Where social media went wrong

A few things to know about:

• The Rebooting is conducting a research survey to uncover the strategies and technologies publishers are using to drive audience growth and optimize audience information. Take the survey.
• On Wednesday, Feb. 26, we are holding our next Online Forum, an hourlong interactive session with experts. In this edition, we will take a deep dive into how social media can still work for publishers in 2025. I’ll be joined by True Anthem's CEO and founder Chris Hart, and Valnet's director of marketing for gaming James Kosur, for an interactive session focused on how Valnet’s brands in entertainment, gaming and tech use Facebook, TikTok, X and dark social. Sign up.
• I’m speaking next week at the Newsletter Marketing Summit, put on by newsletter growth savant Matt McGarry. I’m hosting a couple talks about B2B media.  I’m excited to meet up with newsletterers. If you can make it to Austin, hope to see you there. You can get $200 off a ticket with the code Brian200 at checkout.
• If you haven’t already, please take The Rebooting’s audience survey.

In today’s newsletter:

• A conversation with BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti about what went wrong with social media
• On PvA: YouTube as the new TV
• Creator financing
• I was a guest on the PublishPress podcast

BuzzFeed’s next big bet

BuzzFeed has always been a company that plays with the boundaries of media, technology, and internet culture. From its early days mastering viral content to its ill-fated attempt to build a sustainable news division, the company has been in a constant state of reinvention. Now, CEO Jonah Peretti is intent on transforming BuzzFeed from relying on social platforms for traffic to being a social network.

In a recent podcast conversation I had with Jonah, we discussed what went wrong with social media. His anti-SNARF manifesto hits on a vibe that’s percolating in the work of Tristan Harris, Jonathan Haidt, Tim Wu, the latest Chris Hayes book, and every fifth Ezra Klein podcast: Social platforms have become weaponized against us. 

There’s long been an adversarial dynamic in social media. If you’re not paying, you’re the product. That’s gone into overdrive, as evidenced by a recent National Bureau of Economic Research report that found the majority of users wish TikTok and Instagram didn’t exist. 

“It turns out when an app company doesn't care about content and asks an AI to maximize usage the result is a service that incentivizes content that maximizes addictiveness. The type of content that gets created and recommended is not the best content, but the content that elicits the most compulsive and predictable response from the human brain."

Jonah is an interesting messenger. He built his career on understanding the mechanics of digital virality and using social psychology and lots of data to create shareable content perfectly tuned for Facebook’s algorithm. BuzzFeed built a massive audience this way, constantly following the Facebook algorithm in particular. When Facebook emphasized live video in 2016, BuzzFeed’s livestream of blowing up a watermelon racked up 10 million views. Established media companies would imitate BuzzFeed to the point where we used the term “BuzzFeed envy.” 

But over the years, Peretti observed a shift. Viral content transitioned from lighthearted social expression – “25 Ways to Tell You’re a Child of the ‘90s” – to a darker, more manipulative system that optimized for outrage, fear, and compulsive engagement. “It’s like we moved from the beer and wine era of the internet to the fentanyl and crack cocaine era,” Jonah said.

Of course, there is motivated reasoning at play. BuzzFeed’s ascendant days are in the past. It has struggled mightily as a public company, losing 94% of its market capitalization since it went public via a notably messy SPAC in 2022. It has spent the last few years shedding assets and slimming down. It has gone through a litany of Next Big Things: commerce, franchises, creators, AI. 

Jonah’s new idea, still hazy at least to me, is a social network focused on an upbeat vibe that uses AI tools to allow for self-expression. This would serve as an alternative to the attention slot machines of platforms 

“Facebook started with 80% of people contributing content, and over time that dropped to a tiny fraction,” Jonah said. The major platforms now rely on creators and media companies to supply content, while recommendation algorithms determine what gets seen. This has led to an internet where virality is dictated less by human sharing and more by AI, which optimizes for compulsive behavior.

BF Island, Peretti argues, could reverse that trend by using AI to empower more users to create. Instead of a passive feed, users could engage with generative tools that make content creation frictionless—whether through AI-powered quizzes, meme generators, or social games. 

This seems a bit late in the game. Distribution is controlled by a few massive platforms. The Web 2.0 days of hot new social network launches – are you on GroupMe? – are faint memories. Jonah’s argument is now is the time for a contrarian bet, and AI is driving down the cost of development to make BuzzFeed’s shrunken size an advantage.

“I never wanted to build a social platform 10 years ago because there were so many of them,” he said. “Now, there are fewer places for social content to go, and the apps have basically become content companies."

YouTube is the new TV

The knock on YouTube in its early days was it where you’d find “dogs on a skateboard” videos. The TV industry reassured itself, even in the midst of cord cutting, that TV was far upstream from the riff-raff of UGC. TV was quality; it was “lean back” programming.

In the end, UGC triumphed. YouTube is now watched more on TV screens than desktop or mobile devices. And it is powered mostly by YouTube-native creators as opposed to professional broadcasting companies. Podcasts are the new cable TV talk shows. Even Netflix has noticed. 

On the latest episode of People vs Algorithms, we discussed how YouTube has become an epicenter of decentralized media. Plus: the tough marketing job of passing AI off as pro-worker, the tougher task facing BuzzFeed with starting a social network in 2025, and a check-in on progressive efforts to counter the manosphere with Gary’s Economics and other creators. YouTube | other podcasting platforms.

Creator capital

If there was a lesson from the last era of publishing, it was that venture capital and media businesses are not a good match. Media businesses are messy and rarely scale quickly. Now, the most vibrant part of the media landscape is solo creators that have bootstrapped their businesses.

Running a profitable business is a great ticket to optionality. The tradeoff is you have to grow far more slowly. Capital remains the lifeblood of a business. Slow Ventures is looking to combine the chocolate with peanut butter with a $63 million creator fund that will invest $1-3 million into individual creators in exchange for about 10% of the equity in their holding company that holds their media assets and other ventures, and an option to invest further if the creator decides to raise more capital. The interesting twist: Slow Ventures will be passive investors and not require board seats or any of the headaches that come with having investors. Getting the alignment right between capital and creator will be a chore.

I think most individuals will skip the investment track. You can cover a lot of ground solo that you couldn’t previously. After all, outside capital is always more expensive than just using your own cash flow to expand, even if that means growth is more incremental  and slower, and the big swings are smaller.

Inside the sausage factory

I was a guest on the PublishPress podcast recently. We covered a lot of topics, including The Rebooting’s business model, why Substack is a great platform but maybe not if you want to build an independent media business, and why I’m desperately trying to quit my X habit. Check it out. 

Thanks for reading. Send me a note with feedback to bmorrissey@therebooting.com.