N4G: Flamebaiting via the Top _ List

In a site where the news is submitted, approved, read, judged, and commented on, all by the users, things are bound to get a bit chaotic. People have been proving for years that when you give control of a single operation to a group of individuals who have more interest in acting impulsively on personal urges rather than acting for the good of the operations' success, the whole thing becomes a huge clusterf**k. On N4G, that clusterf**k exists in the form of a perpetual fanboy war that takes place on the front page where the hottest news resides. A lot of this is a result of the fact that people simply can't get enough good old fashioned debate over their favorite console or games. The rest of it is a result of people who have decided that aggravating a portion of the gaming community is the quickest way to get people visiting their site. Even if people go there and hate it, a hit is a hit, and the owners of and writers on the_____gamer.com are desperate to come by internet credibility in any way shape or form possible. The most direct route they seem to have found is the "Top_ List of ___ (insert antagonistic topic here)".

Like N4G, the things that make the idea of top_ lists cool are the very same reasons why they've become an awful thing to behold. It gives amateur writers a very simple template for conveying thoughts or points of view to a reader. One doesn't really need to come up with an approach to support their argument, do any research, or acknowledge the obvious opposing point of view into account when composing a top list. Hell, they don't even need a title, just insert the subject of the list in a sentence containing "top" and the number of reasons/observations they are listing. While it's good that one can use this template to throw their hat in the (gaming) journalistic ring, it seems to have become a crutch that users on here lean on heavily, as well as writers on sites that are submitted here.

Don't believe me? Click the front page and check the hottest news and blogs. Do the same thing this time tomorrow, and the day after that.

Aside from being really lazy and annoying to see after a while, the top list is also the ideal way to flamebait for hits. "Top 5 Reasons _____ (game you like) sucks". "Top 10 Reasons Wii-U will destroy the PS4 and Xbox720". Just like that you've earned hits on your site, and you didn't even have to work at all, just spill the most simplistic opinions you could come up with in the 5 minutes you spent thinking of a topic in between joint pulls. Not only was the work minimal for the writer, but the reader often doesn't even have to read an article to participate in a discussion, as the headline are often enough to do the bare minimum, which is to get people angry. And so the hottest news on N4G is often dominated by lazy flamebait articles.

Don't believe me? Click the front page and check the hottest news and blogs. Do the same thing this time tomorrow, and the day after that.

If you're a writer of these lists and are offended that I'm pigeonholing your method of writing into a category that I loosely define as "garbage", all I can say is you get what you give. Recently I was looking at the comments of a writer trying to defend his flamebaiting top list, and he was getting all indignant about the fact that people were crapping on him and not respectfully acknowledging his points and addressing them intelligently. Perhaps if he had worked harder and come up with a title better than "The Top 5 Reasons That Games You Thought Were Good Really Are Not", he might have found some of that intellectual discourse that he claims to have sought so badly through the writing of his tripe. I checked that person's profile after that by the way, and saw that he had submitted two subsequent articles, both top lists. I have no sympathy for him if he's getting berated and bubbled down on here.

If you're a reader/commenter on N4G who agrees with my opinion on lazy troll submissions, you might be reading this and asking "Oh yeah, well what's your suggestion for making things better, smartass?". Well, the most direct solution is also the least likely, which is to totally ignore trash until it fades into obscurity. That will never happen though, as we gamers are often easily provoked, otherwise this wouldn't be an issue for me to write about in the first place. In my mind it seems that there are measures that site admins (are there any here?) could take to make this a cleaner place to read and comment on stories. For one, the site rating could include a tag that is given in a method similar to the way bubs are given/taken. It can also be prominently displayed next to the article title, so people can know before they even click the title of the story to go to the comments whether or not people have labeled the site as "Troll". Also, the story rating should mean something, and be shown. It might be effective to move very low-rated submissions to a graveyard-ish area where people can still visit and comment, but where it won't be the most popular article of the day just because everyone hates it.

While I might come up with a few more suggestions for how to improve the site, the point of writing this isn't so much because I think I have the solution to the problem I have with this site, it's more to get a gauge of whether or not I'm alone in disgust of how the structure of this site promotes rabid fanboy skirmishes, while burying anything that might actually worth reading and/or commenting on. I know none of the users here can do anything to change the way the site functions, but if a group of us vocally decide and declare that we don't appreciate being trolled every day, there may actually be a decline in the hot garbage that lands in N4G ever hour. Maybe not.

Probably not. Just take it as a point of view then.