Max Read on how the Internet Got Infested With Garbage

There was a a point in time when Twitter used to be good for breaking news. Social media outlets like Instagram and Facebook were great for keeping up with friends. There used to be websites that people would refresh throughout the day, reading news or gossip from sources they knew and trusted. Now, most of that has gone -- or at least changed dramatically. A combination of profit imperatives, political motivations, and AI have upended much of that old internet. So what happened? Why has the web become a home of slop and sludge? We speak to Max Read, the author of the Read Max newsletter, to understand today's internet, and where things are going next. Read More:Musk Is About to Find What $130 Million for Trump Gets HimTikTok Ordered to Close Canada Unit Due to National SecurityOnly Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

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• 0:43Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 0:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:04Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 1:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, you don't use Twitter like quite as much as I do still.

• 1:08Tracy Alloway?

  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 Odd Lots in my career, but I really like Reddit now.

• 1:19Joe Weisenthal?

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

• 1:26Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 1:34Joe Weisenthal?

  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.

• 1:41Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, why?

• 1:45Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know. This is like a question for therapy for a long time. Cause 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.

• 2:02Tracy Alloway?

  That's true.

• 2:03Joe Weisenthal?

  We still discover like experts. They're still there, but like it's objectively gotten way worse. And I don't even think it's just Elon Musk.

• 2:10Tracy Alloway?

  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 bots have always been a problem, but I feel like it might be starting to get worse.

• 2:44Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what platform is really good?

• 2:46Tracy Alloway?

  What?

• 2:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Discord.

• 2:48Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:49Joe Weisenthal?

  In fact, listeners should check out discord.gg/odlotts because 24/7 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.

• 3:16Tracy Alloway?

  That sounds great. The perfect guest.

• 3:18Joe Weisenthal?

  The perfect guest. 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 gonna be speaking with Max Reed, Odlott's 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 Odlott.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  I'm so excited to be here.

• 3:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you for being a part of the Discord. It's fine that you don't post much, but we appreciate that you lurk.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm trying to put all of my words in a monetizable format, which is why I have the newsletter.

• 3:52Tracy Alloway?

  Fair enough. So, one thing I'm always curious about, when people are like internet or culture correspondents, how did you get into that realm?

• 4:00Speaker 04

  So, I got my start in journalism at Gawker, the media gossip website that no longer exists. And I started there in 2010, and I would say I worked my way up, except the way things worked at Gawker is the people at the top just got fired and whoever was left continued to advance. So, I was there during the sort of 2011, 2012 era, which people who were in media will remember as the moment when Facebook, so to speak, turned on the floodgates or opened 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.com all the time.

• 4:35Tracy Alloway?

  I used to do that.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, Gawker 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 15 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, essentially, it's because I went crazy when Facebook decided to change the way media worked, and I've never become sane since.

• 5:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you think, every once in a while, like, I don't know, like Gawker is, there's probably is some version of Gawker that exists out there on like its fifth relaunch. 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 outside of 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 of six or seven.

• 5:42Tracy Alloway?

  I'm pretty sure we've said that before.

• 5:43Joe Weisenthal?

  And we've said that too. Is that just impossible in 2024?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  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 a thing that people would check day in, 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, joewisenthal.com or whatever your blog homepage would be.

• 6:29Tracy Alloway?

  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 content?

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll use Gawker as an example. So Gawker began, as people will 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 started 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 in 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

• 7:25Speaker 04

  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 insider-y, what's Rupert Murdoch up to, and a lot more, I mean, cat videos doesn't even quite begin to cover it. It was sort of, it's sort of sentimental content, inspirational content.

• 7:41Joe Weisenthal?

  I always think of like those BuzzFeed lists, like 23 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.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  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, 2012 and 2014 or so was really dominated by this kind of thing. And if you were there, you remember BuzzFeed as being, you know, Jonah Peretti 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.

• 8:27Joe Weisenthal?

  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 as like this like huge internet juggernaut. And if you weren't there, like, you weren't cool and you weren't part of it. Like, I think it's actually crazy, the degree to which people who weren't there's brains got broken by that, by that behemoth.

• 8:53Tracy Alloway?

  Broken by BuzzFeed. Okay, so we've been reminiscing about the good old internet of like 2013. Can we talk about what's happening now?

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think we're sort of undergoing a process that I think of as TikTok-ization of all these platforms. I mean, you know the carcinization, 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.

• 9:19Joe Weisenthal?

  That goes viral on Twitter every once in a while.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. The evolutionary crafters basically turn 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, carcinization is like a fun metaphor. It might not be quite right. It might just be people copying what they see as the most successful and biggest platform. But when I say TikTok-ization, 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 for.

• 10:02Tracy Alloway?

  What does FYP stand for?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  It's the For You page on TikTok. So if you're a Twitter-

• 10:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Or Instagram or Twitter.

• 10:07Speaker 04

  Right, so if you're on Twitter, the For You, there's a For You feed-

• 10:09Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, I see.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  -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 25 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.

• 10:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Would you show your FYP to your friends and family?

• 10:38Speaker 04

  My Twitter FYP or my-

• 10:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Anyone, anyone.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  I think I would. I mean, I find it, it reveals me to be a much, I brought up college football because it turns out I'm a much bigger sports fan than I realized I was. Like, all of my FYPs are like 90% highlight.

• 10:50Tracy Alloway?

  Or the algo has just pinned you as like a white male.

• 10:53Joe Weisenthal?

  See, I recently searched like a health-related thing, and then my FYP thing was like disgusting afterwards. Like, I'm not gonna talk about it.

• 11:01Tracy Alloway?

  Well, 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.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  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 I don't want.

• 11:37Tracy Alloway?

  So one thing I don't get about this recent development, and by the way, I don't, I'm not on TikTok. I rely on Sam Rowe to curate the best of TikTok and post it 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 of people that you know that you want to hear from.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  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 different thing 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

• 12:45Speaker 04

  opportunity in these sort of fully programmatic, algorithmic, non-social-networky feeds, sort of pushed Facebook in particular, because remember, Meta owns Facebook and Instagram and is sort of controls a huge amount of what platforms are doing at any given moment, decided that they were going to start pushing a very similar kind of structure.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Greaves, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 13:34Speaker 05

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high-frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service institutional clients.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

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• 14:50Joe Weisenthal?

  So can we talk about Twitter or X for a second? Because that's where I started and I still to this day am on Twitter like a lot. Although actually I think I post a little bit less than I used to, especially on weekends and stuff. Are you monetizing yet? I am not. 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'm 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.

• 15:32Joe Weisenthal?

  And I remember like at one point, I don't know, watching the Summer Olympics one year. And then basically the news was like, and then this basketball player tweeted this from the city. And, 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?

• 15:52Speaker 04

  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 it 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 would go to understand sort of what was going on. And I don't think it functions 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 this social network means that what happens on it is important insofar 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.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  But it's just not, it's not the same thing.

• 16:39Tracy Alloway?

  So one thing I wanted to bring up is, I guess, breaking news on Twitter. Cause 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 anecdotes, on the ground, reportage, things like that. What happens with breaking news now?

• 17:01Speaker 04

  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 onto Twitter and you look at not your following list or any other list, if you just look at the default feed, which is your FYP, you're going to get tweets from 12 hours ago, from 20 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 information.

• 17:27Tracy Alloway?

  Informational value.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  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 was, you know, I wrote about this for my newsletter, that this was this 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 100 different meteorologists who were able to, like, 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

• 18:12Speaker 04

  helpful, or local reporters, but it was just drowned in this flood of influencers and hoaxers 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.

• 18:23Joe Weisenthal?

  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, 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.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 2016, people started calling it fake news. But, like, the degree of, like, fiction or fantasy, you know, you would, 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

• 19:06Joe Weisenthal?

  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, 15,000 retweets. And I'm curious, like, 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 people.

• 19:40Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 19:59Joe Weisenthal?

  And I guess what I 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 in 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.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  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 to other 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 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.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  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 with the truth to sort of like fight with each other.

• 21:23Joe Weisenthal?

  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 where people view them as an arena for fighting? Or for pushing a faction?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  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, it's sort of political background. And Twitter still has to some extent, a kind of, I think because of 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 is 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 too, is a lot of people on content moderation teams are getting laid off, people whose job is to try and to sort of limit untrue information, to make judgment calls about what is true and what isn't true.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  I think Elon's kind of desire to blow that up on Twitter because he seemed to believe that it was overbiased 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 for all that people love to complain about Facebook's inconsistent moderation and the bad moderation and all this, there was people doing real jobs at trying to make the platforms 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.

• 22:54Tracy Alloway?

  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 internet scandals, like the Bridgerton party that went wrong and things like that. I do enjoy those.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's less political, but definitely because TikTok has the reply feature where you can 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.

• 23:27Tracy Alloway?

  Are we going to be replaced by AI?

• 23:29Speaker 04

  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 relationship.

• 23:42Tracy Alloway?

  Oh yeah, the Facebook images, those are crazy.

• 23:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Weird Facebook AI Slop. If you haven't seen these on Facebook, there's a great Twitter account called Weird Facebook AI Slop, which I recently wrote a piece about for New York Magazine. This is a case where you have, Facebook has started paying out 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.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  He told me that his most engaging topics were Jesus, pets and animals, the US military and Manchester United. Were like his four big engagement subjects. And he goes in and he just makes these AI images, these sort of rokoko 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, 500 or more bucks a month off of this, which is pretty close to, which is 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, 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,

• 25:08Speaker 04

  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 the social network, really, you know?

• 25:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's tons and tons of slop. I also like noticed on both Twitter and LinkedIn replies that I'm like sure are AI. Like I'll like post like a new episode about mortgage rates and then I'll get a reply.

• 25:33Tracy Alloway?

  A crypto scheme or something?

• 25:35Joe Weisenthal?

  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.

• 25:47Tracy Alloway?

  Somewhere there's a poor guy out there who like said that in complete seriousness, trying to be part of the conversation.

• 25:54Joe Weisenthal?

  I know, but I'm like not sure anymore because that's very easy. Like, you know, the free version of a 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 podcasts and stuff. Here's my thought 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, say, 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 DOE 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.

• 26:39Joe Weisenthal?

  It serves a use. Yeah, it was not terrible.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  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 LLM and then made podcasts about my group chats that I've been sharing with my group chats, which was not productive or useful in an economic sense.

• 27:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Not GDP adding.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  No, but I love doing it. You know, I think that there's a lot of use for 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.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Because obviously, there's plenty of ways that a podcast about a DOE 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 99% of what you're creating with AI stuff, it's just nonexistent. It's hard to imagine that the noise isn't going to drown out the signal at some point.

• 28:30Speaker 07

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• 29:38Speaker 01

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• 30:15Tracy Alloway?

  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. Does it matter who is producing content on the internet? Assuming that we're all addicted to it and we're still going to keep looking at it. Why does it matter?

• 30:38Speaker 04

  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 that the sort of content we consume, like the TV shows or the novels or whatever are created by AI than 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 wholesome happiness

• 31:18Speaker 04

  out of 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.

• 31:27Tracy Alloway?

  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?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Right now, it doesn't seem like they do. I mean, look, I think for me, what is optimistic for me is the idea that we're looking 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 scrolling through a bunch of slop, like, a lot of people are gonna have left, 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 slop surrender as long as you're getting the people who might go to your restaurant or whatever it is.

• 32:10Joe Weisenthal?

  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, I'm like, right? Like, no, there are rules and you will be banned at whim, and if it was a mistake, sorry, but on net, like, this is a good thing to have a very heavy hand in it. Is the future of all media just like narrow subscriptions to actual humans you trust or narrow communities run by humans you trust?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  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 employs like 7% 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 Substacks and streamers and this 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.

• 33:38Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what still exists is local news networks. Like you'll go to like a town or something, like we'll be traveling and there still are like the local NBC affiliate or whatever, which always surprises me a little bit.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:04Tracy Alloway?

  On the personality-driven media, one thing I always think, it 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?

• 34:34Speaker 04

  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 2020 or so, between rank and file journalists and management. I think that the 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

• 35:17Speaker 04

  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 say, I wouldn't want to be in charge of Facebook. I'm not sure I'd want to be in charge of a big institutional media organization, too.

• 35:36Joe Weisenthal?

  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 used 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 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 could take you to the next safe like port of call.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:09Joe Weisenthal?

  And so like, this idea is like, I need a new lifeboat because Twitter might not be there anymore. I think was like a very revealing word to describe how a lot of these star journalists view the platform.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you need an audience. And like, I mean, Substack is now my lifeboat. And I have a port. And one thing that Substack was very attractive with for a lot of journalists, they allow you to port your email list. So you've got, you know, you lose your Twitter account, as I have, but I now have 40,000 strong email lists that I own that I can take where that's my lifeboat.

• 36:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Max Reed, thank you so much for coming on the Ablot. That was awesome.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time.

• 36:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I love talking to him. I like, you know, it's always fun every once in a while to do-

• 36:56Tracy Alloway?

  Basically just gossiping about our own industry.

• 36:59Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I don't like to indulge into too much. I actually find a lot of media navel gazing to be sort of boring, to be honest. But sometimes it's sort of fun to look back at how things have changed in the last, I don't know, 15 years.

• 37:11Tracy Alloway?

  You know, I got a really good idea from that.

• 37:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Tracy Alloway?

  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 pages on various social media platforms. And you would instantly get a sense of who that person is, or at least who the algorithm thinks they are.

• 37:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Could even be a for you page based dating app, where it's just all you see is the person's for you page.

• 37:37Tracy Alloway?

  That's a good idea.

• 37:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Do I like this person? That would be good.

• 37:39Tracy Alloway?

  Should we make that startup?

• 37:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think that's a good idea. You know what I really liked? The word carcinization.

• 37:45Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:45Joe Weisenthal?

  And I think that'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 a, an example of carcinization too is like, everything sort of being, it's either 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.

• 38:20Tracy Alloway?

  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.

• 38:47Joe Weisenthal?

  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.

• 39:04Tracy Alloway?

  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?

• 39:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 39:11Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 39:16Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Check out Max Reed Substack. It's called Reed Max. Find that at maxreed.substack. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin, Dashell Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kel Brooks, at KelBrooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a daily newsletter that you can subscribe to and get into your inbox. And you can chat 24/7 in the nicest, most moderated environment. You can find our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 39:50Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we occasionally indulge ourselves by talking about the media, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. You will also get that daily newsletter. All you have to do to listen to ad-free episodes is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 40:49Speaker 07

  Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, you know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch. And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just $5. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokemon, with new limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home, or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. And the cash goes right-

• 41:34Speaker 07

  Right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger low balling you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.