The Onion’s ClickHole Opens Its Traffic-Baiting Maw

If you want to gorge yourself on listicles and surveys and headlines that promise things “you won’t believe” (let’s stop being so damn incredulous shall we?), there’s a new hot dog stand in town. The Onion has launched ClickHole, its BuzzFeed-style satire of online media publications that trade in so-called clickbait, and the initial results are very promising.

The lead article at the time of this writing is “16 Pictures Of BeyoncĂ© Where She’s Not Sinking In Quicksand,” and it only gets better from there. “8 Touching Pics of Celebrities And Their Dads” is another choice selection, and the quizzes are divinely moronic. Then the sadness hits you when you’re reading and you realize that there’s a huge portion of the population that will find these and not even realize there’s anything funny going on.

ClickHole’s main challenge will be to keep the site interesting on an ongoing basis. The pool of content that feeds these actual sites is already incredibly shallow, so theoretically the stock of available means to satirize and parody said content would likewise be thin. Still our Facebook feeds will probably be filled with the crap ClickHole is satirizing for the foreseeable future, so hopefully the site’s shame game stays tight.