Fighting Back Against Lists

Matt Haughey (of Metafilter fame) on the tendency of online content to take the form of lists and how-to's for easy scanning and ingestion:

Seriously, the top of digg, delicious, reddit, and every other link aggregator seems to be clogged with Lists of Vital Things You Should Know. After seeing dozens of them fly by every single day, I'm starting to think it's just lazy headline writing that gets promoted up thanks to our nanosecond attention-span RSS readin' latte drinkin' ruby on rails codin' getting things done task managin' nerd culture. Cool it with the lists. Feel free to use real paragraphs and explain stuff. I have time.

Comments

[Marti]

I'm bored of lists as well. I rarely use them, and think too many people have read blogging advice books that suggested them. Yes, everyone is in a hurry, but a well-written post that is meaty will get more comments.

[Matt]

This is so true. It seems that every blog and article you ever see nowadays is structed as a how-to list. Some blogs seem to be composed of nothing else!

It just has the effect of making them all seem the same -- which is a shame because blogging is a great medium of (unique) self-expression.

Hopefully people will get sick of this phenonmena and start to reward the more original, honest and individualistic blog posts and articles.

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[Hazel Walker]

This post is funny when you consider that right below it is the Blogging Checklist.

Different behavior styles read differently. I am a fast paced person, give me the list, on the other hand my business partner likes the details.

So, different strokes for different folks. The list get the most hits and get republished most often.

Thanks for the post.