The Best Thing You Will Ever Read!!!!!!

Having recently completed a career-reviving / cockroach-showering stint in the I'm a Celebrity... jungle, former Radio 1 presenter and all-round “funny man” (who's not actually as funny as most of your mates) Chris Moyles is back in the news.... or rather, was (this was written late December so he's probably long gone again by now). Whilst scrolling through my social media feed, a suggested post by no less than the THE INDEPENDENT newspaper proved just titillating enough to have me click through, clearly desperate to avoid doing whatever I should have been concentrating on whilst vaguely intrigued by the whiff of drama, despite my genuine indifference to all parties involved.

The headline read: Chris Moyles lashes out over Nick Grimshaw takeover of his Radio 1 show.

The accompanying photos of a ragged looking Moyles alongside a benign-looking Grimshaw suggested an epically one-sided meltdown... judging from Moyles' intense stare and harrowed expression, possibly even the use of a cosh or some knuckle-dusters or something.

Instead, the “article” detailed a time when, ten fucking years ago, Chris Moyles was left feeling “a bit cross” at being outed from the station. That's the full extent of the lashing. No shouting, no profanity. Certainly no knuckle-dusters or “Comedy Dave” administering a Chelsea smile. Rubbish. Waste of time sensationalism and hyperbole to draw eyeballs to a few paragraphs nestled between adverts for iPhones, online gambling and Amazon Prime.
And from THE INDEPENDENT??! Apparently there wasn't enough actual news going on, what with global humanitarian and health crises, economic meltdowns and soaring costs of living. Obviously that stuff's all a bit depressing but it's still funnier than Chris Moyles. Especially Chris Moyles not doing something vaguely interesting... a decade ago. Admittedly a prestige paper forced to chase revenue through trash content and misleading headlines is proof enough that times are hard all around. Everyone gotta eat / stay relevant... even if that's via promoting irrelevance.

Welcome to CLICKBAITOPIA!!

Perhaps it's just a matter of time before The Financial Times is luring online users with the type of heaving cleavage thumbnails already synonymous with so much sponsored content.

If it's not a beautiful woman, perhaps it's a big red arrow pointing to something “YOU WON'T BELIEVE YOU MISSED” in the latest Marvel film. You missed it because it really doesn't matter. Or you didn't even miss it - you just didn't realise that until the end of the video because the linked image was intentionally misleading. Perhaps it's the photoshopped thumbnail promising an epic showdown between an anaconda and an elephant which never actually occurs in that 10 minute youtube vid of “14 craziest animal battles caught on camera”.

Sometimes the bait is just ridiculous. Your common sense tells you not to waste your time – the equivalent of spending an hour watching Ghost Detectives, UFO Hunters or Real Werewolves on some tragic cul de sac of cable TV. Surely if they actually found Bigfoot, Nessie or E.T. The world would've been informed by something other than a low-budget, bombastically-narrated hackumentary on the History Channel at three in the morning....  Nevertheless, morbid curiosity abounds and when the water is chummed so blatantly, you almost want to take a bite just to prove your cynicism well founded.... Also, it would be cool if they actually filmed a werewolf!

I recently screen-grabbed a suggested post which proclaimed:

Andre the Giant's daughter is even bigger than him - she is probably the prettiest woman to ever exist. Wrestlers' children and where they are today.

Beloved as he was, rocking the lycra as he did, Andre the Giant was still no Brad Pitt. It follows that even discounting our awareness of the sensationalist ploys of clickbait, most of us would doubt his “even bigger” daughter, towering as she must do above 7 ft 4 inches, could be the prettiest woman to “EVER” exist. You have to assume that whichever charlatan (or A.I. Bot???) cobbled together that headline, they knew it wouldn't, nay...couldn't be taken at face value. It got noticed though, which still takes some doing these days.

Despite resisting the urge to click on it at the time, whilst searching for the same post just now, I instead found a Reddit thread started by one intrepid user who'd detailed their heroic wade through the photo-addled listicle of celebrity spawn generated by clicking the original headline – they'd got 75 pages in, a mountain of popup ads swatted away and some no-doubt abysmal grammar regurgitated, yet nary a sniff of the colossal wonderchild in question. They weren't even wrestlers' kids featured, so more gonzo points lost. 75 clicks. Hundreds of ads. No lycra. Thank you for your service Reddit user genericscissor; your sacrifice will not be forgotten.

Both Facebook (where I saw the suggested post) and Google say they are working to improve the online experience by eliminating this type of misleading, wilfully disingenuous content, penalizing the ranking of sites whose high bounce rates suggest they're tricking users into clicking through, although judging from the above, their net clearly has holes in it.... wait a sec, don't all nets have holes in? Why do nets have holes in??....

You won't BELIEVE what they caught when these 12 former child stars removed the holes in their nets. Number 8 will really shock you!....

.....CLICK.....

...... advert for boner pills.