Structure 007: Twit Madness?

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Anyone tired of brackets yet? I was in a festive mood this week, so I decided to celebrate the end of March Madness with a bracket challenge of my own. I collected polls from thousands of respondents (not at all, just me here) to develop what I’ll dub as the official Structure 2023 Twit Madness Bracket. Twitter and general internet trends fought it out for the top spot as champion. Let’s see who came out on top and review some of the trends we’ve seen come and go online recently. We’ll introduce the competitors in the first round then see how the rest of the bracket plays out.

Northwestern Division Round 1: Twitter Threads vs. Venture Capitalists

This matchup is an interesting one because there is some significant overlap between competitors, but we can sort through that. I discussed some thoughts on Twitter threads in my last post and the rationale there stays the same. The algorithm started boosting thread engagement to the moon and this resulted in a massive influx of lower quality (being nice here) threads plaguing our platform. Threads belong on the platform and when done well, can be a great addition to any content scheme. However, for a while there it was a problem (full thoughts here).

Venture Capitalists (VCs) is a wide category and that’s by design. I wish I could dial it down to one company, area, or niche of the industry, but I can’t. VCs have a viable use case for networking / interacting within tech Twitter. It makes sense for them to Tweet a lot in certain spaces. So, they do. They Tweet a lot. Which is fine, but it’s not exactly uncommon to find some crazy opinion, or weird thought starter posted by a VC which then in turn sets Twitter on fire for a day or two. Luckily we’ve got @VCBrags (great follow) to keep them honest.

Winner: VCs

Southwestern Division Round 1: Hype Trains vs. Shitposting

Not sure who did the seeding for this bracket, but this is a top tier matchup that belongs in the championship. We’re lucky to witness greatness like this so early in the tournament. Hype trains can loosely be described as the growing interest around an (usually) unproven piece of technology. People love to be right about things and pledge their allegiance as early as possible, we see it in sports every single day, stocks, etc… When a new concept comes around and starts to pick up steam, people are often quick to hop on the train regardless of any true understanding of the concept at any level deeper than face value. This results in a hype train where all of life will change because of this one new idea. Web3 was the last one (not a knock on blockchains, actually, but that hype train was huge) and the current one is AI. Again, the reality of a hype train has no relation to the usefulness or legitimacy of an idea or tech, it’s all about the volume of people supporting it for no reason outside of hearsay. Always keeps it interesting online.

Shitposting doesn’t need a ton of introduction. There is an art to shitposting and some people have mastered it. Taking true domain level knowledge and applying it to jokes is something we’ve seen a rise in recently. Accounts like Litquidity pioneered how popular that type of humor (finance niche) could become and we’ve seen spinoffs spanning every industry you can think of. This type of humor has then trickled down into normal Twitter outside of the main “meme” accounts. We’ve seen memers online start by making jokes about tech workers and end up raising a round to invest in companies. Shitposting is powerful and the jokes are always welcome.

Winner : Shitposting

Northeastern Division Round 1: Fake Features vs. Cold Exposure

There was a Huberman Lab podcast episode that turned the general population on to the potential benefits of limited cold exposure daily. One of the most popular methods being an ice bath. A short ice bath each morning was linked in a scientific study with potential benefits to focus, energy, mental toughness, metabolism and more. This was all the internet needed to turn it into a mini hype train where anyone with an audience suddenly was tweeting about their cold exposure each day. A few companies that make cold exposure tubs definitely saw some enhanced impression volume / sales numbers during this time. As much as I want to leave VCs in their own matchup, they carried a good portion of the load here. All that said, this trend came and went. Haven’t seen the words cold exposure online in months. Not to say they aren’t effective or still in use, but the hype certainly came and went.

Fake features is one of my favorite trends as of late. Spearheaded by Soren Iverson. This trend stemmed from designers taking popular apps, IOS features, or anything else on your phone and creating mockups of how certain features would look if implemented. Some are cool little tweaks it would be interesting to see, and some are just hilarious. I don’t speak for the public by any means, but they haven’t gotten old to me just yet. Votes to cancel a Google Meet invite, Tinder Net Worth indicators, and Instagram community notes just scratch the surface of what people have come up with online. Highly recommend further investigation (cc @soren_iverson , @0xGaut).

Winner : Fake Features

Southeastern Division Round 1: Emergency Analysts vs. AI Content

Emergency analysts is a difficult one to pin on a specific event since it happens so regularly. Twitter is always filled with noise, but when any sort of white-collar crime, flop, or fold happens that noise triples. Half of that noise is likely due to the emergency analysts. This phenomena is when users with no background or history within a subject suddenly feel compelled to instruct the general public on that subject when the engagement looks most appetizing. Recent examples of events include the SVB bank run, Crypto Luna death spiral, and after covid-19, anything related to sickness or disease. These examples all resulted in lots of discourse online and there is nothing less useful than seeing someone with a background in not finance describe the inner workings of a technical financial event. I’m not the most educated on every subject I talk about and that’s not a pre-requisite for writing, however don’t pass along an opinion in the midst of a crisis as advice. Please.

Artificial intelligence has made some crazy content creations a lot more within reach than they previously were. Not going to get into the high level implications of AI here, but it made for some hilarious content. This may not appeal to everyone, but the videos of our 3 most recent presidents playing video games together made me laugh without fail for quite a while. Joe Rogan playing Minecraft with Elon. Not sure who comes up with these, can’t link anything to one specific account or two, just random videos on my timeline that made me laugh. What’s not to love.

Winner : AI Content

We’ve ran through our competitors and played out the first round, before we get to the final results let’s see a few honorable mentions.

• Elon : The guy purchased Twitter and as a recent development had some super engagement boost attached to his profile. We literally couldn’t ignore him if we tried. Impressive.

• Forbes 30 Under 30 : A year or two ago it became public knowledge that some people were able to pay their way into Forbes 30 Under 30. After that it’s been the butt of jokes year after year as being high signal towards grifters or Ponzi schemers. Makes for content every year, true or not.

• Originality : What if it was never about the bracket, but about the memories along the way? I love that thinking through this bracket, it would look entirely different if I did this last year, or the year before that. The mass stream of consciousness we’re able to see online provides endless content yes, but also communication, inspiration, and undisturbed access to humanity. The internet is great. Even when I complain about it, it’s good to keep that in mind.

Now let’s close this out , here’s the final bracket.

Final Winner : Shitposting

It’s a wide topic which leads to a lot of upside. It hasn’t gotten old to me yet and I truly hope it never does.

Thanks for reading through this post, back to a standard essay next week!

‘Till next time

Braxton

Song of the Week

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