Stop Chasing Trends: Focus on What Actually Matters

For the better part of a decade, Ruby Thelot has approached viral content with a simple, repeated checklist: Is this a paid promotion? Is the account behind it even real? Is this a genuine cultural shift, or merely a momentary blip?

Recent internet crazes like the “6-7” meme and “looksmaxxing” have escaped their niche corners, but not every piece of online jargon or subcultural quirk is destined for the mainstream. Think back to the NFT hype that tech executives insisted was the future, or the brief moment when Clubhouse was crowned the next big thing in social audio before burning out spectacularly. Even the experts got that one wrong.

Thelot, who studies cyber-ethnography and media theory at NYU, argues that our tendency to overestimate trends stems from the internet’s fragmentation. The web has become “balkanized,” he says, with users isolated on their own “digital islands.” What looks like massive virality is often just the product of algorithmically force-fed content. True virality now travels between these isolated provinces, not across a unified public square.

His upcoming book, In Defense of Being-On-Line, arrives this fall. In a recent conversation, Thelot unpacked why virality is a shaky yardstick for measuring culture, why the so-called dating burnout narrative misses the mark, and what the surge of interest in prediction markets really tells us.

JASON PARHAM: When we try to judge whether a trend is legitimate, is the core issue that we confuse short-term buzz with long-term adoption?

RUBY THELOT: The real problem is that virality used to be a useful indicator of culture. Now it has become the end goal itself. This ties into Goodhart’s law, the principle from British economist Charles Goodhart, which states that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a reliable measure. People are now designing content with the sole aim of racking up views, without any regard for the intrinsic value of what they are making. That intrinsic value is what actually determines cultural staying power. We have pushed Goodhart’s law so far that you can manufacture virality without it ever seeping into the broader culture.

Dating burnout has dominated headlines lately, prompting apps to pivot toward AI-driven features. Bumble, for instance, announced in May that it was scrapping its swipe mechanic to win back users. But you argue that this burnout narrative is largely a myth.

Heteropessimism, the term for the general disillusionment straight women feel toward dating straight men, has been circulating since 2019. There is no doubt that a real group of people genuinely feel this way. But consider this: a friend of mine recently published a New York Times piece titled “There’s Nothing Wrong With Wanting Men,” which took a more hetero-optimist stance. She felt compelled to write it because the prevailing mood was so grim.

We decided to test this. I analyzed around 1,000 Instagram and TikTok videos, each with over a million views, to see what share of the content was actually negative.

What did your findings show?

The negative content hovered around 25 percent. I also wanted to see if certain platforms skew more pessimistic than others. I am trying to map out these digital islands and identify where this specific commentary gets amplified. For example, X has a trickier algorithm that tends to foster more negativity. My conclusion is that heteropessimism has been blown out of proportion by culture writers, and I say that as someone who contributes to magazines myself.