Late Tuesday evening, a miscarriage of justice occurred.
Upworthy, a website that skillfully aggregates articles from around the Web that viewers love, made a mistake. The website typically posts articles that spotlight the world’s beauty. With headlines like “This 7 year old has found a way to end hate” and “Think eggs aren’t people? Think again,” Microsoft easily chose Upworthy for the default homepage of its new web browser.
However, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, an article was posted to the site that failed to live up to the site’s name. The article, “6 ways to be rational about everything,” was not upworthy. If anything, it was downworthy.
The piece, originally uploaded to a thought blog owned by Canadian writer Jeremy Harden, starts with some advice: “Try to not get excited about things you’re not excited about, and not to get angry about things you’re not actually angry about.”
The rest of the terrible article goes on to tell people that living a life perpetually angry about social issues makes you a “drag to be around,” and that deriving one’s personality from the Internet can be a mistake.
Harden, Upworthy staff said, is the one who is actually mistaken. They apologized that this dribble ended up on Upworthy, “the God site.”
“I’m sorry for this huge blooper,” Upworthy curator Adam Mordecai said. “Our site is a haven for content that actually matters, not terrible advice that will do anything but help our readers. I can promise you, in the future, we’ll make sure every article we post will be worth sharing among the Internet’s greatest circles.”