress. To
Speaker 2: capitalize on the trend. Pizza Hut posts a picture of
Speaker 2: a shitty pizza with the caption It's white and gold.
Speaker 2: Two newscasters wear the dress on air as a bit
Speaker 2: The original dress on a website called Roman Originals sells
Speaker 2: out immediately. Brandon Silverman, the former CEO of social media
Speaker 2: monitoring site crowd Tangled, said this when asked about the
Speaker 2: range of institutions that wanted in on this story. This
Speaker 2: is from a twenty sixteen retrospective on the Day of
Speaker 2: the Lama and the Dress from twenty sixteen, written for
Speaker 2: where Else BuzzFeed.
Speaker 6: Silverman says this, We've seen other stories go viral, but
Speaker 6: the sheer diversity of outlets that picks it up and
Speaker 6: we're talking about it was unlike anything we had ever seen.
Speaker 6: Everyone from QVC to Warner Bros. To local public libraries
Speaker 6: to Red Cross affiliates were all posting links to it
Speaker 6: on their social accounts. That kind of diversity and who's
Speaker 6: sharing a story pretty much never happens, and certainly never
Speaker 6: to that degree.
Speaker 2: And of course, no Internet main character would be complete
Speaker 2: without the backlash, which in the case of the dress
Speaker 2: came in the form of people bemoaning that this story
Speaker 2: had overshadowed more important news from the same day. And
Speaker 2: even this mentality feels a little bit dated now. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's important to discuss the other news of the day,
Speaker 2: but favoring something goofy and meaningless over hard news wasn't
Speaker 2: something that started in twenty fifteen. Although that said, I
Speaker 2: do think there's a case for saying that the success
Speaker 2: of posts like the dress tells people in tech developing
Speaker 2: social media algorithms at this time what kind of stories
Speaker 2: are distracting for people, leading to an era of the
Speaker 2: algorithm favoring engagement driven posts over carefully reported news. To
Speaker 2: talk about what made the dress special in terms of
Speaker 2: what it is said about where social media was picking
Speaker 2: its main characters at this time, I turned to a
Speaker 2: writer who has spent her career writing about the Internet,
Speaker 2: often meaning the Internet turns on her. Taylor Lowrenz released
Speaker 2: her book Extremely Online, The Untold Story of Fame, Influence,
Speaker 2: and Power on the Internet last year, taking a look
Speaker 2: at the short and eventful history of online influencers, including
Speaker 2: a fair number of characters of the day, and yes,
Speaker 2: the dress herself. We caught up on zoom about this
Speaker 2: very particular moment in internet history.
Speaker 5: I'm Taylor Lorenz and I'm the author of Extremely Online,
Speaker 5: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet.
Speaker 2: This has been your beat for some time. How did
Speaker 2: you become the person to talk to about the Internet.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I'm like peak millennial. I graduated directly into
Speaker 5: the recession, the two thousand and eight financial crisis, and
Speaker 5: I had had like random internships in college and summer jobs,
Speaker 5: but I didn't really know what I was doing. And
Speaker 5: so I was working retail foodstarre, I worked for a
Speaker 5: messenger company, I was babysitting. I worked at a call
Speaker 5: center for a while. I was just kind of making
Speaker 5: money and I discovered Tumblr, which back in two thousand
Speaker 5: and nine was ascended as a social platform, and that
Speaker 5: was kind of my gateway into blogging. And I just
Speaker 5: started blogging about stuff. At the time, I was really
Speaker 5: against the mainstream media because they were writing really stupid
Speaker 5: things about tech and millennials and it was making me mad,
Speaker 5: and so I would just go on my blogs and
Speaker 5: rants about whatever I felt like ranting about. I was
Speaker 5: really inspired by this woman Katie Natopoulos, who yes, she
Speaker 5: was blogging back then too, and she had this website.
Speaker 5: She had all these funny like blogs and sites, and
Speaker 5: she seemed to be like the only person that I thought.
Speaker 5: She was like a couple years older than me and
Speaker 5: seemed really cool, And I just thought, I'm going to
Speaker 5: try to write about the Internet, but like from the
Speaker 5: perspective of somebody that actually uses it.
Speaker 2: There are stories that feel or my feeling at first
Speaker 2: was it feels very connected to a certain type of
Speaker 2: platform or like a certain era in social media. When
Speaker 2: I was reading extremely Online, I was like, oh, right,
Speaker 2: the dress was kind of this cross platform success story.
Speaker 2: Could you unpact that a little for me of like
Speaker 2: how the original story and then BuzzFeed kind of had
Speaker 2: a mutual role in this story success. Yeah.
Speaker 5: We was just to kind of like explain the landscape
Speaker 5: throughout the early to mid twenty tens. You had this
Speaker 5: explosion of digital media sites spurred by VC funding, you know, BuzzFeed,
Speaker 5: Mike dot Com, Race to Work, Mashable, like, there were
Speaker 5: all these like digital media sites, and the primary way
Speaker 5: that they were gaining traffic was going into sort of
Speaker 5: what were then the depths of the Internet, mostly Tumblr
Speaker 5: and Reddit, getting the most viral content off those platforms
Speaker 5: and repackaging on the website. Because that was an era
Speaker 5: when not a lot of people were going and spending
Speaker 5: a lot of time and getting their news and information
Speaker 5: and entertainment from social media directly itself. It wasn't as
Speaker 5: widely adopted. People didn't know how to navigate the Internet yet,
Speaker 5: so buzzeed would just sort of like mine this content.
Speaker 5: Keats was working at BuzzFeed at the time, found a
Speaker 5: Tumblr post about the dress and was like, wow, this
Speaker 5: is kind of crazy. It was getting a little bit
Speaker 5: of traction on Tumblr, and she thought, let me post
Speaker 5: it on the BuzzFeed website because that's kind of again
Speaker 5: the business model at the time was finding what did
Speaker 5: while on Tumblr and then bringing it to this wider
Speaker 5: audience a BuzzFeed, And of course she publishes it on
Speaker 5: BuzzFeed and it just goes insane. A bunch of other
Speaker 5: places immediately published their own versions of that story, but
Speaker 5: BuzzFeed got like all the upside kind of from it,
Speaker 5: Like they got all the traffic they were able to
Speaker 5: monetize through ads on that article page. Like right, nobody
Speaker 5: was clicking through as much to the original tumbler.
Speaker 2: That day, I was cruising the way back machine and
Speaker 2: I was like, this is what I think of as
Speaker 2: like peak BuzzFeed. How did they get there? Like what
Speaker 2: made BuzzFeed special or early to this kind of content mining?
Speaker 5: BuzzFeed was one of the first true sort of like
Speaker 5: digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea
Speaker 5: in the two thousands, it's really expurred by the rise
Speaker 5: of blogging, that you could build digital media platforms and
Speaker 5: capture digital media ad dollars. There's all this money moving
Speaker 5: from traditional advertising to digital advertising. The traditional advertising had
Speaker 5: been with newspapers and traditional media, and so the thinking
Speaker 5: was back then was all those traditional ad dollars are
Speaker 5: going to go to the digital version of the news
Speaker 5: media that the advertisers were advertising with. So there was
Speaker 5: this website like vox and you know, other sites were
Speaker 5: sort of created to capture those ad dollars. Obviously that
Speaker 5: didn't happen. The money actually ended up going to Facebook
Speaker 5: and Google directly, which is why that whole crop of
Speaker 5: digital media companies died pretty much or like as a
Speaker 5: shell of themselves. But traffic was the most important thing.
Speaker 5: Traffic was so important because the more views you got,
Speaker 5: the more digital display ads you know we're seeing, the
Speaker 5: more money the platform would make. And this is when
Speaker 5: a lot of platforms, including Facebook, were prioritizing link posts.
Speaker 5: They hadn't pivoted to video yet. There wasn't a lot
Speaker 5: of multimedia because the Internet speeds weren't there yet, so
Speaker 5: it would make the sites really slow and clunky to load.
Speaker 5: Instagram was barely had video at that time, so links
Speaker 5: were really kaying and if you could create a very
Speaker 5: shareable link, you could get tons of traffic. Therefore, the
Speaker 5: company would make tons of money. And BuzzFeed was just
Speaker 5: expert at this because BuzzFeed realized very early that Internet
Speaker 5: users at that time didn't want to go through Reddit.
Speaker 5: You have to remember this was pre algorithmic feeds. Algorithmic
Speaker 5: seeds were not really a thing back then. I think
Speaker 5: Twitter only rolled out their algorithmicfeed in twenty sixteen. Twenty fifteen,
Speaker 5: it was really like the Internet was very manual, and
Speaker 5: so if people went on a platform, they couldn't especially
Speaker 5: Tumblr at that time was completely reverse chronological, right, so
Speaker 5: if you went on the platform, it was hard to
Speaker 5: kind of find the most interesting viral content. So we
Speaker 5: relied on this intermediaries like BuzzFeed to go into these
Speaker 5: platforms scrape out the most engaging content and presented to
Speaker 5: you all in one place. On this case too, I
Speaker 5: think it's really interesting that the dress post it was
Speaker 5: posted on a Tumblr that was like a fan tumbler
Speaker 5: for this girl, Sarah White chol I was mispronounce her
Speaker 5: name even though Yeah lovely who was like a YouTuber manager.
Speaker 5: So it was just like the chances of somebody finding
Speaker 5: that normally, yes, it was getting reblogged on Tumblr, but
Speaker 5: BuzzFeed was really like the amplifier.
Speaker 2: Basically, thanks so much to Taylor and check out Extremely
Speaker 2: Online in stores now, and we'll be right back with
Speaker 2: another interview about why the success of the dress marked
Speaker 2: the beginning of the end for dumb fun on the Internet.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I am The author of
Speaker 2: the twenty fifteen post was SNL's isis sketch too offensive.
Speaker 2: As fascinated as I am about how the dress went
Speaker 2: viral in what now feels like an almost old fashioned way,
Speaker 2: I wanted to take a second to do my due diligence.
Speaker 2: Why were people seeing this dress as two different color schemes.
Speaker 2: This was a major subject of clickbait from Clickbait at
Speaker 2: the time, most notably a Wired piece published the day
Speaker 2: after that ended up racking up over thirty two million views.
Speaker 2: In that piece, writer Adam Rodgers asked Professor Bevill Conway,
Speaker 2: who studied color and vision at Wellesley College, to comment,
Speaker 2: and Professor Conway said that it was some combination of
Speaker 2: the varying ways in which people perceive light, and that
Speaker 2: the picture was just shitty quality and really blown out.
Speaker 2: Here's his fancy science explanation. Your visual system is looking
Speaker 2: at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic
Speaker 2: bias of the daylight axis. People either discount the blue side,
Speaker 2: in which case they end up seeing white and gold,
Speaker 2: or discount the gold side, in which case they end
Speaker 2: up with blue and black. This also connects to the
Speaker 2: maddening feeling of the dress switching colors before your eyes.
Speaker 2: Like Quinta yelled about in the BuzzFeed video. So if
Speaker 2: you were a neuroscientist with a focus on vision, and
Speaker 2: I know you're not, this actually prompted a pretty rich
Speaker 2: scientific discussion. The Journal of Vision dedicated a whole issue
Speaker 2: to the dress with some pretty interesting findings. They spoke
Speaker 2: to fourteen hundred respondents, with fifty seven percent seeing black
Speaker 2: and blue, eleven percent black and brown, thirty percent white
Speaker 2: and gold, and two percent. Other tests included showing the
Speaker 2: dress in artificial yellow and blue light to see if
Speaker 2: that's shifted bias, and a study from Pascal Wallash showed
Speaker 2: the really interesting trend that people who woke up early
Speaker 2: were more likely to see the dress as white and gold,
Speaker 2: and people who went out at night moore were likely
Speaker 2: to see black and blue. And I'll admit reading about
Speaker 2: why your brain makes you see the dress as one
Speaker 2: thing or the other is really really interesting, even when
Speaker 2: what's being explained to you is a pretty straightforward optical illusion.
Speaker 2: And even though as I'm writing this episode this only
Speaker 2: happened about nine years ago, it feels like it's longer.
Speaker 2: It reminds me of a targeted ad I got for
Speaker 2: a T shirt sold by ClickHole which if you're not familiar,
Speaker 2: is a spinoff of the onion Net, specifically satirized clickbait.
Speaker 2: The shirt says the Internet nineteen eighty three to twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: and it gets at this feeling I'm having that shortly
Speaker 2: after the Dress, the Internet became less fun. Of course,
Speaker 2: this is coming from a very Western, privileged perspective, but
Speaker 2: it's pretty commonly held that in the US, around the
Speaker 2: time that the twenty sixteen election cycle began, social media
Speaker 2: became less fun. Let's not to say it was a
Speaker 2: cakewalk before. There are many stories of discription and harassment
Speaker 2: that took place here, many of which I'll cover on
Speaker 2: this show. But I'm trying to get at the ratio
Speaker 2: of fun stories to existentially terrifying stories, the ratio of hey,
Speaker 2: what color is this? To bigoted conspiracy theories in the mainstream.
Speaker 2: The dress kind of feels like the end of an era.
Speaker 2: Early twenty fifteen wasn't an Internet that wasn't poisoned with hate,
Speaker 2: but it felt like an Internet whose hate didn't poison everything,
Speaker 2: and less than a year later that didn't really feel true.
Speaker 2: I didn't speak to anyone involved in the original dress
Speaker 2: story for reasons I'll get to, but I wanted to
Speaker 2: better understand how the Internet shifted in the year after
Speaker 2: the dress, to bring us to the kind of viral
Speaker 2: stories we were seeing in twenty sixteen. Just a year later.
Speaker 2: For Perspective, the Ringers roundup of twenty sixteen viral stories
Speaker 2: included some classics like chewbacco mom, but also just the
Speaker 2: word Nazism. So, yeah, there was a mainstream shift that
Speaker 2: had taken place. And this was for a reason, not
Speaker 2: just because of the heightened bigoted extremism in the Western world,
Speaker 2: but because of how our social networks were functioning. It's
Speaker 2: something that BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti commented on as recently
Speaker 2: as twenty nineteen, less than five years after the dress story.
Speaker 2: In November twenty nineteen, he told Max Read at Intelligencer,
Speaker 2: the dress.
Speaker 7: Was a kind of perfect thing to catch fire. At
Speaker 7: that moment, the Internet was less polarized and politicized, and
Speaker 7: it had shifted to mobile fully, so people were looking
Speaker 7: at mobile devices with the dress. If you saw it
Speaker 7: on your phone and you were with people, you could
Speaker 7: hold the phone up and say what color is this. Plus,
Speaker 7: in the early days of BuzzFeed, our traffic would die
Speaker 7: in the evening because people would watch television or go
Speaker 7: out with their friends. Now, with mobile, we see primetime
Speaker 7: for our content as the same as primetime for television.
Speaker 7: People are sharing content and looking at content later.
Speaker 2: Keep in mind this is a quote from less than
Speaker 2: half a decade later, but the difference between twenty fifteen
Speaker 2: and twenty nineteen on the US Internet made it feel
Speaker 2: like he was talking about twenty years ago. I mean,
Speaker 2: hell on the Internet. Forty years passed between November twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen and November twenty twenty, and since this interview, BuzzFeed
Speaker 2: has changed even more. Paretti pulled the plug on his
Speaker 2: Pulitzer winning news operation only seven years after it launched
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three, and is currently focused on rerouting
Speaker 2: BuzzFeed to AI. Depressing, yes, but not surprising, because after all,
Speaker 2: Paretti started the company to operate on algorithms with no
Speaker 2: creative at all, and now he has robots instead of
Speaker 2: writers and the company is worth less than ever. I
Speaker 2: talked to a second author who published a great book
Speaker 2: about social media and full disclosure. He's also my best
Speaker 2: friend's boyfriend. He's the best and pertinent to you. He
Speaker 2: has a thorough knowledge on how social media algorithms have
Speaker 2: been forcibly evolved and monetized to serve those that make
Speaker 2: them money, not their users. Max Fisher currently co hosts
Speaker 2: Offline on Crooked Media and wrote about this very topic
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty two's The Chaos Machine, The Inside Story
Speaker 2: of how Social Media Rewired our minds and our world.
Speaker 2: Here are some of our talk.
Speaker 8: My name is Max Fischer and I'm a journalist and podcaster.
Speaker 2: As we're talking about the dress today is what is
Speaker 2: your personal recollection of the dress saga? Were you You
Speaker 2: were working in media at the time.
Speaker 8: Right, I not only was a working in media, but
Speaker 8: I was working not at BuzzFeed, but at Fox dot com,
Speaker 8: which was a fellow kind of web you know, new journalism,
Speaker 8: left leaning startup that was trying to chase audience on
Speaker 8: social media. So it felt very much kind of in
Speaker 8: our wheelhouse. It was something that we were all really
Speaker 8: excited about. Wow, look a post can get this much
Speaker 8: attention by you know, doing something that Facebook really likes
Speaker 8: and that social media algorithms really like. And we were
Speaker 8: trying to do not the dress exactly, but we were
Speaker 8: trying to do like, you know, the policy WONK version
Speaker 8: of the dress every day, So we thought it was
Speaker 8: like this amazing moment that we paid a lot of
Speaker 8: attention to.
Speaker 2: So I know that you've spent a lot of recent
Speaker 2: years thinking about how our algorithms work, and you know
Speaker 2: the implications of that. Were you thinking about this ten
Speaker 2: years ago? What did that algorithm chasing look like?
Speaker 8: I was thinking about it, But like a lot of
Speaker 8: journalists I think of our generation, I thought of it
Speaker 8: as just purely a good thing, as just a thing
Speaker 8: where it's like, oh, if I write my piece that
Speaker 8: I was going to write anyway on you know, the
Speaker 8: Iran nuclear deal, but I phrased the headline in a
Speaker 8: certain way, then Facebook can deliver me, thanks to its algorithm,
Speaker 8: huge amounts of traffic and eyeballs and people who want
Speaker 8: to read the story. And that's great, and that's so
Speaker 8: nice that social media can be there to help us
Speaker 8: reach a larger audience. So I was aware of it,
Speaker 8: but thought of it as kind of a relatively neutral force, like, sure,
Speaker 8: you play up certain emotions in your headlines and certain
Speaker 8: ideas that you know are likelier to go viral. But again,
Speaker 8: maybe like a lot of people, it wasn't really until
Speaker 8: after Trump was elected, like a year and a half
Speaker 8: after that that I started to think of social media
Speaker 8: and social media algorithms as something that could be bad.
Speaker 8: At this point, I really thought that they were just
Speaker 8: a good thing and.
Speaker 2: Also just I think, certainly on my end, there was
Speaker 2: a lack of thinking about how this algorithm chasing translated
Speaker 2: to money, which in retrospect feels very naive of me,
Speaker 2: but there was at the time. It seems like money
Speaker 2: to be had from you know, taking these stories that
Speaker 2: you would find on social media and then you know,
Speaker 2: delivering them and making you know, question mark a shitload of.
Speaker 8: Money, right, I mean, the idea for the web startups
Speaker 8: of that era was that you will get so many
Speaker 8: more eyeballs on social media, and then so many more
Speaker 8: people will click through to your website and they will
Speaker 8: see ads on your website, so then you will make
Speaker 8: more money. And we weren't thinking of it, and maybe
Speaker 8: you guys were breaking it in to the Boston BuzzFeed.
Speaker 2: But almost impossible to can see that we were.
Speaker 8: I mean, we maybe this was idealistic, but we were
Speaker 8: thinking of it as this will be great because it
Speaker 8: will make journalism sustainable, Like we were all veterans of
Speaker 8: the two thousand and eight financial crisis, So we had
Speaker 8: all lived through a time when there were no jobs
Speaker 8: to be had because the industry was collapsing because the
Speaker 8: Internet and social media had taken all of the revenue
Speaker 8: that used to go through classifieds. So the idea that, aha,
Speaker 8: now we're going to leverage that same social media to
Speaker 8: get all these ad impressions. We can have a sustainable
Speaker 8: business again, and won't that be so great for like
Speaker 8: the future of the industry. And like before I worked
Speaker 8: at Fox, I worked at the Washington Post, and they
Speaker 8: loved the idea that you would do the journalism you
Speaker 8: were going to do anyway, but right in a way
Speaker 8: that will please algorithms, or right the headline in a
Speaker 8: way that will please algorithms, so that we can make
Speaker 8: more money and continue to pay for foreign correspondence. So
Speaker 8: it is a very starry eyed era that boy has
Speaker 8: sure not aged well.
Speaker 2: Used a phrase that it just feels very inherent to
Speaker 2: what the dress was. You use a phrase the old algorithm.
Speaker 2: What do you mean when you say the old algorithm?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 8: Yeah, okay, So I think we all know that algorithms
Speaker 8: are what drive everything and how you experience social media.
Speaker 8: They're the programs on every platform that select what you
Speaker 8: see the order you see it in, that choose what
Speaker 8: kind of emotions to surface, what kind of like political
Speaker 8: valance to surface for you. They're the absolute core of
Speaker 8: the social media business model. The era before algorithms, social
Speaker 8: media was a loser business that didn't make any money,
Speaker 8: and people didn't spend that much time on like rimbor MySpace,
Speaker 8: you didn't spend that much time on the site live journal.
Speaker 8: After they developed algorithms, that is when people's time on
Speaker 8: site explode because they are so effective at making the
Speaker 8: experience of being social media very engaging and addictive, and
Speaker 8: that's what turned social media companies into huge businesses. So
Speaker 8: for a long time, the way that those algorithms worked
Speaker 8: from their first invention and like the end of the
Speaker 8: two thousands, like Facebook kind of starts it in two
Speaker 8: thousand and six with the Facebook news Feed, but it
Speaker 8: takes a while for their platforms to catch up up
Speaker 8: through like the era of the dress, the way that
Speaker 8: it worked, the old quote unquote old algorithm promoted whatever
Speaker 8: content was. They tend to promote outbound links, like it
Speaker 8: would promote a link to some other website or news site,
Speaker 8: even if it's like a lollcat or something off the platform,
Speaker 8: and it would be whatever is the link that people
Speaker 8: would click on the most. And what that tended to
Speaker 8: privilege is if you remember like upworthy, Upworthy was like
Speaker 8: a website that existed to create content specifically decater to
Speaker 8: like the old Facebook algorithm, because it was like curiosity
Speaker 8: gaps or it was like you won't believe what happened next.
Speaker 8: So you're like, oh, I guess I'll click on that link,
Speaker 8: and then you click on that link, and then Facebook
Speaker 8: or Twitter learns, okay, we promote that link to a
Speaker 8: lot of people, they will click on it. And the
Speaker 8: dress is kind of the last gasp of that old
Speaker 8: algorithm because it is again you see the link and
Speaker 8: the way that it displayed on not just Facebook, although
Speaker 8: Facebook was the big one at the time, but all
Speaker 8: of the platforms read it. Twitter, the way that it
Speaker 8: would displays you would see a cutoff image of the
Speaker 8: dress and then you would see a headline about people
Speaker 8: see it in different colors, so it really makes you
Speaker 8: want to click. So everybody who saw this link on
Speaker 8: their news feed, you were like, oh, I have to
Speaker 8: click through and figure out what color the dress is.
Speaker 8: Even if you only spend eight seconds on that post,
Speaker 8: the algorithm learns that serves it to everyone on the
Speaker 8: platforms because it creates these outbound links, and that is
Speaker 8: when BuzzFeed starts to get you know, a million people
Speaker 8: minute or whatever the numbers were.
Speaker 2: Looking at it, a section of your book covers really thoroughly.
Speaker 2: Like twenty fifteen is a really important year for this shift.
Speaker 2: So the way that the algorithm looks in late February
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen and at the end of the year seems
Speaker 2: pretty different. What is changing with how algorithms are used
Speaker 2: on social media throughout this era.
Speaker 8: So there's not like a moment of shift, like they
Speaker 8: don't pull a big lever and go over to new
Speaker 8: set of algorithms. But bummer bummer, I know. But over
Speaker 8: like twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, the big social media
Speaker 8: platforms make a bunch of incremental changes that shift to
Speaker 8: a set of algorithms that just fundamentally privilege a different
Speaker 8: set of things. The language that Facebook uses for this
Speaker 8: and they are kind of like leading the charge at
Speaker 8: this point because they're still dominant way back in this era,
Speaker 8: is that they want to start privileging quote emotionally engaging interactions.
Speaker 8: And what that means is that instead of pushing up
Speaker 8: to the top of your feed, whatever is the link
Speaker 8: to an outbound website that they think you were likely
Speaker 8: is to click on, they want to promote whatever content
Speaker 8: in your feed, whether that's a link, or it's a discussion,
Speaker 8: or it's a Facebook group or it's a photo that
Speaker 8: is going to generate the most discussion on that post.
Speaker 8: And the reason they do that is they want to
Speaker 8: keep you on the platforms because if you click that
Speaker 8: outbound link, now you're on BuzzFeed, and Facebook doesn't make
Speaker 8: any money from you spending time on BuzzFeed. They want
Speaker 8: you to spend as much time on Facebook in discussions
Speaker 8: whatever as they can. And they frame this is like, oh,
Speaker 8: we're going to start giving you. They call it like
Speaker 8: meaningful connections or like meaningful interactions, as if it's going
Speaker 8: to bring you like all sorts of love and friendship.
Speaker 8: But of course that is not at all what it brings,
Speaker 8: because these algorithms are incredibly ruthless in running billions of
Speaker 8: what are basically tests like little social science experiments every
Speaker 8: single day. And what is the exact kind of content
Speaker 8: that will get people to engage in these quote unquote
Speaker 8: emotionally engaging interactions, not just to spend time on the site,
Speaker 8: but also to post back in the site in ways
Speaker 8: that we'll get other people to spend time on the site.
Speaker 8: And like, what is the content and the set of
Speaker 8: emotions that are going to be most engaging. And like,
Speaker 8: you know, as any student of human nature will know,
Speaker 8: it's not the nice stuff. It's not you know, here's
Speaker 8: your friend's baby, you know, your cousin got a new
Speaker 8: job promotion, your aunt had a great day. It's outrage primarily,
Speaker 8: and especially moral outrage. And it's anything that expressed fear
Speaker 8: or hatred or discussed with some sort of social outgroup.
Speaker 8: And that might be you know, political partisans on the
Speaker 8: other side that for a lot of people, that's racial groups,
Speaker 8: religious groups, immigrants, anything that cultivates a sense of like
Speaker 8: there is a social group out there that I don't
Speaker 8: like and I find them to be scary or I
Speaker 8: find them to be offensive, and I want to rally
Speaker 8: my in group against them. That is the thing that
Speaker 8: the algorithms as they are being introduced to all of
Speaker 8: these platforms over twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen learned to
Speaker 8: surface above all else. And Facebook's own researchers are tracking
Speaker 8: all of this, and they're finding both that this is
Speaker 8: enormously successful at making people spend more time on the website,
Speaker 8: but also that it's really bad for them. There's this
Speaker 8: paper that's kind of the last gasp of when Facebook
Speaker 8: used to publish research into what their algorithm does with users.
Speaker 8: In May twenty fifteen, Facebook's researchers, because they have accessed
Speaker 8: all this data, published this paper warning that this change
Speaker 8: to this new algorithm was sorting people into not just
Speaker 8: like minded discussions, but within those discussions was consistently surfacing
Speaker 8: whatever was the angriest or most emotional or most extreme
Speaker 8: viewpoint that everybody agreed with, and that that created an
Speaker 8: effect that was associated with adopting more extreme attitudes over
Speaker 8: time and misperceiving facts about current events, which is a
Speaker 8: somewhat euphemistic way of saying that people became more extreme
Speaker 8: in whatever beliefs they already held, and that they became
Speaker 8: likelier to believe misinformation or conspiracies, because, of course, if
Speaker 8: you already are angry about something, a conspiracy about it
Speaker 8: will make you feel even angrier.
Speaker 2: Right, I was fascinated to read how that information was
Speaker 2: at one point public, and I think, like how it
Speaker 2: feels completely inconceivable that they would publish anything like that
Speaker 2: to the public just five years later or even two
Speaker 2: years later. And how you know it was? It was
Speaker 2: well known internally and it seems like I mean you
Speaker 2: explained I think inside and also outside of Facebook, the
Speaker 2: sort of attempted, the attempts to blow the whistle on like, hey,
Speaker 2: this is really not good for us. So I mean,
Speaker 2: it's of course like profit is why that happens. But
Speaker 2: I at what point do these platforms sort of switch
Speaker 2: to infinite growth?
Speaker 8: So that had always been the business model since those
Speaker 8: first days of the news feed back on the late
Speaker 8: two thousands. But what happens actually around the same time,
Speaker 8: around twenty fourteen, is they start to realize that the
Speaker 8: pool of human attention is finite, and that's what they
Speaker 8: trade in. That's their asset that they are chasing, is
Speaker 8: seconds of your day that you're spending on the platform
Speaker 8: so they can sell ads against it. And they realize
Speaker 8: around twenty fourteen that they've kind of reached saturation collectively
Speaker 8: on how much of that they hold where at this
Speaker 8: point people spend As of twenty fourteen, people on average
Speaker 8: are spending more time on social media platforms than they
Speaker 8: do interacting with other people socially in real life, which
Speaker 8: is staggering, and that gap, of course has only grown since.
Speaker 8: So what they realize when they get to this point
Speaker 8: where they realize, Okay, we've kind of saturated the market
Speaker 8: for how much human attention we can captures, they get
Speaker 8: into this arms race with each other for who can
Speaker 8: hold more of that attention. And that is when they
Speaker 8: go from just having a existing business model of infinite
Speaker 8: growth to needing to, like you said, take every step
Speaker 8: that they can, no matter how extreme, to try to
Speaker 8: outcompete each other for how much of that attention they hold.
Speaker 8: And this is when all of the social media companies
Speaker 8: again is around like twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, higher up,
Speaker 8: all of the big names and artificial intelligence, like every
Speaker 8: major European and American researcher at every big research university
Speaker 8: suddenly works at Facebook, which is like that seems unsurprising
Speaker 8: now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at that
Speaker 8: time that was really shocking because this is just like
Speaker 8: this was like fancy or MySpace. It's just like a
Speaker 8: weird little website, and all of a sudden, all of
Speaker 8: these rock stars of artificial intelligence work for them, because
Speaker 8: what they are doing is they are trying to make
Speaker 8: the social media algorithms that govern what you see as
Speaker 8: smart and as ruthless as possible. This is when YouTube
Speaker 8: sets towards this big internal goal they have for one
Speaker 8: billion hours of daily watch time, meaning that everyone who
Speaker 8: uses YouTube will collectively watch one billion hours of video
Speaker 8: every single day, which is ten times what they had
Speaker 8: across the platform at the time they set this goal.
Speaker 8: So they're starting to really design their business models and
Speaker 8: their engineering around the idea that they need to in
Speaker 8: order to survive drastically increase the stickiness and addictiveness of
Speaker 8: being on their platform, which is when they kind of
Speaker 8: start getting into all of these dark arts of emotional
Speaker 8: and psychological manipulation.
Speaker 2: It feels so clear now and at the time you're like,
Speaker 2: this is weird. Why am I so upset?
Speaker 8: On Well, the thing that I always think about that
Speaker 8: I did not appreciate at the time. I didn't get
Speaker 8: its significance. But looking back, I'm like, oh, okay, I
Speaker 8: see how that was like a big watership moment is
Speaker 8: around twenty fifteen, when gamer Gate goes from being this
Speaker 8: thing that is happening on the like fringes of Reddit
Speaker 8: and the fringes of YouTube, where it's like a bunch
Speaker 8: of like young white guys are really mad about video
Speaker 8: games for some reason and I don't understand why, to
Speaker 8: all of a sudden it's completely dominant on all of
Speaker 8: the social platforms, and it's the like number one thing
Speaker 8: day after day on the platforms, and all of these
Speaker 8: like weirdo gamer Gate characters like Miloguianapolis and Mike Cernovich,
Speaker 8: all of a sudden they're like mainstream political figures. And
Speaker 8: that is we know now in retrospect because this is
Speaker 8: the time when social media algorithm started to realize that
Speaker 8: stuff like gamer Gate was going to be so so
Speaker 8: effective at increasing engagement. So that's where when you go
Speaker 8: away from the social media algorithms of the era of
Speaker 8: like the dress, what you get instead of the social
Speaker 8: media algorithms of game or Gate, which I would not
Speaker 8: consider a trade up.
Speaker 2: This is also the time where which I feel like
Speaker 2: ties right into the Milo stuff, where Breitbart really starts
Speaker 2: to pop off, and it feels to me, I mean
Speaker 2: very diabolical match of the BuzzFeed model of like luring
Speaker 2: people in with really splashy headlines. As we're like coming
Speaker 2: out of this era of the dress and things are
Speaker 2: getting more politicized and engagement driven to you know, really
Speaker 2: monetize and push outrage. What are the success stories and
Speaker 2: how do they sort of shape what the new algorithm favors.
Speaker 8: That's a great way to put it. I think you're
Speaker 8: exactly right that if BuzzFeed and like upworthy worthy sites
Speaker 8: that embodied benefited from the kind of pre twenty fifteen
Speaker 8: social media ecosystem and algorithms, then the site that embodies
Speaker 8: and most benefited from the post twenty fifteen social media
Speaker 8: algorithms is definitely Breitbart. There was this huge Harvard study
Speaker 8: or it was like led through Harvard, but it was
Speaker 8: a ton of different scholars that came out after the
Speaker 8: twenty sixteen election and was kind of trying to ask, like, Okay,
Speaker 8: what happened, what was the like something the internet played
Speaker 8: some role in the twenty sixteen election. Social media played
Speaker 8: some role, but we're not quite sure what it is.
Speaker 8: So let's do like a big systemic investigation into what
Speaker 8: the social web looked like in the run up to
Speaker 8: the twenty sixteen election, And one of the big things
Speaker 8: they found is that from May twenty fifteen to November
Speaker 8: twenty sixteen, when the election was held, which is kind
Speaker 8: of the onset of that era of the new social
Speaker 8: media algorithms, Breitbart was the third most shared media outlet
Speaker 8: on all of social media, which is crazy when you
Speaker 8: know that Breitbart has like no staff, they have no budget.
Speaker 8: It's a terrible experience to be on their website. They
Speaker 8: don't produce very many articles, and before this algorithmic shift,
Speaker 8: they had been a teeny tiny little website with no readership,
Speaker 8: and there was like this kind of narrative that like, oh, yes,
Speaker 8: Steve Bannon, who's running Breitbart, is some like genius of
Speaker 8: the dark arts of the social web. And what we
Speaker 8: learned from this Harvard study and from a lot of
Speaker 8: subsequent investigations is that he was not. The people of
Speaker 8: Breitbart were not these geniuses. They were just passive beneficiaries
Speaker 8: of the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter, basically plucking this
Speaker 8: website and similar websites out and pushing them in front
Speaker 8: of huge audiences of people. Like Breitbart got more audience
Speaker 8: and engagement on Facebook than Fox News did in the
Speaker 8: run up to the election. And Fox News is like
Speaker 8: a bajillion dollar company with hundreds of reporters.
Speaker 2: I mean, and certainly in the case of Breitbart, it
Speaker 2: was just saying shit and presenting it as news, and
Speaker 2: you know, like I wasn't saying fascistic shit, but there
Speaker 2: were times where I was just kind of saying shit,
Speaker 2: and they're like, and she's a reporter. I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's interesting to reflect on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a.
Speaker 8: Really interesting point. I hadn't thought about that before. But
Speaker 8: you're right that this was kind of the first stage
Speaker 8: and a shift that now feels much more complete, from
Speaker 8: getting your news from a news source to then you're
Speaker 8: getting your news from a new source repackaged for social media,
Speaker 8: to then you're getting your news from a new source
Speaker 8: that is saying shit. I know, most of us get
Speaker 8: our news from people who are just saying shit on
Speaker 8: social media, and we kind of like trust or hope
Speaker 8: that the like viral posts that we're reading is at
Speaker 8: some point sourced from something real, and sometimes it is
Speaker 8: and it's just spun in a way to like get
Speaker 8: more engagement on social media. But you know, it's just
Speaker 8: as possible that it's made up, that it's exaggerated, or
Speaker 8: that it's out of context. So it is, in retrospect
Speaker 8: like the start of a larger shift to the just
Speaker 8: saying shit era of media consumption, because on some level,
Speaker 8: you know, even though we do all care about getting
Speaker 8: accurate information from credible sources, our brains, unfortunately are really
Speaker 8: really drawn to things that are emotionally satisfying, or that
Speaker 8: delivered like outrage, which feels very affirming to indulge in,
Speaker 8: or that deliver a sense of like moral righteousness, or
Speaker 8: in group versus outgroup, and that can overpower that desire
Speaker 8: that we do also feel for real credible information, which
Speaker 8: is of course only gotten worse since twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Max for speaking with me in
Speaker 2: full disclosure. His cat is so large now I have
Speaker 2: to be honest. In the interest of contextualizing the dress
Speaker 2: in real time, I did leave something off about its
Speaker 2: longer future. To this day, there's an an entire page
Speaker 2: about the dress on the Roman Original's website where it
Speaker 2: was manufactured, calling it the quote phenomenon that revealed differences
Speaker 2: in human color perception, which have been the subject of
Speaker 2: ongoing scientific investigation in neuroscience and vision science. I mean sure.
Speaker 2: And while some subjects on this show will require a
Speaker 2: bonk on the head to fully remember who is Chilli neighbor,
Speaker 2: who is being dad Sidebart, the mid character is so
Speaker 2: often insert name of food, insert type of person, whatever,
Speaker 2: but the dress rarely needs introduction if the person was
Speaker 2: online at the time. There were retrospectives of the dress
Speaker 2: story being written as recently as last year. When I'm
Speaker 2: building out episodes for this show, step one is to
Speaker 2: reach out to the main character themselves to see if
Speaker 2: they want to talk. After all, the dress was for
Speaker 2: someone's wedding, and the mom who wore the dress stated
Speaker 2: at the time of the incessant optical illusion that she
Speaker 2: was annoyed that she was being excluded from most news coverage.
Speaker 2: Cecilia and the married couple got the classic fifteen minutes
Speaker 2: treatment for this era. The married couple, Grace and keirr
Speaker 2: and Cecilia and her partner Paul, were flown out to
Speaker 2: la to be on the Ellen Show, and the couple
Speaker 2: got a briefcase full of ten thousand American dollars. The
Speaker 2: mother and stepfather of the bride got underwear for some reason,
Speaker 2: half black and blue and half white and gold, and
Speaker 2: that was it, and Cecilia was pissed from a Guardian
Speaker 2: piece from late twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: Should it be on display somewhere? Blaisdelle wonders, should it
Speaker 1: be in a vaulter or whatever. It still got sweaty
Speaker 1: marks on though needs a clean. So nine years later
Speaker 1: I wanted to see where everyone was, and that's where
Speaker 1: this story takes an especially dark turn. When I went
Speaker 1: to find out where that couple is now, I found
Speaker 1: this headline from July twenty twenty three. Man behind viral
Speaker 1: blue black dress illusion charged with trying to kill wife.
Speaker 1: I don't want to rehash it too heavily here, but
Speaker 1: the relationship had been tremendously abusive since before the dress
Speaker 1: and their marriage, culminating in husband Keir making repeated violent
Speaker 1: attempts on Grace's life, isolating her from friends and family,
Speaker 1: and attempting to murder her during the spring of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two. He then went to court and denied all
Speaker 1: charges and most clickbait in twenty twenty three because yes,
Speaker 1: all of the same outlets reported on this story again
Speaker 1: made the somewhat lazy observation that the dress had previously
Speaker 1: been used in a domestic violence awareness campaign in South
Speaker 1: Africa back in twenty fifteen, featuring a woman wearing the
Speaker 1: dress in white and gold while covered in black and
Speaker 1: blue bruises. Why is it so hard to see black
Speaker 1: and blue? The ad asked.
Speaker 2: I think this ad is very weird, even if the
Speaker 2: intention was well placed, and the wave of twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three press connecting it to the real life terror campaign
Speaker 2: taken out on Grace felt just as wrong because virtually
Speaker 2: all of those pieces, while sympathetic to her, ended in
Speaker 2: some tired version of by the way, the dress was
Speaker 2: black and blue and as of this month, in May
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, I am recording this a month after
Speaker 2: we finished this episode. Here, Johnston is being held in
Speaker 2: prison after pleading guilty to attacking and attempting to kill
Speaker 2: Grace back in twenty twenty two. At the time, Grace
Speaker 2: called and texted people for help after years of reporting
Speaker 2: abuse and said that her husband was trying to kill
Speaker 2: her after she was violently attacked, strangled, and was threatened
Speaker 2: with a knife. As of this recording, the case is
Speaker 2: ongoing and we wish Grace nothing but peace. And getting
Speaker 2: as far away from any of this fucking discourse as
Speaker 2: she needs to do. And it's further proof that any
Speaker 2: Internet story on a long enough timeline begins to reflect
Speaker 2: the ugliness of the world that the Internet reflects and
Speaker 2: so often warps. Okay, cutting back into the original episode here,
Speaker 2: I'm sort of hesitant to say that there's it's a
Speaker 2: clear lesson to be learned from the saga of the dress,
Speaker 2: but it certainly encapsulates a moment in Internet history that
Speaker 2: feels ungo backable, and there's no better example of that
Speaker 2: than all the writers who were paid at the time
Speaker 2: to make it mean something outside of being an increasingly
Speaker 2: rare monocultural moment that swirled in normal people with tech
Speaker 2: profits and our attention. So the dress means something, but
Speaker 2: what exactly that is is a little elusive. Almost ten
Speaker 2: years on, I feel kind of nostalgic for a time
Speaker 2: where the Internet could unite over a neutral issue, But
Speaker 2: as a twenty two year old clickbait writer, I didn't
Speaker 2: even have the time to appreciate it because I needed
Speaker 2: toform an edgy, smart adjacent opinion about it as quickly
Speaker 2: as possible. Here's a passage from a reaction to the
Speaker 2: dress and the lama's success as stories on the heels
Speaker 2: of the net neutrality decision. The essay is called the
Speaker 2: open Internet will keep Us stupid and happy. At this point,
Speaker 2: it's unfathomable to think of anything short of a Gill
Speaker 2: force windstorm full of knives that could prevent the Internet
Speaker 2: from brimming with memes, jifts, and asenine materials from content farms. Hell,
Speaker 2: I used to write for a content farm in Boston,
Speaker 2: and yes, I have written an article called how Seth
Speaker 2: MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West can
Speaker 2: teach us about how to run our tech companies? And
Speaker 2: that is objectively gross. The Internet is stupid, but it
Speaker 2: was almost stupid and expensive. Thanks to the net neutrality
Speaker 2: vote passed yesterday, we won't need to worry about our
Speaker 2: access to lamas and confusing dresses being hindered for now. Anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I wrote this, and what the fuck was I talking about? Anyways?
Speaker 2: Good for her, I'm sure she'll never overthink anything again.
Speaker 2: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: It is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jamie Loftus,
Speaker 2: our other executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans,
Speaker 2: and our supervising producer and editor is Ian Johnson. Our
Speaker 2: theme song is by Sadie Dupui, and I would like
Speaker 2: to thank all of the pets, Anderson the dog, my
Speaker 2: cats fleeing Casper, and my pet rock Bird, who'll outlive
Speaker 2: us all. Bye,