Because it's a click bait title and many, myself included hate them
While one could technically derive a stark, bizarrely restrictive definition to be a link that requires one to click through to satisfy one's curiosity, any good faith reading would note that the whole point of the term is to characterize links which are also sensationalized and deceptive (upon reading click-through content).
The 2nd paragraph makes this explicit, comparing click-bait to pre-digital "bait-and-switch," which is-- again-- a deceptive practice.
Being annoyed at having to click a link isn't the same as being deceived into clicking one.
Edit: Then take your own advice, downvote my comment, delete your own comment, and move on, to serve as an example.
Many people prefer titles to be an accurate and concise summary of the article, rather than relying on emotional tricks to get you to visit an external website find out what it's actually about. On a news aggregator site like HN, an accurate title is nicer because it respects your time and lets you choose your content.
Mysteries are interesting, so humans want to solve them. If the article turns out to be something uninteresting or something not to do with the headline, then the reader has wasted their time and the author and the website is being dishonest and being rewarded for it by clicks.
A dozen endangered elephants died. The reason will shock you!
The Guardian aims itself at people who like to consider themselves more intelligent than the average bear. The clickbait will therefore be toned down a little. Some people still prefer it to not exist at all, if possible.
What kind of baby society has conditioned us to expect “short summaries” as the title to an article? The only appropriate title for this article is a word-for-word copy-and-paste of the entire text of the book 1984.
In the article, they claim it was a mystery and have a link to a previous story they published in September about said mystery.
> If the article turns out to be something uninteresting or something not to do with the headline, then the reader has wasted their time and the author and the website is being dishonest and being rewarded for it by clicks.
That's about the nicest concise definition of clickbait I've ever read!
It's also exactly the reason why this article does not qualify as click bait:
1. The answer is interesting to anyone who cares about elephants (and if you clicked the headline link I assume you care about elephants)
2. The answer in the article is literally the answer to the headline.
Please consider the distinction between a) annoying headline links that require you to click to get the answer, and b) clickbait-- by your own definition-- which leaves you with uninteresting/non-relevant content to what was claimed in the link
If you overload clickbait to mean both things, you might erroneously reply with a buffer too large for the type of definition you meant and accidentally pad with private key material
"Dozens of endangered elephants killed by septacemia, scientists find" would be the non-clickbait title.
Edit: How am I attacking the character of the poster? I described his post, not his personality or belief system. And now you're doing worse than what he's doing, posting uninteresting off topic personal attacks that aren't even true. If you don't have anything to say about elephants, then don't say anything. Your time would be better spend looking up and learning what the term "strawman" means.
that's literally the point of an articles' title, the idea that you think it's somehow strange makes it seem as if clickbait strategies have become so ingrained as to appear invisible.
Titles aren't meant to be gamified and reduced into the shortest possible quip that will produce hits, they're supposed to aid in summary of the content. They're supposed to be shallow and formulaic; they're a tool for indexing and summarization, not a tool for generative publicity.
"Septicemia - possibly exacerbated by climate change - kills dozens of elephants." vs. "Scientists discover elephants TRUE KILLER, CLICK HERE NOW!"
'Shallow, boring, formulaic' is a good thing and it keeps with thousands of years of academic tradition and good sense.
I always write the body/article/post first, then the summary/abstract, then the title/subject. If I save my reader a click because they can easily judge the article's relevance at a glance, good. That is the whole point of a title. The only people who should click in are the ones whose interest would actually be helped by the content.
Attention-marketplace advertising has turned that on its head. Now the people who would actually be helped by the content will click in regardless, and the goal of the title is to waste the time of as many other people as possible, to pump those numbers up.
It's vile.