If you’re anything like me, you’ve gotten quite annoyed with list posts. You know, the ones with headlines like “[Number] [Adjective] Ways To [Adverb] [Verb] Your [Noun].”

It’s not that anything is wrong with this kind of headline per se, except that it’s become a formula for lazy people to exploit the flaw in our evolution that makes us inexplicably drawn to numbers. And now that the internet has become saturated with this template, even the good list posts are lost in the noise.

Sure, I’ve written a list post here and there, with 1,000 Ways To Be Happy being a sarcastic example, and the post you’re reading now being an ironic one. But every time I see a Cosmo headline, I die a little inside.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 reasons list posts suck:

1. They’re hard on the readers.

WTF am I supposed to do with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace? Don’t give me 213 ways. Give me one, and make it count.

2. They’re hard on the writers.

In the time it takes someone to come up with 213 Ways To Achieve Inner Peace, they could get plenty of more useful things done. Just because something is useless doesn’t mean it’s effortless.

3. Numbers don’t reflect value.

“This guy has 10 Ways To Make Money Online. OK, let’s get started! Oh wait, this guy has 20 Ways To Make Money Online. Wow, I’m gonna be rolling in it! Wait–OMG! This guy has 50 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE! Cha-ching!”

4. List posts are easy to rehash.

Once you have a big list, you can crank out an unbelievable number of smaller list posts just by combining the items in different ways. Say you want to write about 10 Ways To Save Money. First, write a post about 100 Ways To Save Money, but don’t publish it.

Do you know how many lists of 10 you can get by taking subsets of those 100? A lot. 17,310,309,456,440 (17.3 trillion) in fact. And that’s assuming that you can’t reuse the same list in a different order. If a different order makes a list unique enough, you can get 62,815,650,955,529,472,000 (62.8 quintillion) lists of 10, starting from your list of 100.

Now what happens when everyone does that? That’s an awful lot of rehashed content.

5. Headlines are the appetizer, not the main course.

If you need a number and a spicy adjective in the headline to get people to read the post, what does that tell you about the post itself?

7. People can’t count.

Seriously, it’s ridiculous how many misnumbered list posts I’ve seen.

8. Lists give the illusion of substance.

Lists can be very useful for providing structure and organization. But in practice, they’re often used as a way to expand a few pieces of common sense into something that looks like a real post.

9. To reach whatever magical number they’re going for, bloggers often throw in a useless point.

Like this one.

10. List posts are easy social media bait.

Come on, you know you can’t resist the urge to Stumble and Tweet this. You know anything with a number is going to do well in social media, and you want to get credit for passing it along. We all do it, because the formula can’t fail. One of these days, I’ll give you 10 reasons why.