Everyone underestimated him, but you’ll never believe how this kid surprised everyone! Click here to see what he did!”

Raise your hand if you’ve never seen a post like this one before on Facebook or any other social network you fancy. Yeah, I figured. You’ve probably seen thousands of them: most of them are sponsored posts that lead you to ad ridden websites where you need to fight your way across pop-ups and videos that start playing on their own just to see the one piece of content you were interested in, the kid who did something that surprised everyone. In most cases, if you do get to see it, it will be an utter disappointment. You close the tab and continue hunting for more, trying to find that special something.

So what’s going on here? Someone once said that the true scarce resource nowadays is attention. We spend a significant amount of time interacting with content online because, in the end, we want to be surprised. We genuinely desire to be swept off our feet and just for one instant, be carried away into a world that is better, where dreams are fulfilled and ordinary people secretly have heavenly voices.

On the other side, there are companies and people who have an interest in feeding us this kind of content. Or at least to convince us that they have it. In the end a Facebook post functions exactly like a magic trick: it has the pledge, the turn and the prestige. The pledge is the ordinary, sloppy kid; the turn is, of course, the revelation that the kid has some surprising ability; while the prestige… well, you need to click on the link for that.

Now, if we’re dealing with an ad driven business model, the moment you click the transaction has already happened. Whether you like what you’re seeing or not, it doesn’t really matter. The ad has been displayed, money has changed hands and the deal is done. Of course, if the content is truly interesting it has some chances of going viral and gathering even more visits, but as the amount of content available online increases exponentially, this is becoming less and less relevant.

So what do community managers do in order to convince you to make the magic happen? It’s actually simpler than we like to admit. We push your buttons, because in the end most people are sensitive about very similar things: condemnation of those who harm animals, children or women, social justice, property damage, taxes, religion, sex… but also the desire to be surprised we talked about earlier. So basically we just need to take one of these topics, build the post following the magic trick pattern and the deed is done. All that’s left to do at that point is the fine tuning based on aggregated analytics data in order to make sure that future posts will convert even more. That is, a higher percentage of those who see the posts will eventually click.

Some time ago I read an interesting post about the “soul crushing job of content moderation” and the words stuck and resonated in me. What it lacked, however, was the story of those who actually create the content on behalf of organizations or companies. You scrape the news in search of something that you know will touch people’s consciences and you craft a post that you know will make them angry, or sad, or spark some sort of disdain. Your goal becomes making people uncomfortable, and giving them the means for relief by clicking and interacting with your content. This is basically it. If you’re good at it, you’ll see turbulent comments and numerous conversions for whatever your call to action was. (And you’ll probably have made the the world a better place.)

Of course, this is not true for all content on social networks. There is a recent trend in companies that put a strong highlight on values, with eye-watering posts that make readers sigh deeply. Remember that saying, that people won’t remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel? Well, turns out it works like a charm in advertising as well, and many a bottle of champagne has been sabered after the conclusion of campaigns built around these principles.

But what does this do to the people who are behind the scenes, the copywriters, the content editors, the interns? Those who learn how to leverage human emotions in a way that yields no true value for the user, whose index becomes the extension of the company’s business plan. The young social media editors who grow cynical and bitter?

It’s not it, though: all this should also make us think about our audience as well. We know almost everything about them. We know their age, their sex, their interests, their relationship status, their religious and political inclinations… but are they truly only the sum of their targeting connotations?

And most of all, isn’t the current situation a self fulfilling prophecy? Humans respond coherently according to how you treat them. What if we stopped the click-baiting strategies? Would we reach the same target audience? Probably not. Most probably there would be much fewer people getting lured into these kinds of techniques, we would get less visits, but at least they would be consistent and interested.

Are we sure it would be such a bad thing?