1. they are mainly stupid, common sense observations that have been ghostwritten by captain obvious.

2. one or two of the items on the list are just meant to be trollbait for fanboys or detractors of the subject in question.

3. people that write them are fat losers with no life.

4. people that write them are skinny dorks with no life.

5. they always leave out something incredibly important so that a million comments pour in reminding the author how stupid they are for forgetting x or y in any list regarding z.

6. they always try to have at least one funny item on the list, but sadly no one is laughing except for the author.

7. in a variation of godwin’s law, every top list must contain at least one tangential reference to linux, no matter what the subject matter of the top list is.

8. the entries are riddled with adsense advertisements and banners for shit that no one on digg would ever click anyway, because users of digg are savvy enough to understand that clicking ads on the internet is retarded.

9. every week, a list from the week before is regurgitated on someone else’s stupid blog (save a few minor changes, to make you believe that the author is a certified genius for his new insight) and dugg to the top, perpetuating duplicate content on the internet and wasting google’s precious caching space.

10. everyone with a blog is an armchair philosopher and thinks they are the second coming of plato, so they wrongly believe that their “groundbreaking” life-lessons top lists are the best things to have ever graced the internet.

11. it is trendy and edgy to end a list on a number other than five or ten because this is web 2.0 and the world is oblong and polymorphic.