Ask HN: Ways to kill clickbait?

3 points by throwaway13337 9y ago ↗ HN

It's not just on Facebook. Clickbait is killing journalism in main stream media, on video sites, and importantly search results. It's shaping our information consumption is a huge way towards the negative.

Clickbait is not just in the title, but can also be suggestive pictures and other deceptive presentation.

A big reason clickbait works so well is that people's clicks reenforce the algorithms that determine if something is relevant.

Is there a way to solve this as technologists? HN has done a lot with moderation. Is there a generic solution to apply? Meta-moderation? Devaluing clicks? Moderated search engines? Curated?

Are there success stories of mitigating it?

3 comments

[ 0.81 ms ] story [ 13.3 ms ] thread

drdeca 9y ago ↗

browser extension that, if one clicks the back button shortly after starting to view a page, sends a message that the url is more likely to be of poor quality ?

just a spitball idea.

PaulHoule 9y ago ↗

All you need is this one weird trick.

DrScump 9y ago ↗

Make it no longer profitable.

Facebook gladly serves up utterly phony sports/celebrity "news" ads complete with bogus ESPN.com or People.com displayed URLs (by right-clicking on the URL you can see where clicks really go, e.g. ufcheatnews, vovnianko, xlvitrin). They'll keep serving them up until Disney or other trademark owners sue the hell out of them.

I will never, ever buy anything with any connection to a Facebook ad. Even if I see something I can't live without, I'll navigate there with a native URL on a different browser.