joe veix

The Top 10 Reasons You KNOW You’re Reading a List

1. Statements are ordered numerically.  

2. The article contains mostly pictures.

3. An old high school friend posted a link to the article on Facebook.

4. The article involves cute animals.

5. The article involves the ’90s.

6. The article involves cute animals from the ’90s.

7. You’re at Buzzfeed.com

8. The article collects every permutation of a newly popular meme, of which the joke structure is simplistic enough that seeing more than three versions of the meme makes you tired and sad and kind of hungry.

9. One of the points is an outlier from the general pattern of the article, to a humorous effect.
  
10. You suspect that the structure is not necessarily being properly utilized to proclaim a hierarchy but instead to provide an easily digestible format to an audience that is willfully illiterate.