Breadcrumbing and Jestermaxxing

dating apps feel "millennial coded"

Grace and Anna Van Patten are Hollywood’s hottest sister act; reality TV star Paige DeSorbo turned bedrotting into a business empire; Bridgerton breakout Regé-Jean Page will act in and produce a West End stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby; Harry Styles announced album listening parties in 40 cities; and Vogue interviewed Apple Martin for their spring issue.

GEN Z HAS PERFECTED THE GLORIOUS ART OF BOREDOM AS ENTERTAINMENT, telegraph
The biggest audiences on the internet’s newest platforms are gravitating toward “Just Chatting,” a live-streaming format on Kick where a person simply sits in front of a camera and talks to viewers for four to eight hours with no guests, no segments, and no script. The format traces a direct lineage from Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM to JenniCam in 1996 to reality TV’s 24-hour live feeds, all built on the appeal of “someone else’s ordinary life.” It’s the boring parts that create the connection — the silence, the tangents, the scrolling Wikipedia pages — because “the nothing is what makes the something feel real.” After decades of media getting louder and more engineered, Katherine Dee writes that this return to ambient, unstructured content “might be the most hopeful thing I’ve seen in years.”

‘JESTERMAXXING’ IS TAKING OVER THE INTERNET — AND SOMEONE’S MAKING MONEY, businessinsider
The looksmaxxing lexicon — terms like “jestermaxxing” and “frame mogging” — has broken out of its niche forum origins and flooded mainstream social media, driven largely by the sudden rise of 20-year-old Clavicular on Kick. But the virality isn’t purely organic: According to Katie Notopoulos, much of it is being accelerated by “clippers,” third parties who extract the most outrageous moments from livestreams and podcasts, slap on clickbait-style captions, and post them across social media. These clippers, who earn money through platform creator programs or directly from the content creators themselves, are incentivized to find the most ridiculous clips and pair them with the most attention-grabbing language, creating a feedback loop where the vocabulary itself becomes the viral product.

VCS ARE THROWING MONEY AT RECENT COLLEGE GRADS TO BUILD PREDICTION MARKETS, forbes
Over $40 billion was wagered on Kalshi and Polymarket in 2025, with $10 billion in January 2026 alone, and both platforms’ twentysomething founders are now billionaires. Enter: A deluge of recent college grads now building the next wave of prediction markets, from 24-year-old USC grad Gabriel Perez Carafa’s Noise (an “attention marketplace” where users go long or short on internet trends, valued at $35 million) to 22-year-old UC Berkeley student Ronit Jain’s Pluto (a market for betting on GPU costs, raising at $60 million). Chemistry VC Mark Goldberg, who said that “the line between gambling, gamification and consumer finance has never been more blurry,” predicts trading volume will go “100x in the next 5 years.”

START-UPS, SKIING AND SOCIALISING: WHY YOUNG BRITS ARE MOVING TO GERMANY, thetimesuk
Young British professionals are increasingly relocating to Germany — particularly Berlin, which registers about 500 new startups annually, is home to 21 unicorns, and where more than half the population is under 45. The cost of living is dramatically lower than, say, London: Furnished one-bedroom rentals in Berlin average around €1,647/month, while Leipzig — which has the fastest-growing population of any German city and has been dubbed “the new Berlin” — offers city-center one-bedrooms for €700/month. Kyomi Wade, 34, who moved from London to Berlin, says the city still has “the same experimental and creative side, with less pressure than London.” Practical draws include Germany's €63/month Deutschland ticket for unlimited urban transit and Europe's fourth-highest minimum wage at €13.90/hour.

HOW GEN Z DATES, theupandup
Ahead of Valentine’s Day, Rachel Janfaza surveyed dozens of Gen Zers ages 16-28 across 10 states and found that dating apps feel “millennial coded” to this generation. Instead, they want to meet partners the old-fashioned (read: “boomer coded”) way — IRL. Financial instability is reshaping romance at a fundamental level: as one 18-year-old said, “many people turn to shallower relationships to bide their time while they become more financially stable and ‘able to’ date.” The “talking stage” — weeks of texting before an actual date — has become the norm, with “breadcrumbing” now so pervasive that one respondent said they “wish ghosting would come back in style.” Perhaps most depressing, a 24-year-old man said that “the trend of people opting out entirely does not get enough attention — the ‘silent majority’ are simply not dating.”

LOVE BOOKS AND HATE DATING APPS? THESE READERS ARE BRINGING BACK THE MEET-CUTE, usatoday
Bored of Dating Apps (BODA), a London-born organization now active in New York, is tapping into massive dating app fatigue by hosting in-person singles events, like a sold-out mixer at Book Club Bar in Manhattan’s East Village that moved 200 tickets across two sessions just days before Valentine’s Day. Attendees described apps as “clinical” and “transactional.” “I read a lot of romance books,” said Shreyas Seethalla, 24. “That magic doesn’t exist anymore.” But maybe it could, at a thematic in-person mixer? Though it’s only been around a few years, BODA’s events have already resulted in weddings and what the founders call “BODA babies,” with hosts acting as built-in wingpeople to lower the social barrier.

One last thought:

@logm4#asu #varis #frat #framemog

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser