"King of Clickbait"

"The offices of Spartz, Inc., are in a loft space with polished-cement floors, bright-red walls, a hammock, and an aquarium full of sea monkeys. Games are everywhere—Xbox, Blokus, Ping-Pong—but I never saw anyone playing them. Spartz and his staffers sit in one room, at undivided workstations. On a wooden support beam near his desk, Spartz has tacked up images of some of his idols: Jobs, Branson, Bezos. The office layout is ostensibly non-hierarchical, but the workstation next to Spartz belongs to Matt Thacker, the chief financial officer, who has an M.B.A. and describes himself as the company’s oldest employee “by a hundred years.” He is thirty-six. A few seats away sits Gaby Spartz, the company’s vice-president of content. (Dylan Spartz recently left the company to join a startup in Los Angeles.) Other workstations are for data scientists, Web developers, and five “associate editors,” who write the material on Spartz’s sites.

Employees communicate with one another through instant messages. They almost never talk out loud, and there are no office phones. When something must be discussed face-to-face, staffers arrange to meet in one of several conference rooms ringing the central space. These are named for regions of Westeros, the fictional territory depicted in “Game of Thrones.” Because the decision to continue a conversation off-line is made online, a visitor will occasionally notice several people standing up in unison, unplugging their laptops, and carrying them silently toward King’s Landing or Casterly Rock...

At the bottom of a Dose post, there is usually a small “hat tip” (abbreviated as “H/T”). Many people don’t notice this citation, if they even reach the bottom of the post. On Dose’s first day of existence, its most successful list was called “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.” It was a clever illustration of global diversity and inequity: an American truck driver holding a tray of cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frappuccinos; a Maasai woman posing with eight hundred calories’ worth of milk and porridge. Beneath the final photograph, a line of tiny gray text read “H/T Elite Daily.” It linked to a post that Elite Daily, a Web site based in New York, had published a month earlier (“See the Incredible Differences in the Daily Food Intake of People Around the World”). That post, in turn, had linked to UrbanTimes (“80 People, 30 Countries and How Much They Eat on a Daily Basis”), which had credited Amusing Planet (“What People Eat Around the World”), which had cited a 2010 radio interview with Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, the writer and the photographer behind the project.

The Dose post, which received more Facebook shares than its precursors, briefly mentioned D’Aluisio and Menzel (though D’Aluisio’s name was misspelled). But their book, “What I Eat,” went unmentioned, and they certainly did not share in the advertising revenue. “This took us four years and almost a million dollars, all self-funded,” Menzel told me. “We are trying to make that money back by selling the book and licensing the images. But these viral sites—the gee-whiz types that are just trying to attract eyeballs—they don’t pay for licensing. They just grab stuff and hope they don’t get caught.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/virologist

Trying to pull apart why I find this so distasteful. What is this "change the world", why/how is he deriving so much self-importance from his work?