Social media has become a freak show

SNIP But every now and then, a FiveThirtyEight article would “go viral” on News Feed. When this happened, it seemed literally almost completely random. It wasn’t even particularly well-correlated with the headline. And it was inversely correlated with the depth and quality of the article. But here’s the thing: that “viral” traffic was almost worthless. A lot of it quite literally consisted of people who visited the site for 5 to 30 seconds, read a paragraph or two, and never returned. Twitter, then also near the peak of its influence, was a comparatively better platform for us, often producing more...