What happens when you can’t skeet video

Planet of the Bass

I just need everyone to experience the brilliance of Planet of the Bass.

TikTok comedian Kyle Gordon’s parody character DJ Crazy Times is such a good tribute to the totally nonsensical gibberish of Eurodance lyrics. A+. 10/10. No notes. I understand that some people are confused by different TikTokers playing the role of fictive collaborator Biljana Electronica in different videos, but that’s honestly too boomer a concern for me to even wrap my head around the confusion. Just enjoy the nonsense. Put your hands up in the air. All of the dream. 

Platform Updates

Instagram & Threads

• Threads is getting some useful new features (sharing posts to IG DMs, customizable alt text, and easier mentions) 

• Instagram Tests New Collaborative Posting Option to Encourage Participation

• You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon

TikTok

• TikTok Adds New Required Labels for AI-Generated Content

YouTube

• YouTube no longer suggests videos if your ‘watch history’ is turned off 

• YouTube is deactivating links in Shorts videos to combat spam (so if you had a click-driving strategy on Shorts adjust that, I guess) 

Google 

• CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search

Reddit

• The Reddit Protest Is Finally Over. Reddit Won. 

Twitter

The Product 

• X Is Adding a New Option to Sort User Posts Based on Engagement

• X Continues to Evolve Its ‘Verification for Organizations’ Package

• X hopes ‘sensitivity settings’ will bring back advertisers (so many levels of yikes here) 

The Dumpster Fire

• Twitter fined $350K for taking too long to hand over January 6th data

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

• Free ad-supported TV streaming services are booming, 1 in 3 U.S. viewers tune in

Music 

• Google and Universal Music negotiate deal over AI ‘deepfakes’

Creator Economy 

• Patreon podcasters can now use Spotify to distribute exclusive content 

• Creators vow not to scab as SAG-AFTRA, WGA strikes continue

Gaming 

• Netflix just released a game controller app for the iPhone 

AI 

• OpenAI Launches GPTBot With Details On How To Restrict Access

• AI comes for YouTube’s thumbnail industry 

• Zoom can now train its A.I. using some customer data, according to updated terms 

Feature Fracture 

Planet of the Bass caught me a bit off guard because I’ve been pretty out of the loop on TikTok recently. I’ve spent a lot of my free time on social apps with Bluesky in the past few weeks. I’m enjoying the bizarre terminally online and cripplingly horny vibes of the beta user community there. But you can’t share video on Bluesky yet. 

Before Twitter totally fell apart, I found it was a somewhat useful filter for the type of TikTok content I’d actually enjoy. For the most part, anyone can download a video on TikTok and repost it where ever they like. If you were following people on Twitter or Instagram whose taste you enjoyed, you’d get good cross-posting of the stuff they see on TikTok. Between opening the app myself once or twice a week and seeing cross-posted content, I felt in the loop. Now the people I follow on Bluesky can’t share videos, and I have no clue what’s happening over on the clock app. 

I think we’ll look back on 2020-2022 as the critical mass point of the social web. The time features, conversations, and communities across social apps were at their most consolidated and most resembled a pre-internet monoculture. 2023 is the beginning of the explosion back outward into niche communities and services. I doubt any single Twitter clone will reach the size or importance of peak Twitter. We’ll have Threads for brands, influencers, and the normies who engage with them, Mastodon for Linux users, academics, and news outlet experiments, Bluesky for deranged weirdos (positive), X for deranged weirdos (derogatory), and so on. 

It won’t just be that different communities gravitate to different collections of apps. The different feature sets on different services will shape the ease of information passing between them. If Bluesky never ads native video posting, there will always be friction between the cultural conversation on TikTok and Bluesky. Information, memes, trends, and influence just won’t move between the two spaces the way it had between Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. 

Last week I shared a chart from Axios showing how so many large apps have adopted the same set of features. With new smaller, niche social platforms coming online, I doubt we’ll see the same push for feature parody. New platforms will need novel ideas about how users interact to stand out (see BeReal). Smaller apps won’t be able to financially support the development costs associated with building out all of these different posting features. They’ll need to specialize by necessity. 

Festival Weekend 

I’ll be at Outside Lands this weekend. I love having a great music festival right here in the city. I’ll try to take notes on the different acts I see and might write up a festival review piece mid-next week. Or I might just enjoy the music and try being in the moment. We’ll see.