GAWKER BECAUSE INTERNET WE CRANKS NOW FULL

Gaze upon our collected works and despair. Like our forebears, we too speak a common tongue in erecting our Tower of Babel, but ours is language of shares and clicks and uniques. To be more specific, it looks like the original skyscraper in the original desert. Upworthy is now 'so much more dominant than other news sites on Facebook,' wrote The Atlantic's Derek Thompson, 'that when you graph its Facebook-shares-per-article, it looks like a skyscraper dropped into a desert.' Among them were posts like the one whose headline misleadingly claimed doctors were injecting HIV into a dying girl to treat her cancer. The leader, Upworthy, had about seventy-five thousand likes per article, twelve times more than fourth-place BuzzFeed. Among the more revealing graphs was one tabulating Facebook shares per article by domain. Earlier this month, NewsWhip posted statistics about the most frequently shared sites online.

GAWKER BECAUSE INTERNET WE CRANKS NOW FULL

That mastery of social media platforms is imperative, because this was the year someone isolated the DNA of the viral story, and the world-hearts full of wonder, hope, and maybe a little fear-saw for the first time the awesome potential of viral content. 'We reject the idea that the media elite or people who have been trained in a certain way somehow have the monopoly on editorial judgment.' We solved the riddle, and then we got eaten anyway.īuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti admitted as much when explaining, that, when he's hiring, he looks for 'people who really understand how information is shared on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and other emerging platforms, because that is in some cases as important as, you know, having traditional reporting talent.' Upworthy editorial director Sara Critchfield seconded the notion. We in the media have been struggling for twenty years to solve that riddle, and this year, the answer arrived: Big Viral, a Lovecraftian nightmare that has tightened its thousand-tentacled grip on our browsing habits with its traffic-at-all-costs mentality-veracity, newsworthiness, and relevance be damned. The Internet, like the Sphinx, is a ravenous beast that eats alive anyone who can't answer its hoary riddle. It's hard not to note the tidy symbolism here. Needless to say, the photos were bullshit.

Gawker because internet we cranks now