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.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s not new, it’s just adapted to the media format.

    Getting people to read the news and the ads between articles is how the game is designed.

    Journalism classes has always educated this.

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      If you had been an adult during a decade or two before the Internet you would know that a headline used to sum up the basics of a story. For example, pic king a random 1980s headline: “Six US embassy aides escape from Iran”. Nowadays that would be more like, “US admits Iran plot.”

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        I took some journalism classes in the 90’s (and then decided it wasn’t for me), and my SO was a journalist around the same time.

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months 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

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
    0·
    2 months ago

    No other choice than sticking with the few reputable media that still don’t do that. Gotta support them so they don’t fall into that too.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Sometimes the articles themselves are fine, and it’s just the editorial department that adds the sensational headlines. I don’t know if it’s worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
        0·
        2 months ago

        If the marketing has the power to go over the journalism to change the titles, isn’t it a symptom that things are going downward for this media?

        • can@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          2 months ago

          Haven’t the titles always been traditionally written by someone other that the articles author?

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yeah I made c/savedyouaclick in the hope of getting people de-clickbaiting stories, but I was the only poster afaict. I wonder if calling it newssummararies could help.

  • spittingimage@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    I don’t click those any more. I assume they’re completely written by AI and not fact-checked in any way. They just suck knowledge out of me instead of adding more.

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
      0·
      2 months ago

      Exactly. If the headline is garbage, I assume the story is, too. Real journalism that’s worth reading doesn’t need to resort to clickbait.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Could have social media websites — like us — have some system for selecting, maybe voting on, alternative titles.

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        !News@lemmy.world is very similar on that rule. I don’t like it because I’ve had many links removed when I wanted to give a bit more context or the title is total click bait.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Yeah, it’s got advantages and drawbacks. /r/Europe had a fairly-strict implementation. It’s helpful to avoid people editorializing titles, which was definitely originally a problem there, and for some reason, I’ve rarely run into here.

          However, it hits a couple problems:

          • Some publications have titles that are totally reasonable in the context of a reader of the publication, but which are unreasonable if you’re just skimming titles from many publications on a social media website. I remember people complaining about some title in a publication aimed at US Navy personnel, and people on /r/Europe complaining that it didn’t explicitly say which country it was talking about in the headline, which was talking about “the Army” or something like that.

          • A bunch of publications stick their name on the titles of their page’s headline, which is just obnoxious when social media websites tend to also show the domain name of submissions.

          • I see a lot of headlines with mis-escaped HTML ISO entities.

          • Sometimes it’s not immediately clear why a given story is relevant to the community. For example, maybe you’re on, oh, a community that deals with about books. An article comes out titled “Trump tariff policy gets additional executive order updating policy”. In the context of the specific community, you might really want to know the fact up-front that the issue is that one of the items in the order is either books are excluded from tariffs or that there’s a global 200% tariff.

          The Threadiverse does let one attach some text to a submitted article, which both partly brings back the issue with editorialization (if I’m putting anything that’d be potentially-controversial, I try to put it in a top-level comment rather than the submission text), but can let one do some of the “context-information-providing” stuff. But that’s not subject to community correction; only the submitter can deal with it. And it doesn’t show up in the list of articles, just when viewing the comment page for an article.

        • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          It would be better if they allowed for clarification in brackets or something after the original title.

  • Grass Cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s the news that Starship Troopers and Idiocracy both parodied. Except it’s not future fantasy, it’s real and here now.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
    0·
    2 months ago

    I hate them. I hate that everything is always trying to sell you something or trick you into generating profit somehow. It makes me want to burn down a bank.