https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/07/buzzfeed-gawker-huffpost-internet-traffic-media-ben-smith-traffic-interview

Ben Smith was BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief when it was at its peak. He explains how the groundbreaking site and its rivals changed the media – and sowed the seeds for their own demise

In any technological advance there is a golden age in which, for pioneers and believers, remaking the world seems within their grasp. For social media, that moment was just over 20 years ago, when to digital evangelists it felt like a new generation of “citizen journalists” – bloggers – might create a connected utopia of transparency, sweeping away those crusty media “gatekeepers” who had – the theory went – so long kept us all in the dark. This imagined paradise was a place in which no one had yet heard of cat memes and dick pics and Andrew Tate; where anti-vaxxers and anonymous “patriots” still just wrote furious letters to editors in green ink in their bedsits; where likes and follows and trolls and gifs and pile-ons were not yet the stuff of life.