The Apotheosis of the Internet
March 23, 2013 5:53 AM   Subscribe

Clickbait

From the makers of Rapbot.
posted by Horace Rumpole (28 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Omg! It's just like the Internet!
posted by etc. at 5:59 AM on March 23, 2013


5. This functionality is probably best known for its marriage to the hottest celebrity of the year, though it's included in THIS list because it's so verbose!

Doesn't handle producing snarky comments so well.
posted by gomichild at 6:08 AM on March 23, 2013


Neither do the writers of those crap articles. I think that's the point. Also, reload.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:10 AM on March 23, 2013


Still more readable than the Huffington Post.
posted by jbickers at 6:11 AM on March 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Hilarious, although they should have gone the distance and auto generated each list instead of just the title and an image. Hell, do that and hook up AdSense and they'd probably have a revenue model stronger than most startups...
posted by gwint at 6:57 AM on March 23, 2013


gwint, note the "AdBlock breaks this page" — with AdBlock disabled, you'll see a full(ish) list.
posted by hatta at 7:11 AM on March 23, 2013


Yes, must visit without Adblock. Which is funny in and of itself.

I do a lot of random Internet browsing, trying to suss out interesting things for my linkblog. I finally learned about six months ago never to bother with any link titled "N X that Y". They are always junk. This rule means I pretty much never visit BuzzFeed, definitely a feature.
posted by Nelson at 7:41 AM on March 23, 2013


I finally learned about six months ago never to bother with any link titled "N X that Y".

One Rule That Makes The Internet Better
posted by DU at 7:51 AM on March 23, 2013 [9 favorites]


I don't know why I'd ever voluntarily look at this website, when I could just go through my servers' referrer logs and wade through the several hundred SEO-optimizing websites that are hotlinking images from my servers, wasting my expensive bandwidth, trying to trick people and bots into giving them pagerank. Or is that the joke? Seriously, "line of markov-chain generated text and a random image" is already a thing on the internet, and the internet is worse for it. If you want examples, I can give 'em, but I don't want to link to them directly and play their game, and they're usually NSFW. These sites are literally indistinguishable from the link in the OP, other than the lack of random scat porn in the OP.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:58 AM on March 23, 2013


Yes, must visit without Adblock. Which is funny in and of itself.

I must?
No, thanks.
posted by Mezentian at 8:02 AM on March 23, 2013


Ghostery doesn't much like it, either.
posted by Malor at 8:05 AM on March 23, 2013


AdBlock breaks this page

Doh!
posted by gwint at 8:08 AM on March 23, 2013


This clickbait was generated by ~40 lines of code. If you write stuff like this for a living: think about your fucking life. And reload for more.
(Amusingly, AdBlock breaks this page.)


With my blockers running Ghostery pings nothing.
posted by Mezentian at 8:09 AM on March 23, 2013


Yay! We've officially reached peak Buzzfeed.
posted by mathowie at 8:43 AM on March 23, 2013 [3 favorites]


With my blockers running Ghostery pings nothing.

Does this explain why even when I disable Adblock, I still can't see anything?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 9:15 AM on March 23, 2013


Amusingly, AdBlock breaks this page.

Why is that so amusing? Is it too difficult to figure out how to fix that?
posted by fredludd at 9:58 AM on March 23, 2013


Ghostery kills it outright. If I run it in chrome without ghostery or adblock, it still sometimes doesn't show up.

Not a bad joke though. Makes me wonder if you could make one for real: track highly viewed images on imgur, parse the associated reddit threads to determine what kind of image it is and tag it appropriately (sad, funny, cute, cat, kitten, insect), and then when you have enough images with overlapping tags, assemble a post. You could pull the captions from the highly voted comments in the reddit threads too.
posted by postcommunism at 10:03 AM on March 23, 2013


Why is that so amusing?

That's the text it gives.

Anywhoo : Tracking the Web Trackers.

Do you know what data the 1300+ tracking companies have on you? Privacy blogger Dan Tynan didn't until he had had enough of being stalked by grandpa-friendly Jitterbug phone ads. Tracking company BlueKai and its partners had compiled 471 separate pieces of data on him. Some surprisingly accurate, some not.
posted by Mezentian at 10:18 AM on March 23, 2013




postcommunism: that was/is ebaumsworlds.com's business model....

FWIW: it doesn't appear to be doing anything more maliscious than pulling images off of google image search and hotlinking to them.
posted by Freen at 11:32 AM on March 23, 2013


Ebaums was more deliberately shitty to people though. Far as I know it was never automated, so they had to manually erase or crop out watermarks.
posted by postcommunism at 11:39 AM on March 23, 2013


But damn, I want to know who The 19 Most Elaborate Princes are!
posted by GenericUser at 11:49 AM on March 23, 2013


One Rule That Makes The Internet Better

Is it a strange rule? Was it discovered by a $MYCITY mom?
posted by hattifattener at 2:49 PM on March 23, 2013


One Rule That Makes The Internet Better

Is it a strange rule? Was it discovered by a$MYCITY mom?


Nono, it's "one weird trick," and internet doesn't want you to know about it.

And the mom looks like a bearded ex-con, but he's getting his degree.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 4:26 PM on March 23, 2013


where the FXXXCK did 'one weird trick' come from?? I feel like maybe 'one weird trick' is part of the protoplasmic scum forming in the overheated servers of the pre-sentience era internet ocean. Just 'weird trick' is enough to make me shudder: that is possibly the ugliest combination of two words I can imagine. It's like the Modern Times gears grinding up a plastic bag full of molars.
posted by notesondismantling at 5:42 PM on March 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


Hilarious that "The 11 Most Recumbent Penthouses" includes 9 Penthouse covers & 2 actual penthouses.
posted by smirkette at 5:43 PM on March 23, 2013 [1 favorite]


The 19 Most Liminal Redundancies turned out pretty good.
posted by gusandrews at 9:16 PM on March 23, 2013


I feel like maybe 'one weird trick' is part of the protoplasmic scum forming in the overheated servers of the pre-sentience era internet ocean

you're not the only one who thinks this
posted by hattifattener at 12:34 AM on March 24, 2013


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