Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026

TL;DR

• 1

  Disney's FiveThirtyEight takedown is called 'digital arson': Zvi treats ABC and Disney deleting 538's archive after refusing to sell it back to Nate Silver as a case study in how large institutions casually destroy valuable public records.

• 2

  '90% of the internet is fake' is overstated, but stealth marketing is real and cheap: He cites Fledify's 65,000 rentable dummy accounts and a $1 CPM for clipping campaigns, while arguing the actual equilibrium cannot be mostly ads or platforms would collapse as signal sources.

• 3

  Mental health awareness can manufacture some of the suffering it tries to prevent: Drawing on Dasha Sandra and Michael Inzlicht, he highlights concept creep, nocebo effects, and illness self-labeling as mechanisms that can turn ordinary distress into pathology, especially for young people.

• 4

  The UK social media law is really an ID check for everyone, not just a teen ban: His key objection is that platforms like YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, and BlueSky become gated behind identity verification, with 70% to 80% public support making the politics even darker.

• 5

  Taste is partly about avoiding overused tricks, but great art must also work for novices: Using Scott Alexander's writing on cliches, AI prose, and architectural examples, Zvi argues that true greatness should reward experts without becoming ugly, inaccessible, or 'easy mode.'

• 6

  Several small practical heuristics are more useful than they look: He endorses walking for 15 minutes to boost creativity, replying to job outreach immediately, asking 'Are you lying to me right now?' to break social scripts, and using 'don't suffer twice' only when worry no longer affects the outcome.