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Comment by jcranberry | Hacker News Reader

The point is it's an investigation not a conclusion.

The author heavily focuses on pollution in the area being a possible cause, and points out inadequacy in investigation performed on and arguments against pollution being the cause. But all her evidence is anecdotal.

The point isn't to assert that she is certain of the cause, it's to provide a spotlight on evidence which she has seen which has not been given adequate examination and the resulting suffering from what could possibly be preventable.

The title is appropriate, not clickbait.

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The title is clickbait, because it deliberately withholds key information to force readers to click. A non-clickbait title would be:

"Pollution suspected of causing rare cancers in Waycross, GA"

considering something to be bait or not is subjective. so why argue on it ? :D wtf guys

While that's a solid point, I think a critical part of why people look down on "clickbait" is the additional ingredient of "withholds key information to force readers to click ... and that key information makes the content substantially less interesting than the headline implied." The reason we call it clickbait is because it implies that it would clearly not be something you'd want to click, were the hook left unbaited.

Otherwise, it's not all that bad - just clever headline choice. (The point of headlines has always been to intrigue prospective readers, after all.)

Since this article is a substantial piece of journalism that remains interesting if you know the tl;dr, rather than an insubstantial chunk of #content, I don't think it really counts as clickbait.

The key information does reduce the expected level of interest. Controversy about cancer clusters and pollution is nothing new. But there are other possibilities, e.g. it might be caused by some genetic disorder that's found in a family who happens to live there, and the article might be about identifying and diagnosing that. It might be about some infectious disease that causes cancer like HPV. It might be about a cultural practice, e.g. eating carcinogenic foods like hijiki seaweed. Unless you actually live there, or know somebody who does, all these are more interesting to read about than the real "residents say it's pollution, industry says it isn't, everybody argues but nothing is really decided" story that's happened so many times before.

When I was small we learned the inverted pyramid model of news, that the most important information should be at the top (the headline) and succeeding content should be ordered primarily in descending order of information significance.

Did this change at some point? Or is this just tabloid practices infecting journalism in the era of maximizing clicks? I find the old model infinitely better especially as people tend not to read past headlines in most cases.

> The point of headlines has always been to intrigue prospective readers, after all.

Which would have been a better headline on, say 9/11?

A: “U.S. Attacked - Hijacked Jets Destroy Twin Towers”

B: “Something Awful Happened in NYC Today. Click here to find out what!”

The article seems well-researched and informative. It made me think about the balance between economic growth's positive and negative outcomes. If it takes a modicum of editorial trickery to get more eyes on such a piece, I think we're fine.

> A non-clickbait title would be: "Pollution suspected of causing rare cancers in Waycross, GA"

That's arguably worse than clickbait. It actually discourages people from reading the article who might find it interesting.

It suffers from being both too specific and too general at the same time.

It's too specific because Waycross, GA, is a town of under 14k people and as far as I can see there is no reason to expect that many people outside of Georgia to have ever heard of it. Naming it in the headline suggests that the story is aimed at those people who do recognize it.

It's too general because of course it is pollution. The other things that cause cancer don't tend to cause cancer spikes in small areas.

Both the town and the cause are actually incidental to this story. The interesting aspects of the story are how the various parties reacted when some started noticing there might be a cancer cluster.

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