You’re not going to read this

I ask my students to contextualize links with informative text, rather than hype.

Puppies! Schadenfreude! Thinly veiled primal urges! If you aren’t weeping angry tears by the 3rd paragraph, a gargoyle has your soul! Prove your cleverness and sensitivity by sharing this link! Also so you can find this article again! Link traffic!

20140217-095510.jpgEarlier this month, there was yet another lengthy public debate about Upworthy, the two-year-old publisher that has become one of the most popular sites on Facebook due to its knack for overselling its bite-size content with “curiosity gap” headlines like, “Why Is Bill Nye Acting Like A Lunatic? Because He Doesn’t Want To Get Blown Up, That’s Why.” | In the midst of the Twitter argument, Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for sites like Upworthy, dropped a bomb: “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading,” he wrote. —The Verge

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