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BuzzFeed is basically a supermarket checkout line magazine for the Internet. (So is Huffington Post.) It's less part of the Internet and more something the mundanes brought over from print.

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To be clear, I wasn't attacking BuzzFeed itself. If it existed in a vacuum it would be harmless (and I guess even entertaining to people who like that model) and easy to avoid. The problem is all of the other websites that have seen its success and attempted to emulate it. The model it uses has become incredibly pervasive with what I consider to be a lot of negative consequences.

Again, this is part of the general popularity of the Internet; it looks more and more like popular entertainment pre-Internet than it looks like the thoughtful, intelligent place the Internet briefly was when only a smaller group of enthusiasts wrote online. Instead of the Internet itself being an intelligent niche, it looks more and more like TV and one has to seek out intelligent niches within.

And yet ... http://www.buzzfeed.com/news

They also produce actually good quality news from solid reporters.

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