3 ms·

I think it's just a more casual and less formal way of saying something happened. I can't picture an illustrious newspaper of yesteryear ever writing a headline

I think it's just a more casual and less formal way of saying something happened. I can't picture an illustrious newspaper of yesteryear ever writing a headline of the form "X just did Y". But due to the rise of social media and the progressive commoditization (not using either of those terms as an epithet as so many do!) of news stories, users respond better to headlines that read like it's something their friend would say rather than being the headline of a newspaper. I don't read Buzzfeed, the pioneer (I think?) of this trend, but I read the similar Polygon gaming news site, and two of its five lead stories at the moment sport conversational style headlines: "The Hearthstone legendary cards you must craft ASAP" and "The film Apocalypse could have looked like this".

Declanomous 10y ago
"X did Y" works equally as well as "X just did Y." I'm sure they use 'just' to make the article seem more immediate. "The Price of Solar Power fell 50% in 16 months" has a markedly different tone than "The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months". The headline with the work 'just' seems like breaking news. The other variant seems like a normal report that you can pick up an read at your leisure. Most articles in a normal newspaper don't do this because they don't have to. Only the headline needs to be sensationalist to sell the paper. On a website, every article needs to drag people in. The current headline is click-bait. That would be forgivable if the entire article wasn't terrible as well. There is very little content or analysis, everything is cribbed from other sources, including the charts. I will give the author credit for linking all of their sources, but that is where my praise ends.