Monday, October 16, 2017

Polite Clickbait, as Opposed to the Other Kind

Clickbait is a common accompaniment to featured sites. Their purpose is to attract readers to additional sites to further advertisement or persuasive goals. Some clickbait is rather raw, promising wardrobe malfunctions or scandalous doings or perhaps revealing secrets that people might find embarrassing!

From the start I'll define the term polite clickbait as sites that are generally inoffensive, yet one squanders time pursuing. Conde-Nast Traveler, for instance, has lists of the ten friendliest and ten least friendly cities in the U.S. Where does your city fall? Which places are friendly; and which are unfriendly? Is Nashville a friendly place? What about Baltimore? I'll give you a freebie: C-N cites Charleston as the most friendly place.  

No, not the ones in West Virginia or Massachusetts.

Not surprisingly, the least friendly place cited is in New Jersey. You wanna make something of it?

We now consider the Most Boring Cities. Forbes magazine lists the most boring cities. Apparently, there's not a lot of love for California, Arizona, and Nevada. 

And there's web sites that allow you to scroll among old pictures. These are typically mundane, yet described in sensationalistic ways. You can tell the links to this kind of click bait by suggestible come-on lines as "you won't believe what she was doing." 

What can be said of these sites? They're harmless; but are sort of open-ended wastes of time. At least you don't come away from them feeling icky, like the semipornish ones or the fake news ones. Or, especially, the ones that have viruses attached.






10 comments:

Mike said...

So I could declare bankruptcy and probably no one would notice in Missouri. Except the credit agencies. They always notice things like that.

Jono said...

I know better, but sometimes get sucked into a clickbait site. I nearly always regret it. Tornadoes don't come to this part of the state. It never gets warm enough.

John A Hill said...

Hmmm...
No wonder you moved from Louisiana!

MarkD60 said...

Usually the content promised on the link is not on the site.

allenwoodhaven said...

Everywhere has it charms and pitfalls. Fun to see!

Anonymous said...

Those sites are fun!

Bilbo said...

Virginia leads in motorcycle deaths and my home state of Pennsylvania leads in arson. Oy.

Arlee Bird said...

Those clickbait sites can be so annoying, but sometimes I can't resist--I almost always regret clicking.

By the way, I'm not sure about the rest of the state, but Los Angeles air is much cleaner that it seemed to be when I moved here in 1991. The fires don't help, but I think cars are much cleaner than they used to be.

Lee
Tossing It Out

Cloudia said...

I've learned that clickbait disappoints; and theres the malware too

eViL pOp TaRt said...

Cloudia, you're right. And these sites may even be at the bottom of legitimate ones.