It depends. Sometimes people just want information without any inspiration.

I ran a very specialized technical website from the very early days of the web. Its time in the sun has passed, but at its peak, it pulled 300–400,000 unique visitors monthly. Most of the articles I wrote there were of the “just the facts” sort: here’s the steps to fix this problem.

We didn’t call them listicles, but there was not much literary value.