Comments on: 7 Reasons Why I Don’t Like Lists

By: Matthew Peters

Matthew Peters — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:54:27 +0000

Wow. Three people who agree. I like it.

By: Sandy

Sandy — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:52:54 +0000

I feel your pain. I also hate list posts. Really. I avoid them like the plague, although I do occasionally have a lapse of judgment and read one, which only serves to confirm how much I hate them. In fact, I also wrote a blog post about it titled “Innumerable reasons why I don’t like list posts”.

By: soph

soph — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:51:54 +0000

Hey! Thanks for popping by my site. Can’t take credit for the masthead I’m afraid, it’s thanks to the designer of the template. But I’m loving it too. See you on Twitter!

By: Online Advertising

Online Advertising — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:09:50 +0000

I could not agree with you more. The list i usually find on sites are frustrating to begin with and tell you actually nothing about the sites they are listing! Great Post

By: Max Gladwell

Max Gladwell — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:56:29 +0000

Great post. We feel the same way. Having worked in magazine publishing, we come from the original list-baiting industry. The circulation people are always pushing for more lists on the cover to generate newsstand sales. It’s so funny how all of those old media tactics translate.

Love your solution, too. We’ll consider that in the future, as our deep lists tend to be very long posts. What we also do, though, is to write deep introductions. See Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media: http://www.maxgladwell.com/2008/05/ten-ways-to-change-the-world-through-social-media/.

More recently, we broke this top 10 (http://www.maxgladwell.com/2008/07/the-gas-price-cloud-has-a-green-lining-part-1) into two posts of 5. But we also didn’t necessarily promote it as a list, just a two-part series. Which is also a good tactic.