This Week in Discourse: A Full Vibecovery
Hope you’re having a good weekend, gremlins. Since we just did a delayed Discourse post on Wednesday, this weekend’s Discourse post is a little shorter than usual. Worry not! The schedule will be back to normal next week, or until I screw it up again.
Onto the discourse:
Fighting the Doom
About a month ago, I wrote The Age of Doom about how people think everything is falling apart, dying, and constantly getting worse (despite evidence to the contrary). One of the characters in that post was Will Stancil:
Will Stancil, over the last few months, has found himself as the main character of a long running fight on Twitter. He is in a Sisyphean struggle to convince people that the US economy - where virtually all economic indicators are strong, are trending in a positive direction, and are significantly better than peer countries - is in fact a good economy. And people are furious that he believes the economy is good. He gets dozens of incandescently irate replies to each post, berating him for this belief.
But he’s not wrong. The US economy is doing great by any objective measure right now. The unemployment rate is at historic lows. Job growth is strong. Real GDP and real wages are growing. And the fastest growth is happening at the lower end of incomes, which means inequality is shrinking. The stock market is up. Inflation, which admittedly has been high for several years, is now back down near the target of 2%.
Stancil’s problem was that nobody believed this story, despite it being true:
And yet virtually nobody believes this. The Federal Reserve’s consumer sentiment tracker shows that confidence in the economy has fallen off a cliff. Sentiment is as low as it was in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009. Polling shows that people are even more pessimistic today than they were in August 2020, when huge chunks of the economy were literally shut down because of the pandemic.
One of Stancil’s core theories is that media coverage is far more negative than real economic indicators. This theory seems to have new support - a recent research paper finds that news coverage of both economic issues and non-economic issues is universally becoming more negative over time. I’d count this as partial confirmation of the vibes-theory-of-doom.
But in the 1.5 months since that post, Stancil’s single-handed campaign to make people understand that the economy is doing well, something amazing might have happened. He might have succeeded!
Consumer sentiment tracking shows that people’s perceptions of the economy jumped almost 20 points in just two months.
If consumer sentiment isn’t something you normally follow, let me tell you: this is NUTS. That’s the largest two month increase in consumer sentiment in 30 years.1
It’s probably reductive to credit this all to Stancil. There are a lot of things that could be influencing sentiment. Inflation fell last year and people are starting to notice it, as perceptions of inflation tend to lag reality. The stock market is hitting all time highs, and that generates good headlines.
But I think it’s also wrong to say Stancil (and other posters like him) made no difference. Stancil, by sheer force of will, created a loud and persistent counter-narrative to the omnipresent doom. Pundits and media members still pay close attention to what’s happening in these conversations, and he started influencing them with his insistence that statistics objectively show a strong economy. They started changing their tune, and the public seems to have followed. We’re exiting the vibecession. All hands on board for the vibecovery.
That’s not the only reason sentiment is up, but I really do think Stancil made an appreciable difference here. There’s no underlying reason why sentiment should have improved by so much, so fast. Media and social media narratives had to have something to do with it. And that makes me optimistic - maybe social media, when we fight for it, can disseminate positive and true messages into the world. Maybe we’re not stuck with doom narratives forever.
More like Dead-a-verse
Look, we all knew the ‘metaverse’ was kind of a dumb thing to get excited about. Everyone in the world other than Mark Zuckerberg knew this. Nobody wants to strap a computer to their head and have a screen one inch from their eyeballs for 10 hours a day. Phones and laptops work fine. VR headsets are fun gimmicks, not an everyday tool.
And lo and behold, new reporting says that tech investors are fleeing the metaverse. Who could have seen this coming, except for everyone? Hell, even Zuckerberg is now pivoting to AI.2 This pivot to AI is a great business move, even as it’s intensely embarrassing for a guy who literally renamed his company ‘Meta’.
Tech is going to continue to get new form factors, and we’re going to have to continue to adapt. But the idea that there was going to be a major transition in the next five years to wearing VR headsets and the metaverse (to the extent that the ‘metaverse’ even exists) was always a fantasy.3
Links
Hey, ghost trends are back! I wrote about these in October, and noticed them popping up again on Twitter/X this week. I suspect that if/when Twitter continues to devolve, we’ll continue seeing this sort of thing more and more. A sort of canary-in-Twitter’s-coal-mine of the site losing usefulness.
Users who have AdBlock installed are reporting that YouTube is causing performance issues on their PCs. Apparently, the issue was with AdBlock and not Google, and uBlock4 saw no issues.
Freddie deBoer wrote an excellent piece on the spectacle and hypocrisy of people leaving Substack. I’m not sure I agree with every single thing in there, but it is a breath of fresh air compared to the many self-righteous ‘leaving Substack’ posts I’ve seen.
An interesting research paper - When Chinese social media apps started mandating geolocation data with user posts, users were meaner to other users from poorer and less favored regions in China. Truly, people online will take any excuse to be shitty to each other.
TikTok usage growth slowed to only 3% year over year, a much poorer result than expected. Some think the TikTok Shop and its clogging of TikTok’s algorithm is to blame.
Reddit is planning an IPO in March, surprising nobody. I speculated about this last year during the Great Reddit Blackout, and the obvious explanation (Reddit was cracking down in anticipation of an IPO) was the correct explanation.
TikTok releases a plan to combat election misinformation in 2024.
Instagram is telling teens to go to bed.
Posts
Someone used a Bruce Buffer cameo to do a breakup
Finally, this little guy is eepy. Me too, buddy, me too. See you all next week.
If you’re the kind of person who likes to check for yourself, the data is at the Federal Reserve’s site here - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UMCSENT. It’s not yet added the last two data points, but the last jump of this size was in 1992.
He denies it’s a pivot, but that’s just face saving. He’s invested tens of billions in metaverse R&D and most of it is just wasted, so there’s a lot of face that needs to be saved.
The metaverses I find the most interesting are the ones that don’t use that label - for instance, games like Roblox. Realistically they’re more ‘shared creative platforms’ that didn’t get hung up on VR headset tech.
the superior adblocking product
Strongly recommend clicking the 'eepy' link at the end
It feels deBoer's rebuttal is a long and contrarian way to say "Ugh, capitalism". Yes, different products and industries have different norms as to what's acceptable. Does that mean there's no ethical consumption under capitalism (to use a phrase I absolutely hate)?
It mistakes doing something with not doing everything. A person like Casey Newton probably doesn't have significant leverage over a coal mining company. He does have the ability to move the needle on a blog+email-publishing social network and make the internet a slightly less hostile place.
More importantly, "I'm leaving this platform but I'm still gonna do my thing" is an important signal that there is a market for a similar product to Substack. The people who are very public about quitting Substack are functionally encouraging investment in competition, which means the quitters are more likely to get a better product that they can use. It's a classic example from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. To which I say (seriously and unironically, 'cause internet), yay capitalism and markets!