Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source | Hacker News Reader

Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

hu-berlin.de

241 pointsrustoo84 comments

The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed:

* with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something

* with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something

* a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason

Then I simply don’t click on it.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-wo...

Can't agree more. Any headline which invokes a "what, really?" response should not be clicked, instead the keywords (like $villain or $unflattering_third_person or $unique_despicable_action) should be searched (for pro's, in a private window via DuckDuckGo or if that sucks (like, most of the time)) with google (may involve skipping the first, second or even third page of results for _hot_ clickbait topics).

With some luck there'll be a really credible secondary, or even better, the primary source. Those usually come without clickbait headlines.

This is much better that an ad-blocker, since it doesn't increase click count for the attention-seeking clickbait news provider, and yields no money for them. In the long run, this drains their money stream. At least I hope so.

It is also simple enough to understand and follow to pass over to most non-IT-friends and acquaintances.

I use the same rubric but go one step further and tell YouTube not to recommend any videos from that channel.

Have attempted to do this with recommendations for 30-120s clips with 500,000 to 2,000,000 views from old TV shows, cartoons, and movies. It's not working.

I'd rather read a spreadsheet with a list of public YouTube video IDs/metadata than experience the silence in the downtime between worthwhile videos.

Is that possible? There's a channel i just don't want to see. Ever. I've blocked the channel but it regularly shows up in recommendations.

I actually have a todo item to see if i can't force the issue with a uBlock Origin rule.

When you click the three dots, it's the second option from the bottom.[1] It's not perfect, but I feel that eliminating entire channels at a time from my recommendations is a proportionate response to the engagement-maximization algorithm.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/JfYYTSk.png

But you've already read it, even if you don't click, so hasn't it already affected you?

That might be a good strategy for dealing with youtube videos but it's not an equally good strategy for dealing with print media. The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be. A great article by a great author will quite often get a ridiculous headline from an editor, for all the bad reasons an editor might have: baiting the audience, putting their own spin on the story, or whatever.

You'll miss some things if you just skip a story because of a bad headline, and I think the cited article is just another indicator that we ought to deliberately not give headlines too much thought.

How is journalism such a sad joke that things like that are "normal"?

Each publication has always had a lowest common denominator target. The headlines are an indication of the audience. In latter days, all journalists expect their audience to be stupid.

The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well. Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom - for a brief moment in history, there was a nice thought that the subscription revenue model would allow more fair and balanced reporting compared to the ad-revenue models (since they wouldn't need clickbait headlines/stories).

Turns out that people don't want to pay to hear things they don't like. So it's all become more polarized, and those of us who really would like to know what is going on have no clue what is true or not any longer.

Break the legacy institutions by boycotting them, and encourage individual journalists to self-publish. The credibility of the person will reign, and there is a huge market for independents who are actually interested in what is happening around the world without all the partisan spin.

You’ll have to put some effort into evaluating the media you use, whether or not you believe freelancers are better equipped to be effective.

> those of us who really would like to know what is going on have no clue what is true or not any longer.

Well yeah, if this is your policy:

> The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well

You’re not going to have any idea what is going on.

A vigorous application of this rejection of legacy media is going to have you completely ignoring sources that are pretty easy to parse, like AP or Reuters newsfeeds. It’s worthwhile to develop the skills needed to use those sorts of things and understand their limits, rather than ignoring them completely. You can get value from media without being completely credulous about what any one source is reporting.

Respectfully disagree - you don't "put effort into evaluating" food from a restaurant that has continually served you dodgy food. You either go elsewhere that doesn't serve you poisoned items (alternatives), or boycott eating out all together if such alternatives don't exist.

The belief is that the general media teaches you useful information from current events that impact your life. It doesn't. I'd rather read a "year in review", or something on a longer time frame, than follow things too closely.

For specialised knowledge, there are professional journals for that sort of thing. But mass media "news" is not useful at all, so I've taken the policy of cutting it out. Mental health and general life perspectives have been vastly improved.

> Respectfully disagree - you don't "put effort into evaluating" food from a restaurant that has continually served you dodgy food.

I think this is perhaps a poor analogy, but is illustrative of the real disagreement. There’s no informational equivalent to a restaurant that is so trustworthy that you no longer need give a moment’s thought to the safety of the food prepared there. That’s not to say there aren’t great newspapers or magazines or individual writers, but if you think you’ve found one whose entire output should be trusted unconditionally, I’d really want to discuss some of their lesser works with you as counterexamples.

> I'd rather read a "year in review", or something on a longer time frame, than follow things too closely.

This seems like a mentally healthy way to learn about world events, and I don’t disapprove. What you read will be produced by the same journalists, though, right?

I avoid television news almost entirely when I can and I suspect our point of view on this might not be very far apart. I do think the ability to parse corrupt - or hopefully, merely imperfect - media is an important skill for people to have.

> Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom

Sure, but the new crop of media that we've seen arise in the past couple of years isn't objectively better - it's just wretched in different ways.

> The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be.

That shouldn’t really change your policy. Some of those YouTubers might not have a choice in their thumbnails either. This doesn’t change the fact that the person or group is attempting to get you to consume some content by using irrelevant emotional manipulation. It sucks that some people in the group are probably well-meaning and competent.

Once you read a headline it's you've already engaged with it. Maybe we could address the problem of why some media outlets keep polluting the semantic space instead of just telling consumers to change their behavior as they trudge through an ever-rising tide of information sludge.

Is there a youtube client (or browser extension) that accepts a whitelist of channels and only shows videos from those?

This got me thinking... A browser extension deleting everything from the front page except videos from the given channels might not even be that complicated. Hm, I might end up creating a simple extension like this...

Edit: Sorry for being OT

I think this is what we need: plugins that protect users. Allow users to vote against webpages that are too “sensational” or something.

You can't crowdsource good taste. All you'll end up with is popular content gets upvoted and unpopular content doesn't. Every voting system open to the masses ends up this way. So many problems on the Internet stem from people confusing popularity with quality.

What about wikipedia?

NewPipe can do this on Android. Search for your channels, click the subscribe button, then on the home screen of the app there's a tab with the chronological list of videos from your subscriptions. You can hide the YouTube trending tab from the home screen, and within videos you can swipe between comments & suggested/related videos, so you don't lose discovery of new content.

Any strategy that requires a mental effort from people is likely not going to work at scale.

I had to stop watching Scotty Kilmer because of his thumbnails/titles. At one point it felt like every new video was click baited with him being sent to prison, dying, retiring or being forced to shut down to business.

I'm willing to tolerate the o-face from channels who put out good content on a regular basis tho.

Yes, I did the same thing about a year ago. I enjoyed his insight as a mechanic, but could not stay for the unsavory click bait. Unfortunately the technique seem to be effective and might be the only method for some of these channels to grow after a certain threshold.

I love this extension for making YouTube less horrible. It removes the thumbnails and returns to 'frame from the video'.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

Thank you

That's lovely, Thank you for the link.

agree with that, I also click on "no interested"

Australia news sites favorite words: "terrifying", "chilling", "tragic", "sinister", "slammed". It's almost as if there's an editor imposed target / quota for excessively emotional words on the first page.

Slammed, I dont know why but it triggers me.

But if just reading the headline is already having an emotional impact, as the source claims, then even that method won't change much as you will still be exposed to the title.

Which presents kind of an difficult problem: You won't know if an headline is emotional without actually reading it, but once you read it, and it turns out to be emotional, you will already be affected.

Developing the faculty to emotionally detach from things you read or see, and stay level-headed, is useful across one's entire life. Doctors, first responders, and other people who face extreme situations develop it to be able to do their jobs.

But it's not out of reach for a person who just practices it consciously. This is not about removing your emotions, it's about letting your mind observe the flow of emotions, and still stay and act sober.

As somebody working in palliative care I'm well aware about facing emotionally extreme situations, it's something HCWs, first responders and other social job fields, have been struggling with for as long as these occupations have existed.

That's also exactly why these sectors suffer from way above average depression rates, even tho most of them have the training, knowledge and, ideally, access facilities that should help them deal with it better.

But it's not simple as you make it out to be: Humans are emotional beings, whether we like that or not, it's not something we can "train away" or just turn off on demand, it's part of what makes us humans.

What training helps with is staying clear and sober in the moment where it counts, but that does not negate the long-term impact of regularly being exposed to such situations and the emotional toll they excerpt; It adds up, and creeps back up in the most irrelevant contexts.

To bring it back to the topic: When participants rationally knew the source and thus most likely the claim to not to be credible, even with that rational knowledge, the headline still ended up having an emotional impact on them.

Which will very likely add up over time just as it does with social jobs, but trying to evade that impact seems impossible: There is no way to know if a headline is emotional until actually reading and parsing it, but by that point it's apparently already too late.

The subjects' brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they made judgments about the individuals. Fast, involuntary brain responses can be distinguished here from slower, more controlled responses. The researchers had expected the latter to involve consideration of the source's credibility in addition to emotion, and thus that credibility might factor into people’s judgments, whereas emotion should dominate in early and more involuntary responses. However, both late and early brain responses showed dominant influences of headline emotionality independent of credibility.

In the spirit of being critical even when we want to agree with or believe the conclusion: how "good" are these EEG studies?

I recall some scandal several years ago in which fMRI data was being promoted as far more useful than it really was, due to some buggy clustering software and maybe also p-hacking.

Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid?

> Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid?

It's a new study, so no-one had the opportunity to reproduce their findings yet. Generally in the scientific community, one tries to find the flaw in their argument/methods, rather then presuming them to be faulty.

It doesn't seem like a very complicated, time consuming or costly experiment (compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson), so I'd think it's reasonable to expect another team to reproduce the results in the near future, if there is sufficient interest.

My question was more about the EEG method in general. Even if this one result is new, surely this method has been used many times in the past.

So no, I am not just assuming the study is faulty. I am asking a specific question about the validity of one of the core study methods.

> compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson

Understatement of the month, haha. I don't suppose you debate in engineering circles?

I do, but perhaps not very well ;-}

I mentioned the search for the higgs boson only as it leaves me uneasy, that it was so expensive, that I doubt in my lifetime any team will attempt to reproduce the results.

That's a big reason what makes HN successful: a blanket ban on emotional content.

Edit. I've been thinking of an idea that for us knowledge sharing resembles neuron connections, based on my limited knowledge of that topic. Each of us watches a few channels of information and makes a choice to forward/retweet a piece of information so your subscribers would see it, ignore it or block a channel if it sends you bogus data. Every time we do this, we adjust the rating of the source. So I've been thinking that if we could set up such a network in a more formal way, and if the network would grow to at least a few thousand "neurons" (that are people), would it exhibit some unexpected higher level effects?

If your definition of success is popularity, I think it’s also possibly why HN isn’t more successful.

Emotional content draws people in and keeps them there.

Obviously the kind of people drawn in by that aren’t the desired audience of HN, especially as it doesn’t rely on ad revenue

I think this site gets emotional content. It might not be political flame war baiting topics. There's plenty of rust is great, microservices suck, npm continues to be trash, hot new thing considered harmful. Reinforces the my team wins ideas

Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations?

Maybe it could work by changing the incentives. If you had a magical perfect AI that was loyal to you and ran on your PC, it would always act in your interest - Spidering the web and returning interesting things based on your feedback. Whereas the current model is, none of this stuff is self-hosted, it has to run on Somebody Else's Computer. SEC costs money to run, so they have to make that money back by tweaking the recommendations, and none of the big ones inter-operate. YouTube will never recommend videos from the Fediverse.

So anything that's not self-hosted (which is just a specific form of a subscription payment, anyway) will never have your best interests at heart, it can only have some of your interests at heart. This same problems comes up in politics - Companies have no interest in creating public goods and we shouldn't expect them to do so.

But anyway, I think this is where some of the good stuff will fall out of AI in the next 10 or 20 years - Having intelligent agents that try to cut through the BS of the web on behalf of their owners.

My idea is a lot simpler and doesn't need any ML. Think of it as the linkedin feed: if you upvote a post, it'll be shown to your contacts, but if you upvote too much junk posts, your contacts will unsubscribe.

This idea is relatively trivial to implement as an alternative UI of HN. That site would show the very same html, but will hack the upvote and downvote buttons. You upvote to subscribe to someone and downvote to unsubscribe. If someone in your watchlist upvotes something, that something gets shown in your feed. You'd still use the main HN feed for discovery. Eventually this would form a network that propagates information in some way. That network could be even visualised in some way to see how certain posts travel thru it. The topology of the network, its dynamic properties and whether it'll remain connected are interesting open questions. The entire thing can be written as a one file python script with a sqlite db running on a 5 bucks vps. The biggest challenge is getting enough folks on hn to use it.

I think there would need to be a browser extension as well to detect the upvotes/downvotes.

> Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25405128

I feel that formalizing such a system would make it more vulnerable to market capture - there are powerful entities that spend a lot of money to control influence, and it's always risky to paint yourself as a target.

Any system you create would have to be distributed enough to be resilient to those forces. I'm not naysaying, but this is something I think about a lot and I haven't come up with (or found) a good answer to those problems.

HN has a ton of emotional content. But it really depends on the topic/thread. For example, I clicked into a thread recently where I found that at least 80% of users commenting have been blocked by myself for posting that type of content, and this is what I literally see:

https://imgur.com/a/nGFvx08

(I use a script so users can be blocked with one click)

Whereas in this thread, it's only about 1% (1 blocked in 73 comments).

Despite me having a huge block list, I'm consistently amazed how often I'd click into a huge thread with hundreds of comments and find that I've blocked not even a single user.

I used to think that until Covid came along. I've never hidden so many threads so quickly.

It’s so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?

Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having.

One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything. And then be paid for it. Journalism ultimately is this: it launders views you have so that you can express them as if they were consensus views and also, it takes outrageous positions so that you can describe yourself in opposition.

Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines

No. "Revealed preference" is exploitation of vice, plain and simple. Addicts might honestly say they would prefer to abstain, but still relapse. The same dopamine systems are being exploited in either case.

That's a distinction without a difference. An addict who says they prefer to abstain but doesn't, doesn't actually prefer to abstain.

Where preferences come from is irrelevant. De gustibus non disputandum est.

This is conflating desires/aspirations/preferences with basic drives.

Everyone has base instincts that we inherited through evolution, and more evolutionarily recent executive control that we have to exercise and develop. "Revealed preference" tends to manipulate the base instinct at the expense of executive control.

By that logic, there is no such thing as addiction.

No. Revealed preferences are manipulative bullshit. Calling choices forced by external conditions (whether it's your own addiction, manipulative headlines or strong market pressure) choices is just a way to whitewash deeply immoral manipulation, and justify selfishness as serving others what they "want".

Revealed preference is just a way to make manipulative marketing sound more noble than just applied behaviorism.

> Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having.

It is also a fine explanation as to why countries often have all these noble rights in their constitutions, and everyday technicalities by which they are legally evaded.

The people don't want these rights to exist, they want to claim they want them to exist. They want to say “Better a thousand guilty men go free, than a single innocent man be in prison!”, but what they really want is conviction upon præponderance of evidence, together with the all to common mentality of “It won't happen to me.”.

It persists in order to get people to read the paper. This is openly acknowledged in the industry (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne... ); headline writers are aiming to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible", while making sure they don't "give away the ending". Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines.

> Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines.

Shouldn’t it still concern them? If I wrote a piece about Obama making a hard choice to fund orphanages or schools and it got a headline “Obama yanks funding from orphans” then I’d be pissed. Journalistic integrity of headlines needs to at least be somebody’s concern.

Because a man rarely realizes how often they mislead, when the headline tell him what he wants to hear.

All the very rational criticism often put forth about such principles is seemingly saved for disagreement and scrutiny for what one does not wish to hear.

I daresay that many on H.N. would relish a sensationalist haedline such as “How Microsoft and Intel planned for RISC-V to never take the market.”, which upon closer inspection in the article would be less sensationalist than what the headline suggests.

It has a lot of impact on me even if I try to ignore because I see so much sharing of misinformation and sources that are not even close to credible. It is especially troubling when it is from people I trust and respect and it takes a lot of self control to ignore and move along as I know arguing online about these things online hardly ever improves the situation.

It's a pity that there's really no social norm to penalise sharing non-credible information/misinformation.

> penalize???

Due to bad content, I flatly refuse to go to Web sites of ABC, ..., WaPo. E.g., if there is a post at Hacker News from the NYT,

===>> NO WAY <<===

will I go there. Same for The Guardian, the BBC, etc. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Bad media has fooled me way, WAY too often, and I will NOT go back. I just conclude, bluntly, fooling people is all they know how to do. But they aren't fooling me anymore.

It's worse than that: For many years I got triple play Internet access -- Internet, landline phone, and TV. And my house had three nice TV sets. But I NEVER used the TV (except for movies on VCR). The triple play was cheaper than just Internet and landline phone access.

What happened was, I clicked through all the TV channels looking for something worth watching and finding nothing once too often and flatly, absolutely, positively, totally gave up on all of TV. All of it. Now I have no TV set at all.

From me, ALL of TV has been penalized, totally. And nearly all of the mainstream media sources have been equally penalized.

What do I pay attention to? Hacker News for one: I get good links to good content and the often good comments on that content from Hacker News readers who post.

For the issue of images and video, notice that Hacker News has none of that! Fine with me!

For more? Sure, a few selected blogs and YouTube channels.

In total, there are a lot of good URLs just on Hacker News!

These businesses are being fooled by analytics platforms. Their collapse would be so sudden that employees would be learning to code.

It may be that believing what we hear / see is an evolutionary survival trait, a built-in cognitive default. I think this because the young of ancient humans had a FAR better chance of survival if they believed their elders. Examples: don't play in those woods or you may get eaten; don't eat THOSE pretty berries or you will get sick and maybe die; here is how you hunt or harvest food; and so on.

It is hard to overcome this natural tendency, and without education and effort and a wide variety of sources one can be pretty easily deceived and brainwashed.

Humans are 1-2 orders of magnitude more influenced by habit instead of genetic predisposition. There are plenty of sources for that argument.

In other words: educate your children, peers and acquaintances how to escape emotional headlines a.k.a. clickbait. I know you know.

One corollary is that you should completely block news sources that have the most emotional headlines. Google News has a feature for blocking specific sources, fortunately.

I had done this out of irritation with crappy articles. Bad articles seem to be correlated with emotionally manipulative headlines, so it's interesting to find out that there are other good reasons to do it!

Although as a non-expert, the methodology of the study seems sound to me, I find its conclusion depressing.

I know it wasn't their intent to attempt to provide solutions, but it bothers me having absolutely no idea how to even begin to solve this problem at scale, in a world where it's becoming easier and cheaper to influence such large amounts of people. Every single idea I've thought can either be defeated, exploited, or ignored, and I haven't seen a project or effort that seems strong enough to go to battle for.

Has anyone here seen something worth exploring?

This is why we're building a news platform that sets up a different incentive structure than the current status quo. If publishers aren't desperate for clicks, there is no reason to stoop to outrage porn.

https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...

> Yesterday, my cofounder wrote a controversial post on this blog

But to bootstrap your project some controversial posts help right :P?

For me, the impact ist mostly "no, I don't want to read this if the headline is already that bad".

Is there a good discovery mechanism for finding individual journalists producing quality content on eg substack or medium? I want to find their content but I don't know where to start.

Not a surprise. Though anecdotal, I've noticed an increase in the use of "blasts", "slams", and "lashes out" in U.S. news titles over the past few years.

I've also found that reading news with images and color removed lessens the emotional reaction I have to the news (e.g. text.npr.org).

The funny thing is that I find this headline to be impactful regardless of it's credibility.

A self proving headline

"humans have emotions"

"nlp works"

You were able to condense my comment from 29 words to 2. Nice job.

I find the new york times sort of annoying now.

I like them and even set up a script to pull down the homepage as a .pdf each day to read it. Today's would be:

    https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/12/30/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf

But I found the articles I generally read (mostly links from hn) have a different quality than the front page.

The front page articles seem emotional. They seem opinionated. Bit they're not marked "opinion"

Even if I agree with the opinion, I think they could take the high road.

Lot of traditional liberal media including NYT have resorted to yellow journalism. This is probably because of advent of internet. But that doesn't absolve them from the wrong-doings. Lot of published articles are "technically true", but intentionally misleading. Lot of articles are very clearly politically motivated, but packaged under the guise of some good cause. The identity politics born in universities and made mainstream by Twitter has essentially ended ethical journalism and gave birth to activist journalism.

Basically they hooked gizmos to peoples' brain and found if they force people to read emotional words, their brain indeed feels some impact... cool. Thanks for that, great read.

Imagine that, negation of a negative has in practice no consequence.

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