I agree that they’re fulfilling a need, which is why I end the post with an admission that there’s an exchange going on and that perhaps this exchange reflects even more poorly on the readership than the so-called authorship.

However, I think it’s wrong to conflate this phenomenon with the general human tendency to want attention. Make no mistake, we are experiencing “a moment” right now. People are publishing duplicate content that they likely don’t even care about at a dizzying pace solely to garner likes and follows, because likes and follows are the social platform equivalent of power. What these people will eventually choose to publish when they have accumulated enough platform power is anybody’s guess — maybe nothing, maybe more clickbait.

But the more people who start “writing” clickbait pieces, the more competitive the space will become, until eventually people will — gasp — actually need to be creative even to write successful clickbait. The relative stranglehold these non-authors currently command will then be distributed across an ever-widening group, and their empires will crumble. Think the gold rush, only replace gold with “platform-based self-help articles.”

So, in a sense, it’s both a universal problem and a very specific problem with timely implications.