Website Mocks Clickbait; You Won't Believe What Happens Next!
ClickHole, a new site from the makers of The Onion, satirizes the style and content of meme-recycling machines such as Upworthy, which pair politically correct outrage with puppy pictures to glean unholy amounts of traffic.
The parody site features vapid, click-baity headlines like "This Stick of Butter Is Left Out at Room Temperature; You Won't Believe What Happens Next." Spoiler: A single, three-hour shot later, it's finally melted.
In classic Onion style, ClickHole courts controversy, with "7 Classic '90s Toys That Weren't Fun Anymore After 9/11" and other listicles with a political charge. Brilliantly self-aware, it even has a click counter at the bottom of the page, so you can gauge just how often you've wasted time perusing fake viral content. ClickHole's weakness, like The Onion's, is that its headlines are often its punchlines, giving limited impetus to read the articles themselves.
