I originally had an idea that I was going to discuss some of the public domain stuff that is going on right now (like the Pooh Bear horror movie) – but I’m going to save that for a bit. Instead, I would like to babble about the horrible nature of modern social media.
WHAT A FUN JOURNEY THAT WILL BE, HATTON!?
Yeah, I know – sorry.
So here’s a list of internet and social media trends that drive me cuckoo bananas:
CHANGING THE YEAR ON OLD CONTENT
Go into your google machine and type in, ‘Best Puzzle Games of 2022’ and you will get pages and pages of lists. I guarantee you that 90% of those lists will say they were written in the last two months and most of them won’t have any modern content in them.. some won’t have games from before 2020. That’s because internet content on surprisingly popular websites simply repost their own blogs every few months with updated dates. A few will change the headline to be less shameless, ‘Puzzle Games You Should Play In 2022’ or ‘Some of the Best Puzzle Games (2022)’ but the fact is they are garbage lists by garbage people and won’t help you with your search.
REACTION VIDEOS
I brought this point up on Facebook and got a range of responses, so let me clarify… if you have knowledge on a topic and are reacting to it like ‘Opera Singer Comments on Heavy Metal Music’ or ‘CGI Experts Watch The Scorpion King’, that’s fine. You are adding something to the conversation. If you scroll through TikTok and see a post of a guy watching someone make ice cream….. and then… he goes ‘Wow’ or makes approving gestures, or the worst of it, is over-excited about someone at Coldstone folding fudge.. why? Why is watching people watch things interesting now? Why do I care about your facial expressions? (Spoiler: I don’t.)
PADDED “TROLL” VIDEOS
This is a bit of a niche, but there is a surprising amount of Facebook videos that have an interesting sounding premise ‘This woman opened a box and you won’t believe it…’ By and large, that title is clickbait incarnate, but hey, I can spend a minute while she opens a box… until she realizes there is twine that she needs to get scissors… that don’t work… so she pulls at the string… finally it snaps… under the first wrapping is more wrapping… with more string. At this point in time, you look and see that this video is 20 minutes long. You click to the end, see the ending sucked, and leave. Why does it exist? Is it just a troll? Nope. That “creator” (a loose term at best) just got ad revenue for you being sucked into that garbage.
– STAY TIL THE END
This is a newer trend. First, let’s address that it is mighty sad that your content is so bad on Tiktok that you need to tell people to ‘stay to the end’ because you are afraid you can’t hold their attention for 80 seconds. The second part of that is that you are probably right, your 80 seconds of content is garbage. It is rare a video that feels the need to tell you to stay gives you any actual reason why you should stay. This follows along with the reaction videos listed above, and sometimes are in the same video.
Imagine if you were watching the Godfather 2, and sometime in the middle of DeNiro squishing olives, a big banner flashed on the screen ‘STAY TIL THE END’…
CONCLUSION
I’ve been on the internet longer than most… which makes me feel old because it is a statistical truth. With the advent of short-attention-span videos/stories/reels/vines/tiktoks, I have finally reached the spot where I don’t get it. #OldManYellsAtCloud
