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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

I believe we may be at a point where it is understood that headlines are created with the goal of attracting readers to the article, and it may no longer be necessary to point this out for each article we come across.

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What’s the limit? What if I write an article with a title like “Breaking: Google to deprecate its search engine, will get into selling beanie babies instead” but in reality the article is about the many different types of mayonnaise one can buy? I think it’s reasonable to expect the title to somewhat reflect the content of the article.

It's their job to sex up the headline and ours to deflate it to size.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I've replaced the title with representative language from the article body.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&sor...

I'll stop when I'm dead.

When the headline is so obviously clickbait, it's probably more interesting than the actual article... And the comments here are likely more interesting as well, just based on the title.

So I no longer worry about people who haven't read the article. I just enjoy the discussions.

There's a difference between editorializing a headline vs having an article titled "X is the best", where the content is literally "Well X obviously isn't the best, that would be ridiculous. Also we have no idea what the best is."

That's not even the case. The point of headlines is to attract readers to the comment section on facebook, reddit, twitter, HN, etc. Some small percentage of people who have become engaged in the discussion seeded by the title then click through and provide a bit of ad revenue.

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