Pop quiz: What percentage of the top 50 BuzzFeed community posts of last year were lists?
An astonishing seventy-six percent.
BuzzFeed is no outlier. Lists make up a large portion of the content being created online every day. It isn’t just because lists are easy to create. Websites crank out lists because they bring in traffic. The truth is that nothing gets us to click on a link quite like a good list. There’s even a name for it, clickbait.
Not all lists are clickbait and not all clickbait comes in the form of lists. However, one factor ties them together, their power resides in the deeply ingrained psychology around them. Validation is important to us. We use crowds outside restaurants and reviews to validate our belief that it’s a good place to eat, we use likes on Facebook to validate the importance of the moments we share and the comments we make, and we ask our friends how we look trying on clothes to validate our fashion sense and body image. All of this feeds a need to belong and a need to be right.
Lists promise validation even before you click on the link. The title alone, ‘Best new fall TV shows’, gets us thinking of the shows we like and fuels the desire to find out if our tastes will be validated by the author and that we’ll belong by liking the ‘right stuff’.
There’s also the matter of how easy lists are to consume. We’ve written before about how in an age of so much information it’s hard to process it all. Lists help us bring order to the world and let us quickly filter information that gets straight to the point. As humans, we’re always working to maximize our resources and to us lists look like a great return on information for the total amount of time invested to get to it.
Think of it this way, lists are like a bento box: self-contained pieces of information united to form a larger whole. Compared to that, normal articles are like miso soup: bits and pieces of useful stuff strewn about but you’ve got to dig in past the murky depths to really see what’s in there.
Lastly, lists are just more shareable. We can quickly check them out and pass them along to the next relevant party in exchange for the social currency that comes with sharing useful knowledge. With most other forms of content, it’s not as easy. You can be sure a friend will take the time to at least read the key items on a list (often that’s enough) but you can’t be sure they’ll take the time to find the valuable bits hidden in an article. Building social currency is important but you can’t share everything you come across or people will ignore you and you won’t be able to generate as much currency from sharing. Because of this, lists prove to be the preferred way of distributing information much of the time.
This is not to say there aren’t some great articles out there worth reading and spreading around, but nothing beats a well thought out list.
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