DeepSummary
The transcript is a podcast episode discussing the viral phenomenon of "the dress" in 2015, where people disagreed on whether the colors of a dress in a photo were white and gold or black and blue. The episode explores how this story represented the peak of viral content on sites like BuzzFeed before social media algorithms began favoring outrage and engagement over fun, harmless content.
The host interviews Taylor Lorenz, author of "Extremely Online," and Max Fisher, author of "The Chaos Machine," to analyze how the dress story marked a shift in how social media platforms like Facebook prioritized content that would keep users engaged and online for longer periods of time, even if that meant promoting more divisive and emotionally-charged material.
The episode also touches on the dark side of viral internet fame, revealing that the woman in the dress photo had been the victim of domestic abuse from her husband, who later pleaded guilty to attempting to kill her in 2022. This serves as a sobering reminder that internet fame can often come with unintended and harmful consequences.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- The 2015 "dress" viral phenomenon represented the peak of harmless, fun internet trends before social media shifted towards favoring provocative and divisive content for engagement.
- Major social platforms like Facebook deliberately adjusted their algorithms around 2014-2015 to surface more emotionally-charged, polarizing content in order to increase user engagement time.
- While intended to drive ad revenue, this algorithmic shift enabled the rise of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and online harassment by rewarding provocative divisiveness.
- The story of the woman in the original "dress" photo later becoming a victim of severe domestic violence highlights the potential dark side of internet viral fame.
- Early content farms like BuzzFeed played a major role in amplifying viral trends through repackaging third-party content to game social algorithms for traffic.
- Controversial figures like Steve Bannon and websites like Breitbart benefited immensely from the algorithmic shift towards provocative content despite lacking innate viral talent.
- The social media business model is inherently driven by harvesting as much human attention as possible, inevitably incentivizing increasingly unethical methods of user engagement over time.
- The trajectory of "the dress" story exemplifies how the early 2010s open internet rapidly gave way to an internet shaped by opaque, profit-driven forces outside of public scrutiny or control.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “The dress is worse than the Sony hack.“ by Mindy Kaling
- “This is when all of the social media companies, again, is around, like, 2014, 2015, higher up, all of the big names in artificial intelligence, like, every major european and american researcher at every big research university suddenly works at Facebook, which is like, that seems unsurprising now because these are trillion dollar companies, but at the time, that was really shocking because this is just like, this was like Fancier MySpace, this is just like a weird little website.“ by Max Fisher
- “BuzzFeed was one of the first true, sort of, like, digital media companies of that wave. There was this idea in the two thousands, really spurred by the rise of blogging, that you could build digital media platforms and capture digital media ad dollars.“ by Max Fisher
- “And all of these weirdo Gamergate characters like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich, all of a sudden, they're, like, mainstream political figures. And that is, we know now in retrospect, because this is the time when social media algorithms started to realize that stuff like Gamergate was going to be so, so effective at increasing engagement.“ by Max Fisher
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Episode Information
Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
5/21/24
In 2015, the world was gripped by one question: is this dress black and blue, or white and gold? No, no, I refuse to argue with you about it — but the story of The Dress is the dying breath of a pre-algorithm driven social media, the peak of Buzzfeed, and contains some dark truths about the internet.
Featuring interviews with Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz), author of Extremely Online and Max Fisher (@maxfisher22), author of The Chaos Machine.
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