BuzzFeed accidentally unified trivia and news through the same viral machinery

Evidence

Jonah Peretti’s years working to understand the mechanics of virality finally paid off in 2015. BuzzFeed won the internet for a day with “the Dress,” an optical illusion that sparked debate over its colors: Was it blue and black or white and gold? There was no additional depth to the story, yet as former BuzzFeed News editor in chief Ben Smith recalled, “The Dress was an unmitigated triumph for BuzzFeed and for Jonah. The kind of social content he’d hoped would define us.” … BuzzFeed’s last major viral moment came in 2017 with the News team’s release of the Steele dossier, filled with unverified claims about Trump’s ties to Russia. Smith recalled, “I loved the traffic…. My news operation, always jealously eyeing the clicks that came from silly lists and quizzes, finally had its version of the Dress.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 518

Categorization

• XREF: The Dress and Steele dossier sharing ‘the same traffic logic’ is a concrete instance of Marx’s larger claim that format/substance collapse into one thing — links to his omnivore monoculture thesis. — connects to: BuzzFeed pioneered a news model built purely on social sharing across mobile platforms — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1066; Winning the attention race did not make BuzzFeed profitable — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1073
• SEED: The watermelon-elastic explosion and the Dress as ‘content with no depth’ make a nice essay figure for how attention became the only metric in the post-curation internet.