Hello!

I sure hope you are all doing well.

I just need to let you know that I walk around thinking that you folks are the smartest people possible, blessed with way more intelligence than the average person and of course a lot hotter, too.

Okay, done with the pandering, but of course it is all true. Which is why I always wince when one of my friends (i.e. you) says or does something that even I with my limited intellectual capabilities can recognise as something really, really dumb.

It doesn’t happen a lot, but sometimes even my extraordinarily intelligent and attractive friends share something from Upworthy on Facebook or link to a 9gag joke or committed some other internet etiquette atrocity. Really. And being the helpful nerd with a vast insight into how humans work, I want to help my friends – usually by telling them that they just did or said something so daft that even a shrew would be deadly ashamed being caught in a situation like that.

I don’t know why people usually get defensive and tell me to fuck off instead of organising a parade or at least buy a fruit basket for me. I clearly helped them, right?

Now today I happened to find a public Facebook post by a “German online thought leader”[1] who in all earnestness warned his… his… thought followers(?) – and I paraphrase – that manipulative click-baity headlines on Facebook manipulate people into clicking them. And that he also shared them in the past and that he feels very sorry for that.
No shit, Sherlock?
And people ate it up. They were very grateful for this information and that finally someone uncovered that conspiracy of manipulation.

I was completely stunned.

Both that these people didn’t already by default realise that these clickbait articles are evil and that they were so grateful for the fact that someone – finally – spoke out about it.

So, apparently to get people to realise they are doing dumb thing it doesn’t help to post links to Clickhole and yelling at them for not noticing that it’s satire – instead, people need to get told these very basic things.

I am still stunned.

Not you guys, though – I know you’re all a lot more intelligent than that.

Now which Game of Thrones character did you get in that quiz?

Dominik