Substack Live on Trump/Iran Monday at noonI needed a break today from writing about Iran, Trump, and/or basketball, so let’s talk about another of my favorite topics: social media. However, I will be conducting a Substack Live with Galen Druke at 12 noon tomorrow (Monday), where we’ll discuss what increasingly looks like both a foreign policy and a political crisis for the White House. You can join us on the Substack App in real time, or I’ll send the video out to subscribers later. I’m also taking questions for SBSQ #31, which I’m hoping to get to sooner rather than later.FiveThirtyEight (re)launched under Disney/ESPN in March 2014. In retrospect, our timing wasn’t great. Despite various missteps, we were trying to deliver a differentiated, engaging, high-quality product. But this was probably the single period since the web rose to prominence when the quality signal was least well-rewarded.1Publishers believed that maximizing “reach”, particularly as measured by the number of monthly unique visitors, was the key to success. It didn’t matter how long someone stayed as long as they visited your site, for any length of time, at least once during the month. And no platform provided more opportunities to trawl the ocean depths for potential customers than Facebook, which was then close to the peak of its influence. Entire businesses like Upworthy were premised on gaming the News Feed algorithm, often through peculiar clickbait headlines such as “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next”.You will believe what happened next: it didn’t work. The whole period was like the Underwear Gnomes meme come to life. Phase 1: Collect lots of low-quality traffic from Facebook. Phase 2: ???. Phase 3: Pivot to video.It didn’t help that Facebook was constantly tinkering with News Feed, and grossly exaggerating metrics like average time spent watching videos. But more fundamentally, it was locked into a zero-sum, adversarial relationship with publishers. Facebook wanted readers to stay withi