Nothing gold can scale
This week: WeRateDogs, tradwives, Gamestop (of course), anti-MLM YouTube and cringey subcultures
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2015 was a good year, on the internet — maybe, arguably, the last good one. It gave us Pizza Rat, Left Shark, “The Dress,” “Hotline Bling” … and the lolzy canine-scoring empire WeRateDogs.
But while most of 2015’s favored memes and villains have faded in the 3,000 internet-years since then — rather like my faith in humanity, or Donald Trump’s hair — WeRateDogs has, miraculously, only ascended. What began as an offshoot of weird Twitter, crowdsourcing photos of dogs and reposting them with over-earnest and occasionally absurd captions, has grown into a full-fledged media brand. On Monday, Matt Nelson, the account’s 24-year-old creator, announced he’s contracting a “writer’s room” of caption writers … and a creative strategist.
Does it take a Slack channel of collaborative, dog-loving, “wholesome” people to joke about collies that look like pandas? That’s probably irrelevant; this is the internet (slash America, slash capitalism) and anything that finds any commercial success needs to scale as large as possible. As early as 2017, Nelson was telling interviewers he felt pressure to tone his captions down and follow certain proven formulas to make sure they’d still go viral. As a result, an account that once quipped about human sacrifice and deployed an entire weird internet lexicon of invented dog words (pupper, blep, bork) now serves up the type of standard-issue 12 or 13/10 Good Boys you could forward your mom (… or vice versa). (To be clear: They’re *still* good dogs.)
But those tweaks seem to have worked: Today, WeRateDogs sells masks and calendars and the type of novelty picture book you might find in well-stocked bathrooms. Nelson has also, in the past few months alone, scored partnerships with Royal Canin dog food, Universal, a pet insurance company and Budweiser. It’s hard to imagine what might come next: A reality TV show? An empire of cat-rating or bird-rating accounts?!
After all: That was basically the trajectory of I Can Haz Cheezburger? until it sold out to an Israeli digital media firm eager to hook a younger audience. 😕
If you read anything this weekend
I have seen the Big Short and spent a few years on WaPo’s national economy desk … despite that, I apparently have only the vaguest idea of how the stock market functions!! Of the many, many Gamestop explainers I read to remedy that fact, (1) this one from Vice struck me as both entertaining and informative. So much for the econ 101 I took in college!!
If you’re not yet burned out on Gamestop takes, I’d also rec this wider look at (2) “meme stocks” and the gamification of trading, by James Surowiecki in Marker, and Bloomberg’s (3) prophetic profile of r/WallStreetBets from last winter. Ryan Broderick and Roger Cheng both make the argument that GameStop looks a lot like Occupy Wall Street, plus or minus some familiarity with a Bloomberg terminal. The comparison seems apt and intriguing, to me, and certainly more sensible than this NYU clown who thinks this could’ve been avoided if only aimless young men got it in more.
Beyond Gamestop: This week the internet served up a double-dose of thinly veiled ex-media tell-alls. Choose your own adventure: this (4) very very funny slice of life from inside “a women’s website” (Bustle; I loled, and often) or this (5) not-at-all-funny takedown of The Atlantic, James Bennet and a very recognizable class of moldering D.C. media men.
Also: (6) Kaitlyn Tiffany on anti-MLM YouTube is insightful and interesting; I kind of wondered why The Kids hate MLMs so much, but now I see the profit motive lies behind literally everything. Jezebel, meanwhile, continues to own my favorite line of internet coverage: (7) profiles of baffling and cringey subcultures. (Vaguely related, (8) on that note: “If I’d married someone right after high school … maybe that could be me with 38k Instagram followers, seven sons under the age of 10, and a house on a farm in Montana.”)
Postscripts
The rise of right-wing crowdfunding. The fall of @TheRickyVaughn. The photographer behind the Bernie meme speaks. (“It’s not a great photo, but it is a nice moment.”) Remote learning lessons from a refugee camp. The recurring secret to social media success. Nextdoor is filling local news deserts, we think? — but it’s hard to say, because they’re so damn secretive!
“A razor blade hidden in cotton candy.” The lessons of Alvin the Beagle. Misogynist Twitter harassment isn’t going away; it’s just getting savvier. Welcome to QAnon, USA. Make your own special snowflake. Last but not least: The people on the other end of those scam calls you get 20 times per day.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one.
— Caitlin
P.S. I’m playing around with some formatting changes this week; hit “reply” if you have strong feelings about them.