Posts Tagged ‘click bait’
High Hopes
Today, there is a spring election in Wisconsin with a state supreme court race at the top of the ballot. We will also be choosing local municipal and judicial candidates and responding to a school referendum question. It isn’t easy to get truly revealing information on local candidates. So many published statements are couched in terms that sound reasonable on the surface but lack any details that might expose obvious alignment with those who are destroying our country right now.
We have found it has become a case of hunting for any evidence that a candidate supports the current pedophile/criminal-in-chief and using that information to vote AGAINST that person or persons.
Yes, we want our roads maintained responsibly and our tax dollars managed judiciously, but not by anyone who is too bamboozled to object to the wanna-be-king’s every word or decision. Just imagine if the Republican politicians in Congress had enough good sense to “Just Say No” to all the kleptocratic idiocracy the demented leader has unleashed on the world.
Yesterday morning, I was the one bamboozled for a few seconds when I allowed myself to be moved to a tear of hope that the clickbait appearing in a Reddit feed might be real. Was writing “Praise be to Allah” going to be the last straw for all of the staff in the White House, as the headline teased?
No. That was a false hope, just like all the others that have occurred so many times that I can’t remember what it was like before the immature narcissist first dragged his slimy ways into national politics.
Over a year ago, I was so embarrassed to see how President Zelensky was treated in a meeting in the White House that I electronically signed a letter of apology from the American people. I had hoped that it would go viral and make a large impact in influencing members of Congress to save us from the incompetent leader. Yeah, it didn’t.
What did result from that simple moment of hope was that my email inbox became regularly swamped with teasing subject lines begging to be clicked so I could see requests for ongoing financial support from a variety of opposition organizations.
Apparently, I could have stopped this whole mess if I had just sent $5 a month to any one of these well-meaning outfits.
The word “eviscerated” tends to get used a lot in their subject lines. For a while, I was putting the emails in a folder that I named “ClickTHIS!” to see how many varieties of ways they could say the same thing without actually ever stating something real.
After recognizing that each of the messages from places that actually align with my views was repetitively seeking endless financial contributions from me, I stopped looking at them. Instead of unsubscribing from any of them, I use their arrival as a form of entertainment, sending them to the trash as quickly as they appear.
I have high hopes that a day will come when such solicitations are no longer a thing. In the meantime, we will vote every chance we are given.
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Don’t Click
It’s a game I play with myself almost every day I’m online. Don’t click on that bait. Sure, I’m curious about the 12 most outrageous ways some common thing we are eating/reading/handling/doing leads to these 16 unbelievable/startling/amazing/scary results that some doctor/study/company/environmentalist/yogi has recently revealed/published/announced/proclaimed/guaranteed.
One facet of clickbait-ology I am anxious to find out about is how the “number” is selected for these attention-getting carnival barkings. A quantity of 10 seems like a very dependable collection. It’s an even number. It’s double-digits. If I was making a list, my first inclination would be to shoot for 10. Maybe I just watched too many years of David Letterman and his Top-Ten List.
From that bias, I find myself puzzling over why a title would feature a list with 12 or 13 items, or even bother when there are only 5 or 6. I saw one once that boasted 17, which starts to press the boundaries of believability. I’m skeptical the source was really able to come up with 17 of anything on a topic that worked for a click-baitable headline.
I wonder what I could come up with to entice people to click through to a page of mine that has no redeeming value to offer in return.
“Never ever give in to the urge to read 10 answers to the most essential question ever pondered.”
You know, the number 10 doesn’t seem to work so well, after all.
I get it now. It’s too status quo. It’s ‘ok boomer.’
Instead, the more ridiculous, the better.
“Eleventeen reasons why things you are already doing won’t make enough difference to matter.”
“These 16 ideas never worked before, but they will now after you’ve read this!”
“Take a penny, leave a penny by clicking this article 7 times a day for 13 weeks and feed a hungry kitty that looks exactly like a unicorn.”
For the record, I don’t always win at my own game. One time, I clicked to see the umpteen most amazing images since the beginning of time. Then, I clicked and clicked and clicked about umpteen more times. Each image was on a unique ad-filled page that took a painfully long time to load. Luckily, the first thing to pop into view for each page was the table of new clickbait ads across the bottom with strange quantities of subjects for me to try “ignoring.”
No one said this game was going to be easy.
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Relative Something 