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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

NYTimes runs social experiments on users for years:

https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-rearchitected-mobile-a-b-tes...

This is mentioned in the article. But yeah, it is ironic. And given that newspaper headlines are pretty much all some people read, I wouldn't say it's any less harmless than suggesting weak ties for your linkedin network.

Did you read the article? It's right in the article:

> The New York Times uses such tests to assess the wording of headlines and to make decisions about the products and features the company releases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

I read it on Saturday, and it hadn't mentioned it then:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220924090459/https://www.nytim...

Looks like they realized they got caught and updated it. TBH, I could 100% believe that the reporter and editor had no idea the NYT did it themselves, because anyone would be clued in enough to understand that wouldn't have written the article in the first place.

> The Times also makes a practice of running what are called A/B tests on the digital headlines that appear on its homepage: Half of readers will see one headline, and the other half will see an alternative headline, for about half an hour. At the end of the test, The Times will use the headline that attracted more readers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/insider/headline-trump-ti...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com