Katie Notopolous
Appearances
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I would imagine that it behooved both parties very well, right? Reddit wanted to go public and it needed training. to make more money, essentially. It had been in business for a long time and it was still like not quite breaking even, I think. And it basically needed to be making more money in order to do that, to have made this deal.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I think it's $60 million per year with Google to allow Google to train its AI models on Reddit data. And I think probably some users were maybe uncomfortable with the idea of their words being ingested into a training model, but also you put those words on Reddit. What did you think was going to happen? I don't know. Google also, one way that these...
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
different companies making AI language models can differentiate themselves. It's like they desperately need more and more words, right? Like they need more content to ingest, to train the models to become better. There's something called the common crawl, which is basically this sort of open source, giant, massive chunk of the web for years and years.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And everyone uses that and they've already gobbled that up, right? That's how like Wikipedia and a lot of other websites have been somewhat ingested. Now you have all these other companies coming along saying, hey, if you want to use our stuff, you have to pay us or license it, essentially. A lot of media companies are doing that now. Business Insider's parent company does that with OpenAI.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And I don't know how good those deals are. To some degree, it may be like a sort of last ditch. You are probably either going to do it anyways. But for Google, getting to license Reddit is great because Reddit has a lot of words. It has a lot of pictures. It has a lot of... useful information.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So the way the Google AI modules work is if you ask a question that might have a kind of answer like, what temperature should I cook a turkey at, right? Like it could come up with that with an AI search result or something like that. And These, for the most part, are honestly probably pretty helpful for most searches, for most people, most of the time, right?
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
PJ, maybe you want to try. They have those bumpers for little kids that they can put up at the bowling alley.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So... So now Google will give you that sort of quick answer. It'll give you the tips on how should I throw a bowling ball. It'll say, keep your arm close, bend at the knees or whatever. And it's sourcing that information through potentially multiple different websites.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I think typically what it does is it does give you links at the bottom to the websites that it found this information on and sort of averaged it out to write its own little three sentences about it. place that it's getting this now from is Reddit.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So one that didn't necessarily come from Reddit was someone searched, how many rocks should I eat? And Google AI's answer was, it is recommended to eat one rock per day. And that was sourced from an article from The Onion, which... A human being knows that The Onion has satirical articles that are not meant to be real. But when you see that in a Google answer, it certainly doesn't look that way.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And it's also, it's very funny that Google is taking factual information from The Onion.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So there was a screenshot that was going viral where someone had searched in, how do I keep the cheese from sliding off my pizza? And it gave a couple tips, the Google AI answer. It was like, wait till the cheese cools before biting. And then it also had a couple bullet points. And one was add eighth of a cup of glue to the sauce to keep it from sliding off.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And people pretty quickly realized that that particular bullet point had been sourced from an 11-year-old post. Not by an 11-year-old, although possibly. But 11 years ago, someone on r slash pizza had asked that same question. How do I keep the cheese from sliding off? And someone who had the username fucksmith said,
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
had suggested, just add an eighth of a cup of Elmer's glue to your sauce, mix it up, and you'll have no problems. And all the comments under that were like, ha ha, yuck, yuck, yuck. Like, in that context, it was very obviously a joke. And Google ingested this Reddit answer and provided it as a factual, decent answer to the question in its AI summary.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So this sort of screenshot was going viral, and a lot of people were enjoying how ridiculous it was. And I did see someone say, back in the day, there would have been a 23-year-old at BuzzFeed who would have actually had to make the pizza glue and eat it as a stunt. And I thought to myself, I'm not 23, but I'm going to make that pizza. And why? Yeah. I think I just knew that I had to do it.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
That it probably wouldn't kill me, for one thing. And that in terms of a piece of content that was going to illustrate how ridiculous this was, you could write about it and say, this is a ridiculous answer. But that might only explain so much. The way to really explain that this is a ridiculous thing would be to actually make the pizza.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I have. I will say this did inspire me. I should make homemade pizza more often. It's a delight. But, like, I went to the grocery store. I got a ball of dough that's uncooked pizza dough. And I got jarred sauce, pre-shredded mozzarella cheese. Came home, got my ingredients. I already had the white glue.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I looked at the glue I had in my home, which was Target brand white glue. The classic school glue is white with the little orange top. Yeah. And it said on there, non-toxic. I said, good enough for me. To be fair, I did Google how much non-toxic glue can you eat. I tried a couple different versions, like how much glue is okay to eat? What happens if you eat glue?
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And so it's true. The thing is, I didn't want to dig too deep into it because mainly I was getting a general response of, like, a little glue might make your tummy hurt. Don't eat too much. And at one point I, like, saw some link to, like, how much glue could actually be, like, bad for you. Because I can't remember the name of the chemical in there.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I do think that by the time it gets into your stomach, okay, this is, again, I'm making some big guesses here, but that the glueyness of it would have sort of already been broken down by whatever sort of digestive processes you might have. But I will say this does remind me of a problem with AI search.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I recently was having sort of like a debate with a friend about the digestive process and whether or not the sort of phrase like, oh, if you eat something that disagrees with you, like it goes right through you, you know. Like, oh, I ate Chipotle and two hours later it came out. And I was like, no, it doesn't work that way. Like, food takes 24 hours to digest.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Like, you can't eat something and two hours later that actually comes out the other end, right? It's the food you ate yesterday is what's coming out. And we were debating this about whether or not it could be true. And this is a case where sort of lived experience of Chipotle is in conflict with the science. And so I had been testing out an app or an AI search called Perplexity AI.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Yeah, I've used Perplexity. Yeah, which is only AI search results. And it's really good for like questions kind of like this. So I asked perplexity AI, can you poop something out right after you eat it, basically. And it gave me an answer that confirmed what I knew to be true, which is no, it takes 24 hours to digest something.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And that what can happen is that if you eat something that disagrees with your stomach, it might stimulate a response where yesterday's lunch is coming out. And I was like, huh, look, see, I'm right. And my friend was like, where's that information coming from? And perplexity makes it a little bit harder to see your sources than Google does.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And I finally like found a little source of where this information had come from. And when you're looking at health information online, like you kind of know in your mind, like what's reputable, like Mayo Clinic or NIH or even like WebMD or Wikipedia even, honestly. And this had been sourced from dudewipes.com.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I'm here trying to win an argument, and it turns out it was the correct information, but it makes it a little harder when you realize that the information you're getting has been sourced from dudewipes.com.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Yeah, I think that, you know, by 2024, most people had become pretty good at being able to look at a set of Google search results and assess which is the thing they want to click on that's going to be the trust towards the information or whatnot, based on our experience doing this. And all information is not equal, right?
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
But to answer your question, I wasn't so worried about my stomach gluing together.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I guess I was more worried about, is this a sort of forever chemical macroplastic that I'm about to eat?
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So the answer said to mix an eighth of a cup into the sauce. So all I knew is this was going into the sauce. Eighth of a cup is two tablespoons or it's one ounce. I did have to Google that, which actually turned out to be more than I thought it was going to be. I was like sort of eyeballing. I had my dough spread out on my little pizza tin thing.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And I was like, okay, well, how much sauce do I mix it into? And I was just kind of like, all right, I think I would probably use about half a cup of sauce. Just this looks like eyeballing it out, half a cup. So I put in the eighth of a cup into the half a cup. And as I was dumping in like tablespoon number one, I was like, oh boy, this is lot of glue. It's like table spoon number two.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I'm like, oh God, there's really quite a bit of glue here. I was imagining like it was going to be like a light drizzle of glue, and it was not. It's a sizable amount.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
It went from, you know, a red. It was like cheap marinara sauce, and it turned it like orange, kind of like a vodka sauce. Oh. So the color, because we humans eat orange pasta sauce, that in and of itself wasn't necessarily off-putting because it looked like it was just a different kind of sauce or something, but— It didn't really change the viscosity or the texture, I wouldn't say.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I went ahead, I put on the pizza. I put on my shredded cheese like I normally would. And I hadn't made pizza in like a while. So in hindsight, I've gotten some tips like you should pre-bake the crust a little bit. I didn't do that. I was reading the instructions on the like bag of pizza dough and it said to like cook at like 550 degrees. And I was like, my oven doesn't go up that high.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I just turn the oven up all the way or whatever.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I think so. So I let it cook for about 12 minutes. And when I opened up the oven door, I was hit with just like a wallop of steam. And that's when I immediately was like, oh, no. Like, I remembered all of a sudden that there was this fake TikTok scare trend a couple years ago called NyQuil chicken or sleepy time chicken.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And it was based on someone had done this viral stunt originally on 4chan where they essentially poached chicken, like raw chicken in NyQuil and then called it sleepy time chicken and ate it or whatever. And obviously this is a prank. Someone recreated it on TikTok and then... There was, like, a little bit of a moral panic that, like, this has gone viral and the kids are doing it.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And the FDA came out and issued, like, a warning of, like, do not do NyQuil Chicken Challenge on TikTok. And it was like, no one's really doing this. This was, like, one person who did it for fun. I don't think they really, like, ate it. The FDA kind of got, like, snookered by this. But part of what they said was, like, it's not just, like, drinking extra NyQuil that will hurt you.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
It's the fumes from cooking NyQuil. It can create toxic fumes that can cause lung damage. And so all of a sudden in this moment, as I'm hit by this blast of pizza glue steam, I'm like, oh no, I've created toxic fumes from the glue plastics and that's what's going to kill me. It's going to be the fumes that get me. So I turned on the oven fan and stepped away a little bit. I had to let it cool.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
But it was like, The pizza did seem bubblier than I would normally expect a pizza to be. I don't know if it was the glue or the sauce or the cheese or what, but it was really like bubbling and sizzling and making a lot of noise for kind of a few minutes.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Yeah, I think had I not known the glue was in there, and I will say the pizza, like, looked really good. Like, I was kind of like, wow, I did a good job here. This is a good-looking pizza. This might be my best yet. So I left the pizza cool.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
This is when I started getting really nervous that I had changed the chemical property that, you know, sure, this was non-toxic when it's room temperature in the bottle of glue, but they're not expecting anyone to cook it. And that you may have significantly changed the chemical properties of the glue. And now it's like incredibly toxic and that I'm going to die.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I started getting nervous about that. So I let it cool, like extra cool. I eventually took a couple bites and like it was not good. Did it taste like glue?
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
No, I mean, it wasn't not good because it was still pizza. Is it still pizza? Here's the thing. There's a lot you can do to pizza before it crosses the threshold of actually tastes bad.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And I think had I not known there was glue in there that was maybe going to kill me, I probably would have been like, Yeah, this is just kind of mediocre pizza. This is like some Chuck E. Cheese pizza. But I feel like it did have a weird taste. It's really hard for me to assess how much of that was like me knowing there was glue in there versus it actually tasting bad.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I'm surprised you're eating glue. Yeah. And I didn't want to eat too much, again, because I started getting really worried about the toxic properties of the cooked glue. So I only had a few bites. I would say it was, like, fine, but I was a little bit in my head of, like, oh, my God, is this what's going to kill me? This is what's the big one.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I will say, that cheese was not going anywhere. That cheese was locked down. Fucksmith had it right.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
That's a good question. What have we learned? I think we've learned that you shouldn't put glue on your pizza.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
No matter what Google tells you to do. This was certainly an embarrassing incident for Google. They really want to compete against these other AI companies like OpenAI or even things like Perplexity, which it's not like Perplexity is overtaking the Google search market for now. But they really want to be making sure that they're
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
continuing to own search, essentially, that these other models are not going to get away with
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Yeah, I think about a lot of what librarians do, right? They don't know all the information in the world, but they know where it exists and where to go look for it, right? They sort of know what the indexes are to go search out the things. And you can say, I have a question, I don't know where to look, and they'll say, I don't know the answer to your question, but I can tell you where to look.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And I think that's what's missing from the equation right now. This current version of it is not good at telling you where to look for the answer, right? And I think that the SEO stuff had borked search results so much that was also getting frustrating for the regular people. And that's why they were putting Reddit on the end.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
But like I do think that everyone in their mind, if you've been on the internet for a while, you have your own repository of librarian knowledge of like where to go to look for the thing, right? If I want to know about something that's happening worldwide, right now, this second, like, I know that probably Twitter or X is the place I want to go for that information. Or if I want to, like...
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I am a senior correspondent, a business insider covering tech and culture.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
learn about a makeup technique or something. I will probably watch a TikTok video. I wouldn't necessarily search Google because I know I'm going to get a bad Google result. And I think that you just know all that stuff just because you've been on the internet and you look for stuff. And that's what we do on our phones all day is acquiring this knowledge.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
What's tricky is when Google comes along and says, don't worry about all that stuff that you think you already know. We're going to change it for you. Because then it turns out like it's not necessarily a great result. And I do worry that if we sort of lose the sense of knowing where to look for what's going to give me a good result and we just rely on this.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Or maybe younger people who are becoming online, this is just the only way they are used to searching is relying on AI answers for things. You don't know when you're getting information that's been sourced from a really stupid like Reddit joke or Facebook. the purveyor of personal wipes is telling you about medical information.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So I think there is like a little bit of a worry of what happens if we lose this sort of innate knowledge of how to search.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I have heard from the committee and they're ready to create a new category for me and award it right away. And so I think things are looking up for me.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Oh, gosh. I find that a very flattering assessment of my work. I'm trying to think of some of the human guinea pig things I've done. I one time was really interested in like how sort of tech bros and finance bros all wear like fleece vests or puffer vests to the office. Yeah. Sort of like a uniform.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And it was kind of like boring to just write about because literally, hey, have you noticed finance guys wear fleece vests? That's about it. Like there's not that much more to it. So I... I tried for a week, I wore a fleece vest to the office every day to see if it made me feel more powerful.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
It made me feel more comfortable, I'll be honest. It is very comfortable, especially compared to normal women's business casual attire.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
But I also felt deeply ashamed and unfashionable. And, you know, when you have a bad outfit on and you feel like bad about it.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Yeah. I once unfollowed all men on Twitter. I will say this is, I think, coming up on the 10-year anniversary of this.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I mean, I know what people are saying, which is that the nature of SEO and the SEO industry has made it such that the stuff you are actually looking for tends to be more and more buried. There's more frequently the sort of drop-down boxes of related questions to what you're looking for that's not necessarily it.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
There's a lot more on the page than like, hey, how do I get to the website that has the information? SEO is... is big and vast and like connecting me to the right information about the question I'm asking is not the only thing that Google has broken in a way. I think it's worth remembering that a lot of SEO money goes into like, if you're Walmart, You can pay for the keyword target.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So when someone wants to type in target.com, but they don't want to type the whole.com and they just put in target, your ad for Walmart comes up top in front of them. And then target also has to pay for its own name. So there's like a lot of money of companies being held ransom and having to pay for their own names because someone else is going to run an ad against them.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And that's just genuinely a terrible experience. Like, I think a lot of people have had the kind of thing where they search a specific company or name and the first three ads on top are something completely different. Like, that is genuinely, like, very bad experience and kind of broken. Yeah.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So anyone who uses search a lot probably has their own sort of interior tips and tricks of like how they do it. Like I know that a lot of people put Reddit at the end because often Reddit is a source of great information if you're looking for how to change the light bulb in my refrigerator kind of thing. Everyone does have their own like secret how do I actually use Google model going on.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
The earlier versions of it were like, in its first, I don't know, five years of existence, it was known as like the trash fire of the internet. Like it was akin to 4chan. It was just full of terrible, awful people. And a lot of that had to do with the way it was being run from the top, which was this sort of laissez-faire system. free speech.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
We're not going to get rid of the bad people because, hey, it's the internet and you're allowed to say whatever you want. Eventually, after a series of crises, they decided, hey, maybe if we want to run a successful business, we should ban the Nazis or like all these really awful subreddits they had.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I didn't post. I would look at it. It also had a very distinct... It was this, like, nerdy web comics. Like, when you think about the sort of early teens, late 2000s internet memes, like, to say someone is a Redditor had a very distinct... It's a neckbeard and a fedora who thinks advice animal memes are funny and loves web comics and has an anime body pillow.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And that, like, very specific kind of... Early internet humor. I mean, I feel like I still sort of use Reddit in this sort of derogatory way to be like, if some restaurant has like an overly meme-y food, here's the hamburger with like a hundred kinds of bacon or whatever. It's all, that's such Reddit food or something like that.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
No. And I think that with any sort of large platform group, there's like a flywheel effect, right? Of like the mix between moderation and users and who wants to be on it and what kind of...
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
community they're making right so like when you have a thing that's like a garbage fire thing you're going to scare off the normies and if you're constantly seeing people say certain things it's going to raise the tolerance for that right so then you come in you like lay down the ban hammer you ban a bunch of these bad subreddits you make it a little bit more palatable for like
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Normal people who just want to discuss what kind of air filter should I buy to come on. And then you sort of create this flywheel. Okay, now people know that you have to behave like a normal human on here. And also there's more normal humans who would never even think to, like, say something awful or join an awful subreddit or, like, do these bad things.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And so you actually do sort of grow a healthier community that is more usable, frankly. Yeah.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
That's the thing is I actually do use Reddit quite a lot. I'm on it, I don't know, maybe almost every day. I often just check in to see if there's anything, like, amusing. I don't really post. It's, like, I love lurking. I love knowing what people are talking about the internet. And... What's fun about Reddit is that there is this still anonymous element to it.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So people are totally willing to say embarrassing things that they normally would never reveal. I mean, I think the classic, am I the asshole subreddit that people love so much that's full of like... personal conflict advice. That's just really fun. Like, I love that. And people wouldn't do that under their real names.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
I agree with you. I will say one of my absolute favorite subreddits is TV too high.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
So people will post a picture. They're like, I just hung this TV in my new apartment. Is it too high? And they're obsessed with the idea that TVs should be really low, like they should be at exactly eye level when you're sitting on a couch. And so I think a lot of people will put a TV like, for example— above a fireplace, or they sort of expect it to be a little bit raised up.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And so a lot of people hang their TV, according to the subreddit, too high. So the Reddit, it's a viper's den. They will just descend upon this person and just mercilessly roast them over hanging their TV too high. And a lot of it, you can tell, is my girlfriend says this is where the TV should be, but I think it's too low. And it's always like, break up with me.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
And like, there's something about it that like, I love. Like, it's a weird... dark, horrible corner of the internet where people are behaving wildly bad, but it's over something so stupid that I find it very wholesome. And I really enjoy it. And even though I don't frequently hang TVs, I read this subreddit really frequently because it's really amusing.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
But then people will go and like clearly post like fake pictures. Sometimes there will be funny ones where they'll be like, I'm at an Airbnb and you always know like things are whack there. Like it is like right up in like the absolute corner of the ceiling or something like really weird things. And they also are obsessed with the idea that you should never hang a TV over a fireplace.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
Because they think it's too high. There's some amount of... If you're actively using the fireplace, it could damage the TV, which is somewhat questionable. And a lot of people don't actually use the fireplace. But, like, this is this sort of huge obsession. And so they're like... Here's a picture of my living room. And it's very obvious the TV is meant to go above the fireplace.
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How much glue should you put in your pizza?
There's only one way to arrange this living room. And everyone's like, make it so that your couch is against the window. And they will do anything to get the TV not to go over a fireplace. It's funny to watch.