Condé Nasty's roundup of "most photographed Greek islands" is total B.S. — here's why

How legacy travel outlets turn app surveillance data into editorial slop

It’s almost 2027, and we are still ranking things? Well, we are not, but at the fallen houses of Condé Nast (Chloé Malle, Vogue editor, really?) and Travel & Leisure (now owned by this guy), reductive listicles are apparently still in fashion.

So, here’s how this plays out. Editor sends out an email to staffers: “We need some Monday morning clickbait. Get busy.” Islands, especially Greek ones, are perfect candidates because unlike thoughts and ideas they are easy to count.

Someone finds “a photo book and memory curation app” — how terrifying is that — called Popsa which has “analyzed anonymous location data of photos uploaded to its platform” — no commercial interest there, of course — to come up with a top 10 for — cringe alert! — “any snapper's bucket list”.

In other words, some bored intern or thirsty PR agency repackaged routine app surveillance as a 'study,' and an editor who should know better copied and pasted it straight into the CMS, with cringe headline to accompany.

Babies, if it’s data-driven, it isn’t journalism. We’d suggest the little Fiona or Gemma or whoever stand-in for an actual human who generated this kind of slop either go back to school or get a job in real estate.

Oh and also, what about the myriad islands that weren’t uploaded to “Popsa”s platform because, um, no one’s actually heard of Popsa?

It’s not that the ten islands mentioned aren’t photogenic. Of course they are. But so is Salamina. Rankings are so déclassé and irrelevant that it’s — well, just what you’d expect from today’s totally degraded legacy media brands.