HN Explorer

Let's not read articles with clickbaity headlines

5 points by xchip ↗ HN
I am guilty.

I am guilty of reading clickbaity articles, I am guilty of sharing clickbaity articles, I am guily of increasing the revenue of the websites that produce them. I am guilty of helping make the internet a worse place.

I contributed to the enshittifycation.

But if I keep doing the same we will keep getting the same. That is why, from now on, I won't click on dishonest articles.

So dear fellow HN readers, we get what we reward, the power is in our hands, let's join forces and let's not pay those websites with our precious attention, let's not water those bad weeds.

Let's unite to stop the enshittifycation, let's have the Internet succeed!

Thank you all and have a great day.

4 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 23.3 ms ] thread
warrenm
Irony: this post's headline is "clickbaity"
h2odragon
Be the change you want to see.

is "clickbait" your issue, or "dishonest articles"?

'cuz there I may have to disagree with you. We should read the rank propaganda, and the "honest journalism", and whatever other sources we can. Accepting all of them with a veracity level no higher than "someone wanted to tell me this."

We have to form our own idea of what the world is; and we'd best use all the tools at our disposal when doing so. Its regrettable that so many of those sources are of low quality, high bias, etc; but that's what we have.

armchairhacker
HN guidelines are to post the article's title except when it's clickbait. Then you should post a more reasonable title with the main finding, which for a clickbait submission, would presumably make it boring and therefore not get upvoted enough to show up on the front page.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe we should emphasize posting different titles for misleading and linkbait articles, and more aggressively flag those articles with linkbait titles even if they are the original title. Also, I don't know if HN already has this, but I think it should prevent submitting titles which contain a question mark; display a message requiring the submitter to edit the title so that it no longer contains a question. Even if people just edit "Why did X do Y?" to "reasons why X did Y", the latter title has the same exact semantics but I think it's an improvement, because it generates less subliminal interaction.

EDIT: just after I posted, this article is #3 on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38708215. This is an example of what I'm talking about: the title is "SSH protects the most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker", which is the article's real title, but I think it should be un-clickbait-ified into something like "Terrapin Attack for prefix truncation in SSH". Although also, that article isn't the original source, and said source has been posted a day ago...

unraveller
He endured modern journalism, then he fixed it.

it's about 10 lines of code to add a client side feature to have posts filtered out by domain. That's the easiest way to avoid the main clickbait offenders.