In May 2016, Candace Payne, a stay-at-home mother from Texas, walked into a Kohl’s department store to return some yoga pants and made a purchase that would change her life.
It was a plastic Chewbacca mask that made noises like the beloved furry “Star Wars” character.
Ms. Payne streamed a video on Facebook Live, then a new feature being pushed by the tech platform to encourage users to share in real time. Seated in her car in the store’s parking lot, Ms. Payne giggled in a manner best described as a physical embodiment of the coffee mug mantra “laugh like nobody is watching.”
Except people were watching. Lots of them. It was an instance of internet monoculture, a few days when it felt like everyone on social media was keyed into the same thing.
A decade ago, that was not exactly a rare occurrence.
Once “Chewbacca mom,” as she quickly became known, exited the stage, in would come a parade of others who briefly became “main characters” and earned the Homeric epithets that long outlasted their turn in the spotlight: the “BBC dad,” “Cinnamon toast shrimp guy.”
Going viral online often involved ordinary people stumbling into transcendence. It held the potential to change your life. It could give a small business an enormous boost overnight. It could land you a walk-on spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and a comically oversize check from that day’s corporate sponsor. You could become the face, briefly, of Ocean Spray, and give a rock song from the 1970s its biggest streaming week to date.
These mass, attention-getting events had nothing to do with world leaders or extreme weather or tragedy or Hollywood celebrities. They were low stakes, but they became a global pastime.
“During the rise of Facebook as a kind of universal platform, and now this feels Neolithic, there were these moments of really universal instant global culture,” said Ben Smith, the co-founder and editor in chief of Semafor.
With the rise of algorithmically driven social media platforms like TikTok, moments that get people around the world talking, on cable news and at the dinner table, are becoming less common. Each user’s feed is hypertailored to them, meaning no one sees the same version of the internet.
Content creation can now be a full-time job, and as most creators jockey for fame and influence, piggybacking off trending topics and buzzwords to game the system, it’s become far easier for the average person to find hundreds of thousands of followers or even millions of views.
“There’s such a saturation on social media that we did not have back in the time of 2016,” said Ms. Payne of Chewbacca mask fame. “You could throw a rock at a teenager and hit one that’s had a viral video from TikTok nowadays.”
But if everyone is going viral, that means no one is.
How Did We Get to a Post-Viral World?
It was Feb. 27, 2015, when seemingly the entire internet engaged in a raucous, low-stakes debate about a striped dress. Was it blue and black? Or white and gold?
The grainy image of the dress had been resurfaced by BuzzFeed, then a nascent media company that had staffed a newsroom with reporters whose remit was relatively novel at the time. These media workers chronicled what was happening across the internet, hunting for some nugget — a meme, a video starting to pick up traction, like a post about a sad grandpa who threw a picnic for his family but only one person bothered to show up — that might move viewers to extreme feelings.
This online world — still quite separate from “real life” — had its own gossip and intrigue, providing diversions for a certain generation of office workers refreshing new media websites like Gawker, HuffPost and BuzzFeed.
Virality was not “a natural result of the internet,” said Rusty Foster, who since 2013 has written the daily media and internet culture newsletter Today in Tabs. “It was an outgrowth of a particular media ecosystem that existed at the time and doesn’t exist anymore.”
Would-be viral stars needed these digital news outlets as much as the outlets needed them. These same outlets had the power to generate viral moments of their own, like the time BuzzFeed got hundreds of thousands of people to tune in to Facebook to watch as employees placed rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded.
As with the dress, many of these flash points generated friendly online sparring. But as harmless as the discussions might have been, they were still “fundamentally divisive,” Mr. Smith said, and would come to help shape the way platforms operate today.
“The reason it spread so fast was because people were arguing,” said Mr. Smith, the onetime editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. The “negative attention,” he added, made some platforms wary.
He recalled Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s co-founder and chief executive, meeting with a senior Facebook employee after the dress went viral. Mr. Peretti was excited. The Facebook staffer, however, was alarmed.
The dress, lighthearted as it might have been, was still a moment in which large swaths of the internet were getting into drag-out fights with one another. It was not hard, Mr. Smith said, to imagine such debates taking a more frightening turn.
Rise of the Algorithm
Not long after the dress and the watermelon, a new app called Musical.ly burst onto the scene, popular with teenagers in the United States. At first, it generated its own versions of viral moments: a dance that hundreds of thousands of people would replicate; the tale of a woman who traded a bobby pin for a house over the course of nearly two years; a recipe for a delicious pasta dish.
As the app, now known as TikTok, grew more popular, its users slowly acclimated to its proprietary algorithm, which at times seemed to know them better than they knew themselves. By August 2018, TikTok had surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in monthly downloads, and to keep up in the race for users’ attention spans, other platforms soon embraced an algorithmically driven approach to surfacing content. In 2016, Instagram began to test a chronological feed — initially to much grousing.
But later, a study backed by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, found that many people preferred the algorithmic experience; a time-based feed left them bored and likely to jump ship to scroll on another platform. That meant internet users could no longer dip into a stream of continuous, linear conversation. Without chronology, life on the internet became more fractured and it became rarer for people to be talking about the same thing at the same time.
“There’s been this sea change from content that is shared by people in your networks to this automatic feed of content based on your own interests,” said Caitlin Dewey, who writes the Substack newsletter Links I Would GChat You if We Were Friends. “Anything that could fairly be called a viral moment,” she continued, “just sort of dissolves and dissipates across many billions of people’s highly individualized feeds.”
By experimenting, people learned how to game the system for eyeballs. Users could hop on the bandwagon of a trending word or format and, without having very many followers themselves, get their videos in front of hundreds of thousands of people on an app with 170 million monthly users in the United States, according to analyst estimates.
Rather than hoping for accidental virality, some TikTokers now brag of being able to harvest millions of views. They are certainly incentivized to do so.
Popular content creators can net thousands of dollars and the equivalent of annual salaries through brand deals. Earlier this year, a talent manager estimated that Alix Earle, a TikTok juggernaut, commands $450,000 for a single Instagram story, a post that is visible on the platform for only 24 hours. Forbes reported that Charli D’Amelio had made $17.5 million in endorsements and partnerships in 2021.
But even without getting so many views, everyday people are also increasingly posting on TikTok as a way to make money. The platform will pay users with a certain number of followers revenue for views and, more recently, the arrival of TikTok’s e-commerce arm, the almighty TikTok shop, has transformed the For You Page into a perpetual mall.
Posting is no longer just about visibility. It’s about income.
Virality Came Fast, and Could Be Gone Just as Quickly
The dream of internet fame and its financial rewards eroded further when TikTok entered an extended limbo period under a looming ban in the United States, including a temporary shutdown earlier this year.
When TikTok returned, some users felt the experience of being on the app had been subtly altered; they were uneasy about the suddenly visible machinations of the platform and the ease with which it could all be taken away.
At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order that forged a path for TikTok to remain in business in the United States. A coalition of American investors will oversee the platform, which will operate independently from TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance.
TikTok’s future in the United States seems settled for the moment, but questions remain for users about what kind of content TikTok’s American leadership will prioritize. Creators may need to figure out how to make a splash all over again under new rules.
Mr. Foster argues that for the most part, things go viral anymore. Today in Tabs, his newsletter, was easier to write, he said, when “there used to be a couple of things everybody was talking about.” Now, to curate his links, Mr. Foster said he relied on private group chats — rather than on social media platforms — to suss out what topics were breaking through the noise and worth covering.
He would not have had to look far, though, on the days when Tareasa Johnson and Hailey Welch became the internet’s avatars — Ms. Johnson, better known as Reesa Teesa, for the twisty, turny 50-part tale about her ex-husband that she shared on TikTok, and Ms. Welch for a lewd joke that earned her the moniker “Hawk Tuah Girl.”
If it briefly seemed as though the internet was back to its old ways, that notion was quickly dispelled when the two women’s fates followed much different paths from those of the viral stars of the 2010s. Swiftly, Ms. Johnson inked a deal with a talent agency and had her story optioned for television; Ms. Welch embarked on a splashy press tour and landed her own podcast.
No longer a lighthearted diversion, a widely viewed video is a serious business proposition.
When Going Viral Makes You Sick
To keep users engaged, those same strong emotions that helped shape early viral content had to become more extreme, meaning that much of the content that captures widespread attention features belligerent people being yanked off airplanes or screaming at fellow drivers in parking lots.
To go truly, universally viral lately is almost always to be having a particularly bad day, like this summer when a married tech executive was spotted with a female colleague looking very cozy on the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert.
“Either they’re having an affair, or they’re just very shy,” Chris Martin, the band’s frontman joked onstage as the couple tried to skirt off frame.
It was too late, though, and by morning their names, faces and personal details were everywhere, from social media to mainstream media outlets, including this one. Astronomer, the company where they worked, put out an ad shortly after to capitalize and redirect the attention. It starred Gwyneth Paltrow, Mr. Martin’s ex-wife.
Behind the joke was a chilling reminder that, with cameras always rolling, anyone could be the star of the next Coldplaygate.
Ms. Payne, or Chewbacca Mom, continues to enjoy the spoils of her brief moment in the spotlight. She still lives in Texas, but has since carved out a multihyphenate career as a writer, podcaster, speaker and self-described “joy evangelist.” In an online store, she sells $25 motivational journals and $5 key chains full of “emergency confetti.”
She said she did not regret the course of her life; still, Ms. Payne was wary of anyone else looking to purposefully trace the same path.
“As I look back,” she said, “I would hope that nobody would really want to be viral.”
Photos in article: Chewbacca Mom Photo: Candace Payne via Facebook, Ocean Spray Skateboard Guy: Nathan Apodaca via TikTok, The Dress photo: Cecilia Bleasdale via Facebook, Watermelon photo via BuzzFeed, Renegade photo by Jill Frank for The New York Times, Hawk Tuah still Tim and Dee TV via YouTube, Coldplay photo Instaagraace.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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