The Legacy Of SNARF

Nine years ago, a pair of employees of a popular viral news site decided to test the capabilities of the platform they were targeting by grabbing attention in the most effective way possible: By doing something crazy.

In their case, they grabbed a watermelon and a whole pile of rubber bands and tried to see how many rubber bands would fit around it until it burst, Gallagher-style. It was also a test of a different kind: How many people would latch onto their Facebook Live stream based only on the promise of insanity?

The answers, respectively, were 690 and half a million—both more than anyone probably expected.

This classic idea is reflective of what BuzzFeed ultimately wanted to be—a fulcrum point for all things virality. If there was a platform, BuzzFeed would find it, engage with it, try to do viral things, and make money from the transactions. That was their business model.

There’s just one problem: This exchange only works if the platforms match your vibes and welcome your input, and unfortunately for BuzzFeed, they long haven’t done so. Beyond Hot Ones, which the company sold to an investment firm last year, BuzzFeed hasn’t had a hit in a while. Sure, they have successful posts—a piece about Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian cleverly responding to criticism of wife Serena Williams’ appearance in the Super Bowl scored a solid 160,000 views just today. But that’s a far different situation than where it was in the mid-2010s, when it was scoring millions of views on Facebook and Instagram daily.

Per Statista, traffic to its website has fallen 30% since 2022—a time when it had a news operation. BuzzFeed and its subsidiary HuffPost represent 142 million views a month between them, according to SimilarWeb, but the sites aren’t thriving compared to similarly sized competitors, such as Business Insider and Politico.

Which is perhaps why BuzzFeed wants a moat. What does that moat look like? Well, on Tuesday, Jonah Peretti laid out his plan: The Anti-SNARF Manifesto. What the hell is a SNARF, besides a famously cute character from an ’80s cartoon? Here’s Peretti’s explanation:

SNARF stands for Stakes/Novelty/Anger/Retention/Fear. SNARF is the kind of content that evolves when a platform asks an AI to maximize usage. Content creators need to please the AI algorithms or they become irrelevant. Millions of creators make SNARF content to stay in the feed and earn a living.

Essentially, this is the kind of content BuzzFeed is specifically known for, mostly in the S, N, and R categories. (Certainly, this describes the watermelon video, perhaps with the addition of a fear factor—would the watermelon kill these viral creators?) But Peretti says that this system creates negative motivations in the creator ecosystem:

We are all familiar with this kind of content, especially those of us who are chronically online. Content creators exaggerate stakes to make their content urgent and existential. They manufacture novelty and spin their content as unprecedented and unique. They manipulate anger to drive engagement via outrage. They hack retention by withholding information and promising a payoff at the end of a video. And they provoke fear to make people focus with urgency on their content. Every piece of content faces ruthless Darwinian competition so only SNARF has the ability to be successful, even if it is inaccurate, hateful, fake, ethically dubious, and intellectually suspect.

Peretti, despite being responsible for introducing many of us to this very dynamic of content, says that users desire alternatives to this approach, and it’s something that many consumers are getting sick of. BuzzFeed wants to offer an alternative to all this. Which means he’s working on a new kind of social network, which aims to offer an alternative to the social cues of virality that BuzzFeed has traditionally benefited from.

“We are creating a new social media platform built specifically to spread joy and enable playful creative expression,” Peretti said. ”This social media platform will use AI to give users agency instead of stealing their agency. I’m fed up with giving the platform companies advice about how to fix the internet, if we want this done right, we have to do it ourselves!”

The concept, which appears to be called BuzzFeed Island, seems to want to raise BuzzFeed, a company behind a lot of internet culture, into a better version of said internet culture. It’s kind of an interesting choice, and honestly, it sort of reminds me of what cohost was trying to do. But it also seems like it would have been more useful when the company had more cultural leverage.

Like, what if the watermelon video came out on BuzzFeed’s own social network in 2016, rather than giving all of that power to Facebook? It might have helped offer a sense of balance to what the internet had on offer. We can’t live in regrets, but BuzzFeed clearly had the power and technical know-how to not let its network get diluted by shifting cultural tides.

Many of the critiques I’ve seen so far have knocked BuzzFeed for not wanting to join the fediverse, but I don’t think that’s necessarily fair. It’s too early to judge for that, and it’s possible that it needs a sort of cohost-style incubation to allow it to build its own culture so that it’s strong enough to survive on its own. BuzzFeed may be struggling, but odds are, it will be more likely to make the business work than cohost was. (It helps that Peretti is credited as inventing the reblog, a fundamental part of internet culture, so his reputation in the virality realm goes way back.)

I will concede it would be nice to have it plug into another platform. But maybe that’s not what it actually wants to be. It’s called BuzzFeed Island. Is that shorthand for “a BuzzFeed island unto itself”?

There are plenty of folks being snarky about this, but I’ll take him at his word.

I would like to pose that if BuzzFeed wants to raise itself on this journey, it should bring in partners that are culturally aligned with it. The Dodo and Upworthy, both somehow still around today, come immediately to mind. But it doesn’t just need to be the big guys. If BuzzFeed becomes an incubator for talent, like it was when folks like The Try Guys and Quinta Brunson and Ryan Broderick passed through the building, awesome. But I do think there is a need for folks on the open web to not have a place where every post, even the relatively innocuous ones, get targeted by SNARF.

Last night, when I posted my egg carton piece on Bluesky, I got a couple of replies that suggest that even if I don’t want the SNARF, the SNARF often comes to you anyway. (There is a contingent on Bluesky that wants to make literally every topic political.) And that can be disappointing when you just want to share your creativity with an audience.

I don’t agree with everything that Peretti has done over the years—the very least of which is not hiring me when I interviewed there a million years ago, because who cares at this point—but if we’re taking him at his word, he is still in this for the creator, who does not benefit from constant SNARFing.

But do we take him at his word?