A N D R É S   O S I N S K I

How to Rant your Way Into the Front Page

Andrés Osinski

1. Get an amazingly idiotic, extreme, or unthought opinion on a hot topic. Make sure it's something that will merit a knee-jerk reaction from at least 50% of your readers. Better if by some weird twist of interpretation your opinion can be bent into something that might look somewhat reasonable if you squint really hard.
   
2. Inflame your readers by insulting people, movements, companies, and anything popular yet slightly flawed. Cussing, putdowns, and destructive criticism that tears down ideas but provides no alternatives is the preferred method here.
   
3. Put a headline that continues the flamefest, such as "You Suck at X", "Why X will never be like Y", "Why I'm never going back to Z", "Should you even consider A?" (implying that only a mouthbreathing retard would ever consider A).
   
4. Replace all <p> tags in your article for <li> (list items). People like lists. If they have 10 items, better. Don't bother adding more content; they won't be reading it anyway.
   
5. Don't research information. Factually correct articles are boring and a waste of time when you could be ranting and racking up more page views.
   
6. Don't spell-check. Clarity makes it easier for people to see just how shallow your rants are; it's better to leave the benefit of a doubt for as long as it takes for the reader to upvote your link on a social network.
   
7. Steal content. Got a reply for a page? Save yourself the hard work of thinking up stuff and just paste that fucker in the middle of your article and reply to large, well-researched paragraphs with one-liners. Quote sections twice for emphasis (people can't get enough emphasis, so use caps and bold text liberally). Just keep the informative, boring parts to a minimum to allow more room for ranting.
   
8. Dichotomize in absolutes. Everything falls into two, at most three, distinct categories. No shades of grey, no alternatives. If X is good, non-X is bad. People always fall into 3 types. If you have to make compromises in logic to awkwardly fit something into your categories, do so, just don't allow room for alternatives; fixing logical inconsistencies just makes you look like a flip-flopper, and probably a Communist too.
   On a similar note, nothing you write should be boring or debatable, it's either Things That Are Awesome or Things That Sucks And Should Burn in Hell.
   
9. Pictures are awesome and you need more of those. If you're writing an article on PHP ORMs and have no idea of what to put in, just add an image of something Cool and Hip, like sushi, Pedobear, the Starbucks logo, or concept cars. Apparently Pedobear's more glamorous than being a coder.
   

On a more serious note, these last three weeks many an Internet reader has lost countless hours of his time reading opinion pieces on NoSQL and a few other tech fads. Thankfully we still have a few bastions of great writing (or at least a judicious choice of links), but the signal-to-noise ratio has hit a low point these last few weeks, and will probably bottom out with the release of the iPad.