Depending on who you ask, viral content farms like Upworthy and Viral Nova are either polluting your Facebook News Feed with deceptive headlines, or they’re bringing interesting stories to your attention. If you’re in the former camp, the good news is that Facebook’s working to get more news into your News Feed, but if headlines like “9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact” are still driving you crazy, there’s a new Chrome plug-in that might do just the trick.
Downworthy is a Chrome plugin that converts hyperbolic headlines from viral mills into sarcastic — and much more realistic — semantic equivalents. For example, the word “literally” is replaced with “figuratively”; while “go viral” is translated to “be overused so much that you’ll silently pray for the sweet release of death to make it stop.”
