> Clicking on a chumlink — even one on the site of a relatively high-class chummer, like nymag.com — is a guaranteed way to find more, weirder, grosser chum. Th

> Clicking on a chumlink — even one on the site of a relatively high-class chummer, like nymag.com — is a guaranteed way to find more, weirder, grosser chum. The boxes are daisy-chained together in an increasingly cynical, gross funnel; quickly, the open ocean becomes a sewer of chum. This seems like a particularly interesting point. Presumably 'chum' ought to be higher-impact than the source page, so as to beat out "Related Articles" links, other open tabs, or leaving the computer. (After all, you just read an article of mental impact X, so you're someone who cares about stories of >X value.) But there's a limit on how fast you can ramp up - you can't go straight to sex and death without provoking whiplash and disgust. So we get the weird progression that's come to define the internet; the outbound links for a given page are always weirder than the page itself. Hence "the weird part of Youtube". Hence the 4chan -> Reddit -> Buzzfeed progression by which content is generated in strange spots, then sanitized for mass consumption. And hence the bizarre sponsored-content funnel: stock news leads to stock tips leads to pyramid schemes leads to "BUY GOLD!" Either you cash out somewhere (some of those sponsored links go to products, not 'stories'), or you stick to news and teaser sites, and head arbitrarily far down the rabbit hole.