Enough With The List Posts: Write Something Original For Once
List Posts: They Are Bad, don't Write Them
Ahh! god-damn some of you nerds make me angry. It seems you can’t visit a blog about technology or design without having your corneas assaulted with a barrage of list posts telling you what the author thinks are the “25 greatest tools for [insert common IT role here]” or “50 Cool Images You Won’t Believe Aren’t Photoshopped”, where has the originality gone, did China steal it? You wish.
Smashing Magazine is a perfect example of this (they’re not the only one). A lot of their posts consist of lists and information about things designers and web developers already knew in the first place. Each and everyday the saying, “You’ve seen one list post, you’ve seen them all” applies to more and more sites that have potential to be better, but instead would rather write link-baiting posts to increase pageviews to get advertising dollars, I believe they call that selling the fucking out.
The Anatomy of A List Post
There isn’t all too much to a list post. Most list posts contain a screenshot cropped to a particular size, a paragraph of text and a link to another website. That is all there is to them, yet people go fucking crazy for them like these posts are cocaine and they’re all addicts. While I am sure 1 or 2% of list posts might actually be semi usually the other 98 / 99% of them aren’t.
The Traffic, It Is A Lie
Another thing that really annoys me about list posts besides the idiots that go ga ga for them, is the fact blogs like Smashing Magazine are capitalising on these short bursts of traffic from Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and Reddit to make advertising dollars.
Although this might just be jealousy, it pisses me off how there are people out there writing about original things, hand-crafting their posts spending hours and days on them, only to have their effort overshadowed by some lame list post that took probably less than an hour to write and publish.