Yesterday I threw caution to the wind and left a comment online following a news story. I know this is risky behavior, but hey-- I've done worse in the past. Knowing I wouldn't end up pregnant or in the ER, I went forward. The article headline said "Hillary Clinton swarmed by bees in Malawi." I clicked on the story right away because of my own severe bee allergy and I wanted to see if she was okay. After all, Hillary is just about my age, and except for her recent decision to mimic the TV news babes with the long hair and the big earrings and the shiny blouses, I relate to her on a personal level. So I read the article and it turned out that she was not stung, in fact was not even near a bee. The bees showed up at the airport where she was boarding a plane, and her handlers hurried Clinton inside so she would not get stung.As a reader who had fallen for their trap, I was annoyed. First of all, there was no news whatsoever. A truer headline would have been, "Bees come to Malawi airport where Hillary Clinton was," but how many people would have clicked on that? And on the Internet, clicks are money. To register my dismay, I wrote the following: So Clinton was not stung even by one bee, yet they chose a headline to suggest she was. Those editors at AOL are too much! This elicited the following comment from a reader who called himself Bite: Who gives a crap douchebag???? Enjoy your mindless crap and leave the rest of us alone!
Really, was that necessary? Am I a douchebag? Was my comment really mindless crap? And why are strangers so mean to each other? I must add that my comment got 274 "thumbs up" responses, so other readers must have felt wronged also. That's nice, but still--I worry about Bite. What's he so pissed about? Is he the next rampaging shooter? Also, it was Yahoo, not AOL. (This time.)
Unfortunately, a lot of these online mediums and Social Networks, people say many things that if they had said them in person would have gotten the crap beaten out of them. I agree with your statement. It isn't about news, it is about clicks and advertising.
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Maybe he was referring to the editors, not to you....He was calling the editors douchebags who write mindless crap.....but his comment about "leave the rest of us alone" really makes no sense at all. He is the one reading the article, how can the writer leave a reader alone? It is the reader who does not read the article that would leave the writer alone. huh???
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