Domain names have value, even when the websites that were once hosted there are shut down or abandoned. Prospectors will often swoop in and snatch up an unused domain, then erect a new website filled with clickbait articles. If the domain name used to rank highly in search results, the new clickbait articles will also rank highly, guaranteeing the prospector a steady stream of visitors searching the web for common phrases.
These zombie sites are all over the web; you’ve probably landed on them many times yourself. But this shady market is poised to grow exponentially thanks to the proliferation of generative AI tools. Text generators like ChatGPT make it easier for prospectors to crank out clickbait articles at greater speed, feeding an already raging river of pablum.
This week, Kate Knibbs tells us about her WIRED story on one of these entrepreneurs in the world of AI-generated clickbait hosted on squatted domains.
Read Kate’s story about Nebojša Vujinović Vujo and his clickbait empire. Also read Kate’s original investigation into what happened to The Hairpin, a popular blog for womens’ writing that went defunct and was then reborn as a content mill.
Kate recommends the novella Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Brian recommends the novel The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Lauren recommends giving up fancy, creamy coffee drinks for Lent. Mike recommends the social media platform Bluesky, which is now open to everyone.
Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs. Brian Barrett is @brbarrett. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: When is the last time you visited the website The Hairpin?
Lauren Goode: It's been a while. Why do you ask?
Michael Calore: You should go check it out right now.
Lauren Goode: Right now?
Michael Calore: Yeah, right now.
Lauren Goode: OK, hold on. I'm going to do this. OK, wow. “Talking With An Actual Tiny-House Future Resident,” “Dream Interpretations,” “The Ultimate Guide To Wearing A Jumpsuit,” “Who's the Most Important Person in Your Life? Testimonies.” It's a little different from the Hairpin I remember.
Michael Calore: This is not the Hairpin you remember.
Lauren Goode: It's not. So what's going on here?
Michael Calore: Maybe something has happened to it. Maybe somebody else owns it and runs it.
Lauren Goode: It sure looks like it.
Michael Calore: All right. Well, our guest today is going to explain what's going on.
Lauren Goode: All right, I'm intrigued.
Michael Calore: Let's talk about it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Michael Calore. I am the director of consumer tech and culture at Wired.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at Wired.
Michael Calore: We are also joined by Wired senior writer Kate Knibbs, who covers culture, media, and artificial intelligence for us. Hi, Kate.
Kate Knibbs: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Michael Calore: Of course. Welcome back to the show. We also, as a special bonus, we have in studio the person who is your boss and mine, Wired's executive editor of news, Brian Barrett. Brian, welcome back.
Brian Barrett: Thank you. I like to think of myself as your friend and yours.
Lauren Goode: Management speak if I ever heard it.
Michael Calore: I think the last time you were here was 2022. We talked about Peloton.
Brian Barrett: Yes, we sure did.
Michael Calore: Do you still row, bike, run?
Brian Barrett: I still bike. Mike, I've added some strength training. I don't know if anybody has noticed.
Lauren Goode: Who's your favorite strength training instructor on Peloton?
Brian Barrett: You got to go with Adrian, right?
Lauren Goode: I thought you were going to say Rad?
Brian Barrett: No, I haven't.
Lauren Goode: But Adrian is great.
Brian Barrett: Maybe I need to give Rad a chance.
Lauren Goode: Rad Lopez.
Brian Barrett: I'm familiar.
Lauren Goode: He's pretty great.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Always a Ben fan too.
Lauren Goode: Respect. Do you meditate in Peloton?
Brian Barrett: I do. I tell you what, sleep meditation I feel like is a cheat code.
Lauren Goode: Ross Rayburn.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. Also, Krista McKee. This is just the podcast now everybody.
Michael Calore: Well, unfortunately we're not talking about Peloton or sleep meditation this week.
Lauren Goode: Can we also just add the context that this isn't just Brian's first time back in the podcast studio. He actually left WIRED and came back to us. He did a boomerang.
Michael Calore: He did. He went on a long journey of self-discovery.
Brian Barrett: Let's call it that.
Lauren Goode: We're so happy to have you back.
Brian Barrett: I'm happy to be here.
Michael Calore: Kate, of course, thank you for joining us.
Kate Knibbs: I haven't gone anywhere.
Michael Calore: Well, the thing that we are talking about this week is terribly exciting. It's domain squatting. It's a business model as old as the web. Somebody will scoop up a domain name that used to host a website but has since been abandoned. The person will then launch a new website at that domain and fill it with content that has a good chance of showing up in search results for commonly searched phrases. You've probably landed on one of these zombie websites yourself when you clicked on a search result for a news story or an article offering some advice. You may have wondered what's going on. Domain squatters have been doing a pretty good business for decades, but the explosive growth of generative AI tools has given the practice a significant boost.
Now, Kate, you fell into this world of AI empowered domain squatting recently when you visited The Hairpin, the site that Lauren was just checking out. Tell us a little bit about that experience.
Kate Knibbs: It was a very shocking experience because The Hairpin had been one of my favorite websites in the 2010s. I would definitely describe myself as a Hairpin super fan, so much so that when I moved to New York to be a writer, I, like, Talented Mr. Ripley my way into being friends with some of the writers because I admired them so much and the way that I found out that The Hairpin had been turned into a zombie version of itself was because I'm in a group chat with some of the former editors and they were all very alarmed and confused about what had happened to their work. I thought, "Well, actually, I'm a tech reporter so I should probably look into this for you guys."
Lauren Goode: Brian is nodding right now, by the way, as our executive editor of news.
Michael Calore: Thumbs up.
Lauren Goode: He's like, "Get after it."
Kate Knibbs: Yeah. I love when stories come to you via the group chat. It's a real lifehack. I was like, "Let me see what I can find out." I actually didn't have to do that much digging because when I emailed the email address that was on this new weird Hairpin's website the owner responded to me and was surprisingly open to talking about what he had done to the website.
Michael Calore: What sorts of articles was this new owner publishing?
Kate Knibbs: It was a mix of AI generated articles. There was a lot of stuff about dream interpretation. There was some really generic relationship advice, just stuff that you would never have seen on the old Hairpin because the old Hairpin was very ... It was a blog. It was like a women's general interest blog ostensibly, but it published a lot of very eccentric humor writing and a lot of voicey conversational.
One of the headlines that you read out as the weird new Hairpin was actually an old Hairpin headline, the jumpsuit one actually. But the content that exists on the zombie Hairpin is the exact opposite of the content that existed on original flavor Hairpin instead of being very idiosyncratic and voicey. It's just generic nonsense.
Brian Barrett: I think that's the part that seemed especially weird and troublesome to me as someone in media. I guess I have been in digital media for so long, I sort of now expect that my work from previous 10 years ago might not still survive. So I save PDFs of it. I've learned to do that on things that I really care about. And you see the Messenger shutting down, all of those stories are gone. So I think that's become a part of just being a journalist line is recognizing there's some ephemerality to it. But it's not just that in this case, it's bastardizing what was already there and turning it into this remixed gloopy nonsense garbage on the, under their name. I would almost in some ways maybe not prefer that it just go away, then be turned into this zombie thing that goes against everything that it stood for.
I mean, Kate, when you talk to ... Is that sort of the feeling from the group chat to the extent that you can share group chat confidentiality, but yeah, how are the writers and editors feeling?
Kate Knibbs: So I reached out to a bunch of them separately and asked them to speak about it on the record. So I can definitely say that people were very upfront about how disappointed they were on behalf of a lot of the freelancers who didn't really have the opportunity to save their work as PDFs. And for a lot of them, it was some of their first published clips like things that have a lot of sentimental value and they didn't know that they were going to need to save.
So there was just definitely a feeling of palpable disappointment that they didn't have a heads up that their work might be going away. Oh, because what I should have said earlier was that in addition to the AI generated articles, there were some of the original articles republished, but the author's names had been removed and they had been replaced by generic mail names. And then the story art had been changed too. So you would get in these situations where like Kelly Conaboy, who was a really fantastic humor writer and journalist who wrote for The Hairpin, one of her articles is still up there. It's about celebrity teeth and how all celebrities have veneers. And instead of her name on the story as the byline, now it's just some random guy's name. Technically you could still read her writing, but it's been stripped of all context. Her name isn't even on it anymore and it is definitely, I think, worse than it just disappearing for good.
Lauren Goode: And when you wrote to this new owner of The Hairpin domain, he responded to you and you ended up learning quite a bit about his life. You wrote in your story on WIRED.com that he was actually kind of a nice guy, not this chortling villain who you would picture him to be. How does he explain what he does and why he does it? And also how do you pronounce his name?
Kate Knibbs: So I might not do the greatest job pronouncing it, but it's Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. Vujo is kind of the name that he goes by, so we'll just call him Vujo. So when I emailed him and asked him some questions about The Hairpin, he responded to my questions, but he said, "I have another story I want to tell you actually." And so I made an appointment to Zoom with him the next week and then we ended up talking for almost two and a half hours. He was very forthcoming.
He doesn't think that what he's doing is good. That was why I ended up kind of liking him because he wasn't really trying to defend himself. He was more just trying to explain himself and I appreciated the candor. He is aware that he's making the internet worse basically and he thinks it's inevitable that the internet is going to be filled with AI generated nonsense. And so he just thinks he might as well make some money playing a small part in a thing that he sees as unstoppable.
I'm not defending him. I don't think that what he's doing is good either. I very much wish he wasn't doing it and I feel terrible for the writers and editors at The Hairpin. But he is very self-aware that he is not doing anything admirable.
Michael Calore: I'd like to learn a little bit more about how he's doing what he's doing. So he's publishing articles that are generated just by gen AI tools? Are there humans involved? Is he just publishing these things automatically or is he doing it manually?
Kate Knibbs: No, there's humans involved and that was one of the points that he emphasized was that even though he was a purveyor of AI generated slime, it was AI generated slime with a modicum of quality control. He does have an editorial staff. He has a digital marketing agency called Chantel, that's his main business. And so he has the staff they used to outsource the writing of this kind of article because he's been doing this for years. He's been doing this before generative AI came onto the scene.
Initially, he would go on different domain auction websites and look for URLs that had a good reputation and then buy them. And he would fill them with human generated content that was just very hastily written for SEO purposes. He would hire bloggers from different platforms like Fiverr and Upwork and basically gig workers. He would pay small amounts of money to fill his websites.
With AI, he had a team of full-time editors and now instead of coordinating with these gig workers, they'll just use ChatGPT to generate the articles. And he claims that they fact-check them. I don't know if they do, but human eyes see them.
Lauren Goode: I mean, the best jumpsuit is kind of subjective.
Brian Barrett: Is it though? Is it?
Lauren Goode: Sorry to interrupt, Kate. Please continue.
Kate Knibbs: So it's not totally automated at all. It's basically just that they use ChatGPT to generate a bunch of articles very quickly because The Hairpin was just one of many, many websites that he's doing this on. He was surprised that I asked him about The Hairpin because it's not one of his more popular offerings. So there's a lot of content that he's putting up every day.
Brian Barrett: Kate, and that's one thing I did want to ask you about too because it's not just The Hairpin and there's some really big name sites that I was surprised to see in your story. Do you mind talking through some notable examples that you've seen and how he came to get them?
Kate Knibbs: Sure. So he told me the most successful site that he has is another women's website called The Frisky, and he purchased that when it shut down because of digital media complications. And his first year he said he made half a million dollars running it and he said it changed his life. He had of just been dabbling in domain squatting before that, but its success made him turn this into a full-time career. His favorite website that he has squatted on is a website called Pope2You. And it was Pope Benedict the 16th's original official website, which is just insane to me. It's like Pope, the letter 2 and then You. That is what the Vatican picked out.
Brian Barrett: Wow.
Kate Knibbs: It was what they wanted. And when he stepped down and the new pope came on the scene, somehow that website got lost in the shuffle and its domain went to auction and Vujo bought it and he was super excited about it and he just thought it was the funniest thing in the world that he owned this website and he did make a big point to tell me that he really didn't want it to offend anyone.
I will say that that website actually had my favorite ... Some of the content, I was like, "Yeah, this isn't that bad." There was a post about how the pope wears red shoes that I found genuinely kind of informative. The site that made my jaw drop when he told me about it was the website for Apple Daily, which is a newspaper that was Hong Kong based that's been around since the '90s and is very culturally significant because its owner, Jimmy Lai, is a very outspoken critic of the CCP and government corruption in China in general.
He used the newspaper to really advance a pro-democracy platform in Hong Kong and he got arrested for it. Once he got arrested and so did several of his editors. They lost control of the domain, Vujo bought it and now he's filled it with content that is basically the exact opposite of what used to be on Apple Daily. As much as I talked to him and saw him as a human and understood his motivations and was getting on board with how he was justifying it when he explained the Apple Daily thing to me, I just ... It made what he was doing very apparently grimy and damaging because he had taken this important news site and the articles that he's put on there are the most insipid things you've ever read in your life.
It's like 45 wishes for teacher ... It's just stuff that he's not even trying to pretend has value. And so it just made the scavenger nature of his mission very stark.
Lauren Goode: And he told you he doesn't really care about politics. You asked him about that and he didn't seem concerned at all that this is happening at a time when the Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on freedom of speech in Hong Kong?
Kate Knibbs: No, he said he loved China as well. When I asked him about it, he was very adamant when I talked to him that he was never going to publish anything politically provocative. And he explained himself by talking about how he is Serbian, but he was born in Bosnia. He had to flee during the fall of Yugoslavia. He had lived through a war. He really didn't want to put anything into the world that could be seen as politically divisive. I do still believe that his motivations were sincere and that he really doesn't want to put anything on the internet that's politically divisive. But he was definitely very unwilling to recognize that the act of purchasing a pro-democracy website and then emptying it of its political contents and filling it with insipid nonsense is in fact a political thing to do. He didn't really seem to acknowledge that aspect of what he was doing at all.
Michael Calore: All right. Thanks, Kate. Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back and talk more about this.
[Break]
Michael Calore: Kate, how widespread are clickbait farms on the web and is Vujo representative of the type of person who runs one?
Kate Knibbs: There's actually not that much quantitative data about how commonplace this sort of thing is now. I just actually recently interviewed someone who works for NewsGuard because I'm trying to get a handle of the landscape here. And they did say that they've seen a massive uptick in AI generated clickbait farms that they found, but it went from zero to numbering in the hundreds for what they've been able to track. I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. I would love to see Google do some sort of in-house analysis, but right now there's just a lot of stuff we don't know about like who the major players are.
I hope that people are like Vujo are misguided but not outright malicious. But I think he's the only one who's been interviewed at this point. So I don't know. The person from NewsGuard who I talked to for a sort of follow-up article that I'm working on did mention to me that they have found a few different incidents where the clickbait farmers do seem politically motivated, but that by and large they seem motivated by money. Primarily this is a moneymaking scheme before anything else.
Brian Barrett: Kate, you mentioned Google in there. I am curious, how good a job is Google doing at catching these clickbait farms at deranking them? I mean, clearly Vujo is making a lot of money still. Is it a game of cat and mouse? And if so, what more could search engines be doing?
Kate Knibbs: It definitely seems like a game of cat and mouse. A lot of the SEO experts that I've talked to try to get a better handle on what the larger landscape looks like, a lot of them have actually been more defensive of Google than I thought they would be. I heard from several people that they thought Google was trying its best and that it was going to hopefully make big improvements soon.
When I talked to Google reps, I was actually a little taken aback by how they seemed to downplay the issue. They pointed me to preexisting rules that they have in place and didn't seem to be ... They didn't admit that they were working on any sort of analysis that I'd like to see them do. They didn't seem to be super on the ball. I hope they get on the ball. Actually, I am concerned by how far behind the problem they seem to be right now.
Lauren Goode: So what happens, maybe all of us can weigh in here. What happens when the entire idea of SEO changes? It's how we've been operating news sites for a very long time now. Just as a quick explainer, search engine optimization, it means we're publishing stories and headlines that we think will basically get page ranked in such a way that our work stands out on the messy internet. But some people are saying now that that's going to go away with the way that generative AI is changing our browsing experience. So what happens to all these clickbait farms in a post SEO world?
Kate Knibbs: I think that it all depends on what Google does. If Google really does figure out a way to down rank these sites systemically, then I think that they will have to pivot because their business model won't work. I'm not sure that's going to happen. I haven't gotten any sense that Google is actually taking this seriously or is going to be able to get a handle on it unless search just ends as we know it altogether.
I really don't know. But I think it all depends on how the search engines respond to this issue. And as of now, I'm not super optimistic that they're going to respond in a way that actually curbs it.
Lauren Goode: I want to toss this to Brian, who I affectionately call Brian GPT because you are very good at SEO.
Brian Barrett: Well, not intentionally.
Lauren Goode: Not intentionally. You're very good at crafting smart headlines for our stories that, also, they're grabby and not in a clickbaity way.
Brian Barrett: Well, thank you, Lauren. I guess to the extent I think about SEO, it's more like do we have the product name in there? But I do think like a grabby headline wins no matter whether it's humans or robots. I think what I find interesting about this dynamic is the more that Google and others try to really foreground generative AI in results and as results, sort of giving you a summary of what you searched for with maybe a few links at the bottom.
This is going too far. I don't actually want to say this, but I'm saying those are ... is that that different from a site using generative AI to turn out because everyone's just drawing from internet chum to turn it into a nice little package. So whether that's Google or whether that's our friend in Serbia, I do wonder about the longer term effects of just these regurgitated pieces of information both on every level. Professionally, I worry about it, but also just as a consumer of content and someone who enjoys getting information that is reliable and consistent and comes from a specific human rather than a sort of melange of what various sites have had to say along the way. I don't know.
For the same reason I'm anxious about what happened to The Hairpin, I am anxious about what is going to happen to search. I'm not saying that they're directly equivalent, but it rhymes.
Michael Calore: If you look at the tools that the biggest players in search are building like Google and Microsoft primarily, they're building these interfaces where you can ask a question and get a result that is not like, "Go read this article." It's a summation of all the articles. So I think what you're saying is that we're in a new world now where we're going to be asking a computer for information that is going to be looking out at a sea of information generated by computers to give us an answer. And that answer is now muddied because all the data out there that it's reading and that it's collating is bad.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, I think so. I think you get into sort of a cursive place where it's AI generated responses based on AI generated content, based on AI generated ... It's all the way down. So I worry about a little bit of a spiral there.
Michael Calore: And Kate, Vujo, at the end of your story, he told you that he thinks that this is the future of the internet, that the future where AI generated articles are competing against human generated content for search engine rankings and winning more often than not. He says that's inevitable. I can't imagine that that comment landed with anything other than like an icy shattering thud.
Kate Knibbs: I think it probably landed with me internally despairing, but I don't know. I don't think he is wrong as of now what's happening to the internet. Google and the other search engines permit AI generated content and have not given us any indication that they are actually capable of quality control. What Brian was just saying makes me think they really should be more concerned about quality control because the tools that they're creating that are meant to keep you in their search engine where they're collating the information that they get off the web aren't going to work well if the web is chockfull of AI generated nonsense.
So you would think it would behoove them to clean up the initial search results, but again, I'm not seeing action here that would suggest they're taking it as seriously as they need to take it. I'd love to be proven wrong about that. But I think if I had to bet on this, I would bet that Vujo is right.
Brian Barrett: Never bet against Vujo.
Kate Knibbs: No. He does know a lot about search results, unfortunately. Honestly, obviously if I was in charge of Google search at this moment, I would be seriously questioning just automatically deranking all AI content, even though some of it is helpful, but until they get some quality control going that works, I don't know. I just don't see a way out of the internet devolving into the slime fest that Vujo thinks it's going to.
Michael Calore: All right. Well, Kate, thank you for this uplifting conversation about the future of the internet that we're all going to be living in very shortly.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. We're working in.
Michael Calore: We appreciate you joining us.
Kate Knibbs: Maybe. Anytime.
Michael Calore: Stick around though because we're going to take a break and we're going to come right back for recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: All right. Welcome back. This is the last part of our show where we go around the table and everybody gets to recommend a thing that our listeners might enjoy. Kate, as our guest, you get to go first. What is your recommendation?
Kate Knibbs: I'm recommending a novella by Ray Nayler called The Tusks of Extinction. Ray Nayler is a really terrific, pretty new sci-fi writer, and The Tusks of Extinction is just bonkers. It's about this scientist in the near future who gets murdered by poachers and then her consciousness gets frozen in a computer for however many years. And then eventually her consciousness is revived and inserted into the brain of a wooly mammoth that they've brought back from ... A de-extinction company has brought back. And it's really sad and I loved it, so you guys should read it.
Michael Calore: Nice. You say novella. It's not a long book. It's a short book?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah. It's like 80 pages. So it's a quick read that will make you probably cry if you're like me.
Michael Calore: Awesome. What's the name again?
Kate Knibbs: The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler.
Michael Calore: Excellent. Thank you for that.
Kate Knibbs: I hope that's not your rec, Brian.
Brian Barrett: No, no, no, no.
Michael Calore: Brian, What is your rec?
Brian Barrett: So I'm celebrating my return by once again recommending a work of literary fiction because I know that our listeners love it when I do that. It is The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It is a very long book. It's approaching 700 pages. It follows from shifting perspectives, an Irish family in modern times, navigating various personal, interpersonal, and financial calamities. It's terrific. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.
Michael Calore: Wow. Is this a new book or is this an old book?
Brian Barrett: It came out within the last year or so.
Michael Calore: That counts as new.
Lauren Goode: Does it take place in Ireland?
Brian Barrett: It sure does.
Michael Calore: OK. What part of Ireland?
Brian Barrett: I'm going to say, not Dublin. Somewhere outside of Dublin. I forget the town, sorry. I didn't know there would be a quiz.
Lauren Goode: [inaudible 00:30:09] an American.
Brian Barrett: I didn't know there were towns outside of Dublin.
Michael Calore: One of those places outside of Dublin.
Brian Barrett: Some of it takes place in Dublin when people go to college there, but it's great. He's a brilliant writer. I've been a big fan for a long time. Another book by him is Skippy Dies at the end. Anyway, so please go ahead and ... Actually, can we cut out that last part?
Lauren Goode: No, that's great. Truly, that's great.
Kate Knibbs: Brian, I'm in the middle of reading it.
Lauren Goode: No.
Brian Barrett: Yes.
Kate Knibbs: So we're really simpatico here.
Brian Barrett: Kate and I are ...
Lauren Goode: Wow.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Lauren Goode: Same way wavelength.
Kate Knibbs: It is so good. But wait, why does he ... Sorry, I know this won't be part of the episode.
Brian Barrett: No, this is the podcast now.
Kate Knibbs: Why is Instagram in it?
Brian Barrett: Why not?
Kate Knibbs: It's set in 2009, Instagram didn't exist.
Lauren Goode: Did it not exist?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: I think it was acquired in early 2012 or 2011, so it might've technically existed then as Bourbon, which was the precursor.
Kate Knibbs: It's an anachronism. There's an anachronism going on. It's been bothering me because I'm still in the past section and I've been like, "Why are they on Instagram?"
Lauren Goode: I remember interviewing Kevin in the early days. And I think it was like 2009. Sorry that's—
Michael Calore: Weird flex, but OK.
Lauren Goode: I was going to say, I don't mean that as a flex. I'm literally going back. I was working at the Wall Street Journal and I remember that was the timeframe.
Brian Barrett: Well, hold on. Do they explicitly say 2009 in the book, or are we just mapping that on the financial crisis?
Kate Knibbs: Oh, I might be mapping it on the financial crisis.
Brian Barrett: Because I think financial crisis started in 2009.
Kate Knibbs: '08 fall.
Brian Barrett: Well, in Ireland. Yeah, 2008. So 2008, 2009. But I think part of it is just they're dealing with the repercussions of the crisis. So I'm giving it a little bit of grace to say it.
Kate Knibbs: OK. But it is amazing so far.
Brian Barrett: Early '10s. Yeah, it's great.
Michael Calore: Excellent.
Kate Knibbs: Sorry.
Michael Calore: OK. Good recommendations from you both. Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is partly inspired by Brian's visit to WIRED. I'm trying to give up heavy coffee drinks in favor of more tea.
Michael Calore: Oh, OK.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, so that's my recommendation. I'm already a tea drinker, but I was having tea and a lot of lattes and cappuccinos and espresso drinks with foamy milk. And then recently another friend of mine, shout out to Tomie, who listens to this show, was pointing out all of the ingredients that are in some of the store-bought nut milks so many people enjoy these days, and it kind of freaked me out. They're also very caloric, not to be confused with Calore.
Michael Calore: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: And so I'm switching to for a while at least switching to drip coffee or batch coffee and just trying to. .. I was having three or four coffee drinks a day.
Michael Calore: So you're primarily concerned not about caffeine intake, but you're concerned about just all the stuff.
Lauren Goode: All the stuff in the coffee that's now in coffee.
Michael Calore: I see.
Lauren Goode: And also today happens to be the start of Lent, so I figured why not give it up? Why not give up the foamy coffee drinks?
Michael Calore: That's a good thing.
Lauren Goode: That's what it' is.
Michael Calore: That's a good thing. I'm giving up avoidance for Lent.
Lauren Goode: I appreciate you.
Michael Calore: OK. That's a good recommendation. So drink more tea.
Lauren Goode: Drink more tea and maybe cut back on your coffee if it's something that you've been trying to do. I'll report back on the level of headaches I have. Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: Bluesky.
Lauren Goode: Oh, say more.
Michael Calore: I've recommended it before in the show. It is a social network. It looks a lot like Twitter. It looks alarmingly, some would say embarrassingly like Twitter. It also functions like Twitter. Also, some of the executive leadership team is from Twitter. It is a microblogging platform where posts appear in a feed that is organized in reverse chronological order. There are likes, there are comments, there are no direct messages, but it is a fun platform that has a vibrancy to it now that people have started signing up for it.
Signups used to only be available to people who had an invite code, but within the last week it's opened up and now anybody can sign up for it. And I highly recommend getting on the Bluesky train. You may ask, what's wrong with Twitter? What's wrong with X? What's wrong with Threads? What's wrong with Mastodon? There's quite a bit wrong with X and Twitter, but as far as Threads and Mastodon go, they are like Bluesky, all part of the emerging Fediverse, which is the network of networks where we can freely exchange information between networks.
So I like Bluesky's aesthetic. I also like the vibe there, the people who hang out there, the people who I interact with. It seems to me like the community that is the most rich, the most fun and the most wide-ranging of all of the platforms. So that's why I'm recommending Bluesky. If you haven't checked it out because you didn't have an invite code or you're just like, "I'm over it. I'm over all social networking." I recommend that you log on and try it out.
Lauren Goode: And Kate, you spoke to Jay Graber about Bluesky recently for WIRED.com.
Kate Knibbs: I did. Jay Graber is the CEO of Bluesky and she ... I have been a Bluesky fan since its launch. And talking to her only reconfirmed that I'm really rooting for them. I think they're not perfect at all, but I think that they're trying to do something really interesting with social networking and I want them to succeed.
Michael Calore: Nice. Well, we can hang out there together. I'm @snackfight. You can find me.
Kate Knibbs: I'm just @Knibbs. And also Threads is boring.
Michael Calore: Yeah, Threads is really boring. And they make you use an app on mobile. I don't get that at all. It's supposed to be open to the web. What's wrong with the open web? What is wrong with the open web, Meta?
Lauren Goode: And Threads is not very good at threading.
Michael Calore: No.
Lauren Goode: I mean, part of the toxicity of Twitter was logging on and seeing all the angry responses that people had to the original Tweet, the OT, but you open Threads and you can't ... There's no discourse. It's just like a lifehacker posting a big chunk about how they woke up at 4 am and took a cold plunge and successfully raised his $10 million VC funding, something.
Michael Calore: There's LOLs. There are LOLs.
Lauren Goode: There are LOLs. I actually do appreciate what the brands are doing on Threads having a lot of fun with it.
Michael Calore: Do you now?
Lauren Goode: CeraVe is ... Yeah. I do. I have to say they're quite clever. Bookshop.org throwing shade at Amazon all the time.
Brian Barrett: Love it. I'll say too about Threads. I have no followers there and that feels like a Threads problem. That feels like ... Because who wouldn't want to follow to read my threads?
Lauren Goode: To follow you. Truly.
Brian Barrett: You're guaranteed one every two weeks or so.
Lauren Goode: Yeah. Threads is interesting too because Mosseri is just threading through it.
Michael Calore: Oh, boy.
Lauren Goode: He's just become customer support on threads.
Michael Calore: That's the man who runs it, by the way. OK. Well, thank you all for your recommendations and thank you all for joining us. Kate, thanks for Zooming in to talk to us about Vujo and AI fueled clickbait farms.
Kate Knibbs: Thanks for having me. You guys know I love talking to you.
Michael Calore: You can read Kate's story on WIRED.com including the follow-up coming soon. Brian, thank you for joining us sitting down with us this week.
Brian Barrett: Great to be back. Thank you all.
Lauren Goode: So great to have you in studio.
Michael Calore: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback for us, you can duet all of us on TikTok. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week with the new show. And until then, thanks for listening.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
Kate Knibbs: He lived through a war and so he was very adamant that he never wanted to pub—
[Kate’s audio suddenly glitches, causing her voice to sound like it is robotically chanting “Anything Political. Anything Political. Anything Political.” It ends with an abrupt tonal squeal.]
Boone Ashworth: I'm sorry, what.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Brian Barrett: Kate, you glitched.
Michael Calore: Sorry.
Brian Barrett: You glitched.
Lauren Goode: AI Kate!
