The McDonalds Fan Wiki Is An Omen
I’m worried the internet is about to get a whole lot less useful
Programming Note - I’m gonna take next week off from the newsletter (unless something really juicy happens and compulsion takes over). See y’all in Q3!
Fight! Fight! Fight!
Just like everything else from 90s/Y2K culture, Celebrity Deathmatch is getting the “reboot but make it worse” treatment. Apparently, Elon and Zuck want to physically fight each other. Heterosexual masculinity and extreme wealth are both prisons of the mind that seem to constantly drive these men to the most childish public behavior. I don’t understand the brainworms that make middle-aged men think MMA fights and boxing matches are some kind of modern pistol duel for honor (which were also very stupid). Why can’t these two put aside their differences and go take a nice submarine ride together?
Platform Updates
Instagram
The Rest of Meta
Meta is rolling back its covid-19 misinformation rules in the US
Meta Expands Reels Ad Options, Adds Simplified Music Tool for Reels Promotions
Website Owners Say Traffic Is Plummeting After a Facebook Algorithm Change
TikTok
YouTube
Discord
Reddit
Reddit CEO Flames Protesting Moderators, Calls Them ‘Landed Gentry’ (Huffman really got a PhD at the Elon school of bad PR)
Reddit hackers demand $4.5 million ransom and API pricing changes
Reddit removed moderators behind the latest protests before restoring a few of them
Reddit says it’s ‘not acceptable’ for communities to go NSFW in protest (they can’t serve ads against NSFW subreddits with their current policies)
LinkedIn
Twitch
Twitter
The Product
The Dumpster Fire
Twitter Employees Sue Company, Claiming It Refuses to Pay 2022 Bonuses
Not gonna link to any of it but Elon’s personal use of the platform to harass scientists, promote anti-vaxers, and spread anti-trans bigotry is gross. We don’t need to dwell on it, but it’s hard to say I’ve accurately summarized what’s going on there without noting it.
Twitter Alts
Anecdotally I’ll say BlueSky is starting to pick up momentum, with a lot of Gay Twitter folks arriving this week.
Culture Movers
Film & TV
Creator Economy
Gaming
AI
Scams
Big Purple Mess
I love wikis. In high school, we used to play this game called “5 Clicks to Jesus,” where you’d load up a random Wikipedia page and see how quickly you could click through to the page for Jesus. Listen, religious school is traumatizing for a lot of reasons, but it was fun then and instilled an admiration for the vast amount of useful information a wiki can hold. I also love fan wikis. While keeping track of random side characters and lore details in video games, anime, and comic books comes somewhat naturally to me, I appreciate being able to cross-check details sometimes. I can even get into a corporate wiki so long as people actually maintain it with up-to-date information.
Mcdonald's hates wikis. Well, at least is willing to treat the Fandom-run wiki page for Grimace as a big ad. Fandom is a wiki-hosting service with an almost monopoly-level grip on the fan wiki-hosting business. Anyone who’s watched Wikia’s transition to Fandom and the massive explosion of ads on their wikis (which make pages slow and buggy to the point of near-uselessness is probably not surprised by this McDonald’s campaign.
At first, glance, letting a business come in and edit a wiki page to fit their current promotional campaign is pretty innocuous looking on the surface. But fandoms live separately from the brands and creators they follow for a reason. A fan wiki is a living document and record of how something landed in culture and becomes culture itself by sparking conversation and creation. I don’t love the idea of a brand paying to override that. Imagine Marvel paying to take over wiki pages for comic characters that once appeared in stories with dated attitudes around race or gender. Or Sega scrubbing a wiki of any reference to the very strange world of Sonic fanart.
I don’t want to go full “RIP Useful Internet” just yet, but things are not looking great. Reddit and Twitter, as companies, both seem perfectly happy trading the utility of the service for any small short-term revenue improvements. Google search has been getting worse for a while now, and now adding “Reddit” to your query might take you to a private link. AI can produce a large volume of content, but we are far from it being able to consistently produce quality solutions to many of the problems a Reddit forum, Twitter thread, or fan wiki solved.
I have some hope still. Even if many of them will not survive, the wide range of Twitter and Reddit alternatives people are starting feels like a powerful moment. It’s fun being on Bluesky and watching new folks get excited about the platform when they join. There’s joy in rediscovering how fun just chatting with people around the world can be. I hope that stays around.
P.S. I do kinda want to try Grimace’s Birthday Shake
Padam? Padam!
San Francisco Pride is this weekend. I expect to hear Kylie Minogue’s new single “Padam Padam” approximately 17 million times. I’m beyond excited. I love Kylie, and while this track isn’t my favorite of her effortlessly danceable songs, it’s a fun time. Kylie is an undeniable mega-hit in her home country of Australia and in Europe. America, being the godless nation that we are, has never caught Kylie-mania in the same way. This upcoming album feels like it might be the moment the US catches up with the rest of the world in stanning her.
If her music alone isn’t enough to get you onboard the Kylie train, read up on what happened when Kylie Jenner tried to trademark “kylie.”