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Comment by d_theorist | Hacker News Reader

This might seem like a weird thing to complain about, but am I the only person who is sick to death of headlines of the form "X just did Y"? It's the "just" I object to. It seems to be some sort of trend over the last couple of years.

I think it's to make it seem more dramatic or something. It just happened! My god!

In this case it is especially ridiculous, since the article describes something that happened over the course of 16 months.

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Another bait-word is "quietly":

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=quietly&sort=byPopularity&pref...

Really gives you the impression that Facebook deprecated their API's official Python bindings in order to be evil. Otherwise, they would have formally alerted the press.

"X just quietly did Y" is a thing, even:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=just%20quietly&sort=byPopulari...

Its SEO/Click-bait 101 unfortunately. It is sensationalisation of something to make it sound more interesting.

Next it will be "See what crazy change to solar made energy purchasers sit up pay attention!"

But can it be improved with a "just?"

"See what crazy change to solar just made energy purchasers sit up and pay attention!"

You clearly have a fantastically lucrative career in annoying-headline-writing ahead of you.

I'm trying to validate my product. Would you pay me $5/day for an annoying headline?

"10 Crazy ways to validate your product for free that startup gurus won't tell you about!"

PS: I don't know what the 10 ways are, I just write headlines.

7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.

"You won't believe these 3 changes that just made energy purchasers sit up and pay attention!"

"3 crazy changes made local [your town here] mom save 50% on solar panels in just 16 short months. What happens next is incredible"

The big secret to solar costs utility companies don't want you to know

"Read these 3 tips to boost your solar efficiency! Energy companies hate them!"

> Next it will be "See what crazy change to solar made energy purchasers sit up pay attention!"

That is _much_ worse, and I refuse to click on any link with that sort of headline because it's guaranteed to be more ads than content.

At least with the original headline I have an idea the topic is solar, and the news is the price falling significantly. Honestly I don't see the problem with the original headline.

"18 developments that just changed solar power forever. You won't believe number 6"

Maybe people like fresh things?

Here's an A/B test I recently ran on some notification messages. There were two messages, only difference is the word "new" in there.

    A: "You received a message from the admins about your Facebook page."
    B: "You received a new message from the admins about your Facebook page."

A clickthrough 15.64%, B clickthrough 15.95%.

About 1000 samples per group. Not sure if noise.

.3% on 1k? That's three people.. Yes, noise.

That's a great way to get a gut check on the validity of the result. Put it in real terms.

I'm often annoyed when reading reports that use percentages instead of the actual ratios. For example, "2 out of 3" is much better than "66.7%".

https://www.mccallum-layton.co.uk/tools/statistic-calculator...

  Sample Size: 1000
  Observed Proportion: 15.64%
  Confidence Level: 95%
  Confidence Interval: ±2.25
  Range for the true population proportion: 13.39% to 17.89%

It's noise.

Hmm, I tried playing around with this tool.

When I enter 250000 in sample size I get ranges that don't overlap. Does that mean I would need that many samples to answer this?

Yes. The bigger your sample size, the bigger your ability to see small effects. A test with 1000 elements can only tell apart big effects; a test with 250000 can tell apart much smaller ones. This is the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power

I came in here to complain about this same thing. Just implies a timeline much shorter than 16 mos.

That depends on the timeline you're comparing it to. If previously prices dropped 50% over 10 years*, then 16 months seems pretty damn fast.

(I have no idea what historical prices of solar panels were)

Yeah, I hate it. Vote with your clicks and never touch those headlines.

I think it's just a more casual and less formal way of saying something happened. I can't picture an illustrious newspaper of yesteryear ever writing a headline of the form "X just did Y". But due to the rise of social media and the progressive commoditization (not using either of those terms as an epithet as so many do!) of news stories, users respond better to headlines that read like it's something their friend would say rather than being the headline of a newspaper.

I don't read Buzzfeed, the pioneer (I think?) of this trend, but I read the similar Polygon gaming news site, and two of its five lead stories at the moment sport conversational style headlines: "The Hearthstone legendary cards you must craft ASAP" and "The film Apocalypse could have looked like this".

"X did Y" works equally as well as "X just did Y." I'm sure they use 'just' to make the article seem more immediate. "The Price of Solar Power fell 50% in 16 months" has a markedly different tone than "The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months". The headline with the work 'just' seems like breaking news. The other variant seems like a normal report that you can pick up an read at your leisure.

Most articles in a normal newspaper don't do this because they don't have to. Only the headline needs to be sensationalist to sell the paper. On a website, every article needs to drag people in. The current headline is click-bait. That would be forgivable if the entire article wasn't terrible as well. There is very little content or analysis, everything is cribbed from other sources, including the charts. I will give the author credit for linking all of their sources, but that is where my praise ends.

Is "just" synonymous with "recently?" I wouldn't object to that adjective being in a headline.

Oh good, we can whine about this instead of talking about the issue at hand. This is HN constantly now, the top comment is some nitpick more or less totally unrelated to the topic.

Sorry. :)

I didn't intend it to become the top comment. I just finally snapped and had to express my annoyance.

I guess I tapped into a lot of pent-up demand for the same thing.

Isn't that how conversations work though? At least, I know most of mine work that way. Oh, hey! That reminds me of something sort of related...

I was just (sorry) gonna post the same thing.

'Just' and '16 months' are pretty far apart in my mind, I found the headline quite awkward to read because of it.

Yes. I think headline writers are trying to force things into this form.

You've just posted an example of the recency illusion.

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