Apocalyptic Writing For Its Own Sake is ClickBait At Its Very Worst
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Sacrificing quality at the alter of clickbait will bring about the demise of this platform a lot sooner than later.
It’s the 31st of December 2021.
And there is so much concerted pressure to keep up with the top writers in this space.
For those of us who rely on Medium for our livelihood(whisper it gently), we often feel the need to pump out material in order to keep up with our fellow writers, or shall I say competitors in this space.
And Make no mistakes about it, writing here is extremely competitive, far more competitive than we realize or appreciate. The sharp elbows from the our colleagues are all too apparent.
And in this extraordinarily fierce battle for eyes, there seems to be an overwhelming preponderance, an avalanche of badly written apocalyptic articles, in this space.
You know what the headlines look like: The world is about to end and no one is in charge or we are sinking into the abyss and no one cares; The Omicron is ripping through our lives and more people will end up being dead etc.
Based on these titles, these authors then proceed to publish lengthy posts, which say absolutely nothing that you haven’t watched on Alex Jones’s show or listened to on Joe Rogan’s podcasts; the sort of material which sails quite close to conspiracy theory territory.
And therein lies the big problem for me.
These articles are clickbait, pure and simple.
According to Wikipedia, the definition of clickbait, goes thus:
is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.[2][3] A “teaser” aims to exploit the “curiosity gap”, providing just enough information to make readers of news websites curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.
And before I get too moralistic, I must point out that I am a sinner too.
