Why do otherwise internet-savvy people insist on linking to/sharing/giving free publicity to terrible trolling articles online?

this is like going to mcdonald's and buying 10,000 hamburgers to hand out to people to show them that mcdonald's is shitty

You have met, yes, the ILX?

i'm not sure how you can make a point about an article without actually referencing the article in question. you can attack McD's in all sorts of ways without giving out hamburgers.

What article are you talking about, n/a? Could you link to it?

the most effective thing to do if you find a shitty article is not share it with anyone or talk about it or look at it again

you don't have to make a point about it

that's not how the internet works n/a

how does it work

going to try my "ignore shitty content instead of validating it" theory on frogbs' posts, let's see how it works

sometimes internet savvy people want lols, I think this is what it comes down to

going to try my "ignore shitty content instead of validating it" theory on frogbs' posts, let's see how it works

you literally made it 0 posts, congrats

I agree with n/a to an extent but I also think there is something to be said for public shaming of those responsible for said terrible articles

I agree if they're obviously trolling (e.g. anything on Daily Mail site) they should be ignored

I mean are you seriously trying to argue that things would be better if the taco mayor or the dude encouraging people to tell their kids to be afraid of black people were just ignored

this concern typically translates to "I am not interested in this subject/discussion so talk about something else"

There are some outlets that might just about be shamed into firing people / changing editorial policy but the likes of the Daily Mail / Vice / Takimag are only going to be encouraged by it. Racist article + 1,000,000 outraged clicks = more racist articles in the future.

because theyre bored

sometimes internet savvy people want lols, I think this is what it comes down to

― iatee, Wednesday, April 25, 2012 12:03 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm ok with this but internet-savvy people should know how to share these lols without giving clickthroughs to the actual sites

I think sharing the article is best if you copy the entire text of it along with a link; that way, you can show that you provided a reference to the source and therefore weren't stealing the entire article, but you can also share it with your audience without giving the offender extra clickthroughs.

when reddit wants to talk about gawker posts they take screenshots of the article and host it on imgur

'how can I read lol articles at work in a way that ensures that ad revenues are morally distributed'

lol at reddit that is kinda clever

lol this has nothing to do with the moral distribution of ad revenues, this has to do with traffic numbers being agnostic

no one actually cares if you love or hate an article, they care that you clicked on it; that drives what types of content the site is more likely to run

if you hate something and you pass the link around to 20 friends, you are telling the site that 21 people want to see more of that type of thing; no amount of mocking is going to turn your click from "good" to "bad"

do you think john derbyshire agrees w/ that statement

the thing is 21 people probably DO want to see more of that type of thing so they have more stuff to feel superior about while they're at their shitty job

do you think john derbyshire agrees w/ that statement

I think whatever site it was that ran his piece does

oh who cares

can someone imgur this discussion? I don't want to reward n/a's trolling :[

they had to fire him and apologize! and I mean I don't really follow the NR thread cause I do sorta believe that half of their readership is outraged ilx types so maybe I kinda agree sometimes but it's not like that site can pay for itself let alone make big $ by trolling ilx

I don't think you can monetize 'hard trolling', tho you can def monetize 'soft trolling' (ie slate, nyt)

xp

NRO didn't run that piece, Takimag did. To my knowledge, Takimag has neither severed ties with Derbyshire or apologized for running the piece.

How internet porn turned my beautiful boy into a hollow, self-hating shell

i feel this way (to a lesser extreme) about product trolling too, companies putting out pizza with hot dogs in the crust. there's no way they're going to make a significant amount of money off the product, it's just about getting media attention/trying to go viral, and people who seem to understand how this stuff works just go ahead and give them free publicity anyways.

This applies to any huffington post link.

i can't imagine a less effective response to the trollbait phenomenon than sneering at everyone for looking.

when reddit wants to talk about gawker posts they take screenshots of the article and host it on imgur

― max, Wednesday, April 25, 2012 1:36 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol

i can: creating a strawman who's sneering at people for looking at trollbait
xpost

i am not sneering at anyone. sites use these techniques because they work, i am just as susceptible to marketing and curiosity and dumb stuff as everyone else, i'm just feeling kind of sad about it.

oh great we all get to see you feel sad

great jesus cheeks

Hey everyone, smell this bad milk. It's awful.

NRO didn't run that piece, Takimag did. To my knowledge, Takimag has neither severed ties with Derbyshire or apologized for running the piece.

well I guess that's still kinda the point - nro is 'kinda sorta taken seriously by someone somewhere' and can't be associated w/ 100% straight-up racism whereas takimag doesn't have any associations for most people today beyond being a site where something racist was posted that one time. (afaik.) if it posted something racist by a writer who wasn't associated w/ a mainstream org, nobody would care. derb had some institutional legitimacy and the nro has some institutional legitimacy and had to save face. this is why we talk about something slightly racist in the nyt but don't go looking at kkk msg boards for things that are quite clearly racist.

i dont care who gets click throughs, im not a click through activist, i care only abt discussing terrible things

iatee in getting proven wrong and then somehow turning that into being right shocka

hahaha I was too busy marveling at that to really respond

neither severing ties or apologizing really constitutes how it effects profit though, if that's what we are really after.

i coulda swore there were some goalposts here a second ago...

what-time-is-the-super-bowl_n_1253239.html

haha, damn, that dude fucked up. lets all shit on him!!!!!!!!!!

haha, damn, that dude fucked up. lets all shit on him!!!!!!!!!!

board description

how do i monetize click

http://ohnotheywrittnt.tumblr.com/

yeah I just think you guys are probably overestimating the amount of money that can be made by trolling ilx

How much revenue does a big news site get per click, in general?

who said this topic was exclusively about ILX, is what I want to know

less than one cent xp

well this is a site that likes to feel good about itself via tearing others down

worlds smallest frog playing a violin

Forklift Driver Drops a Coin in a Bottle

Video: Showing major skills, this forklift operator can pick up a coin with his rig & drop it in a bottle. His cool stunt puts a whole new twist on the notion of heavy machinery.

Wonderwall, Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 9:31am (PDT)
By Kat Giantis

A week after Suri Cruise celebrated her sixth birthday, a tabloid is giving the tot a very special gift: an imaginary sibling.

"Baby Bombshell," declares Star magazine, which says Katie Holmes, 33, is expecting another fruit of Tom Cruise's loins.

"She's struggling to contain the news," an insider tells the tab (via Hollywood Life). "She can't wait to be a mom again, and the sooner she can tell the world about it, the happier she'll be."

The evidence, such as it is, includes an earwitness to Suri asking her mom if she had "her baby sister" in her tummy, a question supposedly posed as they faced a paparazzi crush on their recent trip to see "Newsies" on Broadway.

"Katie laughed and whispered something in Suri's ear," relays the spy.

As for Cruise, who is also dad to Isabella, 19, and Connor, 17, with ex-wife Nicole Kidman (they adopted the kids as babies), he's said to be delighted by the news.

But alas, it appears the actor, 49, won't have a chance to break out that at-home sonogram machine he purchased during Katie's conspiracy theory-surrounded gestation of Suri.

Holmes' rep assures Wonderwall, "She is not pregnant."

RELATED ON WONDERWALL:

Suri's silly faces

Katie poses in steamy ads

Suri acts like a kid, tosses a tantrum

the only click through avoidance i practice is yahoo's front page b/c of shit like that.

Suri acts like a kid, tosses a tantrum

STOP THE PRESSES

Yahoo's front page is a juicy worm and I'm just the fish to take it out.

A MAN WAS READING A BOOK DURING A BASEBALL GAME? DAMMIT, I HAVE TO CLICK.

i hope suri grows up to be an s.p.

it's best when people do this and the article turns out to be a year or two old. there is so much laughably pointless anger on the internet.

there's so much laughably pointless anger in the world. the internet just gives it a stage where it won't lead to people beating each other in the face with milk bottles outside the grocers.

i'd prefer milk-bottle-beatings most days tbh.

worlds smallest frog playing a violin

is it a normal-sized violin though

http://i.imgur.com/6TftG.jpg

that's a big dime.

i think this is the best thread for this

http://www.misstravel.com/

jesus fucking christ

terrible prostitution sites?

We do not perform background check on our members, so please proceed with extreme caution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAc8v4Gzp9Q

from the comments:

Have you ever dreamt of being a hooker, but didn't know where to start?

If Liam Neeson is your Dad, then go for it.
Just not if your best friend's Dad is Liam Neeson, then you're fucked. Literally.

i'm sure adam carolla is not benefiting in any way from getting a shit-ton of free publicity immediately before he publishes a new book

so many people RTing clueless corporate 9/11 rememberance tweets but are they going to recognize their 8,000 retweets as ironic/critical and stop doing it (no) or keep doing it bc it gets them attention and exposure (yes)

most of them took down the tweets after the "outrage"!

This isn't really the same thing but I don't get how "TA accidentally attaches her amateur porn to class email" is news enough to justify further embarrassing someone who ultimately just made a harmless easy dumb mistake.

I haven't actually read any of stories because I'm at work but the idea of what's happening to this poor person just makes me feel awful.

because people will click on it (I did)

When you link to something or type stuff in Facebook, your bullshit is properly formatted and exists in a space conducive to sharing thoughts at any given moment (as opposed to just soapboxing in 'real life' interactions). So all kinds of dumb shit gets sublimated into 'proper' discourse, by the nature of democratic internet space.

i've made all the easy dumb mistakes it's about possible to make.

facebook remains delightfully untainted by my nude pics.

it's funny, i actually think about this "problem" quite a bit. it's a pressing one, i think, in environments (twitter) in which communications are judged successful mostly insofar as they produce further communications (retweets, responses, mentions, etc) regardless of whether those communications are positive or negative response because the "point of sale" interface has become omnipresent: a click is a click is ad revenue.

choosing to ignore something or remain silent about it is almost rising to the level of an ethical act.

though of course nothing have really qualitatively changed with the internet other than the fact that things which used to constraint communication qua communication (cultural mores, the business of mass media, and so on) are increasingly irrelevant.

I think that's also why so many websites seem to be purifying their content down to a kind moralistic sorting mechanism.

Everyone fell for the new Hamburglar trap