TOO CUTE! A Journey into the Nostalgia of Clickbait
In 2016 when I was a senior in high school I traveled to California to tour a few colleges and the sites of Los Angeles. Of course, I wanted to see it all; the Hollywood Sign, the Walk of Fame but, most importantly, I wanted to see the Buzzfeed office. So we did, we got in our little rental car and followed the address to a corner in Downtown LA, where I got out and took a picture in front of the small building, red Buzzfeed logo displayed on top. I proudly gave it its own post on my Instagram, with a caption that reads, “Hi, I’m Lexi, and I’m obsessed with the Try Guys.” A scroll back to my 2016 comment section echoes the sentiment. “I’m jealous, I love Buzzfeed,” says one commenter. “I don’t think you quite understand how jealous I am right now,” says another.
Flash forward to 2023, and I’m studying digital publishing. While I work to find ways to make my own brand marketable, I think back to the craziness that was the Buzzfeed era. I can’t help but feel a tug of nostalgia as I scroll through the site, and think back to the glory days of being consistently pulled into the clickbait-y listicles. Now, as I start my own career, I get tense. Is this sort of writing ethical? And is it even real?
Win! The Creative Success of BuzzFeed
As for the reality, an ex-writer of BuzzFeed remarks an echo of nostalgia to writer Mia Sato in her article for The Verge, saying, “‘I just feel wistful for early BuzzFeed days. It was a very specific time on the internet and a very specific vibe on the internet,’ Holderness says.” BuzzFeed, for all its issues, was able to foster a sense of culture on the internet that didn’t take itself too seriously, and allowed writers the freedom to be creative.
My future as a writer sometimes scares me with what my anxiety-ridden mind sees as the only two bleak outcomes; I can either write for dense medical sites and journals, or I can write pieces that I enjoy for sites many readers would scoff at. In ye olden days of BuzzFeed, it felt like you could have both.
Other ex-writers described BuzzFeed to Sato as “a place filled with funny, smart people who were allowed to experiment and create interesting work.” Take this as a stark contrast to the words of writer Ben Kissam, a “clickbait writer” in his piece for the Boston Globe. Kissam says that while, “I may spend my workday writing, but I’m not writing for artistic expression. I’m marketing my words to a search engine.”
Of course, no one can really have it all. Both my idealized BuzzFeed and Kissam’s work exist in the same clickbait vacuum, and SEO strength is the main currency. Where BuzzFeed starts to topple is the unethical sourcing and rigorous, yet vapid, reporting style. In an effort to keep up with the trends, BuzzFeed writers are expected to scour Reddit for possible leads, and apparently use these comments as sources for their own article, leading to many an upset Redditor. User Nina* explains her frustration to Sato, “It’s not about whether I want my comment featured,” Nina says. “It’s the principle behind how it got there.” This is someone’s published writing, afterall, and Reddit seems to have taken a laissez-faire approach to enforcing the rules it imposes on journalists.
“Users might feel one way about it, but Reddit, Inc. isn’t hostile to BuzzFeed. Aggregators like BuzzFeed ultimately benefit the platform, says Young. If someone sees a viral BuzzFeed post about a Reddit thread, they might become a new Reddit user,”
Sato acknowledges, recognizing the symbiotic relationship of the two social media giants. This begs the question, is writing for clicks worth sacrificing a part of journalistic integrity? How desperate for clicks have sources become?
Fail: The Swift Fall of Quirk Culture
Readers may remember the ill-conceived article BuzzFeed posted in response to Egypt’s crisis in 2017, consisting of Jurassic Park gifs and low reportage. Caitlin Petre for Nieman Labs points out, “While undoubtedly optimized for clicks, the post might have been construed as an ill-conceived attempt to cover a complex subject in an attention-grabbing format that might attract readers who would be otherwise uninterested and uninformed about the situation unfolding in Egypt.”
No writer existing today is immune to this, and all of us exist in a contradiction. I can say that I don’t think it’s ethical to use Reddit comments to fuel an entire story, which I do believe. But is it ethical of me to use Instagram comments in this? Is it more or less ethical to not disclose their names? Do I need to notify them of the use of their comments from 2016, or do I get to exist in the same state as a BuzzFeed writer?
The Oscars took place last night, BuzzFeed’s own Super Bowl, and the tongue in cheek relatable language is starkly different from the other publishers. While Vanity Fair calls Hugh Grant’s interaction with model Ashley Graham, “The 2023 Oscars Most Awkward Moment,”BuzzFeed says that “Hugh Grant Was Super Rude To Ashley Graham During The Oscars Pre-Show, And I’m Screaming For Her.”
The fact of the matter is, all goliaths must fall to their David eventually, and while the debate is out on if it was the work of Facebook’s mass clickbait targeting, the mass exodus of BuzzFeed video stars (like my aforementioned believed Try Guys), or the simple declared ‘cheugy-ness’ of BuzzFeed to GenZ, the era of listicles and cat gifs is beginning to sink into the void forever. But, if the only way it can survive is at the expense of daily internet users becoming unwitting sources, perhaps it is for the best.
