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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

This is the worst type of clickbait. The types of people who would be attracted by the title will hate the article because it doesn't have a straightforward title. And the types of people who would enjoy the story probably won't be too intrigued by the title.

A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part and why it took so long to solve this mystery. Instead it talks about the life of a mastodon, which while very interesting, isn't really much of a mystery. In fact, the word mystery appears only in the title and nowhere else.

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The problem is that hacker news doesn’t let the submitter write the very helpful subtitle.

> Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of time and space that helped explain his violent death.

We should be complaining about the aggregators, not the actual sites.

The subtitle is usually fine here (but sometimes the mods rever them if they don't like the change). A random sentence in the middle of the article is not fine here (but sometimes the mods use it anyway when the title and subtitle are bad).

The subtitle has more than 80 characters, but it can be reduced to

> Tusk of a mastodon has a record of time and space that helped explain his death

Yeah it's a quality article, but it's more "The Story That Took 13,200 Years to Tell"

Quite a few click/ false headlines appearing of late. That's why I always immediately go to the comments, and rarely bother with the articles.

> A title like this should emphasize on the 13,200 years part and why it took so long to solve this mystery.

Correct me if I'm wrong because I stopped reading quickly after realizing it was clickbait, but the skeleton was discovered in 1998, so at best the mystery took 24 years to resolve, so I don't see what there is to emphasize.

Anyway, I'm off to figure out the billions of years old mystery of what I'm gonna have for breakfast.

Remember that the author writes the content but usually has very little control over the title that will ultimately adorn their prose. I agree that the article was click-baiting but perhaps I'm the rare person who enjoys a good mystery and isn't repelled by content that actually teaches me something.

One of the worst examples I've seen recently was that article with the title "Physicists Have Discovered A Never-Before-Seen Particle – Sitting On A Tabletop". I can just imagine some annoyed grad student trying to explain how they detected this new particle using a small, highly polarized optical detector while the intern from Planet News is giggling and asking to hear less science junk and more about the tabletop.

The problem was the title: There was no mystery. A mammoth lived, and then died, as did every mammoth ever born. There had once been a mystery about their extinction, but the article gets that one wrong.

I came here to say something similar about the title, but you said it far more powerfully than I could have. Also it's a terrible title for SEO.

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