You’re Misunderstanding Online Trends

Over the past ten years in the realm of social media, Ruby Thelot has consistently pondered similar questions whenever he encounters viral content: Is this a promotional piece? Is this account authentic? Is this a genuine trend or simply a one-off event?

Although terms like “6-7” and “looksmaxxing” have recently gained traction, not every emerging term or subcultural trend has genuine mainstream longevity. Remember those times when tech enthusiasts tried to popularize NFTs? Or the phase when audio chat applications like Clubhouse were touted as the future of social media but swiftly fizzled out? (A prediction that WIRED also fell victim to.)

According to Thelot, a cyber-ethnographer and media theory researcher at NYU, the tendency to overestimate trends stems from the internet’s fragmentation, where individuals find themselves on their own “digital islands.” Here, many viral occurrences are merely products of forced consumption. Today, virality is chiefly confined to small communities rather than widespread audiences.

Thelot’s upcoming book In Defense of Being-On-Line is set to release this fall. Recently, WIRED interviewed him about why virality may be an outdated gauge for assessing trends, the illusion of dating fatigue, and what the buzz around prediction markets truly represents.

This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.

JASON PARHAM: When evaluating whether a trend is legitimate, has the challenge shifted to confusing short-lived engagement with sustained adoption?

RUBY THELOT: The challenge in comprehending culture is that virality, which once served as a reliable indicator, has transformed into an objective of its own. Goodhart’s law [popularized by British economist Charles Goodhart] indicates that once a metric becomes a target, it loses its validity as a measure. Consequently, content is being crafted merely to achieve a high view count, often disregarding the true, intrinsic value of the content itself. This intrinsic value is what actually ensures cultural longevity. Given how deeply we’ve adopted Goodhart’s law in our culture, it’s possible to design for virality without it having any real cultural impact.

Dating fatigue has attracted significant attention in recent years, prompting dating apps to pivot towards AI. In May, Bumble announced the removal of its swipe feature to attract users. Yet, you argue the narrative surrounding burnout is misleading.

Heteropessimism has been a topic since 2019, reflecting the general discontent that straight women feel when dating straight men. It’s noteworthy that such sentiments clearly exist among a specific demographic.

A friend recently penned a New York Times essay titled “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men,” a more optimistic take, highlighting the prevalent sense of disillusionment. We examined social media posts, specifically analyzing around 1,000 videos on platforms like Instagram and TikTok that surpassed 1 million views. Our goal was to determine the percentage of negative content.

What were the findings?

The figures hovered around 25 percent. I wanted to investigate whether any particular platform exhibited more negativity than others. I aimed to pinpoint distinct digital enclaves to see if a specific comment trend manifested more negatively on certain platforms, possibly influenced by algorithms. Therefore, I do believe that heteropessimism is somewhat overstated by cultural commentators, and I assert this as someone who contributes to magazines.