Google is building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join
and the source article:
Google is essentially building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join
The one word changes the article from providing an interpretation of a set of facts to a declaration of a proven fact. Since Recode has some gravitas the difference is even greater than if it was a blog mill churning out click bait.
> How the post does should be relevant to its content, not the few words you typed into the box.
This is true, but idealistic. "How the post does should be relevant [...]" is not the same as "How the post does is relevant [...]".
Some lousy articles with click baity headlines get upvotes.
And it's particularly frustrating when a neutral informative headline is changed back to the uninformative or clickbaity original headline of the article.
When we do change a title we try to use representative language from the article itself, rather than making up a completely new one. In the above case we've taken the linkbait bits out of the original title and reordered the result to make it grammatical.
HN Headline: Google inks deal on payment of French media links (reuters.com)
Title on Reuters: Google to pay 60 million euros into French media fund
Subhead on Reuters: Google... will not pay them for posting links to their content.
Article content says publishers had been pushing for payment for links and snippets, and Google was threatened with legislation to pay for links, but instead settled on this fund to help the publishers make more money using Google's advertising technology (kind of like a $60M version of the $100 AdWords leads.)
Troubles me that informative submission titles are so often elided, while ones suggesting the opposite of the article's intent can be left as is.
I agree with this, your examples should not have been changed. I would like to see the converse -- if the title is the same as an article's but the article's title is linkbait or sensationalized I would like it to be changed to something that tells me what it's really about.
Am I the only one tired of click-bait titles that don't tell you anything about the article? Had to read the comments here to understand what the article was about and decide if it was worth reading.
All it takes is 4 extra words to give the title context:
> What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You [about working at Amazon]
> I will click the one whose headline is most like what a headline should be: an actual summary of the story.
I think you might be stating your opinion as fact. Clearly there are a lot of people in web publishing who disagree. Also, we're talking about link titles not headlines.
I'm not in web publishing but still I'd argue that the whole point of a link title is to get you to click on it. Just like the whole point of the design on your cereal box is to get you to buy that one instead of some other box. One link title can be measurably better than another by counting how many clicks each one gets.
AFAIK the rule is to use the title given in the article and not create your own click bait headline. IF the mods determine the articles title is click bait they can change it.
But in practice, even dang(/team) themselves sometimes change the title away from the original, to be more indicative of the article content, even when it isn't exactly linkbait or wrong per se.
> Take a second look at this post’s title [of "I increased my traffic 13,000% by changing a title"] - is it “clear, descriptive, and informative”? Or is it “flashy, gimmicky, and potentially clickbait”? I’d classify it in the latter, but if I went with the former then you never would have found this post (or me).
The author has this backwards, which was part of their initial problem. The title "I increased my traffic 13,000% by changing a title" is clear, descriptive, and informative.
Here's a case where the previously submitted title, which included something like "in less than 50 lines of literate C++", was more indicative/compelling and I think more useful for news.yc.
I don't think of that as click-bait in the same way as "you won't believe #7", but rather as additional information which truthfully and transparently makes it more likely that I'll accurately gauge my interest in the linked article.
"Don't editorialize" in this case is a negative, but perhaps is globally optimal.
"Readability" has been around a while, but it indispensible, IMHO. David Pouge (NY Times) called it the best single technical idea of 2009. I'd call it an absolute necessity to reading postings on the Web.
I think the blurbs help also. Sort of like Slashdot blurbs, but done better. Imo the "headline-only" style of reddit/digg/HN has an unfortunate tendency to promote stuff that's that's easy to summarize in a soundbite, and makes it hard to get attention for anything that needs even 3 sentences to set context for. There's even a word for the extreme case (linkbait), but I think it has more subtle effects throughout as well.
Anybody have a better title? 'Better' here means (1) less baity; (2) more accurate and neutral; and (3) preferably a representative phrase from the article itself.
This post heading:
Google is building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join
and the source article:
Google is essentially building an anti-Amazon alliance, and Target is the latest to join
The one word changes the article from providing an interpretation of a set of facts to a declaration of a proven fact. Since Recode has some gravitas the difference is even greater than if it was a blog mill churning out click bait.
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