Posting linkbait is a dishonest waste of other's time | Hacker News Reader

Posting linkbait is a dishonest waste of other's time

68 pointsadriand33 comments

I'm feeling frustrated by having, yet again, read an article posted here whose content turned out to be only mildly correlated with its egregiously misleading title.

When people post (and upvote) articles with highly misleading titles, they are wasting everyone's time. As an intelligent human being, it is not difficult to ascertain whether the title of an article is a truly accurate description of its content. If you post it anyway, you're doing other people a disservice.

No one is so needy of karma, and no article is so worthy of attention, that a post requires a misleading or dishonest title.

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Not to hijack this thread, but since we're having a meta-discussion about HN already... I am (mildly) aghast to discover that people are using the flag feature as a substitute for downvoting! There are numerous comments throughout this thread to that effect.

I always thought there was a reason that no downvote option was offered on submissions, i.e. so that people wouldn't bury articles simply because they didn't agree with them, etc.

Instead it appears that people are using the flag feature to do the very same thing. This is actually worse than downvoting, because if a submission gets enough flags it just gets killed outright. At least with downvoting, it just effects the point count, which I use as a shorthand to decide whether an article is worth reading or not.

I have only every used the flagging feature for articles that were completely inappropriate for Hacker News (e.g. stuff about politics, jokey stuff more appropriate for reddit, outright spam). I would never dream of using a flag to register displeasure with an author's style, arguments, choice of title, etc. as other people are suggesting here.

Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but I find it disappointing that people use HN like this.

Well. There is also quite a movement (one i subscribe to actually) to use the comment downvote feature not for disagreement (which should be a comment) but to "punish" comments not in the spirit of the community.

In that context flag would be synonymous with downvote in some respects.

I think the overriding theory is that on HN neither downvotes nor flags should be used to signal disagreement but to signal a bad/poor comment/article.

(I make not comment on whether that actually works out or not :))

Not just a bad/poor comment/article. You can have a horrifically written article on Erlang and it would still be on Hacker News, therefore not deserving of flagging. What's supposed to happen is that nobody upvotes it and it stays in obscurity. On the other hand, even a brilliant article on upcoming political elections should be flagged because it's off-topic.

I won't disagree; although in my mind it is cleaner if the badly written (as in fallacious, factually wrong, ranting, flamebait etc rather than the quality of the writing) is flagged too.

> I would never dream of using a flag to register displeasure with an author's style, arguments, choice of title, etc. as other people are suggesting here.

perhaps some people do this, but i only use flags to report spammy type stuff, or similar.

flagging only brings it under review, too. if the mods agree, they'll kill it. i don't think there's anything that auto-kills things. i could be wrong, though.

I have seen several [dead] comments in the last week where I haven't been able to figure out why the comment was killed. Is this a case of "three flags from other community members and you're out"? I've really struggled to figure out why these innocuous-looking comments were killed.

Agreed - a little more thought about the relevance of items would be a service to us all. However i am also concerned about the reverse face of this problem. I have detected a couple of relevant and interesting posts that have been flagged by enough folks to get them auto-deleted. The suspicion must be that the posts have been flagged by HN users who disagree with the opinions of the author. This surely is even less acceptable.

For example? Were they "on topic" without using that "anything that's intellectually stimulating" escape clause?

Example:

This post http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2010/06/law-enforcement-has... was deleted when first posted. I reposted it the next day because the opinion was well argued (agree or not).

hank Williams' subsequent post responding to the deletion on HN was not well informed and (correctly) did not show up here as far as I know.

I would absolutely flag that if I came across it (which I didn't.) I think it was poorly argued, disingenuous flamebait. (It never mentions the obvious retort, which is that the high profile of the cases in question, not a Batphone at Apple or AT&T, led to the criminal investigations.) If it was posted with the original headline, that would be even worse.

In addition, not a single thing in the post was interesting or original; it was just agitating about old news with the same anti-authoritarian slant present on every website ever.

Flagging stuff because you personally think it's poorly argued, disingenuous flamebait is a bit dangerous. I can't tell you the number of times I've read some article that's been upvoted dozens of times that I think is a piece of garbage. (For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1392140). That doesn't mean I should flag it for deletion and try to force my view of the world on everyone. I just point out the flaws and move on. If you want to ignore me that's your loss.

You should try to use a more objective standard when flagging posts. Flagging is easily abused should be a last resort.

It's interesting because that article (at the time) struck me as an excellent piece of rhetoric - and the provoked discussion was good.

Don't confuse controversial arguments ("What's a disease? Or: shoud fat/shy/alcoholic people be blamed or treated?") with flamebating/ranting ("Law enforcement has apparently become an arm of AT&T and Apple")

> You should try to use a more objective standard when flagging posts.

Surely: poor arguments (as in bad rhetoric - such as fallacies), flames/baiting and so forth are suitable objective standards.

What else would you recommend to use? (honest question; I can think of nothing much)

I sympathize with your viewpoint, but I'm not convinced it's correct. If there were a downvote, I might have downvoted it, but not flagged it. However, there's only a flag. I try to use the flag to mean "off-topic" or "very low quality", and preferably both. I think the post under discussion was both -- it certainly wasn't technical or informational, and was it really newsworthy or intellectually interesting to anyone? (Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but by "anyone" I hope I mean "the vast majority of the readership.")

I really don't like the "point out the flaws" approach. There's no way I would pollute a comment thread on a reasonable post with a discussion of why I think the post is no good, unless it was really bad and I was just trolling. I think that would lead to a pretty undesirable level of noise if it were commonplace.

I guess that my feeling is -- in a community with no full-time moderators who can look at every post, users have to shape the community in a way they consider reasonable, and in my experience online, taking out the trash is a really important part of that. There might be some unfortunate subjectivity in the process, but I think it beats the alternative of doing nothing.

(Anticipation: You may say, don't flag anything, but upvote many more things to indicate what you prefer. Unfortunately, there aren't really a huge amount of great posts that I feel stand out from the average decent posts, and I want to be able to really encourage the great ones in particular. Upvoting so many posts would seem like I was diluting my real preference, so I don't do it; I reserve the upvote for the top 10% or so of my quality range. I don't know if this is really rational, though.)

You have to consider why there is no downvote button.

From the HN guidelines:

>If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

You're plainly abusing the flag link just because you don't like the article(even if others do) and by your own admission are trying to hit it with whatever is at your hand. You may not be one, but I have seen this behavior a lot in Apple fanboys who seem to be super sensitive to any criticism of Apple.

As a counterpoint; I consider that an example of the sort of thing that we should be flagging into oblivion. I flagged it.

Badly argued, outright wrong in many places, an ongoing part of his anti-Apple rants (which have cluttered up HN before) - no thanks!

(I though his domain had been banned but apparently not)

I flagged your submission for all the reasons ErrantX listed. I've read 4 articles from that site that have been submitted recently and I flagged every one of them after reading them.

This website has finally caused me enough grief to justify flagging without reading the next time it pops up. This it the first website to receive this treatment from me.

Pro-apple and anti-apple biggotry really gets tiring.

Let's generalize:

    Pro-_____ and anti-_____ bigotry is tiresome.

FWIW, I didn't flag that article, but I'm really tired of Hank Williams, and probably would have flagged it if I had seen it.

His first few blog posts seemed to be mildly thought provoking on a slow day, but the last several I've seen from him have been a little too high tinfoil-hat rhetoric.

In short, I don't think Hank has much of value to add that doesn't already exist 100 times over on other C-string blogs on the internet, so I'm not terribly surprised any links to his site get killed here.

To have a contrast here, what do you think of Gruber's posts ?

Gruber's posts, while definitely pro-Apple, are very well written and technically insightful, so I have no problem up-voting them if they are good.

Whether you agree with Gruber's world view or not, the man has a pretty good grasp on what is coming out of Apple, which arguably, is leading innovation in a lot of computer related fields at the moment.

I've gotten extremely sick of him on HN. Not just because I dislike his writing style, but also because it inflames the Pro-Apple/Anti-Apple debates. I'll admit that I frequently get sucked into these, but it's not the kind of discussion I come to HN for.

I've not flagged any of his articles yet (well maybe one a few months back, now I consider it) but I stopped upvoting them a while ago.

I notice it that some Apple fanboys seem to be the most sensitive and maybe suffer from some persecution complex... no wonder they take any measure necessary to bury content.

Anyway, I didn't think article posts could be flagged and deleted here. I thought voting would take care of that. If this happens on a regular basis I might consider stopping visiting this site.

Edit: Inspite of people trying to teach me a lesson by downvoting me, let me point out the guideline from HN:

>If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link.

Some people using it as a 'downvote' link to bury content that they don't like (digg style) are just plain abusing the system just because they cannot take criticism against their favorite company.

If something makes it over 10 votes no amount of flagging will kill it. Before that it is open season.

You're also being unfair about "Apple Fanboys" - I'm somewhere between fanboy and apathetic (i.e. it doesn't worry me) and even I am tired of Hank Williams rants.

Ultimately majority rule wins; if some of us flag things to death then so be it. It only happens on particularly bad articles such as that one.

We can't down vote articles so there is a flag link. The only way to get an article that shouldn't be on the front page off is to flag it and hope it gets enough flags to kill it or a moderator comes along and kills it.

Flagging is a means of voting. Once you've reached a specific karma threshold, a 'flag' link appears next to articles and posts. Too many flags and something gets removed.

Flagging is NOT a means of downvoting. If there was a downvote, downvote would mean "On topic for HN, but I don't want to read it." Flag would mean, "Off topic for HN whether I want to read it or not."

For example, I enjoy free-riding, but I would flag most articles about it. Except maybe an article about how the North Shore movement got started by people building secret trails and using ladder bridges and other contrivances to sculpt trails over unrideable terrain... That's hacking of a sort.

Guilty - I posted a recent article about Chat Roulette. Wouldn't be surprised if this is the actual one you are referring to (and if so; I apologize - actually I'm sorry either way).

I didn't think too much about the title other than I couldn't think of anything to replace it with so I left it intact.

I'll be better about this in future. After discussion in the Comments I thought about appending "Linkbait Title" but that in itself would probably be a bigger draw...

Possibly he is also talking about this (posted today): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1477566

Which had quite a bit of discussion about the bait-y-ness (word?) of the title.

EDIT: I don't think you need to worry about the Chat Roulette article. Title seems ok-ish to me, and I think the generally accepted policy is "unless it is outright baiting leave as is".

I agree completely. I think that even when the real title of an otherwise good article is linkbait, it should be changed when posted to HN. I would love to see a feature developed around this idea: perhaps allow others to suggest more accurate titles to be voted up, or to simply make it a rule to use honest titles and quote it directly under the title field on the submit page.

My startup is semi centered around this idea: http://quippd.com/about/intro

I asked for feedback in an Ask HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454934

I too hate misleading headlines and untrue stories, so I'm trying to make it a centerpiece of my project. Hope you check it out! :)

I'm mostly on-board with this. I hate "7 Ways to X", and titles like "Is styrofoam going to kill us all?" that have the obvious answer of "No". I actually enjoy titles that are clever and provocative though, ones that provoke a smile or make me curious, as long as the article delivers.

Maybe part of this is cultural. I find the over-the-top sobriety of US newspaper headlines unintentionally funny, I much prefer something more in the tabloid style with a little zing.

I'm all for weeding out dumb articles, but let's not go on a puritanical crusade against every title that isn't anodyne and boring.

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