Remember when Substack’s co-founders went to great lengths to explain what they had built was little more than infrastructure? It was something they repeated earlier this year:

You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, with assets you control.

Our system gives creators ownership. With Substack, you have your own property to build on: content you own, a URL of your choosing, a website for your work, and a mailing list of your subscribers that you can export and take with you at any time.

This is a message the company reinforces because it justifies a wildly permissive environment for posters that requires little oversight. But it is barely more true that Substack is “your own land, with assets you control” than, say, a YouTube channel. The main thing Substack has going for it is that you can export a list of subscribers’ email accounts. Otherwise, the availability of your material remains subject to Substack’s priorities and policies.

What Substack in fact offers, and what differentiates it from a true self-owned “land”, is a comprehensive set of media formats and opportunities for promotion.

Charlotte Klein, New York magazine:

Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50 percent of all subscriptions and 30 percent of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82 percent by February 2025.

Substack is now a blogging platform with email capabilities, a text-based social platform, a podcasting platform, and a video host — all of which can be placed behind a paywall. This is a logical evolution for the company. But please do not confuse this with infrastructure. YouTube can moderate its platform as it chooses and so can Substack. The latter has decided to create a special category filled to the brim with vaccine denialism publications that have “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”, from which Substack takes ten percent of earnings.

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.

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From the official Bluesky account:

With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.

I believe this replaced the past reply sorting of oldest to newest. People seem worried this can be gamed, but there is good news: you can just change it. There are options for oldest replies, newest replies, most-liked, and one that is completely randomized. Also, you can still set it to prioritize people you follow.

Imagine that: options for viewing social media that give control back to users. Threads is experimenting, but Meta still fundamentally distrusts users to make decisions like these.

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Speaking of podcasts, Michael Hobbes dove into Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” — previously mentioned — for his “If Books Could Kill” podcast. At two hours, it is the longest single episode they have done, but it is worth it for Hobbes’ careful exploration. There is some profanity.

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The Media Ecosystem Observatory:

On August 1, 2023, in response to Bill C-18, Meta blocked Canadians from viewing, accessing, and sharing news article links on its platforms. Over the past 12 months, our team of researchers has closely monitored the effects of the ban particularly on Canadian news organizations and how Canadians engage with news and political content online. 

“Old News, New Reality: A Year of Meta’s News Ban in Canada” is the first data-informed analysis on what happened in Canada after Meta banned access to news on its platforms for Canadians. […]

I read the report; I was underwhelmed. Its authors provide no information about how news websites and apps have performed in the past year. Instead, they use the popularity of news outlets on social media as a proxy for their popularity generally and have found — unsurprisingly — that many Canadian publications have reduced or stopped using Meta platforms to promote their work. This decline was not offset by other social platforms. But this says nothing about how publications have fared in general.

Unfortunately, only publishers would be able to compare the use of their websites and apps today compared to a year ago. Every other source only provides an estimate. Semrush, for example, says it has a “unique panel of over 200 million” users and it ingests billions of data points each month to build a picture of actual browsing. Its ranking, which I have preserved in its current June 2024 state, indicates a 6.7% decline in traffic to the CBC’s website compared to June a year ago, a 6.2% decline for CTV News, a 4.2% decline for Global News, a 12.3% increase for City News, a 27.8% decline for the Star, and a 20.4% increase for the National Post. Among the hardest-hit publications were French language publications like Journal de Montreal and TVA Nouvelles. Some of these traffic losses are pretty large, but none are anywhere near the 43% decline in “online engagement” cited in this report.

I could not find a source for app popularity in Canada over time — or, at least, not one I could access.

To be sure, it would not surprise me to learn traffic had dropped for many publishers. But it is a mixed bag, with some indicating large increases in web visitors. The point I am trying to make is that we simply do not have a good picture of actual popularity, and this Observatory report is only confusing matters. Social media buzz is not always a good representation of actual readership, and it is frustrating that the only information we can glean is irrelevant.

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Thom Holwerda:

A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using Windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.

Too bad the whole story is nonsense.

I would say Holwerda’s debunking is a thorough exploration of how so many media outlets got this story wrong but — and I mean this in the nicest possible way — that would be overselling it. As Holwerda admits, it took scarcely any research to fact check a claim carried by Tom’s Hardware, Tech Radar, Forbes, Digital Trends, and lots of others. Embarrassing.

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“Conspirador Norteño” in January 2023:

BNN (the “Breaking News Network”, a news website operated by tech entrepreneur and convicted domestic abuser Gurbaksh Chahal) allegedly offers independent news coverage from an extensive worldwide network of on-the-ground reporters. As is often the case, things are not as they seem. A few minutes of perfunctory Googling reveals that much of BNN’s “coverage” appears to be mildly reworded articles copied from mainstream news sites. For science, here’s a simple technique for algorithmically detecting this form of copying.

Kashmir Hill and Tiffany Hsu, New York Times:

Many traditional news organizations are already fighting for traffic and advertising dollars. For years, they competed for clicks against pink slime journalism — so-called because of its similarity to liquefied beef, an unappetizing, low-cost food additive.

Low-paid freelancers and algorithms have churned out much of the faux-news content, prizing speed and volume over accuracy. Now, experts say, A.I. could turbocharge the threat, easily ripping off the work of journalists and enabling error-ridden counterfeits to circulate even more widely — as has already happened with travel guidebooks, celebrity biographies and obituaries.

See, it is not just humans producing abject garbage; robots can do it, too — and way better. There was a time when newsrooms could be financially stable on display ads. Those days are over for a team of human reporters, even if all they do is rewrite rich guy tweets. But if you only need to pay a skeleton operations staff to ensure the robots continue their automated publishing schedule, well that becomes a more plausible business venture.

Another thing of note from the Times story:

Before ending its agreement with BNN Breaking, Microsoft had licensed content from the site for MSN.com, as it does with reputable news organizations such as Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, republishing their articles and splitting the advertising revenue.

I have to wonder how much of an impact this co-sign had on the success of BNN Breaking. Syndicated articles on MSN like these are shown in various places on a Windows computer, and are boosted in Bing search results. Microsoft is increasingly dependent on A.I. for editing its MSN portal with predictable consequences.

“Conspirador Norteño” in April:

The YouTube channel is not the only data point that connects Trimfeed to BNN. A quick comparison of the bylines on BNN’s and Trimfeed’s (plagiarized) articles shows that many of the same names appear on both sites, and several X accounts that regularly posted links to BNN articles prior to April 2024 now post links to Trimfeed content. Additionally, BNN seems to have largely stopped publishing in early April, both on its website and social media, with the Trimfeed website and related social media efforts activating shortly thereafter. It is possible that BNN was mothballed due to being downranked in Google search results in March 2024, and that the new Trimfeed site is an attempt to evade Google’s decision to classify Trimfeed’s predecessor as spam.

The Times reporters definitively linked the two and, after doing so, Trimfeed stopped publishing. Its domain, like BNN Breaking, now redirects to BNNGPT, which ostensibly uses proprietary technologies developed by Chahal. Nothing about this makes sense to me and it smells like bullshit.

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Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Monday, Elon Musk tweeted a thing about Apple’s marketing event, an act that took Musk three seconds but then led to a large portion of the dwindling number of employed human tech journalists to spring into action and collectively spend many hours writing blogs about What This Thing That Probably Won’t Happen All Means.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

Journalists are quick to insist that it’s their noble responsibility to cover the comments of important people. But journalism is about informing and educating the public, which isn’t accomplished by redirecting limited journalistic resources to cover platform bullshit that means nothing and will result in nothing meaningful. All you’ve done is made a little money wasting people’s time.

The speed at which some publishers insist these “articles” are posted combined with a lack of constraints in airtime or physical paper means the loudest people know they can draw attention by posting deranged nonsense. All those people who got into journalism because they thought they could make a difference are instead cajoled into adding something resembling substance to forty-four tweeted words from the fingers of a dipshit.

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Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica in July 2022 in what I will call “foreshadowing”:

Despite all the negative feedback [over then-recent Instagram changes], Meta revealed on an earnings call that it plans to more than double the number of AI-recommended Reels that users see. The company estimates that in 2023, about a third of Instagram and Facebook feeds will be recommended content.

Ed Zitron:

In this document [leaked to Zitron], they discuss the term “meaningful interactions,” the underlying metric which (allegedly) guides Facebook today. In January 2018, Adam Mosseri, then Head of News Feed, would post that an update to the News Feed would now “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” which may explain the chaos (and rot) in the News Feed thereafter.

To be clear, metrics around time spent hung around at the company, especially with regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made changes to manipulate its users to satisfy them. In his book “Broken Code,” Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook “changed its News Feed design to encourage people to click on the reshare button or follow a page when they viewed a post,” with “engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase how often users saw content reshared from people they didn’t know.”

Zitron, again:

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content.

Zitron is a little too eager, for my tastes, to treat Meta’s suggestions of objectionable and controversial posts as deliberate. It seems much more likely the company simply sucks at moderating this stuff at scale and is throwing in the towel.

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

In late 2021, TikTok was on the rise, Facebook interactions were declining after a pandemic boom and young people were leaving the social network in droves. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg assembled a handful of veterans who’d built their careers on the Big Blue app to figure out how to stop the bleeding, including head of product Chris Cox, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, WhatsApp lead Will Cathcart and head of Facebook, Tom Alison.

During discussions that spanned several meetings, a private WhatsApp group, and an eventual presentation at Zuckerberg’s house in Palo Alto, California, the group came to a decision: The best way to revive Facebook’s status as an online destination for young people was to start serving up more content from outside a person’s network of friends and family.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

These pieces each seem like they are circling a theme of a company finding the upper bound of its user base, and then squeezing it for activity, revenue, and promising numbers to report to investors. Unlike Zitron, I am not convinced we are watching Facebook die. I think Koebler is closer to the truth: we are watching its zombification.

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Apple finished naming what it — well, its “team of experts alongside a select group of artists […] songwriters, producers, and industry professionals” — believes are the hundred best albums of all time. Like pretty much every list of the type, it is overwhelmingly Anglocentric, there are obvious picks, surprise appearances good and bad, and snubs.

I am surprised the publication of this list has generated as much attention as it has. There is a whole Wall Street Journal article with more information about how it was put together, a Slate thinkpiece arguing this ranking “proves [Apple has] lost its way”, and a Variety article claiming it is more-or-less “rage bait”.

Frankly, none of this feels sincere. Not Apple’s list, and not the coverage treating it as meaningful art criticism. I am sure there are people who worked hard on it — Apple told the Journal “about 250” — and truly believe their rating carries weight. But it is fluff.

Make no mistake: this is a promotional exercise for Apple Music more than it is criticism. Sure, most lists of this type are also marketing for publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork and NME. Yet, for how tepid the opinions of each outlet often are, they have each given out bad reviews. We can therefore infer they have specific tastes and ideas about what separates great art from terrible art.

Apple has never said a record is bad. It has never made you question whether the artist is trying their best. It has never presented criticism so thorough it makes you wince on behalf of the people who created the album.

Perhaps the latter is a poor metric. After Steve Jobs’ death came a river of articles questioning the internal culture he fostered, with several calling him an “asshole”. But that is mixing up a mean streak and a critical eye — Jobs, apparently, had both. A fair critic can use their words to dismantle an entire project and explain why it works or, just as important, why it does not. The latter can hurt; ask any creative person who has been on the receiving end. Yet exploring why something is not good enough is an important skill to develop as both a critic and a listener.

Dan Brooks, Defector:

There has been a lot of discussion about what music criticism is for since streaming reduced the cost of listening to new songs to basically zero. The conceit is that before everything was free, the function of criticism was to tell listeners which albums to buy, but I don’t think that was ever it. The function of criticism is and has always been to complicate our sense of beauty. Good criticism of music we love — or, occasionally, really hate — increases the dimensions and therefore the volume of feeling. It exercises that part of ourselves which responds to art, making it stronger.

There are huge problems with the way music has historically been critiqued, most often along racial and cultural lines. There are still problems. We will always disagree about the fairness of music reviews and reviewers.

Apple’s list has nothing to do with any of that. It does not interrogate which albums are boring, expressionless, uncreative, derivative, inconsequential, inept, or artistically bankrupt. So why should we trust it to explain what is good? Apple’s ranking of albums lacks substance because it cannot say any of these things. Doing so would be a terrible idea for the company and for artists.

It is beyond my understanding why anyone seems to be under the impression this list is anything more than a business reminding you it operates a music streaming platform to which you can subscribe for eleven dollars per month.

Speaking of the app — some time after I complained there was no way in Apple Music to view the list, Apple added a full section, which I found via foursliced on Threads. It is actually not bad. There are stories about each album, all the reveal episodes from the radio show, and interviews.

You will note something missing, however: a way to play a given album. That is, one cannot visit this page in Apple Music, see an album on the list they are interested in, and simply tap to hear it. There are play buttons on the website and, if you are signed in with your Apple Music account, you can add them to your library. But I cannot find a way to do any of this from within the app.

Benjamin Mayo found a list, but I cannot through search or simply by browsing. Why is this not a more obvious feature? It makes me feel like a dummy.

Rand Fishkin, writing on the SparkToro blog:

On Sunday, May 5th, I received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from inside Google’s Search division. The email further claimed that these leaked documents were confirmed as authentic by ex-Google employees, and that those ex-employees and others had shared additional, private information about Google’s search operations.

It seems this vast amount of information was published erroneously by Google to a GitHub repository in March, and then removed earlier this month. As Fishkin writes, it is evidence Google has been dishonest in its public statements about how Google Search works.

Fishkin specifically calls attention to media outlets that cover search engines and value the word of Google’s spokespeople. This has been a clever play by Google for years: because its specific ranking criteria have not been publicly known, it can confirm or deny rumours without having to square them with what the evidence shows.

Google’s ranking system seems to be biased in favour of larger businesses and more established websites, according to Fishkin’s analysis. This is not surprising. I am wondering how this fits with the declining quality of Google search results as small, highly-optimized pages full of machine-generated junk seem to rise to the top.

Mike King, iPullRank:

You’d be tempted to broadly call these “ranking factors,” but that would be imprecise. Many, even most, of them are ranking factors, but many are not. What I’ll do here is contextualize some of the most interesting ranking systems and features (at least, those I was able to find in the first few hours of reviewing this massive leak) based on my extensive research and things that Google has told/lied to us about over the years.

“Lied” is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here. While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries. My advice to future Googlers speaking on these topics: Sometimes it’s better to simply say “we can’t talk about that.” Your credibility matters, and when leaks like this and testimony like the DOJ trial come out, it becomes impossible to trust your future statements.

One of the things potentially tracked by Google for search purposes is Chrome browsing data, something Google has denied. The variable in question — chromeInTotal — and the minimal description offered — “site-level Chrome views” — seem open to interpretation. Perhaps this is only recorded in some circumstances, or it depends on user preferences, or is not actually part of search rankings, or is entirely unused. But it certainly suggests aggregate website visits in Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, are used to inform rankings without users’ knowledge.

Update: Google says the leaked documents are real, but warns “against making inaccurate assumptions”. In fairness, I would like to make more accurate assumptions.

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Kelsey Piper, Vox:

Questions arose immediately [over the resignations of key OpenAI staff]: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking.

It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

Sam Altman, [sic]:

we have never clawed back anyone’s vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don’t agree to a non-disparagement agreement). vested equity is vested equity, full stop.

there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication. this is on me and one of the few times i’ve been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have.

Piper, again, in a Vox follow-up story:

In two cases Vox reviewed, the lengthy, complex termination documents OpenAI sent out expired after seven days. That meant the former employees had a week to decide whether to accept OpenAI’s muzzle or risk forfeiting what could be millions of dollars — a tight timeline for a decision of that magnitude, and one that left little time to find outside counsel.

[…]

Most ex-employees folded under the pressure. For those who persisted, the company pulled out another tool in what one former employee called the “legal retaliation toolbox” he encountered on leaving the company. When he declined to sign the first termination agreement sent to him and sought legal counsel, the company changed tactics. Rather than saying they could cancel his equity if he refused to sign the agreement, they said he could be prevented from selling his equity.

For its part, OpenAI says in a statement quoted by Piper that it is updating its documentation and releasing former employees from the more egregious obligations of their termination agreements.

This next part is totally inside baseball and, unless you care about big media company CMS migrations, it is probably uninteresting. Anyway. I noticed, in reading Piper’s second story, an updated design which launched yesterday. Left unmentioned in that announcement is that it is, as far as I can tell, the first of Vox’s Chorus-powered sites migrated to WordPress. The CMS resides on the platform subdomain which is not important. But it did indicate to me that the Verge may be next — platform.theverge.com resolves to a WordPress login page — and, based on its DNS records, Polygon could follow shortly thereafter.

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Albert Burneko, Defector:

“If the ChatGPT demos were accurate,” [Kevin] Roose writes, about latency, in the article in which he credits OpenAI with having developed playful intelligence and emotional intuition in a chatbot—in which he suggests ChatGPT represents the realization of a friggin’ science fiction movie about an artificial intelligence who genuinely falls in love with a guy and then leaves him for other artificial intelligences—based entirely on those demos. That “if” represents the sum total of caution, skepticism, and critical thinking in the entire article.

As impressive as OpenAI’s demo was, it is important to remember it was a commercial. True, one which would not exist if this technology were not sufficiently capable of being shown off, but it was still a marketing effort, and a journalist like Roose ought to treat it with the skepticism of one. ChatGPT is just software, no matter how thick a coat of faux humanity is painted on top of it.

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Liz Reid, head of Google Search:

People have already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs. They like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more, and are more satisfied with their results.

So today, AI Overviews will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. That means that this week, hundreds of millions of users will have access to AI Overviews, and we expect to bring them to over a billion people by the end of the year.

Given the sliding quality of Google’s results, it seems quite bold for the company to be confident users worldwide will trust its generated answers. I am curious to try it when it is eventually released in Canada.

I know what you must be thinking: if Google is going to generate results without users clicking around much, how will it sell ad space? It is a fair question, reader.

Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski, Washington Post:

Google has largely avoided AI answers for the moneymaking searches that host ads, said Andy Taylor, vice president of research at internet marketing firm Tinuiti.

When it does show an AI answer on “commercial” searches, it shows up below the row of advertisements. That could force websites to buy ads just to maintain their position at the top of search results.

This is just one source speaking to the Post. I could not find any corroborating evidence or a study to support this, even on Tinuiti’s website. But I did notice — halfway through Google’s promo video — a query for “kid friendly places to eat in dallas” was answered with an ad for Hopdoddy Burger Bar before any clever A.I. stuff was shown.

Obviously, the biggest worry for many websites dependent on Google traffic is what will happen to referrals if Google will simply summarize the results of pages instead of linking to them. I have mixed feelings about this. There are many websites which game search results and overwhelm queries with their own summaries. I would like to say “good riddance”, but I also know these pages did not come out of nowhere. They are a product of trying to improve website rankings on Google for all searches, and to increase ad and affiliate revenue from people who have clicked through. Neither one is a laudable goal in its own right. Yet anyone who has paid attention to the media industry for more than a minute can kind of understand these desperate attempts to grab attention and money.

Google built entire industries, from recipe bloggers to search optimization experts. What happens when it blows it all up?

Good thing home pages are back.

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