Three Reasons to Dislike Blogs of Lists

Over the past few years, a lot of blogs or news articles have been written that are lists of items related to a larger topic, like “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” or “10 Things You Didn’t Know about this Big Star” and so on.

I generally dislike these for three reasons.

  1. Lack of Speed. A lot of these articles are set up such that you have to load a sequence of pages to read each of the items. The pages are usually very complex and take a long time to load, bouncing up and down and around in the browser while they are loading. I have a very fast connection and loading still takes too long.

  2. Advertising. All those multiple pages are just a way to push more advertising at you. Even those posts that are on a single page tend to have a lot of advertising to load. I’m sick of seeing advertising.

  3. Shallow. Very often, the content of each item in the list is really shallow.

My advice? Try to refrain from creating or reading these things if possible. (Of course, this post is a bit of a parody of the others, but without the slow loading or advertising. Still pretty shallow unfortunately.)