Ten Reasons Why I Hate Listicles
Listicles. We’ve all seen them, and we all know them when we see them. “Ten Best Loudspeakers Under £5000”. “Seven Turntables That Will Change Your Life”. “Twenty Albums Every Audiophile Must Own”. “Seven ways to use up leftover Brussels sprouts”. They are everywhere because by all accounts, they work. They are easy to write, easy to read, and brilliant for SEO. Google bots absolutely adore them, I’m told. There’s one on my Google newsfeed this very morning called ” 5 Things Business Class Passengers Do That Economy Passengers Never Notice.” They really are quite the flavour of the month, and I really don’t like them!
And when there’s a quiet news day, they start to appear. They are the content equivalent of opening the fridge, finding nothing in it, and making a meal out of ketchup and regret….and sprouts.
I understand why folk do them, and I’m sure I’ve probably done one at some point. Readers click on them, and algorithms love them. Social media likes nice, neat numbered lists because apparently our brains now require information to be stacked into tiny digestible and numbered piles. Let’s not challenge the reader, or they might turn off.
Personally, I hate them with a level of venom usually reserved for genuinely terrible human beings, like people who stop dead in supermarket aisles or leave their sprouts on Christmas day.
Anyway, here’s my Sunday Thoughts listicle on why I hate listicles.
1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS “BEST”
“The Ten Best Loudspeakers”.
Best for what exactly?
Best in a tiny flat with neighbours who bang on the wall if you fart too loudly after a night on the sprouts? Best in a dedicated listening room the size of a village hall? Best with valve amplification? Best with Class D? Best for jazz? Best for death metal? Best for Crass? Best for somebody who likes warmth and body? Best for somebody who apparently enjoys listening to cymbals through an electron microscope, or the audio equivalent?
You cannot objectively rank something as broad and subjective as HiFi without first narrowing down about a gazillion variables.
And yet these listicles often present themselves with the confidence of Moses coming down the mountain carrying stone tablets that say “THOU SHALT BUY THESE STANDMOUNTS, SONNY JIM”.
2. THEY COMPARE THINGS THAT AREN’T EVEN REMOTELY COMPARABLE
At #1, it’s a £700 turntable. At #2, it’s a £25,000 turntable made from materials usually associated with military satellites and Formula One brake discs. Next, it’s a 50 quid turntable in a suitcase from the shite aisle at Lidl.
That is not a comparison. That is just putting objects next to each other. It is like doing a “Top Ten Cars” listicle and including a Dacia Sandero, a tractor, and a nuclear submarine.
3. THEY PRETEND SUBJECTIVITY DOESN’T EXIST
Some people love a big, warm sound. Some want detail and precision. Some want bass that rearranges their internal organs. Some want vocals to sound so intimate that they feel uncomfortable making virtual eye contact with the singer between their speakers.
None of this is wrong. But listicles flatten all that complexity into one neat pile as if there is some universally agreed-upon answer hidden inside audio.
There isn’t. And I don’t reckon there ever will be.
If there were, the entire industry would consist of one amplifier, one pair of loudspeakers, and a streamer.
4. THEY ARE OFTEN JUST QUIET NEWS DAY FILLERS
No launches. No scandals. No trade shows. No new products. No billionaire buying another famous audio brand for reasons nobody fully understands, and that was only sold to a different group of gazillionaires a few weeks ago.
Quick. Somebody rank some DACs, and don’t forget to include the solar-powered radio from that aisle again! You can almost hear the panic in the morning editorial meeting.
5. THEY CREATE ABSOLUTE CHAOS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION
Nothing starts an argument online faster than leaving somebody’s favourite bit of kit off a list.
You could write an article called “The Ten Best Turntables”, and within minutes, somebody called VinylWarrior1967 will appear to explain that you are a blithering idiot because you didn’t include a suspended belt drive model handcrafted in a shed in Antwerp by a former jazz drummer called Jean-Luc de Paradiddle.
6. THEY CREATE THIS WEIRD ILLUSION THAT THERE IS A FINISH LINE
As though somewhere out there exists a final destination where you buy “the best” thing and the journey ends. But HiFi doesn’t really work like that. Well, not in my experience, anyhoo.
The fun is often in the experimenting, the tweaking, the changing, the curiosity, the odd terrible decision, and the moments where something unexpectedly clicks in your system and makes you sit there grinning like the blithering idiot I mentioned earlier. A numbered list can’t really capture that.
7. THEY AGE ABOUT AS WELL AS A FIVE-YEAR-OLD iPHONE
“The Best Streamers Of 2023”. Fantastic!
Half of them now require seventeen firmware updates, three new subscription services, and a minor blood sacrifice to the Home Network Gods just to connect to WiFi. The internet moves quickly. Technology moves quickly. Audio trends move quickly.
And yet these lists sit there forever, fossilised in Google search results like digital archaeology.
8. THEY TURN EVERYTHING INTO A HOMOGENOUS GLOOP
After a while, every listicle starts collapsing into the same handful of products.
The same brands get repeated because people recognise the names – and that’s good for SEO. The same products appear because they are safe choices that won’t upset fanboys or search rankings. And eventually the entire hobby starts feeling oddly narrow, as though only fifteen products on Earth actually exist.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, some tiny company is making something genuinely interesting and good that never gets mentioned because nobody has enough SEO confidence to put it at Number Three above the thing everybody already knows the far end of a fart about.
9. BECAUSE I AM NOW WRITING ONE
This is how it starts, isn’t it? One ironic listicle. Then another. Before long, I’ll be writing “Fifteen Jazz Albums To Test Your Speakers”.
Still, I do understand why listicles exist. They can be useful as starting points, I guess. They can introduce people to products they may never otherwise encounter; other than that, as mentioned, the same products come up time and time again. And not everybody wants to read three thousand words of existential rambling about “The Philosophy Of High End Audio Paranoia”.
10. SIR NOT APPEARING IN THIS LISTICLE
By way of protest, number ten has refused to appear in this listicle and has gone to see what delights are in the shite aisle at Lidl. And whilst there, it’s promised to pick up some Brussels sprouts.
Stu
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