Oh, look, we're all pivoting to video again

Every pivot to video has brought with it idiotic requirements for creators. Facebook wanted everyone to go live and then it wanted everyone to make videos that didn’t require any audio and then it wanted everyone to go live with videos that didn’t require any audio. YouTube wanted jumpcuts every 20 seconds. And TikTok wanted purely vertical videos. But this current pivot is dumber than anything we’ve seen before. Possibly dumber than anything I’ve ever seen on the internet.

And yet, major news networks, still anemic from their last ill-fated round of pivots and “digital transformations,” are finally making the jump (again). NBC is partnering with reporter Joanna Stern on a newsletter and video project, The New York Times is hiring video creators, and CNN is redecorating its newsrooms to look like man cave podcast studios. All of them missing the point, succinctly put by The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian King, “People don’t listen to Joe Rogan because they think he’s better at his job than CNN; they do it because they hate CNN.”

And so I think it’s time to call it. Whatever all this was, we have likely reached the end of it. The video pivot that started in 2020 has clearly reached the zenith of its stupidity and while old media tries to steer their beleaguered newsrooms towards the last next big thing, the next next big thing is clearly just over the horizon. Of course, the question is, how exactly did we end up in a post-Clavicular world? (btw Clavicular is, according to Osceola County Sheriff’s Department, actually 5’11”. This has nothing to do with the rest of today’s story. I just wanted to share that.)

Silicon Valley emerged from COVID lockdown with big plans to beat TikTok, which was about to cross a billion users. In August 2020, Instagram launched Reels and, a month later, YouTube launched a beta version of Shorts in India, which would open up worldwide in 2021. And, finally, in 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, rebranded it as X, and gave it a For You page similar to TikTok’s. But none of these platforms replaced TikTok. In fact, if anything, the proliferation of these TikTok-likes backfired in a way.

TikTok became more important. The same way the tweet was “atomic unit of content” in the 2010s, something to be screenshot for Reddit and Tumblr posts, Instagram carousels, and thrown in listicles, the TikTok began to function the same way in 2020s. I don’t have hard data about how viral videos traveled around the internet in the first half of the decade, but I have plenty of anecdotes. A useful one here would be the 2023 mass panic about TikTok users stanning Osama bin Laden. A relatively small conversation about Bin Laden’s post-9/11 “Letter To America” among unknown creators didn’t go viral until after the videos were shared to X, which from there, was shared to Reels and Shorts (and Google via news stories).

This peaked — and likely started dying out — last spring, when President Donald Trump announced his disastrous tariff plan and misogynist X users started sharing the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video for gazillionth time, arguing that crashing the global economy would be a good thing if it meant women couldn’t make TikTok videos at work anymore. But the fact that X users had not plucked a new TikTok video out of the ether to rage over was telling.

This is me speculating, but I think TikTok started throttling itself after the Bin Laden outrage and effectively went into algorithmic hiding after Trump entered office in January 2025. It still had plenty of users posting all kinds of videos, but For You pages were not prioritizing timely content, especially news content, and especially news content about the Trump administration or the war in Gaza. The platform’s top videos were always kind of stupid and irrelevant, based on the research Garbage Day researcher Adam and I do every month, but they got really dumb last year. And they have stayed dumb following Trump World’s purchase and carving out of TikTok US earlier this year.

Once again, things did not play out the way any millennial with memories of Myspace would assume. Instead of TikTok fading into obscurity, it has simply become yet another app to upload videos to. This is almost certainly due to the fact that all of these platforms have some kind of mechanism to pay users to post. The money isn’t very good, which is why the content isn’t very good, and why no one is making platform-specific videos anymore, but it’s good enough to keep uploading. We can’t replace pre-adpocalypse YouTube, but we can recreate it in aggregate.

So now creators film one larger piece of content and clip it down for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and X. The first industry to get a real boost from clipping was podcasts, which have always had discovery problems. In 2023, I stumbled across pornstar Victoria Banxx posting fake podcast clips to Instagram to advertise her OnlyFans. Safe For Work creators quickly jumped on the bandwagon (porn always leads the way) and we ended up with a new podcast boom that got so big even Netflix wanted to get in on the game, adding a podcast category to the platform back in January. I believe that this will not work long-term and will be looked back on as the end of the video podcast era.

In fact, already, video podcasts have proved to be both too much of a slog to make (and watch) and felt too produced to viewers, who always gravitate towards the lowest common denominator online. Which is why most of them have devolved into celebrity chat shows. Meanwhile, we are now inundated with completely unproduced livestream clips of various Gen Z musclemen smizing on sidewalks outside of nightclubs. Most of these clips are being made in the global south, where the small payouts from the platforms are enough to fund a content farm. For instance, the account that famously clipped Clavicular being framemogged by an “ASU frat leader” is called @biggerboy111 and it’s based in Nigeria. Which is why, I assume, that user didn’t know that frats don’t have a “leader” position, it’s called a president, and also didn’t know/care that Varis Gilaj, the guy mogging Clavicular in the video, isn’t in a frat at ASU.

According to The Wrap, the larger, more professional clip farms are charging up to $10,000 a month to pump these videos out to different video platforms. Incidentally, this strategy was something Andrew Tate recognized the power of earlier than everyone else. His Hustler’s University program was basically an affiliate marketing program where his fans would pay him for the privilege of clipping his videos for TikTok.

This is what the CNN’s of the world are about to compete with. A completely over-saturated video landscape, propped up by what is basically low-level ad fraud, that does not generate enough income to pay for itself. But who knows, maybe they’ll give the people what they want and force Anderson Cooper to get in a bar brawl in Miami.

At this point, it’s best to think of X, formerly Twitter, as a completely new social platform. Both for the points I made above about video and, also, because of all the sad striver losers, redpilled zoomers, and Silicon Valley reactionaries that are now using it every day. So every few months they discover a thing that every Twitter user learned a decade ago. This weekend, thanks to a change in the For You algorithm, everyone’s feeds were suddenly filled up with Japanese-language posts. (Fun example below.)

I wrote last week about Japan’s history with social media, but if you missed it, basically, Twitter in Japan has been used more similarly to Reddit or 4chan in the west. It’s heavily male, still predominately pseudonymous or anonymous, and, thanks to the way the Japanese language interacts with character counts, a lot more expressive. You can fit a lot more in 120 or 250 characters in Japanese. There used to be a really cool site called TwTimez that ranked every tweet using Japanese character by retweets.

Twitter in Japan is, also, because of its connection to Japan’s precursor to 4chan, 2chan, extremely racist. I’d argue even more racist than US Twitter. It’s long been a massive hub for Japan’s Netto-uyoku, or its ultranationalist troll army. X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, keeps calling the viral Japanese posts “wholesome,” but the majority of the posts being surfaced by X’s English-speaking users are extremely racist.

A user in the r/redscarepod subreddit noticed threads secretly promoting the crypto-backed casino app Stake. Stake, by the way, owns the livestreaming platform Kick. Here’s a backup of the post if it gets taken down by mods again.

The user in r/redscarepod noticed that the users posting these ads, which are meant to look like normal threads, are using Cyrillic characters for “a” and “e.” The thinking is that if Reddit has some kind of automod features scanning for the word “Stake,” they wouldn’t pick up different unicode characters that look the same.

The New York Times’ Aric Toler looked into this, as well. “For what it's worth, I read through all of these posts a month ago, and it seemed like they were most all from one guy, based on the posting style and common subreddits posted in,” Toler wrote. “But I haven't done a super-duper deep dive to know for sure.”

As The New York Times’ Mike Isaac wrote last week, the prevailing wisdom is that Apple missed the boat on AI. And, yes, they were slow to adapt to the generative AI boom. For the last few years the rise of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini has made Apple’s Siri feel pretty lame.

But the world of AI services went through a pretty massive shift earlier this year with the launch of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot). The open source software wasn’t an AI model, but a genuinely exciting wrapper for existing AI models. It was so destabilizing that Anthropic is now releasing its own version of OpenClaw that will work natively in Claude. For those who weren’t following this, OpenClaw basically allowed any AI model to remote-access your computer (or the internet) and carry out tasks for you.

Per Bloomberg, Apple will soon be giving Siri the ability to work as an OpenClaw-style wrapper. It’s reportedly getting a new “Extensions” feature, which will allow Siri to work with any AI model that supports the connection. So, yes, next year, you will finally be able to have sex with Siri.

Further proof that TikTok has lost its juice, a three-year-old video of a waitress serving a hideous looking steak went viral in a big way last week. The video has been bouncing around since at least 2023, but a 2024 upload started circulating on X again for reasons I can’t totally figure out. I mean, aside from the fact the steak looks gross. Anyways, here’s what you, uh, not need, but, maybe, would like to know about this steak:

It was filmed at Black Rock Bar and Grill in Michigan. And I was shocked to discover this wasn’t filmed at a casino in Las Vegas, seeing as how the butter in the video is called “casino butter,” but what the hell do I know, I guess. Also, this appears to be a recipe for it.

P.S. here’s a really good dinosaur thread.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***