Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, you don't use Twitter like quite as much as
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 3: Still, no, I kind of. I don't know what happened.
Speaker 3: I guess I just went off Twitter. You know what
Speaker 3: platform I'm on quite a lot, and it doesn't help
Speaker 3: me in any way in terms of all lots in
Speaker 3: my career. But I really like Reddit.
Speaker 2: Now I know, I see you. Actually, Tracy doesn't like
Speaker 2: that I sometimes notice what she's browsing, but I respect
Speaker 2: that You're.
Speaker 3: Joe is constantly looking over my shoulder. And whenever I
Speaker 3: start like shopping online for five minutes, you start talking
Speaker 3: about the furniture that I'm buying.
Speaker 2: Well, it's really nice, It's really I'm always it's because
Speaker 2: it looks really good. But I still am completely addicted
Speaker 2: to Twitter. And I don't really know why, Because why
Speaker 2: I don't know. This is like a question for therapy
Speaker 2: for a long time, because like I know, it's gotten
Speaker 2: really bad and I don't even I don't know. I
Speaker 2: like to be there. I like to post words and
Speaker 2: the short form is a good medium for me. It
Speaker 2: feels like sometimes I see interesting things. We still source
Speaker 2: a lot of guests from Twitter, that's where you're be honest,
Speaker 2: and we still discover like experts. They're still there, but
Speaker 2: like it's subjectively gotten way worse and I don't even
Speaker 2: think it's just a Elon Musk thing.
Speaker 3: By the way, Well, here's the thing, Like this is
Speaker 3: the key difference in my mind between Reddit right now
Speaker 3: and a bunch of other social media platforms. Twitter is
Speaker 3: now run by this like insane algo right that just
Speaker 3: pushes stuff at you and sometimes it's really random. TikTok
Speaker 3: is the same thing. Reddit, at least you can still
Speaker 3: curate your feeds relatively easily. But even with Reddit, obviously
Speaker 3: since the IPO, there's pressure to boost revenues and we're
Speaker 3: seeing like more algo driven stuff, a lot more AI
Speaker 3: generated content like have always been a problem, but I
Speaker 3: feel like it might be starting to get worse.
Speaker 2: You know what platform is really good? What Discord? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 2: in fact, listeners should check out discord, dot gg slash
Speaker 2: odd lots because twenty four to seven in there there
Speaker 2: is a well curated world of fellow listeners who are
Speaker 2: interested in all the same things, talking in a very
Speaker 2: generally polite and adult way about important news and finance, markets, economics, tech, automotive, semiconductors,
Speaker 2: all those things that we like. And actually today we're
Speaker 2: gonna chat with He's not just a Discord member, but
Speaker 2: sometimes he chats in there and he has opinions on
Speaker 2: the Internet.
Speaker 3: That sounds great.
Speaker 2: The perfect guest, the perfect guests. We have the perfect
Speaker 2: guest to talk about why so much of the Internet
Speaker 2: has essentially turned to complete garbage filled with slop AI
Speaker 2: generated nonsense, completely made up news stuff like that. We're
Speaker 2: going to be speaking with Max read odd Lots, Discord lurker,
Speaker 2: but more importantly, the author and sole proprietor of the
Speaker 2: excellent read Max substack, one of the few substacks that
Speaker 2: I actually pay money for. So Max, thank you for
Speaker 2: coming on odd Lacks.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 2: Thank you for being a part of the Discord. I
Speaker 2: did's find that you don't poets much, but we appreciate
Speaker 2: that you lark.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm trying to put all of my words
Speaker 4: in a monetizable format. Yeah, I have the newsletter fair enough.
Speaker 3: So one thing I'm always curious about when people are
Speaker 3: like internet or culture correspondence, how did you get into
Speaker 3: that realm?
Speaker 4: So I got my starting journalism at Gawker, the media
Speaker 4: gossip website that no longer exists, and I started there
Speaker 4: in twenty ten, and I would say I worked my
Speaker 4: way up, except the way things worked at Cowkers, the
Speaker 4: people at the top just got fired and whoever was
Speaker 4: left continued to advance. So I was there during the
Speaker 4: sort of twenty eleven twenty twelve era which people who
Speaker 4: were in media will remember as the moment when Facebook,
Speaker 4: so to speak, turned on the floodgates or open the floodgates,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden, we went from sort of
Speaker 4: jockeying for traffic from Google or even homepage traffic. People
Speaker 4: would visit Gawker dot com all the time. I used
Speaker 4: to do that, Yeah, I mean Goacker was old enough
Speaker 4: to be a homepage site. And then Facebook said, hey,
Speaker 4: we've got hundreds of millions, billions of users, let's direct
Speaker 4: some of that at the media. And then, for various
Speaker 4: occult reasons, we started to get fifteen million page views
Speaker 4: on a blog, totally unheard of. For reasons we couldn't
Speaker 4: figure out, we couldn't understand, and because I was in
Speaker 4: management at this point, I became kind of obsessed with this,
Speaker 4: and I found myself thinking constantly about how culture and
Speaker 4: media and businesses based around those things were changing because
Speaker 4: of the way platforms were able to direct these huge
Speaker 4: audiences to places. So, I mean, it's essentially it's because
Speaker 4: I went crazy when Facebook decided to change the way
Speaker 4: media worked, and I've never become Saine, sir.
Speaker 2: Do you think every once in a while, like I
Speaker 2: don't know, like Gawker's there's probably is some version of
Speaker 2: Gaarker that exists out there on like It's fifth relaunching.
Speaker 2: I'm not actually sure if that title exists, but it'll
Speaker 2: be launched. If it's not currently existing, someone will relaunch
Speaker 2: it at some point. But even though it sided that,
Speaker 2: there's always every once in a while, like some new thing.
Speaker 2: It's like we're going to bring back the good old
Speaker 2: days of like a blog and a homepage and it's
Speaker 2: like a team.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure we've said that too.
Speaker 2: Is there just impossible in twenty to twenty.
Speaker 4: Four, Yeah, I mean, I think that substack is probably
Speaker 4: the closest platform to facilitate the creation of a blog
Speaker 4: like object, but because it's email distribution above all, you
Speaker 4: actually can sort of force your way into people's field
Speaker 4: of vision instead of requiring them to go to a homepage.
Speaker 4: I mean, we were talking about this already, but the
Speaker 4: existence of the homepage, as I think that people would
Speaker 4: check day and day out, was really important to as
Speaker 4: far as I'm concerned, was really important to the way
Speaker 4: a blog exists, how it feels, the tone, the kind
Speaker 4: of structure of it. And now that most people's first
Speaker 4: visit is a platform like Twitter or Instagram or one
Speaker 4: of the others, it's a lot harder to like cultivate
Speaker 4: the audience necessary to type in, you know, Joe Wisenthal
Speaker 4: dot com or whatever your blog homepage would be.
Speaker 3: Could you talk a bit more about what happened when
Speaker 3: like Facebook and the other platforms started dominating the media
Speaker 3: sphere and generating those millions of page views, Like, how
Speaker 3: did that change.
Speaker 4: The actual Yeah, I'll use Gawker as an example. So
Speaker 4: Gacker began, as people remember as a pretty mean let's
Speaker 4: call it a mean gossip, not as mean as I
Speaker 4: think people remember, but it was sort of sophisticated, witty
Speaker 4: cutting and about a kind of narrow cast of media
Speaker 4: and political and entertainment figures. And this was sort of
Speaker 4: starting to change and open up as it became clear that,
Speaker 4: you know, search engine optimization or SEO would allow you
Speaker 4: to get a bigger audience if you wrote about celebrities
Speaker 4: that people were googling, for example. But Facebook opened it
Speaker 4: up even bigger and even as far as I was concerned,
Speaker 4: sort of stranger way, because what you were going for
Speaker 4: was not like what are people searching for or even
Speaker 4: necessarily sort of what people are interested in. It's what
Speaker 4: will people share and what will people click on if
Speaker 4: they come across it in their Facebook feed. So in general,
Speaker 4: especially at the early stages there, what you were getting
Speaker 4: was a lot less of the kind of like insidery,
Speaker 4: what's Rupert Murdock up to? And a lot more I mean,
Speaker 4: cat videos doesn't even quite begin to cover it. It's
Speaker 4: sort of sentimental content, inspirational.
Speaker 2: I always think of like those BuzzFeed lists like twenty
Speaker 2: three things only people who live in Upstate New York
Speaker 2: would know, and they're so powerful because you just share
Speaker 2: it if you're from Upstate New York with everyone you
Speaker 2: know from upstate New York, and it just sort of changes,
Speaker 2: like what that category of content is that people care about,
Speaker 2: that affinity content.
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, I mean there was a huge amount of
Speaker 4: affinity you know, micro targeted identity content, things that people
Speaker 4: would share, things that people would sort of like throw
Speaker 4: out to all their friends. I mean this was the
Speaker 4: Internet between say twenty twelve and twenty fourteen or so,
Speaker 4: was really dominated by this kind of thing. And if
Speaker 4: you were there, you remember BuzzFeed as being you know,
Speaker 4: Jona Predi would talk about it as being the next
Speaker 4: Disney or something, because it had that kind of momentum
Speaker 4: behind it, the sense that it was so big. Underneath
Speaker 4: all of that, it turns out what was actually big
Speaker 4: was Facebook, not BuzzFeed.
Speaker 2: I feel like there's also this and there was a
Speaker 2: famous I think it was actually the All which you
Speaker 2: were part of, but I think it was published there
Speaker 2: maybe somewhere else. Like the psychological damage that people who
Speaker 2: weren't at BuzzFeed were undergoing at the time because everyone
Speaker 2: just saw BuzzFeed is like there like huge internet juggernaut,
Speaker 2: and if you weren't there, like you weren't cool and
Speaker 2: you weren't part of the Like, I think it's actually crazy.
Speaker 2: The degree to which people who weren't their brand got
Speaker 2: broken by that'd.
Speaker 3: Be broken by BuzzFeed. Okay, so we've been reminiscing about
Speaker 3: the good old Internet of like twenty thirteen. Can we
Speaker 3: talk about what's happening now?
Speaker 4: Yeah. So I think we're sort of undergoing a process
Speaker 4: that I think of as tiktokization of all these platforms.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, the Carsonization, the idea that like
Speaker 4: creatures that live deep deep deep underwater tend to evolve
Speaker 4: into crab like shapes even though they're genetically quite distinct.
Speaker 2: That goes viral on Twitter everyone. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: The evolutionary craftures basically turned them all into like hard shelled,
Speaker 4: you know, multi limbed, claw bearing animals. And I think
Speaker 4: there's a similar process happening online where every platform is
Speaker 4: turning itself into TikTok I mean, Carsonization is like a
Speaker 4: fun metaphor. It might not be quite right. It might
Speaker 4: just be people copying what they see is the most
Speaker 4: successful and biggest platform. But when I say tiktokozation, what
Speaker 4: I mean is a focus on content from strangers and
Speaker 4: people you don't know, rather than your sort of social networks.
Speaker 4: A tendency like a sort of scrollable video feed that
Speaker 4: you just bounce through really quickly. And you know, like
Speaker 4: when I say content from strangers, this is all based
Speaker 4: around the FYP like a really you know, heavily weighted
Speaker 4: algorithm that's supposed to give you exactly what you're looking
Speaker 4: down for. It's just the for you page on TikTok.
Speaker 4: So if you're a twin Instagram right right, So if
Speaker 4: you're on Twitter, that for you, there's a four you
Speaker 4: feed which is effectively the same deal. It sends you
Speaker 4: what's going viral on the platform. If you scroll past
Speaker 4: a college football tweet, you will suddenly see twenty five
Speaker 4: college football tweets in your feed. And then the other
Speaker 4: big thing, which I think is really important to this
Speaker 4: is that the platforms that are heading in the TikTok
Speaker 4: direction tend to pay posters directly for engagement, which we
Speaker 4: know about from Twitter, especially the blue check program and
Speaker 4: the sort of general like Twitter program where they will
Speaker 4: pay you out if you have particularly engaging posts.
Speaker 2: Would you show your FYP to your friends and family,
Speaker 2: my Twitter fyp or my anyone anyone?
Speaker 4: I think I would. I mean, I find it. It
Speaker 4: reveals me to be a much I brought up college
Speaker 4: footble because it turns out I'm a much bigger sports
Speaker 4: fan than I realized. I was, like, all of my fops.
Speaker 3: Are like ninety or the ago has just kind you
Speaker 3: as like a white male.
Speaker 2: See I recently searched like a health related thing, and
Speaker 2: then my FOYP thing was like disgusting after I'm not
Speaker 2: going to talk about it.
Speaker 3: That this is This is one of the problems with algos.
Speaker 3: It's like when you first sign up to a platform,
Speaker 3: I find there is so much pressure on the first
Speaker 3: thing you click, because that's basically going to show up
Speaker 3: in your algorithm forever. It feels like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, and I find myself very consciously if
Speaker 4: I have accidentally gotten into a place I really don't
Speaker 4: want to be. You know, politics on Twitter in particular
Speaker 4: is a bad situation for this. If you if you
Speaker 4: go down the wrong rabbit hole, the next thing you know,
Speaker 4: your FYP is just filled with guys you never want
Speaker 4: to hear from and don't ever want to see again.
Speaker 4: And so I will really consciously go and find something
Speaker 4: else to like scroll through, click on, you know, like
Speaker 4: wait over so that I can cleanse my fyp of
Speaker 4: all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so one thing I don't get about this recent development,
Speaker 3: And by the way, I don't so I'm not on TikTok.
Speaker 3: I rely on samro to curate the best of TikTok
Speaker 3: and post it on Instagram for me. But like, why
Speaker 3: the emphasis on random content from alges Because when I
Speaker 3: think back to the essence of a social network, the
Speaker 3: idea was that you had an actual social network of
Speaker 3: people that you know that you want to hear from.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think what the big platforms found was
Speaker 4: that people actually didn't really want to hear from their
Speaker 4: friends and family. I mean, we know this as a phenomenon.
Speaker 4: I think we can all acknowledge it being a phenomenon
Speaker 4: on both Facebook and Twitter, where you had this idea
Speaker 4: of context collapse, where you would be posting something to
Speaker 4: an imagined audience of your friends, say, but your aunts
Speaker 4: and uncles and everybody else is also on the same platform,
Speaker 4: and all of a sudden, the things you feel comfortable
Speaker 4: saying in front of your friends and in front of
Speaker 4: your family might be different, and they might get in
Speaker 4: fights in the comments, and it might be awkward and strange.
Speaker 4: And I think that Facebook kind of recognized this. Twitter
Speaker 4: is a slightly differenting because it was I think it
Speaker 4: was pretty rare to sort of follow your family on Twitter.
Speaker 4: But you know, there's a reason for that, and I
Speaker 4: think TikTok coming through and showing that actually there was
Speaker 4: a huge opportunity in these sort of fully programmatic, algorithmic,
Speaker 4: non social networking feeds sort of pushed Facebook in particular,
Speaker 4: because remember Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, and it sort
Speaker 4: of controls a huge amount of what platforms are doing.
Speaker 4: In an even moment, decided that they were going to
Speaker 4: start pushing a very similar kind of structure.
Speaker 2: So can we talk about Twitter or X for a second,
Speaker 2: because that's where I started and I still to this
Speaker 2: day on Twitter like a lot, although actually I think
Speaker 2: I post a little bit less than I used to,
Speaker 2: especially on weekends.
Speaker 3: Are you monetizing yet?
Speaker 2: I am not. I do not think that. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I just did my ethics training here at Bloomberg and
Speaker 2: I didn't say anything about that specifically, but I just
Speaker 2: probably not going to touch that. You know, there was
Speaker 2: a point, I would say, I don't know, seven or
Speaker 2: eight years ago, maybe a little longer, where it never
Speaker 2: felt that like Twitter just never had the same size
Speaker 2: really as some of the other big social networks, particularly
Speaker 2: Instagram or Facebook. But I always felt like all reporters
Speaker 2: are on there. You know. Other people have said this
Speaker 2: Twitter is like the assignment desk for much of the Internet,
Speaker 2: And I remember, like one point, I don't know, watching
Speaker 2: the Summer Olympics one year, and the basically the news
Speaker 2: was like and then this basketball player tweeted this from
Speaker 2: the city, and it's like, Oh, the future of TV
Speaker 2: news is actually people reading tweets on air. Is Twitter
Speaker 2: right now like setting aside whether it's profitable or good
Speaker 2: or anything, is it important?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: I mean I think it's important in a kind of
Speaker 4: disconnected way, not in the same way that you're talking about,
Speaker 4: where we'd functioned as a kind of assignment desk. My
Speaker 4: friend John Herman, who's the tech writer for New York
Speaker 4: mag and is a great thinker about these things, used
Speaker 4: to call Twitter the context for media, like it was
Speaker 4: where you'd go to understand sort of what was going on.
Speaker 4: And I don't think it funked like that anymore. But
Speaker 4: because of the fact that it's owned by Elon Musk,
Speaker 4: I think you could argue, oh, Elon bought Twitter in
Speaker 4: order to make himself important to politics. But in a
Speaker 4: funny way, I think Elon as an incredibly influential and
Speaker 4: like hugely well resourced figure. Owning the social network means
Speaker 4: that what happens on it is important in so far
Speaker 4: as it reflects an idea about like where politics is headed.
Speaker 4: But like the way you're talking about reading people's tweets
Speaker 4: out loud, it still happens, sure, but it's just not
Speaker 4: it's not the same thing.
Speaker 3: So one thing I wanted to bring up is, I
Speaker 3: guess breaking news on Twitter, because that seems to have
Speaker 3: changed quite a bit. And I do remember again the
Speaker 3: good old days when you would go on Twitter when
Speaker 3: something is happening, you would search and you would get
Speaker 3: like a lot of different opinions, maybe little anecdotes on
Speaker 3: the ground, reportage, things like that. What happens with breaking
Speaker 3: news now?
Speaker 4: Well, I mean talking about the FYP because it's not chronological,
Speaker 4: because it's really kind of anti chronological. You're going to
Speaker 4: see stuff if you sign on to Twitter and you
Speaker 4: look at not your following list or any of the list,
Speaker 4: if you just look at the def feed, which is
Speaker 4: your FYP, you're going to get tweets from twelve hours ago,
Speaker 4: from twenty hours ago, from five minutes ago, all jammed
Speaker 4: up against one another. You're going to get a huge
Speaker 4: number of people who are putting themselves out there, not
Speaker 4: for any kind of let's say, noble informational value, yeah,
Speaker 4: but to specifically to get followers to get engagement payouts.
Speaker 4: So you're incentivizing hoaxes. You're sort of diminishing the value
Speaker 4: of the feed itself, and so what you get. I mean,
Speaker 4: we saw this with the most recent hurricanes. This is
Speaker 4: a you know, I wrote about this for my newsletter
Speaker 4: that this was a thing where Twitter used to be
Speaker 4: the place you would go check for a ongoing news
Speaker 4: event like that, and consistently it was. For all the
Speaker 4: things you can say that were bad about Twitter, it
Speaker 4: was a great place to find people like local reporters
Speaker 4: in the area or even people who were like living
Speaker 4: through a disaster event like that. You would find images
Speaker 4: and video, you'd have one hundred different meteorologists who were
Speaker 4: able to help you contextualize all these things. And I
Speaker 4: wasn't able to find any of that, really, I mean,
Speaker 4: it was there to some extent. I don't want to
Speaker 4: pretend that there weren't meteorologists, say, being helpful, or local reporters,
Speaker 4: but it was just drowned in this flood of influencers
Speaker 4: and hoaxters and people just trying to get attention for
Speaker 4: various reasons in a way that felt sort of impossible
Speaker 4: to learn anything real or true about what was happening.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I found this true. In fact, on the most recent hurricane,
Speaker 2: the one that was heading right near Tampa Bay, I
Speaker 2: realized that I had been on Twitter all morning the
Speaker 2: next like through the night, and I didn't actually know
Speaker 2: what had happened. And then the only place that I
Speaker 2: found the sort of the preliminary assessments was Bloomberg dot com,
Speaker 2: And I thought that was like really striking, like I
Speaker 2: just didn't get any value. But you know the other thing,
Speaker 2: and you mentioned hoaxes, and I guess, like in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen people started calling it fake news, but like the
Speaker 2: degree of like fiction or fantasy, you know, you'd like
Speaker 2: see these tweets that would go viral for like Fema
Speaker 2: is on the ground aiming snipers at anyone who's trying,
Speaker 2: and they've been told that they're not allowed to return
Speaker 2: to their house and their private property is now the
Speaker 2: property of the federal government and all that, like truly
Speaker 2: like beyond fiction type stuff, and then it'll have like
Speaker 2: fifteen thousand retweets. And I'm curiously if you have a
Speaker 2: theory for that, because to me it feels like part
Speaker 2: of what's going on there's the engagement bait, there's maybe
Speaker 2: the desire for blue checks to get payout. But I
Speaker 2: also like worry that basically sort of real facts that
Speaker 2: exist in the world are just becoming like a category
Speaker 2: of facts. And then there's other but these are just
Speaker 2: as good and these are just as interesting. To me, it.
Speaker 3: Feels like the algo like can only measure engagement. Basically,
Speaker 3: it can't measure quality of the tweet, right, So if
Speaker 3: someone is doing engagement bait, if they're just making people
Speaker 3: angry or they're just tweeting out something that's wrong and
Speaker 3: then a bunch of people come on and start like
Speaker 3: pointing out that it's wrong, it still counts as engagement.
Speaker 2: And I guess what it would also say is like
Speaker 2: I'm not even sure people care that it's fact, Like
Speaker 2: the idea like there may have been one point where, like,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't believe traditional media. I believe these
Speaker 2: alternative sources for various reasons. Some of them actually might
Speaker 2: be legitimate my view, but actually the idea that like
Speaker 2: this is an actual fact to be believed, I'm not
Speaker 2: convinced is that important to people.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think there's an attitude a lot of
Speaker 4: people have on Twitter. I mean, there's two things I'll say.
Speaker 4: One is that I think there's an attitude a lot
Speaker 4: of people have on Twitter, on social media, but especially
Speaker 4: on Twitter, that you're not actually engaged in describing the
Speaker 4: world as it is, in communicating information other people. You
Speaker 4: were engaged in a fight or a war between political parties,
Speaker 4: I suppose, but between sort of political factions, and therefore
Speaker 4: it doesn't have to have any relationship to truth. You're
Speaker 4: just out there to own the other guys, to rally
Speaker 4: people to your side, to do whatever. And I think
Speaker 4: that the changes to the sort of algorithm and to
Speaker 4: the structure of the platform have exacerbated this tendency because again, Twitter,
Speaker 4: over its first decade or so, sort of realized that
Speaker 4: the edge it had over other platforms was news. It
Speaker 4: always thought of itself as a social network structured around news,
Speaker 4: and this was like, ultimately not a great way to
Speaker 4: structure themselves in terms of like revenue and profits and
Speaker 4: growth and whatever else. But it was pretty good for
Speaker 4: getting a lot of journalists to pay attention and to
Speaker 4: share honestly and earnestly, and to to sort of assess
Speaker 4: the truth and fact value. And now it's like more
Speaker 4: like a political like, among other things, a sort of
Speaker 4: political arena for people with not great relationships the truth
Speaker 4: to sort of like fight with each other.
Speaker 2: On this point real quickly, Like I'm old too, so
Speaker 2: I don't I'm not on TikTok are the would you
Speaker 2: say the other platforms have emerged in the same way
Speaker 2: or people view them as an arena for fighting yee
Speaker 2: or for a pushing a faction.
Speaker 4: Yeah, to some extent, I mean, I don't think it's
Speaker 4: not quite the same way as it is on Twitter,
Speaker 4: which has, because of its news background as sort of
Speaker 4: political background. And Twitter still has to some extent a
Speaker 4: kind of I think because if its size and its
Speaker 4: structure a kind of central sense of what people are
Speaker 4: talking about and how to join it, and TikTok can
Speaker 4: feel much more kind of open as and obviously Instagram
Speaker 4: and Facebook the idea that there's like a trend a
Speaker 4: set of topics that people are talking about. It's just
Speaker 4: non existent. The other thing I would say about this
Speaker 4: is that one of the sort of industry wide trends
Speaker 4: that really obviously in the case of Twitter, but it's
Speaker 4: happening in Meta and Facebook two, is a lot of
Speaker 4: people on content moderation teams are getting laid off, people
Speaker 4: whose job is to try and sort of limit and
Speaker 4: true information, to make judgment calls about what is true
Speaker 4: and what isn't true. I think Elon's kind of desire
Speaker 4: to blow that up on Twitter because he seemed to
Speaker 4: believe that it was over biased and incorrect and all
Speaker 4: these things has opened up space for Meta, for example,
Speaker 4: to lay off a ton of its own content moderators.
Speaker 4: And so I think that, you know, for all that
Speaker 4: people love to complain about Facebook's and consistent moderation and
Speaker 4: the bad moderation, all this there was people doing real
Speaker 4: jobs at trying to make the platforms like enjoyable to
Speaker 4: use and not just filled with garbage all the time.
Speaker 4: Those people often don't work at those companies anymore, or
Speaker 4: they're overwhelmed, and there's not a huge amount of will
Speaker 4: from what I understand, to sort of bring that.
Speaker 3: Back, just going back to people fighting on platforms, I
Speaker 3: will say there is a lot of low level drama
Speaker 3: on TikTok that I kind of enjoy. And I don't
Speaker 3: watch TikTok directly, but I do watch the YouTube summaries
Speaker 3: of like Internet scandals like the Bridgerton party that went
Speaker 3: wrong and things like that. I do enjoy those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's less political, but definitely because TikTok has the
Speaker 4: reply feature where you stitch yourself into another person's video,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of responses and trying to coast off
Speaker 4: of the viral success of somebody else or something. So
Speaker 4: you're absolutely right, that's definitely a huge part of it.
Speaker 3: Are we going to be replaced by AI?
Speaker 4: I don't think so, but I think a lot of
Speaker 4: posts are going to be replaced by AI. We're already
Speaker 4: seeing a lot of stuff on Facebook, on Twitter, even
Speaker 4: on TikTok and Instagram that is basically AI generated that
Speaker 4: seems to have no real really.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the Facebook images those are crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The weird Facebook AI slop If you haven't seen these
Speaker 4: on Facebook, there's a great Twitter account called Weird Facebook
Speaker 4: Ai Slap, which I recently wrote a piece about for
Speaker 4: New York magazine. This is a case where you have
Speaker 4: Facebook has started paying out sort of creator bonus to
Speaker 4: people who get a lot of engagement, and from what
Speaker 4: I can tell, it's not necessarily worth it for like
Speaker 4: an American who has an opportunity to make American minimum
Speaker 4: wage to try this out as a full time job.
Speaker 4: But you have a lot of people all over the
Speaker 4: world for whom the payouts actually are pretty meaningful, and
Speaker 4: who can figure out ways to juice engagement on Facebook
Speaker 4: groups or on the posts they're making in order to
Speaker 4: get payouts. So I talked to a guy in Kenya,
Speaker 4: for example, who had started a bunch of pages. He
Speaker 4: told me that his most engaging topics were Jesus, pets,
Speaker 4: and animals, the US military and Manchester United were like this,
Speaker 4: four big engagement subjects. And he goes in and he
Speaker 4: just makes these ai images, he sort of roco co
Speaker 4: sentimental Jesus images, and he posts them and tries to
Speaker 4: get you know, hundreds or thousands of people to like
Speaker 4: and share, and he can make you know, five hundred
Speaker 4: or more bucks a month off of this, which is
Speaker 4: pretty close to just above minimum wage in a lot
Speaker 4: of places in Kenya, and this stuff is kind of
Speaker 4: taking over Facebook. Facebook will tell you it's not, and
Speaker 4: I believe them that in some sense it's not, because
Speaker 4: it's a drop in what is a huge ocean of content.
Speaker 4: But I've talked to a lot of people who found
Speaker 4: that if they click or scroll or check out an
Speaker 4: AI generated image, that in some way and in some sense,
Speaker 4: the Facebook algorithm is really pushing this stuff on people.
Speaker 4: And I mean, I find it like fascinating. It's like
Speaker 4: it's like a car wreck. You know, you go and
Speaker 4: you can't not look at these things. But it's not
Speaker 4: what I want out of a social network really, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's tons and tons of slop. I also like
Speaker 2: noticed on both Twitter and LinkedIn replies that I'm like
Speaker 2: sure our ai Like, I'll like post like a new
Speaker 2: episode about mortgage rates, and then I'll get a reply that, no,
Speaker 2: I wish it were that. It's more like, it's more like,
Speaker 2: thank you for keeping us updated on mortgage rates. Staying
Speaker 2: informed on mortgage rates is really important. And it's like
Speaker 2: kind of at that line where maybe like someone could
Speaker 2: have said that, but I'm not sure, And it's making
Speaker 2: me like.
Speaker 3: Somewhere, there's a poor guy out there who like said
Speaker 3: that in complete seriousness trying to be part of the conversation.
Speaker 2: No, but I'm like not sure anymore, because that's very easy, Like,
Speaker 2: you know, the free version of chat GPT could come
Speaker 2: up with that quite easily. But going back to whether
Speaker 2: we'll be replaced by AI, Like I listened to some
Speaker 2: of the I think it's called the Google Notebook LM
Speaker 2: like fake podcast and stuff. Here's my lot on some
Speaker 2: of this stuff, Like none of it is interesting, Like
Speaker 2: I've never seen like an actually like interesting AI output
Speaker 2: really that could replace a like an interesting writer. But
Speaker 2: I didn't hate it, like if you like, you know,
Speaker 2: I listened to this podcast that was about some deally
Speaker 2: nuclear report and it's like I did not think it
Speaker 2: was a terrible way to consume that content, like if
Speaker 2: we're on the subway or something like that, Like it's
Speaker 2: not that interesting or that good, but it actually like
Speaker 2: sort of summarized it in an audio way. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: was not terrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean those podcasts are one of the is
Speaker 4: probably the most recent thing from out of AI that
Speaker 4: I've felt like are cool that are sort of like wow,
Speaker 4: this is really cool and like surprising and interesting and
Speaker 4: like I could see this being useful in some ways.
Speaker 4: I mean, I exported a bunch of my group chats
Speaker 4: and made podcast like as text and put them in
Speaker 4: notebook LM, and then made podcasts about my group chats
Speaker 4: that I had shared with my group chats, which was
Speaker 4: not productive or useful in an economics you know, but
Speaker 4: I love doing it, you know, I think that there's
Speaker 4: a lot of use for them that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: The other thing I'd say is that, you know, I
Speaker 4: think there's a lot of ways that people have talked
Speaker 4: about the relationship of AI to the platforms that we're
Speaker 4: talking about here, And one thing writing and reporting about
Speaker 4: this sort of wave of SLOT made me realize is
Speaker 4: how much these two technologies are quite complementary to each other.
Speaker 4: That in fact, like on Facebook, you have this effectively
Speaker 4: infinite market for content of basically any kind as long
Speaker 4: as somebody will look at it, and in llms you
Speaker 4: have an effectively infinite content generator. So if I was
Speaker 4: in charge of the Facebook platform or whatever, I would
Speaker 4: have a really hard time figuring out how to make
Speaker 4: a decision about what, you know, like what stuff I
Speaker 4: allow and what stuff I don't allow, because obviously there's
Speaker 4: plenty of ways that a podcast about a deal energy
Speaker 4: report is like, I mean, that's not going to go
Speaker 4: viral on Facebook, let's be honest. But there's there's interesting
Speaker 4: versions of this that you don't want to tell people
Speaker 4: they can't post. But the problem is the threshold for
Speaker 4: creating this stuff is so minimal, and ultimately the value
Speaker 4: add is for the ninety nine percent of what you're
Speaker 4: creating with AI stuff is just non existent. It's hard
Speaker 4: to imagine, and that the noise isn't gonna drown out
Speaker 4: the signal.
Speaker 3: At some point. There is the dead Internet theory, so
Speaker 3: the idea that eventually it's just going to be bots
Speaker 3: talking to each other and people just aren't going to
Speaker 3: be that engaged in terms of content creation anymore. Doesn't
Speaker 3: matter who is producing content on the Internet. Like, assuming
Speaker 3: that we're all addicted to it and we're still going
Speaker 3: to keep looking at it, why does it matter.
Speaker 4: I have a strong feeling that it matters in some
Speaker 4: fundamental way to us that the things we see and
Speaker 4: engage about are human created. I'm trying to think about
Speaker 4: how to articulate this. Maybe put it this way. It
Speaker 4: matters less than the sort of content we consume, like
Speaker 4: the TV shows or the novels or whatever are created
Speaker 4: by a then it does that there are other humans
Speaker 4: to talk about that stuff with. Like, I think so
Speaker 4: much of how we consume culture is about our relationship
Speaker 4: to other people and the ability to kind of consume
Speaker 4: it in tandem with other people that we can talk
Speaker 4: about it with. I'm skeptical that we will get the
Speaker 4: same level of satisfaction or like wholesome like happiness out
Speaker 4: of like talking about AI generated content with AI bots
Speaker 4: waiting for the next AI generated episode of a TV show.
Speaker 4: But it remains to be seen.
Speaker 3: Does it matter to advertisers at all? Like, if the
Speaker 3: currency of the Internet is eyeballs and they're still getting eyeballs,
Speaker 3: do you think they care?
Speaker 4: Right now? It doesn't seem like they do. I mean, look,
Speaker 4: I think this for me. What is optimistic for me
Speaker 4: is the idea that we're looking you know, on a
Speaker 4: medium term time horizon. There is a recognition on the
Speaker 4: part of advertisers that these are not like high quality
Speaker 4: views that they're getting on their ads. That if you're
Speaker 4: like scrolling through a bunch of slop, like a lot
Speaker 4: of people are going to have left that the people
Speaker 4: who are scrolling through it are not looking for the
Speaker 4: stuff they're doing, but right now it doesn't seem like it.
Speaker 4: I mean, they're happy to get their clicks, and you know,
Speaker 4: so much of what Facebook is about is like really
Speaker 4: specific micro targeting for small to medium sized businesses, where
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter if it's all AI slaps running, as
Speaker 4: long as you're getting the people who might go to
Speaker 4: your restaurant or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: I mean, everyone knows about the terrible economics for a
Speaker 2: lot of legacy media businesses, the entities that in theory
Speaker 2: try to create factual, real things, et cetera. But there
Speaker 2: are like some things. I mean, you're a sole proprietor
Speaker 2: of a profitable newsletter that people pay for, And there
Speaker 2: are Reddit pages and discord groups that are sort of
Speaker 2: run by a dictatorship in which no, unlike right like no,
Speaker 2: there are rules and you will be banned at whom
Speaker 2: and if it was a mistake, sorry, But on net
Speaker 2: like this is a good thing to have a very
Speaker 2: heavy hand at. It is the future of all media,
Speaker 2: just like narrow subscriptions to actual humans you trust, or
Speaker 2: narrow communities run by humans you trust.
Speaker 4: I think we're basically we're hollowing out the middle. So
Speaker 4: you have on the one side, I mean, this is
Speaker 4: what it seems like to me right now. It's on
Speaker 4: the one side you have the Times, probably the Wall
Speaker 4: Street Journal Bloomberg, who can remain afloat as really sort
Speaker 4: of enormous national outlets. I mean, the Times already employees
Speaker 4: like seven percent of everybody of all journalists or something
Speaker 4: like that. I may be making that up, but I'm
Speaker 4: pretty sure i'm not. It's some shocking number of the
Speaker 4: currently employed journalists in the US are employed by the
Speaker 4: New York Times. And then on the other side you
Speaker 4: have sub stacks and streamers and the sort of Internet
Speaker 4: personality model of media, which is for better or for worse,
Speaker 4: where my career has ended up. But this sort of
Speaker 4: big middle of what used to be like a really
Speaker 4: diverse set of magazines, you know, weeklies, even like local
Speaker 4: daily newspapers you know it.
Speaker 2: Still exists, is local news networks like you'll go to
Speaker 2: like a town like or something like will be traveling
Speaker 2: and there still are like the local NBC affiliate or whatever,
Speaker 2: which is always a surprised with me.
Speaker 4: They're also like surprisingly powerful too, like the fact that
Speaker 4: Sinclair owns them and is like quite pro Trump has
Speaker 4: always been a little bit interesting to me, But yeah,
Speaker 4: they do still exist. I mean I wonder like what
Speaker 4: the time horizon is for those, but it seems like
Speaker 4: that's a it seems to be relatively successful business model
Speaker 4: for now.
Speaker 3: On the personality driven media, one thing I always think
Speaker 3: doesn't get enough attention, but like there is a tension
Speaker 3: between telling reporters that they need to develop their own
Speaker 3: brand and audience and do all that. And Joe and
Speaker 3: I have been told that basically our entire careers and
Speaker 3: have tried to do that, but then the legacy newsroom
Speaker 3: doesn't really know how to handle that, Like they don't
Speaker 3: seem to have like a strategy for if you develop
Speaker 3: your own audience, what do they actually do with it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we've seen a million examples of this
Speaker 4: over the last few years. Taylor Lorenz, the Internet reporter,
Speaker 4: recently left the Washington Post and sort of essentially said
Speaker 4: this that she'd built a brand for herself and she
Speaker 4: was running up against the limits of what the Washington
Speaker 4: Post was willing to let her do or allow. And
Speaker 4: I think that a lot of the tension that we've
Speaker 4: seen in newsrooms. I'm sure a lot of people have
Speaker 4: read about tension inside The Times, for example, you know,
Speaker 4: since twenty twenty or so, between rank and file journalists
Speaker 4: and management. I think that this sort of star economy
Speaker 4: of this is a bigger driver of that tension than
Speaker 4: people maybe recognize or understand that. Both in the sense that,
Speaker 4: you know, if you are a working journalist and you're
Speaker 4: watching people get a lot of leeway and a lot
Speaker 4: of rope from management because they happen to be big stars,
Speaker 4: you might start to feel frustrated. And also because you
Speaker 4: have people who have huge followings on Twitter or Instagram, say,
Speaker 4: who know that they have an audience, know that they
Speaker 4: have some leverage with their bosses because they're bringing people
Speaker 4: to the Times, and maybe they should just walk away,
Speaker 4: you know. Again, like I said, I wouldn't want to
Speaker 4: be in charge of Facebook. I'm not sure i'd want
Speaker 4: to be in charge of a big aditional media organization too.
Speaker 2: I remember, like a couple of years ago at some
Speaker 2: point when people were like convinced that Twitter servers were
Speaker 2: about to crash, and I remember like people talking about,
Speaker 2: you know, they would try to find some other site,
Speaker 2: and a few people use the word lifeboat, which I
Speaker 2: thought was really interesting because it implies to my mind
Speaker 2: that a journalist's social media profile is the thing that
Speaker 2: they hold on to when their organizations. So Twitter is
Speaker 2: a lifeboat if you're at like some newspaper, Twitter is
Speaker 2: your lifeboat because your newspaper might go down, but you
Speaker 2: still exist as an entity and that could take you
Speaker 2: to the next safe like port of call. And so
Speaker 2: like this idea is like I need a new lifeboat
Speaker 2: because Twitter might not be there anymore. I think it
Speaker 2: was like a very revealing word to describe how a
Speaker 2: lot of these star journalists view the platform.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean you need an audience and like my
Speaker 4: I mean substack is now my lifeboat and I have
Speaker 4: a port. I mean one thing that subssec was very
Speaker 4: attractive with for a lot of journalists is they allow
Speaker 4: you to port your email lists, so you've got you know,
Speaker 4: you lose your Twitter account as I have, but I
Speaker 4: now have forty email lists that I own that I
Speaker 4: can take where that's my lifeboat.
Speaker 2: Max Read, thank you so much for coming on the OBLAS.
Speaker 2: That was awesome.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Had a great time, Tracy. I love talking to him.
Speaker 2: I like, you know, it's always fun every once in.
Speaker 3: A while, basically just gossiping about our own industry.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't like to indulge in it too much.
Speaker 2: I actually find a lot of media naval gazing to
Speaker 2: be sort of boring, to be honest, But sometimes it's
Speaker 2: sort of fun to look back and how things have
Speaker 2: changed in the last I don't know, fifteen years.
Speaker 3: You know, I got a really good idea from that
Speaker 3: that won't be useful in my personal life, but maybe
Speaker 3: it will be useful to others. I think when you
Speaker 3: go on a date with someone, When you go on
Speaker 3: a first date, people should show their for you page
Speaker 3: on various social media platforms, and you would instantly get
Speaker 3: a sense of who that person is, or at least
Speaker 3: who the algorithm things are.
Speaker 2: Do you be a for you page based dating app
Speaker 2: where it's just all you see is the person's for
Speaker 2: you page? I like this person. That would be a
Speaker 2: good Should we make that start up?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think that's a good idea. You know what. I
Speaker 2: really liked the word carsonization. Oh yeah, and I think
Speaker 2: there's a really powerful idea, the idea that, like all
Speaker 2: apps trend towards looking and functioning the same way, and
Speaker 2: currently it's all towards TikTok. The other thing, which we
Speaker 2: didn't get into, but I think is also an example
Speaker 2: of carsonization too, is like everything sort of being it's
Speaker 2: either a TikTok or a chatbot like text. Like I've
Speaker 2: like opened windows, like I'll open an app and it
Speaker 2: will take me to a second to realize, Wait, am
Speaker 2: I in I am right now? Am I in chat
Speaker 2: GPT right now? Like this sort of this dominant mode
Speaker 2: of interfacing with the Internet that's all like chat related.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, it is true
Speaker 3: on this point that even Reddit, which like I started
Speaker 3: out fawning over, is starting to like experiment with more
Speaker 3: algo pushed content. So it will suggest subreddits for you now,
Speaker 3: but luckily you can still ignore them for the time being.
Speaker 3: But again, like as pressure to generate revenue actually ramps up,
Speaker 3: it seems like the direction of travel all roads lead
Speaker 3: to TikTok.
Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, Spotify too, and like you know, there's like
Speaker 2: stories on Spotify. It looks very similar. You get pushed
Speaker 2: all this different stuff that's people that you're not listening to.
Speaker 2: I think the answer is to just subscribe to odd
Speaker 2: Lots and just hang out in the odd Lots Discord
Speaker 2: and then just not worry about any of this other stuff.
Speaker 3: That's right. It's a safe space and you can still
Speaker 3: curate what you what you want to talk about. All right,
Speaker 3: shall we leave it there.
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Oudlots podcast. I'm
Speaker 3: Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Check out Max read Substack. It's called Readmax. Find that
Speaker 2: at maxreadt substack dot com. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez
Speaker 2: at Carman Arman dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and Kelbrooks
Speaker 2: at Kilbrooks. Thank you to our producer Moses Ondam. More
Speaker 2: Oddlots content go to Bloomberg dot com slash odlocks. We
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