A similar thing happened with one of my favourite podcasts: Tech Won’t Save Us. They just started crowing about what a craven loser Elon Musk was at every opportunity. And it really sucked all the life out of the podcast for me. Like it used to be super interesting, well researched, broad, hopeful; and suddenly it seemed to only be about dunking on billionaires.
Which, deserved. But I don’t want to hear about Musk’s stupid machinations while I’m doing food prep. I want to hear about something cool, like collective action in India.
Maybe I’m in the minority though. Or maybe it’s gotten better by now. Idk
They probably noticed a huge bump in numbers in the episodes where they shit on Elon. There’s a weird dynamic where toxic shit partially maintains it’s popularity because content that focuses on debunking it gets eaten up. So ‘sane’ creators have to decide between creating interesting things or repeatedly dunking on some toxic shit that it grows their platform.
That makes sense, and it’s definitely what happened with mainstream news and Donald Trump. It’s this weird codependence that creates the audience for the behaviour your pointing out as outrageous.
It’s kinda how I feel about any shitty person that gets clowned on. At some point it’s just like “yeah, we all know this person is a POS, what else is new”.
A similar thing happened with one of my favourite podcasts: Tech Won’t Save Us. They just started crowing about what a craven loser Elon Musk was at every opportunity. And it really sucked all the life out of the podcast for me. Like it used to be super interesting, well researched, broad, hopeful; and suddenly it seemed to only be about dunking on billionaires.
Which, deserved. But I don’t want to hear about Musk’s stupid machinations while I’m doing food prep. I want to hear about something cool, like collective action in India.
Maybe I’m in the minority though. Or maybe it’s gotten better by now. Idk
They probably noticed a huge bump in numbers in the episodes where they shit on Elon. There’s a weird dynamic where toxic shit partially maintains it’s popularity because content that focuses on debunking it gets eaten up. So ‘sane’ creators have to decide between creating interesting things or repeatedly dunking on some toxic shit that it grows their platform.
That makes sense, and it’s definitely what happened with mainstream news and Donald Trump. It’s this weird codependence that creates the audience for the behaviour your pointing out as outrageous.
Right, if all you talk about is the shit Elon is doing, you’re really no better than a fanboy of his.
It’s kinda how I feel about any shitty person that gets clowned on. At some point it’s just like “yeah, we all know this person is a POS, what else is new”.