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