You’ll never believe number 6

You’ll never believe number 6

What he did next OMG

Clickbait. We all know it, and I for one hate it. Now don’t get me wrong; there is a LITTLE good stuff in some of those annoying posts, but most of it could easily be displayed in a single post making things far more enjoyable for everyone. The reason for this particular rant however is not clickbait as such, but more the ridiculous puzzles such as “1x1+1/1-0+1=” or “comment with an English word That begins and ends with the letter “T”” or “type Amen for this completely useless cause”.

So here for you is a decent puzzle (the answer is at the end of this should you wish to chicken out): there are 3 words in the English language that begin with the letters “dw” – name them.

While you are thinking on that, consider how many people type ‘amen’ or ‘solve the BEDMAS puzzle’ (correctly or incorrectly) and whether or not you need to do a fb friend purge based on the number of your friends that respond to this sort of thing.

But let us step back and admire the beauty and simplicity of this game. In the end it is, unsurprisingly, about money. The way it works is that the person/company provides a story, or headline, or picture, or easy problem to solve but doesn’t show you all of it (for the problem or story ones). From there the idea is that you will click through to the website. What this does is it logs your visit on a counter. One visit one tick – as it were. If they can get you to click further, start the gallery for example, then they receive more ticks on their counter. And what is the point of these ticks, I hear you ask. The ticks are counted by the all-knowing google; these ticks mean that they can verify that a person has visited the site, and if you have visited the site it means you saw the ads, which makes the ads worth more, which means they get paid more.

But this isn’t all they get. This blog receives about 50 reads for every post (feel free to share it around, by the way), and because I host it on a google site I get to use google analytics (for free) and it tells me wonderful things like what browser you are using, when you read it, and which country you are reading it from. This is just the free stuff. And information, as they say, is power, or in this case money.

So it’s a smart game, and it makes money for those interested. But for the rest of us we must put up with those that generate the money, and those that click on and indeed share these annoying posts, because it’s pretty, or cute, pulls at their heart strings, or challenges their limited intellect to remember the things they forgot after their 4^th form maths test was over (Brackets, Exponents, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction).

What then to do? Well, there are only really two options: either put up with the annoyance or do a Facebook cull. I do a Facebook cull about once every 6 months or so – it just gets rid of the contacts from kindergarten that you haven’t spoken to since but contacted you anyway. So do a cull, get rid of the chaff of your contact list, but do it nicely, give people an opportunity first, I suggest something like, “Hi all, I’m about to get rid of people on here that I haven’t talked to in a while, just to keep my numbers down. Please feel free to re-friend me if you would like to stay in touch; if not please take no offence – my feed is just too busy.” And then do a cull.

The answers?

3.

ThaT.

Dwindle, Dwarf and Dwell.