It’s begun.
Actually, since list-style blog posts on design trends and other pretty things have been popular for a few years now, I’m sure the backlash has been happening for a while.
Now, it does make sense to organize your a complex article into easily digestible chunks, especially in a not exactly 100% comfortable to read environment such as the Web. It’s good to keep tabs on great new typefaces and graphics in your arsenal.
However, list articles have gained a bad reputation for other reasons because quality is put on the backburner. And there are a number parties responsible:
- The marketers: It’s easy to thank SEO for this phenomenon. A significant portion of internet marketing involves social media, and high-traffic sites like Digg just love the list format. It’s killer linkbait.
- The readers: The problem is lists don’t always contain what people need to truly learn. A lot of these people don’t know any better, and the explosion of lists distracts them from laying the foundations first.
- The internet: Why? There are great lists out there; people will need to separate the wheat from the chaff. But maybe, it’s the very nature of the Web that mutates the need to find the good stuff into the need to find as much stuff as possible or the quickest, easiest solution to a problem.
I’ve noticed this trend to screenshot tweets instead of copy-pasting their texts in blockquotes for some time now. On web design and technology blogs, no less. You’d think these sites who constantly write articles about HTML, CSS, web standards, usability, semantics would actually listen to their own advice.
What do people get out of doing it, though? Is Twitter really that much of a game-changer that you can now break the conventions of quoting people in articles on websites? Is it really that big of a deal to debate on how you should add tweets to articles—which is so obviously linkbait?
Are tweet pages designed so much prettier than your default blockquote designs that you feel compelled to use them instead (that’s definitely an “unsuccessful designer trend” isn’t it)? Though, consider the construction: large text, a clear indication of who said the tweet, and a fuzzy timestamp. Maybe that’s what blockquotes should aspire to be?
Are tweets such special data forms that you need specialized plugins and scripts like WP Quote, Twickie, QuoteURL to display them? Or do those exist to up one’s geek cred and feed the third-party Twitter apps machine?
Still, those aren’t as bad as web apps like tweetshots. Want to share a tweet on Tumblr? Use the Quote post type. WordPress is getting custom post types in its next major release too. But publishing platform or no publishing platform, that’s what the HTML tag <blockquote> is for.
Let me channel Steve Ballmer and say: Blockquotes, blockquotes, blockquotes, blockquotes, blockquotes. They’re not that hard to use, certainly not more than taking a screenshot and uploading it.
I understand why on some occasions using images instead of text and other data formats is preferred. They’re usually more portable when passed around in email, forums, social networks, and other communication platforms. More people know how to deal with images than URLs too. But for the purpose of quoting tweeple on websites, I see no excuse for displaying text as images.
I’ll spell it out for you in <strong> and <em>: display text as text, not as images, damn it!
Sure, screencapping tweets may not be as grave a sin as using tables for layouts, but back when that was the dominant method of creating websites, it was a pragmatic choice to make do with the technology available. The choice to use images for text is illogical today. It is confusing behavior that is inexplicably linked to Twitter’s success.
I’m no master of writing wicked linkbait, getting a thousand crazy linkage, reaching the frontpage of Digg, and so on. In a way, I pride myself with that, because most of this kind of content is downright boring.
Think about it, another 35 ways to do this or that list, do we need that?
At times, absolutely. Smashing Magazine is a proof of that, it’s often a great resource, since they’ve done all your research. Glancing over the content is boring though, as is writing that kind of posts, in my opinion. I guess they like it though, or make a bundle of it.
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