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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

De-clickbaited headline: "The great trap for all Americans is prejudice"

It seems that baity titles become less so when the content is as highly predictable as nybooks.com. If a reader is comfortable sitting down to what they can reasonably expect is a book review, they might not feel so cheated when it's about prejudice instead of, say, economics.

The principle behind letting a title like this one stand where not everything is spelled out is that it encourages a quiet, reflective approach. This is a highly desirable quality for Hacker News in that it supports the gratification of intellectual curiosity, which is why we're here.

If a set-up question can be simply answered, it's clickbait. I don't care who the hell's written it.

I hear the same complaints from an 84 year old friend with greatly diminished eyesight who gripes about this all the time in newspaper headlines. Teasing titles which reveal nothing and force the reader into the story. He's among the few subscribers the paper has left, and is about all out of fricks to give for their shoot.

This is clickbait.

The fundamental problem with clickbait, and the reason it draws so much rightful ire, is that it is deliberately contemptuous of its reader.

HN should fix the title or flag the post. Fixing the title wins my vote. Particularly as you've already troubled to write an excuse not to.

I support you and Dan having absolute authority to decide which direction you want to take HN in, and which policies to set in order to achieve that goal, but for what it's worth, I respectfully disagree with this decision.

I'd explain why, but TeMPOraL already did so perfectly in the insightful second paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12746980, every word of which I agree with.

Is every intriguing headline called clickbait now?

It's not like they said "9 great traps all Americans fall into. Number 3 will blow your mind!"

The headline was clearly written to get people to say, "Hmm, a great trap? And it affects all Americans? I wonder what this trap is. Some kind of alligator, maybe? My brain will not allow me to get any work done until I find out the nature of said trap."

Literary-journal article titles have been clickbait of this nature since before the Web existed. Buzzfeed has nothing to teach the NYRB.

This is true; before it was bait for clicks, it was bait to get you to pull the magazine off the rack.

Different technology, same user-hostile purpose.

I wonder what the line between "user hostile" and just regular writing is. In English class I'm pretty sure we were told to do things similar to this (get the reader's attention).

Hemingway didn't spend a lot of time trying to get the readers attention as far as I can tell.

There's a difference between not boring your user after he decided to read your piece, and tricking your user into reading your piece.

Agreed. This is definitely not a clickbait title. An article title doesn't have to recap the entire contents; it should be a hook to get the reader interested. Clickbait is something more than that.

>This is definitely not a clickbait title

That's subjectively defined so I'm not sure how you can be authoritative judge here.

I think it is clickbait, and I think the people here are pretty smart and completely understand why this is relevant given current events. (By relevant I do not mean accurate)

To be honest, most people on HN/reddit focus wayyyy too much on titles these days, so much so that the only comments in this thread so far are about whether it is clickbait. Yes clickbait is a problem, but I also think we should make exceptions of the sort for known reputable sites. If every website was forced to use a dry and descriptive title, I'm not sure the reader would be better off. (I always found old-style titles to be peculiar: "A, or a B on C in the D of E for a F of G") I think it's only fair to make accusations of clickbait after reading the article and concluding that the substance doesn't match. "5 best horror movies of all time" tells you exactly what you're going to get, while maybe "you won't expect what happens next!" might not. I understand that titles might not give you all the information necessary for a persn to decide if they should click a link, but the comments help to give some of that context. (though they also lead to people commenting without reading based off other's conclusions, and a hivemind mentality)

I wouldn't consider "5 Best Horror Movies" to be a clickbait title - it tells you exactly what you're going to get. The title of this article is a pure clickbait, IMO - it's designed to arouse curiosity and does not reveal what the article is about.

I guess it depends on what you believe article titles are for. I believe they should first and foremost be a tool for readers to decide whether or not to look at the article at all - therefore they need to accurately tell what the article is about. Sadly, most publishers consider headlines to be a marketing tool (with implicit assumption that the article is interesting for everyone).

I think it's more subtle than that. The main theme here is slavery, but not with a focus on prejudices that justified it; more with a focus on how enmeshed it became in economies and societies and cultures (including some that we don't tend to associate with it), and something about what the idea of slavery has meant to people.

Could you rephrase that in the form of, "The great trap for all Americans is ________"?

'The great trap for all Americans is clickbait'

I'll advocate for adopting the "savedyouaclick" standard of `${title} | ${completed_description}`

ex: "The Great Trap for All Americans | Prejudice"

Thanks. Now I can comment my opinion on the topic without having to read the article!

More importantly, I can skip this article without rewarding the headline style.

Please keep sarcasm and strawman arguments off HN.

We'd have to stop linking to most online journalism if we did that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com