The Onion was great back when their Youtube channel created real videos. Now it's a mild chuckle every few months
I wonder why they stopped.
They may also have been victimized by the scandal where Facebook was lying about the engagement that short-form videos generated over other kinds of content, leading several content producers into bankruptcy or near bankruptcy through loss of ad revenue when they pivoted towards it.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-p...
My favorite bit, still stuck in my head whenever I see politicians from both parties rush to the scene of a protest or whatever, is "New Live Poll Lets Pundits Pander To Viewers In Real Time": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg
The whole pivot to video era that crippled a whole bunch of online writing outlets was still four years out, so definitely too early.
lets collate the best of the best. i'll start:
https://www.theonion.com/protagonist-scrolls-intensely-throu...
https://www.theonion.com/jumbled-nest-of-cords-makes-move-to...
> Congress approves intellectual stimulus package giving every American a graduate degree
https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3kqyj7u...
This will not not be a return to The Onion you fondly remember. Most likely it will be a continuation in the same direction it's been going.
Also if you think being partisan is the lowest bar instead of “report the truth” or “be accurate and fair” then that tells me enough already about your values.
I don’t know who Ben Collins is and at a first read of his bio I’m not really sure who would. My first instinct is that this is one of those terminally online things, like how I kept reading references to “Taylor Lorenz” as if she were the devil incarnate and when I finally looked into it she was just another pretty boring journalist.
The Onion's comedic point-of-view used to be less predictable, but as the culture war as progressed, so too has The Onion's voice, and it's a more reliable voice for the left these days. If you rue that trend, for whatever reason, Collins provides little reason to imagine things will change.
'Little Boy Heroically Shoots, Mutilates Burglar'
'Black Man given Nation's worst job' (After Obama won)
I've never laughed so hard at headlines
OG writers refusing to relocate from NYC to Chicago in 2012 when the HQ was moved, choosing to part ways instead.
Then, the remaining writers being called out for the following tweet, somewhat rightly, but being neutered forever after:
https://crasstalk.com/2013/02/sorry-former-onion-staffers-ca...
The writer of that article seems to have still somehow misunderstood and come to the conclusion that The Onion actually hates Quvenzhané Wallis. I wonder if they really don't get it, or if they're just sort of performatively not getting it for the outrage article.
I don’t think anything about that situation was somehow off limits or immune to satire, they just didn’t pull off the joke. It’s not like the kid was likely to have seen the joke, so no worries there. The problem is that when you use language like that and you’re not even funny, you’re operating at the Andrew Dice Clay level of comedy. That should inspire suicidal ideation in any comedian (who isn’t Andrew Dice Clay… I guess…).
https://www.theonion.com/black-man-given-nations-worst-job-1...
(I did just watch the very good MacBook Wheel one though.)
It feels like there's a big hollowed out void between hackneyed mass appeal, and full sending to absurdist and surreal comedy.