Shitposting at Meta
Meta built a social network for itself.
It was called Workplace. A feed for the people who built the feed. Tens of thousands of employees scrolling an internal timeline optimized by the same ranking logic the company had spent years defending in congressional hearings.
The layout felt familiar. Groups for launches. Groups for launch readiness. Groups for explaining why the launch wasn’t ready.
There were also investing clubs. Parenting groups. Remote-work survival threads. Entire micro-economies of advice and coping strategies flourishing between OKR updates.
But the real capital city was a group called "Shitposting at Meta."
Shitposting served as the company’s pressure valve. Reorg bingo cards. Calibration memes. Layoff fears converted into gifs. The organization studied itself in plain sight, performing ignorance as a type of survival tactic.
Even internally, the feed was ranked. Engagement dictated reach. A meme about performance season could eclipse a VP’s carefully worded strategy post.
Legend says the ranking model had to be updated because Shitposting kept overpowering the employee feed. The world’s largest social network had to demote its own employees' amusement so people would close the tab and open their tasks.
Two employees sitting side by side could experience entirely different versions of Meta depending on what the algorithm decided was worth their attention.
An attention economy within the attention economy.