Clickbait Quotes

Those who can make people believe absurdities, can make people commit atrocities.

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’). Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse. Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Freshman Year: Accidentally Dating My Sister (Not Clickbait)

In the nitty-gritty of my daily life, repentance for idolatry may look as pedestrian as shutting off my email an hour earlier or resisting that alluring clickbait to go to bed.

I was playing rainbow six siege and that's the moment when I saw a dick on the wall so i knew I needed to masturbate so I uploaded thumbnail representing a dick so I can clickbait while masturbating” ~Eren Yeager

If the favored modes of the alt-right were the women-hating troll and the neo-Nazi meme, the favored modes of the alt-left were clickbait and the call-out, sentimental, meaningless outrage—“8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated”—and sanctimonious accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.

My willingness to sacrifice much-needed rest and my prioritizing amusement or work over the basic needs of my body and the people around me (with whom I'm far more likely to be short-tempered after a night of little sleep) reveal that these good things—entertainment and work—have taken a place of ascendancy in my life. In the nitty-gritty of my daily life, repentance for idolatry may look as pedestrian as shutting off my email an hour earlier or resisting that alluring clickbait to go to bed. The truth is, I'm far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment that I am for prayer. When I turn on Hulu late at night I don't consciously think, "I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body," But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.

Journalists are hardly immune to these forces. We become more polarized, and more polarizing, when we start spending our time in polarizing environments. I have seen it in myself, and I have watched it in others: when we’re going for retweets, or when our main form of audience feedback is coming from partisan junkies on social media, it subtly but importantly warps our news judgement. It changes who we cover and what stories we chase. And when we cover politics in a more polarized way, anticipating or absorbing the tastes of a more polarized audience, we create a more polarized political reality.

While he was still president-elect in January 2017, Trump seized on the term “fake news”—which was coined by reporters and researchers to describe made-up stories on social media—and co-opted it as a bludgeon, a diversion, and a punchline. “Fake news” meant Russian propaganda and clickbait, but for his base Trump defined it as “news you shouldn’t believe.” It was probably the most important thing he did during the presidential transition period. Turning “fake news” into a slur fit perfectly into Trump’s permanent campaign of disbelief, as best conveyed by his 2018 statement that “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” He suggested with disturbing regularity that everything could be a hoax. It was straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Clickbait)

Accidentally Dating My Sister (Not Clickbait)

If Woodstock happened today, you would be invited on social media. Websites would livestream it. Rolling Stone would not cover it. You would read “The 5 Craziest Parts of Woodstock (Number 4 Will SHOCK You).” Instead of lighters, we would hold up cell phones, so we could record the moment instead of inhabiting it.

Who knew what was true. The sheer density of information and misinformation at the End, encapsulated in news articles and message-board theories and clickbait traps that had propagated hysterically through retweets and shares, had effectively rendered us more ignorant, more helpless, more innocent in our stupidity.

Media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as visibility (and revenue) is gained, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals.

The media keeps running stories on the Yellowstone supervolcano. Spectacular, but it’s clickbait. I have it on good authority from a friend in Bozeman, Montana that Cascadia is the big one.

Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.

Every so often she’d see a reporter complaining on Twitter about how far the quality of journalism had tumbled, thanks to the internet, and that journalists with real skills and experience who knew how to write original stories were getting shoved aside in favor of young people who leeched off the hard work of these allegedly hardworking journalists, and it was all because their greedy overlords were obsessed with clicks and traffic—again, at the expense of “real” journalists. Aggregation had become a dirty word, and the people who suffered were the readers, who were now faced with piles of online news dreck, according to this line of thinking, and every story was the same, and no one checked sources, and eventually everyone was just going to die under a pile of clickbait, which was the dirtiest word of all.

Her every utterance is clickbait, and according to the headlines, she no longer says anything, but rather “eviscerates.

Against this cultural backdrop, it’s not hard to understand why Banksy’s Dismaland was painted by its critics as naïve, reductive, repetitive, and deeply uncool, another act of ego-driven attention-seeking. Ben Luke of the London Evening Standard proclaimed that Banksy’s Dismaland was “mostly selfie-friendly stuff, momentarily arresting, quickly forgotten—art as clickbait.” Others emphasized its pointlessness. “[I]f Banksy has the money to make an entire theme park, WHY NOT JUST USE IT TO HELP PEOPLE!?” squawked John Trowbridge of The Huffington Post. Banksy could “fund a school in Africa” or “make a video encouraging the youth to be positive and engaged.” Has there ever been a more Disneyfied vision of what it takes to change the world? Ignore all the bad stuff out there and post a super-inspiring video to YouTube instead.

Freedom from Uncontrolled Thinking A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn off my “monkey mind.” When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want. If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7. I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. [4] A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time. There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters. Maybe some of us will get there, but I’m not likely to, given how involved I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while. I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get. [8] The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

in an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption:

In the great Age of Tech, journalism was clickbait, and Big Tech controlled the clicks.

For those who are curating a self, social media notifications work as a form of clickbait.22 Notifications light up the ‘reward centres’ of the brain, so that we feel bad if the metrics we accumulate on our different platforms don’t express enough approval. The addictive aspect of this is similar to the effect of poker machines or smartphone games, recalling what cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han calls the ‘gamification of capitalism’.

What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn't: all the actions you didn't take , all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone. You pay for that extra Game of Thrones episode with the heart-to-heart talk you could have had with your anxious child. You pay for that extra hour on social media with the sleep you didn't get and the fresh feeling you didn't have the next morning. You pay for giving in to that outrage-inducing piece of clickbait about that politician you hate with the patience and empathy it took from you, and the anger you have at yourself for allowing yourself to take the bait in the first place.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy.

the Slow Media Manifesto argues that in an age in which the digital attention economy is shoveling more and more clickbait toward us and fragmenting our focus into emotionally charged shards, the right response is to become more mindful in our media consumption:

will ruin your reputation. The second is that if you create curiosity or loss aversion, you have to make sure the experience of attending is worth it or people will feel tricked like they do from a bad clickbait article. When engaging, build around the IKEA effect so participants will invest group effort. This will have them bond more to each other and you or your brand. To instill the membership values, try to apply the peak-end rule so people develop a strong

And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.

And so Silicon Valley keeps dishing us up ever more sensational clickbait, knowing full well, as a Swiss novelist once quipped, that ‘News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.’30

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a “once-and-for-all” type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity. We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again, together.

But at night the opposite happens: oxygen enters through the pores and carbon dioxide escapes,

In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Franklin Foer warns, “We’re being dinged, notified, and click-baited, which interrupts any sort of possibility for contemplation. To me, the destruction of contemplation is the existential threat to our humanity.

these features have the potential to create an ecosystem in which attention is more directly and precisely compensated. It won’t necessarily end the phenomenon of “clickbait” journalism—presumably, if stories on Kim Kardashian continue to draw people’s attention, they will fetch the highest payouts in BATS. But the option to tip publishers could send more nuanced, informative signals to them. We don’t know for sure how people will behave, but perhaps they’ll be more inclined to tip BATs for a work of insight and effort than for a sexy photo they felt compelled to click on.

You’ve likely heard the term “clickbait” referring to posts with ridiculously manipulative headlines that dare you not to click and check out their content. And we’ve all fallen for it!

I’m not the only one, we discovered collectively. The fact that people were paying attention changed everything. Am I going to contribute to the empty-calorie click-bait noise? Or am I going to try to do something that matters?

have some damned standards: Traditionally, language is used to make specific points and convey information. In the age of driving web traffic, usage is increasingly vague and misleading. Whether they’re acts of clickbaiting or dumbness, internet headlines routinely mischaracterize quotes, inaccurately paraphrase statements, and misuse specific terms, all to make readers click. Editors say they’re doing what they need to do, or they argue it’s a valid way to interpret the facts; I call it “lying.

All they had to do was get people to click on their articles and the advertisements on the website would fund their operation, so instead of focusing on producing quality content that people would be willing to pay for, they began flooding the Internet with sensational clickbait, throwing all journalistic standards out the window with one goal in mind—drive traffic to the articles, no matter what.

Dennis Michael Lynch, a conservative blogger and the producer of several straight-to-DVD documentaries about illegal immigration, was working on a documentary about the shooting and advising Andy on how to navigate the media. When Andy told Dennis about Kenny’s report, Dennis interviewed him. A few days after that interview, on March 27, Dennis ran an article previewing Kenny’s report.17 But Kenny wasn’t flattered; he freaked out. He had figured that the interview would be part of a documentary that would air a year later. Now a scoop on his report had been published on a conservative clickbait website that, he reflected, “looked like it could give you a computer virus.” Kenny had wanted to write a serious report that would attract meaningful media attention. But now anyone who Googled him might see him as a partisan teenage attention-seeker.

Because hyperactive users tended to be more partisan and more inclined to share misinformation, hate speech, and clickbait, the intervention produced integrity gains almost across the board. An analysis of how the intervention would affect the distribution of polarized content in the United States showed it would hit far-right and far-left outlets hard—and slightly boost the distribution of mainstream news publishers.

To click or not to click, that's the trillion dollar mental health question in the internet age.

an age of ubiquitous and addictive click-bait.

Humans were biology. They lived for the dopamine rush. They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. It was not a way to live long or to prosper, but it was a way of being as ineradicable, now, as the ragweed that flourished in the roadside ditches.

Thom Morgan would be an absolute disaster for anyone stupid enough to care about him.

News article, or tabloid magazine, Lauren? You know firsthand how the media loves a clickbait headline, true or not.

Clickbait ushered in an era of “fake news,” which led us to the disinformation age of the 2020s, where it’s so hard to tell truth from fact online that bad actors have figured out how to get what they want—be that money or power or something else—by spreading intentionally false information.

Shooting Nazis in a game doesn’t reinforce any desire to hunt Nazis in the real world; it doesn’t even increase the probability of enjoying other Nazi-shooting games. In fact, according to the latest progressive philosophical musings, gamers are already crypto-Nazis, since only a Nazi would find insightful, click-baiting commentaries on popular culture silly or a waste of time; which is odd seeing as the average gamer has probably destroyed half the Wehrmacht during his gaming life.

Deep State,” the pejorative term he uses to refer to professional public servants who conduct the nation’s business without regard to politics; he has called Jim Comey “a terrible and corrupt leader”; he has called the investigation of Russian interference in the elections and possible ties with his campaign “perhaps the most tainted and corrupt case EVER!”; and he has referred to two of the investigators on the Russia case, themselves, as “a fraud against our Nation,” “hating frauds,” and “incompetent and corrupt.” His insults have emboldened legions of goons to push further. Even mainstream news outlets have been unable to refrain from trafficking in destructive clickbait, juxtaposing the terms “FBI” and “corruption” in headlines over stories ostensibly covering “both sides” of the brawl that now passes for argument.

The internet sets clickbait traps, tempting you in because, come on, who doesn’t want to know what their favourite soap star from the 1980s looks like now? You won’t believe it, right? So you spend 20 minutes clodhopping through a maze of clickbait trash, accidentally clicking an advert or two on your way through the minefield, and the end result is, well, not quite as truly amazing as the headline said. She looks kind of the same but a bit older. Meanwhile, 20 minutes of your life have ebbed away and you feel the need to go and have a shower to scrub away the stench of gullibility.

Social media nationalism and clickbait populism have led to a third phenomenon that undermines the intelligence of crowds, threatening the advancement of humanity and the unity of democracies: the death of expertise. As the barriers to internet access got lower and lower, anyone, regardless of education, training, or status, could explore information and voice their opinion in debate. This would seem, on the surface, to be good for democracies, as increased information, awareness, and voice would seem to encourage more civic engagement and debate and better collective outcomes. Instead, social media users, in their relentless pursuit of preferences, have selectively chosen information and expertise they like over that which is true or even real. Social media users participating in the crowd have chosen to be happier and dumber by not just challenging McAfee and Brynjolfsson’s core but also by seeking to destroy it.

Is your name Google? Because you have everything I'm searching for. It's lucky I have a library card because I'm totally checking you out. Do you like raisons? How do you feel about a date? I know this seems like clickbait, but if you and me dated, you wouldn't believe what happens next!

They could get it either by putting the relevant chemicals directly into their bodies or by partaking of some clickbait that had been algorithmically perfected to make brains generate the dopamine through psychological alchemy. It was not a way to live long or to prosper, but it was a way of being as ineradicable, now, as the ragweed that flourished in the roadside ditches.

Wolf may be a poor researcher, but she is good at the internet. She packages her ideas in listicles for the clickbait age: “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps.” (Beware Step #10.) “Liberate Our Five Freedoms.

This is the shittiest fucking love declaration I've ever heard of. Seriously, Thom. This is awful. You're so bad at this.

Hey, maybe I don't want people to think I'm dating someone who's so fucking creepy that people think a picture of you beating me up is how you'd look during sex.

You might be a big deal in Palo Alto, but you're nothing in politics. Because politics involves actual work, not going to Burning Man and billing it as a business expense. We work twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, in cubicles, for government pay, because we've figured out the difference between what's trendy and what matters. You're a bunch of kids burning billionaire's money, making useless toys, thinking it means something. I do more in a day than they'll fit into your entire obituary.

I'm not keeping anything important from my family. And... I guess, if anyone has to be my 'fake' fiancé, I'm glad it's you. I'm okay with my family knowing you. That's not fake.

Please, want me back, please, please love me too.

Nope. You know what, Thom, I can't do this-this, like, Svengali, don't-say-what-I-mean and definitely don't-let-anyone-see-I-have-feelings crap anymore. I fucking love you, okay?

The twenty-first-century shift into real-time analytics has only made the danger of metrics more intense. Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist at Google, warns that trying to get website users to see as many ads as possible naturally devolves into trying to cram sites with ads: “When you are paid on a [cost per thousand impressions] basis the incentive is to figure out how to show the most possible ads on every page [and] ensure the visitor sees the most possible pages on the site.… That incentive removes a focus from the important entity, your customer, and places it on the secondary entity, your advertiser.” The website might gain a little more money in the short term, but ad-crammed articles, slow-loading multi-page slide shows, and sensationalist clickbait headlines will drive away readers in the long run. Kaushik’s conclusion: “Friends don’t let friends measure Page Views. Ever.