You'll never believe what's on Facebook! Click here

Despite what billions of Facebook addicts think, it isn’t in fact the greatest boon to mankind since the microwave oven. It has its flaws, and even its biggest fans will admit to being turned off by the incessant “clickbait” that ambles into their daily feeds. 

These are links posted by well-meaning but horrendously misled friends to videos and other content on websites that make money by luring masses of visitors with sensational headlines and teasing questions. The more the links are shared, the more money they get (the stupid sites, we mean, not your stupid friends).

Now, though, rescuing Thai Facebook users from this pestilence, there’s a page called “Job Kaow” (“End of News”), set up by an anonymous group, which offers a neat way to get around these parasite sub-sites. The tagline at Job Kaow is “If you want to know but don’t want to click, come to us.” 

So, for example, the next time you encounter what appears to be a thrilling, must-view link flagged “I have NEVER seen anything like this – what a scary moment!”, just contain your enthusiasm and check it out at Job Kaow first. There you’ll find a very brief, reassuring and inevitably anticlimactic synopsis, such as “Nothing much, just a hailstorm.”

“She was swimming at the beach when this came out of nowhere!” it says in your Facebook feed with considerable alarm. Job Kaow is not sorry to disappoint: “One photo from the beach (not so clear).” In other words, nothing to see here either, folks.

“Mom left father with her child but when she came back, she couldn’t believe her eyes!” God only knows what’s happening there – you’d better check and see if you can be of assistance. Relax, says Job Kaow: “Father and daughter sing together.” 

The clickbaiters infesting Thailand are not pleased with these no-click spoilers, but of course we don’t care. They’re a nuisance, as evidenced by the 323,000-plus followers relying on Job Kaow for guidance. Entertainment figure Yuthana “Pa Ted” Boonorm is one of them, posting on his own page, “I’m really annoyed with those sites and I no longer click any link with headlines like ‘you won’t believe what you see’ or ‘what happens in this video will change your life forever’.” Also to be avoided: IQ tests, nostalgia quizzes and pointless “best of” lists.

“Your 3G service is valuable,” Job Kaow says right up top, “so don’t waste it on clickbait.” And people are seeing its point. The sneaky sites are feeling the heat and losing income because Job Kaow is channelling people’s curiosity into safer territory (while saving us all a lot of time). TrueHits, a Web-traffic auditor, says visitors to clickbait site Boxza.com have declined by 26.3 per cent in recent months. 

Full disclosure: Another big benefit of this clickbait-busting is that the less newspaper and online media content is being stolen for use as bait, meaning more advertising revenue for the original sources, meaning greater rewards for their staff, meaning us. Okay, maybe we’re being a little too optimistic about that last part, but you get the picture. 

At any rate, the more popular Job Kaow becomes, the sooner the clickbait sites will give up trying to tempt us. Whoever is behind that page deserves an IT lifetime achievement award of some sort – if only for enduring the agony of previewing all that muck in the first place.