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From What Would Josh Do, via Neatorama
A headline is supposed to be a succinct summary of an article. Clickbait, on the other hand, is like the headline’s slimy, used-car salesman cousin. It’s vague, intriguing, hyped up, and created with only one purpose in mind: to make you click on that link. Over the past couple of years, lazy bloggers have more or less standardized the jargon, so pretty much any headline starting with “this” or “these” or a number, like “6 Ways The Grocery Store Is Ripping You Off” and “This hilarious cat will make you bawl your eyes out” is clickbait.
This insightful xkcd turned the eye of history on clickbait, and came up with 14 headlines that you won’t believe.
Some of these are really obvious, but if you’re stuck on what the headlines are about:
The hovering title text is about Einstein’s publishing of the Theory of General Relativity.
From xkcd
As you’ve probably heard, last week, Facebook decided to give in to the grammatical abominations that are hashtags, start supporting them, and surely hasten the apocalypse. Here’s how that likely went down — and yes, it probably did involve their brilliant focus group:
Via FAIL Blog
A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.
The arbitrary distinction between steroids and other chemicals, like creatine and whey protein, is even more confusing when you add in the fact that there are good steroids.
From xkcd
On the heels of the latest news that Voyager 1 — the farthest man-made object in the universe — has left the solar system, xkcd decided to tally up how many times this has happened before:
The hover text reads:
So far Voyager 1 has ‘left the Solar System’ by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.
Note that some of those aren’t actually at the edge of the solar system, or even real things.
From xkcd
College Humor has these and other cards on their website, which would have been very popular with the ascetic Puritans.
From College Humor, via Laughing Squid