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Ryan Broderick Profile picture
Ryan Broderick
@broderick
I write the Garbage Day newsletter about web culture and host the Panic World podcast. They're both really good.
2 subscribers
Nov 7, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Liberals need to build their own Joe Rogan" is something someone could only think if you've never listened to Rogan or ever met anyone who listens to Rogan. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what Rogan is and why so many men listen to him. The bulk of his massive audience are (relatively) normal men. They listen to him because he's a parasocial virtual friend. He talks about sports and "comedy" and smokes weed and he's not embarrassed to ask guests questions that uninformed men are curious about.
Apr 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I used GPT-4 to make a very bad and ugly app over the weekend and learned a lot about what GPT-4 can and can't do.
garbageday.email/p/very-slow-an… Image The app I made is here:
random-garbage.glitch.me

It's 135 random links pulled from previous issues of Garbage Day. You press the trash can button and it opens one of the links in a new tab. Like a super jank StumbleUpon. Image
Apr 13, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I keep waiting for someone else to make this point but it hasn’t happened yet. Or I haven’t seen it yet. Discovery on here sucks now. But there’s a very profound thing that Twitter provides creative industries that isn’t traffic. And when it’s gone, oh boy, are we gonna feel it… In a normal newsroom, writers room, studio, whatever, there are people who pitch things and people who accept or turndown those pitches. No matter how many diversity initiatives you push for, this will always create a bottleneck. Junior folks pitching, senior ones accepting them.
Apr 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
No, it isn’t true.

The companies that “win” a tech revolution are never first. They’re only the first to make it Good Enough. Which isn’t sexy and sucks for self-mythologizing. Which is probably why Microsoft completely misunderstands their own role in the current AI boom. It’s never about pure innovation. It’s about pragmatism. Desktop computing, social media, smartphones, AI — none of that stuff matters if it’s complicated. No one cares if it’s innovative. All people care about is whether or not they can use it and if it’s convenient (and cheap).
Feb 27, 2023 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
I put together a hypothesis about Twitter's For You algorithm and have used it twice now to get a tweet over 1,000 retweets (which is something I haven't been able to do since last November).

*Very sad man who pays for Twitter voice* Here’s how I did it… My Occam's razor assumption is that the For You algorithm was cobbled together from existing parts because Musk can't build anything.

In early January, I noticed that @dieworkwear and a handful of single-topic accounts were all over my timeline.
Feb 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
AI will (most likely) not gain sentience in our lifetime. But what it is doing right now is replacing human labor with bad facsimiles, making public communication worse, automating prejudices, strengthening monopolies, and creating new ways to terrorize each other. We, Americans, need regulation now or we will be left behind. We need regulations on AI training data, we need new labor laws, we need new copyrights. It is a waste of time to worry it an AI wants to live or not. We are barreling towards a very scary future.
Jun 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The Boys subreddit is chaos right now. Threads getting locked, users rage-deleting whole accounts. It’s amazing. Right-wing users are whining about “no politics,” but it’s impossible to talk about the show without them now. Fans who thought Homelander was cool are in a meltdown. It’s worth pointing out that even as right-wing and transgressive as the comic was, it’s very clear Homelander is a deranged fascist. I mean, he full on [spoiler] a baby at one point. But there seems to have been a lot of fans of the show who thought he was just a cool guy.
Jun 17, 2022 • 11 tweets • 8 min read
On this week's @thecontentmines, @imbadatlife and I fell down a bizarre rabbit hole where seemingly-hijacked Twitter accounts that used to be owned by real, verified users, are now spitting out a constant stream of NFT garbage.

Here's everything we know... [Thread] We started poking into the accounts mentioned in this great thread from @SilvermanJacob and also found another one. They're all big accounts that suddenly pivoted to hardcore NFT shilling in early June.
Jun 16, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I spoke to @benjaminjackson about Slack moderation for his very good newsletter.
hearmeout.email/p/the-extremel…

During our conversation I stumbled across kind of an interesting question: if companies had dedicated community moderators for their slack servers, would that be an HR role? Image Slack, and similar apps, very quickly entered work environments, but there’s been almost no thought to what that actually means — which is that a Slack-enabled office is more similar to an online community than it is an irl office. And it seems like businesses want to ignore that
May 20, 2022 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
I am so excited about this @VICE piece looking into the money that The Daily Wire is spending to promote their Depp v. Heard trial stories.
vice.com/en/article/3ab…

It actually gives us an incredible look at how insanely broken Facebook (and right-wing publish is right now): The VICE mentions a couple specific stories that The Daily Wire is paying to promote. The first is one titled, "The Attempted Character Assassination Of Johnny Depp". VICE estimates The Daily wire has paid $20,000 to $25,000 to promote.

Let's feed it into CrowdTangle!
May 11, 2022 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
My friend told me that in Garbage Day I have a lot of different mean and snarky ways of describing Twitter and that I should do a thread collecting them all. So here goes. "It’s a fandom app for current events."
garbageday.email/p/its-just-osc…
Apr 25, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
So a while back I actually started digging into the theory that Tumblr discourse infected Twitter and TikTok and I’m happy to confirm I have identified dozens of wildly toxic users who do appear to have left Tumblr around 2018 and become super posters on Twitter and TikTok. This kinda supports an idea I’ve had for a while that community moderation in the platform age is basically about managing the same migratory cluster of like 10,000-20,000 people who just respond very badly to centralized social feeds and algorithmic recommendations.
Apr 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It’s the last day of the Miami Bitcoin convention In between acts, they’re playing a message from from Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road whose currently serving two concurrent life sentences without parole.
Apr 8, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I’ve learned a lot this week about how Bitcoin true believers see this technology. There are obviously a lot of entry-level consumer investors here, but if you get into the headspace of Bitcoin maximalists you begin to realize how drastically they want to reshape the world… At every panel this week, cancel culture and deplatforming has come up. It’s an obsession. Many Bitcoin maximalists see internet virality and capital as one in the same. This idea was compounded by the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto message board posts are all over the conference.
Apr 8, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Easily biggest crowd reaction of the week for Jordan B Peterson #bitcoin2022 Peterson says that Bitcoin feels like a fairy tale, but also makes him “weary”. Then said he’d explain what he meant but then went on a 3-minute tangent about how central planning agencies can’t “algorithmically determine the future.”
Nov 4, 2021 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Won't know for sure until I get the 24-hour report later, but yesterday's Garbage Day may have pulled in the most paid subscription conversions for a single issue I've ever had.
garbageday.email/p/the-internet…

People seem interested in Substack mechanics right now. So some observations: My piece yesterday is not my most shared, nor was it my most read. In fact, the open rate is currently 36%. I average around 40%. Might not seem like much, but in email world, that's a drop. By the metrics of traditional online publishing, this was a *fine* post.
Nov 1, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
I am not good at math, admittedly. But I do not understand how video game companies make more money from NFTs than if they just fully pivoted into gacha games. I got briefly addicted to a gacha game. Puzzle And Dragons. Blew $30 in 10 minutes on a custom character lottery. I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t get the character I wanted, but @ellievhall did. And as I attempted to buy more turns, she tormented me with it.
Nov 1, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Me and @katienotopoulos together? At an event about internet culture? And it’s at… the end of the year? Extremely curious. Also, can we just take a sec and marvel at how absolutely stacked this line-up is?
Sep 2, 2021 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Alright, I'm ready to share my findings.

Optimistic main character who actually has depression His jock friend
Aug 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
The fact that Facebook has, in the last 24 hours, revealed the 6th most-viewed link on their site is literally just "yahoo.com" and unveiled a new big product which is just Miitopia for boomers makes me wonder how on the pulse of culture this company actually is! sorry I'm just absolutely losing my mind at the idea of an entire industry of media professionals allowing Facebook to dictate what kind of content does best and the sixth most-viewed link on the whole damn site is "yahoo.com"
Jan 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Tried something a little different today in Garbage Day.

I documented how a 1.6-million follower boomer meme page called Giggle Palooza went from Minion memes about coffee to full on QAnon over the course of lockdown last year.
garbageday.email/p/the-radicali… Giggle Palooza's wall, as of last Spring, was nothing but memes like these.

Like your most basic grandparent-friendly internet content.