Odd Lots - Max Read on how the Internet Got Infested With Garbage

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

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.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast OddLots on Amazon Music. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Allaway. 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 thoughts 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...

Yeah, 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. If we're being honest, 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 an 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 bots 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.g.g. slash odd lots, because 24-7 in there, there is a well-c 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 going 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. 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 Reed,

Oddlod's Discord lurker, but more importantly, the author and sole proprietor of the excellent Reed Macs substack, one of the few substacks that I actually pay money for. So Max, thank you for coming on odd lots. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for being a part of the discord. It's fine that you don't post much, but we appreciate that you lurk. I mean, I'm trying to put all of my words in a monetizable format. Yeah, I respect that. 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 2010, and I would say I worked my way up, except. I got my start in. I was

the way things worked at Gawker's, the people at the top just got fired and whoever was left and 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, you know, 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.com all the time. I used to do that. 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. Do you think every once in a while, like, I don't know, like Gawkers, there's probably is some version of Garker 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 is 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... I'm pretty sure we've said that before. And we've said that, too. Is that just impossible in 2024? 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 and day. 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.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 content? 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 I think people will 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

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 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, of sentimental content, inspirational content. 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. 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 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 or 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 this huge internet juggernaut. And if you weren't there, like you weren't cool and you weren't part of it. I think it's actually crazy the degree to it. People who weren't there, brains got broken by that. 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? Yeah. So I think we're sort of undergoing a process that I think of as ticker. talkization 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. That goes viral on Twitter everyone. Yeah, exactly. The evolutionary craftsters 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 is the most successful and biggest platform. But when I say TikTokization, 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. What is the FYP stand for? It's just the for you page on TikTok. So if you're a, if you're a Or Instagram or Twitter.

Right. So if you're on Twitter, for you, there's a for 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 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. 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 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% high-y. Or the Algo has just pinned you as like a white male. See, I recently searched like a health-related thing and then my FYP thing was like disgusting. I'm not going to talk about it. 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 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. 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. 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 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 networky feeds, sort of pushed Facebook in particular, because remember meta owns Facebook and Instagram and 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. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real.

Lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. At Vanguard, institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. We're talking top-grade products across the board of over 80 bond funds, actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders. These folks live and breathe fixed income. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out,

go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing corporation distributor. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to see. Stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gura.

Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend. I'm Christina Rafini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews. All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg this weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. That on Sundays we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead.

Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television. Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. 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.

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 it 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 at 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 it function 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 the 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, 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, 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 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. Yeah. But 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 a hundred 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 helpful or local reporters, but it was just drowned in this flood of influencers and hoaxers and people just trying to get it. 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, like through the

night, and I didn't actually know what had happened. And then I, the only place that I found that was 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'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 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.

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 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 to. 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 are engaged in a fight or a war between political parties, 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 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, just 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. Would you say the other platforms have emerged in the same way where people view them as an arena for fighting? For 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, 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. And obviously, Instagram and Facebook, the idea that there's like 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. 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, you know, for all that people love to complain about Facebook's inconsistent 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 Bridgett 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 can stitch yourself into another person's video, there's a lot of like 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 relationship. 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 Slop, 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 U.S. 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 roco-co sentiment, 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 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 the social network, really, you know. Yeah, there's tons and tons of slop. I also, like, notice 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. Like, crypto scheme. 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 less. Somewhere there's a poor guy out there who like, earnestly.

In complete seriousness, trying to be part of the conversation. 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, L.M, like, fake podcast 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 I were 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. It serves a use. 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 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 shared with my group chats, which was not. productive or useful in an economic sense. Not GDP adding.

But I love doing it. 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. 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 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 the AI stuff is just non-existent. It's hard to imagine that the noise isn't going to drown out the signal at some point. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new

podcast, Leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts.

What separates good leaders from transformational ones? I'm Jessica Chen and in season two of Leading By Example, we'll sit down with executives like Grace Chen of Bertie Gray to find out. It's important to understand where you spike, also really acknowledge where you don't and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to leading by example, executives making an impact on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. There is the dead internet theory, so the idea that, like, 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 we 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, 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 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, 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 slap surrounding it 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, and 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 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 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 U.S. 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. You know what still exists is local news networks somehow? 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 always surprising 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 wonder what the time horizon is for those, but it seems like that seems to be relatively successful, this 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 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 filed 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 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 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. I remember, like, a couple 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 journal. 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. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. Like, I mean, Substack is now my lifeboat. And I have a port. I mean, one thing that Substack was very attractive with for a lot of journalists is 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 list that I own that I can take where that's my lifeboat. Max Reed. Thank you so much for coming on the Obloft.

That was awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I had a great time. Tracy, I love talking to me. I like, you know, it's always fun every once in a while to do a little. Basically just gossiping about our own industry. Yeah. You know, I don't like to indulge into 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, 15 years. You know, I got a really good idea from that. Yeah. 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 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. be a for you page based dating app where it's just all you see is the person's four you page. That's a good idea. Do I like this person? That would be good. Should we make that startup?

Yeah, I think that's a good idea. You know what I really liked the word carcinization? Oh, yeah. 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 an example of carcinization too is like everything sort of being, it's either a TikTok or a chat bot. 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 I 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. 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. 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 want to talk about. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there.

This has been another episode of the All Thoughts 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 Reed. Substack. It's called Readmax.

Find that at maxreed. Substack.com. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin. Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kel Brooks at Kail Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more oddlots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oblox. 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.org. And if you enjoy Altlots, 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.

You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top stories. Episodes are published throughout the day with the latest information and data to keep you informed. Yes, there are other products like this from a variety of news organizations, but they usually rerun their radio newscasts throughout the day. That's not what we do.

We create customized episodes that can only be heard on Bloomberg News Now. And we don't wait an hour to publish breaking news. When news breaks, we'll have an episode up in your podcast. speed within minutes. So you're always getting the latest stories and developments. Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts. We're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. What separates good leaders from transformational ones? I'm Jessica Chen, and in season two of Leading By Example, we'll sit down with executives like Grace Chen of Bertie Gray to find out.

It's important to understand where you spike, but also really acknowledge where you don't and find people who can fill those gaps. Listen to leading by example, executives making an impact on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.