I honestly wish people would stop posting these articles that have linkbait titles like “Is X dead?” or “Why X has jumped the shark”. It’s really just an attempt to get people to read these posts that have relatively little content, but which have a weak argument that boils down to the author not being satisfied with a product, so they’ve moved onto something that does. Somehow that means that the product no longer works for everyone, and that people should outright abandon it.
The other day I saw a post that asked if Silicon Valley was dead. That was the title, verbatim – but the article had nothing to do with it at all. The argument was that Silicon Valley sucks for various reasons (weather, transportation, cost of living) and that it’ll be a different place in a few years. That might be true and there may have been some decent arguments in the text, but I couldn’t really get past such a poorly named article.
Still other people ask inane questions like, “Has RoR jumped the shark?” or “Has Digg jumped the shark”? First off, neither of those uses are correct. Jumping the shark refers to when some entity takes increasingly drastic steps to stay relevant. A good example of this would be the absurd baiting (and occasionally conspiratorial) headlines CNN has been running to try to get people to read the site. But Ruby on Rails can’t jump the shark unless they, say, recently released a boatload of changes to the language to make it easier to develop, or perhaps to make it more palatable to non-coders. And maybe Digg will jump the shark with the new round of changes in Digg v4, but until then the site is just holding steady in its style and such, so that’s irrelevant too.
I think people need to read their posts after they write them and change the subjects to match the content. It’d certainly make this all a lot easier..
[…] CNN just went ahead and proved my point from my last post. They just ran an article with the title of “Why Obama doesn’t dare become the […]