It’s funny that Aftermath is writing about bad game journalism practices when they themselves have an initial “you must register to read our articles,” but then after registration, hit you with an actual hard paywall after a couple of articles.
If they want to paywall their content, that is their prerogative, but they could at least be up-front about it, instead of only telling me about it after I went through the trouble of creating an account.
Honestly, I hadn’t realized there was a paywall on the article after having signed up a couple weeks ago.
I’ll actually avoid posting their articles here then. Thanks for the callout.
Edit: Though I’m still interested in hearing about where they are hypocritical. People keep saying Aftermath writers say paywalls are bad, but I haven’t seen that anywhere that I’ve noticed.
I quite enjoy this site. On my journey to replace a lot of my content consumption with RSS feeds, Aftermath found a home in my RSS reader. We are human and humans can be hypocrites but there’s no need to dismiss an entire publication because of a single author’s hypocritical stance.
Excuse me? It looks OK to me, idrk what you are talking about. There is one annoying cookie pop-up that my uBlock filter didn’t catch, but that’s pretty much it
FF+uB FTW! But I’ve checked the website on other mobile browsers too both with adblocks and without and the experience was the same. I’m super confused what that person and the 2 orher upvoters didn’t like about the website.
That title is the exact reason i’m going into aviation maintenance in December. Being able to take things apart and put them back together again plus fiddling around with them to see how they work? Perfect
That will be cool! I do a lot of repair, but aviation is another level! Fixing things is honestly the most satisfying labor overall for me. I take any opportunity I can to learn a new device. I’m in assembly these days, though, so it’s mostly for friends and family. Do you need to go to school for aviation maintenance?
I’m going to be going to a trade school for a few years to learn everything I need! AIM (Aviation Institute of Maintenance) has locations all over the US
With the resurgence of city builders, it would be a great time to remaster this game. I know my wife would adore the vibes of this game but would be frustrated by the outdated UX.
This is something I've noticed for a while now, but haven't been able to really describe. This shift away from clickbait headlines towards cryptic headlines that just refuse to tell you what they're talking about. Like The Best Part of Alan Wake Is Now On Youtube or The Best Soulslike Of 2023 Just Got Easier. And those are just a few that I've seen today. Maybe it will fade away like the worst clickbait headlines did or they'll just keep getting so cryptic and opaque that one day the headlines will be: Something Just Happened.
I’ve literally taken to pasting the articles into GPT and asking it to summarize the articles. I imagine they will be the next causality in the coming AI wars.
I would honestly be inclined to pay for a non bs news service, no clickbait titles, no SEO bs in the article which makes it 30 times as long for no reason. Just facts
I mean, they are literally clickbait. They want you to wonder what the best part of Alan Wake is or what the best soullike of 2023 is. It’s just an evolution of clickbait, but it’s still very much clickbait.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that’s less likely to click on articles like that! If they’re not going to give me an idea of what I’m clicking on, I generally don’t read it. It’s usually possible to find a few websites that have informative headlines.
You are not the only one but there are enough who actually click those titels so it is worthwhile for them to write in this manner and they don’t care about the few of us.
Unfortunately that’s not just gaming related news, but all news (and non-news).
It’s by design. It leaves you wondering (and ideally click on the article).
What I actually would like to know if journalists, or whoever writes the articles, are picking these headlines consciously or if they’re following guidelines. I can imagine both scenarios.
If you click on the article, spend two seconds on it, and don’t actually read it, have you actually fulfilled the marketing goals of the web site?
For one, you haven’t actually read anything, so there’s nothing to register “this is a good web site with good content and I will read their articles in the future”. No reputation bump from it.
And two, you didn’t have time to actually see the ads, that is, if you didn’t already had an ad-blocker in the first place.
The goals of clickbait don’t actually align with the goals of their profitability.
Well, obviously someone did the math and figured out it’s better to have these titles than not. So I’d say you’re wrong.
If the title makes more people click in the first place and the amount of people who stay to read at least until they know they’re not interested, is bigger than the number of visitors if they had a normal title… the stupid title wins.
I love how the comments so far are complaining about “clickbait headlines” when in the article he says he doesn’t consider these to be “clickbait” because the definition doesn’t fit these.
That’s probably because the definition is a personal one. In the very literal sense of the word, a headline baiting you into clicking onto it needlessly is clickbait. It baited you into clicking.
And while the author is free to use a very narrow definition, it’s entirely reasonable - and has as far as I can tell become the norm - to define it as any headline where the article only says something that would have trivially fit into the headline to begin with.
So for example, this very article could be better titled “Clickbait has made video game headlines exhausting to read”, and without being longer it would convey the crucial part of information - why is it exhausting?! - without someone having to first open and scan the article. Which, if the article were well-written, they’d still want to do, assuming the subject matter is of interest to them.
And that’s the thing: clickbait precludes being allowed this choice. By not telling you the crucial piece of information, you are forced to open the article (generating ad impressions!) to find out whether you want to read it or not, often wasting time diagonally scanning said article.
I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.
And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.
aftermath.site
Gorące