Music

Are rappers our new content aggregator overlords?

by Tyler Munro

Facebook is weird. Because it’s used by, like, the entire planet, publishers were quick to jump onto it as the means to force-feed you content, something we’re obviously including ourselves in. But then Facebook caught on: In an attempt to minimize memes and quizzes, they added in a continually changing algorithm that made it harder and harder to reach people who liked your page. So what’s the solution to getting your content out?

Rappers, it turns out.

If you like Raekwon, Waka Flocka Flame or Common, you’ve noticed this. Weirder still, most rappers we’ve found sharing dank memes and hot viral content like they’re someone’s weird aunt tend to favour the same websites, namely MiC and Diply. Is this a conspiracy? Has hip-hop Facebook been bought? Gucci Mane will go days without posting his own material, tucking a #tbt in between posts about giant animals and couples bathing together.

Whatever the case, this is super weird, especially when someone like Common, or whoever runs his page, spends presumably thousands of dollars sponsoring and serving an ad about slam dunks. It’s not like these are fake pages, either; these are verified by Facebook as official artist pages. Some sites are (erroneously) calling Diply the quickest growing page on the internet, but the fact remains that if they’re successfully leveraging tens of millions of hip-hop fans on Facebook, they’re undoubtedly a new powerhouse in the viral content game. That Raekwon’s page has seemingly been recently scrubbed of all of the listicles he shared (complete with captions about #7 bringing him to tears laugh crying emoji) puts a funny taste in our mouth.

And then there’s potential future U.S. President Waka Flocka Flame, who’s seemingly turned sharing viral content into a part time job. He’s got his own viral site, Wakavision, which publishes content on the secret life of Adolf Hitler, Muscular People You Just Wouldn’t Believe Are Real (#3 had him in stitches!) and so on and so forth.

We’ve put together some examples of this in the gallery above.