Done With Clickbait

I had an idea recently to write a script to rip the embedded content (tweets/facebook posts/instagram posts/etc) from the clickbait sites that have sprung up in Ireland over the last while (joe/sportsJoe/balls/etc) and publish it all elsewhere.

Been working on it on and off for a little while and you can see the results here: http://donewithclickbait.appspot.com/#/
Click on the headlines to expand and see what they have to used to justify an article. Might save you a few trips to these stites

There was a slight problem with the script for the last week where it wasn't updating for a few days, but I think I have it licked now

There's a few things left to do, the layout needs to be cleaned up for one thing, but it's more or less done. The site is updated a few times a day, and it all runs automatically from Google Scripts* The insults - "a waste of a journalism degree", "mouth breather", etc - are repeated so I need to think of a few more to make it seem less repetitive. Feel free to share the link to anyone you think would laugh at it.

I'm not the Irish Clickbait guy - https://twitter.com/IreClickbait - although you should follow him if you're on twitter. There is a twitter account for the site here - https://twitter.com/_stopclickbait_ - but I haven't done anything with it yet. Again, something to work on. Maybe tweet when the article is first linked by the site, and then a running total whenever they tweet again - "joe.ie wants you to click on new article", "joe.ie linked to this article for the second time today", etc -

I'm doing some data mining on the articles as well, for the few days the site's been running I can tell you an article link is tweeted five times on average by those sites, with balls posting the most articles per day, and joe posting the same link the most times

If there's enough interest I could have a look at doing something similar for clickbait sites based in the UK, but I'm not as familiar with them.

*read up here if you're interested: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers/