Bro, I am so tired

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you eat your daily Costco chicken.

THE ONGOING DEATH OF THE MEDIA

Meta is finally pulling the plug on news. It will no longer pay publishers in the US and Australia and the “Facebook News” tab is also being removed. Of course, publishers can still post, but there won’t be any real support for it. I, honestly, find some relief in this. We can now finally begin to imagine new ways to move forward. The platforms will not help us. Fine.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan is launching a new media company. On Substack. Morals and messiness aside, I’m not so sure that’s a smart idea anymore. I will have more thoughts on this next week, when I write out a longer item about what my first month outside of Substack has been like, but for now, I’ll say this, Substack is not a good place to launch a “media company”. It’s a good platform to spin up a small-to-medium-sized newsletter and see if you like writing that kind of thing. But if you have any long-term goals about turning that email list into an actual company, you absolutely should not be doing that on Substack.

Where are all the dumb fun articles? It’s a question many are asking! One of the weirder side effects of the large-scale pivot to video during the 2010s was that most of the written content still being published online became News Content. Which, let’s face it, everyone kinda hates. And even the biggest news junkie in the world is probably not going to say that reading news content is relaxing or entertaining. But there used to be written content on the internet that was! People wrote fun and/or weird blog posts and other people read and shared them. And to answer the question of why that doesn’t happen anymore, it’s pretty simple. It’s not as good for advertisers as video allegedly is. Advertisers value a video ad more than a non-video ad and now all the words on the internet are from news publishers.

PLATFORMS

TikTok has reportedly not lost any traffic after Universal Music Group pulled all their content. This is really surprising! As I wrote on Wednesday, no platform has successfully defeated UMG. If TikTok truly isn’t feeling any heat from this then I see two possible outcomes here: The simplest is that UMG relents, comes up with a new agreement with TikTok, and all the music gets turned back on. The other, more interesting outcome would be that both UMG and TikTok stand firm and, possibly, TikTok launches a bunch of native musicians that never end up joining UMG?

Nextdoor is not doing so hot. I don’t live in the suburbs or suffer from intense paranoia, so I never really think about Nextdoor. But, apparently, it has struggled considerably since it went public in 2021. It’s an ad-supported social network, after all, and we’re only allowed to have a couple of those and I guess we’re all full up now.

Threads continues to not understand what their own app is, considers auto-archiving posts. Instagram and Threads head Adam Mosseri recently floated the idea of auto-archiving posts on Threads after 30 days. Mosseri is currently on a tour through East Asia and muse-posting his way through it as a he learns a bunch of largely incorrect stuff about how users in country’s like Japan and Korea use the internet. And apparently this is where he got his dumb idea. Bro, I am so tired. Please, just us write words online. That’s all we want.

WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE

Bitcoin is $9,000 away from beating its all-time high. Here we go again!

The Bitcoin spike coincided with the US government transferring a massive amount of seized Bitcoin. The funds were seized in 2016 and are currently worth around $7 billion. And a little under $1 billion of that were transferred this week.

A woman recorded her “virtual nurse” during a recent hospital visit. From what I understand, the nurse was human, just calling into the room remotely from… somewhere. Curious to see how long it takes for the nurse to no longer be human, though.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

Swedish fintech predator Klarna says they’ve been able to replace 700 workers with AI. I don’t have faith in AI customer service in the long term, but I do think it will work for some companies. And the companies it does work for are going to send a bunch of other companies — that it won’t work for — scrambling to try the same. This will make a lot of people very upset.

The Guardian unmasked the duo likely behind the AI nudes app, ClothOff. It is mostly likely being run by a Belarusian brother and sister. As a result of The Guardian investigation, the service has been blocked in the UK.

FANDOMS

A Blink-182 fan remixed their new album so actually sounds good. I listened through it and I would say the big difference is that it doesn’t sound like a TikTok audio anymore.

Was the new live action Avatar bad because of crunch? Author Kayla Ancrum thinks so. And I’m inclined to agree. Also, the show’s VFX supervisors, Jabbar Raisani and Marion Spates, straight up told The Hollywood Reporter that the final FX shots for the show were finished hours before it went live on the site.

The video game world is having a real weird moment right now. There are layoffs happening across the industry, with the consensus being that it has little to do with market forces and much more to do with investors wanting more money. I want to refrain here from connecting the dots too much between large game studios gutting employees and every other kind of tech and media company doing the same, because every industry is different. But I do think the end result will be the same. Small teams will fill the void and hobbling AAA studios will struggle to keep up. It’s a doom spiral.

STREAMERS

(Some) podcasts are getting huge deals right now. This only doesn’t make if you still think a podcast is, like, an audio show you listen to on your phone. Podcasts are just talk shows now. Celebrities will get huge deals, people who are not famous likely will not.

Pinterest is launching a “streaming TV show”. This is a curious little development. It feels very 2014-coded. The show is called Deliciously Entertaining and it stars Danni Rose, a homecook and influencer with about a million subscribers on YouTube. The really interesting thing here is that each episode will feature QR codes that you can scan to add to a Pinterest board. Which is, honestly, very clever.

MEMES AND TRENDS

I don’t think “hamstering” is a real trend that anyone is doing. But we can pretend that it is, I guess. It’s a term that several TikTokers are using to describe a sex act involving the sunroof of a car. Look, if packaging this kind of thing as a TikTok trend is what is needed to keep America’s fourth estate alive, so be it.

That wonderful library guy on TikTok that everyone bullied is going to work with PBS. Thank god. We need to protect genuinely nice people from the internet as much as possible.

Comedian Kyle Gordon continues to focus specifically on my interests with a laser focus. His new release is called “The Irish Drinking Song” and it’s basically just a Flogging Molly song.

DRAMA

A video of white women dancing is tearing apart conservatives. Conservative women are mad that conservative men think it’s proof that western civilization has fallen. Leopards, face, etc. I think the video was filmed by a sorority. It has that kind of vibe. And the thing I find most interesting here is that every single young woman in the video is holding a Stanley cup.

A guy on TikTok is eating a Costco rotisserie chicken every day. He has explained multiple times that he is not doing this for any particular reason, nor does he have any set goals in mind, or even a plan for when he’ll stop. Great stuff.

There’s been some incredible hardcore band drama kicking off this week. It’s so juicy that even the New York Post picked the story up, though likely because they want to use it as transphobic propaganda for reasons you’ll understand in a second. The TL;DR here is that a hardcore band called Llorona kicked out their vocalist after they discovered he was allegedly dosing another band member with estrogen, hoping it would force him to transition and then he could still his girlfriend. To be clear, this story has no relationship to the trans community. Hardcore bands are just like this.

AROUND THE WORLD

The Verge has a great piece about subscription gaming services in Argentina. Interestingly enough, game piracy — or “Green Steam,” which is a reference to the color of the app uTorrent — has become popular in the country not just because it’s free, but because subscription services regularly delete games from their libraries.

Twitch is officially out of Korea and streamers are still trying to find a new home. The two platforms most people are gravitating towards right now are AfreecaTV and a new service called Chzzk.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador doxxed a reporter this week and then had a tantrum about it on X. AMLO, as he’s better know, read out a New York Times reporter’s phone number during a press conference. Then YouTube removed the official video of the event for violating community standards. To which ALMO wrote on X, “The Statue of Liberty has become an empty symbol.” Which goes hard as hell, sure, but just to be super clear, Mexico has one of the highest rates of violence against journalists in the world. Also, as Axios reported, this is not the first time AMLO’s office has been involved in a leak of journalists’ personal info as a way to intimidate them.

SOME FUN STUFF

• An important Change.org petition

• Mongolian TikTok is so good

• “97-year-old NYC burger still serves their Coke the old fashioned way when you take a bite”

• An incredibly interesting thread about prison laptops

• The Minecraft soundtrack but it's midwest emo

P.S. here’s a good frog post.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***