1. Thread: A small trick you can do to help the internet be a little less terrible, shared with me via the great @IonaItalia
2. The Problem: There's are lots of horrible* articles on the internet, some from random weirdos others in major media publications. On one hand, you feel these deserve a response. On the other hand, sharing these articles only increases clicks/pageviews
*however defined
*however defined
3. The reason why this is a problem is in sharing your blistering takedown, you're also promoting a horrible piece, contributing to its revenue, and unintentionally incentivizing people to produce more of the exact same sort of horrible pieces bec of the click rate.
4. The Solution: Don't link to the site directly but to the saved version in archive.org. This way you provide citation evidence for your argument without directing traffic to the offending outlet.
5. If you're a chrome user, I highly recommend the Wayback Machine plugin. Not only is it useful for retrieving archived dead pages, but it allows you to get or even create archive.org links directly from the page you're viewing. Download here: chrome.google.com/webstore/detai…
6. While we can never stop bad takes form being published, we can take away an outlet's financial incentive for publishing gratuitously horrible pieces in order to profit off "controversy"
7. In sum, don't reward sites for being terrible. Use an archive link instead.
