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.
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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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, picking a random 1980s headline: "Six US embassy aides escape from Iran". Nowadays that would be more like, "US admits Iran plot."
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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.
Could have social media websites
like us
have some system for selecting, maybe voting on, alternative titles.
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.
!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.
It would be better if they allowed for clarification in brackets or something after the original title.
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, 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.
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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 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.
I'm less annoyed if its technically true and I get to sharpen my media crit skills by making that evaluation after the fact
Everybody has always been annoyed by them. Since before computers existed; newspaper headlines were the original clickbait and it's always sucked.
Yes, but this has been the case for many years now.
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.
It was wild for a while, then scaled back and not it's re-emerging with a vengance. It's really annoying, and it's spreading to social media. It was getting crazy on reddit, where people have gone back to literally ending titles with "And then this happened"(actually using the word "this" instead of a real descriptor).
I dont click on them. Unfortunately rss is going in the same direction
If you think that's bad, wait until I tell you one obscure detail about this common thing! But first, let me tell you about Raid Shadow Legends...
Newspapers used to be displayed in boxes, and available for sale almost vending machine-style.
I imagine headlines were "buy-bait" back then. But maybe they weren't quite as good at it, since it hadn't been studied as much?
For the past 10 years
No, it is only you who are annoyed at this.
/s 😁
News headlines have gotten more clickbaity. Here's why.
"Universe rotates every 500 billion years"
Source: labrudirudikudi.au.net.eu