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.

  • superkret@feddit.org
    0·
    17 minutes ago

    want to read news
    don’t want to pay for news
    news start to use ads to get money
    ads pay for clicks
    complain about clickbait news

    – average internet user

  • Nyticus@kbin.melroy.org
    0·
    6 hours ago

    For quite a while, yes.

    Anytime I see headlines that say “you won’t guess what’s next!” “you won’t believe this!” or any other variation is a immediate avoid.

    I think Lemmy owes itself a savedyouaclick instance.

  • ripcord@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 day ago

    While we’re at it, does anyone on Lemmy hate capitalism? I never see anyone mention it.

    And that Trump guy is really not turning out well.

    • HurlingDurling@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      22 hours ago

      I don’t hate it, but it’s been allowed to go uncontrolled for too long and it has become cancerous to the successful advancement of society.

      • ripcord@lemmy.world
        0·
        18 hours ago

        Hey does anyone else on Lemmy hate Puppy Kickers?

        I think they suck but just curious if anyone else felt that way

  • Libb@jlai.luEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    I’m not annoyed by them (I simply don’t read them, why would I want to waste my time?), I’m saddened by them.

    Edit: that’s also the reason why I read so few newspapers/periodicals. And why I pay for them. I want to support quality work.

  • Etterra@discuss.onlineEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

    Everybody has always been annoyed by them. Since before computers existed; newspaper headlines were the original clickbait and it’s always sucked.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
    0·
    1 day 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.

  • Grass Cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 day ago

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

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

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

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 days 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 days 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.

        • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          1 day ago

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

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          1 day 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.