As AI-generated noise floods our social feeds, big platforms are effectively throwing up their hands and declaring “slop bankruptcy.”
Today, we explore the friction between technology and society with Devin Gaffney, CEO of Graze Social, who is fundamentally rewiring the attention economy. We dive into the architecture of outrage, the illusion of “credible exit” in federated networks, and how his company, Graze Social, acts as a “Photoshop for algorithms.”
You’ll learn why platforms are designed to trigger “forest fires” of engagement, and how empowering individual users to design and monetize their own custom feeds might be our best defense against the coming wave of AI slop. Stop consuming the hype and start understanding the mechanism.
Devin Gaffney is CEO and Co-founder of Graze Social, a platform for custom algorithms on the open social web that has served 10M+ users and delivered 28B+ posts. His career spans civic tech and social platforms — from misinformation research at Northeastern and Oxford to ML infrastructure at Meedan — with work in WIRED, The Atlantic, and PLOS One.
Find Devin:
https://www.graze.social
https://www.devingaffney.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devin-gaffney/
Watch us on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WmQA7uNHj54
Time Stamps:
(00:00) Episode Preview: Automating behavior on social platforms.
(01:47) Devin’s background in tech and academia.
(08:23) Exploring Blue Sky.
(11:00) Understanding the decentralized social networking model.
(16:45) How outrage fuels the attention economy.
(25:55) Graze: Building custom algorithms without code.
(34:15) Developing an open ad network economy.
(45:40) AI’s impact on social media algorithms.
(51:10) Big tech platforms declaring slop bankruptcy.
(58:55) Cognitive bias and the outrage machine.
Support the pod:
https://3reate.com
https://ko-fi.com/3reate
https://patreon.com/3reate
Listen:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3reate/id1723426314 https://open.spotify.com/show/48Y2M7Ppja43Uq2wlyUtPF https://youtu.be/2wEMD8EvB9I?si=G3iUBE-z4Mx0Ng-Y