modern society

I Am So Sick of Click-Bait

and I don’t mean here on Medium

author-prompted image from openart.ai

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Every now and then I see some article here on Medium complaining about the presence of ‘click-bait.’ (Click-bait, if you didn’t know, consists of a title or subtitle on a post that tricks you into reading about something that you had no intention of reading about.)

I say to these authors: If you think Medium is bad, try Yahoo or Google or CNN or any other purveyor of online information. It was bad enough a year ago. Now it’s ten times worse.

First there was the medical doctor who didn’t want you to eat blueberries or bananas or avocados or oatmeal or any other natural sources of nutrition. Instead he was hoping you would buy his $50 per bottle patented combination of herbs or spices or other hard-to-find ingredients from some remote region of the galaxy that was far better than the same ingredients from somewhere closer to home and that cost a tenth of what he was charging. If you clicked on one of his ads or other links, you had to sit through a half-hour video about the virtues of some esoteric plant or enzyme, only to be told at the end that putting these substances together on your own was either dangerous or ineffective or impossible. No. You had to buy his product. Only way to safely get it. At only $75 per month if you bought one month at a time, with huge discounts down to $49 per month if you bought six months at a time.

It worked so well the first five times he tried it that he expanded his operation, and now he has around thirty or more must-have combinations of ingredients that are essential to your well-being and that you can get only from him. And which would cost you more than three new Ferraris to get everything he sells. All of which you must have if you are not to die tomorrow. At the latest.

I’m sure you know who I mean.

He’s been around long enough that I’ve learned to spot his come-ons before I even get to them, and so I’m able to avoid him and his price-of-gold product pitches.

But, alas, he’s no longer alone. Other medical doctors, not wanting to miss out on the bonanza, have started using his same scare tactics, or, worse yet, seductive and seemingly-harmless lures, to get you to buy their $50 products. There are about fifteen or twenty of these snake-oil salesmen now, and it’s getting worse.

And then the get-rich-quick investment specialists joined the club. Just yesterday I encountered a headline on Yahoo, not even a paid ad, seemingly a legitimate news story, that told me I needed desperately to know about a law which Trump was promoting which would affect me in unimaginable ways. Since I have a pretty good imagination and have already decided that I either need to ignore or run away from anything that comes out of Mr. T’s alleged mind, I thought I’d better read the article. It was written by a guy who is promoting a certain financial product which will ‘take off’ if this certain piece of legislation is passed and signed into law. Please note the word ‘if.’ But just in case, we had better get in on it before it’s too late.

Of course, he just happens to have invested in it himself and doesn’t want to be selfish about it, so is sharing the secret with the rest of us. Once the proposal becomes law it will be too late to get in at an inexpensive level, so we had better act now.

What he fails to mention is that if we all buy into it, the market value will be driven up, resulting in him getting filthy rich, after which he will bail out and leave the rest of us to deal with the fallout when the thing inevitably crashes. Turns out, Trump has nothing to do with the notion. The bill was proposed by some obscure senator from some forgotten state and has about as much chance of passage as a fish-hook has of passing through a trout’s gut. But that’s beside the point. We had better get in quick.

Yep.

Not all of the click-baits are this invidious. Or this easy to spot.

Take the lists of cute pictures that will make you smile, and the places they came from.

The cutest picture is the one you click to get into the list. You never see it again. And you never find out where it came from. You get a list of less-cute images, and you do learn where they came from, as though you cared. But when you get to the end of the list you still haven’t seen the one you came for. And never will.

Same goes for places you have to visit before you die. Or before your next birthday. Whichever comes first. The picture that lured you into reading the list is never identified. (Probably because it’s AI, and not any real place at all.)

Lists of famous people who died before their time (so sad) and why and how they got that way. Bait photo? No name. No story. No explanation.

Even news articles do this now. Especially sports stories.

So-and-so has finally made up his mind. (About what to do about his contract offer.) That’s the click-bait. When you get into the actual story, you find out that the big secret is that, yes, he’s made up his mind, but that, too bad, he hasn’t told anybody yet what he has decided. Not even his wife. You’ll be the last to know.

Unless. Unless you add yourself to the mailing list so that if and when he does decide what to do with his life, you’ll be the first to know. Of course you will also be inundated with five thousand stories a day about seven dozen sports figure you’ve never heard of before. And didn’t want to. But oh well. That’s just (part of) the price you have to pay to be informed.

I could probably go on and on at some length. But I suspect you know what I’m talking about without me painting you a more lengthy picture.

We all used to complain about ‘bait-and-switch’ tactics. Mostly in advertising.

Now it’s gone beyond any kind of switching, and beyond advertising. It’s everywhere. And the worst thing of all is that they share their information with each other. If you fall for one, pretty soon you hear from ten or twelve others. ‘Somehow’ they very innocently got your email address.

It’s bait-and-snitch.