5 Secretly Bizarre Sections Of Websites You Use Every Day

5 LinkedIn Can Endorse You For Anything

Everybody knows LinkedIn. It's the only social media site you can't get fired for visiting during work hours, even though probably 99 percent of its 433-million-plus users set up a profile and then never logged in again. In addition to all the networking you can do, LinkedIn gives you the option to gloat a little and add some skills which you feel you are particularly good at. Then your network of professionals can click on the "endorse" button to validate your claims. If you pick any "John Smith" on LinkedIn, you'll see normal-person skills like these:

But what if you don't have a conventional job like Johnny "Supply Chain Management" Smith up there? For every worker who knows about leadership and project management, there is a guy whose sole purpose is to shovel elephant shit at the circus. What if they want to be endorsed as the greatest elephant shit shoveler to ever live?

What kind of "professional network" is LinkedIn if it doesn't include a skill set for what is probably the most important job in a circus, next to maybe "clown fight preventer"? (Which was also not listed anywhere on LinkedIn.) I would wager that there are a ton of jobs out there with challenging skills that deserve to be endorsed! But what's weirder than the abilities that LinkedIn doesn't endorse are the skills that have already been added and endorsed. Skills which I discovered by creating a profile for Rod Thrustin of Thrustin Company.

The first skill I added was fire dancing -- which, when clicked on, showed that 838 LinkedIn members have this rad skill. Next, since I'd consider someone with abs like Rod's to be outgoing, I added "go-getter" to the profile, and saw that 46,014 members had already beaten me to the punch. In fact, a lot of skills that have no place on a professional site ended up being present on a shocking number of profiles. I threw together a quick graph to demonstrate some of Rod's newly defined skills.

But there were no results for "knob polishing," "tub thumping," or "finger banging" -- making Thrustin a pioneer in those proficiencies, you might say. But "drug dealing" and "murder" are somehow more desirable skills to possess, and "prostitution" and "racist" rocket up into the four- and five-figure territory. In addition to those, you can find endorsements for other nonsensical shit, such as "memes," "paranormal romance," and "money laundering," to name just a few. So the next time you're updating the old resume, don't feel tied down by what society deems a professional skill. Because if Rod Thrustin can be the foremost leader in finger banging, then why can't you?

4 Rotten Tomatoes And Their Mismatched Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes is the kingpin of online movie reviews, like an internet version of Siskel & Ebert, though without the raw sex appeal. Gone are the days where you have to trust one or two random opinions about a film you were considering seeing. Instead, you can just head over to the internet hive mind of reviews to determine if a movie is decent or just a heaping pile of The Huntsman.

The reason Rotten Tomatoes has become the film rating barometer is that it takes an army of trustworthy film critics and puts their expert reviews all in one place. In order to become a top critic at RT, you have to go through an extensive application process and meet a lot of hefty requirements, such as working for a top 100 daily or weekly newspaper, or running a site that maintains at least half a million views each month. With those kinds of stipulations in place, every opinion you see should be dripping with authority. So why is it that when I log onto the page for Deadpool, a universally loved moneymaking machine, I am greeted by a review like this one?

Nothing against this website that I've never visited and almost certainly never will, but how in fuck's full name did this opinion make it to the main page for one of the highest-grossing R-rated films of all time? And it's not just new movies like Deadpool, either. When you open up the page for The Godfather, you're greeted with much of the same caliber of criticism. You have reviews from The Los Angeles Times and the legendary New York Daily News right alongside a whole bunch of sites that positively no one is relying on for movie reviews.

If you're anything like me, you were probably unable to enjoy Captain America: Civil War until you heard the full review from some random guy's website. Luckily, Civil War's front page has a metric fuckton of them.

And of course, this one from Spirituality and Practice is just bursting with vital information for the moviegoing public.

Look, I'm the last guy who would shit on someone's personal website. I've had one for 13 or 14 years, and I still have a 10-year-old bottle of champagne ready to pop when I reach 1,000 page views. But it kind of bugs me that I could write a movie review on my garbage website, and that review could potentially influence someone by popping up on the main aggregator page for a multi-million-dollar film.

It would be one thing if the page just displayed a bunch of random reviews every time you refreshed, but that is not the case here. Any old asshole with a local newspaper can find themselves wedged between the big boys and remain there, possibly forever. This is pretty disconcerting for a guy who relies on Rotten Tomatoes to find out if a movie is worth seeing, so something like 2007's The Invisible never tricks me into buying a ticket again. Now I don't know who to trust.

3 WikiHow Is Giving Your Kids Terrible Advice

If you've ever had to fix an old Nintendo or required lessons on how to ditch a dead body, odds are you've landed on a WikiHow page at some point in your life. In fact, if you google any activity with the words "How to" at the beginning, the first few results will typically present you with links to WikiHow. The site's goal is to create the most extensive how-to site known to man, a task at which they've done a pretty good job by using crowdsourcing.

Let's ignore the fact that the top 10 most viewed articles are basically a timeline of desperate searches from every sad introvert you've ever known.

Instead, I want to focus on the "Youth" section -- and if you have a youth at home, you absolutely should, too. Aside from possibly using the same artist who makes those NSFW Wikipedia drawings, the section is chock-full of bad and sometimes dangerous information.

For instance, in the section for Young Girls, an article explains how to stop being ugly and start being popular. One of the first things it tells girls to do is buy new clothes and "look at the girls around your school to see what they're wearing." Later on in that same article, it tells girls that the way to go from ugly to popular is to "Have your own unique style." That type of conflicting information is the last thing a young lady needs to hear when she's already confused and unhappy with herself. But don't worry. If all else fails, that same article tells girls to just go and get a tattoo -- an activity that is fun for all ages!

Another winner from the Youth section is "How to make everyone want to be your best friend" which actually advises your dumb kid to start spreading gossip so that people will like them.

And if your child is one of those "indoor kids," they can head on over to the page regarding "How To Have Fun At Home Alone If You're A Girl." "Fun" must have a loose meaning at The How, because number one on that list is "Do some chores," followed by "Change into some different clothes." After you're done those time-consuming tasks, WikiHow doubles back and says, "Oh, right. You may want to lock your doors and windows, too," because you don't want a burglar robbing a messy house.

Keeping in mind that this section of the site is for youths trying to figure out how to kill some time, number seven basically tells young girls "mix up a bunch of shit in your house and put it on your face" with no further explanation.

That's almost the exact opposite of the advice parents give their kids before they leave them alone for the night. In fact, "Don't fuck around with the stuff under the sink" is like Parenting 101. And here's the 236th-ranked site on the internet telling kids to ignore that lame-ass advice and instead just mix that shit up and dump it all over your face.

It's becomes pretty apparent when reading through these pages that these were mostly written by kids for kids. No self-respecting adult would write a WikiHow about how to start a gang and claim turf.

But children advising other children is kind of a problem. The reason adults are the authorities on dishing out advice is that kids usually don't know shit about shit. So having a section like this on the certified "How To" division of the internet is just asking for trouble. Especially when they're handing out checklists on how to most effectively lie to your parents or even run away from your fucking home.

2 IMDb's Trivia Section Has Gone Completely To Hell

Once upon a time, the trivia sections on the Internet Movie Database were a bastion of fun, interesting little tidbits that you might not know about the movie-making process. It was the kind of information that Cracked's movie articles thrive on, and was a place you could always expect to learn something new and interesting. It was that wonderful place, that is, until just a few years ago, when aliens abducted the moderation staff, or maybe a plague wiped them out. Either way, the moderators of IMDb's trivia sections have ceased to exist and have plunged this once stimulating oasis into a pit of misinformation and bad grammar.

When you click the edit button at the top of the page to add your own trivia item, you are met with this disclaimer:

This is the trivia list and it's for interesting facts about the movie and its production. Your Trivia should be interesting (to you and at least one other person) and relate to the title. One way to think about your potential trivia item is, "Could it ever be the answer to a question on a TV quiz show?" If the answer is yes, and we don't already have it listed, then please submit it.

It's all right there in black and white (and a little bit of blue), so why do so many dogshit trivia entries make their way through the filter? To demonstrate what I mean, let's take a look at some good trivia items for a random movie, in this case Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

That is some interesting shit! It's well-researched, provable, and they even threw some math in there to give you some perspective. A trivia item like that is one you should expect from the internet database of all the movies. So why is it that when I look up trivia for a newer movie like The Nice Guys, I'm slapped across the face with nonsense like this?

This looks less like trivia and more like a section ripped out of a serial killer's manifesto. It's a trend that's becoming more and more noticeable. Hidden betwixt the legitimate movie trivia are bits that just try to make ridiculously outlandish connections. Such as this one, which compares two completely unrelated characters from two completely unrelated film franchises:

Or how about the gigantic paragraphs of horseshit that somehow leave you with less information than you had prior?

Pulp Fiction:

Did you know you can cut exactly 100 words from that paragraph and still have it make sense? "Butch ... has a bloody altercation with Vincent. ... It is not likely that the actual altercation scene ... was filmed in the same apartment complex." Almost as if it's not that hard to do! But worse than the people who write up whole novellas for a single shoddy piece of trivia are the ones who look for patterns in movies where no patterns exist.

The Dark Knight:

That's like saying "The cars in Cars have four wheels, and tetraphobia is the fear of the number four, so all the cars are dead, because the Chinese symbol for the number four means death." In fact, IMDb standards where they are, I'm half tempted to submit that as trivia and see how many find it interesting. But even all of the above could be forgiven if we could just get rid of trivia items that, grammatically or logistically, don't make any. Fucking. Sense.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day:

The Dark Knight:

12 Angry Men:

Pulp Fiction:

It's difficult to accept that I can no longer rely on the site that taught me one of life's most beautiful lessons: That the disgruntled Munchkin actor who supposedly hanged himself in the background of The Wizard Of Oz is in reality just a bird flapping its wings.

1 Wikipedia Is A Mess Behind The Scenes

If space aliens had just one website to fully understand what humankind is like, I would unquestionably recommend Wikipedia. Not only could they use it to learn about literally anything that has ever existed in human history, but if they take a look behind the curtains, they'll get to see the wide array of human emotions all displayed on one easy-to-scroll page.

At the top of every Wiki page is a button where you can view the page's edit history, and at first glance, it looks like a mish-mosh of technical data and time stamps. But as you scroll further and further down, you'll discover Wikipedia's hidden politics and community drama that would make The Young And The Restless blush.

Sure, you'll find helpful tips and notes, like editors fixing vandalism or unsourced facts. But on a long enough timeline, you'll inevitably stumble upon disagreements you didn't even know were possible. A page like Barack Obama's, one of the most heavily edited articles of all time, is crammed with arguments about the content as well as arguments about the arguments.

Now, to their credit, Wikipedia editors are usually well-spoken, concise, and professional in their reasons for making or removing edits. But then you get a page like Donald Trump's, which has seen around 500 edits made so far this month, and that's when all the patience and tact go right out the window.

This type of exasperation is common with pages about controversial subject matter, like the hissy-shit-fit everyone threw when the first Ghostbusters reboot trailer came out in March:

Or when Martin Shkreli oozed his way out of wherever garbage like him typically oozes from to jack up the price of his AIDS medication.

And the target doesn't even have to be a page about controversial issues. For instance, take a look at what you find when you view the history for the Wiki page about Page History.

Heck, you can even find these types of meltdowns on Wikipedia's sibling site, Wikia, which has little sub-wikis made for literally every television show, movie, and web series you can think of. Sites on Wikia, like Scoobypedia, the Scooby-Doo wiki, can exhibit drama the likes of which you never dreamed.

Follow Erik Germ on Twitter so he can get to 20 million followers by the end of the week.

Which Sci-Fi Trope Would You Bring To The Real World And Why?: Every summer we're treated to the same buffet of three or four science-fiction movies with the same basic conceits. There's man vs. aliens, man vs. robots; man vs. army of clones; and man vs. complicated time travel rules. With virtual reality and self-driving cars fast approaching, it's time to consider what type of sci-fi movie we want to be living in for the rest of our lives. Co-hosts Jack O'Brien and Adam Tod Brown are joined by Cracked's Tom Reimann and Josh Sargent and comedians David Huntsberger, Adam Newman and Caitlin Gill to figure out which sci-fi trope would be the best to make a reality. Get your tickets to this live podcast here!

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