How not to read the news: A guide for worried Warriors fans

Let’s say you’re sitting at your coffee table, Sunday afternoon, casually glancing through the day’s news. Hmm... Politics, bombings, hackers. “Man,” you might be tempted to think, “let me skip this stuff. It’s too depressing. Let me go and read about the Warriors. I need a pick-me-up because the world is horrible right now and I like reading about Kevin Durant because he’s my new favorite player and I still can’t believe he chose the Warriors and maybe if I read some nice, soothing Dubs-related headlines, I can forget all the other crap that’s happening out there in the world right now.”

So, you scroll down, thumb down, hands down man down to the aggregated Warriors section of Google News. Obviously, there’s an aggregated Warriors section of Google News on your feed because you’ve spent the last year (or fifteen or however long Google has existed) feverishly researching every single thing about the team. Also, Google is slowly taking over our brains and so they know what we are about to buy, or what we ate for lunch last Tuesday, or whose car is that parked outside of Martha’s house on the Google Maps drive by?! So anyways, you mosey on down to the Warriors section, and, wait—WHAT?! WHAT IS THIS!

Holy shhh———- how have I not heard about this?! What happened? How did it all unravel so quickly? Ah, no, please. Please, don’t let it be tru—But then you realize, wait, it’s from some website called “ChattSportsNet.com” and you begin to wonder.

Then, it slowly dawns on you. “Ah, right,” you think, “this is utter garbage clickbait.” But, you can’t stop thinking about it. How could they have possibly come up with that headline? Where in the world are they even getting that quote? Why would someone do such a thing, especially when it’s patently false?

Hmm.

And, eventually, out of pure morbid curiosity, you click on it.

Click. Bait. And. Catch.

In that specific instance, turns out the headline came out of this completely harmless Stephen Curry quote:

Stephen Curry, the league’s first unanimous MVP, commented about the supposed cheers and boos that Durant heard.

“I really don’t like him,” he joked. “I’m just messing with you.”

Damn you. Just...Damn you straight to hell. Really?

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The Warriors are going to be a traveling circus this year. The Washington Post’s lead NBA writer, Tim Bontemps, moved out to the Bay Area so that he could more closely cover the team. The Warriors will most likely lead SportsCenter more often than not. I’ve heard there will be upwards of 100 reporters at each game (of which we have one—what up Andrew Flohr!).

Yikes. Sounds like a s—t show.

Naturally, with such intense scrutiny, there is an understandable urge to, um, take advantage of the situation. I mean, if I told you all you had to do to rake in some money was build a jackass website, write evil, made up headlines spreading false rumors about discord and unhappiness within the Warriors organization, and then just wait for the clicks (and therefore the advertising revenue) to roll in, you might be tempted to do it, right? I mean, assuming you were a narcissistic opportunist with no morals and a penchant for the macabre?

And while ChattSportsNet may be one of the worse offenders—as in they actually take the time to write an article that seems like it could plausibly have been written by a human being and therefore comes across as much more dangerous to a layman fan who wouldn’t be able to discount the story immediately (especially when it gets blindly aggregated onto Google News and force fed to the audience among all the other legitimate news sources)—there are many, many other sites that you need to watch out for as we move through the season.

Here’s a partial list, compiled by our good friend sleepyfreud:

ChattSportsNet, Parent Herald, Morning Ledger, The Inquisitr, Headlines and Global News (HNGN), Yibada, Sportsrageous, iTech Post, Mobile & Apps, Morning News USA, GameNGuide.

Some examples:

Go jump in a lake, Parent Herald. I hope the lake is infested with hungry sharks.

I mean, it’d be dope to have Nerlens Noel on the team at some point in future, but stop making things up Inquisitr! I hope your underpants catch on fire from the raging heat of your fake takes.

And this one, from the dastardly fellows at HGNH or whatever the F they call themselves.

If I wanted to be lied to, I would have read the political section of my Google News feed.

If any of you ratbastards are reading this, I hope you trip over a rusty nail, stumble over the weight of your misdeeds, fall off the cliff of irrelevance, and come to rest in an endless sea of disappointment.

And yeah, so what that I’m the guy who wrote a piece called “Patrick McCaw is on pace to become the greatest player of all time.” That’s not clickbait. Them’s just the facts.

Whatever, sue me.

Just don’t ever accuse me of making up fake trade nonsense to pad my pockets with small pennies from gullible NBA fans. Y’all should be ashamed.

Also, lastly, kindly go ahead and #GetOffMyLawn

Okay, rant over.

Happy Sunday.