13 reasons why clickbait headlines are bad | Hacker News Reader

13 reasons why clickbait headlines are bad

luisant.ca

2 pointsremy_luisant7 comments

'Clickbait' has become a cliched term on sites like Reddit and HN. The purpose of a headline is to encourage people to read the article, not to provide a concise but accurate summary of the article.

The problem with clickbait is that the article doesn't live up to the promise of the headline. If I click on an article about "34 ways to get a flatter stomach - you won't believe number 7" but there's just a long list of debunked remedies and unfounded assertions, that's a problem with the article, not the headline. People then share the article without reading it, so crap articles end up polluting search result pages and newsfeeds. So now we've started to associate enticing headlines with poor quality articles, because so often it's true.

But getting rid of good headlines isn't going to solve the problem of poor quality articles, or people not reading content that they share.

I Don't know. When something important actually happens, newspapers just say it plainly, without riddles and silly comments. When WWII started, british newspapers didn't title: something awful just happened, they titled BRITAIN AT WAR.

When anybody titles: Something important actually happened, guess what?, you can be sure that nothing important actually happened.

That's one type of article. Clearly there's a world of difference between "10 ways to improve your SEO" and "Britain at War". If we only write articles in the event of the latter, it will be a strange world.

I use "clickbait" specifically to mean that the title was misleading or unnecessarily vague. I haven't seen the word used much differently, either on HN or elsewhere.

Most headlines _are_ clickbait, or at least they should be, to encourage people to read the articles. The problem is poor quality articles, not well-written headlines.

You seem to be intentionally using a different definition of the word than is generally accepted. A semantic argument about how to define "clickbait" isn't relevant to the original article.

Not really. My point is that we don't like these titles not because there's something inherently wrong with the titles, but because of a Pavlovian association between them and poor quality articles.

Besides that, it feels like every single HN comment thread will include someone denouncing the article as clickbait. If so many people can read the article and find value in it, what does it mean to call it clickbait? Are clickbait articles more likely to be read and upvoted?

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