We’ve all seen this before.
A friend (or acquaintance) on facebook has posted one of those annoying buzzfeed quizzes again. Why would I need to take a quiz (which will probably not give an accurate answer anyway, nor actually contain any options that I can fully relate to) to validate my life? And yet I find myself a few minutes later, despite the fact that I have spent many seconds of my precious time debating whether I should actually do the quiz, taking said quiz. I now know that if I were a food, I would be sushi, I should really belong back in the ’90s and I would be sent to the deepest depths of Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Nice.
Me. In food form.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love sushi. And yes, I would have loved to have actually been grown-up enough to enjoy the nineties (not saying that I didn’t enjoy them, just my memories of them are pretty hazy from being, you know, small). And Lord knows which circle of hell that I’m going to, it was all made up by Dante and I don’t think that it’s real anyway. However, why is my spare time being used like this? Shouldn’t I be doing something more productive in this time? (hah) Or at least pretending to? And to top it all off, who on earth is making all of these? Are they just being turned out by some quiz making machine?
Google describes Buzzfeed as a “social news and entertainment website”. On the front page today, we have eye-catching headlines such as “29 mind-blowing ways you can eat chips” (really?) and “21 sexy ways you can eat spam”. There are many other equally fascinating stories, but I just happened to pick the two random ones that jumped out at me the most. (The fact that they’re food-related is completely coincidental. They’re not all food related.) As you scroll down the page, “quiz” and “omg” fill the corners of randomly selected article pictures, if you feel quizzically or “omg-ly” inclined. There are just so many articles shouting out at me that it hurts. Who on earth could look at this sort of thing all day? The ratio of pictures to text is far too inclined towards pictures for my personal taste, and it’s giving me a headache.
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I understand that it’s a way of getting quick, amusing “facts” that may impress your friends for all of, say, two seconds. However, the way that it presents itself as a headline-grabbing, picture/gif-orientated site brings into question the validity of some of those facts. And the fact that there are so many copycat sites around as well, pretty much imitating what this does. I am sick of clicking links on facebook to something that is either from buzzfeed, or from some buzzfeed-esque site. They must be making millions in ad revenue from people like me accidentally clicking on one of those links (having been linked by friends) thinking that I would be stumbling upon informative articles, but instead have to wait a good 10 minutes for a page full of gifs to load. Yeh, there are a lot of articles where many can say “I can relate to that!” However, is there a way to do it that isn’t so garish? Or stupid?
I don’t know about you, but I like my facts in a form that requires a little bit of mental input to process. I find it makes me remember them a bit more. Maybe if they did it in a way that requires a little more reading, requiring them to do a little more legwork behind their articles, it would appeal to me more.
Or maybe I should find some new friends on facebook. Hah.
tldr; buzzfeed articles are too stupid. But very clever for making money from this stupidity. This angers me. People are stupid
Little ado about everything 