Max Read on how the Internet Got Infested With Garbage

Joe Weisenthal (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, you don't use Twitter like quite as much as I do, still.

Tracy Alloway (0:27)

No, I kind of, I don't know what happened. I guess I just went off Twitter. You know what platform I'm on quite a lot, and it doesn't help me in any way in terms of Odd Lots in my career, but I really like Reddit now.

Joe Weisenthal (0:38)

I know, I see you. Actually, Tracy doesn't like that I sometimes notice what she's browsing, but I respect that you're...

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

Joe is constantly looking over my shoulder, and whenever I start shopping online for five minutes, you start talking about the furniture that I'm buying.

Joe Weisenthal (0:53)

Well, it's really nice. It's because it looks really good. But I still am completely addicted to Twitter, and I don't really know why.

Tracy Alloway (1:00)

Yeah, why?

Joe Weisenthal (1:04)

I don't know. This is like a question for therapy for a long time, because I know it's gotten really bad, and I don't even... I don't know, I like to be there. I like to post words, and the short form is a good medium for me. It feels like sometimes I see interesting things. We still source a lot of guests from Twitter, if we're being honest. We still discover experts. They're still there, but it's objectively gotten way worse. And I don't even think it's just a Elon Musk thing, by the way.

Tracy Alloway (1:29)

Well, here's the thing. This is the key difference in my mind between Reddit right now and a bunch of other social media platforms. Twitter is now run by this insane algo, right, that just pushes stuff at you, and sometimes it's really random. TikTok is the same thing. Reddit, at least, you can still curate your feeds relatively easily. But even with Reddit, obviously, since the IPO, there's pressure to boost revenues, and we're seeing more algo-driven stuff, a lot more AI-generated content. Bots have always been a problem, but I feel like it might be starting to get worse.

Joe Weisenthal (2:03)

You know what platform is really good?

Tracy Alloway (2:05)

What?

Joe Weisenthal (2:06)

Discord.

Tracy Alloway (2:07)

Oh, yes.

Joe Weisenthal (2:08)

In fact, listeners should check out discord.gg/oddlots because 24-7 in there, there is a well-curated world of fellow listeners who are interested in all the same things, talking in a very generally polite and adult way about important news and finance markets, economics, tech, automotive, semiconductors, all those things that we like. And actually today we're gonna chat with, he's not just a Discord member, but sometimes he chats in there and he has opinions on the internet.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

That sounds great, the perfect guest.

Joe Weisenthal (2:37)

The perfect guest, we have the perfect guest to talk about why so much of the internet has essentially turned to complete garbage, filled with slop, AI generated nonsense, completely made up news, stuff like that. We're going to be speaking with Max Read, Odd Lots Discord lurker, but more importantly, the author and sole proprietor of the excellent Read Max substack, one of the few substacks that I actually pay money for. So Max, thank you for coming on Odd Lots.

Max Read (3:00)

I'm so excited to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (3:01)

Thank you for being a part of the Discord. It's fine that you don't post much, but we appreciate that you lurk.

Max Read (3:06)

I mean, I'm trying to put all of my words in a monetizable format, which is why I have the newsletter.

Tracy Alloway (3:11)

Fair enough. So one thing I'm always curious about when people are like internet or culture correspondents, how did you get into that realm?

Max Read (3:19)

So I got my start in journalism at Gawker, the media gossip website that no longer exists. And I started there in 2010, and I would say I worked my way up, except the way things worked at Gawker is the people at the top just got fired and whoever was left continued to advance. So I was there during the 2011, 2012 era, which people who were in media will remember as the moment when Facebook, so to speak, turned on the floodgates or opened the floodgates. And all of a sudden, we went from jockeying for traffic from Google or even homepage traffic. People would visit gawker.com all the time.

Tracy Alloway (3:54)

I used to do that.

Max Read (3:55)

Yeah, I mean, Gawker was old enough to be a homepage site. And then Facebook said, Hey, we've got hundreds of millions, billions of users. Let's direct some of that at the media. And then for various occult reasons, we started to get 15 million page views on a blog, totally unheard of for reasons we couldn't figure out, we couldn't understand. And because I was in management at this point, I became kind of obsessed with this. And I found myself thinking constantly about how culture and media and businesses based around those things were changing because of the way platforms were able to direct these huge audiences to places. So, I mean, essentially, it's because I went crazy when Facebook decided to change the way media worked, and I've never become sane since.