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Fredrik deBoer, “maybe time for change”

This is related to what I was talking about when I said “the clickbait style” has infected everything.  There are so, so many articles that don’t really contain any interesting analysis or reporting or anything, but have some kind of tacked-on progressive spin and get by on that.  Websites have discovered that there’s a certain kind of thing that will get shared a lot even if it’s totally uninteresting and contains nothing new, just because it seems agreeable, and this has resulted in a torrent of writing that must be so easy to produce.

The article he’s talking about (on the same website the brilliant Mallory Ortberg writes for!) is literally just a list of popular books.  It must have been incredibly easy to write; it probably took all of twenty minutes, if that.  There is no original writing there, just a list of titles, all of which are well-known.  Imagine getting paid for that!  It must feel like cheating.  A typical high-quality leftist tumblr blog pumps out twenty better, more interesting posts along the same lines in a day, for free.  These people definitely do feel cynical.  I imagine them having contests about how little time and thought they can put into an article, and wondering at how they can get paid for the kind of chat tens of thousands of people produce casually every day for free.  Why aren’t you monetizing your shitposts?