Hacker News Reader

I disagree, and do not believe the title is linkbaity/sensational at all, and find it problematic that the title was changed. It is an accurate description of the author’s position, which is that the claims made by IBM are fraudulent. Holding a position isn’t linkbaity or sensationalism.

A linkbaity or sensational title would have been “you won’t believe what IBM claims”.

View on HN

Exactly this. I've been uncomfortable with this trend for a while now, where everything gets labeled "clickbait" and there's a thread of resentment if an article does anything other than lay out dry facts as efficiently as possible.

The pendulum has swung too far. This wasn't clickbait, it was a fair and accurate summary of the full piece. Flag the entire post if you think it's inherently inflammatory, downvote, ban it if you're an admin, but this title had no business being edited.

Perhaps a more NPOV [neutral point-of-view] way to reframe the original would be "Claims made by IBM about Watson and AI considered fraudulent" - thus it is no longer advertising an opinion as implicitly true in the headline, but simply representing the article for what it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com