The actual CEO, Ben Collins, has been running The Onion for a short while and his background was as a reporter for NBC. He covered a lot of internet topics very, very well (IMO).
Ben Collins' personal Twitter presence did real damage to the credibility of modern political journalists, imho.
His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style (but he would still tweet four times an hour, carefully calculating the most likely-to-trend level of ironic detachment for his 'epic' dunk on whoever Twitter's victim of the day was). He had a memorable feud with Nate Silver, in which he (Collins) demonstrated utter ignorance of elementary math, to farm likes off of the then-'out' Silver. Collins treated Twitter like he was the starring character in a high school melodrama.
For almost any 'bad Twitter take' cliché you can think of, there's a Ben Collins tweet (which, to be fair, is still much less bad than the worst of the new Twitter).
> His tweets were soaked in that glib faux-distinterested mid-2010s hyper-online style
I think this is generational rather than decade-al. That's just how Gen X/early millenials talk about everything, and it's why Bluesky is still like that.
The other big example is that awful Cory Doctorow babytalk word "enshittification" - they love dropping in the occasional swear but only to make things sound even more smarmy.
