The AOL-ization of TechCrunch headlines continues apace. More technically, SEO-ified titles like this are a great example of Goodhart's law: http://en.wikiped

The AOL-ization of TechCrunch headlines continues apace. More technically, SEO-ified titles like this are a great example of Goodhart's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law Techcrunch is going to lose its audience with posts like this over time because they are improperly using a global trend ("Rebecca Black") to attract a local audience (fairly technical/entrepreneurial crowd, or used to be). One possible technical solution would be for Facebook to launch Facebook Trends, such that you could start cross-sectioning Google Trends by demographic. This would mean blogs could stop going for lowest common denominator stuff and start at least putting together linkbait titles optimized for their intended audience. [Of course, this only works if the global strategy actually is suboptimal relative to the local audience strategy. Empirical question.]