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.

  • Cruxifux@feddit.nl
    0·
    1 个月前

    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.

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
    0·
    1 个月前

    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·
      1 个月前

      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·
        1 个月前

        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·
          1 个月前

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

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 个月前

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

  • ripcord@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 个月前

    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·
      1 个月前

      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·
        1 个月前

        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 个月前

    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.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 个月前

    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·
    1 个月前

    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·
      1 个月前

      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.

  • Victor@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 个月前

    I despise it. It’s everywhere.

    It’s even like that in our public service media in my country, which is tax-funded and does not need to generate clicks at all. There are no ads embedded in their articles or anything. They have no reason at all to bait.

    Yet they do. It’s like it’s getting taught at journalism school or wherever the fuck they go before starting their career in baiting.

    Master baiters are what they are. Absolute masters.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    1 个月前

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

    • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 个月前

      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·
        1 个月前

        [email protected] 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 个月前

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

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          1 个月前

          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.