Hacker News Reader

Comment by social_quotient | Hacker News Reader

Side note: The use of the term “body count” here is a bit cringey. It’s either insensitive to human suffering or bro click bait.

Do others agree or am I being hyperbolic?

View on HN

It's safe to say that headlines and headline writers (usually editors) are some of the biggest contributors to the culture wars and all-up dishonesty in modern discourse.

If you think about it, it was inevitable when incentives became more aligned with quick 'hot takes' and volume over signal/noise ratio.

The darkpattern of our times.

Especially since many (most?) don’t even bother reading past the headline.

...and strangely, even quality sites like HN take the given headline instead of the lede. Some subreddits have a way to indicate 'misleading headline' – could be a great feature across all consolidators/curatorial social media.

The mods here do sometimes change sufficiently misleading headlines, but that takes time and getting their attention.

Which is good, but it almost feels like it should be a UX convention at this point. Of course, that'll be abused as well. Remember eTrust badges? :'D

I read "body count 400+ orgs" and thought that so many companies had been put out of business, didn't notice the individuals part too. Not knowing what MOVEit is, I assumed it was some kind of boycott. Kind of surprised that it meant that 400 organizations and possibly 20 million customers data exposed. Definitely bad wording for the headline.

Of course, it's the Register, they try to be clever with every headline.

Body count has different connotations depending on context, but in the sense of "compromised information about a person" I have never come across this usage previously.

I can’t see how anyone is harmed by this usage. Seems more hyperbolic to me, or rather obsessive compulsive, which I say as someone who has struggled with OCD in the past. The impulse to constantly monitor and revise the minutiae of language for the slightest whiff of offense seems unhealthy to me, but maybe that’s just because of my predispositions.

Seems unclear.

Did the victims die?

It's metaphorical. When you hear someone wears their heart on their sleeve, do you also believe they're in mortal danger?

I read it as another derivation of victims with an emphasis on the human impact. I am just guessing but they probably used that wording as so many sites are hacked every week we probably don't associate it with the human suffering in terms of financial, job losses and data leakage leading to more financial losses it can cause especially when so many businesses are exposed by a significant vulnerability. I don't know if Jessica [1] has an account here but their email is listed.

[1] - https://www.theregister.com/Author/Jessica-Lyons-Hardcastle

I was definitely less able to comprehend the title, because it implied a very different context than the actual subject matter.

It would have been much more readable to write "victim count".

Agreed 100% .. The only "body count" we should be getting up in arms about:

https://psr.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/body-count.pdf

Agree, but it's The Register, they've always had a pretty unique and mostly humorous writing style. Not to dissimilar to The Economist, but learning slightly more into the humor.

It's a riff on British tabloid headlines, which will squeeze a pun, tortured analogy or a breathless overstatement into literally everything. The original clickbait before there were clicks involved.

It’s not the clearest title, but it’s taken directly from the original source who seem to assume the reader has been following their reporting on it and know what it means.

Are you carefully analyzing a title from the El Reg?

Would you say it's "problematic"? :)

Funny and "cringey" titles are a staple of the Register since the beginning.

Not hyperbolic, the title is very charged and I had to reread the opening paragraph multiple times to make sure I wasn’t missing who died.

The Register has always had very click bait titles. It’s like The Sun but for tech.

Hyperbolic

I agree.

Imagine that some LLM starts to communicate body counts due to these types of writings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com