Have you ever heard of "Click Bait"?

[AliShibaz]

I recently was looking through some Youtube files and saw a link titled,

"The 25 best movies of all time"

I decided to take a look and unfortunately, it only showed one per page and you had to click on "Next" to get to the next page. So that was 25 clicks to go through all 25 pages and all the associated advertising.

I really hate this kind of shit. On the first page, Someone posted the comment, "I hate Click Bait articles".

I never heard that term before but I guess they meant the kinds of articles like this where you have to click once on each page and are forced to see all the advertising if you want to see the entire list.

I make it a policy to always immediately close these kinds of articles.

I sure do wish there was something I could do about them. But unfortunately, very few of these articles allow people to leave comments and I sure can understand why.

Does anyone have any techniques they know of to try and strike back at these places?

(This post was last modified: 10-21-2014, 02:43 AM by AliShibaz.)

[radiobox]

I was not aware of the term, but I read such articles almost everyday. :-p

These sort of 'slideshows' are quite common I think. Even imdb has it. No ?
The full slideshow is prefetched and the prev/next links is just a display trick or they use some other means. Only a part of the page is refreshed if am correct.

Here is one solution using add-ons to workaround 'multipage articles' (untested). I hope this is what you meant by 'hit back'.

LIFEHACKER.COM

How To Fix Annoying Multi-Page Articles...

We all know that feeling: You've found an interesting article...

[Spud17]

I make it a policy to always immediately close these kinds of articles.

That's the best way to hit back at the marketeers - wilfully ignore them and find your information from another source.

As can be seen by this article on click-bait marketing in media, most click-bait articles are sensationalist in nature and are aimed, to be frank, at the terminally stupid with the attention span of a brick.

When going through lists of say, top 10 movies with unbelievably stupid endings, I'll go through all the search results and ignore all the click bait ones, primarily because I can't be bothered wasting my time sitting there waiting for the page to load repeatedly, but also because it sucks up precious bandwidth. There are always, always other sites that set out the same information in a reader-friendly way, and click bait is anything but that.

[AliShibaz]

Hi Radiobox & Spud17.

Nice to hear from you both.

I got some additional info from another forum and I will post that now:

Clickbait is when an article has a headline that is exaggerated or misleading at best, getting you to visit the article for one reason but it's really about something else.

Apparently, there are two diff things. One is called "Click bait" and the other is called a "Slide show". Here is the difference between them:


Clickbait is when an article has a headline that is exaggerated or misleading at best, getting you to visit the article for one reason but it's really about something else. Here are some additional comments.

What Ali described is a usually called a slideshow, which is worse than Click Bait. It is what you often get subjected too after you have swallowed the clickbait.

But, there are some downloadable apps that can deal with this shit:

You can use the firefox addon autopager, which tries to convert all of the pages into one long page. Someone said they tried it a few years ago but it didn't work very well at that time. Maybe it will work now?

Doesn't that sound lovely? I'd sure like to try that.

Here is another idea: A browser plugin that allows people who clicked through something like this to write a brief spoiler in the SavedYouAClick style, and future users would have it helpfully appended to the headline when they see it.

Also, the Onion started http://www.clickhole.com to poke fun at the fad.

I'm gonna wait until Velvet or Sporkium has something to say about this. I'm guessing either one or both of them will know something about this. Maybe one of them will even have a good response too? I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best. Both those guys usually have some knowledge about nasty shit like this.

(This post was last modified: 10-21-2014, 06:39 PM by AliShibaz.)