Great piece! Weird to think I've been in this industry for this long.
One thing I'd add is the labor aspect: part of the reason all these sites became unprofitable is because they actually had to PAY people for content. Now that TikTok, YouTube, et al have figured out they can cut out the middle man of news/entertainment sites by having people do those things on their platforms for free (with the hope of one day being sponsored by an underwear company or whatever), there's no need for actual W-2 labor. :(
It's funny, Nick's longtime dream for Gawker Media was that it would be written entirely for free by commenter-writers with individual Kinja accounts. As a business, Substack is much closer to Nick's vision of a future Kinja/Gawker than I think people pick up on!
ya i remember when that started happening. i was like "damn this is evil .... but also very smart and probably the future" -- he was just 10 years too early!
Great post. I tweeted this when Quinn said his thing … then I deleted it because I didn’t want to seem churlish … so now it’s going to be an over-long blog comment, which definitely isn’t a churlish medium … but how much do you think the alleged lack of recent nostalgia/“decade thinking” is due to a lack of clear names for the decades themselves? As in, it wasn’t obvious what to call the two decades from 2000 to 2020 until recently, and even then the ‘accepted’ name for each decade has changed a few times.
In America at least we’ve kept changing what we call the 2000s. During the decade itself, we called it the ‘two-thousands,’ iirc, but then after 2010, that didn’t really work anymore — it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the previous decade or the entire 21st century. So sometime later we settled on the Aughts (or just “the Bush years”) and now Zoomers also talk about y2k, I guess. Meanwhile the British call them the ‘Noughties,’ which is horrible.
Then the 2010s were unsettled too. We didn’t standardize on ‘the twenty-teens’ as a name until like 2014 or 2015, I feel like — during the few years before that, if you referred to the ‘teens,’ it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the present or the future, literally because the years 2010, 2011, 2012 did not end in ‘teen.’ (Around then, we also went from saying the names of years as ‘two-thousand-eleven’ to ‘twenty-eleven,’ too … this has been totally forgotten … I don’t have a theory about it.) So it wasn’t until 2017 or later that you could refer clearly and unambiguously to ‘the 2000s’ and ‘the 2010s.’
If this is true, then the return of the '20s would seem to decisively resolve the problem, but between Covid and US-China and everything else, 2020 is such a clear break in history anyway that there’s not gonna be a way to isolate the variable.
Last thought but I do wonder if this lack of clear '00s and '10s decadal names is a persistent trait of the English language, and not anything inherently wrong with our century. So instead countries tend to generate names for that part of the century — so you get the Regency era in the UK for the beginning of the 19th century or ‘the Era of Good Feelings’ in America. And thinking back to AP US History or whatever, didn’t it feel like the period from 1900 to 1914 was a little undifferentiated, just one big boring ‘Progressive Era,’ at least until we got to WWI, then it was 1920 and we were off to the decadal races? Anyway thanks again Max I’ll take my answer off the air.
Wow--a linguistic-structuralist explanation for the lack of early-century decadal nostalgia. I fully endorse it! Will be interesting to see how e.g. Cheap Mondays get tagged when they start showing up on Depop in 5-10 years.
I've said this before, but - the concept of decades depends on shared experiences, and we don't have them anymore. The internet has atomized culture to such an extent that we don't have shared styles, shared moments, shared idioms the way we once did. In his book on the 90s, Chuck Klosterman points out that every episode of Major Dad had more viewers than the finale of the Sopranos. And I think that's profound - there won't be and can't be another cultural moment like (for instance) the MASH finale, thanks to the sheer immense growth in the amount of diversions we all have. It breaks apart shared experience and without shared experience there's no "the 70s" etc.
Why can't shared experience just consist of less people. This would be in line with the anarchist capitalist movement we are moving toward where communities will rule themselves, no gov etc
Decades are also misleading because they get associated with the highlight moment. It would be better to carve out specific historically linked spans of time & give them catchy names like 'the jazz age.'
Generations do that. Strauss and Howe coined that category by grouping cohorts in roughly 20-year age brackets. Generations weren't a thing until they got the ball rolling with baby boomers and Generation X, and silents, etc.
What's strange was putting the millennial/Gen Z boundary marker at 1996. I think 9-11 would've been a better marker, because generational boundaries were marked by world-changing events that affected everyone. Baby boomers, for instance, would be people born from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK. Gen X would be after JFK's killing and either Ronald Reagan's election or the end of the recession under his first term.
I don't know what an objectively "good" period of the internet was given that the Weird Internet days featured a lot of unfettered bigotry from all corners but when I saw those blogs listed...man, I just miss bullshitting online and reading good writers bullshitting online. Nowadays to get anything readable: I'm constantly refreshing this site for like the ten writers I follow, attempt to mine Twitter for nuggets of gold, and just generally stumbling around the same 3-4 sites that occasionally have something decent amidst capital-C Content. This is nothing more than a lament; maybe we remember the 10s the same way the 70s are remembered: deflated optimism with a creeping sense that the worst is yet to come.
The best era was 1996-2004. Seriously! I am kinda kidding but I believe this. Message board to early blogging era. That was the heyday of the internet. I wrote a substack post about my feelings concerning this period but there's a lot more to say about it.
I'd agree with you about the start being 1996, but my cutoff was 9-11. It was the best era, 1996-2001, because it was carefree fun.
The 9-11 came. Everything got serious. And when the internet is serious, life sucks.
The 2001-2005 period was also the period of the High Dubya. I remember the buildup to the Iraq war and the invasion being the ugliest time of my life, because we got to see America and Americans at their ugliest. And what I learned from the antiwar movement was the awareness of my hopelessness.
It took history, not politics or good ideas, to end the High Dubya. Americans didn't embrace blue ideas or ideals; it just punished the red team for failure. Katrina. Losing Iraq (and later Afghanistan). The Great Recession.
I would then say that there was another good era of the internet, from about 2010 to 2015. Social media was new and it was good careless fun. What happened in 2015? The Fucking Golden Escalator.
I agree with most of what you say, though I did get a lot from reading blogs from Iraqis and other people outside the US doing the war. And actually--sometimes these people were extremely funny, even in grim circumstances. Definitely the 2010-2015 social media age was often a blast. So hard to believe Twitter used to be MOSTLY JOKES. The big accounts were the funny accounts. We’ve definitely lost our way.
I'm one of those avant garde people who canceled Twitter before it was cool.
I didn't actually full on delete my account, because my old tweets have utility as bookmarks. I locked my account and first stopped tweeting, then stopped looking at the feed altogether. When I go into Twitter now, it's always from an embed on something else I read. I look at it, peruse the likes/retweets/replies, and then leave.
My Twitter exit came just after Trump had been declared the winner of the 2016 election. In my timeline came a meme from a jubilant maga. It was Pepe the frog, wearing a red hat, and its fingers pinching an oven knob set to 1,488 degrees.
I didn't have words. I didn't have emotions. It was one of those moments, like where you notice the weather gets really weird and that within hours or days, a tornado or hurricane is going to hit and level your community beyond any recognition.
So then I decided to just block all Trump supporters. Yeah, I created a filter bubble and have no shame or guilt about it. Then I noticed something else. When my political content trended blue, I ... can't really stand being around members of my tribe either.
For people who social media was formative to their politics, let's call this group Left Twitter, they conflate effective politics with scolding. Left Twitter's mirror image of Oven Knob Pepe is the user who tweeted at Barbara Ehrenreich: "You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a nationalism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses." This is the one tweet that captures the essence of Left Twitter.
So I tuned all politics out altogether. My follow list was my colleagues and otherwise, intelligent knowledgeable people who are great writers and great explainers. But you know what? I see my colleagues all the time, and intelligent knowledgeable people do their jobs well enough to make it past gatekeepers and are published, interviewed on podcasts and make it on TV. I just follow them and cut out the Twitter middleman.
I was far enough from Twitter that when Elon Musk bought it, I didn't incur any splash damage and don't really have any feelings about its self-destruction.
A truly weird 2010s throwback traffic source is Google Discover, which functions almost entirely like the Facebook newsfeed of old and not at all like SEO in any sense (it's not based on search queries). It usually contributes around 25% of all Google traffic for some publishers and no one, not even people who work at the sites, seems to notice it much or understand how it functions.
Isn't the 2010s' most lasting pop cultural form the prestige drama centered on an antihero man? While The Sopranos was the first one to really break through to mass consciousness, and The Shield has its adherents, the antihero drama reached peak tastemaker approval in the later seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men, or, if you like, in Hamilton.
Would love to see the rise of shitty programmatic ad tech (and its industry proponents like Digiday) explored in tandem: how the promise of easy ad dollars via targeted advertising networks misled publishers into thinking they could easily funnel in a gazillion dollars through targeting and automation. It's outlined in Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis, but also evident to anyone who ever attended an ad tech-sponsored party between 2011 and 2016: it all seemed like there would be so much money, for everyone, forever, so easy, so automated, as long as the traffic was there. Targeting! Segmentation! But no one figured out how to put the pieces together in a way that audiences actually liked / made publishers money, and now advertisers just block their ads from showing up next to news wholesale.
Also news to me: Facebook was motivated by jealousy because journalists liked Twitter? That's an extremely specious argument that definitely doesn't gibe with my experience of the era; must have been developed by journalists.
Ha--to say that it's "because journalists liked it" is definitely specious, but I think it's been pretty well-documented that Zuck didn't like how much attention Twitter got as a news platform, and the decision to prioritize outbound links in the news feed was at least in part a function of that jealousy. Here's how Ben reports it in his book:
"In October 2008, Mark Zuckerberg met with Twitter’s executives and offered them $500 million for the company. In an email to Twitter’s chairman, Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg also made a tacit threat: if they wouldn’t sell, he’d continue to 'build products that moved further in their direction.' Twitter said no. Twitter’s board believed their company could be worth more than half a billion, and they had qualms about Facebook’s ruthless business practices.
It was a monumental decision, setting off a frantic wave of competition between the two platforms for this apparently positive and inspirational new source of traffic mined from politics and social movements. That frenzy would later draw in companies from BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post to The New York Times, all hungering after the traffic Facebook could send them. Facebook chronicler Steven Levy later wrote that after failing to acquire Twitter, 'Facebook tried to copy a number of Twitter’s features, including a real-time urgency and an increased viral pulse.' He speculated that if Facebook had done the deal, it might not have felt so driven to compete with Twitter to mine the traffic and attention of politics, and that 'maybe the News Feed would not have courted so much of the toxicity it became known for later on.' But Facebook instead chased Twitter in a race to dominate the business of real-time news and overheated opinion, and journalists would find themselves pulled over the waterfall the two companies created."
That's quite the narrative, with so many egos, monumental frenzies and frantic competition. Gotta love the hyperbole about a couple of bros sending angry emails! But it makes more sense for Zuck to be jealous of Twitter in 2008, in the Farmville days before Facebook started raking it in with self-serve ads, and when people were really concerned that college girls were going to damage their career potential when they uploaded party photos. Good to know; thanks for sharing.
@Deborah, there is something to journalists as tastemakers, but it's probably not salient.
Within journalism there is a notion of an online region called the Media Belt, something like the Sun Belt and Rust Belt -- a shared characteristic by a region.
The Media Belt is four metro areas: New York, L.A., Washington, and the Bay Area. They are politically very blue and demographically very diverse, but it's not politics or diversity that forms a kinship.
These four regions dominate search engines and social media. For one thing, most of what remains paying journalism is physically based in these areas. Two, what keeps journalism viable in these communities while local journalism is distressed everywhere else, is that the media is in service to Wall Street (NYC), entertainment (L.A.), politics (DC) and tech (Bay Area). Three, people physically located in these cities like reading about themselves, consuming such content. Four, because such content is consumed so much, search and social algorithms reward it with high ranking results or trending topics. Five, because algorithms reward Media Belt content with prominent play, journalists treat search and social like sourdough starter and keep producing (and consuming) more content because of the incentive structure the internet has nurtured.
So yeah, journalists do have a hand in it but they are more participants and spectators than the architects and executives of this culture.
Google and social media are really what happens when you decide to give the gatekeeping aspects of editorial discretion to AI.
I've never heard of a "media belt" before. I've been working in publishing and digital marketing businesses for 20+ years, and, I dunno, that's some folk economics up there.
My comment's intent wasn't to be anti-journalism; it was more observational. I just have a more audience-centric view of the same events from having worked in different aspects of the industry. The takes I've been reading from most media folks ignore the role of the audience-as-advertiser completely, probably not intentionally, but because it gives the story main characters, which makes the narrative more marketable. It's worth noting the editorial optimization.
"Media Belt" is an emergent phenomenon. The people talking about it work in media and academia (often journalism or communications faculty), and it's probably working its way through academic journals as we speak.
It does sound like folk economics wisdom, but there are numbers to back it up, like about where the media jobs are and what topics win the SEO and social trends. And once you observe it you start to see it everywhere.
Regional Belts, and even generational cohorts, kind of function like a tag for sociologists, anthropologists and theorists. For most of humanity, it's all bullshit and you could go through life not knowing about it but be fine. But for a few, it's a special construct that's something they need to know or a prism through which they see the world.
This is the greatest sentence / paragraph of 2023 (so far):
“But the decade really kicked into gear around 2012, when Facebook, apparently motivated by jealousy over Twitter’s popularity among journalists (and specifically the extent to which they were crediting Twitter with the Arab revolutions of 2011), opened up a fire hose of traffic to anyone willing to make their headlines sound like they’d been written by a dog, but a dog who’d been genetically/cybernetically manipulated to have the intelligence of a seventh grader, but was subsequently brain damaged in a lab accident, and was also on coke.”
I fucking miss Livejournal. It was, for my friends and I, THE social media before people called it social media. I kept up with my friends there in a way that’s difficult now because it’s considered passe or even cringe to post on Facebook (I’m in my early 30s, as are most of my friends, and most of my coworkers are early to mid 20s.)
And as a fandom and original character RPer it was so much better than Tumblr or forums before it, despite all the drama.
The decline of media was already well on its way, but whatever life was left in a certain kind of elite media or publishing experience fully and truly died during the 2010s. I believe median advances for trade books fell 40% that decade. Newsroom staff headcount was literally cut in half. The Gay Talese/Tina Brown/Graydon Carter/Nora Ephron world was just gone, dead, period. In publishing, the really big mid-six-figure/seven-figure deals now go in large majorities to celebrities writing a book, instead of celebrity writers. I'm sure Gawker mostly diversified because to meet Nick Denton's traffic goals they simply had to pull in more normies, but as I've said before it also had to because the elite world Elizabeth Spiers used to envy just truly does not exist anymore. And the knock-on economic effects down the chain of the industry aren't good either, obviously.
At the same time, in the 2010s the already-potent aversion people feel to working some sort of traditional white collar 9 to 5 got even stronger. Influencer culture helped to cement in people's minds that only a chump gets up at 7AM to pile into an office moving paper all day. Social media made glamorous lives of professional freedom seem ubiquitous and like anyone who didn't have one was a chump. And so you have this world of media where the cash was pumping in early in the decade but where the foundations were always clearly shaky and the top-level compensation now quite a bit worse than it once was, but you also had an endless supply of young strivers eager to come to the city and live their dreams, despite the fact that the money never made sense. Their sheer numbers inevitably put downward pressure on the earnings potential of everyone. Now interest rates are up, meaning that there aren't huge piles of loose cash lying around looking for investment. Thus the end of Vice et al. Too many people, too few seats.
The funny thing is what doesn't change: if you want to be in media, you better work for the New York Times!
The 2010s doesn't have one vibe, right? It's split in two. The first half was the Obama era, and it started with the 2008 election and its memes. Peak liberal era, you could be cool (most places) by liking the president, because his biggest opponents were so uncool.
Then around the 2015 primary campaigns, internet culture discovered socialism and quickly thereafter discovered communism. And even some of the right wing, for a minute, was funny. And suddenly everyone in between was exposed as extremely behind and uncool. And everything up to 2014 was cringe. And for a few years, we were all on high alert for cringe. Thus all the wojacks of crying faces wearing grinning masks. The "I have drawn me as the chad and you as the virgin!" era.
In 2020, the Mueller gang became the Fauci gang. But now there's a healthy leftist layer to the internet, making fun of the centrists, keeping the culture from sliding back into Obama-era cringe. Still, I think the COVID hangover era will define the first half of the 2020s, while something else will define the second. Maybe violent revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe climate collapse. Maybe BLACKPINK!
Great piece! Weird to think I've been in this industry for this long.
One thing I'd add is the labor aspect: part of the reason all these sites became unprofitable is because they actually had to PAY people for content. Now that TikTok, YouTube, et al have figured out they can cut out the middle man of news/entertainment sites by having people do those things on their platforms for free (with the hope of one day being sponsored by an underwear company or whatever), there's no need for actual W-2 labor. :(
It's funny, Nick's longtime dream for Gawker Media was that it would be written entirely for free by commenter-writers with individual Kinja accounts. As a business, Substack is much closer to Nick's vision of a future Kinja/Gawker than I think people pick up on!
yeah and it woulda worked if kinja ever got me outta the greys
ya i remember when that started happening. i was like "damn this is evil .... but also very smart and probably the future" -- he was just 10 years too early!
Great post. I tweeted this when Quinn said his thing … then I deleted it because I didn’t want to seem churlish … so now it’s going to be an over-long blog comment, which definitely isn’t a churlish medium … but how much do you think the alleged lack of recent nostalgia/“decade thinking” is due to a lack of clear names for the decades themselves? As in, it wasn’t obvious what to call the two decades from 2000 to 2020 until recently, and even then the ‘accepted’ name for each decade has changed a few times.
In America at least we’ve kept changing what we call the 2000s. During the decade itself, we called it the ‘two-thousands,’ iirc, but then after 2010, that didn’t really work anymore — it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the previous decade or the entire 21st century. So sometime later we settled on the Aughts (or just “the Bush years”) and now Zoomers also talk about y2k, I guess. Meanwhile the British call them the ‘Noughties,’ which is horrible.
Then the 2010s were unsettled too. We didn’t standardize on ‘the twenty-teens’ as a name until like 2014 or 2015, I feel like — during the few years before that, if you referred to the ‘teens,’ it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the present or the future, literally because the years 2010, 2011, 2012 did not end in ‘teen.’ (Around then, we also went from saying the names of years as ‘two-thousand-eleven’ to ‘twenty-eleven,’ too … this has been totally forgotten … I don’t have a theory about it.) So it wasn’t until 2017 or later that you could refer clearly and unambiguously to ‘the 2000s’ and ‘the 2010s.’
If this is true, then the return of the '20s would seem to decisively resolve the problem, but between Covid and US-China and everything else, 2020 is such a clear break in history anyway that there’s not gonna be a way to isolate the variable.
Last thought but I do wonder if this lack of clear '00s and '10s decadal names is a persistent trait of the English language, and not anything inherently wrong with our century. So instead countries tend to generate names for that part of the century — so you get the Regency era in the UK for the beginning of the 19th century or ‘the Era of Good Feelings’ in America. And thinking back to AP US History or whatever, didn’t it feel like the period from 1900 to 1914 was a little undifferentiated, just one big boring ‘Progressive Era,’ at least until we got to WWI, then it was 1920 and we were off to the decadal races? Anyway thanks again Max I’ll take my answer off the air.
Wow--a linguistic-structuralist explanation for the lack of early-century decadal nostalgia. I fully endorse it! Will be interesting to see how e.g. Cheap Mondays get tagged when they start showing up on Depop in 5-10 years.
Calling them the noughties is good, calling them the naughties is better.
I've said this before, but - the concept of decades depends on shared experiences, and we don't have them anymore. The internet has atomized culture to such an extent that we don't have shared styles, shared moments, shared idioms the way we once did. In his book on the 90s, Chuck Klosterman points out that every episode of Major Dad had more viewers than the finale of the Sopranos. And I think that's profound - there won't be and can't be another cultural moment like (for instance) the MASH finale, thanks to the sheer immense growth in the amount of diversions we all have. It breaks apart shared experience and without shared experience there's no "the 70s" etc.
Why can't shared experience just consist of less people. This would be in line with the anarchist capitalist movement we are moving toward where communities will rule themselves, no gov etc
Decades are also misleading because they get associated with the highlight moment. It would be better to carve out specific historically linked spans of time & give them catchy names like 'the jazz age.'
Generations do that. Strauss and Howe coined that category by grouping cohorts in roughly 20-year age brackets. Generations weren't a thing until they got the ball rolling with baby boomers and Generation X, and silents, etc.
What's strange was putting the millennial/Gen Z boundary marker at 1996. I think 9-11 would've been a better marker, because generational boundaries were marked by world-changing events that affected everyone. Baby boomers, for instance, would be people born from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK. Gen X would be after JFK's killing and either Ronald Reagan's election or the end of the recession under his first term.
I don't know what an objectively "good" period of the internet was given that the Weird Internet days featured a lot of unfettered bigotry from all corners but when I saw those blogs listed...man, I just miss bullshitting online and reading good writers bullshitting online. Nowadays to get anything readable: I'm constantly refreshing this site for like the ten writers I follow, attempt to mine Twitter for nuggets of gold, and just generally stumbling around the same 3-4 sites that occasionally have something decent amidst capital-C Content. This is nothing more than a lament; maybe we remember the 10s the same way the 70s are remembered: deflated optimism with a creeping sense that the worst is yet to come.
The best era was 1996-2004. Seriously! I am kinda kidding but I believe this. Message board to early blogging era. That was the heyday of the internet. I wrote a substack post about my feelings concerning this period but there's a lot more to say about it.
I'd agree with you about the start being 1996, but my cutoff was 9-11. It was the best era, 1996-2001, because it was carefree fun.
The 9-11 came. Everything got serious. And when the internet is serious, life sucks.
The 2001-2005 period was also the period of the High Dubya. I remember the buildup to the Iraq war and the invasion being the ugliest time of my life, because we got to see America and Americans at their ugliest. And what I learned from the antiwar movement was the awareness of my hopelessness.
It took history, not politics or good ideas, to end the High Dubya. Americans didn't embrace blue ideas or ideals; it just punished the red team for failure. Katrina. Losing Iraq (and later Afghanistan). The Great Recession.
I would then say that there was another good era of the internet, from about 2010 to 2015. Social media was new and it was good careless fun. What happened in 2015? The Fucking Golden Escalator.
And it's been Eternal September ever since.
I agree with most of what you say, though I did get a lot from reading blogs from Iraqis and other people outside the US doing the war. And actually--sometimes these people were extremely funny, even in grim circumstances. Definitely the 2010-2015 social media age was often a blast. So hard to believe Twitter used to be MOSTLY JOKES. The big accounts were the funny accounts. We’ve definitely lost our way.
I'm one of those avant garde people who canceled Twitter before it was cool.
I didn't actually full on delete my account, because my old tweets have utility as bookmarks. I locked my account and first stopped tweeting, then stopped looking at the feed altogether. When I go into Twitter now, it's always from an embed on something else I read. I look at it, peruse the likes/retweets/replies, and then leave.
My Twitter exit came just after Trump had been declared the winner of the 2016 election. In my timeline came a meme from a jubilant maga. It was Pepe the frog, wearing a red hat, and its fingers pinching an oven knob set to 1,488 degrees.
I didn't have words. I didn't have emotions. It was one of those moments, like where you notice the weather gets really weird and that within hours or days, a tornado or hurricane is going to hit and level your community beyond any recognition.
So then I decided to just block all Trump supporters. Yeah, I created a filter bubble and have no shame or guilt about it. Then I noticed something else. When my political content trended blue, I ... can't really stand being around members of my tribe either.
For people who social media was formative to their politics, let's call this group Left Twitter, they conflate effective politics with scolding. Left Twitter's mirror image of Oven Knob Pepe is the user who tweeted at Barbara Ehrenreich: "You did a racism. You did an imperialism. You did a nationalism. You did a xenophobia. You did a white fragility. You did a weak apology. You did no growth. This makes it abundantly clear you don't understand the intersectional nature of the multiplicity of your offenses." This is the one tweet that captures the essence of Left Twitter.
So I tuned all politics out altogether. My follow list was my colleagues and otherwise, intelligent knowledgeable people who are great writers and great explainers. But you know what? I see my colleagues all the time, and intelligent knowledgeable people do their jobs well enough to make it past gatekeepers and are published, interviewed on podcasts and make it on TV. I just follow them and cut out the Twitter middleman.
I was far enough from Twitter that when Elon Musk bought it, I didn't incur any splash damage and don't really have any feelings about its self-destruction.
That’s absolutely possible. I didn’t become actively Too Online until the mid-aughts.
A truly weird 2010s throwback traffic source is Google Discover, which functions almost entirely like the Facebook newsfeed of old and not at all like SEO in any sense (it's not based on search queries). It usually contributes around 25% of all Google traffic for some publishers and no one, not even people who work at the sites, seems to notice it much or understand how it functions.
That Nate Silver photo with Bill Keller at Nick Denton's is a perfect summary
Remember StumbleUpon? In 2007-2008 I convinced many an editor I’m a traffic guru using that tool alone.
Isn't the 2010s' most lasting pop cultural form the prestige drama centered on an antihero man? While The Sopranos was the first one to really break through to mass consciousness, and The Shield has its adherents, the antihero drama reached peak tastemaker approval in the later seasons of Breaking Bad and Mad Men, or, if you like, in Hamilton.
Would love to see the rise of shitty programmatic ad tech (and its industry proponents like Digiday) explored in tandem: how the promise of easy ad dollars via targeted advertising networks misled publishers into thinking they could easily funnel in a gazillion dollars through targeting and automation. It's outlined in Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis, but also evident to anyone who ever attended an ad tech-sponsored party between 2011 and 2016: it all seemed like there would be so much money, for everyone, forever, so easy, so automated, as long as the traffic was there. Targeting! Segmentation! But no one figured out how to put the pieces together in a way that audiences actually liked / made publishers money, and now advertisers just block their ads from showing up next to news wholesale.
Also news to me: Facebook was motivated by jealousy because journalists liked Twitter? That's an extremely specious argument that definitely doesn't gibe with my experience of the era; must have been developed by journalists.
Ha--to say that it's "because journalists liked it" is definitely specious, but I think it's been pretty well-documented that Zuck didn't like how much attention Twitter got as a news platform, and the decision to prioritize outbound links in the news feed was at least in part a function of that jealousy. Here's how Ben reports it in his book:
"In October 2008, Mark Zuckerberg met with Twitter’s executives and offered them $500 million for the company. In an email to Twitter’s chairman, Jack Dorsey, Zuckerberg also made a tacit threat: if they wouldn’t sell, he’d continue to 'build products that moved further in their direction.' Twitter said no. Twitter’s board believed their company could be worth more than half a billion, and they had qualms about Facebook’s ruthless business practices.
It was a monumental decision, setting off a frantic wave of competition between the two platforms for this apparently positive and inspirational new source of traffic mined from politics and social movements. That frenzy would later draw in companies from BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post to The New York Times, all hungering after the traffic Facebook could send them. Facebook chronicler Steven Levy later wrote that after failing to acquire Twitter, 'Facebook tried to copy a number of Twitter’s features, including a real-time urgency and an increased viral pulse.' He speculated that if Facebook had done the deal, it might not have felt so driven to compete with Twitter to mine the traffic and attention of politics, and that 'maybe the News Feed would not have courted so much of the toxicity it became known for later on.' But Facebook instead chased Twitter in a race to dominate the business of real-time news and overheated opinion, and journalists would find themselves pulled over the waterfall the two companies created."
That's quite the narrative, with so many egos, monumental frenzies and frantic competition. Gotta love the hyperbole about a couple of bros sending angry emails! But it makes more sense for Zuck to be jealous of Twitter in 2008, in the Farmville days before Facebook started raking it in with self-serve ads, and when people were really concerned that college girls were going to damage their career potential when they uploaded party photos. Good to know; thanks for sharing.
Should we call social media and the online journalism ecosystem the Hot Take Industrial Complex?
@Deborah, there is something to journalists as tastemakers, but it's probably not salient.
Within journalism there is a notion of an online region called the Media Belt, something like the Sun Belt and Rust Belt -- a shared characteristic by a region.
The Media Belt is four metro areas: New York, L.A., Washington, and the Bay Area. They are politically very blue and demographically very diverse, but it's not politics or diversity that forms a kinship.
These four regions dominate search engines and social media. For one thing, most of what remains paying journalism is physically based in these areas. Two, what keeps journalism viable in these communities while local journalism is distressed everywhere else, is that the media is in service to Wall Street (NYC), entertainment (L.A.), politics (DC) and tech (Bay Area). Three, people physically located in these cities like reading about themselves, consuming such content. Four, because such content is consumed so much, search and social algorithms reward it with high ranking results or trending topics. Five, because algorithms reward Media Belt content with prominent play, journalists treat search and social like sourdough starter and keep producing (and consuming) more content because of the incentive structure the internet has nurtured.
So yeah, journalists do have a hand in it but they are more participants and spectators than the architects and executives of this culture.
Google and social media are really what happens when you decide to give the gatekeeping aspects of editorial discretion to AI.
I like the sourdough starter bit, tho.
I've never heard of a "media belt" before. I've been working in publishing and digital marketing businesses for 20+ years, and, I dunno, that's some folk economics up there.
My comment's intent wasn't to be anti-journalism; it was more observational. I just have a more audience-centric view of the same events from having worked in different aspects of the industry. The takes I've been reading from most media folks ignore the role of the audience-as-advertiser completely, probably not intentionally, but because it gives the story main characters, which makes the narrative more marketable. It's worth noting the editorial optimization.
"Media Belt" is an emergent phenomenon. The people talking about it work in media and academia (often journalism or communications faculty), and it's probably working its way through academic journals as we speak.
It does sound like folk economics wisdom, but there are numbers to back it up, like about where the media jobs are and what topics win the SEO and social trends. And once you observe it you start to see it everywhere.
Regional Belts, and even generational cohorts, kind of function like a tag for sociologists, anthropologists and theorists. For most of humanity, it's all bullshit and you could go through life not knowing about it but be fine. But for a few, it's a special construct that's something they need to know or a prism through which they see the world.
Cool. Thanks for the explainer. I have a whole bunch of quibbles, but good to know that logic exists.
This is the greatest sentence / paragraph of 2023 (so far):
“But the decade really kicked into gear around 2012, when Facebook, apparently motivated by jealousy over Twitter’s popularity among journalists (and specifically the extent to which they were crediting Twitter with the Arab revolutions of 2011), opened up a fire hose of traffic to anyone willing to make their headlines sound like they’d been written by a dog, but a dog who’d been genetically/cybernetically manipulated to have the intelligence of a seventh grader, but was subsequently brain damaged in a lab accident, and was also on coke.”
Exquisite.
Ok but what are us mid 30s men supposed to wear now?
big pant
big pant
Now that I think back to it, the 2010s in general was a really weird decade. Can't quite put my finger on it
If you did put your finger on it, you should wash it.
livejournal anyone?
I fucking miss Livejournal. It was, for my friends and I, THE social media before people called it social media. I kept up with my friends there in a way that’s difficult now because it’s considered passe or even cringe to post on Facebook (I’m in my early 30s, as are most of my friends, and most of my coworkers are early to mid 20s.)
And as a fandom and original character RPer it was so much better than Tumblr or forums before it, despite all the drama.
The decline of media was already well on its way, but whatever life was left in a certain kind of elite media or publishing experience fully and truly died during the 2010s. I believe median advances for trade books fell 40% that decade. Newsroom staff headcount was literally cut in half. The Gay Talese/Tina Brown/Graydon Carter/Nora Ephron world was just gone, dead, period. In publishing, the really big mid-six-figure/seven-figure deals now go in large majorities to celebrities writing a book, instead of celebrity writers. I'm sure Gawker mostly diversified because to meet Nick Denton's traffic goals they simply had to pull in more normies, but as I've said before it also had to because the elite world Elizabeth Spiers used to envy just truly does not exist anymore. And the knock-on economic effects down the chain of the industry aren't good either, obviously.
At the same time, in the 2010s the already-potent aversion people feel to working some sort of traditional white collar 9 to 5 got even stronger. Influencer culture helped to cement in people's minds that only a chump gets up at 7AM to pile into an office moving paper all day. Social media made glamorous lives of professional freedom seem ubiquitous and like anyone who didn't have one was a chump. And so you have this world of media where the cash was pumping in early in the decade but where the foundations were always clearly shaky and the top-level compensation now quite a bit worse than it once was, but you also had an endless supply of young strivers eager to come to the city and live their dreams, despite the fact that the money never made sense. Their sheer numbers inevitably put downward pressure on the earnings potential of everyone. Now interest rates are up, meaning that there aren't huge piles of loose cash lying around looking for investment. Thus the end of Vice et al. Too many people, too few seats.
The funny thing is what doesn't change: if you want to be in media, you better work for the New York Times!
I feel like the 10s will be thought of as the decade of Twitter. It really got going in 2010 and Musk's purchase is the end of its dominance.
The 2010s: Where "Orange is the New Black" is both a streaming series and the worst outcome for a presidential election.
This has to be right.
I miss The Outline. And Gawker, of course.
The 2010s doesn't have one vibe, right? It's split in two. The first half was the Obama era, and it started with the 2008 election and its memes. Peak liberal era, you could be cool (most places) by liking the president, because his biggest opponents were so uncool.
Then around the 2015 primary campaigns, internet culture discovered socialism and quickly thereafter discovered communism. And even some of the right wing, for a minute, was funny. And suddenly everyone in between was exposed as extremely behind and uncool. And everything up to 2014 was cringe. And for a few years, we were all on high alert for cringe. Thus all the wojacks of crying faces wearing grinning masks. The "I have drawn me as the chad and you as the virgin!" era.
In 2020, the Mueller gang became the Fauci gang. But now there's a healthy leftist layer to the internet, making fun of the centrists, keeping the culture from sliding back into Obama-era cringe. Still, I think the COVID hangover era will define the first half of the 2020s, while something else will define the second. Maybe violent revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, maybe climate collapse. Maybe BLACKPINK!
The 2020s: Civil War II.
Not wrong, but early.