5 Best Sites for Hate-Reading

Recently, the New York Times ran a piece about hate-reading, the practice of perusing things solely in order to get infuriated. Hate-reading can take many forms. You can hate-read a nemesis' Twitter account, a blogger you frequently disagree with, or a magazine whose content drives you mad. Oftentimes you tell yourself there's a reason for reading the loathable content — you want to give that person a fair chance, you need to see how the other side thinks. But in reality, hate-reading tends to serve less noble purposes: Provoking a satisfying outrage, promoting a sense of superiority, providing procrastination fodder.

When you're a blogger, you can justify hate-reading all the more because it might be good material. It's an undeniable fact of the Internet that outrage fuels pageviews. To put it less cynically, sometimes hate-reading prompts new ideas or makes you consider angles you wouldn't otherwise. And sometimes the offending content really does deserve to be more widely hated (bloggers: bringing outrage to the masses since 2002!). For better or worse, I've got a few go-to sites for hate-reading, so why not share the hate? If you're looking to be outraged any time soon, I suggest:

1. The Daily Mail

The Daily Mail's website is pretty much the ultimate place for hate-reading. I have never visited its Femail section without finding multiple "articles" to be outraged about. I put articles in quotes, because the Mail has this amazing tendency to start with unflattering celebrity photos and then retroactively make up some prose pretense for running them. It does also run essays and reported pieces though, and these can be equally bad. Without fail, the Mail will misconstrue health studies to make them more salacious and find a way to make 1/3 of current events a referendum on how terrible feminism is. I may hate what the Daily Mail stands for, but I'm still in awe of how well they do it. The Daily Mail has turned producing hate-read-worthy content into a fine art. For anyone seeking to court Internet controversy, the Mail's website should be required daily reading.

Sample headlines: "First picture of heartbroken mother whose baby girl died when she lost her grip and child fell on to baggage carousel at airport in Spain"; "Chris Brown's on-again girlfriend Karrueche Tran displays her toned figure in a teeny polka dot bikini"

2. Get Off My Internets

Get Off My Internets isn't awful in and of itself; rather, it's more like a hate-reading clearinghouse. GOMI rounds up the best of hate-readable bloggers and content each week in one convenient place. They do the hard hate-reading so you don't have to. It's admirable, really.

3. The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller is a conservative news website founded by Tucker Carlson. True fact: I once-upon-a-time almost blogged there, back when it was starting out and seemed focused on providing genuinely interesting, in-depth reporting and commentary. That model quickly failed, however, and the Caller retooled to make itself more-or-less a parody of right-wing web commentary. Health care costs? Obama's fault. Syria? Obama's fault. You stubbed your toe? Obama's fault.

Sample headlines: "Obama the irrelevant"; "ACORN’s former chief calls for more immigration to boost black power"

4. Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades isn't a blog I look at regularly. But from time to time some link or other will send me there and then: Game Over. Commence hate-reading spiral. Ringleader Ace and his merry band of "pickup artists" and men's rights activists manage to hit some perfect sweet spot of misogyny, misanthropy and idiocy. The worst part is that they know they're hated and delight in it. It makes you not want to even give them the satisfaction of hate-reading them and yet ... can't ... stop ....

Sample headline: "A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Nature of Stupidity"

5. Buzzfeed

Oh, Buzzfeed. Where would we be without you? Probably in a world of a lot GIF roundups, and for this, I will never forgive you. I am going to — what's that? What your top 35 favorite breakfast cereals say about your cat's love life? Click.

Sample headlines: "22 Things You Probably Never Knew About Mean Girls," "The 10 Most Life-Changing Things Joseph Gordon-Levitt Said In His Reddit AMA"