A ranked listicle (such as Rolling Stone's "The 100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years") implies a qualitative judgement, conveyed by the order of the topics within the text.
While conventional reportage and essay writing often require the careful crafting of narrative flow, the building-block nature of the listicle lends itself to more rapid production.
[3] The blogger and technologist Anil Dash has disparaged the proliferation of listicles, particularly within the blogosphere, characterizing them in 2006 as the "geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines".
[6] Steven Poole suggested that listicles have literary precursors like Jorge Luis Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins".
[7] In 2009, posts in the format "25 Random Things About Me" became an Internet meme, starting on Facebook but spreading to the broader web, and attracting considerable media coverage in the process.