Have you ever heard of "Click Bait"?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I recently was looking through some Youtube files and saw a link titled, “The 25 best movies of all time”

I decided to take a look and unfortunately, it only showed one per page and you had to click on “Next” to get to the next page. So that was 25 clicks to go through all 25 pages and all the associated advertising. There was no way to click ahead to the last page and see the Number One selection.

I really hate this kind of crap. On the first page, Someone posted the comment, “I hate Click Bait articles”.

I never heard that term before but I guess they meant the kinds of articles like this where you have to click once on each page and are forced to see all the advertising if you want to see the entire list.

I make it a policy to always immediately close these kinds of articles.

I sure do wish there was something I could do about them. But unfortunately, very few of these articles allow people to leave comments and I sure can understand why.

Do you have any techniques to try and strike back at these things? I sure do wish I knew of some way to give them some grief. They have given me plenty of grief.

2

Clickbait is when an article has a headline that is exaggerated or misleading at best, getting you to visit the article for one reason but it’s really about something else.

Buzzfeed is particularly bad for these. These include phrases like “You won’t believe what happens next!” or “25 everyday things that may kill you!”

Buzzfeed doesn’t usually include multi-page articles that you have to keep clicking through, though. They need a different kind of name to describe their fiendish inanity.

3

Or “10 secrets Billionaires don’t want YOU to know”. In fact it’s a great subject for an entire forum thread - “Speak to me only in clickbait headlines”.

With political articles it is usually just an exaggerated headline. Great names in click bait headlines are people such as Obama and Rush Limbaugh. Anyone who raises passions either pro or anti. Almost any headline that includes the word “Ebola” is extremely effective click bait these days.

It’s a term I have heard a few times lately, I assume it is fairly new but I may be mistaken.

4

I would like an answer to this too. All I can suggest is to keep spreading the word.

5

Well, you could install downworthy, but that’s more for your own amusement than their demise.

6

Deadspin OBLITERATES Current Internet Headline Meme

7

Clickbait is what GuanoLad said.

What you describe is a slideshow, which is worse. It is what you often get subjected too after you have swallowed the clickbait.

8

The Worthwhile Canadian Initiative THAT CAN KILL YOU!

9

Go to the Yahoo home page. Virtually every article there (especially the political ones) are click bait.

10

The Onion even started http://www.clickhole.com to poke fun at the fad.

11

Moved Cafe Society --> MPSIMS.

12

I don’t know if there’s a way to “strike back” other than to just resist clicking on clickbait things. If I click on something and it’s a slideshow, I just close out the tab. I might have been interested to see what they thought the 25 best movies ever are, but I can go without reading it if I have to click through 25 times. Or you can use some other type of viewer to read the website, like Google Toolkit, or some sort of reader, and that sometimes can reduce a slideshow to just one page you can scroll through.

For clickbait articles with headlines like “Some normal sounding thing happened, and you’ll never believe what happened next!” then I just resist clicking on the article. Despite the headline, I know I probably will believe what happened next. Avoid clicking on hyperbolic headlines and anything from Upworthy and you’ll be saved a lot of annoyance.

13

There’s some good twitter feeds, like HuffPoSpoilers that retweet the click bait headlines along with a (usually snarky) summary of what the article is about.

14

@SavedYouAClick on Twitter is another good feed:

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Clickbait is what our entire media is transforming into because the economy of the internet only cares about page views. I read a good book on this called “Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator”.

16

You can use the firefox addon autopager, which tries to convert all of the pages into one long page. I tried it a few years ago and it didn’t work well for me, but you might have better luck.

17

I have this idea that I’m slightly too lazy to implement: A browser plugin that allows people who clicked through something like this to write a brief spoiler in the SavedYouAClick style, and future users would have it helpfully appended to the headline when they see it.

18

That sounds like a great way to get around this. Thank you.

19

You can copy/paste the URL into Deslidefier. It doesn’t work with every slideshow, but you may get lucky.
mmm

20

It happens that I went on a tour of our local newspaper offices yesterday. One of the questions asked was about click bait headlines and if they were encouraged in the online edition. One of the guides said that it used to be paper policy that you were evaluated on how many people read your articles, and your bonus was based on it. Reporters were encouraged to write their own headlines (most reporters hate doing that). A new editor came in and put a stop to it.