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cover of episode Max Read on how the Internet Got Infested With Garbage

Max Read on how the Internet Got Infested With Garbage

2024/11/8
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Odd Lots

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The hosts reminisce about the past state of the internet, discussing how platforms like Twitter and Reddit have changed due to profit imperatives, political motivations, and AI.
  • Twitter and Reddit have evolved significantly due to profit pressures and AI.
  • Reddit allows better curation of feeds compared to Twitter and TikTok.

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Hello and won up to another episode of the odd lots podcast. I G O isn't though .

and i'm Tracy all away.

Tracy, you don't use twitter like quite as much as ideas though.

No, I kind of I don't know what happened. I guess I just went off twitter. You know what? Platform i'm on quite a lot and IT doesn't help me in anyway in terms of all bots in my career, but I really like read IT.

Now I know I see you actually Tracy doesn't like that sometimes notice what she's browsing, but I respect that your joe is .

constantly looking over my shoulder. And whenever I start like shopping online for five minutes, you start talking about the furniture that i'm buying.

Well, it's really nice. It's really i'm always because IT that looks really good, but I still have completely addicted to twitter and I don't really know why because why? I don't know。 This is like a question for therapy for a long time because like I know it's gotten really bad and I don't even I don't know.

I like to be there. I like to post the words, and the short form is a good medium for me. IT feels like sometimes I see interesting things.

We still source a lot of guests from twitter and being honest, and we still discover like experts, they're still there. But like object actively gotten way worse. Don't think think is just a elan musk thing.

by the way. Well, here's something like this is the key difference in my mind between redit right now and a bunch of other social media platforms. Twitter is now run by this like insane algo, right?

That just pushes stuff at you and sometimes it's really random. Tiktok is the same thing. Reddit at least you can still curate your fees relatively easily.

But even with read IT, obviously, since the IPO, there's pressure to boost revenues. And we're seeing like more algo driven stuff, a lot more AI generated content like bots have always been a problem. But I feel like I might be starting to get worse.

You know what platform is really good? What discord?

Oh yes.

In fact, list or should check out discord dot G G slash odd ts, because twenty four seven in there, there is a well curated world of fellow listeners who are interested all the same things, talking in a very generally polite and adult way about important news and finance, market and economics, tech, automotive, semiconductors, all those things that we like. And actually today we're gonna chat with.

He's not just a discord member, but sometimes see chats in there and his opinions on the internet. That sounds great talk. Internet is a replete garbage, AI generated nonsense, completely made up news, stuff like that.

We're going to be speaking with a max read odd lots discord locker. But more importantly, the author and super priest of the excEllent read, max substate, one of the few sub stack that I actually pay money for. So max, thank you for coming out of lot.

I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you for being a part of the discount. I don't find that you don't point much, but we appreciate that you learn.

I mean, i'm trying to put all of my words in a monodist er reform of the news letter are enough.

So one thing I always curious about when people are like internet or culture correspondence, how did you get into that realm?

So I got my started journalism at golkar, the media gossip webs that no longer exists. And I started there in twenty ten. And I would say I worked my way up, except the way things were to cockers.

The people at the top just got fired, and whoever was left continue to advance. So I was there during the sort of twenty eleven and twenty twelve era, which people who were in media will remember as the moment went facebook, so to speak, turned on the flood gates. You open the flood gates in all of a sudden we went from sort of jacking for traffic from google or even home page traffic.

People visit, I mean, god, all enough to be a home page. And then facebook said, we've got hundreds of millions, billions of users. Let's direct some of that at the media. Then for various oco reasons, we started to get fifteen million page views on a blog, totally unheard of for reasons we couldn't figure out, we don't understand. And because I was in management at this point, I became kind of obsessed with this. And I found myself thinking constantly about how culture and media and businesses business around those things were changing because of the way life forms were able to direct huge audience to places. So I mean, it's is essentially it's because I went crazy when facebook decided to change the way media work and i've never become same.

Do you think everyone is in a while? Like I don't know, like gog's, there's probably is some version of goga that exists out there on like it's fifty launch. I'm not actually sure that title exists, but to be launch if it's not currently existing that someone will relate ch IT at some point. But even now decided that there's always everyone is in a while like some new thing is like we're going to bring back the good old days, like a blog in the home .

page and it's like a team of tty.

We've to is there impossible in twenty and twenty four?

yeah. I mean, I think the sub stack is probably the closest that form to facilitate the creation of a blog log object. But because it's email distribution above all, you actually can sort of your way into people's feel the vision instead of requiring them to go to a home page. I mean, we were talking about this already, but the existence of the home page, as I think the people would check day and day out, was really important to for as I was really important to the way blog, how IT feels, the tone, kind of structure of IT. And now that most people's first visit is a platform like twitter or instagram, or or want to be others, is a lot harder to like, cultivate the audience necessary to type in, you know, joe wasn't told dot com or whatever your blog home paige would be.

Could you talk a bit more about what happened when like facebook and the other platform started dominating the media sphere and generating those millions of page views? Like how did that change the actual content?

Yeah, i'll use docker is an example. So docker began, as people remember, is a pretty mean this call IT a mean gossip, not as meaning as I think people remember. But I was sophisticated, wide cutting and about a kind of narrow cast of media and political and entertainment figures.

And this was sort of starting to change and open up as IT became clear that you know, searching and optimize zing or seo would allow you to get a big ger audience if you wrote about celebrities that people were googling, for example. But facebook opens up even bigger. And and even as far I was concerned with a stranger way, because what you were going for was not like water.

People searching for, or even necessarily sort what people are interested in is what will people share and what will people click on if they come across in their facebook feed. So in general, especially the early stage, is that what you are getting was a lot less of the kind of like insider y what's root t murdoch up to and a lot more. I mean, cat videos doesn't even quite begin to come. It's a sentimental content.

inspirational content. I think of like those both feed lists, like twenty three things only people who live in upstate new york would know. And there's so powerful because you just share IT if you're from upstate new ork with everyone you know from upstate new york. And I just sort of changes like what that category of content is that people care about, that infinity content.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a huge amount of finite micro o targeted identity content, things that people would share, things that people would sort of like throw out to all their friends. I mean, this was the inter net between six, twenty twelve and twenty fourteen or so was really dominated by this kind of thing. And if you were there, you remember bus feet as being, you know, joe pretty would talk about IT as being the next disney or something because I had that kind of momentum hind the he was so big underneath all that IT turns out what was actually .

big with facebook. But I feel like there is also, and was a famous, I think IT was actually the all which you are part of, but I think that was publish there maybe somewhere else like the psychological damage that people who weren't at buzzed were undergoing at the time because everyone just saw bus feet is like this, like huge internet jugged not. And if you weren't there, like you weren't cool and you are aren't part of like I think it's actually crazy. The degree to people who weren't their brains got broken.

broken bus. okay. So we've been reminisce about the good old internet of like twenty and thirteen. Can we talk about what's happening now?

yeah. So I think we sort of undergoing a process that I think of a tiktok zone of all these platforms. And you know the cardinalists ation idea that like creatures that they have deep, deep, deep under water tend to evolve into crab like shapes, even though .

the genetically.

the evolution turn them into like hard shield, you know, multi limed covering animals. And I think there's a similar process happening online where every platform is turning itself into tiktok. I my current ization is like a fun metaphor, might not be quite right and might just be people copying what they see is the most successful in biggest platform.

But when I say take together ation, what I mean is a focus on content from strangers and people you don't know rather than your sort of social networks. A tendency like a sort of scrolled video fee that you just bounce through really quickly. And you like when I say you counted from strangers, this is all based on the F Y P, like a really you know heavily waited .

algorithm .

that's supposed give .

you on twitter .

for you. There's a four U C, which is effectively the same deal that sends you what's going viral on the platform. If you p has to college football tweet, you will suddenly see twenty five college football ets in your feed. And then the other big thing, which I think is really important to this, is that the platforms that are heading in the tiktok direction tend to pay posters directly for engagement, which we know about from twitter, especially the blue truck program, and in the sort of general like twitter program, where they will pay you out if you are particularly engaging post.

Would you show your F I P to your friends and family.

my twitter, F Y P.

or my anyone, anyone?

I think I would. I mean, I find IT a review. And I brought up because I turns out of a much bigger sports fan, and I realized I was like.

all of my F P I algo has do as.

like, a White male. I recently searched like a health related thing. And then my F P thing was like, and this is one of the problems with algos.

It's like when you first sign up to a platform, I find there is so much pressure on the first thing you click because that's basically going to show up IT in your algorithm forever IT feels like.

yeah, I mean, and I find myself very consciously if I have accidentally gotten into a place I really don't want to be politics on twitter, and particularly a bad situation for this. If you go on the wrong rabbit hole, the next thing you know, your F, Y P is just filled, guys you never want to hear from and don't ever want to see again. And so I will really consciously go and find something else to like, scroll through.

click on. So one thing I don't get about this in development, and by the way, I don't i'm not on tiktok. I rely on sama to curate the best of tiktok and posted on instagram for me. But like why the emphasis on random content from algos? Because when I think back to the essence of a social network, the idea was that you had an actual social network, people that you know, that you want to hear from.

I mean, I think what the big platforms found was that people actually didn't really want to hear from their friends of him. I mean, we know this as a phenomenon. I think we can all acknowledge IT being a phenomenon on both facebook and twitter, where you had this idea context collapse, where you would be posting something to imagine audience of your friends say, but your ants and uncles and everybody else is also on the same platform.

And all of a sudden, the things you feel comfortable saying in front of your friends and in front of your family might be different, and they might get in in fights, in the comments. And I might be awkward and strange. And I think that facebook kind of recognized this. Twitter is a slightly different thing because if I think was pretty rare as to follow your family on twitter, but you know, there is a reason for that. And I think tiktok coming through and showing that actually there was a huge opportunity in this sort of fully programmatic algorithms, mic, non social network y fees sort of pushed facebook in particular because remember, metal owns facebook and instagram and yeah so of controls a huge amount of what platforms are doing in any given men decided we going to start pushing a very similar kind of picture.

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So can we talk about twitter or ex for a second because that what I started and I still to this day on twitter like a lot, although actually I think I post a little bit less then I used to.

especially on weekends. Are you monti's ing yet?

I am not I do not think that I don't know. I just did my ethic training here at look, didn't say anything about that specifically, but I just tried not going to touch that. You know, there was a point I would say, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, maybe a little longer, where IT never felt that like twitter just never had the same size really as some of the other big social networks, particularly instagram or facebook.

But I always felt like all reporters are on there. Know, other people said this, twitter is like the assignment as for much the internet. And I remember like at one point, I don't know, watching the summer olympics one year that basically the news was like, and then this baseball player tweet this from the city and and it's like all of the future of TV news is actually people reading tweet on air is twitter right now said I said whether it's profitable or good .

or anything is is important. I mean, I think it's important in a kind of disconnected way, not the same way that you're talking about where with functions as a kind of assignment desk. And my friend john herman, who's the tech rider for new york mag and is a great thinker about these things, used to call twitter.

The context for media like this was where you go to understand out of what was going on. And I don't think IT functions like that anymore. But because of the fact that is owned by elon musk, I think you get all you old elon bought twitter in order to make himself important to politics.

But in funny way, I think elon, as a incredibly influential and like usually well resource figure, owning the social network means that what happens on IT is important. And so far that reflects an idea about like where politics is headed. But like the way you're talking about reading people's tweet out, it's still happens, sure, but it's just not it's not the same thing.

So one thing I wanted to bring up is, I guess, breaking news on twitter because that seems to have changed quite a bit. And and I do remember again, the good old days when you would go on twitter, when something is happening, you would search and you would get like a lot of different opinions, maybe little anette on the ground reportage, things like that. What happens with breaking news now? Well, I mean.

talking about the F Y P, because it's not chron logical because it's really kind of anti chronic ical. You're going to see step if you sign on to twitter and you look your following anyways. If you just look at the default feed, which is your F, I P, you're going to get tweet from twelve hours ago, from twenty hours ago, from five minutes ago, all jammed up against one another. You're going to be a huge number of people who are putting themselves out there, not for any kind of, let's say, noble .

informational value yeah.

but too specifically to get followers to get engagement parts so your incentivising hopes, you are sort of diminishing the value of the feed itself. And so what you get I mean, we saw this with the most recent hurry anes. This, I wrote about this for my newsletter, that this was a thing where twitter used to be the place you would go check for a ongoing news event like that.

And consistently, IT was for all the things you can say that we're bad about twitter. IT was a great place to find people like local reporters, the area, or even people who are like living through IT disaster event like that. You would find images in video. You'd have a hundred different meteorologists who were able to like, help, you can textual ze all these things. And I wasn't able to find any of that really. I mean, was there to some extent I don't want to pretend that they weren't meteorologists, say, being helpful or local reporters, but I was just drowned in the flood of influencers and holsters and people just trying to get attention for various reasons, in a way that felt sort of impossible to learn anything real or true about what was happening.

No, I found this true. In fact, on the most recent hurricane, the one that was heading right near tampa, I realized that I had been on twitter all morning, the neck like through the night, and I didn't actually know what had happened then. I the only place that I found, the sort of the preliminary assessment was bloomer dot com and I thought that was like really striking like I just didn't get any value.

But you know the other thing and you mentioned hoax is and I guess like a twenty sixteen people started calling IT fake news but like the degree of like fiction or fantasy you know you'd like cities tweet that would go viral for like female is on the ground aiming snipers and anyone who's trying and the'd been told that they're not allowed to return to their house and their private property is now the property of the federal government and all that like, truly like beyond fiction type stuff. And they have like fifteen thousand retweet. And i'm curiously, if you have a theory for that, because to me, IT feels like part of what's going on there is the engagement way.

There's maybe the desire for blue checks to get payout. But I also like worry that basically sort of real facts that exists in the world are just becoming like a category of facts. And then there's but these are just as good and these .

are just as interesting of, feels like the algo like can only measure engagement. Basically, you can measure quality of the tweet, right? So if someone is engagement, baby, if they're just making people angry or they're just tweet out something that's wrong and then a bunch of people come on and start like pointing out that it's wrong still counts in age.

I guess I also like i'm not even sure people care that effect like the like. There may be one point we're like I don't believe traditional media. I believe these alternative sources for various reasons. Some of them actually might be legitimate in my view, but actually the idea that like this is an actual fact to be believed, i'm not convinced as that important.

I mean, I think there's an to a lot of people have on twitter. I mean, these two things that is that I think doesn't had to a lot of people have on twitter, on social media, but especially on twitter, that you are not actually engaged in describing the world as IT is in communicating information of the people. You are engaged in a fight or a war between political parties, I suppose, but between sort of political factions.

And therefore, IT doesn't have any relationship to truth. You're just out there to own the other guys, to rally people to your side, to do whatever. And I think that the changes to this sort of algorithm and to the structure of the platform have exacerbated this tendency because, again, twitter, over its first decay or so, sort of realized that the edge IT had over other platforms was news.

IT always thought of itself as a social that we're structured around news. And this was like ultimately be not a great way to struct themselves in terms of like revenue and profits and growth in winter rolls. But IT was pretty good for getting a lot of journalists to pay attention and to share honestly honest story and to just sort of assess the truth. In fact, are you and now it's like more like a political like among other things, that sort of political or people with not great relationship, the truth to sort of like .

fight with each other on this point role quickly like i'm old too, so I am not a tiktok. Would you say the other platforms have emerging the same way? Or people view them as the arena for fighting for a pushing a faction yeah to some extent. I mean.

I don't think it's not quite the same way that is on twitter, which has because of if I knew this background, got a political background and twitter still has to sum extend a kind of because of its size and its structure, kind of central sense of what people are talking about and how to join IT. And tiktok can feel much more kind of open as an obviously instagram ment facebook.

The idea that is like a trend, a set of topics that people are talking about is just not existent. The other thing I would say about this is that one of the sort of industry wide trends that really, obviously the cause of twitter, but is happening on in meta and facebook. Two is a lot of people on context moderation teams are getting laid off.

People who whose job is to try and to sort of limit true information, to make judgment calls about what is true and what isn't true. I think elon's kind of desire to blow that up on twitter because he he seemed to believe that IT was over biased. And importing all these things has opened up space for meter, for example, to lie off a ton of its own content moderators.

And so I think that, you know, for all that people love to complain about facebook, and consistent moderation and the bad moderation on this, there was people doing real jobs at trying to make the platforms like enjoyable to use and not just filled with garbage all the time. People often don't work with those companies anymore or they're overwhelmed. And there's not a huge amount of will from what I understand, to sort of bring that back.

just going back to people fighting on platforms. I will say there is a lot of low level drama on tiktok that I kind of enjoy. And I don't watch tiktok directly, but I do watch the youtube summaries of like internet scandals like the brighton party that went wrong and things like that. I do enjoy those yeah, it's less political.

but definitely be because tiktok has the reply feature. Stick yourself into another person's video is A. Like responses and trying to post off of the viral success of somebody else or something. You're obvious, right? That's definitely a huge part of IT.

Are we gonna replaced by A? I I don't think so.

but I think a lot of posts are going to be replaced by A I we're already seeing a lot of stuff on facebook, on twitter, even on tiktok and instagram that is basically AI generated. That seems to have no real.

oh, at the facebook images. Those are crazy. Yeah.

the weird facebook. A I slap, if you haven't seen these on facebook, there's a great twitter account called weird facebook I slap, which I recently won a piece about for new ork magazine. This is a case where you have facebook started paying out sort of creator bonus to people who get a lot of engagement.

And from what I can tell, it's not necessarily worth IT for like an american who has an opportunity to make american minimum wage to try this out as a full time job. But we have a lot of people all over the world for whom the payouts actually are pretty meaningful and who can figure out ways to juice engagement on facebook groups are on the post that making in order to get page. So I talked to a guy in kenya, for example, who had started a bunch of pages.

He told me that his most engaging topics were jesus pets and animals. The U. S.

Military and manchester united were like this for big engagement subjects. And he goes in and he just makes these A I. Images, he sort of voco co. Sentimental jesus images, and he posts them and tries to get, you know, hundreds or thousands of people to like and share.

And you can make, you know five hundred or more bucks a months of this, which is pretty close to move in mum wage and a lot of places in kenya. And this stuff is kind of taking over facebook. Facebook will tell you it's not.

And I believe them that in some sense, it's not because it's it's a drop in what is a huge ocean of content. But I touch with a lot of people who found that if they click or scroll or check out an AI generated image that in some way, in some sense, the facebook program is really pushing this stuff on people. And I mean, I find IT like fascinating. It's like, it's like a car rack. You know, you going you cannot look at these things, but it's not what I out of the social network .

really yeah there's tones and tons of slop. I also like notice on about twitter and linked in replies that i'm like, sure are A I like, I like post like new episode about mortgage .

rates .

and then i'll get a reply. I wish it's thank you for keeping us updated on mortgage rates. Staying informed, don. Mortgage rates is really important and it's like kind .

of IT that line or maybe like somewhere in complete seriousness is trying to be part of the conversation.

I but I like not sure you work because it's very easy like you know of the free version of a change GPT could come up with that could easily. But going back to whether i'll be reached by A I like I listen to some of the um I think it's called the google notebook. I M like fake podcast. Here's my thought on some of the stuff like none of IT is interesting like i've never seen like I actually like interesting AI output really that could replace say like an interesting writer. But I didn't hate IT like if you like a you know I listen to this podcast that was about some due nuclear report and it's like I did not think that was a terrible way to consume that content like our on the subway or something like that like it's not that interesting or that good, but IT actually like sort of summarized IT .

in an audio years.

He was not terrible.

Yeah, I mean, those podcasts are one of the is probably the most recent thing from out of A I that I felt like are cool that I sort of like, well, this is really cool and like surprising and interesting and like I could see this being useful in some ways I mean i'd exported a bunch er of my group chats and made pockets like as text and put them in the pog m and made I just about my group chats that I can share with my group chats which was not productive or uh useful in an economic p you know but I love doing IT.

No, I think that there's a lot of use for that kind of thing. The thing I say is that, you know, I think there's a lot of ways that people have talked about the relationship of AI of the forms that we're talking about here. And one thing writing in reporting about this sort of wave of slot made me realized as how much these two technologies are quite complimentary to each other, that in fact, like on facebook, you have this effectively infinite market for content of basically any kind, as long as somebody will look at them.

And in LLM, you have an effectively infinite content generator. So if I was in charge of the facebook platform, whatever, I would have a really hard time figuring out how to make a decision about what like what stuff I allow and what stuff I don't allow because obviously, there's plenty of ways that a podcast about a deal energy report is like, I mean, that's not going to go viral in facebook is behind est. But there it's interesting versions of this that you don't want to tell people they can't post. But the problem is the threshold for creating this stuff is so minimal and ultimately, the value that is for the ninety nine percent of what you're creating with the aid stuff is just nonexisting. It's hard to imagine that the nose can join up the signal at some point.

Direct lending has been one of the most dynamic areas of the private alternative space these last few years, having grown massively as a source of capital for both corporate borrows but also a financial sponsors that have kept going from strength to strength. And i've needed that private capital to a Foster the growth that they've .

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There is the dead internet theory. So the idea that like eventually it's just gonna bots talking to each other and people just aren't onna be that engage in terms of content creation anymore, doesn't matter who is producing content on the internet. Like assuming that we're all addicted to IT and we're still gona keep looking at IT, why does IT matter?

I have a strong feeling that IT matters in some fundamental way to us, that the things we see and engage about our human created, i'm trying to think about how to articulate this, maybe put of this way, matters less that the sort of content we consume, like the T. V. Shows or the novels or whatever, are created by A I then IT does that there are other humans to talk about that stuff with.

Like, I think so much of how we consume culture is about our relationship to other people and the ability to kind of assume IT in tandem with other people that we can talk about IT with. I'm skeets ticals that we will get the same level of satisfaction, or like wholesome, like happiness, out of talking about A I generated content with A I bots waiting for the next AI generated episode A T. V. show. But IT remains to be seen.

doesn't matter to advertisers that all like if the currency of the internet is eyeballs and they're still getting eyeballs, do you think they care right now?

IT doesn't seem like they do. I mean, look, I think the this for me what what is optimistic for me is the idea that we're looking now on a medium term time horizon. There is a recognition on the part of advertisers that these are not like high quality views that they're getting on their ads, that if you like scoring through a bunch of slop, like a lot of people are going to have laugh, the people who are growing through IT or not looking for the stuff of doing. But right now, IT doesn't seem like, I mean, they're happy to get the clock. And do you know so much of what facebook is about is like really specific microtargeting for small the medium sized businesses where IT does not matter if it's all AI slap s running, as long as you're getting the people who go to your restaurant or whatever IT is.

I mean, everyone knows about the terrible economics for a lot of legacy media businesses, the entities that, in theory, try to create factual, real things. Is that a but there are like some things. I mean, you're a super prior of a profitable newsletter that people pay for and there are edit pages and discord groups that are sort of run by a dictatorship in which you don't like, right? Like now there are rules and you'll be banned at women if you was a mistake. Sorry, but on net like this is a good thing to have a very heavy hand at IT is the future of all media, just like narrow subscriptions to the actual humans you trust, or narrow communities run by humans you trust. I think we're .

basically we're hollowing out the middle. So you have on the one side, I mean, this is what IT seems like to me right now, is on the one side, you have the times, probably the world to journal bloomberg, who can remain a float as really sort of enormous national outlets. I mean, the times already employees like seven percent of everybody of journalists or something like I maybe making that up.

I'm pretty sure i'm not at some shocking number currently employed journalists in the U. S. Are employed by the york times. And then on the other side, you have sub acks and streamers and the sort of internet personality model of media which is for Better or for worse, where my career has ended up. But this sort of big middle of what used to be like a really diverse set of magazines, you know, in the .

work, something like will be traveling and they're still are like the local nbc affiloir, whatever, which always surprisingly there .

are also like surprisingly powerful too, like the fact it's syncline owns them and is like quite pro trump, is always been a little bit interesting to me. But yeah, they do still exist. I mean, I wonder like what the time horizon is for those, but that seems like that seems to be relatively successful business mile for now.

On the personality driven media, one thing I always think doesn't get enough attention, but like there is attention between telling reporters that they need to develop their own brand and audience and do all that. And joe and I have been told that basically our entire careers and have tried to do that. But then the legacy news room doesn't really know how to handle that like they don't seem to have like a strategy for if you develop your own audience, what do they actually do with that?

Yeah I mean, we've seen a million examples of this is the tailor rens, the internet reporter recently left the washington post and sort of essentially said this, that SHE built a brand for herself and SHE was running up against the limits of what the washington post was willing to let her do or allow.

And I think that a lot of the attention that we've seen in newsrooms, i'm sure a lot of people read about tension inside the times, for example, you know, since twenty twenty years. So between ranking file journalists and management, I think that this sort of star economy of this is a bigger driver of attention. People maybe recognize or understand that both in the sense that, you know, if you are a working journalists and you're watching people get a lot of lev and a lot of rope for management because they happen to be big stars, you might start to feel frustrated.

And also because you have people who have huge followings on twitter or instagram, say who know that they have an audience, know that they have some leveraged with their boss because they're bringing people to the times and maybe they should just walk away you again. Like I said, I wouldn't want to be in charge of facebook. I'm not sure I D want to be in charge of big. Didn't media organza too?

I remember like a couple years at some point when people were all like convinced that twitter servers were about to crush. And I remember like people talking about, you know, they would try to find some other site and a few people use the lifeboat, which I think is really interesting because IT applies to my mind that a journalist social media profile is the thing that they hold on to when their organization sinks. So twitter is a lifeboat. If you're at like some newspaper, twitter is your lifeboat because your newspaper might go down but you still exist as an entity and that can take you to the next safe like part of yeah and so like this ideas, like I need a new live book because twitter might not be there anymore. I think this is like a very revealing word to describe how a lot of these star journalists to the platform.

Yeah, I mean, you need an audience. And like my man, substate is now my life. But I A one thing that substances very attractive with for a lot of general, allow you, you ve you lose IT down as I have. But I now have forty thousand years that I, that I can take her as my life next read.

Thank you so much for coming on. All love. That was awesome.

Thank you so much for having at a great time.

Tracy, I love talking. I'd like, you know, it's always fun.

Everyone is basically got something about our own. Yes.

I do too much. I actually find a lot of media naval gating to be sort of boring, to be honest. But sometimes it's sort of to look back how things have changed in the last and fifty years.

You know, I got a really good idea from that. Yeah, that won't be useful in my personal life, but maybe I will be useful to others. I think when you go on a date with someone, when you go on a first day, people should show there for two pages on various social media platforms, and you would instantly get a sense of who that person is, or at least who the algorithms.

inks could be. A four u page based dating APP, where this is all you see is the person .

for you page that's .

a good you know, I really like the word personalization oh yeah. And I think there's a really powerful idea, the idea that like all apps tend towards looking and functioning the same way. And currently it's all towards tiktok.

The other thing which we didn't get into, but I think there is also a an example of personalization too, is like everything sort of being it's either a tiktok or a chatbot, like text, like i've like opened windows, like all open an APP and IT will take me to his second to realized weight. Am I I am right now? Am I am ChatGPT right now? Like this sort of this dominant mode of interfacing with the internet?

That's all like chat related? Yeah I guess that's true. I mean, that is true on this point that even read IT, which like I started out funding over, is starting to like experiment with or algo push content. So IT will suggest sub redis for you now, but luckily you can still ignore them for the time being. But again, like as pressure to generate revenue actually rams up IT seems like the directional travel all roads lead to tiktok basically.

Yeah you spotify to and like you know there's like stories and spotify looks very similar. You get pushed all this different stuff that people that you're not listening to. I think the answer is to just subscribe the old lots and just hang out in the old loves disco and then just not worry about any of the other.

That's right. It's a safe space and you can still curate what you what you want talk about. All right, shall we leave IT there?

Let's leave IT there. This has been another episode of the all lots podcast. I'm Tracy l way you can follow .

me at Tracy away and why you can follow me at the start. Check out max read sub stack is called a read max. Find that at max read dut substate dot com follow our producers common rud rigas at common armon dash Bennett at dash butt and q Brooks at kill Brooks.

Thank you to produce your most as on them more oblig content good to bomberg dog com slash of logs. We have transcripts, a blog and a daily news letter that you can subscribe to and get into your inbox, and you can check twenty four seven in the nicest, most moderated environment. You can find our score discord.

And if you enjoy all lots, if you like, IT, when we occasionally indulge selves by talking about the media, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a bloomer subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes. Absolutely add free.

You will also get that daily newsletter. All you have to do to listen to add free episodes is find the bloomberg channel on apple podcast and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

We're in the middle of a truly wild presidential race pitting a democrat who wasn't on the ballot until this summer against the republican who is convicted on thirty four felony counts. But the wild dest thing might be this guy.

if you are ready ve in the constitution, you're just signing something already believe, and you can want a million dollars.

awesome. I max chaffin. And this is citizen iron three part series from ironic, where we investigate iron mosques on precedented support for Donald trump, for you onic on apple podcast, or wherever you like to listen.