It was a simpler time. You’d go out with your friends, come home at 1am, and dump 103 photos into an album and hit post. “Status updates” were actually just random, unfiltered thoughts. Twitter was full of sh*tposts, those stream-of-consciousness thoughts that weren’t pandering to an algo. They just… were. Now, social media is all about curation. Choosing the perfect wording that will *hopefully* go viral. And sure, optimising content is great for reaching the masses. But it’s also made social media a lot less random (and, in some cases, a lot less fun). [Read more]

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

And if you weren’t aware of what’s going on, the company has decided to cut 8,000 employees’ jobs and move an additional 7,000 to AI-focused roles, which started Monday. Obviously, a terrible day for everyone affected in the company, laid off or not. But that didn’t stop Zuck from making it just that much worse, telling remaining employees in a memo that “success isn’t a given” in the fierce and competitive space of AI.

"AI is the most consequential technology of our lifetimes," Zuckerberg also said in the memo. "The companies that lead the way will define the next generation." Why thank you, Mark. We all feel a whole lot better now 😊

Speaking of AI, Kevin O’Leary’s “biggest data center ever” is causing huge problems in Utah. Residents have basically given the plans for the 40,000-acre data centre stretching across the county’s Hansel Valley a giant “f*ck no.”

“B-but it’s going to establish American AI dominance.” It’s also going to have irreversible, damaging effects on the environment and already strained water supplies in the state. The Stratos Project, projected to be twice the size of Manhattan (!!!) and consume double the state's peak electricity demand is projected to cost more than $4 billion. It has obtained approval from the county and Gov. Spencer Cox, but it must still obtain environmental and building permits.

While all of this is concerning, it’s not as concerning as the outstanding blanket of heat that is usage could produce. This is a total thermal load of 16GW — or “the equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day, potentially raising the daytime temperatures in the area by 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit a day. No need for Jesus to start the rapture. It seems we’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves.

Finally, social media stars have become a magnet for campaigns and political groups.

Last month, progressive influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina revealed an endorsement to his 14.5 million followers: He would support Tom Steyer, the billionaire running for California governor as a Democrat. He did not reveal, however, that Mr. Steyer’s campaign was paying him $100,000 to help win the election.

Which is kind of the problem. Because he doesn’t need to.

The $100,000 fee, buried in campaign finance records, is described as a payment for “strategic advice and campaign surrogacy.” It’s increasingly a pay-for-play world in social media. Content creators are compensated to promote candidates. And there are little to no requirements for disclosure. And politicians have spent millions doing this over the past few campaign cycles.

Just another reminder to take everything you see with grain of salt. You don’t know who has paid, and how much, to put it there.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The modern internet is stunningly beautiful, immaculately produced, and thoroughly optimised.

It’s also, kinda f*cking boring.

Between the collapse of Twitter and the rise of the aesthetic text graphic, we completely lost the art of the sh*tpost. And along with it, we destroyed the loose, accidental, and beautiful digital communities that used to form around a single, half-baked thought fired off into the void.

We swapped the digital neighbourhood for an over-produced gallery space. And we are paying the price in cultural stagnation.

It wasn’t just low-effort spamming or trolling. At its peak, sh*tposting was an act of aggressive, ironic resistance against a polished, commercialised web. But it also, like, wasn’t that deep. It’s hard to explain. You really had to be there.

It was anti-aesthetic, relying on pixelated screenshots, intentional typos, and deeply unappealing formatting.

There was always a sort of detached stance: giving creators a Zen-like detachment from the earnest outrage loops of the internet.

And its core objective was to cause the biggest emotional or comedic reaction with the absolute minimum amount of production effort.

It was the ultimate equaliser. It didn't matter if you were a verified journalist or an anonymous account with a cartoon avatar. If your text-only thought was funny, weird, or jarring enough, it could alter the cultural fabric of the internet for a day.

It was digital graffiti that couldn’t be packaged, monetised, or turned into a sponsored content campaign.

Early Twitter was essentially an SMS-based chat room for the entire world. Because it was short-form and chronologically fed, the barrier to entry for posting was non-existent.

There was absolutely no strategy. No need for a visual asset. And certainly no hook designed to retain a viewer past the three-second mark.

The lifecycle of an idea was beautifully simple. You literally just typed whatever intrusive thought crossed your mind and watched a little pocket of spontaneous discussion bloom in the replies, instantly birthing a fleeting micro-community.

The modern feed operates as a corporate broadcast. A thought must first be transformed into a highly curated asset before being pushed out by an algorithm. And this leaves the audience to passively consume content rather than actively connect with the person behind it.

When users scattered across Bluesky, Threads, and Discord following the platform's decline, that centralised public square fractured. More importantly, the vibe changed. We moved to new apps, but we also changed the way we behave inside them.

Enter the girlie pop OST Reel.

Now, if you have a fleeting, passing thought about relationships, late-stage capitalism, or existential dread, you format it into clean text blocks. Then you overlay it onto a 4K video of a moody cityscape, an empty highway, or your fit check.

As noted in my breakdown of the "glamorous philosopher" we are no longer sharing raw human observations. We are performing the aesthetic of depth. By wrapping a simple thought in the safety blanket of a curated video background, we strip away its spontaneity. The sh*t post has turned from a casual invitation to chat in the replies to a video product designed to pull passive views.

But when everything has to look like a Pinterest board, nothing feels real.

During the sh*tpost era, the format was raw and text-first. Then it was distributed chronologically to a tight-knit network of friends and peers who engaged in chaotic, collaborative comment sections just for the sake of amusement.

In contrast, the modern OST era relies entirely on stylised video loops and curated text blocks. These are then pushed by an interest-graph algorithm to complete strangers.

Meaning what used to be a conversation is now a passive scrolling experience, or at the most, engaging with a “omg so me, girl!”

Because current feeds favour media designed for strangers rather than a timeline of your actual peers, the spontaneous neighbourhood feel of social media has largely vanished. A good sh*tpost requires a contextually aware in-group to land properly.

When you throw a hyper-specific, chaotic joke into an algorithm designed to push a highly polished video to millions of completely random people, the community aspect dies. You don't get much of a discussion. Just silent shares and repost metrics.

The loss of sh*tposting matters because, well, it was fun. But also it marks the end of social media as an organic human playground.

When every piece of content must have a hook, a background loop, and a stylised text layout, we lose the casual digital spaces that allowed us to be creative without the pressure of performance.

If we want to build personal brands that actually have a soul, we have to stop filtering the humanity out of our accounts. We need to actively resist the pressure to turn absolutely every passing thought into a beautifully produced multimedia launch.

Bring back the blurry photo, the typo-ridden, zero-context observation, and the video rant that looks like a FaceTime with a friend.

Fire off a text-only thought simply because it amused you, not because it looks good overlaid on top of a sunset.

The only way to escape the algorithmic prison of the modern feed is to start posting like real, messy people again.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Professionally, personally, spiritually. You know who you are and more importantly, you know who they are (i'm on your side).

The sound comes from Jerrilyn Lake, aka @indeskribabull, from a satirical video titled "3 reasons why your hatred of black women is justified." Point number 3 is where she delivers the line, calm, but struggling to not break character, and with the energy of someone who has said everything they needed to say and has exactly zero follow up questions. The internet took the audio and immediately started pointing it at everything that has ever done them dirty.

My favourites so far:

Use the sound and put the target on screen. A person, an institution, a life decision. Anything that deserves it really.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😲WTF: How emails find me
❤How wholesome: Dad speaks up in a house full of girls
😊Soooo satisfying: Naruto trend
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: MAGIC LEMON RICOTTA PANCAKES

Hey Roz!

If you want customers to actually use their loyalty points, you’ve got to make it feel fun and easy for them to do so. You could try sending little reminders that show them how close they are to their next reward, or run “bonus” days where their points are worth double. Another idea is to turn your loyalty program into a game of sorts. For example, you could set simple challenges like "Redeem points this week and unlock a surprise."

Make sure you aren't burying the points info, either! Add reminders in receipts, your app, even on packaging if you can. People forget they have points unless you put them right in front of them.

As for getting customers to come back more often, makes sure to check in the week after they've made a purchase. You could try offering extra rewards or limited-time offers to create a bit of urgency. This could include things like early access to something new or surprise perks. Since they have recently engaged with your brand, it's the perfect time to make that connection with them even deeper.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.