By Jeffrey the Barak

Readership of the-vu is quite small these days. A few dozen reads per day are all we see, from everywhere in the world. Back in the early days, when the-vu was one of just a handful of Internet magazines, we had many thousands of reads every day.

These days, most of us find our online reading content, not in magazine sites, but in news portals. Sites that gather pieces from other sites. Examples are Flipboard, Google News, and increasingly, the right column of Facebook.

We can focus on our interests this way and look for headlines that are related to things we like, for example, scooters, jazz, drums, Hawai’i etc.

One trend that we see in such gathered headlines, is articles that have top ten lists, or top five lists etc. And I have recently taken to completely ignoring any such article. I boycott them in fact.

It is the same with YouTube videos. The site knows our interests via cookies and history, and presents us with videos entitled for example, the top ten uses for….

It would seem to me that any article or video that has top ten or top five in it’s title is generally not worth the time it takes to read or watch. I don’t really know why such content is so terribly bad, when on the face of it it would seem to directly address one’s interests, but really, these pieces are almost invariably a waste of time.

The 7 best foods for healthy weight loss.
10 party outfits that are better than formalwear.
The 5 best electric bicycles.
The 3 best ways to cut cable.
10 ways to improve your mileage.
8 hair color trends that dominated 2015.

All such articles are usually low on content, and high on headline appeal. Empty articles, that are not worth the time it takes to click through to them.

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Who is compiling these lists and why? Why are people clicking through to them, creating more demand for more lists?

I certainly don’t mind short, concise articles with no fluff, but there has to be something, other than a list with a paragraph for each bullet point.