Writing a Link-Bait Crap Post

[mbarrick]

1. Use Point Form

   Most people can't or won't read with comprehension, they just skim headers and assume they already know what's going to be written below. If your crappy link-bait list is going to get Stumbled, Digged, or whatever, you need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and make them feel like they are clever. It's all about the "F" reading pattern that SEO snake-oil salesmen like to harp on. Remember that 99.83% of humanity has an I.Q. below the second standard deviation, it's only that remaining 0.27% (or 0.0027 if they work for Verizon) are geniuses capable of understanding prose and have the freakishly long attention spans to stay focused on something for more than a tenth of second.
    

2. Steal Your Content

   Why waste valuable time thinking for yourself? Just assume that your audience has the attention span of a gnat and a memory like a sieve. They won't remember that they've seen the same list four hundred and twenty seven times before just so long as you change up the order a bit and use a different coloured background.
    
   Here are a couple of great things to steal:
    
   

   1. Do a Photoshop Tutorial

      Make sure it is something completely inane that every freaking wanker calling themselves a "designer" now that they've managed to get their pirated copy of Photoshop working can get into, like how to use layers, handy keyboard shortcuts like "CTRL-SHIFT-Z", or pretty much anything else you can get straight out of the help file. Remember that your audience is functionally illiterate, so you are pretty much guaranteed that they won't have looked in the help file.
       

   2. Present an Uncredited List of Photographs

      Everyone likes pretty pictures, especially the drooling morons that read your crappy blog. Remembering once again that your audience can't or won't read makes writing any kind of credits for the photographers pointless anyway. Doing anything so intensely difficult as, say, linking to the photographers' websites is counter productive. Not only would it mean learning how to form an <a> tag, but it might mean people would leave your site by some means other than clicking on the fucking Google ads dominating your page in the upper left placement because you are so damn clever about exploiting that whole "F" pattern thing (never mind that it makes your first bullet point illegible, the content doesn't really matter anyway.) You can even pretend that you give a shit about the people you are exploiting by saying something like, "I found these pictures in various places around the Internet and don't know who they belong to. If you recognize something send me a note so I can credit the photographer." That's really brilliant, that way you look like the good guy and it's really your readers' fault for not knowing who you should credit.
       
      Here's some popular things you can rip-off:
       
      

      1. Weird Houses

         Your lowest-common-denominator audience just loves laughing at creative freaks. Throw together some pictures of houses that have some character and your audience will feel better about the suburban monotony that surrounds them, and the ones from AOL will feel better about their trailers.
          

      2. HDR Photographs

         The sort of idiots that boggle at pressing three keys at the same time to get more than one level of undo out of Photoshop are really impressed with these. They're like magic. Especially if they are trailer-park ass-hAOLs and the pictures are of things they can't grasp, like buildings in Europe that are more than 20 years old.
          

      3. Big Stuff

         How about that picture everyone has seen a million times of that really big excavator crossing the highway? Or that bridge in France that crosses a valley? Or the strip mine in Siberia that sucks in helicopters? People love shit like that. One more time won't hurt. And enough people might click on your Google ads that you can treat yourself to a stick of gum.
          

      4. Renderings of Product Concepts

         If they have absolutely no chance of going to market because the concept relies on violating some fundamental law of nature, so much the better.
          

      5. Cats

         Because the Internet needs more pictures of cats. That's what it is there for. Especially "LOL Cats" - make sure you cover the classics: "I can has cheeseburger", "Drillcat will kill your family", "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate", etc. They never get old.
          

      6. Stuff They Don't Have in America

         Face it, if you are writing in English, even if your domain ends in .uk, .au, .nz, .ca or the two-letter country code of any civilised (with an "s") country, most of the drooling idiots that with look at it (I'd say "read" , but we know that is being too generous) are going to be from the good-ol' U.S. of A. Just run together a bunch of things that Americans have never seen in real life, like canals, advertising designed for people with more than two functional brain cells, small reliable cars that get good gas mileage, clean subways, buildings more than 20 years old, books, etc.
          

3. Don't Screen or Moderate Comments

   Nothing makes an interesting post more interesting than the unfiltered insight of knuckle-draggers. Maybe start things out by trolling your own post with the requisite "photoshopped" comment. This is especially effective for posts of things that are necessarily photoshopped, like HDR photos or photo-manipulations. If you're really lucky the comment thread will degrade into a Republican vs. Democrat argument on American politics. Those are always fun.
   

Comments

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. Quite true.

What prompted this?

(Psst...typo in heading 3.)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Thanks for spotting the typo. Fixed.

This has been forming in my head for a while. I'm getting really tired of Stumbling pretty much the same content over and over and over. I was in a bad mood because of rejection letter and I had the time to actually write it today so we'll call it catharsis. Now I'm curious to see if it actually gets picked up by a social bookmarking system... and if it does what sort of brain-dead comments it will illicit.

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

It's a good bit of writing, anyway. When I came across it I began thinking, "...this looks a lot like the Epic Edits blog. But it's not. Huh."

Well, rest assured that your tone is unique enough that it's definitely noticeable when you stray from it...

[ladyvermath.livejournal.com]

LMAO! I can't help it, I love your rants but it makes me beg to wonder what on earth happened to cause it?

See above

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/875025.html?thread=3230481#t3230481

Of course I was writing that just as you were posting.

[scarletwildfire.livejournal.com]

I think the post was photo-shopped. :P

What a wanker - see the shadows aren't attached to the letters! GEEZ!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I knew that wouldn't take long ;-)

I was tempted to take my own advice and accuse myself of photoshopping the post.

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

Alas, true. But do yourself a favor and never ever go to the Halifax Chronicle Herald site, where there's commenting. It'll utterly destroy your remaining shred of faith in humanity. The "we don't need no book lernin/edumacation!" reigns supreme here, and I confess I've just grown a blind eye to all but the worst of the ignorant knuckledragging populace.

( I may be guilty of something like "stuff they don't have in america" if only because we have people here who don't understand elevators, egg cartons, urban change or wit.)

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I find it amusing that Yahoo! News actually had to *stop* accepting comments of stories because, regardless of what the article was about, every thread was hijacked by Creationists and Republicans.

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the C-H gets some real nut jobs. Racist? Ignorant? Short sighted? Back water drooler? Bible thumper? Yup. They don't like the universities, or people volunteering overseas, or happy plucky stories about kids.

It's an embarassment, and if I'd read those before we moved, I'd have stayed in Vancouver, and been the happier for it.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

it's funny but the cbc website is just as bad...inevitably every story gets hijacked by conservative vehement "capitalists" and haters of the cbc...especially any stories on the cbc itself...my problem is i just have this terrible habit of reading a comment or two just to see how stupid they will be and i'm never disappointed...but like a car accident i have to look...thankfully i'm intelligent enough to not feel the need to comment myself and propagate the idiocy...same goes for the tyee, they have interesting stories, but the gordo supporters are always on there...

[nicosian.livejournal.com]

Where I am now, people hate everything. They're also dumb as stumps, so we joke that moving to Surrey would be a drastic step up.

And they comment on the news. I picture them, alas, in ratty overalls and a flannel shirt, with one wonky eye and a pitchfork, as they rail on saying they don't believe those liberal academic ivory tower snobs and that all those durned edumacated fools outta grab a shovel and do real work.

We have a high percentage of conservative, religious, creationist sorts here. I've heard more backwater commentary on them there muslims and gays than I ever needed.

I do post to the news stories, mostly to see if I can make their heads explode in fury, not by trolling, but being literate and logical. There's not much else to do here. Aside from drink. Poking the ignorant is all I got.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

well i see your point there...i often consider trying, but the cbc site generally gets so many comments it's pointless...and on the tyee site there are plenty of lefties to rile the rubes...that in itself is sometimes entertaining...now the question is would a move to abbotsford/chilliwack be a move up, my guess is it's more lateral...same with prince george, etc...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

It doesn't really seem to matter where. If comments are wide-open the stupidity flows unabated. I actually have to give Yahoo! credit for what they did.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i play ball hockey with ian h from cbc news vancouver and i've often told him that i think the comments on there are pointless...he agrees and doesn't like it himself...in fact i'm sure he has told them that...but it seems to be the norm now and if they did cut them off i'm sure the only ones who would complain would be the hater conservatives who don't think they should exist anyway...ha ha...

[logik.livejournal.com]

Bwahaahahahahah.

"Because the Internet needs more pictures of cats. That's what it is there for. Especially "LOL Cats" - make sure you cover the classics: "I can has cheeseburger", "Drillcat will kill your family", "Ceiling cat is watching your masturbate", etc. They never get old."

Oh dude... I get sent about a dozen of these a day. I think I want to kill the webmaster of "I can has cheeseburger" at this point. I think I've seen one funny one ever, and I'm pretty sure that it was only funny because I was on cold medication. The rest of it makes me, a cat lover, want to puke.

Don't even get me started on photoshop freak postings... lol.

You made my morning.

:)