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Comment by devoutsalsa | Hacker News Reader

I’m dating a non-native English speaker. This morning I was explaining clickbait to her. First I had to explain bait. Next I explained the title of “The Witcher Season 2 Netflix release date” [1] Finally I shared with her the content “Those looking for news of a final release date for The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix will be disappointed to learn that no date has been set just yet.”

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/123143/the-witcher-season-...

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Surely they have clickbait in other languages?

There's not a good word (that I know of) for this in my language (Czech). People who can speak English use the English word. People who don't just say something along the lines of the article author being a bastard.

So, less reframing and cutesy phrases, perhaps?

Things might have been a lot different if instead of saying LinkedIn was using "dark patterns" to grow, they were being pieces of shit.

Different for sure, but better or worse? Here in our culture we don't really do reframing and cutesy phrases. But the public discourse is very vulgar and pessimistic, and this is not a fad, it's like that for decades already.

In French some say "putaclic". But it’s not widespread outside of the "old-ish" French tech sphere and, being composed of the word "pute", a slang for prostitute, quite vulgar...

In Polish everyone says "clickbait" (in English), because there is no direct and terse translation.

Until fairly recently clickbait didn't exist in English too. Once the concept got a catchy English name it spread to other languages.

The word didn't exist, but there were stories on the local news similar with teaser headlines like, "Your refrigerator is killing you! Watch at the bottom of the hour!"

I gather you're in the States?

Yes, but the point is that "clickbait" existed before people could click. The forms may have differed between geos, but I doubt you are disputing the existence.

And it's a way overused phrase. As if headline writers haven't tried to entice people to read articles for 100 years. Some people seem to want scientific paper titles for headlines. Basically not going to happen. (There are egregious examples of course but the idea that headlines shouldn't try to grab a reader is silly.)

Very unlikely. There would usually be a description of such thing but not one,easy to use word describing it.

So she didn’t even know the concept of a clickbait? Her country sounds like a wonderland.

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