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SnowHill9902

“Tricholoroethylene strongly linked to Parkinson”

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This would give me less personal context than the original.

And also be less clickbait-y

What is Tricholoroethylene?

"A widely used chemical"

....

"Widely used chemical Tricholoroethylene strongly linked to Parkinson"

Upvote here. Good suggestion. This would be more accurate and less click bait-y.

Renowned author Meredith Wadman

“Parkinson links strongly from widely used chemical Tricholoroethylene”

Funny how making an informative title for a piece of text is on the curriculum but good-for-readers titles don't earn money... so writers have to learn good-for-ARR titles instead

a colorless, volatile liquid that is primarily used as a solvent

Imagine this headline

A widely known basketball team wins NBA finals

Clickbait?

Depends on the audience i guess, im not sure i can name a basketball team.

Does the average reader of science.org know what trichloroethylene is without a prompt?

I read science.org, I’m pretty average, and I don’t know what it is.

>> A widely known basketball team wins NBA finals

> Depends on the audience i guess, im not sure i can name a basketball team.

It's bordering on tautology. After all, who else would win National Basketball Association finals - a soccer team? A more astute reader will also observe that NBA finals aren't something casually won by random teams nobody heard of - by the time they get to the finals, the team is already widely-known.

Equally informative, but non-clickbait version of the headline, would be "NBA finals complete" - or, for basketball fans, "Today is 18th of June, 2023".

I know of it as "dry cleaning chemical and why you don't want to buy a building which used to contain a dry cleaning shop with on-premises processing".

Yes and a straw man also. Widely known and widely used are definitely not the same.

More people know the names of basketball teams than know the significance of TCE.

Not to ruffle any feathers, but I notice this trend on HN also. People will post something the city they live in and drop all kinds of hints... except the name. Same for employers. Strange. It's like we need to play the old boardgame "Guess Who?"!

They don't want to deanonymize themselves.

Yes, but too often the vagueness is just silly.

"I work for a major search engine (rhymes with Scroogle) and...blah"

Just come out and say it at that point.

That is exactly my point. I guess I can feed these types of posts into ChatGPT 17 and it will tell me the name of the company, city, etc. Soon enough!

This is very common in regional newspapers, especially online. Even for "real" stories. "This local team is advancing to ..." Garbage.

Which automobile manufacturer do you work for?

A major one.

My first thought would be, "What is this? Is it a common chemical?". Then I'd probably call the article click bait even though it says it's common early in the article.

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