Beaten to the punchline

Brooklyn-based social media contractor Alex Mizrahi, 30, set up @HuffPoSpoilers, a Twitter account that deflates the teasing tweets from The Huffington Post’s Twitter account, in August last year. Now, the account has 30,000 followers, which Mizrahi points to as evidence of just how frustrating clickbait can be. He exchanged emails with The Wireless.

What kind of a response have you had to @HuffPoSpoilers? What do you think that says about how people view HuffPo’s Twitter account?

The response has been incredibly passionate and supportive. It’s great to see that so many people out there share my frustrations, but while we're up to 30,000+ followers, it’s still less than one per cent of @HuffingtonPost's followers. So either way more people LIKE the way HuffingtonPost tweets, or they haven't discovered me yet, or they’re spambots. Most likely a combination of the three.

This tweet, “Student forced to carry papers to prove she can wear hijab”, in which they don’t say the school name, has 29 RTs right now. My tweet that does, has 43, despite having one per cent of the followers. So imagine if they’d just included the school name in their original tweet. More reach, more engagement, chain reaction RTs. Instead, they chose to stay vague and weaken their product.

What frustrates you most about the Huffington Post’s Twitter presence?

The most frustrating aspect is just how blatant they are in their absolute disregard for the well-being of their audience. They don’t respect their followers at all, they don’t care about what's important and what’s not, they don’t care about what's news and what isn’t. They call themselves “the internet newspaper” but they’re way more tabloid magazine than a reputable and trustworthy news source. And the longer I’ve been doing this, the more I’ve noticed it and the more angry I've gotten.

Why do you think HuffPo markets its content on Twitter the way it does?

Because it works. Plain and simple. They get the clicks, which leads to ad revenue. There’s an expression in the freelance world (and I’m sure in other industries as well): Under-Promise, Over-Deliver. Clickbaiting does the opposite: it over-promises and under-delivers, leaving readers annoyed and unfulfilled, but keeping those clicks coming in.

How could HuffPo improve its social media presence without compromising page views, which are used to appeal to advertisers)?

1. Compromise some page views for the sake of your reputation, which is currently terrible. The laughing stock of news organisations on Twitter. 

2. Trust your readers; that they’ll still want to read about X even if they know it doesn’t take place in their state, etc. Stop making them work so hard, it just pisses people off.

Can you think of any online publication that does clickbait well (or… if not well… less irritatingly)?

NY Times, Gawker, and plenty others. I understand you can’t fit a whole story into 140 characters, there’s always going to be something left out, so at least write something creative or funny or interesting, instead of sticking to the most boring, formulaic, and uninteresting styles that HP does.

You could argue that clickbait’s an unfortunate product of the commercial imperatives driving much media today; that HuffPo is a free service, competing amongst many other free services, and it’s got to make money from advertisers somehow. What do you think?

I get it. They have bills and salaries to pay. But you can be clickbait-y and interesting at the same time, and we'd all feel way less dirty about it if they were.

You’re a self-described “big NPR nerd” – would you say that public service media has more important a role in today’s media landscape, given the commercial imperatives behind much of the rest of media?

Public service media is more important than ever for the sole reason that so much local commercial media are disappearing. So the fewer small town papers, the more crucial it is we keep and support the ones we have. But NPR’s done an amazing job of diversifying and expanding its culture, music, and international coverage just as other outlets shrink theirs (I don't have numbers to back this up, all based on what I see and hear).

If this kind of “lowest common denominator” clickbait is the upshot of HuffPo, a free service, needing eyeballs on pages to appeal to advertisers, does the funding model for online media need to change?

I don’t know if it needs to “change” but there obviously needs to be some sort of growth, if only because it’s been proven that the current model isn’t working so well for many media organisations. I think HuffPo’s problem is, their content is so broad, and much of it so pointless and stupid, that if they went to a pay model it would collapse because there’s very little passion among its followers. It’s spread so thin among every subject in the universe that it has very little depth in any of them.