Blog:A Rant About Millennial Blog Sites

Here on this tiny wiki of ours, me and Vicious187 like to rant a lot about modren day blog posts and news sites, especially the ones who's target audience are Millennials and have a left-leaning political stand, like BuzzFeed and the late Gawker.

An interesting thing is these sites we rant about basically have the same problems. And I don’t consider that a coincidence. These issues are, of course, not exclusive to these sites targeting Millennials and SJWs, or those “gaming websites” that GGers like to complain about so much. Let’s take a look at them:

1. Clickbait Titles
No, I didn't make up any of these titles.
 * Zendaya Posted An Adorable Photo With Her Dog But Fans Noticed One Weird Detail
 * This Girl Opened Twitter To Find Her Dad Had Gone Viral In The Most Awkward Way (Come and click me!)
 * 18 Cats Who Are Beyond Pumped For Taylor Swift's New Album (Jesus, I’m so bored.)
 * This Black Muslim Just Became A Lord Mayor And People Are Loving This Photo Of Him (He just succeeded in life and all you care about is a f***king photo?!)
 * This Woman Is Embracing Her Birthmark In The Most Beautiful Way (Oh, for crying out loud!)
 * Why BuzzFeed Doesn't Do Clickbait (Now that’s hypocrisy if I ever see any.)
 * There’s a penis on my backpack (I'm sure there's a vagina too, but you're too obssessed with male genitals to notice.)
 * My fart will go on (It'll be gone before you even caught a whiff of it)
 * Your Boyfriend Was Spotted in Pittsburgh (I'm straight and I have no boy friend!)
 * How Are We Still Having the “Strong Female Character” Debate? (It would have ended already if you stop bringing it up all the time!)
 * Here's the Absolute Best 2014 Cat Calendar (Oh,sure! I'm SO intrested in FAKE calendars!)

Seriously, what is this trend with the ridiculous titles?! They look like the kind of trash called "sponsored links" we see on the site and bottom of the blog post pages! Sure, their weirdness may poke people's curiosity, but one look at them and I can tell that the content behind these titles are as crappy and shallow as the titles themselves. I don't care about what on earth is going on, my time is better used in trying to get a high score in Desert Bus!

To be honest, today's ad supported revenue models pretty much encourages bad journalism and shoddy content. These people don't care about making quality articles anymore, all they care about is making something to attract attention, incite clicks and gain ad views. It's simply more profitable to write multiple low-effort, poorly sourced or superficial articles rather than few well-researched ones.

Some people will even defend their sensationalized and misleading titles in every way they can, even if it means making themselves look like jerks and compromsing their future career.

But does it work on the long shot? Eventually people will see through your trend and stop paying attention to your articles unless they're extremely bored, and even then the only thing they will do is to visit your site (with adlock on), archive your page, share it with the rest of the Internet to show how ridiculous you are and convince more people not to drop by on your site... and you can watch your already limited income dwindle.

Next time you see these "Guess what happens next...", "Big companies hate it but...", "Doctors are shocked...", celebrities' trivial stories or some nonsentional title, steer clear of them, your time deserves better usage.

2. Biased Reporting
This narrative pushing is becoming more and more common now days in these left-wing Millennial blog posts and news sites. They either only report their own side of the story, or simply warp reality into something they want you to see. An here we are, with James Rolfe's video having more than 143,000 likes and the Ghostbusters trailer sitting at 23rd of the top 50 most disliked YouTube videos. Quick question: DID YOU EVEN READ HIS F***ING MEMO? Face it, Ellen Pao got fired because she was being obnoxious and a nuisance. If it was Elliot Pao, I imagine the result would have been the same.
 * James Rolfe: I won’t see the new Ghostbusters film, the trailer looks bad, it has no connection with the 1984 original and it’s shameless attempt to bank on the name to get fans to see it.
 * Media: James Rolfe is an entitled, sexist angry nerd who won’t see the new Ghostbusters because it has women and is progressive and different.
 * James Damore: Google is wrong to force diversity into the industry, there's a reason that men are more common in our industry: men are more adapt at dealing with machines while women are more comfortable around people. So we need to make changes to help them adapt to the IT industry.
 * Media: James Damore is against diversity in the IT field and claims that women are biologically unfit for programming.
 * Reality: Ellen Pao lost her sexual discrimination lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins and now must pay more than 270K in legal fees.
 * Media: Ellen Pao has lost but won and has helped uncovering sexism in Silicon Valley, #ThankYouEllenPao.

Least we forget about the tone they use, so condescending, so self-important, telling people how they should feel about things or how they should react, as if the writers themselves are the only ones who have their heads out of the clouds:

"Games should be delighted to include modes that remove all their difficulty and challenge, and players should cheer when they hear about it." Oh, sure, Mr. Walker! We gamers will be SOOO pleased with an easier than easy mode that makes the game inclusive to filfthy casuals who don't even care about learning to play it!!!

In SJW newspeak, this will be called “mansplaining”.

To be fair, this can be somewhat hard to avoid as journalists are humans, and humans have preferences. But there’s one thing every single journalist should bear in mind: Your job is to tell the story—both sides of it, not to determine who’s right and who’s wrong—that’s the job of the audience and the commentator. You don't have the right to tell your readers how they should think, nor should you try and guilt them into your echo chamber.

3. Forcing In Politics
This can be considered another form of clickbaiting: Want to attract eyeballs? just throw in controversial topics like social, race or gender issues!

This seems to be very common among media covering pop culture subjects like video games, movies and comics. Usually, the content that discusses the matter is spiced with some SJW ideology. And geeks are simply sick of it.

But here’s the deal, you are here to talk about pop-culture, the audience come to your site to read about pop culture, not politics or progressive ideology. Who the heck pays you to write about politics? How hard is it just to deliver something your audience want to see? I don’t care how Ready Player One "promotes toxic alt-right nerd culture ", how Black Panther "embraces its blackness" or how “anti-Trump” Rogue One is! I want to see action! I want to know about the characters and the lore! I want entertainment!!!

And don’t give me that nonsense about how all entertainment have to be political, if that’s the case, they won’t be called “entertainment” anymore, they will be renamed “propaganda”.

Then there’re people who write about games, they literally deserve a category of their own: What about the gameplay? How are the graphics? What system is the game compatible with? Are there any glitches I should watch out? Are there any loot boxes? Are the DLCs worth it? You’ve spent two thirds of your article ranting about how openly misogynistic and racist the game world is and haven’t helped me decide whether or not to buy the game at all!
 * Kingdom Come: Deliverance—Racist!
 * Call of Duty: WWII—Whitewashing!
 * Bayonetta 2—Sexist!
 * The Witcher 3—Misogynistic!
 * Cuphead—Ableist!
 * Soul Caliber—Problematic!
 * Forza Horizon 3—Portrays Australia too nicely!

I don't know what to say. Just... DO YOUR F**KING JOB! Leave the politics out of it and let people have FUN! Oh, right, you don't know what "fun" means... :-(

4. Regressive Ideologies
What the hell is up with all this anti-male, anti-right, anti-white and pro-censorship agendas?! These days left-wing sites are publishing articles about how toxic and sexist men are and about fighting causes that only first world upper-class women would consider problems—cultural appropriation, white privilege, rape culture and other ridiculous notions.
 * 22 Ways the Letters in 'Republican Party' Can Be Rearranged Into Rape Anagrams (Now you're just wasting your time.)
 * White men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it (Didn't we stop "them" in 1945 already?)
 * Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American (And I hope that you're not a racist douche)
 * White guys are killing us: Toxic, cowardly masculinity, our unhealable national illness (Being the majority is now an illness?)
 * The Marine Corps has a “toxic masculinity” problem (On Memorial Day?! Have you got no decency?!)
 * It’s time to consider a curfew for men (So they won't work extra hours to provide more income!)
 * The Far Right Are Uniting Around Their Right to 'Free Speech' (Which is a right any human should have!)
 * No to Movember, Share the Funds, Shave the ‘Stache (This really needs a trigger warning put up)

The best explanation for this is, well, SJWs have became so loud over the years that these publications actually believed that social “justice” is the current trend now. So in an attempt to incite more clicks, they started posting these SJW pandering garbage. How well did it work out for them? Well, instead of attracting more radical feminists and hardcore SJWs, they only brought to themselves people from KiA, TiA and other anti-SJW/feminist group who archived their articles, shared them and made a total laugh stock out of the publications. We always say that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but I don't think that's so true.

But it appears that these publications simply won’t learn, and keep on posting these articles with quality reminiscent of LJN video games. Eventually, even the shitposters and the anti-SJWs got bored and decided to simply ignore them and find something more interesting to do. And what happens next? The site’s precious traffic will simply tank and their already dwindling ad revenue will be even lower.

I think that its important to remeber that just because something is "popular" or "progressive" doesn't automatically make it morally correct. Everything is certain to have flaws, and the last thing we should do is to follow the concept like a cult and treat every aspect of it like dogma.

5. Corny Humor
Besides the condesending tone many of these blog posts use take treats the readers like morons, another somewhat annoying but similar trait many of these sites like WatchMojo and Buzzfeed share is the frequent use of satricial humor. Many writers attempt to make themselves look witty and relatable when it comes to conveying opinions, but usually it backfires.

"Comedy doesn't work unless someone's getting offended." says George Carlin.

Especially satricial humor, these could be challenging to make as it requires subtaly or outright insult someone in order to convey the point. To make it succeed, it needs to make people feel more humored than offended. The pop-culture nerds (gamers, comic book readers and anime fans etc), who are usually looked down upon by the society, are usually on the reciving end of this corny humor trend, either their hobby or themselves get mocked in these situations. And this is actually part of the reason why this style of writing can backfire: nerds are already sick of being belittled and they're usually defensive of their hobbies, so they're most likely more "triggered" then amused.

This is not saying that satricial humor should be censored, but that doesn't mean we can use it whenever we want on whoever we like. It's usually not a good idea to use this type humor and set the subject of mockery as your target demograph, you may think that you're being witty with your lighthearted and cheeky humor but your audience may only see you as a smartass who should be avoided.

6. Pretty Much The Same

 * Top 10 saddest deaths in...


 * Top 10 most hated/loved (insert channel) shows


 * Top 10 (insert genre/franchise) characters who...

Why don't we have a Top 10 Most Overused Countdown List Topics? Sure, there are plenty of YouTubers out there who make countdown lists like these, but the likes of Angry Joe and PhantomStrider make lists based on their personal experience and opinons while most of these popular blog posts like WatchMojo make lists based on critic scores and popular opinons (or at least what they think is).

It's not just WatchMojo or countdown lists, various blog sites are posting hihghly similar content that have been written by different people with same mind. Like the aforementioned backlash against Ready Player One, dozens of publications tried their best to push their narritives about how the movie "promotes toxic nerd culture" and "gatekeeping" all the while gamedropping as much as they please. One would have say that these journalists were concluding again and this is "Gamers Are Dead" encore, just shows how they have learned nothing since 2014.

Sure, sticking to the "popular opinions" may be the safe way, with how trigger happy people are these days. But when pretty much everyone does that, it becomes very stale indeed.

Summary
Overall, it can be quite hard to create a decent blog posting site with neutral coverage, fact checking and original ideas, since there are already a ton of similar sites out there. The biggest benefits these Millennial blogs have is to serve as lessons on what mistakes you should never make in order to prevent your creation from becoming a pandering, mindless junkfood site that is so common now days. Profit should not be the one and only thing on our minds, because the more desperately we desire to gain wealth, the less likely that will happen. And pushing the audiences' bottom line is never a good idea.