7 ms·
A journey through internet garbage
- widescape 7y agoIt's a trap!
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoI think the original article title should be used. "A mysterious gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out “this vegetable” now. But, like, which?"
- jfengel 7y agoOr at least some indication that this article is somehow different from every other article about clickbait. Though I'll admit, having read it, that I'm unclear on just what that is.
- tbirrell 7y agotl;dr - Vox is trying to figure out what that mysterious vegetable is that some gut doctor has been going on about in every ad box ever. Their best guess is that it's corn, but the doctor (or more specifically, his publicist) won't confirm.
- nerdile 7y agoFollowed by a bunch of garbage outbrain ads, which, for me, were all weird game of thrones links today.
- burtonator 7y agoWe're going to need laws around algorithmic news. This makes me want to work on a bot to reword hacker news into all clickbait links? "Rust vs Python? You'll be amazed what this hacker recommends!" "Uber lawsuit! They sued who?!"
- dredmorbius 7y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/1283/ https://www.xkcd.com/1283/
- baud147258 7y ago> "Uber lawsuit! They sued who?!" From a casual following of tech news, it should be: "Uber lawsuit! Who's taking on them this time?!"
- skocznymroczny 7y agoThat'd probably be a no-op bot, as most titles are clickbait nowadays anyway.
- ihuman 7y agoHaven't articles always had attractive headlines? Newspapers had them for a long time so people seeing the front page would want to buy that day's paper. The only difference between then and now is that the article's content is more likely to be low-quality.
- ducttape12 7y agoStuff like this is why I don't feel bad about blocking ads. This garbage adds no value and just exists to get clicks from tech illiterate people.
- cpeterso 7y agoI don't mind ad-supported content, but I don't want to see this Taboola/Outbrain garbage. So I created a short blocklist (compatible with uBlock Origin and Adblock Plus) for these clickbait ad networks. Pull requests are welcome! :) https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/ https://github.com/cpeterso/clickbait-blocklist/
- tempguy9999 7y agoAre YOU aware of this one weird blocklist? Advertisers HATE it! (may they all rot) http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm
- dewey 7y agoThey clearly said that they don't mind ads as long as it's not this click bait crap. I guess it pays really well because every newspaper web site has it :(
- karambahh 7y agoAnecdotal evidence: news source I read tend to switch from provider to provider every six months or so. Either they are offered a great deal by the new incumbent or management gets fed up with poor revenue/poor targetting. I've seen it happen 3 or 4 times in the last few years?
- finnh 7y agoJust added it to my ABP - thank you! Taboola & Outbrain are a plague on the internet. Plus, I still have belly fat.
- noer 7y ago
- rcarrigan87 7y agoIt does feel like most pure clickbait leads to some kind of supplement pitch...
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoYup, selling something. Even if it's selling awareness of gut problems so people realize they may have a problem and start looking for a solution. (That's behind a lot of marketing actually, making people think they have a problem; that they have gut issues, that they're not cleaning hygienically enough (and that there's germs everywhere), that they need to have a four hour erection at age 70, that they need to go skydiving in tight white pants while on their period, that someone might shoot a cannon at their boat so they need tape to patch it, that their abs are not good enough so they need another gym device that fits under their bed, etc.
- ForHackernews 7y agoIsn't this how Tim Ferris got his start? Hawking "brainQUICKEN"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Workweek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_4-Hour_Workweek
- mattkevan 7y agoThought the 4-hour work week was an interesting pitch (less work, passive income – yes please) until I realised he was financing himself via a borderline-scam product like nutrition supplements...
- loudandskittish 7y agoI'm more interested in the part where the answer to which vegetable to throw out is found at the end of a 40 minute video...having come across similar videos, have to ask, does this actually work?
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoYou underestimate how many people watch mindless videos / watch videos mindlessly. I mean I've found myself half an hour into an hourlong ad once when I fell asleep watching youtube on the tv.
- waingake 7y agoThis very page loads chum at the end of the article ...
- atomwaffel 7y agoYes, and the author acknowledges that twice in the two very first paragraphs. This objection comes up every time any news outlet writes about ad tech or tracking, and it always comes down to the same thing: the people writing articles are not the ones making economic decisions and they can criticise a system even when they’re part of it.
- smurv 7y agoI can confirm this as I used to work as a developer for a media company. We basically begged our advertisment executive for permission to get rid of that horrible box of semi- to unrelated content which appeared beneath every article. His answer was "No, it genereates too much revenue".
- ForHackernews 7y ago> genereates This is how you know it's a C-level email.
- camillomiller 7y agoSpoiler: the vegetables seems to be corn. Go read the piece though, it's very funny.
- ordu 7y agoSeems that the strategy is to trigger curiosity, then pull person by this curiosity to show him a lot of ads. To trigger curiosity they pose some artifically created question, by inventing an imaginary gut doctor with some imaginary obscure opinion, and create a bunch of content that seems promising on answering question, but never answers it actually. The answer is irrelevant for their goals and all the scheme works while answer is not accessible easily. This scheme can be scaled by a lot of misterious clickbaity questions without answers, because an attention of a person searching for answer for some question can be redirected to another question, then to one more, and more... It looks as a labyrinth where you could follow clickbaits and where you never able to find answer for question bothering you. Moreover you a facing a lot of other mysterious questions and if you got tired for the current one, then your attention might get caught by another, and you might continue to run through the labyrinth, clicking, clicking, clicking... I guess what is the business model behind this. Showing ads? Skewing metrics?
- whalabi 7y agoThis might be the most genuinely entertaining article I've read this year The lengths the author goes to to discover what must be a highly questionable answer, just from irresistible curiosity. TL;DR? Looks like it's corn.