I Tried Reading “I Tried [this]” Stories Every Day for a Week, Here’s What Happened (rant)

OK, that isn’t a true statement, I actually did not try to read those types of stories every day for a week. I’m afraid my psyche would not have survived the experiment, hence the crazy “after” pic. I have, however, noticed a trend of those types of ‘stories’ popping up in MSN.com headlines much more frequently. Since I use outlook.com as a free email service, each time I log out I am dropped onto the MSN main page where I generally briefly sift through the headlines and roll my eyes at those ones.

I just don’t see what those types of stories are supposed to offer. They aren’t anywhere near being scientific experiments and I certainly wouldn’t consider them enthralling. The “results” are completely subjective and the stories are generally accompanied by a set of side by side photos that are apparently supposed to show some before and after difference. The most recent one I noticed was supposed to reveal some until now unknown effect that drinking a gallon of water each day for a week would have on skin quality. It was a week! Why there was some appreciable change expected to happen in that time frame I’ll never know. I am sure she peed more, probably a LOT more, though I don’t see how knowing that is at all beneficial. The before and after photos have different hair styles and different lighting and possibly even different make-up so how they are supposed to show any change or not is beyond me.

Anyway, I guess no harm, no foul. I am certainly not forced to read any of them. I just find the entire format to be laughable at best. I suppose they work as filler for slow news days at least. I’ve just been annoyed by the increase in this trend of completely unhelpful annecdotal fluff.

Are these types of stories showing up places other than MSN? Do they annoy anyone else quite so much?

[End rant]

Word of the Day Challenge: Enthralling

Special Thanks to slightly_different for the base crazy face picture!

Published by Jim Sponseller

Family man, father, programmer, and artist. I work with digital art, photographs, author poems and fiction, and also work in artistic metal smithing. You can find poems, photos, and digital art samplings at https://mindescapes.net. Thank you for your support! If you like my offerings and would like to donate, please buy me a coffee:https://buymeacoffee.com/jimsponseller View more posts