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| This face should be on the side of a milk carton. |
The majority of clickbait spam headlines are cut and paste nonsense, with the same article being used again and again with a slightly different thing filling in the blank. I have seen the "Why Hollywood Won't Cast X" headline a hundred different times with various names. Some of them are people who are absolutely still cast in films, and other ones are like, "Oh yeah, I haven't seen Brendan Fraser in a hot minute." I don't think humans actually write this article. I think some sort of bot just makes up a vague article and fills in a name from a list of 200 different B-actors.
9. [_____]'s Net Worth will SHOCK you!
No, it won't. This is usually a person who is an actor/musician/athlete or famous businessperson. These people are generally always rich. Occasionally this clickbait article is flipped and it's about someone who you'd think should be rich but is actually poor. Generally this doesn't shock anyone either because the celebrities who have gone broke are already famous for going broke. Like MC Hammer and Brendan Fraser.
8. All [_____] Share THIS in Common!
All millionaires share this in common! All celebrities share this in common! All people who live to 100 share this in common! All geniuses share this in common! All people with successful marriages share this in common! All successful entrepreneurs share this in common! All happy people share this in common! Once again, another copy-and-paste headline that plays on stupid people's beliefs that if they learn that one secret to success that every single other successful person shares then they too will become successful. Guess what, morons... there is no easy, minimalist answer that solves all your woes. These articles will be full of generic Tony Robbins motivational pep talks about how believing in success will make you successful. As if the people who are successful were simply the most "hungry" for success and worked hardest for it. Well, I'm sure there are emaciated child slaves all around the world who are really, really, REALLY hungry to break away from their oppression and have freedom (and also hungry for actual food, because they're emaciated), and yet they never find as much success as Brendan Fraser. Conversely, there are successful assholes who merely inherited their good fortune without ever working a day in their lives. It's like when a NFL commentator says that the team who "wants to win more" will win. Uh, no. If you put a team of cancer patients up against the New England Patriots and say the team who wins will get the cure to cancer, the Patriots will still win even though the cancer patients surely "want to win more." And don't think for a minute that Bill Belichick will throw the game and let the cancer patients win. Bill Belichick is evil.
7. #7 Will Shock You!
Did this shock you? Of course not. #7 never shocks anyone. Like #9 above, the people or robots who generate these headlines don't seem to actually understand what the word "shock" means. This number is not always 7, but it is quite often 7. Why? Well, most clickbait websites are just slideshow pages anyway, which means you have to click some "next" buttons to move forward. Every time you click next all the ads on the page refresh and you get brand new ads and additional page counts for the website to boost its stats. Sometimes these things go on for like 100 damn pages. But most people won't stick around for that long. Most people might go two or three pages before they go, "Ugh, stupid slideshow. I'm closing this." But this devious method of hyping up #7 can trick a lot of people to going at least that far with the promise that the monotonous and uninteresting bullshit that the first few items on the list were will suddenly be "shocking" at #7. But there is never anything interesting or special about #7. It's just filler like the rest. Probably filler about Brendan Fraser.
6. You'll Never Believe What [_____] Looks Like Now!
Is this an article about how some awkward child actor grew up to be beautiful (that girl from Spy Kids)? Is this an article about how a cute child actor grew up to be ugly (Haley Joel Osment)? Is this an article about how someone who used to be fat got skinny (I've seen a million versions of this that claim "Precious" got skinny to get you to click, even though she totally didn't)? Is this an article about how someone who used to be skinny gained weight (Brendan Fraser)? Is this an article about how someone who was attractive when they were young is still attractive now that they're older (Phoebe Cates)? Is this an article about how someone who was attractive when they were young is now ugly (Brendan Fraser)? No matter what the headline is, you shouldn't click it because it doesn't matter and you should stop being obsessed about looking at before and after pictures of Brendan Fraser. He looks generally the same now, but ages like everyone else does (except Phoebe Cates).
5. [_____] Does [_____] and YOU WON'T BELIEVE What Happens Next!
They'll tell you a very scant first part of a story, and then you'll have to click their stupid headline and go to their website to see the next part of it. Don't worry about those pop-up ads which appear on your screen! And if one of their ads tells you that your computer needs to be "optimized" by installing this software... you should definitely do it, because it's legit. An animal gets abandoned and I won't believe what happens next? Actually, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that a different animal adopts it and raises it, because that is the end result of that headline 99% of the time. The other 1% is when a human (sometimes, but not always, Brendan Fraser) adopts it and nurses it back to health instead. I want to see just once where this headline winds up with "the baby duck starved and died alone in the cold!" That would be super depressing, but also: 1) quite a twist on how these stupid headlines go, and 2) pretty reflective of the sad reality of life.
4. Only [Low Number]% of People Will Know [_____]!
These headlines are often associated with lame slideshow "quizzes" where you, again, have to click next about 25 times to get some result. In the very worst of these you'll get to the end and it tells you to enter your email to get the result. You would never have gone through with it if you had known that at the beginning, but now you've wasted 10 minutes and you're committed. Generally the quiz will be super easy and you'll get a much higher percent than the low number stated at the beginning. Why do people click these? Because everyone wants to show to everyone else how smart they are and how much better they are than everyone else. Only 10% of people can identify these countries! Only 15% of people can answer these trivia questions about Star Wars! Only 20% of people can identify which movie this is by one screenshot of Brendan Fraser from it! You'll take these quizzes and even if you're downright stupid you can probably get 80%, because the low number is just a lie they made up. The vast majority of human beings can easily differentiate the outline of France from the outline of Germany, and can also recognize essential differences between the wardrobe choices of Rick O'Connell and Professor Trevor Anderson.
3. One Weird Method/Trick You Can Use to [_____]!
I'm not quite sure why the adjective in this clickbait is always "weird." A lot of times, these are very similar to #1 below (don't jump down yet... you'll get there soon enough). When they are like #1 below, they can be downright dangerous to your health if you believe them. One weird trick to weight loss! Is it to stop eating and drinking water? But just as often the weird trick is just about inane bullshit. One weird trick to getting your Hermes handbag cheaper! You'll probably click 12 different slides and download 4 viruses to your computer in order to be told "wait until there is a sale." One weird trick to stop Brendan Frasier from stealing your food! The answer to this one is usually, "tell Hollywood to hire him again so he can afford to buy it." Honestly though, most of these weird trick things are about penis size.
2. Watch [_____] Destroy/Decimate/Eviscerate/Shred/Aggressive Verb [_____]!
These are sooooo annoying and they're getting worse every month just from the fact that they're multiplying like bunnies as headlines. These are almost always political and show a person from one side of an issue "totally destroy" the other side with their brilliant understanding of how things REALLY work. They're also often just a link to a short clip of a TV talking head giving some group-think propaganda to their target audience while strawmaning the opposing side. Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty of these clickbait crimes to your Facebook news feed, and chances are you're only seeing the ones you want to see anyway because you've already unfriended (or at least unfollowed) all your old high school, college and work friends who are of the opposing political party. On the few occasions these headlines aren't political you might see something like "Watch Brendan Fraser destroy your childhood with Dudley Do-Right!"
1. Doctors Don't Want You to Know [_____]!
As alluded to above in #3, this one goes above and beyond the usual harmless clickbait nonsense and into a zone that can endanger your life. Although if it does you're likely very stupid and deserve the consequences. Similar to the #8 "All [_____] Share This in Common" nonsense, people want to believe their is one magical thing that will solve everything. And so many people are completely obsessed with the idea that "doctors" or "Big Pharma" are behind some massive conspiracy and hiding the secrets to better health or the cures to diseases. Chris Rock hilariously hit a nerve with his "Ain't no money in the cure. The money's in the medicine!" routine. People want to believe that we can magically become healthy with this one trick that doctors, pharmaceutical companies, or Brendan Fraser playing biotech executive John Crowley in the 2010 film Extraordinary Measures don't want you to know about because it will take away all their money. These clickbait headlines are often tied in with "alternative" or "natural" medicine that the evil cabal known as "they" don't want you to learn about. And what are these natural homeopathic miracle cures? Acai berries, kale, vinegar, honey, gingko biloba, ginger root, coconut oil, aloe, onions, magnets, cardamom, reflexology, getting rid of gluten, wellness bracelets, or anything you've ever heard Dr. Oz say. These are all snakeoil for the 21st century. They share the same lack of any scientific evidence to back them up as do "anti-vax" and "detox" nonsense. When pointed out though, the people who believe in this readily turn to their convenient conspiracy theory. Do you know what Pfizer would do if they found the cure to cancer or AIDS? Hide it so they could sell "the medicine" rather than the cure? You are a moron if you think so. They would do exactly what they have done with the rest of their business model - patent the formula so that only their company can sell it and get billions and billions of dollars. Do you want to know why I say this? Because science has totally cured or created vaccines to completely prevent dozens of diseases before. Polio, smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, rabies, measles, yellow fever, etc. In the 1920s, there were an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 cases of diphtheria every year in the United States, causing 13,000 to 15,000 deaths per year. Between 2004 and 2015, a total of two cases of diphtheria were recorded in the US. Why did Crucell, a biotech vaccine company which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, not "hide the truth" of their diphtheria-preventing Quinvaxem® from the world as part of the big pharma conspiracy? Because contrary to noted health expert and supporting actor in Grown Ups 2 Chris Rock, Johnson & Johnson can actually make a shitload of money from the cure. If kale could cure a damn thing then every single kale seed would already be the intellectual property of GlaxoSmithKline, and you'd have to pay $40 a seed.
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| The picture next to the "Cinematic Masterpiece" in the dictionary. |
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