Kyle Chayka

YouTube video by BBC Global Why did our friends stop posting on social media? | BBC Global

Nice conversation with @chaykak.bsky.social + @kattybkay.bsky.social on the anti-social future of social media—however, I still think the future is not to give up but instead build "small" social media. 🙂

The Verge Launches New Site Features Aimed at Deepening Audience Engagement and Announces New Editorial Newsletters The site’s users can now follow reporters and topics, and receive a personalized daily email digest.

@theverge.com give me a big shiny badge on my homepage for being a subscriber cowards www.theverge.com/press-room/7...

Substack as OnlyFans It wants to build a broader creator platform

best overall analysis of where substack's at from Brian Morrissey of course www.therebooting.com/substack-as-...

Reddit's relationship with Al is similarly tense: As a training corpus, Reddit is immensely valuable; after years of unauthorized scraping, the company has official licensing deals with Google, which sometimes turns its content into Al-generated search "Answers," and with OpenAI, which uses Reddit's vast archives to give its chatbot depth and outside sourcing and to help it sound like a normal person - or at least a normal redditor. Meanwhile, Reddit moderators are battling a flood of inauthentic content generated by chatbots that were trained, of course, on Reddit. They're getting tired while users, less certain that other commenters are real - and less sure of their ability to tell and noticing the rising tides of slop elsewhere - are drifting into mutual suspicion. Huffman suggests that, just as Reddit was rewarded for offering an alternative to more baldly growth-and-ad-driven social media, it could serve a similar role in the post-ChatGPT world as a refuge for actual human interaction in a sea of generated text. "Social media made Reddit make more sense, and I think now that the web is kind of dying, sadly, that evolution helps Reddit make more sense," he says. "Reddit in that era is, Reddit is not social media. And now, we're entering this new era where Reddit is not AI."

It's a powerful pitch, to the extent it remains true. But it doesn't quite capture just how strange and risky Reddit's position is in 2025. Being one of the last islands of humanity on a dying web may make you more appealing to, well, humans. But it also makes you even more valuable to the companies doing the killing. Reddit is an alternative to a web that's harvested, polluted, and depleted by tech firms in a race to dominate Al. It's also an increasingly valuable data source for tech firms in a race to dominate AI. How long can it be both?

on reddit, the website at the end of the internet nymag.com/intelligence...

As the social-media ecosystem has become more fragmented and complex during the past several years, with new platforms continually emerging and decaying, there’s been some user attrition. As one person put it, “I don’t have the patience to keep teaching myself Discord or Bluesky or whatever.” Many people complained about feeling that they were constantly fighting against technology. The design of social media has discouraged casual posting, with metrics that make users feel inadequate for not getting enough attention, and with algorithmic feeds that prioritize popular accounts that post constantly—not mundane moments but punditry, provocation, and self-promotion.

In all seriousness, h/t to @chaykak.bsky.social for calling it how it is.

Meanwhile, we're working on breaking the status quo and building digital spaces that feel useful and actually connect you with your friends, family, and neighbors. Check it out: newpublic.org/local

I'll always remember the one about music, or sound, that was like "Neanderthals probably made loud noises when they were going into battle"

I want to review Landman lol

Lauren Collins performing the absolute perfect New Yorker beginning of the second section historical jump back www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The base of a mass-produced black mug features the logo of the TV show Yellowstone, a soap opera that depicts a highly cliched vision of life in Montana.

The dishes at my Montana Airbnb are from Yellowstone (the show). Cc: Baudrillard.

Life Without Screens: This Camp Is a Teen’s Worst Nightmare Hidden burner phones. Hunger strikes. Runaways. The director of a digital detox program for kids spills about how hard it is to tear kids away from their devices.

One of my favorites from the package: what it's like to work at a 'digital detox' camp for teens, who are miserable sans phone www.wired.com/story/teen-s...

The Battle to Save the Soul of City Pop From AI Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost genius from shitpassé lameness. This week, Kieran ...

"There’s a twisted kind of logic to city pop’s trajectory, where the same recommendation algorithms that gave the genre a random resurgence would now also push people onto robo bootlegs" really good piece: pitchfork.com/thepitch/the...

I know my book kind of covered that but someone should really write about the decentralization of "coolness" and the new ecosystems of urban culture!

Idiosyncratic media Notes from the Traffic Apocalypse™

"For all the New York or Nowhere merch, NYC is as much like anywhere else as it has ever been." www.therebooting.com/idiosyncrati...

Does Restaurant Criticism Still Matter? Tejal Rao, Helen Rosner, MacKenzie Fegan, and J. Lee discuss wigs, fake names, and the powers and pitfalls of the written review.

such a good roundtable about food criticism www.bestfoodblog.net/does-restaur...

"If you had one month, surrounded by high-agency peers in one of the most inspiring places on Earth, what would you build?" mailchi.mp/edgecity/pat...

Here's the U.S. cover! From @doubledaybooks.bsky.social

New book coming.

how I kind of miraculously found my daily screentime down 35%

Sacrifice Zone: Pattaya - Believer Magazine Each year, as many as twenty-­five million people visit the sacrificial landscape of Pattaya, Thailand. If visitors don’t arrive by air, then they likely take the eight-lane motorway that zips them al...

From my recent piece in The Believer: “Disuse does not define the area’s state of wild abandonment, but rather the hedonistic exploitation and exhaustion of land and sea in a bargain for economic prosperity.”

You can read it at @thebeliever.net

great paragraph on Wimbledon by Louisa Thomas @newyorker.com www.newyorker.com/sports/sport...

The phrase Google Zero is used to describe a hypothetical future internet in which search engines no longer drive traffic to other websites, because they can generate answers to queries themselves using A.I. We might also be heading toward something like Posting Zero, a point at which normal people—the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses—stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure. Posting Zero would mean the end of social media as it was once conceptualized, as a real-time record of the world created by anyone who was experiencing anything at all. But the presence of normies was what made social media worth tuning into. In their wake, like detritus on a once busy beach, there will be only dry corporate marketing, A.I.-generated slop, and dreck from thirsty hustlers attempting to monetize a dwindling audience of voyeurs.

perhaps tech companies no longer coerce people to post publicly because overall surveillance has improved www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui? Sharing casual moments from our lives on social media doesn’t seem to make sense the way it used to.

As someone who has spent his entire adult life generating content in one form or another, this commentary resonates with me: www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

Very good on overtourism in Japan

I still need to read the books not just watch the show!

‘That mean shabby little island’ — why Lawrence Durrell hated England In this biography, Michael Haag reveals the boozy, skinny-dipping life of ‘Larry’ Durrell, the quintessential sexed-up literary Brit abroad

Durrell loathed England (“that mean shabby little island”, “an expurgated prose-land”) and was happiest near the Mediterranean, which he called “the sex organ of Europe”. www.thetimes.com/article/69e6...

which is a feat

my impression is that Sam Altman is somehow even less cool or just relatable than Mark Zuckerberg

Email from Outlook Calendar: david brooks fancy deli meats anniversary

Opinion How We Are Ruining America By David Brooks July 11, 2017

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named "Padrino" and "Pomodoro" and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

happy anniversary to all who celebrate

a northern european woman will eat this, work 4hrs at the Langfaart Logistik shipping container company, repeat, work 4 more hours, then eat something called "pasta mexikansk" and live to be 112

Brian Morrissey's rules for successful media post-AI www.therebooting.com/the-demise-o...