hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

its impressive the level of anxiety twitter provokes in ppl

lol that quote is hilarious

sometimes, when someone does something everyone else dislikes, they get mad

when people seem to disapprove so much of sites that are basically just people talking to each other, i wonder what kind of peaceful, uneventful, unfailingly polite human interaction they expect millions of people to maintain every single day of their lives

I think Curtis is mostly talking about the feedback loop thing that happens when people are clamoring with millions of others to have their voice heard and embraced by some group. In a truncated medium, you do this by saying familiar things -- staking out a hardline stance.

He kind of jams this into a facile alarmist narrative about how twitter is ruining everything but i think he is right insofar as it and other areas of the internet seem less than ideal for substantive conversation. People talk past each other on twitter. This is fine but people want to use it as a vehicle for important conversations. How many thinkpieces are just exigeses of tweets?

People talk past each other on twitter.

was gonna say

the feedback loop thing that happens when people are clamoring with millions of others to have their voice heard and embraced by some group

come on, ascribing reductive psychological impulses to "millions" of people makes you look like a dumbass

so Gawker is hardly the only site not to let a woman being raped get in the way of "Horny Mom" lols:

http://gawker.com/horny-mom-threw-teen-daughter-a-naked-twister-sex-party-1697948520?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

But:

The night ended for Lehnardt around 3:30 a.m., when she woke up in her bed to find her daughter's 16-year-old boyfriend having sex with her. According to an Evans County sheriff's report quoted by the Huffington Post,

"Mrs. Lehnardt told [the sponsor] she and her daughter had spoken and that her daughter 'felt guilty because the 16-year-old was 10 inches long and huge, and if she had just been able to take it, he wouldn't have needed to rape her mother.'"

The horny mom, arrested based on the sponsor's story, won't face any sex-related charges because 16 is Georgia's age of consent.

the feedback loop thing that happens when (an unidentified number of) people are clamoring with millions of others (who have their own agendas, as people use twitter in all sorts of ways) to have their voice heard and embraced by some group

yeah i was going to post the "horny mom" story earlier but i was afraid to hear how people would try to defend it.

Was the rape part in the story at first? I didn't notice it when I saw the post and I don't think it was included in the local news story they initially linked to.

It was there when i read it last night

i heard 3 different radio shows discuss the story on my drive to work this morning, only 2 of them mentioned that part, and only one of them seemed to take any notice of the fact that any of the sex in the story was non-consensual but even then were kind of snickering about the entire thing.

oof

i mean granted the first thing everyone hears about this story is 'naked twister mom!' so it kinda takes a minute as the details unravel that you go heh heh go on heh heh wait this entire thing is really fucked up

xpost probably pointless to continue in the face of that story (hey I went to high school for a few years in Evans), but:
no matter the number I feel like speculating about individuals' motives for using twitter is inescapably condescending, but more constructively Treeship, are there internet or IRL spaces that you think are good at being "a vehicle for important conversations"?

two intellectual luminaries in conversation

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:55 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

two thumbs up

all abt the clicks no matter what you're selling to get them. tried and true biz model.

the implications of naked twister mom are pretty fucked up on their own but its obvs easier to lol @ twister than consider the desperation of the situation

just think if mice did something other than click, such as touch. and we saw with something other than eyeballs, like barbles. we'd all be talking about barbles and touchbait.

UK grime scenesters from 2011

i like it good thought leadership from hear on out barbles and touchbait it shall be

i feel like the titillating fucked up-ness of it has been a part of every conversation I've read

although i'm sure there are conversations where the rape is being ignored

again I'm not sure what 'lols' gawker is being accused of propagating in that article that aren't an inherent part of the story, that's a pretty straight aggregated read

i mean, there's a critique to be made which is whether these kinds of lurid stories are worth covering at all, but i mean, welcome to 2015

Let's have that conversation.

they aren't worth covering

don't feel like any media is very arbitrated by "worth"

I wish Gawker wrote more about BuzzFeed.

i think it is important to discuss what a gossip blog covers since if its coverage is skewed then there is no other place on the internet to get news guyz

lurid trash stories are always going to be covered by tabloids as long as there is an interest in them. but gawker seems to want to be a "better" -- more sophisticated, progressive -- tabloid and i am interested in the tension there, if it's possible, or if it's just marketing

again I'm not sure what 'lols' gawker is being accused of propagating in that article that aren't an inherent part of the story

referring to a woman as a "horny mom" after sharing details suggesting she was raped is not a "lol" inherent to the story

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?o=lt&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&f=999999&r=1y&t=2&z=30&c=1&h=150&w=340&u=buzzfeed.com

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?o=lt&y=t&b=ffffff&n=666666&f=999999&r=1y&t=2&z=30&c=1&h=150&w=340&u=gawker.com

lurid trash stories are always going to be covered by tabloids as long as there is an interest in them. but gawker seems to want to be a "better" -- more sophisticated, progressive -- tabloid and i am interested in the tension there, if it's possible

if those boundaries have ever been hard - i don't think they have - they are certainly never gonna be hard again

oo-er

i mean "tabloids" is probly not the ideal word because the populist press precedes the tabloid/broadsheet distinction but when has a populist press in history ever not been a combo of gossip/rabble-rousing/prurience/investigation/political advocacy etc etc?

Will unionization (if it goes through) change Gawker's editorial policies?

http://gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to-organize-1698246231

referring to a woman as a "horny mom" after sharing details suggesting she was raped is not a "lol" inherent to the story

― da croupier, Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:40 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not a 'lol' at all. i'm not defending the entirety of the story as written, i'm saying it's not written as if they were trying to make the story 'funny'

so "horny" was not meant as a humorous adjective following the description of assault, just factual

lurid trash stories are always going to be covered by tabloids as long as there is an interest in them. but gawker seems to want to be a "better" -- more sophisticated, progressive -- tabloid and i am interested in the tension there, if it's possible, or if it's just marketing

― Treeship, Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:39 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if they don't do this someone else will. this is not a defense of doing it, merely an observation that in an effort to have an impact in the world & get any kind of message out, you make a moral calculus about buying into the system, a system which runs on both our (all people's) higher values & on those base values that we are nonetheless clicking on, i mean this is pretty entry level shit

frankly i've done worse jobs than covering lurid tabloid stories. one time i worked rewriting sales books for an insurance company, telling their salespeople how to get folks to spend more on insurance.

capitalism is about exploitation man, if you have an alternate method of running a media company in 2015 that is totally 'clean' plz let everyone know

so "horny" was not meant as a humorous adjective following the description of assault, just factual

― da croupier, Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:53 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know what the writer's intent was, it seemed like it was 'factual' based on the dynamic before she passed out—she walked into the room and started masturbating in front of the party, i don't think the idea that she was horny somehow contradicts the notion that she was raped, this is an absurd conversation btw

maybe they did intend it to be funny, but personally the effect i got as a reader was of them writing it as straight as possible & letting the facts of the story do most of the legwork

are you sure you're not making a defense

what kind of effect is the writer going for by calling her "The Horny Mom" two paragraphs after describing her rape? Maybe not 'funny' but 'assholish"? Maybe I'm not familiar enough with Gawker style.

are you sure you're not making a defense

― da croupier, Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:57 PM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a defense of what? the existence of the story or how it was written? i'm definitely not making a defense of either

i'm just saying that i don't think it was intended to push a particular conclusion or editorial point of view but to leave a story out there and let the commentators hash it out

"just the facts, horny ma'am"

lol

feels like if they weren't trying to push an agenda or steer the convo in a direction, they'd have referred to her by name or at least as an adjective-less being. instead they deliberately choose to call her by the same term throughout the article even after the details of her assault are discussed. i'm not so sure that's the most impartial way to recount the ugly details of this fucked up story.

idk my guess is it could as easily have been "ugh this dumb story will get a million clicks" *someone aggregates it quickly and lazily*

i mean, there's a critique to be made which is whether these kinds of lurid stories are worth covering at all, but i mean, welcome to 2015

v true, but this might actually be gawker-specific. not sure even a tabloid would go with repeated 'horny mom'

it seemed like it was 'factual' based on the dynamic before she passed out

more factual description might have been 'alcoholic mom'
indications of mental illness/ substance abuse disorder make 'horny' less neutral descriptor, more intentional lolchoice

unfortunately, gawker lolchoice might also be predicated on her physical characteristics (relative youth/ attractiveness) & "georgia"

xpost yeah, I suppose criticizing a Gawker (et al.) article is like criticizing a telemarketer