Source: BuzzFeed

Does the phrase “urban poverty” make you giggle or tighten your fists with rage? If so, it’s probably because of this infamous thinkpiece that your friends have very polarized opinions about: “The Urban Poor You Haven’t Noticed: Millennials Who’re Broke, Hungry, But On Trend”.

The point that piece was making was that there are lots of young employees in the corporate world who spend undue amounts of money on keeping up appearances, often at the cost of their own basic needs. An example from the essay mentions a young journalist who often starved for the whole day so that she could buy discounted sandwiches in the evening from a posh bakery.

The meat of the criticism is entirely valid here — lots of young professionals are highly obsessed with how they look over how they live. Then why did this essay spark so much charged outrage and rhetoric online?

One major reason was the choice of words in the title: “urban poor”. This phrase is used in the article itself only once, but the way it was highlighted in the title led to a lot of criticism — Quartz, Scroll.in, Newslaundry, and everyone in between had something to say about it. This criticism was fair; urban poverty is a much larger issue than image-obsessed twenty-somethings, and it is borne by people much poorer.

So could a phrase like “cosmopolitan poverty” have helped the essay convey its point more effectively?

Perhaps. But would you have known of the essay or read it if that was how it was titled?

At the end of the day, BuzzFeed as a company is driven by engagement — from listicles to well-researched and in-depth news stories, all of BuzzFeed’s content is begging to be clicked, shared, and commented on.

An essay that trended both globally as well as in India was a goldmine for them. In a country where the tinderbox of argument is very easily sparked, BuzzFeed India put out a masterpiece of polarization that even their New York colleagues achieve rarely with their larger audience.

This tailored provocation may have been unintentional, but it taught them a lesson.

Take the following headlines for subsequent essays they published:

Now, each of these essays deals with very important subjects, and more often than not, very sensitively too. But it’s the way these titles are surgically tailored to provoke readers that unites them more than anything else.

“3 Idiots didn’t destroy Ladakh, people did,” insisted hundreds of people who read the headline, but not the piece in its entirety. Bollywood tourism is a legitimate problem, but singling out 3 Idiots like the headline did was something that led to a lot of backlash. But that’s the point. Backlash is still engagement. And engagement is the most important thing an Internet media company can ask for. A troll or a contrarian leaving a comment contributes more to BuzzFeed’s bottom line than all the listicle clicks ever could.

“Why My Brother Became An Internet Troll”: an essay empathizing with an Internet troll in the family sets off a lot more engagement than a thinkpiece criticising them. That’s because the audience you’re tapping into isn’t just one that agrees with you and appreciates your nuance — it’s audiences who disagree; audiences who have something to add; and audiences who are enraged that you would even approach this topic with anything less than a slap on the troll’s face.

“Indians are never taught to talk to their parents as adults, and that’s a problem” is also a skillful manipulation of its subject — it makes a broad generalization about Indian parents, and it is worded in a way that led to some people interpreting it as a direct attack on the way they were raised, and by extension, on their parents. This was not how the essay itself was written. The essay is deeply personal, and the author doesn’t directly venture outside his own personal life to comment on parenting in general. But that’s where BuzzFeed’s genius kicks in — by provoking an audience larger than the people who agree with the essay, it engages in a way that has little precedent in Indian Internet history.

The patterns in the other essays are similar, and it all boils down to one thing — thought-provoking essays with emotion-provoking titles.

This is genius as far as BuzzFeed’s strategy is concerned. But how far does it do justice to the opinions of these authors? What is the impact of generating primarily emotional responses from intellectually charged essays? Is BuzzFeed helping more than it is harming the issues they cover by packaging them so polarizingly? I suspect that they are struggling with these questions too.

For BuzzFeed India, these essays (few in number as they are so far) mark a significant evolution — clickbait to thinkbait. First they came for your pageviews; now they have come for your opinions and your outrage. What will they come for next?

You can follow me on Twitter at @AroonDeep.