Upworthy seems to have started a noxious trend -- it's supposedly a successful marketing technique, and has hence been copied. The headline style itself has a bit of a longer history, but Upworthy was the first to combine it with aggressive social-media promotion of re-shares (Their business model is "give us a video, we will promote the heck out of it to force it viral"), so that it gets forced upon people who don't want to see it (as opposed to HuffPo, for example, which you can mostly avoid by choosing not to visit the site).

And Upworthy content is political propaganda (it's a spinoff project from the moveon.org folks, and its services are marketed as a tool to manipulate viewers' political viewpoints, not just sell stuff or generic ad impressions), not just humorous clickbait; that adds an extra layer of manipulative slime to the headlines.