I can't stand click bait!

You know the drill. You’re on your favorite tech blog and you see the headline, “Nokia will go out of business if they don’t fix this” or “The lawsuit over patent XYZ will be the end of Microsoft”. Immediately you recognize what it is. You know even before you click the headline that the following article is going to be a total exaggeration, chocked full of sensationalized and wildly unfounded claims about things that probably have no basis in real life. You know it’s all lies. You know it won’t provide you with any perspective worth having. You know you’ll be disappointed at the shoddy attempt at journalism. You know it’s a trap. You click the headline anyway. That’s click bait.

Click bait, as far as I can tell, is the new currency of internet journalism. It arises mostly out of the fact that advertisement revenues are largely based on site traffic, which means blogs can make more money by tricking you to stay there longer and click on lots of things. Naturally, news blogs are torn between generating quality news content and making more money. Real journalism is expensive. It requires time and effort, careful fact checking, unbiased perspective, and dedication to the truth, regardless of popular opinion. The sloppy alternative, click bait, gets more rewards at half the cost. The bloggers know that humans have a weakness for fantastically scandalous stores and that we’ll always have a need for resolution once we’ve read the cover. Click bait works for the same reason that grocery stores put tabloids right in your face in the checkout line. They know that even though you really know their wild claims are true, once you read the headline, you just have to know more. At the end of the day, why bother doing real investigative journalism when you can make more money making up things that aren’t true? Some may say that news blogs would have an incentive to keep their roots in real journalism because smart consumers will notice the lack of real content and decide to go somewhere else, but even I keep going back to engadget and businessinsider daily, even though I know enough about the rampant click bait on those sites to be motivated to write my own blog entry about it. Clearly click bait just works.

Click bait is proof that natural selection is not always a good thing, and that sometimes the thing that survives isn’t what’s best for us but is actually what indulges our subconscious desires the most (which is often the opposite of what’s best for us). Some say that “survival of the fittest” should more aptly be redubbed something like “survival of the most viral”. If natural selection was really a force of positive progress, it seems it would propel us in a radically different direction, and "survival of the fittest" lends itself easily to misunderstanding what the term 'fittest' really means in that context.