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I always find it most amusing how many fans of the Onion get irrationally angry at the Babylon Bee.
by yucky 4y ago
I always find it most amusing how many fans of the Onion get irrationally angry at the Babylon Bee.
- idlewords 4y agoThe inflection point sometime in the past two years when the Bee became funnier than the Onion was a pretty sad one for us long-time fans of the latter. The McSweeneysization of formerly good humor sites is one of the great tragedies of our ongoing culture war.
- puffoflogic 4y agoWoah, you can't call the Bee funny on HN.
- idlewords 4y agoI didn't call it funny! Just funnier than the Onion now.
- spencerflem 4y agoI can reccomend the LA Hard Times! Absolutely terrific stuff. Onion is a little sad, just more boring than anything and their website layout is somehow still bad at showing new articles. Was incredible at their peak tho. Bee is too hateful to be funny for me at least :(
- 1123581321 4y agoIt’s interesting how this happened, too. First, there’s that the Babylon Bee is independent and The Onion has been just one of several brands under Gizmodo, then Univision, then a PE firm. Independence is an asset when trying to be funny since executive notes have never been known for being creatively freeing. Second, the Bee has a big pool of writers because it has a membership tier that allows pitching headlines. And their membership has grown as they’ve become a news story for things like their suspended Twitter account. So while The Onion’s parent corp was laying off staff, the Babylon Bee was growing its writers and also making more money, which let it hire more editors and producers and hire some of the headline-writing members who had proven themselves. All that led up to being able to produce a high volume of headlines and stories.
- idlewords 4y agoWhat you describe sounds like the old Cracked model, which worked for a surprisingly long time. The Onion was funny for a long time after they sold out; what seems to have tanked their comedy is an editorial decision in the last few years to become more politically engaged, and to start "punching up". You can date this to the time when they ditched the absurdist persona of Biden as a washed-up drifter they'd been building up all through the Obama years.
- boston_clone 4y agoIf that’s what you find “most amusing”, then of course you’ll like a site like that; it’s mostly neofascist regurgitations served on a plate they call satire. Edit - allow me to substantiate: a quick visit to their site has everything from anti-worker sentiment, anti-LGBT+, election conspiracies, COVID denialism, and an obvious support of right-wing talking points. Did they used to be more even keel? Sure, but they’ve changed their tone for the worse in the last few years.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoSatire sentiment is subjective
- boston_clone 4y agoedit - I’ll just not engage in the inanity of sniping at subjective definitions; my point about the site remains.
- spencerflem 4y agohey for what it's worth I agree with you - free speech and all that but the bee is in favor of a bunch of messed up stuff. hackernews is full of right wing types
- boston_clone 4y agothat’s okay, I’ll continue trying to make it an uncomfortable place for them. I’ve already had the pleasure of off-boarding a neo-nazi from an old job, and spent a year in a country fighting both kinetically and ideologically against the dominant religious authoritarians. This is just a Saturday.
- 1123581321 4y agoIt must be depressing to go from being in a militia to arguing online.