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Comment by anorphirith | Hacker News Reader

we should forbid click bait titles on HN, it's an insult to the audience's intelligence

Clickbait title are so common we think they're normal titles.... Here's how he did it: you create a craving for an answer then you offer a solution for that craving. "here’s how it was" ==> that's the trick Also "here’s how" should never be used in a title, we all know that the title's subject IS what you're going to talk about. a pre-click bait era title would have sounded like: Learnings after using Haskell for 5 years

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We should, and we do.

This title is on point: The author used Haskell for several years, and found there was a learning curve, some helpful libraries, some poorly documented libraries, lots of historical baggage, unclear performance consequences, and uncommon correlations (good and bad) between task and difficulty.

While this title follows a particular style it actually tells you what the article will be about (5 years of Haskell). What bothers you about it?

It's clickbaity because you have to click to find out if their opinion is highly positive or negative. It sounds like it's going to be answered by "... terrible" or "... great!", and that it's phrased that way to make you click and find out.

Granted, once you click you find out that's not why it's titled that, but you still feel baited into clicking to find out. A better title would be something like "I tried Haskell for 5 years and here's the good and the bad", or something like that.

It's hardly clickbait. Clickbait would be a purposely inflammatory or exaggerated title to get you to click the link. This is the complete opposite of that.

> It's clickbaity because you have to click to find out if their opinion is highly positive or negative.

I think you just stated the purpose of a title. Wiki says clickbait is:

> "... relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures "

There's nothing sensationalist about. "I tried Haskell for 5 years". It's rather banal.

The title is not only accurate but it is stylistically appropriate in this case as the author is making an explicit criticism of the type of post where an author tries something for a few days and blogs about it.

Do you think this title is clickbait? I just read the thing it seems like a good title.

It's "baitish-feeling at first", just missing the tailing "and here's what happened" --- but --- at this point I think this style is just starting to become assimilated into general "unintended" blogging/writing style..

The other day, I saw some Medium post titled "Functional programming will make you happier". I was furious and about to blast some diatribe on the increasingly infantile-inanity-inflation-in-headlines but looking at the post, the author seemed genuine in taking the troubles to work out their thoughts to the reader, so I refrained.. tilting at windmills, increasingly people are simply growing up with these sorts of titles and develop a primal instinct for what gets attention and clicks --- aka, reads.

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