They’re not that type of humor anymore. Just a bit of humor in pop cultury stuff.
And, yeah, they are activists. As they pointed out themselves, that’s because their audience skews very much college age.
I have literally no problem with any of the writers there. I actually find it weird that so many people pay attention to who writes what.
My main quibble is that their desire to make intriguing titles crosses over into clickbait way too often. They really would do well to change the model of having someone else make the titles well after the original was published.
I mean, they have an article right now about how BDSM isn’t what it is in the movies. Or, that’s what the title says. The actual article is about how BDSM isn’t as strange as you think it is. They don’t actually compare it to movie versions at all.
Well, that and they don’t moderate their comments sections, at all. They are just now possibly getting decent spam filtering.
…for those that aren’t in the know: three years ago was the birth of goobergate. (Name changed to protect my sanity.) If you don’t know what goobergate is: well, read the cracked article on it.
The goobers devastated many online communities. But many websites fought back: and decided they needed to take definitive stand on certain issues. Cracked was one of those sites. You can interpret that as Cracked becoming an “SJW attack blog” if you like: but I don’t interpret it in that way at all.
It’s not humour so much, but some of the articles are very interesting.
The podcasts about why many of us fail to achieve our goals, the US justice / prison system and post-apocalyptic fiction were all great.
But other times, yeah, it’s so preachy and poorly-researched. It’s a shame there’s not a more consistent standard.
I find, as a general rule, if it has something like “mind-blowing” in the title, it’s likely to be a dud.
As an aside, I got banned almost immediately from their forum. I started a thread about hypothetical propostrous titles for cracked articles, they thought it was trying to make fun of their writers (it wasn’t) and banned me with no chance to reply. So yeah, there’s that too.
And yet, IMO, the quality of them has dropped off. It’s less actual Photoshop work these days, and more “here’s an unedited photo with a paragraph of text on top of it”, which more often than not is something that an old Cracked article already reported, or which an old Cracked article declared to be false.
I’m pretty much very left-leaning, but a lot of their articles have this horrible ‘You’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why’ slant that sets my teeth on edge. David Wong, though talented, writes like this.
It’s created a bad atmosphere. I only ever really went there for Swaim.
I’m a writer and I’ve pondered writing stuff for them but didn’t for the following reasons:
I just don’t find myself able to think in their format and tone. I’m fine with calling this a weakness or limitation.
The pay sucks.
Everything I’ve read has led me to believe that the editors are massive dicks and working with them is a miserable experience. You have provided another data point in that direction.
Agreed that the Photoplasties are mostly garbage. To build on your point, they are full of “Web facts” that are not new, not interesting but shit that I’ve read a bunch of times before. They also tend to have that feeling of “dumb people trying to be clever.”
Auntie Meme has found a home there. His/her stuff, however, is poor in my view.
Why does a single film created in 1977 overshadow tens of thousands of films created in the years since then? It was a pretty good film, and as a tween in 1977 I really liked it, but to take over society like it has? Star Wars is not all that.
And every other article is about movies. I don’t watch too many movies anymore, so those are a turnoff.
But the articles written by people who you would never have the opportunity to hear from are pretty cool (call girl? Guantanamo corrections officer? they have interviewed them).
Other articles get a bit too preachy at times.
But I still check the site every day for the occasional gems.
I find it ironic that Cracked once wrote a column mocking Buzzfeed titles.
My only regret is that they changed the Photoplasties from being on multiple pages to all being on one page. Now it’s less obvious when I click on one and immediately back out when I see it’s going to be twenty Auntie Meme factoids. I’ve no idea how they became a regular on there, everything is just a bit of maybe-accurate trivia slapped over an unretouched photo collected via Google Image Search.
Eh, back when I used to read trashy D&D novels, I noticed a large variance in quality between authors. Sure, they were all writing about Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms and often even about the same characters others had written about but some authors just weren’t worth reading. If you’re reading Cracked on a regular basis, I’d find it weirder if someone wasn’t able to tell the difference over time. Of course, being part of a homogenized think-group that blurps out indistinguishable “Ten Reasons Why You’re A Super-Racist” articles is nothing to be proud of, either.
Way back when I first found the magazine version (mid-60s to early 70s) I actually preferred it to MAD some months and on some topics. This new version strikes me as fast and cheap and not very funny at all. I’ve hit links when folks have posted something I cam across, such as this OP, but I wouldn’t spend a bookmark on the site.
See, what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t expect them to ever look in the first place. There’s no one that’s so good you want to make sure you read all their stuff, and no one so bad that you want to be sure to avoid everything they do.
I read maybe 10 articles yesterday. I have literally no idea who wrote any of them. It would be like knowing who made my Big Mac.
And that is my metaphor for them–fast food of articles. Only thing of real worth are the things where they talk with real people about unusual jobs or whatever.
Don’t know what to tell you. I doubt anyone here was making a conscious effort to mentally catalog the writers. Just something you pick up on over time. The writers’ names are on the front page with the article title and again on the page itself. I guess some people are just more prone to take in that information.
Wow, that is a huge black mark against them in my book. Any site which can’t take a bit of ribbing is a site run by insecure assholes. Some of the articles are amusing but the proportion of those is getting less and less.
I agree that the quality of the site seems to have gone downhill lately.
I do, however, enjoy David Wong and John Cheese’s articles. Cheese describes what it is like to grow up in poverty extremely well, especially the psychological effects. I find myself still struggling with the poverty-stricken’s attitudes toward money, and he helps to understand why I view things the way I do.
Yeah, I don’t agree that the writers on there are interchangeable, though I would say that that is more true than it used to be. Quite a bit more.
Each of the major writers used to have his/her own humorous header with their name, a funny title, and funny cartoon (I can’t remember a specific one now [“Drinking with Gladstone” may have been close to one], and I did a Google image search and they all appear to be just gone). So they were trying to build up the personalities but for some reason dropped that.
What makes them easy to tell apart, more or less, is the topics they write about. People have mentioned John Cheese writing about poverty. JF Sargent is politics and SJW horseshit, etc. But looking at the names now, it’s true I don’t see a lot of familiar ones. Luis Prada is one, and I see staff writers like Jack O’Brien and Michael Swaim (who, by the way, is one big reason why their videos are terrible. Why they have held onto his suckitude for years and years is beyond me.).
So, I can kinda see where that opinion comes from if someone hasn’t been reading there a long time. A lot of the articles these days are one-off interviews, etc.