It’s that part of the internet again.
You know, the weird part, the side of the internet full of stuff that makes you question the rabbit holes you took to get there, along with life on this planet and human existence as a whole.
Yep, this time this weird side of the internet is seeping into Bored Panda from Facebook. The Unusual Pics page shares pics of exactly that, unusual things that make folks raise more questions than they can manage to get answers to.
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There ain’t much that we can dig out about Unusual Pics, other than it’s your run-of-the-mill meme page with an ambiguous past and an even more ambiguous future as it hasn’t been active in over a year at this point.
What we can know is its content: pictures that range from mildly unusual to outright bizarre. On the one end, we have pics of folks projecting a movie onto a cow because of course a tree isn’t gonna cut it and this lad trolling a trio of ladies who think they’re all taking a selfie, but he’s just tapping the 5 key to simulate a button press.
But then there’s cursed images like the hard soap dispenser, meat and banana in ketchup dinner, Pikachu on the train, and this questionable idea. Yep, the page does not discriminate and all of it ends up here for your entertainment.
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The bigger question here is why does weird stuff gain so much traction online? Well, DigiChefs, a digital marketing agency, discussed the topic and nailed down a number of key elements that make weird stuff online attractive to the general public.
It all ultimately boils down to the agency’s self-proposed Theory of Human Connect—the idea that every successful narrative has an element of surprise, a backstory, and an emotional connection. Things that surface on the internet as viral content essentially have all these. And there’s quite a bit of nuance involved in it too, but this does not deter from the virality. If anything, it probably reinforces it.
Let’s say something is going viral, but the key premise is annoyance. Like the legendary Rebecca Black’s Friday. It had a huge cringe and annoyance factor that people not only had a collective reason to bash and debate, but also the video could have been used to annoy people. And it only made the video even more viral. All because humans were being humans with cringe content.
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But the nuance doesn’t stop there. Besides cringe and annoying content irking us something fierce, there is also virality by proxy—if there is an internet trend, there will surely be content that’s trying to jump on the bandwagon and piggyback the OG content to success.
Sometimes it does truly one-up the original content, but it doesn’t have to in order to be viral. Cue all the TikTok dancing and bizarre challenges. It’s that fear of missing out that keeps people reinforcing the vicious circle of content that wouldn’t otherwise be viral if not for X video or X tweet or whatever.
Lastly, it’s word of mouth that helps viral content spread. Hey, have you seen the video of that one dude doing something surprisingly stupid as a challenge? No? Here. Bam. Instant views.
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More or less the same factors apply with things like weird stock photos. Only the surprise part here is the weird part because it stands out.
“Weird sells, weirdly” is well put by Shutterstock Content Strategist Sarah Lysecki. “[Clients] told us that uniqueness in a photo can be more important than its technical quality. People who are buying photos have highly specific needs and will often opt for something that stands out from the crowd over one that is high quality, but otherwise standard.”
In other words, folks online have seen it all. Now they want to see what they haven’t yet. There is always the question forced by critical thinking—where would you ever use weird stock footage?—but remember, this is the internet, nothing goes to waste. Especially if there’s prime stock real estate to be reposted for your entertainment.
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