h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Probably never, but they might get more subtle with it.

> Father And Son Take Same Photo For 25 Years! The Last One Is Shocking!

I just saw that headline and *aggressively avoided* clicking on it. It sounds like the sort of enjoyable fluff I'm in the mood for, actually, but I don't want to reward that headline writer.

TRiG.

When they get no attention, you showed admirable restraint buy not clicking

Then there's the one that promises less belly fat if you avoid this one food.....

Avoid clickbait with this one weird trick.

Yes, I find it offputting, too, like the ones "14 things that are brilliant - #10 is the best"... When I did used to click on them, #10 was no better or worse than any other, so I realised it was likely just clickbait...

I particularly enjoy the ones which say "You won't believe what [insert out of date celebrity of choice] looks like now". OK, I'm curious - so I google them

Deb

Justin Bieber probably doesn't look a lot different than he did two years ago.

Current 'clickbait' problem, if on a search window, when you hit the search button, the screen goes directly to a download button you have to hit to complete the search, DON'T open it.

Trojan spyware aboard.

the ones that really get my hackles up are "you've been doing X wrong all your life"

no, I haven't.

I clicked on some life hacks link on Fb last weekend and actually was astonished to learn something true. I use the long life milk cartons with a screw top and I now know that if you pour with the spout up by your hand rather than down by the cup, the milk doesn't have the tendency to suddenly slosh across the worktop.

http://i.imgur.com/jv9RpCW.jpg

Deb

It's so easy to parody as well. I suppose it'll end when it stops being effective.

I think it's going to stay effective. Curiosity gets the better of many people.

Especially where cats are involved.

The life hacks are tough for me to ignore. I mostly do ignore them now, but some I've really enjoyed, like the one that taught me that I was peeling a banana wrong. Obviously, it's not a major life changer, but I do like peeling them toward the stem leaving it intact. It's only an aesthetic preference. The banana peels in Mario Kart were peeled that way.


There have been a few others I've actually found useful, but there have also been many that after viewing a 5 minute video with 11 lifehacks that were supposed to change my life, I was left wondering why I wasted that 5 minutes.

I peel the banana starting at the end where then peel is already broken, i.e. at the stem. I'm not extra clever, just lazy. The extra work of breaking the other end seems like too much.

Lazy people are extremely valuable for the world, as they always find solutions that entail the least work. But the solutions have to work...

I've heard that peeling from the non-stem end (there must be a word - where's a botanst when you need one?) makes the stringy bits remain with the skin.

I assume the other end from the stem is where the flower buds grew.

I just give that end a squeeze which splits the end, peel and with the last strip, I squeeze that little black core off leaving it stuck to the peel. I still get strings from the peel, but they're manageable. That may depend on ripeness. The riper the banana, the thinner the peel.

A banana a peels to me.

There is an answer to this, and it's probably relatively soon. The online advertising industry is in a quandary. Private Eye has been reporting on it recently. The fact is, advertising on television works. People still watch television, and blocking ads on TV is relatively hard. Plus, some TV ads are actually quite entertaining, so there's that.

Online is different. Blocking ads is easy, and getting easier - more and more people are doing it. Practically everyone who knows it's possible does it. And the actual value of an ad - how likely it is to lead to a sale - is almost impossible to measure. There's a crisis of confidence trickery going on. Everyone knows these things, but the media companies - especially Facebook, but also everyone who makes any money from ads, right down to individual bloggers - are desperate to maintain the pretence that online advertising is worth *some* money, when the evidence suggests it's really not. And pretty much the only quantifiable thing they can point to is clicks - hence clickbait.

BUT: sooner or later, the entire edifice will crash. And when it does, clickbait will become pointless. Which means it will still exist (all kinds of pointless things still exist thanks to the persistence of nutters) but will be drastically reduced, because the real factories of it (Facebook, Buzzfeed et al) will have moved onto some other revenue-generation model.

I don't know... I'm seeing a new trend, especially with media sites, where they detect your ad blocker and make their page unviewable or severely limited unless you disable it.