“Look after the senses and the sounds will look after themselves” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The Onion has launched Clickhole, a new site that targets pandering online media with the seriousness it deserves - by relentlessly mocking the just-so narratives, planted stories and malign headlines that characterize clickbait culture and the financial model that powers it.
Eyeballs! Give us eyeballs!
If You Don't Read The Onion's New Clickbait Parody Site, They'll Kill This Dog, Fast Company:
'For us, ClickHole is just another mirror we can hold up to society,' says [managing editor Ben] Berkley. 'There's a lot of this Internet content that's just so vapid and reductive--that's counter-productive to the greater good ... ClickHole is just a cool new medium for us to tell jokes through.'
The writer of the piece also cleverly asks what might happen if Clickhole were to succeed:
...It will be interesting to see what happens when readers get wise to the clickbait trap. Maybe Facebook's fickle algorithm decides to truly surface 'high-quality content,' as it has promised in the past. If the Internet were to ever reach a point where it stopped regurgitating dumb memes and insufferable headlines--as we should all hope it will--Clickhole will, with any luck, grow up alongside it. (Or at least as much as a parody website can.).... The hope is that ClickHole is something that can and will evolve.
I certainly have no idea what a grown-up Clickhole would look like, but the new venture has certainly picked a fat target now.
Stay curious.
Wayne
