Digital media organizations have changed the face of modern news and helped shape the Internet. It's time they (and, O.K., we) were brought down a peg.
Enter ClickHole, the new site from the minds behind The Onion.
"Coming this summer: an all-new internet experience filled with content so shareable, snackable, and clickable, it will rob you of all logic and reason. Until then, use the guide below to learn the proper method of clicking," the site's placeholder boasts.
[seealso slug="social-media-hoaxes-2013"]
Announced at The Onion's NewFronts presentation on Tuesday, ClickHole will feature Internet media favorites like quizzes, inspiring first-person stories, cuteness and slideshows.
A few of the articles previewed include: "Which pizza should I have for dinner tonight? (presented by Pizza Hut)," "Seven pricks that defied the odds and didn't go into finance" and a photo slideshow entitled "Six kinds of hay."
"Ideally, we want to look at every corner of the internet: the blogs, the aggregators, the Tumblrs, the Twitter accounts, and really represent the internet in its indisputably hypnotic and oftentimes extremely vapid entirety," Jermaine Affonso, editor of ClickHole told Mashable in an email. "We’re excited about using this site to experiment with jokes that run the gamut from biting commentary to more absurdist, whimsical flights that might not work anywhere else."
The site is slated to launch in June and will be a standalone that operates alongside The Onion and The A.V. Club. Mashable verified with a spokesperson at The Onion that the site is real.
"Our comedic vision for ClickHole is to take the same subversive sensibility that the The Onion has been built on for 25 years and apply that voice toward satirizing a new medium—specifically click-baiting content and the culture of the internet at large," Ben Berkley, the managing editor of ClickHole, said.
"We don’t want to primarily target any specific websites; we want a site with absurdist yet biting commentary that can adapt along with the ever-changing internet and take down whatever the most vapid viral content at the time may be. All while preying on the feeble masses and loading our pockets with their money, of course."
[wp_scm_comment]
BONUS: How Does Virality Work?