# Is it possible to explain "sticky contents" without using computer terminology? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 21, 2020, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971 "2020-03-21T18:11:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/1 "2020-03-21T18:11:44Z")
More importantly what do they do on your computer? ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/2 "2020-03-21T18:49:50Z")
Could you explain what you mean, using _any_ terminology? ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/3 "2020-03-21T20:27:45Z")
Sticky content is content that makes you return to the source next time. It’s the reason you buy a magazine every month, or a newspaper every day, instead of just picking one up occasionally. As you can see, I have more of a problem finding a good explanation for “content”. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/4 "2020-03-21T20:36:25Z")
Coke did it in 1971: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-Qiyklq-Q](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ib-Qiyklq-Q) It’s a variant on seductive advertising; stuff which once seen, cannot be unseen. That property will keep pulling the customers back. -Fighting Ignorance Since 1971. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/5 "2020-03-21T23:33:12Z")
I still don’t know what this thread is about. Clever advertising? Jingles that were earworms? What does that have to do with computers? ---
**Author:** ![Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hilarity_n.suze/32/6223_2.png) [@Hilarity\_N.Suze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hilarity_N.Suze)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2020, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/6 "2020-03-21T23:44:22Z")
You want a site that people stay on for awhile. You want lots of stuff that people find fun to watch/read/interact with. That’s sticky content. And then they come back for more. I have only ever heard this refer to websites, and I don’t know why it’s important to keep people there for awhile. The context I heard it in was attracting people to your product (specifically, in the place where I heard this, it was about creating websites for writers of fiction). ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 1:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/7 "2020-03-22T01:13:19Z")
It’s the reason HBO is now broadcasting Sesame Street. Children’s TV is “sticky” in that while people may purchase a month or two to binge watch a particular show, children get hooked on regular new content and create long term subscribers. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/8 "2020-03-22T04:36:03Z")
> [@Telemark](#): > > It’s the reason HBO is now broadcasting Sesame Street. Children’s TV is “sticky” in that while people may purchase a month or two to binge watch a particular show, children get hooked on regular new content and create long term subscribers. A parental corrective - children get hooked on something, and can be happy to watch or listen to it to the exclusion of all else on a four hour car trip. I think for grown-ups stickiness is found in different types of sites where there is a combination of comforting familiarity, minimal interaction, irregular rewards for continuing to participate and minimal distraction. Online gambling and games like Candy Crush have ‘it’, but they are leveraging on psychology that was perfected by the gambling industry with poker machines. A painless siphoning of small amounts of money from your pocket over a long time only pays out for them if its done with stickiness. My answer to the OP is to ask someone here they have spent the most time mindlessly gambling small amounts of money without realising it. That is what stickiness is. ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/9 "2020-03-22T12:21:54Z")
These are all informative answers, but I see no way to match them to the OP. OP, please tell us what you were talking about, ideally with an example. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/10 "2020-03-22T21:00:31Z")
Isn’t it more like the concept of a note tacked up to the top of a (real physical) bulletin board that says “Rules for using the bulletin board”? ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/11 "2020-03-22T21:48:09Z")
Another user who can’t figure out the OP. The “computer terminology” thing awoke my old CS professor side. The def already given doesn’t seem to relate to the “on your computer” phrase. The whole point of web sticky content is to get you to come back to a site since it **isn’t** on your computer. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/12 "2020-03-22T23:11:41Z")
In **Network Loadbalancing** we use _sticky_ in a different way. Let’s say you have a website ([www.myexample.com](http://www.myexample.com)) and you need to handle 10000 users. But a single webserver only handles 500 users, so you need 20 webservers hiding behind a load-balancer that presents a single IP address to the outside world and distributes incoming connections (or requests) to your 20 webservers. You have a shared database for authentication and recording data like orders, which is fine, but the actual session variables that control things like a shopping cart and user state are restricted to the local webserver (because distributed cache coherence is hard and database accesses are expensive operations). So your load balancer needs to ensure that a user with their session always goes back to the same webserver so the session is correctly maintained - we call this _sticky sessions_ or _persistence_. You can base this on a number of things - source IP, a session variable passed as a cookie or header, or by an inserted cookie. The goal is the same - to ensure that a particular user “sticks” to the webserver they started with until their session expires. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/13 "2020-03-22T23:20:50Z")
I looked up an app on Google Play that’s supposed to improve the sound quality on any device I download it on. The list of permissions included a thing called “Sticky contents” when I went to look up sticky contents every definition I could find said it controlled something on the computer called “sticky”, “contents” and “sticky contents”. I can’t remember the name of the app. I’ll have to ask the guy who recommended it to me. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/14 "2020-03-22T23:30:13Z")
Okay apparently I misremembered the words. I’ll need to find the app again. Sorry. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2020, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/15 "2020-03-22T23:34:37Z")
> [@furryman](#): > > I looked up an app on Google Play that’s supposed to improve the sound quality on any device I download it on. The list of permissions included a thing called “Sticky contents” when I went to look up sticky contents every definition I could find said it controlled something on the computer called “sticky”, “contents” and “sticky contents”. I can’t remember the name of the app. I’ll have to ask the guy who recommended it to me. All I can find is a deprecated call for Android called “[Sticky Broadcast](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3490913/what-is-a-sticky-broadcast)” > [@](#): > > sendStickyBroadcast() performs a sendBroadcast(Intent) known as sticky, i.e. the Intent you are sending stays around after the broadcast is complete, so that others can quickly retrieve that data through the return value of registerReceiver(BroadcastReceiver, IntentFilter). In all other ways, this behaves the same as sendBroadcast(Intent). One example of a sticky broadcast sent via the operating system is ACTION\_BATTERY\_CHANGED. When you call registerReceiver() for that action – even with a null BroadcastReceiver – you get the Intent that was last broadcast for that action. Hence, you can use this to find the state of the battery without necessarily registering for all future state changes in the battery. > [@](#): > > Sticky broadcasts should not be used. They provide no security (anyone can access them), no protection (anyone can modify them), and many other problems. The recommended pattern is to use a non-sticky broadcast to report that something has changed, with another mechanism for apps to retrieve the current value whenever desired. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2020, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-possible-to-explain-sticky-contents-without-using-computer-terminology/849971/16 "2020-03-23T17:36:51Z")
Sticky **Intents** is what I was looking for. Thank you for your replies.