Read Max Max Read

Greetings from Read Max HQ, and please, enjoy this, the second episode of the Read Max Experimental Audio Product--a “podcast”-style reading of this week’s newsletter. In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, as well as many other popular podcast platforms. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items drawn from this week’s newsletter:
* A.I.-generated audio: What is it good for? What is it even good at? And in what ways will it make all of our lives worse?
* Marques Brownlee, the last great gadget blogger
The Read Max podcast is free for all readers/listeners. If you enjoy it, or if you enjoy any of the various the Read Max non-audio products, please considering subscribing and helping to fund this unique blend of independent journalism, mediocre jokes, middling ideas, and amateurish execution.


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Greetings from Read Max HQ! I’m very pleased to publish this “experimental Read Max audio product,” which is to say a podcast of me reading this week’s newsletter--with some of the classic off-the-cuff riffing you’ve come to associate with the Read Max brand identity 😎.
In addition to the embed above, the podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts here, or Overcast. It can also technically be found on Spotify but I recommend you do not find it there. On the podcast, as well as in this newsletter, I am discussing two items:
* The current crisis in Hollywood, the danger posed to the time-wasting industry, and the 2001 baseball romance Summer Catch.
* The secret origins of Twitter power user and political candidate Will Stancil.
A reminder: Read Max is my main source of income and producing it every week is a full-time job. If you find it informative, entertaining, or even just a halfway decent way to kill time, please consider becoming a paying subscriber, at the astonishingly cheap rate of $5/month or $50/year (roughly the cost of buying me a couple Snickers bars every month). Paying subscribers not only improve their karmic standing and transmit goodwill throughout the world, they also get access to the popular weekly reading roundup and recommendations email, where I spotlight overlooked books, movies, and music that are often but not always concerned with the ideas and themes of this newsletter (i.e., the future, the internet, samurais, etc.)


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Greetings from Read Max HQ in rain-soaked Brooklyn, N.Y.! Today, an emergency experiment: a solo podcast. I was prepared to offer a column today on the A.I. provisions of the Writers Guild of America contract, but our downstairs neighbors’ apartment flooded, my son’s after-school has been canceled, and my wife is trapped in Yonkers (??), which means that my ability to gather my notes together and produce the kind of finely wrought, sparklingly witty, fully error-free newsletter to which you have all become so accustomed is limited. So instead, I sat in my closet and recorded myself talking through the notes I already had, producing what I hope is an at least vaguely coherent riff on the subject, since I know many readers (or, in this case, listeners) will RIOT if they don’t get their weekly dose of b******t from me. I’m sorry for the messiness of production and the various trailing lines of thought; there are already a bunch of things I wish I hadn’t said or had said differently, but that’s the charm of the exciting world of audio podcasts! Anyway, if you’re not really a podcast person there should be an automatically produced transcript, which I will try to clean up at some point. Stay dry out there!
Read Max, in its capacity as a newsletter and as a hastily assembled podcast, is an endeavor supported entirely by the generosity of paying readers. Please subscribe!



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Greetings from Read Max temporary HQ in Downeast Maine! This week’s newsletter is an experiment: A podcast, featuring my old friend Katie Notopoulos, who was, briefly, the editor-in-chief of Meta, Inc.’s “Threads” product.
Katie Notopoulos is a former Buzzfeed News writer and host of the late lamented Internet Explorer podcast, but for the purposes of this show her most important qualification is that she is one of the finest shitposters to grace the contemporary internet. Katie (as she explains in the episode) now also has the honor of being the first person to ever be “ratioed” on Threads, after she claimed to be the “editor-in-chief” of the Threads platform and was shocked to find that a significant number of people actually believed her.
We discuss that episode, and more, on the podcast. Some selections:
On the Threads celebrity/meme account land grab
I think what’s happening across all the celebrity accounts, all the meme accounts, is that there is, like, intense engagement. It’s a land grab right now. Obviously, like, if you're JLo, and you had -- I mean, I don't even have a sense of scale, of how many hundreds of millions of fans she had on Instagram, [but] a large portion of those will port over, right? But also, because it's only an algorithmic feed right now you have a very good chance of getting in front of anyone's eyeballs if you get enough engagement juice. So there's just tons of this engagement bait stuff going on with like, open ended questions.
On Threads as next hope for celebrities who can’t make it on TikTok
I have this theory that those kinds of celebrities who had quit Twitter long ago, but they're not quite TikTok celebrities -- someone like a JLo, or Paris Hilton, who are kind of stuck in the Instagram era. Those people also skew slightly older, but there are a lot of celebrities who are just not TikTok celebrities, because that's its own special skill set. You have to be, like, funny and weird and really authentic on TikTok in a way that, other than Will Smith, I don't think any mainstream celebrity has really [achieved]. You know, like, the Kardashians aren't really big on TikTok, right? Like, they're very much Instagram celebrities. And I think that those people probably know that Instagram is sort of declining. People who have made a lot of money and are very attuned to these social things can tell that the winds are changing. And so if there's a new platform, especially if it's going to be more tied to their Instagram, even if text is not their, like, best format, they're like, Yeah, let's pump it, let's go, like, gotta cling to this. Like, it's, they're seeing this as sort of like a life raft off of Instagram, or to keep the Instagram juice going. Because otherwise they're gonna fade into irrelevance when TikTok takes over everything.
On making history on Threads
One thing that I found really interesting about the experience was that a key feature that does not exist on Threads is you can repost -- essentially a retweet or quote tweet -- but you don't see that count, and you don't get notifications about it. So when you have something like this post that went viral I could see I was getting a lot of replies to it, but I could not see how it was spreading. And that's a very interesting, weird dynamic when you're trying to figure out a piece of content that's very specifically like this. If you've ever had something that goes weirdly viral on Twitter, and you're like, Huh, what's going on there? Usually, you can kind of figure it out by like, oh, well, I see that this one really big account retweeted it. […] And you can't even totally figure out how successful [it is]. It becomes that likes are the only metric for success, which... I mean, I'd like to give myself the credit here of believing that I am the first person to be ratioed on threads. […] It's a little tricky, because without that retweet count I don't totally know. I do know that I got more replies than I did