Twitter's Public Chaos Weeks
When a massive social media business goes gonzo broken: Context Collapse #170
In This Issue: Figuring out how the hell SpaceX and Tesla’s C-suite feels right now / Scaling a thinktank / How to make money from journalism online / Steak-umm in the metaverse / +More
Greetings from Goblin Island aka Chicago, where things are goblin-riffic.
It’s snowing in Chicago right now. It’s barely the middle of November. It was 70 degrees last week.
Come to Chicago for the great standard of living, culture and work opportunities and stay for the blindingly incomprehensible weather.
Anyway… This whole Twitter-turning-into-a-huge-morass-of-outages-and-PR-facepalms under its new ownership is pretty frustrating to people like me who work in PR and marketing adjacent areas. Scared clients means clients who don’t want to spend money on Twitter, which means less cash money for our agency, etc etc…
But with that stupidity in mind, here’s a rundown of stuff I’ve been reading about Twitter lately:
How Twitter Shapes What You Know, Even if You’ve Never Used It
Twitter Stops Giving Out Blue Check Marks After Impersonators Take to the Platform
And… there’s other stuff happening! More after the jump.
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Other things that have been on my radar:
How the Claremont Center Became a Nerve Center of the American Right (Elisabeth Zerofsky, NYT): Interesting read on how the Claremont Center, a right-wing thinktank in the Los Angeles suburbs (aka waaay outside the Beltway) became a major national player during the Trump administration. Most valuable parts here for me were the behind the scene looks at how a small thinktank scales up when it suddenly gains prominence—lots of how the sausage is made in this one.
Paywalls or Constant Intrusive Ads: Pick One (
, Substack): DeBoer is one of the most consistently interesting pundits I’m reading these days and reading his take on how journalism outlets make money is 10,000% essential.Steak-umm Launches “Meataversity” of Misinformation (David Gianatasio): Processed meat brand Steak-umm is launching (with the help of advertising agency Tombras) the Meataversity, an online learning class in the metaverse that teaches participants how to better evaluate information online and build better internal bullshit detectors. Steak-umms been pursuing the path of discussing media theory and semantics (LOL) on Twitter for a while now, which has done really good in getting them media coverage in exchange for a relatively small investment of money and time. On to the Meataversity!
Peloton’s Founders Have a New Startup Selling Rugs Online (Sabiq Shahidullah, Bloomberg): Ex-Peloton CEO John Foley and a bunch of Peloton founders completed a $25 million Series A for their new company Ernesta, which sells custom rugs online for the same price as a store-bought rug. Onwards!
Snapchat Launches New Integration with Strava, Enabling Users to Showcase their Fitness Activity (Andrew Hutchinson, SocialMediaToday): Genius partnership between Strava and Snapchat, two social networks who are very good at doing well while staying out of the headlines.
80 Million People Are Paying YouTube for Premium and Music (James Hale, Tubefilter): Google’s turning YouTube into a subscription giant quietly and brick-by-brick… and it’s working.
This detail hidden in a larger Daily Beast article about the New York Post offering crime victims front-page coverage in exchange for them saying they were Democrats voting for the Republican New York governor candidate Lee Zeldin:
Project Eleven: Google is Quietly Working on a Wearable Device for Preteens (Blake Dodge and Hugh Lanley, Business Insider): Google’s reportedly working on a wearable for older kids with a planned 2024 launch date that includes tracking capabilities for parents with the Australia Fitbit team overseeing. We’ll see how this goes.
And… last but definitely not least… Some depths of Wikipedia to close today out.
