Buzzfeed and Birthday Cake

Once upon a time, Buzzfeed was a respected website full of educational and well received/well researched articles, way back in the day. Actually, was it ever respected? Was there ever a time when its articles were ever well received? It seems hard to believe now, in 2021, that people are on the edges of their seats waiting for a new Buzzfeed article. Let me tell you a rather mundane tale of my interactions with Buzzfeed, and a slightly less mundane story of how originality seems to have died a death.

I posted a tweet in 2018 that said 'I love how Americans think 'birthday cake' is a flavour'. A very silly tweet that got no traction whatsoever, and rightfully so. I mean who cares, right? Also, I do a lot of silly tweets that get no traction, so I assumed this would be no different. This tweet came around because I, an outsider to the wild and wacky world of the United States of America, once took a trip there and found all sorts of different processed goods that were labelled as 'birthday cake' flavoured. Which, to me, is ridiculous. 'Birthday cake' isn't a flavour. People have different kinds of cakes for their birthday. It's not possible for that to be a single flavour. I suspect what people are calling 'birthday cake' flavour, is vanilla. Now that IS a flavour, when you taste something with vanilla in it, you would say it tastes like vanilla. When you bite into a birthday cake, you don't say this tastes like birthday cake. That doesn't make any sense. Because 'birthday cake' isn't a flavour, it's not a taste. It's a thing that exists, made up of lots of different ingredients.

I have since been informed, by some well meaning twitter folk, that the 'birthday cake' flavour is to do with a famous recipe in America by the Pillsbury company, called 'Funfetti' that was heavily marketed during the 90's, and that seems to have caught on. I do want to shout out the lovely Twitter folks who would offer up titbits of information, instead of the wave of people who would just call me an idiot. What a wonderful place Twitter is. Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself here.

A year later in 2019 I was inundated by replies to this tweet, from many people angrily telling me that I'm wrong and obviously 'birthday cake' is a real flavour. Whatever your opinions are on the matter, feel free to keep them to yourself because I don't care. Eventually, after some sleuthing, I was able to determine why so many people were interested in my stupid tweet, a year after I posted it. Those dastardly boys at Buzzfeed had struck gold with a new classic article, entitled '24 Things People Love About Americans and 24 Things They Find Weird About Americans', written by a man called Matt Stopera. I say written, that's not strictly true. The article itself is just a collection of tweets, 24 tweets from other people just lifted straight from Twitter that mention things people love, and 24 tweets that mention things people find weird about America. That's it, that's the whole article. My tweet was included in the '24 Things People Love About Americans', because I forgot that sarcasm is incredibly difficult to get right on the internet.

(fun game for you guys, if you're ever curious, to google 'Buzzfeed' and then your Twitter username, and see how many of your tweets this establishment has pinched from you)

Now if I didn't think that 'birthday cake' was an actual flavour, then I certainly don't think this counts as an article. If this guy got paid for writing this, then there's something wrong with the world. Collecting a bunch of other peoples tweets and putting them together doesn't count as having written anything. It's lazy, it's cheap, and it's apparently what Buzzfeed is all about. What is Buzzfeed? Just lists of stuff? 82 times I got angry at my toaster? 17 times people accused me of plagiarism? Is that all it is? It sure seems like it. Oh and quizzes, they do a lot of quizzes too. At least you actually have to assemble and write a quiz, so thats something.

For a week or so I was inundated with tweets from people telling me all about how birthday cake is a flavour, which was a very tedious way for me to spend a week, and a real wakeup call about how I manage my time after this. Like all things though, I forgot about it. As 2020 emerged and became what it was, most people had other things to worry about. Not me though, because in October 2020 Buzzfeed released an article entitled '29 Weird Things Non-Americans Love About American Culture', written by Matt Stopera. I say written, but I don't mean that at all. This 'article' consisted of 29 tweets from other people, lifted straight from Twitter, including my birthday cake flavour tweet again. So once again I got another round of tweets telling me I was an idiot. Great stuff, man. This article was suspiciously similar to the one posted the year before, assembled by the same person. I was starting to suspect that Buzzfeed wasn't a very good website.

Still, life goes on, and after my Twitter page calmed down I forgot all about it again. Forgot all about it until April 2021, of course, when I got another round of Twitter interactions. Uh-oh, Buzzfeed must be up to their old tricks again. Sure enough, here's a '20 Things People Actually Love About America and 20 Things They Don't Understand About Americans' article, posted in April 2021, assembled by (you guessed it) Matt Stopera. Three years in a row, three suspiciously similar articles, all written by the same person. Matt Stopera is part of the staff on Buzzfeed, apparently, and nobody seems to mind that not only is he not writing articles, he's also recycling the same lazy articles. Truly astounding.

We're not finished with the fun yet though, there's still more! Not content with publishing the same article three years in a row, Buzzfeed decided to chance their arm and publish it twice in one year, as we roll around to October 2021 with an article entitled '25 Non-Americans Absolutely Hate About Americans and 15 Things They Absolutely Love', and this bad boy has been written/assembled by Dave Stopera, who I can only assume is the brother of staff member Matt Stopera. Now, if you were to take a wild stab in the dark guess about what kind of article this is, and you guessed that it was a collection of tweets written by other people, you'd be right on the money. Congratulations.

Now I'm sure it's hard to write constant material for Buzzfeed. Lord knows my own postings are few and far between. Here's the thing though man, surely you guys care about quality control? Surely you care about the content you're putting out? If you have to resort to posting practically the same article every year (twice in one year in the case of 2021), an article that you didn't even write, maybe you need to take a look at your business plan, or maybe take a look at the charlatans creating content for your website. Like, if this was in your business plan for the website all along, then maybe you guys fucked something up.

I don't care about whether or not 'birthday cake' is a flavour anymore. For the record I don't think it is, but this whole thing has taught me something else, something about being proud of the work you put out. Matt Stopera can't feel proud about lifting other peoples tweets and calling that a days work, surely. If that's what you have to do to get paid, maybe your heart isn't in it anymore. Maybe your heart was never in it to begin with, Lord knows this is a pretty easy way to get a paycheck. To me though, a humble man who makes zero dollars from his written work, it seems pretty lazy. It shows a lack of integrity. C'mon man, learn how to write your own articles. Don't just rehash the same shit every year. If it's that hard to come up with articles, maybe you need to find a new career path. If Buzzfeed is that demanding, that taxing, maybe it's not for you. Maybe it's not for anyone anymore. Maybe Buzzfeed has ran its course. If this is the kind of quality they have to offer the world, maybe we've moved on from the most superficial of superficial. Maybe we'd all appreciate a modicum of effort, just a smidge, of originality in what we digest during our 12 hour internet browsing sessions.

This is now a plea to Matt Stopera, and to a lesser extent his relative Dave Stopera. You guys can do better, I believe in you. I mean honestly if this is the best you can do, then this is awful and you should be ashamed of yourselves. Buzzfeed themselves don't care, surely. They're a huge website, a business that only cares about churning out content, and they don't care what that content is. You though, Matt Stopera, you're a man, a man with feelings. This can't be all your life is. You don't have to put up with this, man. Try. Try something.

Although like I said earlier man, I'm the guy who has been writing words on the internet for years and I haven't made a dime from it. In this crazy world of ours, where paying your bills takes precedence over creating something with some measure of quality to it, who cares about being original? Originality doesn't pay the bills, man. Neither do 'birthday cake' flavoured Oreos. Because 'birthday cake' isn't a flavour.