Weekly Scroll: Money ain't Free

Chase glitches, Brazil bans X, posting dirty laundry and the Dark Meow

Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your guide to the last week of social media. Let’s jump right in.

Chase Free Money Glitch

Over the weekend, news of a ‘Chase free money glitch’ started trending on social media. As best I can tell this started on Thursday and really took off Friday afternoon, but I haven’t found the precise origin. But people were excitedly posting that they got ‘free money’ from doing a particular set of steps at Chase ATMs. People were posting pictures of cash that they had supposedly gotten:

Here’s a free life tip. If someone ever tells you they have a ‘glitch’ to get free money from a bank, you should immediately think ‘this person is going to jail’. What was the glitch? Believe it or not, it was plain old check fraud. People weren’t actually getting money. Instead they were now thousands in debt.

When you deposit a large check, you normally run into a screen like this:

The bank here makes $100 immediately available, but the $36,536 from the rest of the check is on hold until the bank verifies that it’s a real and valid check. In this case, the ‘glitch’ seems to be as simple as encouraging people to deposit bad checks and then withdraw as much money as they can. If things are working correctly, you can really only scam the bank for $100 - you don’t have access to the rest of it.

What’s now going viral is folks who were supposedly able to withdraw funds they didn’t have in large amounts. Predictably, what appears to be happening is that the money *appears* to be in the account, but as soon as the bank realizes it’s bad they yank it back:

It’s unclear to me how much this actually happened - was anyone actually able to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars in cash they didn’t have? There’s not any clear proof of that. With any viral trend, there’s a lot of fake posting and deception - this line outside a Chase, for instance, was claimed as a bunch of people doing the glitch, but in reality is just a branch in the middle of a busy NYC neighborhood that often has a line. It’s possible Chase did have a real glitch that let people withdraw the full amount of a bad check, but it’s also possible this entire ‘glitch’ was just hallucinated.

What is clear is that many people attempted this and didn’t get the money at all. And are now potentially facing check fraud charges. It’s wild to me that there are people out there who will see an anonymous TikTok about a ‘free money glitch’ and genuinely believe it and try it in the real world. And realistically speaking this is a large chunk of the population. I know in my head that these people exist, but it baffles me. Kids, if someone tells you there’s a free money glitch at the bank, do not believe them. It will not work out well for you.

Reddit’s new ad model

To oversimplify: when it comes to online ads, there are two meaningful markets. There’s the Google/Meta market, where those two companies can charge high rates, target users in a highly precise way, and make absurd amounts of money doing it. And there’s literally everything else on the independent web, where ad rates have cratered and it’s nearly impossible to make money via advertising.¹

We’ve talked about this before in the context of why subscription models are replacing ad models as the revenue generator of choice for independent sites. Google and Meta have a lot of advantages. They have absolutely gargantuan size and can scale endlessly. They have incredible amounts of data. And they have incredibly powerful personalization tools that allow advertisers to slice and dice the audience a thousand ways. This last part is important because targeted ads are worth significantly more money than non-targeted ads.

Thoughts on Smith's "Death of the Internet"

Now Reddit is testing a new model based on topics, not user data. Reddit’s theory of the case is that by having the gargantuan size and incredible amounts of data, they won’t actually need the personalization tools:

Unlike many of its much larger advertising competitors, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., Reddit has mostly anonymous users. That means the company can’t always rely on personal information like gender or location to serve the ideal ad to the ideal customer.

But users who don’t identify themselves tend to be more open and honest with their posts and their interests, said Jen Wong, Reddit’s chief operating officer. “When people come to Reddit, they reveal things about themselves that they would not reveal on other platforms,” said Wong, who joined Reddit in 2018 after holding the same title at Time Inc.

The site’s themed discussion forums give Reddit a chance to precisely align advertisers with those interests. That might mean adding a financial services ad in a group about investing, or a car ad promoting extra cargo space in a forum about camping. Reddit has more than 100,000 such communities organized around topics ranging from skin care to parenting tips.

Reddit’s unique bet here is that with the power of their subreddits, they won’t need to do as much individual slicing of users for ad targeting. Reddit largely can’t target individuals as precisely as Meta or Google, but they do have a wealth of other information - what subreddits you post in, what keywords appear in your posts, etc. Ads for dog food don’t need to be matched to individual users when you can just show them in /r/Dogs. And as one of the ten largest sites on the internet, they have the scale to really test this idea.

I’m watching this with interest, because it will be a truly grim sign if even Reddit can’t break the duopoly in online ads.

The Dark Meow

@vero_tolozБоже, заберите у меня 3д принтер… #саtman #cat #batman #batmancat

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Brazil Bans Twitter

The latest in a long, long set of baffling decisions at Twitter: Elon Musk has allowed Twitter to be banned in Brazil.

For context, Brazil’s courts have been upset about misinformation spread on the platform and have made various demands, such as blocking particular accounts or posts. Twitter declined to do any of that, and instead shut down operations in Brazil while still remaining accessible. The logic behind this move is that any ‘representative’ of the company could be held liable for Twitter’s actions, so it was safer to not have any representatives.

Musk claims he’s standing up for free speech by refusing to ban accounts under political pressure and refusing to follow the judge’s orders. The judge, faced with a company that won’t follow court orders and won’t pay its growing pile of fines, thinks Twitter is a scofflaw who needs to be shut down until they appoint a legal representative and pay their fines.

I’m relatively pro-free speech. I actually do think the judge’s decisions in this case sets a dangerous precedent - other than a few narrow categories like terrorism or CSAM, I don’t think governments should get to say who posts on which websites. But at the same time, I’m tired of Musk’s song and dance. Independent reporting shows that Twitter actually does comply with the vast majority of takedown requests², including large numbers of requests from ideologically motivated governments in India and Turkey. But India and Turkey have right-wing governments, while Brazil has a left-wing government. It’s not a surprise that Musk is only throwing a shitfit about free speech in Brazil.

So even though I think the judge is in the wrong, I don’t really feel sympathy for Musk’s free speech claims. He’s personally intervened to ban a number of accounts he didn’t like. He’s a guy who censors the words ‘cis’ and ‘cisgender’ on his own site. He rants about ‘leakers’ who tell the press about Twitter’s internal news and threatens to sue them. He’s in bed with noted freedom lovers Saudi Arabia. Musk is not a free speech warrior. He’s a guy who pulls out the free speech card whenever it’s politically advantageous for shielding right wing viewpoints, and I’m tired of it.

It remains to be seen how long this plays out. Brazil is also freezing funds for Starlink and possibly banning that service as well. They’re the sixth largest market for Twitter, and the ban removes about 20 million users from the site. It’s a significant blow, and in normal times I’d assume that the two parties would find a way to resolve the situation. But with as stubborn as Musk is and as much of a culture war figure as he’s become, this could feasibly go on for quite a long time.

Dirty Laundry

The new trend this week: airing your dirty laundry in public.

The account TradWife2049 does not actually post much trad wife content. Instead it’s basically a trad-wife themed Only Fans poster. With the caveat that everything online is a scam to sell more porn and this might be no exception, she has a remarkable dedication to posting. She’s posting the messy details of how her husband was unemployed for three years and she’s paid the bills, including for his ‘gundums’. She’s posting screenshots of divorce paperwork and termination from her day job paperwork. We are reaching previously unseen levels of Posting Through It:

I will obviously report if the gundums are safe or not as soon as we get an update. But TradWife2049 isn’t alone. We also got this delicious post on the AmITheAsshole subreddit titled “Am I The Asshole for letting you know I am divorcing you by sending you a thread on the website that you use to ignore me?” I have to admit that’s a very stylish way to divorce a husband who neglects you to spend time on Reddit. And apparently he did see the post.

Again, with the disclaimer that all stories on the internet are faked for attention - this feels like something we’re going to see more and more of. If you’ve been here a while you know that Posting Is The Most Powerful Force In The World. People cannot help themselves, they cannot resist posting even when it might ruin their lives. Why would breakups and messy personal situations IRL be any different?

Links

• Look, as much fun as it would be I can’t have a ‘JD Vance is weird’ section for the 4th week in a row. But it is insane how he just keeps doing it. How are there so many different clips of him saying this specific offensive thing?

• It continues to be very funny to me that Meta is thriving and growing their metrics in all their core business areas - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads - except for the actual ‘metaverse’, where they keep hilariously falling on their face.

• A guide to the online dipshits interviewing Trump. Repeat the mantra: It’s always on Infinite Scroll first, as in when we covered Trump’s forays into X Spaces and edgelord Twitch streams.

• It’s always on Infinite Scroll first: The NYTimes on how Trump is courting the ‘manoverse’ online.

• A very cool story from the creator of the viral site One Million Check Boxes. Highly recommend checking this link out, it really captures the spirit of the old internet and how social media can be a tool for creativity and fun in unexpected ways.

• Threads is blocking all searches related to COVID. I keep wanting Threads to do well, and they are growing. But content-wise they seem like they’re on the exciting journey of recreating 2018’s tweets, but worse. And this move seems awful and stupid?

Posts

• A chipmunk having a lifechanging moment

• Charli XCX reads Infinite Scroll

• The greatest headline correction of all time

• The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri reviews Star Wars

1. The oversimplification comes from ignoring Amazon, which to me is a different category as a primarily retail operation. There’s also TikTok, which is aiming for maturity but still not profitable (and might be banned soon).

2. Around 98%!