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Comment by jahsome | Hacker News Reader

For precisely the reasons you listed, this entire article, but especially the headline, are safely labeled click bait.

Everything about it is technically accurate but it's carefully designed to be misleading so passersby think "that can't be right" and click to seek more, or worse, become furious and click to figure out who is responsible.

There's also the knock on effect of someone seeing the headline in one of their various feeds, and forming an opinion one way or another, without having clicked at all.

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Probably clickbait, but increasingly I wonder whether things like this can be chalked up to the fact that most online publications are pretty much amateur hours these days. They might have just genuinely not thought about the difference, or picked up on it. Saying it's clickbait implies a level of sophistication I'm no longer sure most newsrooms possess. If it were only that the headlines were misleading, I'd say it was an irresponsible editorial policy, but you see so many basic mistakes in the copy as well that, at the very least, it would have to be a combination of bad ethics and incompetence.

Most of the time I'd agree with you. But this is the Engadget. They're just too successful/savvy and established for this particular instance not to be deliberate.

There is a lot of truth in much of what you said, but headlines specifically aren't really a product of the newsgathering process. They're kind of a microcosm of journalism and treated completely differently than the rest of the article for a variety of reasons, historical and modern.

More to the point, in the admittedly small number of newsrooms I've been in, the headlines were hand crafted by fairly senior editors.

In any case, the truth is probably somewhere between disingenuous and negligent, but the outcome is the same: more traffic.

"Clicks" are not the purpose. Advertising is. It's ad-bait.

Click-bait is the common term though so it's stuck around.

The title is the bait to get you to click through to the article. Without the click, there are no ads. So clickbait seems apt.

Edit: reworded for clarity

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