The phrase has become meaningless. It used to be “Five ideas that saved my life. #7 will Safe yours...” Today, on HN and elsewhere, people label any headline “

The phrase has become meaningless. It used to be “Five ideas that saved my life. #7 will Safe yours...” Today, on HN and elsewhere, people label any headline “clickbait” if it isn’t a neat and complete summary of the article’s content. Any suspense, or pun, or metaphor gets the dreaded monicker. Which is actually quite a change from just 5 years or so back. At the time where google was the main source for news publishers, and not social media, headlines went through a phase of being overly descriptive. They were trying to hit all the keywords people might search for. Back then, it was quite common to bemoan the death of the creative headline.