Clickbait Unlimited

I wrote about this about almost two years ago, but clickbait seems to be ramping up if anything. I guess Google or whoever else is spying on my browsing habits knows that I like to watch Stranger Things, Mandalorian, Cobra Kai, etc. My issue isn't that someone knows I like those shows, because they are good shows and a lot of people like them. The issue I have is the amount of clickbaity articles being written about them.

I can't count the number of times I have seen a link to a story saying something about a new release date being announced for the next season of a show or that a new actor has signed on to play a certain character. You click into the story, and there is just a pile of garbage paragraphs saying something vague about how we don't know when the new season will come out but probably sometime next year and that we're not totally sure that actor is in the show but if they are then they are excited to see what character they are going to play.

So we've got a whole article written to say nothing more than that we don't know anything about the next season yet.

The other thing I have been seeing more and more of is the random cross-posting of the same old content over and over. An actor will post something semi-controversial or barely interesting on their Twitter account, and then it is screenshotted, copy/pasted, and linked to the post. At least that's what happens when there is a quick boring text post. But when there is a video or image or something that you really want to see, you'll see a full page article about how someone's performance at an awards show was bad or a famous person was acting rudely in public, you can click around forever and never find the actual video everyone is talking about.

I don't know if this is what we get for letting real journalism get eaten up by free news online. The actual newspapers are going under, being replaced by free material, apparently written by either AI bots or middle school students in third world countries to do no more than drive advertising and suck up personal information and habits.