The Weekly Scroll: Humiliation Bait

Plus: Streamer drama, BlueSky in Japan, and a disappearing voice crack

Trying out ‘Weekly Scroll’ instead of This Week In Discourse for the weekend edition. Let me know what you think!

The Cut’s Humiliation Bait

AI generated - “An embarrassed woman posting bait”

The Cut, which is NYMag’s women’s vertical, published two absolutely bananas pieces this week back-to-back.

The first was a piece by Emily Gould about her journey towards almost divorcing her husband, but ultimately reconciling with him. It’s important to keep in mind that is is all from Gould’s perspective, her own words. The piece details how

• She grew intensely jealous that his writing career was more successful than hers

• She acted out by routinely spending more money than they could afford on trivial nonsense

• She declared that she wanted to divorce him in a fit of mania, only to end up in a psychiatric hospital for a month

• Where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder

• While in the psychiatric hospital, somehow got hold of her phone and slandered her husband to the entire internet, setting up a ‘divorce GoFundMe’

• Upon release she went home, declared that she still wanted the divorce, but continued living in the same house with him and their kids

• She then refused to speak to him

• Also she cheated on him

• Eventually she realized she wanted to remain married and they reconciled

• Also he was extremely supportive of her through this entire time¹

The piece is well-written, I suppose. But the entire internet seemed to take a look at the essay and collectively ask Gould What the fuck were you thinking??? You published this voluntarily?

But the Cut wasn’t done! The next you-couldn’t-waterboard-this-out-me article came out one day later, with the article The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger. The article details an absurd story where the writer, who is the personal finance columnist for the Cut, put $50,000 in a shoe box and handed it to a stranger.

It’s a humiliating story that I can’t believe the author was willing to publish. She fell for one of the dumbest scams possible - literally a cold phone call informing her that her ‘identity was stolen’ and she could be in trouble with the police because her stolen identity was ‘used in crimes’. The scammers then connected her to another line where a ‘CIA Agent’ told her that anyone could be involved in the identity theft and not to tell anyone, even a lawyer or her husband. And that they needed to protect her money, so she would need to withdraw her savings and give it to them for safekeeping.

And so she went to the bank, withdrew $50,000 in cash, PUT IT IN A SHOEBOX AND HANDED IT TO A STRANGER WHO DROVE UP TO HER HOUSE.

There are some people who think the whole situation is fake, as some of the details are hard to believe (for instance - banks typically grill you about why you need to withdraw so much cash, to protect you from scams like this). But what’s more interesting to me is that whether it’s fake or real,² the author published it voluntarily.

Writers and social media personalities are both always looking for attention, for clicks, for virality. The hard way to do that is to always produce impeccable quality material that speaks for itself. The easier way is engagement bait - say something controversial or stupid on purpose, and watch all the suckers get drawn in like moths to a flame. We’ve talked about Rage Bait as influencer tactic here before and some of the characters who are very good at it.

This Week in Discourse: Rage Bait as Influencer Tactic

The Cut seems to have stumbled upon a new formula that’s a bit different from rage bait. It’s humiliation bait. Rather than try to make the internet mad at you, write something so utterly embarrassing that the entire internet will discuss how pathetic you are.

Here’s the thing: This kind of tactic works.

If all you care about is going viral, abject humiliation in front of the entire internet will do it. You will go viral. But I’m pleading with you, authors, to have at least a modicum of self respect here.

You do not, in fact, have to submit your most private humiliating moments for public consumption. You do not have to reveal the most pathetic moments in your life’s journey for us to laugh at. Don’t do it.

You’ll go viral today, but tomorrow you will still be the personal finance columnist who was stupid enough to hand over $50,000 in a shoebox. You’re not shaking that - that’s going to be the first comment in the comment section on every article you write from now until the end of time. Emily Gould went viral, but her kids are going to read that piece one day. They’re going to read the account of how their mom daydreamed about being one of those literary women wronged by her husband, when in fact she was an entitled, jealous, mentally ill, cheating, financially abusive loser.³

There’s a larger cultural trend here towards ‘great commentary is about my personal journey and travails’. The people writing essays and thinkpieces for sites like The Cut are less and less often writing about abstract ideas and trends and more and more often writing about their own personal journeys, their own lives and travails. Sometimes this is nice. At other times it’s just masturbatory self-indulgence. There’s an assumption by a certain type of writer that the truest writing is where you bare your own soul, to which I can only say No. No, stop it, get some help. Stop humiliating yourself for pageviews.

Digital Trails and Reality

An interesting thing happened after the Super Bowl, having nothing to do with Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce.⁴ Alicia Keys, during her halftime performance with Usher, had an obvious voice crack in the opening seconds of her song. But in the version of the performance uploaded to the NFL’s YouTube channel, the crack has been corrected out. It’s very noticeable - listen for yourself to both versions here.

First things first: love Songs in A Minor, but we’ve known for decades that Alicia Keys can’t sing live. But more interesting than slagging on Keys is what this means for the future of record-keeping. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest spectacles in the world, so people quickly spotted the discrepancy in Keys’ voice and preserved the original version.

But for smaller events, this kind of digital correction may become common as AI advanced. We may not notice that the things we actually experienced are being air-brushed away. People tend to think of digital technology as making it easier to preserve authentic moments, but what if the future is actually a guessing game of which version is real?

Bluesky Japan

Bluesky opened up last week, and I’ve found a lot of the coverage there pretty tedious - a lot more of people wanting something important to be there than something important actually happening. But I did find one interesting tidbit worth sharing.

Lost in the hoopla and coverage is the fact that most of the 1.5 million new signups seem to be from Japan, not from english speaking countries. Japan has punched above their weight on Twitter for a long time, going back into the early 2010s. And in 2023 they were still the second most common nationality on Twitter, behind only the US. Japanese Twitter is and always has been huge, even if it rarely intersects with English Twitter.

With BlueSky I’m always looking for some kind of proof that any real mass-migration is happening. Or hell, features of any kind - BlueSky still doesn’t have video, DMs, hashtags, etc. I don’t see any evidence of that migration for English speaking Twitter, but maybe Japan is going to lead the way here?

Streamer Awards Drama

A fun little bit of stupid drama to close out the week’s roundup:

QTCinderella is a famous YouTuber/streamer, and also the person who created the 'Streamer Awards'. This is a self-produced show where fans vote on their favorite streamers, a bunch of streamers attend the live event with a red carpet, and awards are handed out in various categories.

Apparently this year's show is costing a ton of money to produce. QTCinderella created a new channel on Twitch showing re-runs of her previous streams as a way to try to fund the show. Seems fine?

But! She's pretty explicitly using the channel in a bad faith way to scam Twitch/advertisers. She tells people to just leave the stream open without watching it to rack up views and ad money. She even gives instructions to mute the browser rather than mute the stream - Twitch can tell if viewers have the stream muted, and you won’t get ad money. But Twitch can't tell if you have the tab muted, so in that case you will get the ad money. She’s coaching her fans how to farm her ad revenue without having to hear any actual ads or even watch the stream.

Turns out people are pretty mad about that! Why? Well, QT is already rich and successful, in the top 0.1% of all streamers. And scamming Twitch/advertisers to pay for a fairly silly award show is a bad look. Especially when that award show is basically just a party for her and her scene/her friends.

On the one hand, you might argue that Twitch is owned by Amazon and why cry about taking cash from a giant like them? But on the other hand, Twitch is a struggling company that loses money every year, and just had to lay off a third of the company. Amazon isn’t going to keep them alive if they just continually lose money, so scamming the site’s advertisers will ultimately end up hurting other streamers as the value of those ads goes down. ‘Teach people how to scam Twitch' is not a great idea for the future viability of your streaming platform.

Of course, this led a bunch of streamers to come to QT's defense and accuse her detractors of 'white knighting a giant company'. The initial critical tweet was by a guy with ~1K followers and probably wouldn't have gone anywhere, but dozens of streamers rushed to QT's defense and Streisand Effect'd the whole thing so it ended up going viral.

QTCinderella’s channels ended up catching a ban from Twitch over the incident. She’s claimed it’s because of a stray bit of nudity that appeared in a stream, but that smells like obvious ass-covering to anyone paying attention.

There’s always been a tension between content creators and the platforms they create on. Platforms are trying to make money. Content creators are trying to make money. Platforms will try to design a system to pay those content creators, and the creators will then relentlessly game the system to earn as much money as they can. You can think here about the band that released an entirely silent album on Spotify⁵. You can think about the YouTuber Spiffing Brit, whose entire channel is filled with details about how to exploit the YouTube algorithm. Some of this is healthy and natural, but you can’t push too hard - especially when the platform isn’t profitable in the first place.

Links

• Streamer Kai Cenat becomes the first streamer officially sponsored by Nike. We’ll likely see more and more of this kind of sponsorship blending giant brands with online personalities in the future.

• This week in Elon - X has been accepting payments from terrorists. And there’s a whole trove of new details coming out from the new book Battle for the Bird. And the site’s ads are still a disaster.

• TikTok and Meta are suing the EU over their new Digital Services Act. The EU overregulating? Couldn’t be!

• Will a YouTuber direct an Oscar-nominated movie one day?

• Singles are now adding credit scores to dating app profiles. Financial maturity got ‘em like 💦🥵💦

• Retrospective - how Slack changed group chats.

• The Biden campaign joins TikTok.

• AI boyfriends in China

Posts

• One of the greatest buried ledes of all time - Tuscon teacher loses job

• Having a good time?

• My little slime

• Disney Cruise Gone Wrong

• Should leftists work out? A melodrama

1. He brought her special gluten-free sandwiches while she was in psychiatric lockdown and she was actively slandering him online! He essentially comes off like a saint.

2. My personal theory, articulated well by a commenter named ‘mr_piss’, is that she’s a disconnected rich kid with a massive trust fund and this all did actually happen.

3. I can’t emphasize enough how much these are all her own words, her own account. I can’t imagine how much worse it would sound if her husband was the one describing it.

4. At least until next season you’re safe from the dreaded Tayvis Swelce.

5. It was removed, but not before the band earned 20K in revenue