A farewell to meaningless clickbait
Recovering some sort of meaning in a senseless world of cLIcKZ
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot during this transition from Vox Media to Let’s Go Warriors is the articles that I most enjoyed writing during my nine years managing Golden State of Mind.
These are not necessarily the articles that were the most pristine or the articles that traveled the furthest on social media, but rather the articles that I actually relished carving out time to sit down and write. That, after all, is why I got into the blog game; I fundamentally enjoy writing as a means to make sense of things, and blogging as part of a vibrant community like GSoM provided a platform with which to share all of the joy and pain of being a Warriors fan during a historic decade.
Five articles came to mind for me for a range of different reasons:
Interview with Kirk Lacob, Part 2: The Warriors, SportVU and solving the “communication problem”
The L.A. Lakers, D’Angelo Russell, and calibrating expectations for Las Vegas NBA Summer League
Charles Barkley is probably not the right person to host American Race
I guess the most relevant one now is the Russell one since he has now found his way to the Golden State Warriors, perhaps making all of my fawning over him during the doldrums of summer league a bit more … rational…? Or maybe just a better excuse for writing about a L.A. Lakers rookie on a Warriors site …
He really was the highlight of summer league for me that year. And I was so excited about seeing interesting basketball in Vegas that I woke up the next morning with thoughts still swirling around my head. So, as alluded to in that article, I sketched out an outline on my phone while laying in bed at the SB Nation Airbnb “bloghouse” in Vegas. At some point, I just decided to finish it while lying there in bed away from the hordes of bloggers coming in and out of the house.
(As an aside, that line about someone coming into the room and interrupting me still sends a chill of frustration down my spine. The SBN publishing platform never worked especially well on mobile and it had inexplicably refreshed just before that person came in, meaning I had to rewrite the remainder of the article. Somehow, I thought it best to just integrate the dialogue in there to get something out of that moment of frustration.)
Regardless of whether the article is any good in retrospect (or if I’m just embarrassing myself by reminding you of my early assessment of Russell), reading it now takes me back to a time when I legitimately enjoyed blogging about random meaningless basketball simply because it actually moved me in some concrete way. And so it comes as no coincidence to me that the last time I truly enjoyed writing something at SBN in a way that I remember was nearly three years ago.
All those articles above were pieces that I vividly remember writing from start to finish and, in some cases, I can even remember exactly where I was when I wrote them. They were also all very different -- ranging from an interview with a Warriors official to just watching an ad for a bad TV show to the last night I spent with my dad -- but I remember that spark and actually wanting to write just for the sake of writing instead of just throwing something together for the sake of someone else’s invented targets or bottom line. There was something at the core of all of those articles that I wanted to make sense of and, in doing so, it made the process of writing meaningful even if I can readily acknowledge that there’s very little real world meaning to be found in summer league basketball.
As Apricot stated in his intro here at Let’s Go Warriors, “Working for a place which pushes Clicks Over All wore down my soul.” But to clarify, it wasn’t even “Clicks Over All” -- it was Post Frequency Over All”, which means these pieces that I actually felt something about writing sort of fell by the wayside as we all tried to keep up with posting targets. That not only meant more posts, but also less time to just let my mind wander about basketball until I hit on something that really excited me … which is probably what we should be given time for when being compensated for it as though it’s purely a labor of love.
What I am personally hoping that we can recover here at Let’s Go Warriors is that focus on writing stuff that holds some sort of meaning to us -- as fans, as community members, as human beings -- even if people outside of our bubble of DubNation can’t understand it. Whether I individually accomplish that task in a way that resonates with others remains to be seen, but I’m hoping that I’ll find more of those quiet moments of inspiration when my mind isn’t consumed with the next form we’re spewing out.
And we hope you’ll join us on that journey toward recovering some sort of meaning in this senseless world that internet media has become.
I've had an idea in my head swirling around for a while - I was planning on putting my thoughts down in a FanPost over at GSoM for a few months now but never got around to it. I feel like sports are losing their soul. I think your article is trying to explain the same feeling that I get as a fan watching sports these days. It's all marketing, it's all hype, ESPN has turned into TMZ, and I have a harder time finding joy in sports. I stopped watching the NFL years ago and not only have I never regret it, I actively appreciate that decision every time some idiot like SAS starts yelling nonsense about the NFL. I don't need that in my life. I rarely watch baseball anymore. In the sports I do watch - college football and NBA, mostly, I only watch my team and mostly ignore everything else.
The level of detail that sports are covered at these days, the nationalization of sports (as opposed to regional "I know the storylines around my team but that's all) is soul sucking. The TMZ aspect of prying so far into the personal lives of athletes and anyone connected to sports in any way at all (right now 2 of 6 top headlines at ESPN are about an actual sporting event, which is better than normal for them, with 4 being: Vanessa Bryant saying something, Dak confident about a deal, lawyers saying something about the Saints covering up clergy abuse, Kawhi talking about helicopter commuting) is brutal. This isn't what sports is supposed to be. This isn't fun. This is the same media politics nonsense of keeping you in a constant state of dread, anger and stress...for some reason that drives clicks.
So I'm on a quest to find the joy in sports again, and when you boil it down, I think it's the same quest you're on looking for joy in writing again. It's the same click-driven media nonsense that took it away in the first place. I don't know when or where I'm going to find it, the Dubs were the place to find joy but the wear of competing for a championship for years now has worn that down. I was hoping for a refreshing, youthful team this year to bring it back. Getting out of the media spotlight has helped, and at times I do see that refreshing attitude I'm looking for, but I also find the team falls into non-competitive pickup too often for my tastes. And bad announcing doesn't help.
So maybe we'll both find the joy in the same place, I've been at GSoM for so long, participated so much for a reason - I really did find a lot of joy there. But I need something new. Something refreshing and honest. And I hope this site can provide that. I think that you guys are looking for the same thing is a good sign. I lost my soul, but maybe I can get it back, and maybe y'all can help me. I look forward to more, I really enjoyed this article. I just want sports to be fun again.
I had read Marcus Thompson’s Kobe article and I tweeted that every paragraph ended with me nodding, “YUP.” This post is the same. YUP. 😎 #DraymondVoice ...And I mean I’d stop what I’m doing to read Nate just like I would MT2. That’s the passion I’m looking for when I seek DubNation content!