You've now had numerous people telling you that it's not. This is not a conspiracy. Listen to us.

It’s how spam and chain emails are formatted.

Ja, that's totally better.

The dumb **** I gotta deal with around here.

Lay OFF of hIM GuYS!

Ewww, I'm scared to read the news link because the font is all wonky. STFU.

There's that trademark open mindedness and self awareness we all love.

Much better text formatting. Thumbs up.

I thought it was supposed to be user friendly but now user's should just suck it up and click on the links no matter how ugly they are?

I don't really find them to be that aesthetically displeasing but they definitely could be improved. For one, the triangle bullets could be done away with. I've mainly seen them used by YouTubers promoting their social media and merchandise, and I find it hard to disassociate myself with the idea that they aren't advertising something whenever they show up. Just off the top of my head, regular bullets (•) would work just fine. You're making lists of information, not advertising after all so they'd probably fit better in the longrun. Other than that my only gripe is the underlining, but like I said before hyperlinks are auto-underlined in HTML so you can't do much to change that, unless you organize them like this:


• David Blaine shoots himself in the mouth (source: WGNTV)

Something like that could possibly take some of what some believe to be overbearing emphasis off your article links. Optionally choosing a different font to style them in (Century Gothic is a favorite of mine) may make them stand out again without putting on overbearing emphasis. Just a suggestion.

I know you're just trying to prove a point, but there's a lot of difference between Merit's design and the clickbait design here. I think equating something like that which uses a blinding red coloring, random symbols and exclamation points with simply emboldened underlined text seems a bit dishonest.