The Great Thing About the Internet Is That You Support Work You Don’t Want to Support by Reading It to Find Out Just How Awful It Really Is

Which just encourages people to write more crap. Send help.

The internet is a perpetual feedback loop of horrible writing.

And in order to find out just how horrible something is — for example, let’s say, a blog post on a blogging platform—you have to click on it.

And you click on it because you’ve been manipulated into clicking on it by the moderators or creators of the website who, for whatever unknown, incomprehensible reason, want you to click on it and tout it as a “Staff Pick” or a “What We’re Reading”, or something equally seductive.

Even though it’s maudlin drivel that belongs in either Guideposts (large-print edition), or Reader’s Digest (sorry, RD. Call me!), or maybe some water-stained, inspirational Victorian pamphlet about the afterlife aimed at spinsters.

I mean, it’s bad. Baaaaaaaaad.

And you’re literally paying money to read it because you have to subscribe to the site in order to read anything.

And even worse, you’re lining somebody else’s pockets and encouraging even more Really Bad Writing because they get a piece of your subscription fees when you click on it because you were told to click on it and you think, “Okay, I’ll bite,” and then you read it and it’s literally one of the worst things you’ve ever read in your life.

Hands down, without a doubt, one of the worst things I’ve ever read. I think I may be scarred for life. Just the title picture alone is making me want to stab myself with a letter opener. They want to ban books? They should do us all a favor and ban that picture.

Somehow, I always find myself going back to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is a truly fabulous book, a pretty good BBC series, and a not-so-hot movie. Remember how the Vogons would read poetry at stowaways to torture them?

That’s how I felt reading this article.

And I keep going back to it because it’s so incredibly bad, I need to re-read it to convince myself that it’s actually as bad as I think it is.

It is.

It’s written at a second-grade reading level, which, okay, that’s about where the American populace stopped paying attention in class. But STILL. The fact that it’s prompted the amount of response it has makes me despair for civilization.

And guess what? It was written that way on purpose, kowtowing to the lowest possible denominator, and it worked! That’s what will be promoted, and that’s what’ll make money. The webmasters are complicit in perpetuating the lowest quality work.

Don’t listen to what they say, my friends. Watch what they do.

Oh, and don’t use quotation marks. They just confuse people.