#7 will totally make your jaw drop!

Lists might be the most insidious form of click-bait. Why are lists on the Internet so annoying?  Let me count the ways.

1. They usually make you click to read each item in the list so they get more ad views.  Not this list though.  It’s all in one big diarrheal spurt.

2. They usually have a dorky “teaser” like that one up above, or “you won’t believe…” or “#17 is insane” or “we want your ad money.”  Sorry, that last one isn’t a real one but at least it’s honest.

3. A hot picture is used to make you want to view the list.  Sometimes more than one.  Often there’s an arrow pointing somewhere just outside the thumbnail so you think if you click you get to see the juicy part.

4. A grotesque picture is used for the “10 celebrities and what they look like now” variety of list.  You see the deformed photo and wonder which child star could possibly have turned out looking like that.

5. They are arbitrary and based solely on the opinion of one lonely person sitting in front of a keyboard.  The top 10 worst songs of all time that make you a loser if you like them usually has several of my favorite songs on it, just so the author can feel superior apparently or compensate for a small thingy.  But, alas, I’m sounding a bit presidential…

6.  They left off my most important one!  Now I have to search for the comments section so I can engage and express my flabbergasted dismay.

7. They overuse exclamation points and/or caps lock in a DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE CONTENT MORE EXCITING!!!!

8.I get a kind of Pavlovian association just because every weekend I face the inevitable “honey do list” which is a bunch of things ostensibly more important than lying around in my underwear watching sports.

9. They combine several of the above techniques in an effort to manipulate you, an intelligent, sentient human being who’s certainly not voting for Trump.

10. The last item on the list is totally superfluous or even a repeat because they were trying to round the list out to an even 10.  Of course we’re not doing that here…