Forget it, Jake, it's Chumtown

If there was some clickbait that said clickbait reduces your IQ by 7 points, I'd click on it. Otherwise no. Here's something that popped up on the usual page with 398495 outbound links:

EVERYTHING. Including the eventual outcome of WW2. As long as we're slogging the tropes, let's see what you're doing wrong today:

And you're doing this wrong.

This is why Clickhole is great: they would never do that. They would never, as Digg did yesterday, have a headline that says "This is the letter you get when you're cut from the NFL," because you are not in the NFL. The Internet You is a stupid person whose every action indicates the galactic expanse of his ignorance. Anyway, Slate explains why Clickhole is the best, then turns the story into something about Slate, and ends up worrying and being depressed before making a Very Smart Person Statement about the internet and what it all means. In other words, you can skip the third page.

Then go here: Awl discusses those clickbait ad boxes, and provides a comprehensive taxonomy of Chum.

True. They nail it: "The only booze seen in chumboxes is wine for some reason."

While we're on the subject of internet annoyances: Wonkette is a Gawker property that got its start as a political gossip site, then turned into a place where writers are required to exhibit their superiority over everyone who is not a Wonkette writer, using the usual tools of the trade: hyperbole and sarcasm, usually deployed with such desperate enthusiasm the reader is expected to mistake the tone for humor. This leads to witless drivel like this piece by Beth Ethier about the spitting ban repeal.

Leaving aside the fact that Ncollet is not the entertainment district - which the author can't be expected to know, since it requires 17 seconds of googling - the link on the trees goes to a current picture of the mall, not the renovation version to which the quote refers. The author concludes:

It must be exhausting to be these people.

NO For a generation that loves "vintage" filters that make everything look like a faded photo from 1976, younguns on the internet have a rather credulous attitude about The Past. Vintag.es, a useless site that hoovers up content from other places, has posted "30 Vintage Ads That Would be Banned Today." No, they wouldn't. We don't ban ads. The copy says: "Besides being discriminating, vintage ads were also full of lies. Whether we like it or not, it is a piece of history worth seeing for everyone…" Uh huh. It's the same collection that gets passed around every few months, and has this one:

Now, such a thing did exist, but anyone who's ever glanced at ads of the period knows that's fake.