The listicle format is popular on the web, but at its heart comes from sites which are driven by page views and ad-revenue. Sites where getting the visitor to click through to the article is more important than getting them to read to the end.
They naturally lend themselves to clickbait. "5 tips for slicing a tomato" is the sort of headline you can grab people with on facebook, which they'll click on out of curiosity but not read much of - because they're not actually interested in slicing tomatoes.
Is that the audience you want for your articles? Are you trying to attract hits to the page, or are you trying to communicate something to an audience who are already interested in the subject?
I'm not saying every article has to be 5K words or anything (I'd rather read 3 short articles on different aspects of a subject than one article that's 3 times as long) - just that list based writing strikes me as just giving in to everything that's bad about writing for the web.
As an example, of all the articles on the ija ezine, the one I skip most consistently is "jugglers scoop" - which is just a list of links.
by Little Paul, in response to this post 2015-11-23 15:44:37