Five More Reasons Lists SUCK (2 of 2)
Some of them can't even fit a top ten into a single update!
Last time, I showed how Web lists could mishandle even simple data like “appearances in movies.” Other lists are a lot less quantifiable. What about “The 10 Greatest Fictional Characters in Film”?
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Under those circumstances, in theory, you’d have a lot more to consider. Would “greatness” correlate with appearances, or are the great characters those who appear in just one unforgettable film? Should we be thinking like college professors here—which characters tell us more about the human condition?—or make it a popularity contest? Should we celebrate the “enduring appeal” of a character like Spider-Man and Dorothy Gale or push lesser-known figures to the fore? And what about characters like Hannibal Lecter, who are really great in one film and, uh, substantially less great in others? Do we view them at their best, or averaged over all their appearances? The latter approach might drag down classic characters like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, too.
I don’t have easy answers to these questions, but the average list of “great characters” doesn’t even seem to consider them. Google “greatest characters of all time” and one of the first results you’ll get is ScreenRant, a site that’s supposedly about its own authors’ movie opinions, listing “10 Best Movie Characters of All Time, According to Ranker.” Way to pass the buck.
In fact, the list you get first from googling “greatest characters in film” shows no “thought” at all, because it’s auto-generated from other websites’ mentions.
Predictably, this algorithm-based list has multiple objective problems a human could correct. James Bond, The Joker, and Iron Man are shown as drawings, not their film incarnations. The Joker is also shown as three separate people. And those rankings…? Google seems to be confusing “frequency of mentions” with “greatness,” which probably reveals more about Google’s engineering philosophy than it does about filmed fiction.
Much as I dislike the advertising-driven content of listicle factories like ScreenRant, WatchMojo, and TheTopTens, I like it even less when Google swipes their data to do their job even more incompetently, denying them the ad dollars they need. In the long run, this disincentivizes humans to keep writing lists at all, leaving search engines a shallower pool of “sources across the web” to work with.
But you can expect a lot more of that, “thanks” to large language models that grab and recycle ideas from elsewhere. Google itself wants to use its Bard to answer more queries in the future, as does Microsoft with its GPT-influenced Bing. In this, the engines are following social-media companies, trying to keep you on their site for longer with inferior versions of services you used to find elsewhere. So the market’s evolving away from thoughtfulness, not toward it.
There’s one famous source of lists on the internet I haven’t mentioned—Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed made its name on silly stuff directed at simple pleasures—quizzes, videos, and social-media inspired quick takes, as well as lists. It married a modern approach to internet content-generation with social media. And those are two things I generally hate, so you’d expect me to hate the result.
Not so! Buzzfeed’s writing was bright and positive, and only shallow when it should have been shallow, instead of vamping to try to force depth into trivial observations. While its more serious news division rose and fell, its frothier side bubbled happily along, churning out lists like “50 Feel-Good Movies You Need to Watch ASAP” and “20 Things That Only List Lovers Will Understand” (no, really).
To be sure, Buzzfeed listicles weren’t perfect. Some were blatant sponcon (sponsored content). And Buzzfeed’s practice of juxtaposing every short list entry with an image, often an animated one, could get to be a bit…much. But all in all, the biggest problem with the Buzzfeed era of lists…is that it’s over.
You might not realize that if you look at the site today. Its quiz, TV/movies, shopping, and videos sections are still active, and some of them use the list format now and then. But the last list on its official “lists page” is from 2021. It’s “17 Things That Seem Embarrassing But Actually Have No Business Being Cringey.” Would “being the last list Buzzfeed ever officially published” be considered an 18th thing? It seems embarrassing, sure, but something had to be.
So let’s review. With search engines and social media no longer rewarding them, traditional list sources trying to squeeze two or three articles a day out of contributors, and exceptional leaders in the field like Buzzfeed succumbing to the market, there’s not much incentive to make new, good lists. Nuance is all but dead—in fact, you have to start with an inflammatory headline like “Reasons Lists SUCK” even to get any attention.
All things considered, much as I love the format, it might be in its best interests to recede to the background for a while. When the Wall*s published their original Book of Lists, it was a bestseller partly because it filled a need no one had addressed. Nowadays, there’s a glut, and what’s happened to Buzzfeed may be a sign that the market’s responding. Demand drops as supply overwhelms. Let’s try going list-less for a bit…and see if that cures lists’ listlessness.
