Stop Feeding The Hate Click Mongers

This piece was cross-posted to my personal website, which you can find at charlierybak.com.

Stop clicking. Stop sharing. Stop retweeting. Just stop.

There are people that exist in this world for the sole purpose of getting you angry. They are compensated for that incredibly lazy skill because they’re able to drive traffic to websites.

Three great examples of that from the past week, each of which I’ve seen shared no less than 20–30 times on my various social networks alongside messages that CONDEMN them in the harshest of terms:

I intentionally didn’t link to any of them. But, be honest — you tried to click at least one of them, didn’t you? STOP! This is bad and wrong and you need to fix yourself so we can start fixing the world.

There’s a difference between provocative arguments supported by a few random facts and whatever this is. Each of these pieces is comprised of stupid, poorly constructed arguments specifically designed to inflame segments of the internet population for profit.

This is a problem born out of the strange model we’ve chosen to support media organizations. Find me one single example of someone doing this who works at a media org primarily supported by subscriptions (as opposed to digital ad revenue). You can’t do it! Once someone pays a subscription fee, they expect a certain level of service for that subscription.

More clicks leads to more eyeballs which leads to more revenue for media organizations. Part of this is because advertisers still buy digital media in stupid ways, like banner ads across entire sites. Advertisers should be smarter than to pay for ads on sites that intentionally jack up their numbers by sending a bunch of furious people to their site, but right now, many aren’t.

I’m not telling you not to go in on these people. You can, and should, tell them how horrible their writing is, and that they’re sad people who everyone will forget about when they’re gone. They’re adding nothing of value to society, and I don’t think anyone should hesitate to let them know that.

But for the love of god, please, please stop doing exactly what they want you to do.