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Anybody else annoyed by news headlines being predominantly clickbaity now? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

69 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Typical pattern: "Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it's not good!"

This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it's in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don't even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.

Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn't to get you to buy anything yet, it's just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It's a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what "headline" even means.

(page 2) 21 comments

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Could have social media websites

like us

have some system for selecting, maybe voting on, alternative titles.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Nice idea - I remember on reddit some subs had a rule that required exact source headlines only, no user-written version. Lemmy doesn't seem to have that restriction.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I'm less annoyed if its technically true and I get to sharpen my media crit skills by making that evaluation after the fact

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yes, but this has been the case for many years now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It was wild for a while, then scaled back and not it's re-emerging with a vengance. It's really annoying, and it's spreading to social media. It was getting crazy on reddit, where people have gone back to literally ending titles with "And then this happened"(actually using the word "this" instead of a real descriptor).