One has to go!
Engagement bait, Yahoo boys, Spotify pop, girl dinners, right-wing grifters and distracted gorillas
Links is coming to you on Monday this week, with apologies for the delay — unless you prefer it, in which case this was absolutely! an intentional schedule change.
Threads did initially look like Twitter, the late/great social network it was built to dethrone. But 12 days and a million recycled memes later, the app acts less like a “new Twitter” than a new Facebook.
Every third post invites its viewer to respond to some inane, open-ended question. Every fifth post plagiarizes an overworked joke from somewhere else on the internet.
Threads, according to various commentators, loves Fuck Jerry derivatives, “motivational hustle bros,” emoji-laden engagement bait and middle-school-age memes. And let us not speak of the posts regarding pineapple on pizza, each disclaimed with the barest shrug of irony.
This is the curse of algorithmic crap — and it’s one that Meta knows really, really well. For years, the company’s own reporting has shown that trash content regularly dominates the Facebook news feed, earning millions of views and shares. Last year, embarrassed by the ongoing content crisis — and concerned that advertisers might eventually react — Meta actually convened an all-out “war room” to stamp out “stolen memes, engagement bait and link spam.”
The company says that effort was successful; outside observers are more skeptical. And engagement bait still ranked very high in Facebook’s latest quarterly content report (see the most-viewed public post, “1 has to go!”)
The best minds of my generation are, presumably, turning their considerable intellects against this crap. But if my Threads feed is any indication … they still aren’t there quite yet.
For more on Threads (with the sincere promise we’ll do something else next week):
“The Algorithmic Anti-Culture of Scale,” by
“The Thread Vibes Are Off,” by
“Meta’s Threads Is More of the Same Social Networking,” by Kyle Chayka
“Threads Won’t Kill Twitter If It’s Boring,” by Rebecca Jennings
“Threads Is a Mecca of Millennial Brain Rot,” by Kate Lindsay in
If you read anything this weekend
“The Romance Scammer on My Sofa,” by Carlos Barragán for The Atavist. Spoiler alert: Barragán makes disappointingly little progress in his quest to find the “Yahoo boy” who scammed his mom. But over four weeks in Nigeria (and roughly one billion words), he does compile a wide-ranging, universally empathetic study of the history, craft and culture of “doing yahoo,” from its modern-day YouTube anthems to colonial roots.
“The Dream of Antonoffication,” by Mitch Therieau for The Drift. To me, Jack Antonoff reads here like a convenient avatar for another, more interesting phenomenon: Spotify, by algorithm and by design, tends to elevate shorter, “moodier” songs. That’s brought the traditional stylings of indie rock to a range of other genres, for better or worse. “Call it Antonoffication: the process of the dispersion of the aesthetics of indie rock out from a distinct subcultural enclave and into a general ether that suffuses and unites the major genres of today’s Top 40 pop music.”
“The Workers at the Frontlines of the AI Revolution,” by Andrew Deck for Rest of World. Once upon a time, if you needed a logo or theme song or product description on a very small budget, you might turn to a site like Upwork or Fiverr and find someone in Eastern Europe or Asia to do it. Now, those contractors and freelancers face growing competition from the likes of Dall-E and ChatGPT — making them canaries in the proverbial coalmine of generative AI technologies.
“New Mark Zuckerberg Dropped,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. What the very intentional rebranding of Mark Zuckerberg — from bumbling boy genius to ~Leader Among Men~ — tells us about masculinity, celebrity and historical revisionism.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this collection of AI images of typical homes in America.
Thanks for being one of my 15,000 hypothetical Gchat friends.
Want to share your newsletter, podcast, job post or product with us? Click here to book a classified ad in the next edition.
Postscripts
Girl dinner. Barbieheimer. The merchification of book publishing. How the “modern farmhouse” conquered America and how handwriting lost its personality. The latest right-wing website grift. Prime Day, explained. Please stop showing the gorillas your phones: They find it “upsetting.”
How to tell when you’re reading something written by AI and how to get AI to write like you. Meet the “hot” telehealth start-ups pushing Adderall to unsuspecting ad-viewers. Inside the graveyard of kitchen fads. Why brands are blowing up your phone. Last/least: I do not for an *instant* think publishers get “very few” complaints re: the Sisyphean nightmare that is cancelling an unwanted subscription.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin