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Worst Headline Ever?

Posted on: 2023-08-23

I've been reducing my social media and general online life consumption recently. I'm sometimes reading actual books, sometimes on paper!

That said, I still need to keep up with what's going on, so I continue to check my RSS feeds and some curated follows on Mastodon, as well as occasional dips in to the latest algorithmic timeline offerings from Threads.

This morning Mastodon brought up a link to an article with a headline that has perhaps the densest collection of trash terms I've seen in one place. Besides "on", "is", and "by" everything else in this is terrible:

Crypto botnet on X is powered by ChatGPT

The article itself is quite informative, actually, though not particularly surprising. That headline though! Let's take it word by word:

This reminds me of one of the things that finally got me to give up on Twitter:

a terrible Twitter ad featuring Elon Musk, crypto, and 'quantum'

It's got it all:

My timeline filling up with this kind of thing really helped me kick the Twitter habit. Sorry to have foisted this on you as well, but at least it's contextualized a bit. Online culture is often like the kid who comes home carrying a pile of dog poop announcing "hey look what I almost stepped in!" Well, even if I did bring this home, at least you can now be more careful where you put your feet while you're out there.

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