Top 4 Reasons Lists Suck

Posted by brant : 2008-10-20 at 3:57 pm

Every single blog has some top of top 10 countdown.  This used to be a late night thing that Leno and Letterman would use.  Then one day, ESPN decided to do a top 10 for just about everything and completely ruined it for everyone.  Then to make matters worse, now even some news sites abuse the top 10 lists.  In fact, there should be a list programming langauge. . . Anyway. . .Here are my reasons why blog top 1-10 lists suck:

  1. Lists are often Repetitive .  Putting things into a list format can lead to points relating very closely to other points.  I will do my best to ensure that the rest of the numbered lists points are related to illustrate the fact they can be easily be combined into a simple paragraph.
  2. Watered Down.  By making lists people tend to add in a bunch of bullshit common sense points that they could have easily added to the previous point but failed to do so. Sometimes the points make no sense but are added anyway to achieve a top 10 list. 
  3. Lists are Readable.  Not only do lists have easy to count numbers (1-10) but people who read slow or are too lazy to read a whole paragraph can just read the bold-faced print and move on! Mmmm, bold-face print "::drools:: . I've just learnered myself something new on the internets!"
  4. Top 4, 6, and 8 Lists Get No Love.  Most often you'll see a top 3, 5, 10, and sometimes 7 lists.  You'll never see a 4,6, or 8 because people have pure hatred for those numbers. . that's why!  
This concludes my top 4 list of pure nonsense.  My fifth point would have been that all blogs end up crashing or using up all their bandwidth when a particular post becomes popular.  As you can already see, this fifth point does not have a number next to it.  Therefore I am still in the running for the best top 4 list of all-time.


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