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[Flying Dice]

Do comedy websites strive to be the saddest, lowest-effort pieces of garbage on the internet? Or is that just incidental?

I feel like all their content nowadays is either "Hey, here's some gifs I found on tumblr!" or "Hey, here's a screenshot of a funny tumblr post!" When your entire website fills the same function as having a tumblr, how the fuck do you convince people to give you money?

I mean, I guess it's no better than the olden days of stealing funny pictures and putting your watermark on them, but at least all the funny pictures weren't all drawn from the exact same website.

Just Look At These 15 Reasons Why Comedy Websites Have Nothing Original

Spoiler: xkcd did A Thing (click to show/hide)

It's not just comedy sites. I swear half of the "online reporters" hired by major new agencies now only know how to report in the form of the Top 10 List. CNN even had an article on the guy that fucking started the trend, to whom they owe 60% of their fucking content now! When I was in J-school, I was told that was shit writing, shit reporting and basically a college student's effort in a professional business. And now, 4 years later, it's basically the goddamn norm in web media.

It fucking enrages me these people get paid to do this work, the equivalent of what a 14 year old does between masturbating and calling people fags in an online game. Trolling Twitter for the last stupid shit someone said is not journalism. Creating lists that are guaranteed to be based off something like a Cracked or SA article is not journalism. Paying some schmuck with a beard to write not-funny articles about some stupid shit he thought about today is not journalism. Posting whatever fucking viral cat video is making rounds on youtube is not journalism.

I have dreams sometimes of a Zombie Walter Cronkite rising from his grave to drag all employees of CNN, Fox, MSNBC ect....under the age of 40 screaming back into the deep earth with him.

"The Dead Are Rising!? 15 Things You Need in Your Survival Shelter"

[i2amroy]

I have dreams sometimes of a Zombie Walter Cronkite rising from his grave to drag all employees of CNN, Fox, MSNBC ect....under the age of 40 screaming back into the deep earth with him.

"The Dead Are Rising!? 15 Things You Need in Your Survival Shelter"

"Midlife crisis? New jobs for older people! Top 8 currently hiring news companies"

[nenjin]

I mean, the recent Buzzfeed list craze hasn't really caused the quality of news to drop. They've just stopped pretending it's respectable. Now the format matches the content.

And it might not be an entirely bad thing! Remember all those news articles that were 50 words of news and 450 words of bullshit to fill space? Now they'll just be a 50 word list and you can dismiss them at a glance!

I'm one of those crazy people who still likes to read news, sometimes in paper format. The format determines a lot about how something is delivered.

And the change to online IMO has lead news to be delivered faster, sexier (an actual term used in the business.) But you also get a ton, an absolute ton, of filler content because not everyone honestly has something worth reporting every moment of every day. They might, if they were tasked with covering something you can't understand in an hour or less, and deliver in 30 seconds.

So I find the trend of most news articles online being accompanied by video irritating, if it's even got a written article attached to it. The shit starts playing instantly when the page loads, and some talking head is making broadcast speak in my ear. (I learned the artifice of broadcast speak as well. So when I hear it, it kills me because I know the intent is to sound conversational, friendly and usually funny in some way. Which was led to a rash of people saying incredibly stupid shit on live TV because they're basically expected to improv an entire news hour, going one minute from "dat cat video" to talking about hundreds dying in Syria to a chemical weapons attack.)

Also, what you term 450 words of bullshit is context and it's there for the benefit of someone who doesn't know about a story until they pick up that article. Here's a novel idea though; instead of paying someone a salary to write the same article every day and add a new line, pay them to actually fucking report on something. Go somewhere, talk to some people, ask some goddamn questions. I have seen articles online today that are literally yesterday's article, copy/pasted with a new line added. Not unlike a forum or blog post.

When you expect content on the hour, you get an hour's worth of effort in that content. That's what I see reflected in the way things have changed, even since I've gotten out of college. Sometimes it hard to call CNN a news site when a large portion of it is given over to fluff, essentially paid advertisements (the # of stories based solely around product releases has shot through the roof in recent years. CNN is basically a shill for certain products. Some release events you really can't get around as news, like an iPhone release. But when you're suddenly making news out of the fact JayZ makes headphones, something smell rotten.) Media has become very passive, because being active, i.e. sending reporters out to cover complicated stories, is both expensive and increasingly dangerous. So new media has gotten very used to information it can find without leaving the office, or information that's given to them rather than discovered. CNN (who I single out because it's really the only website I go to for news anymore, just to catch important headlines) does occasionally do good journalism on things they care about (environmental/social issues tend to get the most play.) But that's about half of what they do.

About the only thing I think I appreciate about new media is that, sometimes, the right person is in the right place with the right technology and you get news unfiltered by editors, advertising, hype and sometimes even the journalist's self-censoring. Being able to literally put the reader/viewer in the middle of it. But that I think makes up a fraction of what constitutes news right now.

I want a return to the dignity and professionalism of nightly network news. I felt like I could respect these guys and when they spoke it was worth listening to. Sometimes because they had the time to process what was happening and have something to say. Maybe just because familiarity breeds contempt. Either way, I can't listen to the majority of broadcasters now because most of them have been trained to be likable, casual and to deal with the news quickly. When you're dealing with all the insane shit going on in the world today, it's not a time to be glib about it or dedicate just as much time to it as you do to all the frivolous shit people entertain themselves with, without your help.

[GiglameshDespair]

I definately think it's a part of 24 hours news. Everything needs to be fresh, snappy and catchy.  Drama, drama, the most eye-catching headline.

I rememebr the reports of the big floods in - New York, I think it was? The BBC was describing it as an 'apocalyptic scene'. Having no electricity is bad, but not the apocalypse! Few if an ydied. No one was in great danger. There were no great outbreaks of panic, looting or disease. It was a disaster, sure, but in the lightest sense of the term, and calling it apocalyptic just cheapens the meaning, really.

[Flying Dice]

It's sort of funny, really. Aldous Huxley predicted bread, but we wound up going for circuses.

[mastahcheese]

As I was in the middle of writing a rage about Steam feeling the need to update a stupid number of times, I accidentally hit the wrong button combination on the keyboard and it closed out of all of my internet tabs.

Hmm.

[hops]

My Google Chrome seem to do that often too. I think it's generally a bad idea to have hotkeys for that but noooo

[Frumple]

If the browser is worth a damn, you can rebind that sort of hotkey to either nothing, or something you wouldn't accidentally press.

[ChairmanPoo]

I almost exploded at work yesterday in sheer rage.

[Draxis]

As I was in the middle of writing a rage about Steam feeling the need to update a stupid number of times, I accidentally hit the wrong button combination on the keyboard and it closed out of all of my internet tabs.

Hmm.

I haven't found a way to actually change the hotkey in a sane way, but there is a Firefox addon which disables it.

[Frumple]

I haven't found a way to actually change the hotkey in a sane way, but there is a Firefox addon which disables it.

Firefox's help pointed to this.

What the hell, though. Hotkey customization not part of the built-in functionality? Firefox confirmed for junk browser. Opera stands supreme. Again.

why would you even do that argh

[nenjin]

Go to your address bar.

Type about:config

In the search bar type backspace (that's usually what I hit on mistake and back browse.)

If you set value = 0, you basically unbind that key.

I don't know what governs closing the whole browser in FF, but it's probably in there.

[MagmaMcFry]

As I was in the middle of writing a rage about Steam feeling the need to update a stupid number of times, I accidentally hit the wrong button combination on the keyboard and it closed out of all of my internet tabs.

Hmm.

Try pressing Ctrl+Shift+N.

[Arx]

Ctrl+W?

AFAIK, that closes most windows.

Thank you greatorder! I have been wondering what the "Close current tab" hotkey is for weeks.

I can now open a tab, search for something, and close the tab again in seconds.

[Yoink]

From the Happy thread:

AHAHAHA I just put the washing on!
I AM A SEXY SHOELESS GOD OF domestic chores. >.>

I finally put my washing on, after wearing the same clothes for several weeks. I kinda wanted to wear new clothes for stuff tomorrow.
Of course, by the time I finally unlocked the laundry and got the frigging washine machine to work (it stopped partway through rinsing, for some reason, and I had to fiddle with it for ages), I ended up coming back upstairs and dozing off. Woke up at past 1AM in the morning, wondering how I ended up in bed.
Then it hit me, and so I dragged myself out of bed and tiptoed downstairs to pull my washing out at half-past one in the morning.

Great job, Yoink. Now I'll have to wear some of the remaining unwashed clothes for the first half of tomorrow, and hope at least something's dry by the evening. Times like this I kinda wish I had a dryer.

Edit: Yes! Yes, let's put my stupidity up on a nice, fresh page for all to see and laugh at! Hahaha.