Weekly Scroll: Suckered Yet Again

Influencer boxing, BlueSky winning, and incredible calendar confessions

Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, your once a week guide to what’s happening social internet.

This week we’re talking about the Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson boxing event, how BlueSky seems to be winning the Twitter Replacement War, how Twitch’s antisemitism drama has caused an adpocalypse, and much more!

Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson

This weekend influencer Jake Paul fought boxing legend Mike Tyson live on Netflix. The fight was a disaster by most traditional metrics, but I did walk away impressed by one thing - Paul’s continual ability to sucker people into watching this shit.

The first problem with the fight was that for most people watching, it didn’t look like the image above. It looked more like this:

Netflix, outside a few recent experiments, is not a livestreaming company. They have an enormous amount of traffic, but rarely do they get millions of people watching a live event all at the exact same time. That presents technical challenges, especially when 60M households tuned in to the Paul/Tyson fight. And they very much did not pass this test - the fight was a disaster from a technology standpoint.

But what about the fight itself? That was also pretty bad. Jake Paul is a 27 year old man and is fairly fit and athletic. Mike Tyson, despite being one of the most storied boxers ever, is 58 years old with a lifetime of injuries to deal with. For the first thirty seconds of the fight, Tyson had enough energy to make the fight seem interesting. After that he plodded around the ring in a manner that can only be described as ‘Bidenesque’. Tyson retreated into a shell and Paul was able to lazily outjab him for 8 full rounds in a spectacularly boring affair. This fight was so uneventful it could have been an email. But there’s one thing about the event that did impress me.