I got a bit of snippy email and twitter comments yesterday, after I made some disparaging comment about the HuffPo and its readership—I wonder if Garry Trudeau will get a lot of “how dare you say rude things about the Huffington Post!!?!?!” after this.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
To be fair to the people who criticized you for criticizing HuffPo, I never really noticed how bad and clickbaity HuffPo was until I actually visited their homepage. (Most of the people who linked me to it, didn’t link to clickbait and I tend to ignore related articles.)
HuffPo is NSFW
Huffpo is NFGBS. The Telegraph is, theoretically, something a desperate person might consider wiping their ass with, in an emergency.
Huffington Post has a whole big section dedicated to “sideboob”. It’s a subcategory of “news”. Enough said.
I don’t do Huffpo anymore but they have socially redeeming value. I think they still offer a lot of liberal/progressive news that their more or less mainstream audience would not otherwise encounter.
Site gives me headboob.
Sideboob? Really? Sounds like a non-adaptive mutation to me.
Only 8 comments? Major headline fail!
Yes! It’s basically a tabloid rag masquerading as a newsite. Half of the articles are “16 things every 30 year old should know,” “8 ways everyone but you is having hotter sex” “13 things better, handsomer, more successful people than you do differently,” and “8 things you’re doing RIGHT NOW that WILL kill you!”
It seems like the whole purpose of the website is to make people feel terrified about the world and insufficient about themselves. It’s garbage.
As bad as HuffPo is in appealing to the entertainment culture and scientific woo, there still are no progressive sites with anywhere near the traffic size (unless you count Washington Post/NY Times, but these aren’t progressive sites, but sometimes do actual journalism). Try to get progressive points of view from the major non-Fox news, they are conservative light. Just watch any of the major Sunday talk news show and you’ll notice how white and how much these cave to conservative ideas, and with few exceptions (Paul Krugman) are completely filled with talking head morons. I know there are tons of better progressive sites (mediamatters, dailykos, motherjones, thenation, talkingpointmemo, rightwingwatch, democraticundergrouind, etc etc etc) but until and unless they grow, the HuffPo is still necessary to get progressive ideas out.
Arianna Huffington is a kind of huckster/exploiter. She’s good at selling right wing bullshit to progressives, and most of them eat it right up.
The comic should have also mentioned that both of the two comments had nothing whatsoever to do with the article, but were part of a continuing flame war between commenters about whether Obama is awsum or sux.
Where else am I supposed to get my sideboob news from?
Huffington has a new book out, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder.* Tells you all you need to know, really.
*B&N has is plastered all over their front page, so I’ve seen it a lot.
I’ve been refusing to read HuffPo ever since hearing that they expect their writers to work for free from Professor Ceiling Cat over on WEIT while raking in the money from the advertising they sell.
Darn you, PZ. Just darn you to heck. You made me go and look. Causing me to see the following headline:
And that sideboob page. Ugh.
[i]”Fleecing: My New Attempt to Boosting Book Sales With Empty PoMo Solgans and Ignoring that Words mean anything in the English language”[/i]
Only 17 comments?
You should have titled the post “But everyone should know that the HuffPo sucks epic sideboob!”
(Now going to Urban Dictionary to look up “sideboob.”)
@Greg
It is what it says on the label. Boobs from the side. Seriously.
Greg Laden @ 18:
I would have thought sideboob was rather obvious. *cough*
Wasn’t Sideboob Bob Bart Simpson’s arch enemy?
They have left out an entire niche; “Underboob”.
Since HuffPo’s Gay Voices section has now basically declared war on uppity trans women, it feels not only crappy and clickbaity but outright poisonous.
@ 10,
Meh. Call me an old fart, but I’m resisting the concept that worthwhile progressive ideas have to be attached to pseudoscience and (often) outright bullshit in order to find a larger audience.I’m finding over the last 6-7 years HuffPo has been adding progressively(no pun intended) more noise and less signal, and if CNN has become Fox light, I don’t think adding a progressive light side is adding all that much value to the discussion. Diluting the message with more filler and additives is kind of their thing( by which I mean Fox and HuffPo).
Sassafras @ 23:
Jesus Fuck. Doucheweasels all. I haven’t gone anywhere near HuffPo for years, and I have yet another reason to stay away.
Maybe an idea would be a central site that is bright and friendly, attractive (but not bullshit laden) that serves as a link to all of the great sites already mentioned by mikeyb @ 10.The newly awakened might appreciate a central site could quickly point them to an alternative to the Fox coma. A little off topic, sorry.
From the link @11 by Atheist, just in case anyone doesn’t know and didn’t check it, or hadn’t actually considered her CV…
—From Huffington’s “The Fourth Instinct: The Call of the Soul”
—From Huffington’s “The Female Woman: An Argument Against Women’s Liberation for Female Emancipation”
— From Huffinton’s “After Reason”
If those quotes alone aren’t enough, add Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Deepak Chopra and John-Roger, and season with the world’s most disgustingly effective and amoral clickbait model to make a truly fascinating stew.
@26 coffeehound
It is a good idea. Admitted with shame: I kept trying to mine the links on HuffPo for meaningful stuff and understanding of current idiocy for far too long, because aggregation WOULD be a wonderful thing if done well. Unfortunately, “done well” would mean “conducive to thought,” which also means “not conducive to click baiting” and “useless for advertising profits.”
But maybe, just maybe, there’s still some shining hope for a truly inclusive, truly international, truly feminist-friendly, truly progressive and clickbait-free All-Sideboob-All-The-Time site, that features only those sideboobs relevant to meaningful political discourse, solid science, and valid humanitarian concerns.
Just saying, it’s clear that I understand what’s really important, and so the purity of my intentions in this great hope are clear.
The “moderators” at HuffPoo are VERY DELICATE CREATURES…any “cuss word,” disparagement of the author of an article, the site, or the person the article is about is liable to get you banned. I’ve been banned for over 4 months because I made the mistake of observing how butt-ugly many of the tea party candidates are. I think Arriana has national aspirations and the moderators are told to delete or ban any comment that might reflect badly on her or her site. They also have the most misleading headlines of any site on the progblogs…meant to steer traffic in and get hits.
Carlos Muecke @ 29:
Rightly so, too. People can’t help their appearance, “ugly” is also a subjective matter, in case you were unaware. Only an ass would make such an…observation, and only an idiot would find that worthy of remarking on, when there are so many valid observations and remarks to be made about their ideas.
Sooo… right-wing hack trying to compete in an already saturated market place and seeing the opportunity to replicate the same business model in a new market? At least that’s what I got from the founder’s CV.
And it takes a truly dense individual to pat themselves on the back about being banned for such statements.
microraptor @ 32:
Word.
If any of you doubt PZ, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/sideboob/
He might not want a l;ink here, but I wanted to see the truth. He spoke the truth. That isn’t a news source any more than the tabloids in Britain.
I like good porn, but:
1) this isn’t good porn
2) this isn’t a news source if this is what they present
Calling people “ugly” might not mean physical appearance. I have seen many ugly people that have great appearances; they are ugly in the soul. It is a multiple-axis word.
thinksanddrinks:
It is used ridiculously more often as a comment on appearance. So I wouldn’t buy that as a defense.
Even when is not used in this fashion, it is usually as a metaphor using that conception of “ugly” and applying to something that doesn’t have to do with appearances. A metaphor meaning “your personality is as poor as an ugly person’s appearance!”. It is using a judgmental term that is rooted in obsession with physical appearances in order to make a comment on someone else’s character. It cements a just-world, “ugly is bad”, “beauty is good” narrative and it causes splash damage while hiding behind the plausible deniability of “oh, I didn’t mean UGLY ugly”. It is a questionable tactic to say the least.
thinksanddrinks #35,
If you can read comment #29 and think ugly is not used with regards to appearances then you are very generous.
If they did not mean to use ugly to denigrate appearance then they have made a poor effort to communicate their point. They should learn some new words. There are lots of them around.
thinksanddrinks:
That’s true, however, when that happens, people generally write in such a manner that it’s clear. I’ve written “you’re walking around with two fistfuls of ugly” before, which was used in the sense you mean. However, when someone comments “wow, those people are butt ugly”, they are talking about appearance.
What, you mean it’s not ok to do it to the enemy? You do realize that those people are them, and not us, right!??
I do occasionally read things on HuffPo when I can’t find the original source they cribbed it from and it seems like it’s something truly worth reading, but I avoid the site as much as I can and have for a long time for a lot of reasons. First I think it was the wanting people to work for free and the fact that so many of the articles are published in identical form elsewhere first (I’ve no idea how much of that is under agreement or whether it’s just outright plagiarism, but it’s certainly not adding original content). Then it was the woo peddling. There’s also the fact that a lot of the stuff I read there that was ideologically up my alley was so poorly sourced that it makes them the Fox News, nay the Breitbart, of the left (well, the slightly less right, they’re not truly “left”).
But really, it’s the sideboob that marks them as unworthy of a single click. You are a pathetic excuse for a media organization if every story has a prominent sidebar link to someone’s sideboob. Maybe it should be minor compared to the other issues, but I think the inherent sexism in it means it’s not nearly as minor as it seems. It makes me want to scream a giant “fuck you” to anyone associated with the site.