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Comment by danielhunt | Hacker News Reader

I see absolutely nothing wrong with swearing. I actually have more of an issue with the automatic disapproval than a healthy spread of profanities.

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I doubt it's an automatic disapproval. It's annoying because swearing is used as linkbait all the time.

Now, that argument I can understand. And if that is indeed the reason for the GP, then fair enough.

But is it really any different than 'sex sells'?

If it's used all the time, it must be easy for you to provide a few examples. I've seen a few cases where a post title used profanity in a way that's arguably unnecessary, but I can't think of any examples of outright linkbaiting.

You mean like this? http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=fuck

Perhaps if we narrow it down to titles only: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

No, I mean the specific examples that prompted you to make the comment I was responding to. You wouldn't make such a broad claim without at least one or two examples, would you?

Suffice it to say that any of the examples you find in those search results are examples of "fuck" being used as link bait.

Even the submissions with "fuck you money" in the title since that is a linkbait-y term unto itself. I am of the opinion that unless you're discussing the word 'fuck' there is almost no possible reason to use it in a title unless it's to attract clicks and votes by eliciting an emotional response.

I think that's debatable. I don't see anything blatantly wrong with any of those, but I could see how someone might find titles like that inappropriate. I personally don't have a problem with it.

Everything is debatable! :)

Whether it is or isn't appropriate is the topic of a separate discussion altogether. That would have to touch upon personal and community etiquette, professionalism, audience, and so forth.

I'm purely focused on the link-bait aspect. Using swear words in a title is in a way like gaming the attention economy by subconsciously tricking peoples' minds into thinking that a piece of content "grabs" them on some level, even before seeing that content.

What I would be interested to know is if there is data that shows that people up-vote those articles -- before reading them -- disproportionately more often than articles with no swear words in the title.

Whether it is or isn't appropriate is the topic of a separate discussion altogether. That would have to touch upon personal and community etiquette, professionalism, audience, and so forth.

You don't think that's important? If you had put a lot of time into this presentation, were proud of it, and submitted it to Hacker News to share it with others (without realizing that some people would take the profanity as a linkbait attempt), wouldn't you be at least a bit upset if someone said:

"Why do you people keep linkbaiting by putting profanity in the title?"

If it were me, I'd probably tune them out and their (valid) complaints would go unheeded. But if someone said something like:

"That was a great presentation! I think it would be even better if you excluded the profanity though. To be honest, it's a bit offensive. But that's just me. What do you think?"

...then I'd be more likely to listen, and might change the title just because I couldn't fathom offending someone so nice. Wouldn't you?

On the contrary, it's unreasonable to make a broad claim based on one or two examples. When people say "I keep seeing people do this," it's based on a memory of repeatedly seeing similar things, not any one specific example they have in mind. Similarly, I noticed today that a lot of people around here have silver cars, but I couldn't name for you any specific silver car I saw on my commute today.

Well sure. But at the same time, it would be setting a bit too high a standard for me to expect people to do a scientific study for every silly little comment they leave on HN, don't you think? If someone claims that something happens "all the time", don't you think it's reasonable to expect that person to have observed it at least once or twice recently? Or at least be able to provide a reason why they don't have one or two examples?

My point is that there's a difference between passively observing something multiple times and remembering precise secondary details about the instances when you observed the thing. I remember seeing lots of silver cars quite well, but I don't remember any specific details about the cars — and remembering the make and model of a car is a lot easier than remembering the URL of a Hacker News posting.

At any rate, I just don't see why it would be useful for him to have specific examples in mind. What is the point in asking for that?

It's important to verify your intuitions, and it doesn't have to be a grand science experiment or a research project. If your intuition is that there are a lot of silver cars, a good place to start would be remembering the last time you saw silver cars. Or you could pay attention to the silver cars you see and take notes about the details that you feel are relevant. If it's worth it, then you can do a more in-depth analysis.

Now that said, there's not really much wrong with making broad assertions about the number of silver cars you're seeing without a more in-depth analysis. Chances are, nobody will care if you're wrong. There is something wrong with making a broad claim about things other people are doing without at least a little bit of evidence to support what you're doing. Just giving a list of search results and expecting others to find their own evidence isn't the best way to go about doing that.

> I've seen a few cases where a post title used profanity in a way that's arguably unnecessary

I think that's pretty much what he means, but you can't blame the author since it seems to work. People here are passionate, especially when it comes to articles related to the human side of software development. Profanity can tap into that emotion fairly well.

"but you can't blame the author since it seems to work" -> "Profanity can tap into that emotion fairly well."

So a formula for getting knee-jerk clicks and votes is to "bait" the user by using language that elicits an emotional response. :)

Exactly, I was agreeing with you.

Ahh, so you were. For some reason I got the impression that you were justifying the use of swearing because of the response it generates while not making the connection between that and outright baiting.

The way I understand it, ignorant of the psychology of swearing but having had to think about it since arriving here from the UK, is that if you're swearing, you're breaking a taboo that people assume you understand, so if you break it, they guess that you've lost your ability to keep your cool, and that because of that they fear you might punch them or shoot them. Which it seems, to me, most people, rightly or wrongly, believe happens quite often here in the US.

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