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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

You could also read the first word of the article.

That’s the definition of clickbait.

Is it? I don't read articles to learn about the goings on in the .nu world, it's because the story may or may not be interesting.

Ignoring that it's supposed to be against the rules, moaning about the title and article is really dull and often seems to correlate with people not actually clicking through at all.

I miss the old days of RTFA.

They could literally just say 'Niue ....' instead of small island nation

IMO headlines should have as much information as possible, "The tiny island nation of Niue [...] ccTLD, .nu" is more informative than the current headline.

It'd be like the heading "Prominent lawyer is now in hospital after contracting a disease" is less informative than "Rudy Giuliani, lawyer to President Trump, is in hospital after contracting Covid-19".

But the difference is I have heard of Giuliani, but not .nu

If in 100 years time, we had an article like "Prominent Lawyer was ill during the pandemic of 2020, [insert anecdote here]", it would be the same kind of article as this one.

Then you would have been informed that .nu exists by the end of my headline. If that piqued your curiousity, you can then read the article.

I think the point is that the newsworthiness here is that a nation is fighting for control of their TLD. It doesn't really matter what nation it is, and most people have probably never heard of it. The issue is that there exists a nation at all that has this problem. I think most would assume that all ccTLDs are well under the control of their respective nations.

IOW, I don't think headlines aim or should aim for information density, but rather focusing on the points that makes the story newsworthy to the target audience. Aiming for information density causes distraction from the point of the story and consequently maybe disinterest the specific potential readers the author is aiming for.

Saying "a tiny island nation" rather than specifying the nation is also better because it focuses on the fact that its problem is probably due to being a tiny island nation, i.e. a nation that is largely unknown and ignored. Putting it like that might invoke sympathy. Saying "Niue" instead might cause the target audience to think the news is not really relevant to them since they don't know "Niue".

So you wrote 3 paragraphs to describe.. clickbait.

Yeah it's obvious the headline was written the way it was to generate a page view. IMO the addition of the "spoilers" don't detract that there's a poor tiny nation suffering. If they didn't know Niue, they would know after the headline that it's a small island country, and look at that, without needing to read the article (but oh no, what about their ad view!).

No, clickbait is using tactics to attract even people that wouldn't be interested in the story otherwise. Clickbait many times doesn't even summarize the content. It's just sensational and enticing nonsense.

I specifically said to focus on the points of interest of the target audience, just the people that would be interested in the story. Doing otherwise wouldn't make for a good summary, which is what a title ultimately is.

As an aside,

> So you wrote 3 paragraphs...

that type of language is really dismissive and rude. I wish you wouldn't use it.

you need to click to do that (and take the risk of downloading software from unknown sources)

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

A ship is build to withstand heavy weather yet you'd still try to navigate around a storm.

It was more to illustrate how ridiculous such a fear seems compared to some actual adventure

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