As far as I can tell Twitter ads are currently some sort of scam used to feed money from stolen credit cards into the site - this is why they're all from verified accounts with crypto/ape avatars. Hard to say who's benefiting but has to be worth reporting to the FTC or Stripe or someone.
As for Bluesky and Japan, a bunch of accounts I follow (minor celebrities like game VAs and some artists) actually have moved over there. Not sure why; current status is something like:
- Twitter is doing fine in Japan, the ads are still legit businesses and it's not full of Nazis.
- but people are starting to notice the no moderation; in the big earthquake recently there were a lot of fake posts and every trending hashtag was filled with spam.
- Japanese people love new apps, probably don't want people taking their usernames, and "Bluesky" sounds like a Japanese name. (feel like the last one matters)
One thing that might be an issue is Japanese users tend to run into problems with Western moderation because there's nothing Japanese people like doing online more than drawing naked anime girls, which Twitter doesn't care about but other services sure do. (Especially non-US ones where it's often actually illegal.)
It always baffles me when people take the time on social media to say "X suggestion that isn't meant for me is bad and hurtful!". Just move on, bro. It's not for you, and that's OK.
The wild thing about that Gould piece is that if that's how benevolent her husband is coming off in her own accounting, I cannot imagine how things were in reality. That guy must have the patience of Job, because quite honestly, almost any one of those things could be a dealbreaker in a marriage. Plenty of people divorce over financial infidelity alone, let alone the rest of that stuff.
I think this piece is disappointingly closed-minded, to be honest, not as thoughtful as the output I've found from your other writing. You seem to think that once someone does something embarrassing or has a crisis, the only reason they would share it would be for masochistic attention-getting. I haven't read the Gould piece so I can't comment on it—though Phoebe Maltz Bovy had a good piece about it that seemed to derive some value from it (https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com/p/goulded-cages )—but the Cowles article has, I think, good actual reasons to exist; it brings readers actual value, not just prurient disaster-gawking.
First, stupid though she may be, obviously Cowles is not the only person to be taken in like this, so apparently there are a lot of people out there with this variety of stupidity, some of whom will read this piece and get a good lesson from it. So that's a reason for the article to exist, as a cautionary tale. After all, one thing scammers rely on is people being too humiliated to tell other people what they've done—that's how Victor Lustig was able to sell the Eiffel Tower twice.
Second, I think there's genuine psychological insight here about how a claim (like the CIA agent) that would seem absurd if someone led off with it becomes more plausible if there have been earlier steps that seem believable (Amazon, then the FTC) and if you're under the influence of fear or stress so you're not thinking clearly. The author points out that police get false confessions using similar manipulations; someone I talked with about the piece said it reminded her of how cults work, starting with broadly plausible and seemingly helpful principles and gradually getting more out there once you're hooked. Now, you can say "I wouldn't buy the CIA thing no matter how many layers they gave me first," and I think you're probably right; I bet you wouldn't believe in Xenu either, and that's great. But that brings us back to the value of this piece for people who aren't as prepared! "Just don't be stupid" is obviously not worthwhile advice.
Basically I think "just don't write this kind of story" is a pretty pointless message, and I certainly got much less out of it than I got from the Cowles piece, and I imagine less than I'd get from the Gould one too. Sorry to be critical but I think you invite that with your dismissive tone.
Criticism is fine and encouraged. I disagree but that's life.
The thing about the internet and content creation is that trends jumpstart themselves very, very quickly. Based on the 'success' of these pieces I feel pretty confident in saying there's going to be a lot more humiliation bait coming down the pipeline very soon. And I think that kind of sucks for the reasons stated above - the hit of viral dopamine isn't worth the long term effect. There are absolutely going to be people who intentionally try to go viral via humiliating themselves. More writers should think carefully before doing this kind of piece (which they won't).
(more broadly, I think the general trend of "I am kind of a dumb or shitty person, but I can relate my dumbness or shittiness to Big Societal Trend, so it's cool to share with you!" is a tired, bad form of writing)
I think if people write valueless stuff then it should be criticized, but you seem to be looking at the bad influences this kind of piece might have on people—they might seek to have (or feign) humiliating experiences to get famous—but not on the positive influences: they might not get scammed when they otherwise would have. Needless to say, a lot more people are getting scammed than are trying to get published in New York Magazine, so the article seems like a positive to me.
I also think there doesn't have to be some Big Societal Trend for us to benefit from reading about people's foibles, because it's a chance to learn empathy and expand our understanding of human behavior. To the extent that people reading this think "ha, that's who gets scammed—stupid people, people other than me" (or in the case of that comment you highlighted, "sheltered rich people; no one with real-world experience could fall for this"), I think they're missing the point of the piece in a big way. Similarly I think the message "if something bad happens to you that's your own fault, how shameful; keep it to yourself" is more harmful than oversharing is.
Both the Cowles piece and the Gould piece suffer from being self-authored. Any valuable takeaways you might get from either get muddled with the bouts of self-justification that virtually everyone does when they tell their own story. You need an objective-ish voice of reason in there to frame things sympathetically to an audience that will be reading things from a similarly objective point of view.
One thing that stood how to me was relative to everything else, how little page space she gave to her cheating. Like, even in the part about a couple therapy, it was kind of yada yada yada as just one more thing they had to work through in addition to all the other stuff, and I'd be curious to know from her husband's perspective if it was just one more thing to work through, because just anecdotally, as a guy, that would probably be numbers 1a, 1b, and 1c. A lot of the gripes that she had about him were, like, normal married person gripes, and I'm sure if you asked him he has a list similarly long, except now it also has cheated on me appended to the bottom.
If I'm being generous in spirit here, it's entirely possible that she gave that so little page space precisely because it would hurt her husband more to put more attention on it.
> And the site’s ads are still a disaster.
As far as I can tell Twitter ads are currently some sort of scam used to feed money from stolen credit cards into the site - this is why they're all from verified accounts with crypto/ape avatars. Hard to say who's benefiting but has to be worth reporting to the FTC or Stripe or someone.
As for Bluesky and Japan, a bunch of accounts I follow (minor celebrities like game VAs and some artists) actually have moved over there. Not sure why; current status is something like:
- Twitter is doing fine in Japan, the ads are still legit businesses and it's not full of Nazis.
- but people are starting to notice the no moderation; in the big earthquake recently there were a lot of fake posts and every trending hashtag was filled with spam.
- Japanese people love new apps, probably don't want people taking their usernames, and "Bluesky" sounds like a Japanese name. (feel like the last one matters)
One thing that might be an issue is Japanese users tend to run into problems with Western moderation because there's nothing Japanese people like doing online more than drawing naked anime girls, which Twitter doesn't care about but other services sure do. (Especially non-US ones where it's often actually illegal.)
Also, that is an incredible buried lede wtf
The Weekly Scroll is definitely a better name
Re: Should Leftists Work Out?
It always baffles me when people take the time on social media to say "X suggestion that isn't meant for me is bad and hurtful!". Just move on, bro. It's not for you, and that's OK.
The wild thing about that Gould piece is that if that's how benevolent her husband is coming off in her own accounting, I cannot imagine how things were in reality. That guy must have the patience of Job, because quite honestly, almost any one of those things could be a dealbreaker in a marriage. Plenty of people divorce over financial infidelity alone, let alone the rest of that stuff.
I think this piece is disappointingly closed-minded, to be honest, not as thoughtful as the output I've found from your other writing. You seem to think that once someone does something embarrassing or has a crisis, the only reason they would share it would be for masochistic attention-getting. I haven't read the Gould piece so I can't comment on it—though Phoebe Maltz Bovy had a good piece about it that seemed to derive some value from it (https://phoebemaltzbovy.substack.com/p/goulded-cages )—but the Cowles article has, I think, good actual reasons to exist; it brings readers actual value, not just prurient disaster-gawking.
First, stupid though she may be, obviously Cowles is not the only person to be taken in like this, so apparently there are a lot of people out there with this variety of stupidity, some of whom will read this piece and get a good lesson from it. So that's a reason for the article to exist, as a cautionary tale. After all, one thing scammers rely on is people being too humiliated to tell other people what they've done—that's how Victor Lustig was able to sell the Eiffel Tower twice.
Second, I think there's genuine psychological insight here about how a claim (like the CIA agent) that would seem absurd if someone led off with it becomes more plausible if there have been earlier steps that seem believable (Amazon, then the FTC) and if you're under the influence of fear or stress so you're not thinking clearly. The author points out that police get false confessions using similar manipulations; someone I talked with about the piece said it reminded her of how cults work, starting with broadly plausible and seemingly helpful principles and gradually getting more out there once you're hooked. Now, you can say "I wouldn't buy the CIA thing no matter how many layers they gave me first," and I think you're probably right; I bet you wouldn't believe in Xenu either, and that's great. But that brings us back to the value of this piece for people who aren't as prepared! "Just don't be stupid" is obviously not worthwhile advice.
Basically I think "just don't write this kind of story" is a pretty pointless message, and I certainly got much less out of it than I got from the Cowles piece, and I imagine less than I'd get from the Gould one too. Sorry to be critical but I think you invite that with your dismissive tone.
Criticism is fine and encouraged. I disagree but that's life.
The thing about the internet and content creation is that trends jumpstart themselves very, very quickly. Based on the 'success' of these pieces I feel pretty confident in saying there's going to be a lot more humiliation bait coming down the pipeline very soon. And I think that kind of sucks for the reasons stated above - the hit of viral dopamine isn't worth the long term effect. There are absolutely going to be people who intentionally try to go viral via humiliating themselves. More writers should think carefully before doing this kind of piece (which they won't).
(more broadly, I think the general trend of "I am kind of a dumb or shitty person, but I can relate my dumbness or shittiness to Big Societal Trend, so it's cool to share with you!" is a tired, bad form of writing)
I think if people write valueless stuff then it should be criticized, but you seem to be looking at the bad influences this kind of piece might have on people—they might seek to have (or feign) humiliating experiences to get famous—but not on the positive influences: they might not get scammed when they otherwise would have. Needless to say, a lot more people are getting scammed than are trying to get published in New York Magazine, so the article seems like a positive to me.
I also think there doesn't have to be some Big Societal Trend for us to benefit from reading about people's foibles, because it's a chance to learn empathy and expand our understanding of human behavior. To the extent that people reading this think "ha, that's who gets scammed—stupid people, people other than me" (or in the case of that comment you highlighted, "sheltered rich people; no one with real-world experience could fall for this"), I think they're missing the point of the piece in a big way. Similarly I think the message "if something bad happens to you that's your own fault, how shameful; keep it to yourself" is more harmful than oversharing is.
Both the Cowles piece and the Gould piece suffer from being self-authored. Any valuable takeaways you might get from either get muddled with the bouts of self-justification that virtually everyone does when they tell their own story. You need an objective-ish voice of reason in there to frame things sympathetically to an audience that will be reading things from a similarly objective point of view.
One thing that stood how to me was relative to everything else, how little page space she gave to her cheating. Like, even in the part about a couple therapy, it was kind of yada yada yada as just one more thing they had to work through in addition to all the other stuff, and I'd be curious to know from her husband's perspective if it was just one more thing to work through, because just anecdotally, as a guy, that would probably be numbers 1a, 1b, and 1c. A lot of the gripes that she had about him were, like, normal married person gripes, and I'm sure if you asked him he has a list similarly long, except now it also has cheated on me appended to the bottom.
If I'm being generous in spirit here, it's entirely possible that she gave that so little page space precisely because it would hurt her husband more to put more attention on it.