Buzzfeed has never really been a widely accepted professional site. Aside from Buzzfeed News, their content is mostly fun fluffy articles about celebrities, lists of random Amazon products or silly polls or quizzes. But lately, their content has included another pillar: stolen Reddit posts.
To explain Reddit for the unaware: Reddit is a social news website where posts are split into communities called “subreddits.” Subreddits can cover a variety of topics or include a variety of groups. For example, the subreddit r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk is a community for people who work in the hotel industry. The subreddit r/MonaMains is a community for people who enjoy playing as the character Mona in Genshin Impact. The subreddit r/SoftwareGore is a community for sharing pictures of technology breaking in horrifying ways. There are currently more than 2.8 million subreddits in existence.
Buzzfeed will often make listicle posts (portmanteau of “article” and “list”) that are just long compilations of Reddit posts. There’s no way to tell that the posts use Reddit until you open a post titled “32 Ridiculously Entitled Parents That’ll Make Your Blood Boil” and realize all the posts are embedded from r/ChoosingBeggars.
Most of the posts Buzzfeed shares in their listicle posts come directly from r/AskReddit, where users ask open-ended questions and users respond to them. There are 34.2 million members of r/AskReddit, with several posts (called “threads”) a day. Questions range from “Which movie have you seen more than 7 times?” to “How do you feel about free healthcare? Should everyone have it?” to “If you were an NPC or an enemy in a video game, what loot would you drop if you were defeated?”
Buzzfeed will take these threads and post them as a listicle, basically listing a bunch of responses with some stock images scattered in between. As of writing their most recent stolen Reddit post, which asks about things that are illegal but aren’t wrong ethically, has 395,878 views. On Reddit, that post has over 18,000 comments and over 38,900 upvotes (similar to likes).
Buzzfeed and several other websites (including, bizarrely, the ICanHasCheezburger Facebook page) have also recently begun sharing posts from r/AmITheA*****e. AITA is a subreddit where users post about situations where they may have been a jerk, and the community votes to judge them. The idea is that presenting your situation to unbiased strangers will yield an objective answer. (The results are debatable, but that’s not the point of this article.)
To be clear: it’s not like Buzzfeed and other sites are actually doing anything with these posts. They’re not using them as quotes to paint some bigger picture. They’re basically just typing up a summary of the posts and letting their own followers comment on it. Their comments don’t contribute to the original AITA post, and the original poster will likely never see them. It’s entirely content/views for Buzzfeed.
It’s not like Reddit has never been a source of content and views. Several YouTube channels are dedicated to reading off Reddit threads, either with a human narrator or text-to-speech. But they’re specifically dedicated to that sort of content – in other words, they’re not a massive media source like Buzzfeed.
So what gives? Is there a writer shortage at the Buzzfeed offices? Can they just not be bothered to write their own stuff anymore? Or is it genuinely more profitable to steal Reddit posts these days? Maybe it’s all of the above. But at least we’ve moved past stealing Tumblr posts for content.
Maybe they’ll just start stealing Duolingo screenshots next. “Build Your Dream Home And We’ll Guess Which League You’re In.” “This Boy Found Something Strange in His Dad’s Closet And We Can’t Get Over It.” “Wake Up, Besties! New Bea Hairstyle Just Dropped!” Truly, the possibilities are endless.
Categories: Opinion
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