Ask HN: A solution for click bait headlines? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A solution for click bait headlines?

1 pointnvader5 comments

I'm getting really tired of seeing incomplete headlines on news articles all over the web and in my news feeds. What specifically irks me are headlines that tell you virtually nothing about the article, but try to arouse your curiosity or interest on what usually ends up being a flimsy premise.

When I first noticed it happening, I would be slightly annoyed that my attention had been stolen and my time wasted. That annoyance was compounded by the fact that my stolen eyeballs had provided revenue to the publisher via ads.

At this point, if I see a mildly interesting link, I don't know whether to click it and risk rewarding poor behaviour.

Are there any existing solutions I can use to determine if an article is something I want to read? (Or even nullify my view of the page if it was useless!)

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If the "articles" permit comments, post the links to NoScript, AdBlock Plus and Privacy Badger.

Alternatively, email the links to the author.

Writing articles is one of the best ways to earn money online, but the common practice yields poor results. Most articles are only long enough to make the ads fit on the page without leaving too much blank space.

What works well for me is to spend quite a long time - anywhere from three days to a month - to research and write an in-depth, insightful article, ask for constructive criticism from readers, and then to post just a couple small ad units.

This works because those who read my article will generally give me organic links.

Clickbait articles might get clicks from those who actually read the articles, but they're not likely to get any inlinks.

This is a product of a systemic issue with "journalisms'" current business model and how they're paid.

Ryan Holiday sums it up pretty nicely in his book Trust Me I'm Lying.

After reading it and having it talk about so many things I was unable to put a finger upon until now, I've become extremely distrustful of media in general.

It's pretty bad actually, communities like HN or getting news directly from trusted sources on emergent networks like Twitter is really what's left.

The web has spawned "iterative journalism" and floods the internet with all the bullshit that passes it's ethical standards. This met with a general lack of peoples attention spans has created a god awful state of journalism.

I've thought about creating a Chrome extension that allows you to say "This is clickbait" on any article, and then it'll remove it from other users' DOMs. Or, if not remove it, at least it'll prevent you from clicking the link.

My solution is to use StayFocusd on Chrome to block sites that are almost always clickbait. I then use FeedBin to subscribe to sites that never post clickbait (Quartz, mainly).

That's the only solution I've found that works for me. There are probably subreddits that would also serve your purposes.

The unfortunate thing is that hard news doesn't get clicks. Every media company has to use clickbait to survive.

What about a chrome extension that notified you how many points a link in the wild got on hn, reddit or similar? Seems like that would be simple to make, and very resilient to gaming or noise.

That's a great idea.

I actually rarely come to HN itself, though, because so many links are (what I personally consider to be) clickbait. They don't live up to the promises of their titles.

I now use a service that converts HN posts with 150+ upvotes into a feed. That gives me the cream of the crop, and it's limited to maybe 10 articles a day.

So your solution would probably limit uninteresting posts, but I personally am trying to find a way to limit posts that don't help me learn/grow/stay informed.

A good example are recent posts of the Ant-Man trailer. I find it interesting, but I don't actually get value out of watching it. I need to be protected from my own curiosity, so to speak.

Another solution I thought of would be to have a site where editors can curate the news every day. You find an editor you like, with similar values to you, and you follow that editor. They can only publish a certain number of stories a day.

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