Virality Misreads Online Trends, Researcher Argues
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- Ruby Thelot, a NYU cyber-ethnographer, argues virality has become a target rather than a measure (Goodhart's law), letting creators engineer views without producing content with lasting cultural value
- Thelot's research on roughly 1,000 Instagram and TikTok videos with over 1 million views found only about 25% were negative, leading him to conclude the "heteropessimism" narrative around dating burnout is overblown by culture writers
- Bumble announced in May it was killing its swipe feature to lure users back, a pivot Thelot frames as a response to a burnout narrative he calls a mirage
- Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket have drawn droves of young bettors wagering on events from Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show to Oregon wildfires
- Thelot's research on young men trading meme coins from 2020 to 2024 found the activity was mostly social, conducted in group chats called "the trenches," where users lost money together as a twisted form of male bonding
- Thelot dismisses AI doomsday fears, arguing most global problems are bottlenecked by cooperation and coordination rather than intelligence, and links worship of intelligence to Francis Galton's eugenics philosophy
- Thelot's book "In Defense of Being-On-Line" publishes this fall
Why it matters: Thelot's data-backed reframing — that only ~25% of high-view dating content is negative — challenges the heteropessimism narrative now driving Bumble's May redesign and gives brands, editors, and culture writers reason to question whether viral metrics reflect real shifts or engineered noise.
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