4 ms·
I am somewhat appalled but not at all surprised to see click bait headlines leaking into the BBC's vernacular.
by avs733 9y ago
I am somewhat appalled but not at all surprised to see click bait headlines leaking into the BBC's vernacular.
- vanderZwan 9y agoThe use of BOLD TEXT is also a bit annoying. I wonder if it has to to with the fact that this is the BBC Future section.
- ashark 9y agoThe bold text is for links. Confused me at first, too. Really poor choice.
- trendia 9y agoI can mentally ignore links, but I don't mentally ignore bold. I assume that if an author is using bold, then they're trying to tell me something really important. But, if bolding hyperlinks becomes the "new style" of online writing, then I guess I'll have to slowly learn to desensitize myself to bolded text as well.
- vanderZwan 9y agoThat's ridiculous, there's no advantage over underlining text, and everybody recognises the latter as a standard. And like trendia said, BOLD TEXT already has the semantic meaning of shouting. It's very aggressive and in-your-face to read
- SurrealSoul 9y agoIt could be worse, I seen far more clickbaity articles about this topic >This flavour is so good its illegal >If your food tastes this good it could kill you >This flavour caused a drug raid
- avs733 9y agoOh it totally could be worse in an absolute sense. But for the BBC...this seems quite bad. Its one thing to get that language from an ad or distractify. Quite another from the Beeb
- Dylan16807 9y agoWhat makes you file it as click bait, exactly? I thought the headline gave me a very clear idea of what the article's contents would be. How would you improve it? Edit: Wait, the actual article says secret and on HN it says chemical. Hmm.
- mrob 9y agoIt's click bait because the most important information is missing from the title. It could be improved by changing it to "Tonka beans: delicious and toxic".
- Dylan16807 9y agoMissing? I'm confused. All of those words are in the title.
- mrob 9y agoOnly in HN's edited title, not the original BBC title.
- Dylan16807 9y agoI think I've been misreading the BBC title the whole time as also saying "Tonka beans". Oops. It's in the subtitle but not the real title.