Former employee at Comic Book Resources claims the company fired all the news editors and has become an “AI-driven clickbait-focused mill"

[IDontBeatGames]

View: https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1694084527516254503?s=20


View: https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1694085562553061816

Full text: "Despite rumors to the contrary, we have not eliminated our News section. We simply fired all the news editors who didn't resign in protest and have been slowly gutting our other departments as Valnet continues CBR's shift to an AI-driven, clickbait-focused content mill."

Spoiler: image of the tweet

 

[Skel1ingt0n]

The internet sucks now.

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

People need to vehemently reject and cease giving sites doing this any clicks whatsoever. If they can't afford to pump out content with actual humans creating it, they deserve to go out of business.

 

[mrmoose]

Wow I don't think I've visited CBR in years.

 

[NotLiquid]

My exposure to CBR is limited but my impression of having read them a few times over the years is that they're relatively clickbaity in general, so somehow it doesn't surprise me that the owners would take it down this type of road.

 

[Tamanon]

Hopefully that should cut down on comic book movie rumor threads now.

 

[entremet]

The internet ad model is very flawed.

 

[Harpoon]

Seeing CBR become this is immensely sad.

 

[Helix]

they have the most bait filled headlines for their articles so this does not remotely surprise me

 

[Astro Cat]

I mean anyone who's read anything on there in the past few months or so knew this was obvious.

 

[Mario_Bones]

Seeing CBR become this is immensely sad.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, people keep saying they've always been like this but it's only been in the last few years since they rebranded as CBR. Used to be a good site for comic news before that

 

[Sagroth]

I left that community years ago, but I made a number of lifelong friends there. It's a real tragedy seeing what the site has become.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

I see these clickbait titles every time I open a new google tab. All the articles are formatted the same way. I'm glad they're being called out for it.

 

[Surakian]

Are they a banned source here? If not, they should be a banned source with this news.

 

[RedMercury]

Not surprising at all, I have def gotten that vibe the few times I have visited there

 

[grand]

Based on the spam that I see from them, I 100% believe it

 

[Palette Swap]

Are they a banned source here? If not, they should be a banned source with this news.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, if they've become an AI content mill, we shouldn't give them the time of the day.

 

[grand]

We're stress testing the thought experiment: if a clickbait site becomes AI driven, could anyone tell a difference?

 

[AgeEighty]

Sorry Jonah, this is what happens when you take the big payday and sell your creation to vulture capitalists.

I'm sorry to all their writers and employees.

 

[Dalek]

Everything sucks now.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

People need to vehemently reject and cease giving sites doing this any clicks whatsoever. If they can't afford to pump out content with actual humans creating it, they deserve to go out of business.

Click to shrink...

I agree with this. There is no point for "content" websites to exist unless they have actual people working there writing the content.

 

[Vash]

There are even more people speaking out.

Former/Current(?) Manager also weighed in.

 

[Tracksuit Larry]

Not to kick CBR while it's down... but they were always super kickable, and this doesn't seem out of bounds for them at all.

There are a bunch of these sorts of Fandom/"Geek Culture" focused sites that are going to be doing this in the future (if they're not already, and a lot of them probably are and we just don't know it yet) because so much of their "Content" is literally just lowballing desperate freelancers who want to say they're a writer or a "journalist" or whatever and will accept dogshit rates to rewrite press releases and recap trailers or basically do 3rd party PR fluff-work to ensure the one or two people on staff who actually need access in order to do junkets can still do that.

So when the opportunity presented itself for these editors/site owners to cut out the self-debasing freelancers they'd been assigning that "work" to, and instead just feed press releases, trailers, and all the other free marketing cruft that makes up 70% of any given "Geek Culture" site's content into ChatGPT or an equivalent, of course they took it.

Yes, this sucks. But the parade of exploitation for corporate franchise media that it was before this came along also sucked. These sites were always clickfarm content mills. The only thing that's changed now is that they've decided to save whatever pennies on the ad revenue split they could and asked a computer to write their junk posts for them.

 

[TheMadTitan]

As I said in the comics thread, gotta grab Screen Rant and Game Rant, too. Same parent company, same bullshit articles. I'm sure they have more sites, too.

 

[Deleted member 8750]

I've been getting AI-generated images and articles in my Google search results lately. It's extremely frustrating. If anyone knows of a good extension to filter this garbage out, let me know.

 

[ZeoVGM]

CBR has been a terrible clickbait site for years at this point. Sad to see it's somehow getting worse.

 

[Speedstersonic]

My exposure to CBR is limited but my impression of having read them a few times over the years is that they're relatively clickbaity in general, so somehow it doesn't surprise me that the owners would take it down this type of road.

Click to shrink...

There were some genuinely good articles they put out. I know someone who worked there before freelance.

 

[NihonTiger]

Seeing CBR become this is immensely sad.

Click to shrink...

It is, sadly, the almost inevitable fate of all large news sites in the future at this point. People are the biggest expense and very few people care if a story was written by an algorithm or a person as long as they get what they want.

 

[Nairume]

Hopefully that should cut down on comic book movie rumor threads now.

Click to shrink...

Cut down one awful clickbait source used to make low effort rumor threads, three more awful clickbait sources used to make low effort rumor threads grow to take its place.

 

[xendless]

I've been getting AI-generated images and articles in my Google search results lately. It's extremely frustrating. If anyone knows of a good extension to filter this garbage out, let me know.

Click to shrink...

The images are probably new, but sadly articles have been in this fucked up bot state for years
Source, my ass who had to comb google news everyday to run a fansite, ENDLESS TRASH

 

[Speedstersonic]

I've been getting AI-generated images and articles in my Google search results lately. It's extremely frustrating. If anyone knows of a good extension to filter this garbage out, let me know.

Click to shrink...

Any time i look anything up for a game now it's like 10 links to these AI run gaming "guide" sites right at the fucking top and they all suck and are useless and copy paste the same thing from each other. It's fucking awful.

Kinda have to just use discord or exclusively search with fucking reddit in the keywords

 

[mbpm]

They should update their forum base is all I have to say.

 

[ivantod]

I've been getting AI-generated images and articles in my Google search results lately. It's extremely frustrating. If anyone knows of a good extension to filter this garbage out, let me know.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, append "reddit" to your search query. Google search sucks ass for quite some time now. Unless you're looking for something very specific, any kind of more generic search query simply results in a slew of AI/Content Mill articles which are completely devoid of any kind of useful information.

Or to put it another way:

So you want to execute a google search. For this you first need to go to google web site. In order to do this, type https://www.google.com in your browser address bar. Now you will get a text input where you are able to put in your search query. Select the input box so that you can type your search query. Type in your search query. However, you want to get actually useful results. Now we will explain to you how you can get actually useful results. In order to get the actually useful results type the word "reddit" after your query.

Ugh... I can't do this any more sorry. But if you would like to know when the next version of this post will be released, watch this post. We'll update you with the release date as soon as it is announced. This way you will not miss the new version of this post.

 

[DanGo]

Hopefully that should cut down on comic book movie rumor threads now.

Click to shrink...

Nah, because fools don't even bother looking at webpages anymore, they just create a thread based on some dumb tweet from an aggregator account that misinterprets the clickbait non-story.

 

[smocaine]

How do you even rank when everything's AI generated, or is the goal just more pages with more ads?

 

[ivantod]

is the goal just more pages with more ads?

Click to shrink...

Yes.

 

[DJConvoy]

Seeing CBR become this is immensely sad.

Click to shrink...

very much this. They were actually a good site for news once.

 

[GifGafJef]

That site was already pretty terrible in terms of clickbait from what I remember so AI clickbait will be a sight to see for sure.

 

[Conkersbadfurday]

Not to kick CBR while it's down... but they were always super kickable, and this doesn't seem out of bounds for them at all.

There are a bunch of these sorts of Fandom/"Geek Culture" focused sites that are going to be doing this in the future (if they're not already, and a lot of them probably are and we just don't know it yet) because so much of their "Content" is literally just lowballing desperate freelancers who want to say they're a writer or a "journalist" or whatever and will accept dogshit rates to rewrite press releases and recap trailers or basically do 3rd party PR fluff-work to ensure the one or two people on staff who actually need access in order to do junkets can still do that.

Click to shrink...

I reviewed and wrote about comics for like, two years for basically free because I got paid in comic books. The state of comic book "journalism" has been a mess for what seems like a long, long time. Like if you aren't writing for IGN, you aren't going to get paid much to cover the next Batman run or Image darling.

Also Scott Snyder gets mad if you give his books low reviews and emails your boss to complain lol

 

[deimosmasque]

Based on how the articles have been lately, that tracks.

 

[Harpoon]

They should update their forum base is all I have to say.

Click to shrink...

The forum parted ways with the site some time ago.

 

[BossAttack]

I'll be honest, I don't think we'll see a difference. They were already a click-bait "news" site for nerd shit. Insert Popular Actor being considered for Insert Popular Role.

 

[808s & Villainy]

Is it sad I can't tell when this firing happened? Because I've associated CBR for years with the type of clickbait indistinguishable from AI

 

[nihilence]

Sad, but everything I saw was always click bait trash. I sort of assumed it was already a crappy ai.

 

[BWoog]

Remember when Gizmodo tried to give AI the easiest, most basic article concept in the world of "List of Star Wars Movies And TV Shows" and it bungled it beyond belief? Don't know why these places think they can cut out humans from the equation.

Unsurprisingly, employees across G/O Media-owned publications were furious in response to the news. And as it turned out, with good reason. In the very first AI-generated article Gizmodo published last week, the website's "Gizmodo Bot" completely missed the mark. The post, a so-called "Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows," was terribly written and riddled with factual mistakes. Before it was corrected, the list failed to put the movies and shows into their correct chronological order and excluded some more recent chapters and spinoffs of the beloved franchise.

Click to shrink...

Gizmodo's AI-Generated Star Wars Article Still Has Errors, and Now It's Ranking on Google

Gizmodo's AI-generated "Star Wars" article — a messy first foray into AI content on behalf of owner G/O media — is on Google's first page.

futurism.com

 

[Double 0]

I mean, I left and hated CBR even while Jonah was in charge (not exactly his fault, the culture there just pissed me off), but this is really pathetic.

 

[Brawly Likes to Brawl]

the places must be severely desperate to save a dime, because AI is nowhere near the point where it can competently creating content to a whole news platform

 

[mbpm]

The forum parted ways with the site some time ago.

Click to shrink...

What, never knew. It has the same url and everything still

 

[Tracksuit Larry]

Don't know why these places think they can cut out humans from the equation.

Click to shrink...

Because they pretty easily can. Most folks don't actually read the articles at these sorts of free PR outlets for entertainment news! They will share the headline and, especially in places like these, only do that much because it provides a convenient reason to talk about what the OP wanted to talk about in the first place. The link is just a jumpoff point, nobody's really expected to do much more than check the headline and scan for a picture.

A lot of this stuff is posted specifically for the shareable headline + img. Not because editorial at the geek culture site in question actually cares about the content they're "creating." The hope is that it becomes that day's link that ends up "going viral" (i.e. shared maybe 5000-7500 times on social media and posted to a subreddit where 400 replies happen underneath that headline) and there are enough ad impressions to make that worthwhile.

 

[iiicon]

The blogs hosted on CBR, like Comics Should Be Good, or Kelly Thompson's blog (which I can't remember the name of at the moment), used to be daily visits for me. It's sad to see a once good community experience death by a thousand cuts over the years.