6 ms·
An incredibly irritating click-bait headline. Why can't they say what corporation has done corruption where? They could provide the essentials with fewer words.
by ptaipale 11y ago
An incredibly irritating click-bait headline. Why can't they say what corporation has done corruption where? They could provide the essentials with fewer words.
- danharaj 11y ago> On Wednesday, The Huffington Post and its Australian partner, Fairfax Media — led by reporters Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie — published the results of a months-long investigation of Unaoil(http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/the-bribe-factory http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2016/the-bribe-factory), an obscure firm that helps big multinational corporations win contracts in areas of the world where corruption is common.
- pessimizer 11y agoThanks.
- hga 11y agoAnd see a bit of discussion in a slightly earlier posted item pointing to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11388542
- wpietri 11y agoI agree that the headline is irritating, but your solution isn't the right one. The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline. It's also not really industry- or country-specific, so they can't mention that. The interesting parts are the corporate corruption and its mechanisms, the government corruption that causes, and the political instability that flows from that. That in turn affects the world. But given the HuffPo's audience, my guess is that "corporate corruption" is the hottest topic; it's certainly the most obvious and most clearly illegal bit. So click-bait style aside, it's not a bad headline.
- mikeash 11y agoThere is an easy and obvious way to vastly improve this headline without making it any longer. Delete the second sentence. Done. This removes no information, while eliminating the shady click-bait tactics.
- wpietri 11y agoI think that line is a gesture toward the complicated geopolitical implications of bribery of this kind and scale. The goal is to personalize it, so that people will realize its relationship to them. Often, business news is seen as irrelevant to individual lives, but this article attempts to tie it back. That's not to say that the headline couldn't be improved. Just that from the headline writer's point of view, there is utility in the second sentence.
- mikeash 11y agoI'm pretty sure the goal is to play with people's psychology to get them to click. If the goal was to show the relationship to the reader, there are much better ways to do it. That last bit seems tautological to me. Of course there's utility in the second sentence from the headline writer's point of view, otherwise they wouldn't have put it there. The issue with "clickbait" is that the headline writer's utility diverges from the reader's utility.
- ptaipale 11y ago> The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline. I don't see how that works. If the name is obscure, and we should know about it, put it in the headline. That kind of headlines definitely turn me away. "Here's why we should care" is typically preceding a text which says nothing useful about why we should care. I just won't read articles headlined like this, because they feel like an insult.
- forgetsusername 11y ago>An incredibly irritating click-bait headline. Click-bait headlines are marginally more irritating than people in the comment section calling out a click-bait headline. We get it, they happen.
- home_boi 11y agoI would like to see huffpo/buzzfeed/clickbait sites put on a "banlist" where their ranking is penalized heavily for being clickbait
- tbrake 11y agoAre click-bait titles a disease or a merely a symptom of a larger one?