What gives with hot takes - flip,instant opinions, which websites claim they are resisting? And why are we so fond of ‘takes’ on things in the first position?Do you absorb a prefer on the “hot prefer”? The editor of BuzzFeed does: he recently deleted one of his writer’s posts with the explanation: “We are trying not to do hot takes.” A “hot prefer” is a striking piece of rapid news commentary, and in some way counterintuitive or outrageous,monstered to maximise page views. The kind of thing you would never find on BuzzFeed. On the internet at large, though, or hot takes sell like hot cakes. But why are they hot? And why are they takes?A curious fact about the “hot prefer” is that no one owns up to producing them. The phrase is only ever used derisively for someone else’s ridiculous work. (Let us conjugate: he writes hot takes; you write comment pieces; I am an analyst.) Yet describing arguments in terms of the temperatures of foodstuffs in this way still tends to devalue the time taken for disinterested analysis (man,that’s cold).
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Source: theguardian.com