Adam Aleksik

Freaking come here.

Give me your Ohio.

For those of you out of the loop, these are the lyrics to the Rizzler song, a meme that went massively viral last year.

It's full of current middle school slang words like riz, gyot, and skibbity, and was instrumental in popularizing those words to a broader audience.

This is because social media algorithms reward repetition.

If a song is funny or catchy and people interact with it, the algorithm will then push that song to more people since it's proven to drive engagement on the app.

The same is true of memes, or words in general, since trending metadata like hashtags will also be pushed to people who previously shown interest in similar content.

Creators are very aware of this, and we actively use trending audios or hashtags to make our videos perform better.

In the wake of the Rizzler song, for example, we saw an explosion of people making videos with the words Rizz, Gyot, and Skibbity, because they knew those videos would do well.

And as a result, the word spread.

Language has always been a little bit like a virus.

Words are transmitted from one host to another, reproducing and changing as they infect different people along social networks.

But now the literally viral nature of social media is accelerating this process from start to finish.

In the span of just a year, a word like Riz can go from complete obscurity to becoming the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year.

And the algorithm is the culprit, but influencers are the accomplices.

We use whatever tricks we can to keep you entertained, because that makes our videos do better, which helps us earn a living.

This means that we often end up creating and spreading words that help the system.

For example, the suffix core has recently gotten very popular in Gen Z slang to describe specific aesthetics, like cottagecore, or goblincore, or angelcore.

And on the surface level, these are cute.

You watch a cottagecore video, you like it.