The 3 things you are doing that will ruin your life:
1) Reading Listicles
2) Reading Listicles
3) Reading Listicles
Listicles are generally blog articles (because no legitimate paper publication would entertain putting them in print) that usually begin with “The 17 things your Teen is doing behind your back” or “The 9 things your husband does to find out if you’re cheating”.
They suck in vulnerable clickers (which is all they care about) to increase the traffic on their sites, using the curiosity pull, and a headline that claims to know the definitive number of things that will sate your undying curiosity and save your endangered life.
What you end up with is some bored or underworked blogger with no more wisdom than you have (and probably a fuckload less because he/she’s probably in his/her twenties) writing a list of things that match some topic they were either assigned to write, or come up with out of the daily irks in their own lives, or something they believe will suck gullible readers in.
Propagate Listicles and what do we get? An internet clogged with bullshit. Now that may seem like a redundant concept, and probably is these days. But what it does is de-legitimize legitimate press (you remember… journalists…?) No, you probably don’t remember those. There hasn’t been a sighting of one in years now. So please. Just skip the listicles, and for godsake, stop posting them to facebook!
The “legitimate press” doesn’t need any help from listicles. It’s long since gone to huge lengths to delegitimize itself.
Do reporters exist anymore? Or just people with that job title who simply copy-and-paste from press releases, or, failing a new one of those, copy-and-paste from other non-journalists, and adding in “$ORIGINAL_PUBLICATION reports” every couple of paragraphs?