How The MrBeast Undisclosed Ad Thing Works

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you consume undisclosed ads on X, the everything app.

PLATFORMS

MrBeast’s X video (not a porn thing) is being promoted as an undisclosed ad, except not exactly. It’s showing up in people’s videos without a label, which has led many to believe X was breaking the law. But I spoke to an X employee about this and think I understand what’s happening here. There is a pre-roll ad from Shopify in front of MrBeast’s video. X’s pre-roll feature is called Amplify, and when a post contains a video that has an Amplify ad in it, the post is boosted like an ad, but without the label. Because technically, MrBeast’s post is not the ad and thus doesn’t require one. The ad is the Shopify pre-roll, which is correctly labeled as an ad for users who press play. This would also explain all the other not-an-ad boosted posts you’re seeing. The ad is loaded in front of the video inside of the post. Get it?

Bluesky dropped their moderation report. My interest in Bluesky ebbs and flows, but I really appreciate how pragmatic they’re being about moderation. Their central philosophy seems to be that giving users more mod tools alleviates some of the pressure on a social network’s trust and safety team. I’m watching this closely because it’s possible that that’s true. It’s also equally possible that this approach is the digital equivalent sweeping bad content under the couch.

Those “ghost trends” on X aren’t new, but we can see them now. The user WilburTheBulldog dropped this in the Discord and it’s a really fascinating look at how bad X is falling apart. I first saw these on a work trip to Mumbai back in 2015. They’re very common in India, where groups called “IT cells” are constantly manipulating trending topics to the point where they no longer work. And without moderation we’re now seeing the same thing in every country.

Reddit is eyeing an IPO. Well, that explains all the self-destructive behavior over the last year! As Reuters points out, this would be the first big tech IPO since Pinterest’s back in 2019.

WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE

This is my favorite take on the Vision Pro at the moment. It’s from a Threads user named Greg Palmer who argued that the Vision Pro is an “expensive developer beta device” and will have terrible reviews, but is a good step towards a decent mixed-reality wearable, but also a worrying sign of desperation from Apple, who may have hit their innovation ceiling. This is where I’ll plug my big gripe with Apple, which is that they’re still bizarrely obsessed with hardware-specific operating systems. There should be a wearable OS, touchscreen OS, and keyboard device OS, and they should spend all of their energy making those as similar as possible lol. All computers are the same now.

Ryder Ripps has to pay Yuga Labs $7 million in damages and fees. This comes after Ripps and a collaborator launched “parody” apes that a judge found infringed on Yuga’s copyright. The bulk of the payout is Yuga’s legal fees.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

Nvidia is creating AI-powered video game NPCs. Neat. Though, I’m fairly confident this actually sucks major ass and undermines the entire point of an NPC in a video game. Why would I want an NPC that can chatter about anything, rather than an NPC that could, idk, further the story of the game along by sticking to a script?

Google News is filling up with AI junk. To put on my tinfoil hat here, I’d say that if I ran a tech company and was sick of dealing with pesky news publishers demanding things like compensation, I’d be pretty excited about turning that particularly annoying corner of my information empire into a digital trash heap so you can eventually sunset it due to user disinterest.

This is what an entirely AI-generated “film” looks like. I don’t think this is good btw. But I do think it’s worth watching to see exactly what this tech currently capable of, if only so you don’t fall for overblown claims about it. Also, this was for a contest sponsored by an AI company, so I get why traditional filmmaking tools weren’t used, but 80% of this could have been easier and look much better if you just used After Effects.

FANDOMS

This is an extremely crazy video about Gameboy Advance ROMs. As one commenter wrote, “This whole thing feels like watching someone reproduce an almost perfect replica of the food they ate via throwing up violently.”

Hatsune Miku is playing Coachella. Miku was supposed to play in 2020, but the pandemic had other plans for the Japanese vocaloid. She is still the only interesting thing anyone has done with a “virtual pop star”. You know? She’s mostly open source.

STREAMERS

I think we broke TV. And here’s a recent rumor from r/Fauxmoi that supports my theory. Up until like 2015, I’d say, we had prestige TV on cable and the regular, but manageable release of streaming shows, all buoyed by standard TV shows playing on broadcasters, essentially, all of the time, except for a couple of months in the summer. Now, we don’t even really know what a TV show is or how to define it or really know where to watch them and they also seem to never be on anymore.

Marques Brownlee weighed in on the all YouTubers quitting. About halfway through he attempts to address the core problem, which is continuing to be creative and making things you love, while balancing what is essentially a small media company completely dependent on the algorithmic whims of a big tech monopoly.

MEMES AND TRENDS

There’s finally something to see in Chicago other than bad improv comedy: The rat hole! Because both American journalism and Google News (read above) are broken, I had to go to the rat hole’s Wikipedia page to answer a question I’ve had since this all started trending, which is whether the hole was actually caused by a rat. Neighbors say it was likely caused by a squirrel.

Filming yourself getting laid off is the hot new meme. With these sorts of things I’m always torn between two reactions. On one side, I think better visibility to all parts of life, no matter how ugly and messy, are probably a net positive. But on the other side, internet content is never truly authenticate and I do think this kind of thing can quickly spiral into a weird kind of performance.

DRAMA

Condé Nast is folding Pitchfork into the GQ brand and gutting the staff. It’s a ridiculous move and Casey Newton over at Platformer has a good rundown of how much online platforms played a role in Pitchfork’s demise. But here’s what kills me most about this. Pitchfork could have easily been reinvented for the modern age, a la Rolling Stone. Instead of pivoting, like Rolling Stone, into a news-and-politics-through-the-lens-of-culture publication, it could have gone the other way, and really deify the Pitchfork score as the defining cultural signifier for Gen Z. I mean, Gen Z is pathologically obsessed with coolness, but they have zero frame of reference for it. Pitchfork would have been perfect there. But I think there’s now a new rule we can cite as far as media trends go. The minute a big brand gives up on something, in this case criticism, it’s about to be huge again. Which will eventually mean the big brand has to scramble to catch the wave in like 2.5 years.

X users are raging over a podcast clip of a pornstar again. Unlike the previous times this has happened, this does appear to be from a real show. It’s called Inside OnlyFans and the woman telling the story about hooking up with Uber drivers is a pornstar named Adriana Chechik. You know, I’ve always heard jokes about conservatism being powered the doom loop of self-loathing and horniness, but I’m not sure I ever believed it until I started spending on time on X. (I had assumed greed and fear were also factors, but now I think it’s really just this stuff.)

AROUND THE WORLD

British delivery company DPD replaced their customer service chat feature with AI. I always hated dealing with them when I lived in London lol. They make Fedex look like NASA. Good to know they’re still committed to constantly finding ways to be worse.

Japanese Twitter users just discovered the Shinzo Abe “have sex” meme. Know Your Meme has a section on this. But the simplest summary I can give is that around 2017, 4chan users started a conspiracy that Abe was ordering the production of anime like Darling in the Franxx and Spy × Family in an attempt to increase Japan’s birthrate and specifically convince weebs to start families.

Russian law enforcement is investigating Skibidi Toilets. The investigation is into whether or not the videos are having a negative effect on children. I mean, yes, they’re probably making children more annoying. But children are always annoying, on the internet, especially so.

China’s new IP-location display regulations turned their internet into 4chan’s /pol/. New Scientist had a great piece on this, as well. Basically, the Chinese government turned on IP locations underneath posts on social media. Which quickly created a near-identical form of factionalism and racism you see on 4chan’s /pol/, which uses a similar flag emoji system to denote geodata about users. Hear that anti-anonymous weirdos? Knowing more about the people you’re talking to online actually makes you MORE awful.

SOME FUN STUFF

• An impression of Jennifer Coolidge as a villager in the upcoming Minecraft movie

• Pretty good modern Seinfeld bit

• Important bit of polyamory discourse

• A weirdly fascinating documentary about probably the best competitive Pokémon player

• Sick new wearable

• An American Girl book illustration that looks like a Junji Ito panel

• The best “We need jungle, I’m afraid” remix

P.S. here’s a real good anime opening.

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