Skip to main content

Upworthy unleashed clickbait on the Internet, but now it wants to take it back

How to Make The Perfect Virtual Mixtape Online
wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock
Dubbed the fastest growing media site of all time, Upworthy has seen its fair share of criticism, thanks to the site’s sensationalized, clickbait headlines. For that, Upworthy cofounder Peter Koechley apologized during the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit in London, reported Business Insider.

“We sort of unleashed a monster. Sorry for that,” said Koechley. “Sorry we kind of broke the Internet last year. I’m excited going forward to say goodbye to clickbait.”

Headlines such as “This Amazing Kid Just Died, What He Left Behind Was Wondtacular,” and “His First 4 Sentences Are Interesting. The 5th Blew My Mind. And Made Me A Little Sick,” donned the website since its inception in 2012, leading Facebook to change its algorithm to weed out misleading articles. The change led to the social network’s News Feed delivering more “high-quality” news stories and new comments, while punishing the types of headlines you’d normally find on Upworthy.

The algorithm change led to a huge drop in traffic for Upworthy, with the site switching to native advertising to make up for that lost revenue. Ultimately, Upworthy’s mission is to have its content evoke a wide array of emotions from readers, though its content will shift to bigger, more societal and political issues.

Up until now, readers were more accustomed to seeing pictures of cats and videos of cool stuff. With this shift, Upworthy risks losing a good part of its readership. However, Koechley doesn’t seem too worried about that.

“If you bring people into a story and really make it worth their while and leave them in a good place, they have an impulse to come back,” he said.

Williams Pelegrin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send…
Blaseball: Short Circuits takes the absurdist sports game back to its roots
The logo for Blaseball Short Circuits.

The cult hit Blaseball is returning on November 1 with a new format. Dubbed Blaseball: Short Circuits, the new season will take the sports simulator back to its basics with simplified, newcomer-friendly mechanics.

Blaseball rose to cult status in 2020 when it launched amid social lockdowns. The browser-based game is an absurdist baseball simulator where players watch a season of "blaseball" unfold over a week and bet on games. It's a mix between an idle game and a live service game, as it contains a community-centric social component. It's also a pseudo-horror game where players are incinerated by rogue umpires. When we last left Blaseball, the entire game had been sucked into a black hole. It's complicated.

Read more
Pimax’s 12K QLED VR headset wants to take virtual reality to the next level
Pimax's new 12k QLED VR headset.

It seems that virtual reality may be about to become even more real than ever before -- all thanks to a new VR headset. Pimax, a company that manufactures VR equipment, announced the upcoming release of a new 12K QLED VR headset that will feature technologies such as eye tracking, full-body tracking, and refresh rates of up to 200Hz. The headset, dubbed Pimax Reality 12K QLED, is part of the company's venture into the metaverse and a step toward bringing true realism to using VR.

During today's Pimax Frontier event, the company's representatives talked at length about the goals behind the product -- naturalness, self-awareness, and freedom. Pimax wants to bring these qualities into virtual reality and the metaverse, allowing people from all over the world to interact and explore virtual worlds together. While VR technology already allows for some of that to happen, Pimax wants to take it to the next level with its new invention -- the Reality 12K QLED VR headset.

Read more
Google now wants you to scroll forever on its Search for mobile
google search mobile

Continuous scrolling is synonymous with social media sites seeking to keep you on their app/website. Whether it's Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook -- all of them offer continuous scrolling so that you stay on their service for as long as possible. Now, Google wants you to endlessly scroll search results on its Search page for mobile. The company says the new change will make "browsing search results more seamless and intuitive."

From the explanation that Google has provided on its blog, it looks like Search on mobile will showcase more related results to open-ended questions like "What to cook with potatoes?" instead of simply showing you the results from the second page of the Search.

Read more