The short answer is: People click on them.

Clickbait has been around for years. Through ridiculousness, sexiness, or just by withholding critical information from a reader, it tantalizes people in such a way that they can’t help but see what’s on the other side—tallying, crucially, a page view (and then maybe a Facebook like) for the clickbaiteer.

Clickbait—old clickbait—makes Twitter accounts like @HuffPoSpoilers possible:

Rush Limbaugh RT @HuffingtonPost: Who said: "It's sad because this pope makes it very clear he doesn't know what he's talking about" — HuffPo Spoilers (@HuffPoSpoilers) December 3, 2013

Upworthy plays the same game, in a different key. There’s something about the Upworthy headline idiom—confident, in the first or second person, saccharine to the point of grossness (maybe ... smarmy?) —that seems to work right now, that seems to get people to click while they are browsing Facebook. And, most importantly, gets people to share the story.

The Upworthy vocabulary works so well that it has spawned clones—Christian clones upon conservative clones upon just plain traffic-mongering clones—which also work well. And news organizations see their success, and their use of the Upworthy idiom, and copy its techniques.

And that’s why you see Upworthy-style headlines everywhere.

Or: That’s one reason. It’s not quite true, though. For there are larger forces at work in the explosion of Upworthiness, forces that tug at the question of what the Silicon Valley-maintained Internet has become and what Wall Street might do to it. If you want to understand why the Upworthy style is suddenly everywhere, you start with a program that controls what millions of people see and read everyday—and which very few people understand.

The mysterious algorithm

About the middle of October, a number of news organization websites started to see huge numbers of visitors flowing from Facebook. Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported that Buzzfeed and its partner sites had seen traffic from Facebook surge 69 percent between August and October.

The change wasn’t out of nowhere. In August, a Facebook corporate blog post hinted that the algorithm that controlled the site’s News Feed was changing slightly, such that “stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.”

It sounds like a little change, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of the News Feed. The feed is what you see when you log into Facebook.com; it’s essentially the homepage of the site, and it changes for every user. What dictates how it looks is the elusive News Feed algorithm, a program that decides not only which statuses, photos, and news stories should display, but how many of each there will be. And a traffic jump of the size Warzel reported could only come with a change in the News Feed algorithm.