How a small sub-reddit may save the world.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that nobody likes clickbait.
Nobody likes clickbait. Most of us think we’re immune to it.
However, in the online click-based economy, it makes financial sense to encourage people to visit your pages and click your links. Increasingly over the last 20 years, news websites have either had to go behind a paywall, or give over increasing amounts of their screen real estate to adverts.
My recent complaint about Spotify led to a well-natured discussion on Twitter, where the following accurate, yet depressing, point was made:
We build everything around the structure that funds it.
Print news used to be funded by a combination of purchases and classified ads. Local papers were especially reliant on the classified ads section to fund them. The move to putting news online definitely hit their profits, but nowhere as much as the creation of eBay did. It’s interesting trying to look back at views from event ten years ago.
Here’s a comment from Rupert Murdoch, quoted in The Independent in 2011:
He was arguing that the likes of Google shouldn’t be allowed to scrape and aggregate news stories. Of course, if you look at newspaper websites today, you’ll find that an awful lot of their stories are…just scraping other people’s content.
There’s also at least two episodes of Dave Gorman’s ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ which deal with clickbait. Dave is quite specific here, and I’m happy to use his definition. By ‘clickbait’ I don’t just mean an enticing headline, or one designed to imply that the content is more controversial than it actually is. Those are frustrating of course, but they’re attached to an actual article that a person has, presumably, written.
Dave is referring specifically to the links towards the bottom of a news page, designed to look the same as legitimate news articles, but which link to a separate site. They usually tell you that ‘You won’t believe what this celebrity looks like’, or will tell you that someone has died when they haven’t. They often spread their ‘story’ over multiple pages, meaning you need to click 50+ times to get the whole deal, increasing their ad count.
You can watch most of the episode above on Dave’s YouTube, although he goes into a bit more depth on this one from about 32 minutes. I definitely recommend those shows by the way, surprisingly biting, if presented in a disconcertingly cuddly fashion.
ANYWAY.
The point is, as horrific as clickbait is, people click on it and it funds these publications. I can complain about how bad it is, but if people continue to click on them, then misleading advertorials will continue to be used. For all my criticisms, sometimes even I see a headline in a clickbait link and have to weigh up whether I’m curious enough to offset my inevitable frustration with the 50 separate pages of guff that are bound to follow.
What would be great is if someone could collate all of those clickbait stories into one place, giving you the tiny nugget of information on the 50th page, or explaining what they story contains so that you don’t have to waste time clicking through useless shite. As Gorman points out, the code of clickbait is that “the words and pictures that act as the bait tend to bear no relation to the thing you’re going to click through to”.
So, if someone could collate a list of recent clickbait headlines alongside what’s actually in the article, it would not only save you a click, it would hopefully deprive these shitty clickbait sites of their audience.
Did you read the title of this piece? See where it’s going?
Reddit seems to contain almost every kind of human being there is. There are undeniably a huge bunch of scumbags on there, but some of them are fighting the good fight. So, what kind of clickbait nonsense can they help you avoid?
This is the kind of democratising step I like seeing on the internet. It’s all well and good for me to complain about clickbait ruining websites, but here’s a group of people actually taking a step to do something about it.
Not everyone can know about things like Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, but we can all be tempted by clickbait. Maybe if more people and organisations take steps like this, news websites might consider providing more in-depth readable content rather than just farming for controversy?
Oh, and if you’re worried about where the funding for these news websites is going to come from… I understand, I do. Real, proper journalists are struggling these days, and being replaced by people who can just retype press releases with a tempting headline. Personally, I think more needs to be done to move towards microtransactions. There are publications I’ve subscribed to in the past, but on the rare occasion I see something interesting in a niche journal like the Washington Post, I’m not going to buy a month’s subscription. In the print days, you could pay less than £1 to buy a print copy. Can you not just let me pay 5p for that article? Or £1 for a day’s access?
The issue for me has never been with specialist publications catering to an audience. We need an easily accessible, widely read news media, which isn’t run by the state or the same few major corporations. Didn’t Murdoch have a point when he said, 10 years ago, that something needed to be done to stop Google scraping all of the work of the creators he was paying? Who will be left to fight against these new giant media monopolies?