Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
For those of you lucky enough to not know what BuzzFeed is,
it's a website that specializes in lazy click-bait articles
made by losers, for losers.
Welcome to The Best Show in The Universe, I'm Maddox.
The site's bread and butter are list articles with too little to no original content.
The articles contain stolen images, exploited pop-trends,
and *** jokes that use run out memes.
For example, there is a BuzzFeed article titled,
24 Ways You Know You Went To Community College.
Cool, except you only need one: You went to community college.
The article contains a bunch of images with captions on them,
that supposedly aim to persuade you of something you should already know.
The images are almost entirely stolen without credit to the original source.
And when there are sources, they are listed in a tiny lightweight font
beneath the images, and almost never point to the actual sources.
For example, this animated gif of Jenna Mourey lists Tumblr as its source.
Want to know how I know this image doesn't come from Tumblr?
Because it's from a video that Jenna Mourey created.
Also, Tumblr isn't a source because Tumblr isn't a person.
Same goes for the barely animated gif of Simon Cowell blinking.
Clicking on the link doesn't give you any additional information
about where the image came from; only a hot link to the actual resource hosted on Tumblr.
So unless you think this URL is responsible for creating the image
of Simon Cowell blinking, it's not an actual source.
Neither is Reddit, Facebook, or any other large website
that hosts other people's content.
The most egregious example of this is this picture of a child playing with a dog
in an article titled, 27 Dogs That Will Do Anything For Kids.
The source is listed as BuzzFeed.
So I clicked on the link, and it took me to yet another more general list titled,
Kids and Their Pets.
The image is posted there again, except this time with no source at all.
So you're led to conclude that this image is a Bona Fide BuzzFeed Original.
Except it's not. A quick Google image search shows that this image has been posted
on thousands of different websites, some before BuzzFeed even existed.
Once BuzzFeed has exploited general themes that people will click on,
they'll then regurgitate lists for a specific demographic,
to exploit traffic streams from different places around the country. For example:
These articles are designed to mine clicks from specific demographics
so BuzzFeed can use these metrics
to sell sponsored content to original advertisers.
Nobody at BuzzFeed gives a *** about you, Michigan State University,
or the problems Hawaiians are suffering from. You're a pawn.
They're using you for clicks to sell you to the highest bidder.
You mean less than nothing to them.
So, you may be wondering,
how exactly BuzzFeed gets away with stealing so much content.
Well, there's a concept in Copyright Law called Fair Use,
which allows you to use copyright-protected content
for commentary, criticism, news, satire, and academic endeavors.
This loose guideline is the flimsy justification BuzzFeed uses.
For example, there's an article on BuzzFeed titled,
51 reasons why commuting to work sucks.
The article shows a whole bunch of images that supposedly demonstrate
why commuting to work sucks.
Except around number 46, he posts this image with a caption that reads,
How is laughing at the odometer a reason why commuting to work sucks?
Does this commentary qualify as fair use? Is it even commentary?
What is the author saying about the picture that qualifies his statement as an
Some of the lists on BuzzFeed are so minimal and devoid of content
that it raises the question about the fundamental nature of what content even is.
Take for example this article titled,
46 Smileys You've Probably Never Used.
The article is simply a list of smiley faces.
No content; just emoticons. And since emoticons aren't inherently owned by anyone,
There's no reason why anyone else couldn't take the exact same article,
switch the order of the list, and republish it as a whole new list.
In fact, you could take any subset of this list
and publish it as a whole new list. The number is completely arbitrary.
And so is the order, which leads to one of the biggest problems on BuzzFeed:
On August, 19th, BuzzFeed posted an article titled,
25 Reasons Wegmans is The Greatest Supermarket The World Will Ever Know.
Then two days later, they posted
23 Reasons Trader Joe's Is The Best Grocery Store That Ever Was.
So which is it? And does it matter?
Since you don't know who wrote the article, you have no frame of reference
for what reasons he or she might have picked to come to those conclusions.
The Trader Joe's article was written by Christine Byrne.
So for that article to mean anything to you, it should be titled,
23 Reasons Christine Byrne Thinks Trader Joe's Is The Best Grocery Store That Ever Was.
Which begs the question: Who the *** is Christine Byrne?
Is she a known writer with an established body of work
whose opinion is trusted and cared about?
Do I give a *** about why she thinks one grocery store
is not only better than another, but the very best store that ever was?
Does she have the historical credentials to know that throughout the entire timeline of humanity,
there has never been another grocery store that compares to Trader Joe's?
Is she well traveled enough to know that this holds true not just for North America,
but for the entire world?
No. Of course not. Because it's a stupid *** BuzzFeed article.
The cheese-crusted icing on the Internet's glazed *** that is BuzzFeed
is their *** labeling system.
The labels range from win, omg, and cute, to lol, and ***.
The end of every article has a long list of people who post hearts of approval
As if some authoritative Internet historian is taking note
of who liked this article, and when approximately they chose to label it, cute.
Does anybody give a *** that melissag68 thinks article titled,
33 Times Niall Horan Was The Most Perfect Member Of One Direction
was worthy of labeling cute, win, and lol?
I can't think of anything I give less of a *** about than
whether or not goldeneyes97 hearts this article.
There's only one label that BuzzFeed needs to introduce, and that's cancer.
That's it for now. Until next time, I'm Maddox.
Subtitles by Fabio Correa
I'm not gonna call it gif.
You invented the Graphic Interchange Format,
you didn't invent the way letters are pronounced.
Letters existed before your *** format.
It's a *** format anyway, use PNG.
If we wouln't have gifs, you wouldn't have so many *** animated gifs on BuzzFeed.
you wouldn't have BuzzFeed.