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!

Earlier 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