Ryan Broderick

And Instagram seems to prioritize different things.

It's not really as trend focused.

But this has basically created a landscape where...

between 2022 and now so about four years clipping has been running the internet and controlling everything we sort of see and think about is whether it's popular or not it has only been in the last six to nine months that people have finally figured it out come to a consensus and named it i don't think that's a short time at all actually i think that's like it took a while um whereas something like planking you know people are doing it it gets a name and it dies pretty quick like or um

Oh, another video trend like this would have been like during the pandemic when people were like eating food out of toilet bowls and stuff and like pissing people off on Facebook.

Like these trends come around and the really successful ones get a name.

And so, yeah, we are in the midst of a clipping apocalypse.

And I think once everyone figures out that's the game, platforms usually have to step in because if enough people are doing the same trick, it starts to basically be a form of spam.

I think that's right.

I mean, I definitely think...

Part of the problem is the gamified, like, payola structure of clipping has meant that a lot of things that have no real interest for people, no real juice, are being talked about to a disproportionate degree.

So it's creating a lot of moments where everyone's talking about something, but they're, like, confused as to why.

So you're getting a lot of incendiary, offensive, very polarizing content rising to the top right now.

It's also making people very paranoid, which is what caused the whole geese thing this month, which sort of culminated in, I thought, a fairly boneheaded take from Wired this week about it.

For those who didn't read Garbage Day.

Yeah, basically Wired...

Picked up a story from this musician on Substack who had discovered that this shadowy digital marketing company called Chaotic Good Projects was using bots and, well, maybe not bots, but fake user-generated content to promote bands.

Alex Warren, Somber, Geese were all listed as artists they'd worked with.

My major problem with any company like this is, okay, so you've manipulated the algorithm.

Show me how you did it.