"Headline Culture" is Getting Embarassing 

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The Internet was great when everyone wasn't on it.

This is quite literally people citing “the voices in my head” as a source. The absolute clown world we live in, man.

Social internet is basically playing the telephone game with deaf people.

The most hilarious exemple I remember was someone sharing with me an article on how 70% or something of people do not read beyond the headlines but when I read further it was a debunking of the previous statement but still warning how the rates have kept growing and now not too far.

The worst part is that these people would rather double down and be wrong rather than actually watch the video and see what your were talking about. It's literal brain rot.

Idiocracy is here to stay.. and get much, much worse.. unfortunately. Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Thanks for the video.

I guess the alternative is to go the Japanese light novel way and just have the entire synopsis in the title

So glad you made this video. This is a problem on both sides of the political aisle and people are way too willing to just regurgitate whatever their favorite talking head says. Friends, do research on both sides of the story and form your own opinions.

Oh god gamingcirclejerk It's literal cancer One of the worst subreddits hands down

I miss the days before the internet was ubiquitous and I was ignorant of how many ignorant people there are in the world. 🤓

Basically Hasanabi in a nutshell

i miss when every other person wasn't some reddit brained or twitter headed "person of unfortunate intellect"

"no discernable signs of human intelligence or critical thinking" is one of the most magnificent insults i have heard in a long time. on a side note, i have a habit of looking at headlines as well and this is a great wake-up call, so thank you.

Reddit: hangout for the unemployed Twitter: hangout for the emotionally dysfunctional

HEADLINE: Upper Echelon tells political ideologues to remove themselves from the world! That headline wasn't true. What he said was that political ideologues should reexamine how they interact with the online world, or remove themselves from it.

I’ll never understand this. It’s the complete opposite of how I grew up. It used to be you’d read the headline on a newspaper and then if it intrigued us enough, we’d buy the paper and want to read the story. That’s the whole way they managed to write headlines in a way that fuelled newspaper sales. Now the headlines *are* the content people want to read.

r/Gamingcirclejerk is one of the most insane subs on the entire site. I've found multiple people there advocating for the killing of "gamers" (which is a term that can mean anyone that disargees with them to basically any white male). The entire online sphere is bonkers due to the excesses of self-moderation, where every ideological bubble has a tendency to drift further and further into their fanaticism, as criticism is weeded out and opposing opinions are eliminated. You can see it across pretty much any subreddit, X group, Telegram, etc. Our discourse culture is not doing well.

The average person is not ambitious enough to fight for something like truth and well-being, this situation doesn't surprise me.

GamingCircleJerk is an actual cesspool. Hate that it shows up on my Reddit feed. as 'recommended' even though I never engage with them.

What im starting to really hate is thumbnails on RU-vid with peoples stupid faces of shock and surprise,man that makes me so upset lol

Perhaps part of the problem that the internet is now used by of people who have never experienced anything differently. "Born in captivity" so to speak.

Both the 'politics' issues and the 'purchased games are just rentals' issues are important, though I get the need to distinguish between them. What does it matter if the game is good if you can't really own it? And what does it matter if you can own a game if the game's just garbage? They're both worthy battles.

Back when I was in College I had this Optional Social Class thing and one of the topics was Conflict Resolution. The clearest thing I remember was when there is a conflict, you are supposed to "get all the facts" before making a decision. This is probably the most useful lesson I got from school, ever!

This is a historical lesson for anyone who wondered how people got so stupid as to burn "witches", make sacrifices and start any ideological/religious war... THIS IS HOW, brainlessly believing in things.

I share your frustration. One of the things reddit especially likes to do is make assertions and then shield themselves behind the subreddit's politics. You can go into those threads saying so and so is wrong, and you will then be downvoted so your reply is no longer visible by default, and left with a few people making insane demands for proof, moving the goal posts every time. More often than not, the proof they ask for is either in the article or in the quoted source of the article. As you meet the increasing demands for proof you'll see people trailing off until you're left with the subreddit's master trolls. You cant even feel vindicated because unless someone goes looking for downvoted posts, you're invisible.

This video reminds me of one Rich from RTU did several years ago where he talked about how people will read the headline of an article, but not the actual article itself, and think they know what the article is about. They then get all the info wrong because they didn't read the article, and when called out will say "I didn't have time to read it." Essentially, they couldn't spend 5 minutes reading the article, but had 5 hours to complain about it and spread misinformation on Facebook and Twitter. If I recall, the article Rich used as an example was one that said something to the tune of "Baby Boomers need to get off of the Couch," or something close to that. The article talked about how Baby Boomers as they were getting older (60+) shouldn't just sit around all day as it can lead to health problems such as Arthritis, Blood Clots, etc. But those who just read the headline, thought the article was calling Baby Boomers lazy, and that they need to get jobs, etc. It's disheartening to see that years later, nothing has changed.

Funny thing is you mentioned how grummz was advertising his own personal project by using GG2 and SBI drama. I have been following his tweets and that isn't what he has been doing. Dude almost never talks about his project especially now. So you might have fallen prey to the very same headline phenomenon you were talking about. Grummz only started talking about it after journos started trying to pull a gotcha on him for the game.

This has been happening since beginning of time. Internet has made it more noticable, but it has always been this way.

you say they should be extremely embarrassed like they have the ability to reflect on their actions in any meaningful way....

I don't agree that Grummz was amplifying controversy to promote the game he's making. I was following him and didn't even know he was working on a game currently UNTIL the hacktivists called him out for promoting the game. After that he decided to promote the game which I believe is fair because his detractors opened the door to it.

"Terminally Online Leftist" sounds like a troll account

I don't remember that 5 or 6 years back it was that bad. Was I that naive back then or things got so much worse in the world since?

headlines get me to go fact check things when I hear something interesting... I usually listen to or read the full story whenever possible.

My ex once got mad at me because of a dream she had and the things I did on her dream, same logic.

OOF. I like a lot of your videos but I seriously LOVE this one. I point these things out to people regularly and absolutely no one seems to care or even try to get it. It's incredible to me that people would rather be stupid/uninformed than have any real idea what's going on. I guess it's the definition of "ignorance is bliss"

it's crazy how stupid and toxic the people on the internet are.

Man I got into this bullshit some time ago like culture war, fake news, propaganda you name it. Right now I feel lost, lost my trust in media, the channels I follow and trust I question more and more. Wanna be up to date but feels like I just need to leave the internet because all this crap just doesn't make a sense.

Idk why you decided to blast Grummz in this. Did he not fact check? Yes. Does it make sense he just reacted like he normally does to a political hack job on X like he does just about every single day?Yes. He's mainly replying to Terminally Online Leftist. He's currently dealing with a huge cancelation attempt by the gaming industry. It looks like trying to brand him a grifter and idiot when he's making a harmless error. It was Terminally Online Leftist that derailed the conversation, it's not on Grummz to put it back on trail first, he can just talk about what he disliked about Terminally Online Leftist's argument.

And this is one of the main reasons why I hate Politics.

This should be seen as a lesson in not jumping to conclusions, but sadly most just seem to think with kneejerk reaction emotions first and actual thoughts second....or even never. It's pretty sad.

It’s a mistake to believe this isn’t a political subject.

We are all guilty of this,looking at something for a second and forming an opinion. Its human nature. And why do you say grummz is criticizing dei to push his video game? Are you saying he doesn’t believe what he is saying? Because he seems pretty passionate about it,i have seen him on many streams and it doesn’t sound like a dude that’s willing to get canceled for a project. Remember we live in a time where you can loose every opportunity if you are not a leftist and criticize dei

Many people clearly haven't learned the notion of "take everything with a grain of salt" or "not everything is at is seems". Other maybe do but because it doesn't aline with their views so they dismiss it entierly because they can't stand the idea of being wrong.

well, we live in an era that people like to watch tik tok, so that is their benchmark on how much they willing to invest their time for a topic before judging the content and move on to next topic.

Thank even as someone who leans left when I saw the screenshot of Asmon with a caption implying he was talking about "woke culture", having seen the original video my eyes couldn't roll further back . Then again twitter/X is braindead no matter the side if the aisle you're on. But that's an L right there.

Did you ever think all this may just be propagated by the exact publishers you are talking about to take the heat off of themselves?

Shout out to the Grummz guy, checked his twitter, he removed it and apologized, props

I wanna know about the ubisoft bots.

But "EvErYtHiNg is PoLiTiCaL!"

Ahhh the Internet. The BEST and WORST invention of all times. I miss the times when the crazies weren't around freely

That's what clickbait headlines get you

Humans are instinctively tribal and operate with an increasing level of cognitive heuristics as we age. Put those two together with an overabundance is data to prove any position anyone might have, and you've accurately created our current social media environment. We have been taught that headlines reflect the content, then headlines became increasingly salacious (skyrocketing with the advent of adtech). Point is that the reality we are in now is completely expected and unsurprising.

As a centrist I always been saying that the left and right are just two sides of the same coin, they constantly do the things they accuse the other of doing and viceversa, it has been like that for a long time, and the more "extreme" or "far" you go with either side the more each side resembles the other, which only someone not into the hivemind can actually notice, as those inside will never acknowledge it or outright refuse it.

Is just culture war stuff. When you're in the trenches and have endured being shelled for log enough, every loud noise sounds like enemy fire and every bright light looks like enemy muzzle flash.

I NEVER thought that video had anything to do with modern politics. There is genuinely something wrong with a large amount of society with who lack any kind of analytics skills. I think that's apparent with what we see going on in culture.

Twitter was a mistake

So the idiots that attacked Asmon have strawmanned his video, which is based on yours which is based on Ross's. Yeah, those reddit fools prove that they never watch the videos which also proves that Asmon's critics literally JUMPED TO CONCLUSIONS about his thoughts. Despite the fact they themselves have the NERVE to accuses Asmon of "jumping to conclusions". . . just like that fool VOOSH the PDF.

We're now living in the "no attention span" generation. Thanks to TikTok nobody wants to watch a video longer than 5 seconds so they just look at the titles and post a comment. Also RU-vid ads are making the situation even worse, most people don't want to wait through double unskippable ads or even know how to use adblock so they just immediately pause the ad and post their comment. This is what the internet has become. Clickbait titles are becoming a double-edged sword, if you don't get to the point right in the title then people will get the wrong idea.

It is technically about politics. They don't preserve game because it isn't profitable. It's more profitable to make bad games cheaper, than good games.

After watching 10 minutes and 22 seconds of your video, it gives me weird disturbed chills that people do this sort of thing so confidently. We are a few short years away from human beings walking off cliffs because they heard that all you need is faith, trust and pixie dust to fly. And they’d be blaming the pixies for scamming them on their way down.

While you're not responsible for others' actions you are responsible for your own. Titling videos accurately rather than for engagement would likely have prevented the whole thing. You said yourself the "Publishers are destroying your games wasn't snappy enough". What you mean is, how close to clickbait for the algorithm can I make the title. To be clear, it wasn't clickbait, but ONLY because you were vague, it was more rage-baiting, which is leaning into the exact problem you're complaining about in the video.

It sucks because this is a genuine issue that effects both sides negatively and could unite both sides but instead has turned into another mud slinging contest.

I think UE was worried in show some parciality in that mess, because he was cited by Grumnz, and I understand; its kind his motto show imparciality...besides, the people really missed the point... However, Grumnz is doing a good job, in my opinion, knowing against what he is fighting... But the thing is: with all crazyness in the world today, specially by the "progressive" people, at this point any incredible BS we loosely hear or see can be true, so if people are impatient, rushed or even lazy, headlines easily can pass as possible...not something good, of course... Add at this we have real critical thinking in general diminishing (again, "thanks" to our "colorful" people, which turned reasoning and even common sense into marxist BS on schools), speacilly on "important" people, and what would be something simple as it is undertand the context of the things, its not anymore, sadly...

I like Reddit. It's a nice containment site that keeps the idiots away from me.

okay thanks, I saw grummz thread, and while I agree with him i was so confused how it had anything to do with asmon's video lol. Thought I was going a little crazy x.x

LMAO. Ross even made a short version of his call-to-action video for people with a short attention span. Goes to show you can never account for stupidity and/or laziness.

The laziness is real 👌

The problem I have here is that you're complaining about something you helped create in this instance. You could've had your title say "Publishers" instead of "They" but you didn't because, as you said, it didn't sound "snappy" enough. Specifically, I didn't watch your other video when it came out *because* of the title. I saw "they" and thought you must be talking about the DEI stuff again and since I didn't like your "be polite" stance last time, I simply didn't bother watching. Had I known it was about publishers, I would've watched. My point is, you're complaining about people only paying attention to the headlines while you yourself used a click-bait title that, whether you like it or not, has a politically charged connotation. "They" is a political word now; it shouldn't be, but it is. Using it is only ever going to lead to a problem with the obliviati like it has while contributing to the problem of titles having little to do with the content.

I don't recall the word culture being used positively in the west for a long time, whether in mainstream media or social media. I'm not sure why.

So you claim Grummz uses this controversy to push his own gaming projects, where did you get that from? I think you didn't invest your own 23 seconds for research here. Not only are you hypocritical here, but this is even defamation.

I feel like a PSA needs to get made about this, this is stupid enough to be considered dangerous.

I have never seen Grummz before but it doesn't seem as though he mentioned anything about the ESG or woke being part of the problem in reference to Asmon's video. I think he may be referring to industry practices in that one.

And yet still it as embarrassing as “first” culture

this 'not reading properly' behaviour has been happening with comments on various sites for years before this. why are we surprised people only read the first 5 words then ignored what was actually said? the amount of idiots that have tried to argue with me and their point is what i said but they didnt read

To be fair they would had to have known about the 23 second time point. If they stopped short of it or played the video at 2x speed, they wouldn’t get it. Humans will take ambiguous info and fill in the blanks and run with it. It would serve everyone not to have click bait titles to avoid the drama.

HASAN PIKER is patient zero for this current META of react first read later....

Funny enough, without watching this video i write: "That's what you get from using mostly clickbait titles instead of reflecting the content"

0:37 have you seriously just noticed this? It was pretty much the entirety of Facebook during the last two elections. Most Americans are too lazy to click on something especially if it involves reading. Play mindlessly scroll social media and if they see the same kind of headline enough times they just assumed it to be true

6:06 AKA your average redditor.

The giraffe could have pulled off The Beegees Staying Alive with that strut.

Same thing happened in the past with yellow journalism. It was to sell newspapers.

I’m a big fan of your videos UE. Still am, this isn’t some dramatic “you lost a fan” break off or anything. But tbh, this isn’t one of your better vids for this reason: You acknowledge you used the ambiguous “they” for a reason. That reason is, you knew there’d be some non-zero attachment to its use. You were sort of taking advantage of the very phenomenon you’re then turning around and vilifying. You can’t have it both ways. Either you want, and enjoy taking advantage of, peoples tendencies to project their own confirmation biases onto your content hooks. Or, you don’t. Which is it? To me, it kinda looks like you sorta baited some predictable behavior out of them, and then torched them for doing it in a response video. Now, maybe this was some 4D chess move you were doing specifically to illustrate the broader behavioral problem? If so, ok sure. But it doesn’t really present itself that way.

Kinda saw this coming ngl

In 2017, I wrote an article on my blog called Read The Article First Before Commenting The article was geard toward politics, but the main point of the article was that people should read the article first before . The article wasn't really about politics I even admit that I was guilty of commenting or sharing things without reading or watching the content. I didn't target one side in the article. I said both sides do this

hey, you are what you eat...

RU-vidr discovers how social media works. Fascinating. You knew exactly what and whom you were baiting when you gave it the title “They’re Destroying Our Games.” Don’t feign ignorance or surprise.

Can we just have entertainment without the annoying American politics, please?

Not just news btw, most commentary channels now have the laziest titles i’ve ever seen. Always using the words streamer or youtuber instead of whoever their talking about’s name. And calling Them Evil. I’ve seen Way too many titles like “Evil streamer is really a…” “RU-vidrs you watched who turned evil.”

The misdirected response to the Asmongold video makes perfect sense since we're also in the midst of Gamergate 2 where 'They' often refers to the wokeists who have been destroying all forms of entertainment media.

I thought people were stupid. They are so beyond any help. Now let's put titles like "Woke Culture is Right and Justified" but the entire video is dedicated solely to bashing the woke culture just to see if anyone notices lmao

just gonna say it now, i'm starting to smell the faintest level of bullshit. Everyone knows DIE/DEI is in our video games, and we've found that these CMs are all together in Discord servers with actual discord mods (people who actually work for discord) pearl clutching about stupid crap. To say it's unrelated is biased, when many of these CMs harass other CMs to keep them quiet. While we constantly get someone on some dev team pearl clutching on twitter about X/Y/Z preaching X/Y/Z from these studios.. come on man..

People should always assume positively of others. Verify what the thing actually is. But I am pretty sure Asmongold did this intentionally, knowing people would rage out over assumptions in their head. This is closely following Asmongold talking about GG2 stuff heavily, recently, and even making videos about Grummz/Mark Kern, softballing Mark's business practices, and I believe interviewing him. The title invoked the sense it was a video in the same vein as those. He's good at farming ragebait engagement, intentionally. Bad on the poor who bite but he's not helping the community/industry be better.

Ultimately, it is the fault of the algorithms. When the most rewarded way to get views is to click bait, eventually almost everything becomes a click bait title. People are bombarded with endless provocative, scary, antagonizing false headlines in nearly every subject on social media / RU-vid. Obviously, you should take the time to watch it if you're going to write about it. But the toxic environment that thrives on making people unhappy is 100% the result of algorithms created for maximum views.

Please stop trying to trick people into viewing your videos. A straightforward title that tells the viewer what to expect is the honest approach. I strongly dislike the dishonest approach...who wouldn't? Don't forget, there's a term for using dishonest titles to get views--clickbait. Think about it, and be better. Just because thousands of fools do it, doesn't mean it should be done, especially not if you wish to keep viewers. When I feel like I've been lied to, I block the channel--that's what the "do not recommend" list is for. What you said about informing the viewer at the beginning of the video _doesn't_ _count_. You're still tricking people into opening the video in the first place. If you can't figure out how that's clickbait, then maybe it's time I unsub and block your channel. Shit, that's the very _definition_ of clickbait. BTW, that truly is all it takes for me to block a channel--lie to me one time.

"Here's a story..." Where in your youth interenets aka tubes culture was different (I remember this time too, sadly gone) for people my age if you say "here's a story" the first thing that pops into _our head_ is... _Here's the story of a lovely lady_ _Who was bringing up three very lovely girls._ _All of them had hair of gold, like their mother,_ _The youngest one in curls._ _Here's the story, of a man named Brady,_ _Who was busy with three boys of his own,_ _They were four men, living all together,_ _Yet they were all alone._

I intensely dislike ESG/DEI and that whole class of bullshit, but I dislike publishers deleting games people enjoy and paid for much more. I probably dislike the notion of "own nothing and be happy" more but it's hair splitting to one degree or another. At base it's someone shoving something down people's throats as opposed to allowing someone the choice of eating shit. Reading something once, in full and deliberately isn't actually enough. Just a title or headline? Wtf...

To give Grummz a slim margin of benefit, he was likely piggybacking on the understanding that TOL (and others like him) /had/ watched the video and were mocking its primary thesis. True, it's still best practice to go view it for yourself, but it isn't reasonable to assume someone is making a scathing comment *entirely in the blind*, even if it is more frequently true of late. He was using the Asmongold thumbnail on the presumption that the people already complaining about the video pictured had viewed at least some of the video. A flawed presumption, as it turns out, but not an unreasonable one.

Your assumption that people with less time watch first 23 seconds of a video is incorrect. If a video is half an hour long, then they will skim it. Your clickbait clarification in first 20 seconds is immaterial and will be skipped. So you can say "they didn't watch the video", but don't go about yelling they didn't spend 20 seconds on it.

I am going to react to your headline without watching your video. Let me know how I do. I have seen it argued before that people just read headlines and just react emotionally, it's not exactly a new topic. Often you have seen a horse beaten so badly so many times that when someone brings it up again it's easy to guess that you've probably heard most of it before. You often see this in legacy media, they have to fill their dying tabloid with "stories" so they hire some English major to write opinion pieces with flashy headlines. If a piece of "content" uses flashy headlines to bait readers into clicking, why should I give them the satisfaction of succeeding in their bait? Why should I not be allowed to make fun of them for thinking they are being profound when it's obvious from the framing of the heading that their understanding is only surface level? Why is media almost entirely tabloid these days? Why do English majors insist on using so many words to say so little? My time is limited and the amount of people vying for my attention is ever growing, it is my privilege to be able to pick and choose who I give my time to, but not reading an article about "the housing crisis" or "public education" does not disqualify me from talking about these topics myself, and since most "content" in media is just surface level anyway, with no actual sources or insight, it is more than likely that my reaction to the heading is equally or more insightful than the content itself. Even if it was not, my comment is likely to bring perspectives not shown in the article, and personally I find it much more interesting to see many different people's perspectives on a topic, than to see an opinion writer from the guardian talk about "the economy" That is why I only consume media with comment sections. I realize as I am writing this that I am lumping you together with English Majors and I apologize for this, but my comment about my time being precious still applies. So why am I spending time writing this? Egomania of course! No, it's just more interesting to me to start a conversation about a topic, than to have an opinion fed to me.