12 ms·

Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

241 points by rustoo 6y ago

dirkt 6y ago
For me, the impact ist mostly "no, I don't want to read this if the headline is already that bad".
ianhorn 6y ago
It’s so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having. One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything. And then be paid for it. Journalism ultimately is this: it launders views you have so that you can express them as if they were consensus views and also, it takes outrageous positions so that you can describe yourself in opposition.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines No. "Revealed preference" is exploitation of vice, plain and simple. Addicts might honestly say they would prefer to abstain, but still relapse. The same dopamine systems are being exploited in either case.
    - qsort 6y ago
      That's a distinction without a difference. An addict who says they prefer to abstain but doesn't, doesn't actually prefer to abstain. Where preferences come from is irrelevant. De gustibus non disputandum est.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        This is conflating desires/aspirations/preferences with basic drives. Everyone has base instincts that we inherited through evolution, and more evolutionarily recent executive control that we have to exercise and develop. "Revealed preference" tends to manipulate the base instinct at the expense of executive control.
      - zepto 6y ago
        By that logic, there is no such thing as addiction.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        No. Revealed preferences are manipulative bullshit. Calling choices forced by external conditions (whether it's your own addiction, manipulative headlines or strong market pressure) choices is just a way to whitewash deeply immoral manipulation, and justify selfishness as serving others what they "want".
    - zepto 6y ago
      Revealed preference is just a way to make manipulative marketing sound more noble than just applied behaviorism.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    > Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having. It is also a fine explanation as to why countries often have all these noble rights in their constitutions, and everyday technicalities by which they are legally evaded. The people don't want these rights to exist, they want to claim they want them to exist. They want to say “Better a thousand guilty men go free, than a single innocent man be in prison!”, but what they really want is conviction upon præponderance of evidence, together with the all to common mentality of “It won't happen to me.”.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It persists in order to get people to read the paper. This is openly acknowledged in the industry (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-new-york-times-headline.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne... ); headline writers are aiming to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible", while making sure they don't "give away the ending". Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines.
  - ianhorn 6y ago
    > Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines. Shouldn’t it still concern them? If I wrote a piece about Obama making a hard choice to fund orphanages or schools and it got a headline “Obama yanks funding from orphans” then I’d be pissed. Journalistic integrity of headlines needs to at least be somebody’s concern.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Because a man rarely realizes how often they mislead, when the headline tell him what he wants to hear. All the very rational criticism often put forth about such principles is seemingly saved for disagreement and scrutiny for what one does not wish to hear. I daresay that many on H.N. would relish a sensationalist haedline such as “How Microsoft and Intel planned for RISC-V to never take the market.”, which upon closer inspection in the article would be less sensationalist than what the headline suggests.
adameast1978 6y ago
It has a lot of impact on me even if I try to ignore because I see so much sharing of misinformation and sources that are not even close to credible. It is especially troubling when it is from people I trust and respect and it takes a lot of self control to ignore and move along as I know arguing online about these things online hardly ever improves the situation.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  It's a pity that there's really no social norm to penalise sharing non-credible information/misinformation.
  - graycat 6y ago
    > penalize??? Due to bad content, I flatly refuse to go to Web sites of ABC, ..., WaPo. E.g., if there is a post at Hacker News from the NYT, ===>> NO WAY <<=== will I go there. Same for The Guardian, the BBC, etc. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Bad media has fooled me way, WAY too often, and I will NOT go back. I just conclude, bluntly, fooling people is all they know how to do. But they aren't fooling me anymore. It's worse than that: For many years I got triple play Internet access -- Internet, landline phone, and TV. And my house had three nice TV sets. But I NEVER used the TV (except for movies on VCR). The triple play was cheaper than just Internet and landline phone access. What happened was, I clicked through all the TV channels looking for something worth watching and finding nothing once too often and flatly, absolutely, positively, totally gave up on all of TV. All of it. Now I have no TV set at all. From me, ALL of TV has been penalized, totally. And nearly all of the mainstream media sources have been equally penalized. What do I pay attention to? Hacker News for one: I get good links to good content and the often good comments on that content from Hacker News readers who post. For the issue of images and video, notice that Hacker News has none of that! Fine with me! For more? Sure, a few selected blogs and YouTube channels. In total, there are a lot of good URLs just on Hacker News!
    - rtx 6y ago
      These businesses are being fooled by analytics platforms. Their collapse would be so sudden that employees would be learning to code.
nathias 6y ago
Imagine that, negation of a negative has in practice no consequence.
nerdponx 6y ago
The subjects' brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they made judgments about the individuals. Fast, involuntary brain responses can be distinguished here from slower, more controlled responses. The researchers had expected the latter to involve consideration of the source's credibility in addition to emotion, and thus that credibility might factor into people’s judgments, whereas emotion should dominate in early and more involuntary responses. However, both late and early brain responses showed dominant influences of headline emotionality independent of credibility. In the spirit of being critical even when we want to agree with or believe the conclusion: how "good" are these EEG studies? I recall some scandal several years ago in which fMRI data was being promoted as far more useful than it really was, due to some buggy clustering software and maybe also p-hacking. Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid?
- guenthert 6y ago
  > Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid? It's a new study, so no-one had the opportunity to reproduce their findings yet. Generally in the scientific community, one tries to find the flaw in their argument/methods, rather then presuming them to be faulty. It doesn't seem like a very complicated, time consuming or costly experiment (compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson), so I'd think it's reasonable to expect another team to reproduce the results in the near future, if there is sufficient interest.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    My question was more about the EEG method in general. Even if this one result is new, surely this method has been used many times in the past. So no, I am not just assuming the study is faulty. I am asking a specific question about the validity of one of the core study methods.
  - canadaduane 6y ago
    > compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson Understatement of the month, haha. I don't suppose you debate in engineering circles?
nomoreusernames 6y ago
"nlp works"
- shanemlk 6y ago
  You were able to condense my comment from 29 words to 2. Nice job.
Natales 6y ago
Although as a non-expert, the methodology of the study seems sound to me, I find its conclusion depressing. I know it wasn't their intent to attempt to provide solutions, but it bothers me having absolutely no idea how to even begin to solve this problem at scale, in a world where it's becoming easier and cheaper to influence such large amounts of people. Every single idea I've thought can either be defeated, exploited, or ignored, and I haven't seen a project or effort that seems strong enough to go to battle for. Has anyone here seen something worth exploring?
crmd 6y ago
The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed: * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason Then I simply don’t click on it. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-world-of-youtube-thumbnails https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-wo...
- firebaze 6y ago
  Can't agree more. Any headline which invokes a "what, really?" response should not be clicked, instead the keywords (like $villain or $unflattering_third_person or $unique_despicable_action) should be searched (for pro's, in a private window via DuckDuckGo or if that sucks (like, most of the time)) with google (may involve skipping the first, second or even third page of results for _hot_ clickbait topics). With some luck there'll be a really credible secondary, or even better, the primary source. Those usually come without clickbait headlines. This is much better that an ad-blocker, since it doesn't increase click count for the attention-seeking clickbait news provider, and yields no money for them. In the long run, this drains their money stream. At least I hope so. It is also simple enough to understand and follow to pass over to most non-IT-friends and acquaintances.
- gryfft 6y ago
  I use the same rubric but go one step further and tell YouTube not to recommend any videos from that channel.
  - CompuHacker 6y ago
    Have attempted to do this with recommendations for 30-120s clips with 500,000 to 2,000,000 views from old TV shows, cartoons, and movies. It's not working. I'd rather read a spreadsheet with a list of public YouTube video IDs/metadata than experience the silence in the downtime between worthwhile videos.
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
m463 6y ago
I find the new york times sort of annoying now. I like them and even set up a script to pull down the homepage as a .pdf each day to read it. Today's would be: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/12/30/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf But I found the articles I generally read (mostly links from hn) have a different quality than the front page. The front page articles seem emotional. They seem opinionated. Bit they're not marked "opinion" Even if I agree with the opinion, I think they could take the high road.
- johncena33 6y ago
  Lot of traditional liberal media including NYT have resorted to yellow journalism. This is probably because of advent of internet. But that doesn't absolve them from the wrong-doings. Lot of published articles are "technically true", but intentionally misleading. Lot of articles are very clearly politically motivated, but packaged under the guise of some good cause. The identity politics born in universities and made mainstream by Twitter has essentially ended ethical journalism and gave birth to activist journalism.
stingblue 6y ago
It may be that believing what we hear / see is an evolutionary survival trait, a built-in cognitive default. I think this because the young of ancient humans had a FAR better chance of survival if they believed their elders. Examples: don't play in those woods or you may get eaten; don't eat THOSE pretty berries or you will get sick and maybe die; here is how you hunt or harvest food; and so on. It is hard to overcome this natural tendency, and without education and effort and a wide variety of sources one can be pretty easily deceived and brainwashed.
- firebaze 6y ago
  Humans are 1-2 orders of magnitude more influenced by habit instead of genetic predisposition. There are plenty of sources for that argument. In other words: educate your children, peers and acquaintances how to escape emotional headlines a.k.a. clickbait. I know you know.
shanemlk 6y ago
Basically they hooked gizmos to peoples' brain and found if they force people to read emotional words, their brain indeed feels some impact... cool. Thanks for that, great read.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
onlyreply 6y ago
the sky is blue regardless whether you agree or not
JacobSuperslav 6y ago
"humans have emotions"
frongpik 6y ago
That's a big reason what makes HN successful: a blanket ban on emotional content. Edit. I've been thinking of an idea that for us knowledge sharing resembles neuron connections, based on my limited knowledge of that topic. Each of us watches a few channels of information and makes a choice to forward/retweet a piece of information so your subscribers would see it, ignore it or block a channel if it sends you bogus data. Every time we do this, we adjust the rating of the source. So I've been thinking that if we could set up such a network in a more formal way, and if the network would grow to at least a few thousand "neurons" (that are people), would it exhibit some unexpected higher level effects?
- permo-w 6y ago
  If your definition of success is popularity, I think it’s also possibly why HN isn’t more successful. Emotional content draws people in and keeps them there. Obviously the kind of people drawn in by that aren’t the desired audience of HN, especially as it doesn’t rely on ad revenue
- tayo42 6y ago
  I think this site gets emotional content. It might not be political flame war baiting topics. There's plenty of rust is great, microservices suck, npm continues to be trash, hot new thing considered harmful. Reinforces the my team wins ideas
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations? Maybe it could work by changing the incentives. If you had a magical perfect AI that was loyal to you and ran on your PC, it would always act in your interest - Spidering the web and returning interesting things based on your feedback. Whereas the current model is, none of this stuff is self-hosted, it has to run on Somebody Else's Computer. SEC costs money to run, so they have to make that money back by tweaking the recommendations, and none of the big ones inter-operate. YouTube will never recommend videos from the Fediverse. So anything that's not self-hosted (which is just a specific form of a subscription payment, anyway) will never have your best interests at heart, it can only have some of your interests at heart. This same problems comes up in politics - Companies have no interest in creating public goods and we shouldn't expect them to do so. But anyway, I think this is where some of the good stuff will fall out of AI in the next 10 or 20 years - Having intelligent agents that try to cut through the BS of the web on behalf of their owners.
nillium 6y ago
This is why we're building a news platform that sets up a different incentive structure than the current status quo. If publishers aren't desperate for clicks, there is no reason to stoop to outrage porn. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
- baby 6y ago
  > Yesterday, my cofounder wrote a controversial post on this blog But to bootstrap your project some controversial posts help right :P?
tedk-42 6y ago
The funny thing is that I find this headline to be impactful regardless of it's credibility. A self proving headline
gsmo 6y ago
Not a surprise. Though anecdotal, I've noticed an increase in the use of "blasts", "slams", and "lashes out" in U.S. news titles over the past few years.
hnracer 6y ago
Is there a good discovery mechanism for finding individual journalists producing quality content on eg substack or medium? I want to find their content but I don't know where to start.
darig 6y ago
This article got everything completely wrong. Responding to headlines with comments denying the premise, while having never read the article, has the largest impact regardless of the credibility of the source. Everyone knows that. There is more of an impact if you say everyone knows that, and things like "largest". Everyone knows that.
FartyMcFarter 6y ago
One corollary is that you should completely block news sources that have the most emotional headlines. Google News has a feature for blocking specific sources, fortunately. I had done this out of irritation with crappy articles. Bad articles seem to be correlated with emotionally manipulative headlines, so it's interesting to find out that there are other good reasons to do it!
failrate 6y ago
I've also found that reading news with images and color removed lessens the emotional reaction I have to the news (e.g. text.npr.org).

241 points by rustoo 6y ago

For me, the impact ist mostly "no, I don't want to read this if the headline is already that bad".

It’s so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?

renewiltord 6y ago
Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having. One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything. And then be paid for it. Journalism ultimately is this: it launders views you have so that you can express them as if they were consensus views and also, it takes outrageous positions so that you can describe yourself in opposition.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines No. "Revealed preference" is exploitation of vice, plain and simple. Addicts might honestly say they would prefer to abstain, but still relapse. The same dopamine systems are being exploited in either case.
  - qsort 6y ago
    That's a distinction without a difference. An addict who says they prefer to abstain but doesn't, doesn't actually prefer to abstain. Where preferences come from is irrelevant. De gustibus non disputandum est.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      This is conflating desires/aspirations/preferences with basic drives. Everyone has base instincts that we inherited through evolution, and more evolutionarily recent executive control that we have to exercise and develop. "Revealed preference" tends to manipulate the base instinct at the expense of executive control.
    - zepto 6y ago
      By that logic, there is no such thing as addiction.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      No. Revealed preferences are manipulative bullshit. Calling choices forced by external conditions (whether it's your own addiction, manipulative headlines or strong market pressure) choices is just a way to whitewash deeply immoral manipulation, and justify selfishness as serving others what they "want".
  - zepto 6y ago
    Revealed preference is just a way to make manipulative marketing sound more noble than just applied behaviorism.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  > Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having. It is also a fine explanation as to why countries often have all these noble rights in their constitutions, and everyday technicalities by which they are legally evaded. The people don't want these rights to exist, they want to claim they want them to exist. They want to say “Better a thousand guilty men go free, than a single innocent man be in prison!”, but what they really want is conviction upon præponderance of evidence, together with the all to common mentality of “It won't happen to me.”.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It persists in order to get people to read the paper. This is openly acknowledged in the industry (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-new-york-times-headline.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/09/insider/how-to-write-a-ne... ); headline writers are aiming to "[create] a mystery that can only be solved by reading further" and "reach and draw in as many people as possible", while making sure they don't "give away the ending". Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines.
- ianhorn 6y ago
  > Journalistic integrity isn't as strong of a concern simply because it's not the journalists who write headlines. Shouldn’t it still concern them? If I wrote a piece about Obama making a hard choice to fund orphanages or schools and it got a headline “Obama yanks funding from orphans” then I’d be pissed. Journalistic integrity of headlines needs to at least be somebody’s concern.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Because a man rarely realizes how often they mislead, when the headline tell him what he wants to hear. All the very rational criticism often put forth about such principles is seemingly saved for disagreement and scrutiny for what one does not wish to hear. I daresay that many on H.N. would relish a sensationalist haedline such as “How Microsoft and Intel planned for RISC-V to never take the market.”, which upon closer inspection in the article would be less sensationalist than what the headline suggests.

adameast1978 6y ago

It has a lot of impact on me even if I try to ignore because I see so much sharing of misinformation and sources that are not even close to credible. It is especially troubling when it is from people I trust and respect and it takes a lot of self control to ignore and move along as I know arguing online about these things online hardly ever improves the situation.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
It's a pity that there's really no social norm to penalise sharing non-credible information/misinformation.
- graycat 6y ago
  > penalize??? Due to bad content, I flatly refuse to go to Web sites of ABC, ..., WaPo. E.g., if there is a post at Hacker News from the NYT, ===>> NO WAY <<=== will I go there. Same for The Guardian, the BBC, etc. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Bad media has fooled me way, WAY too often, and I will NOT go back. I just conclude, bluntly, fooling people is all they know how to do. But they aren't fooling me anymore. It's worse than that: For many years I got triple play Internet access -- Internet, landline phone, and TV. And my house had three nice TV sets. But I NEVER used the TV (except for movies on VCR). The triple play was cheaper than just Internet and landline phone access. What happened was, I clicked through all the TV channels looking for something worth watching and finding nothing once too often and flatly, absolutely, positively, totally gave up on all of TV. All of it. Now I have no TV set at all. From me, ALL of TV has been penalized, totally. And nearly all of the mainstream media sources have been equally penalized. What do I pay attention to? Hacker News for one: I get good links to good content and the often good comments on that content from Hacker News readers who post. For the issue of images and video, notice that Hacker News has none of that! Fine with me! For more? Sure, a few selected blogs and YouTube channels. In total, there are a lot of good URLs just on Hacker News!
  - rtx 6y ago
    These businesses are being fooled by analytics platforms. Their collapse would be so sudden that employees would be learning to code.

nathias 6y ago

Imagine that, negation of a negative has in practice no consequence.

nerdponx 6y ago

The subjects' brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they made judgments about the individuals. Fast, involuntary brain responses can be distinguished here from slower, more controlled responses. The researchers had expected the latter to involve consideration of the source's credibility in addition to emotion, and thus that credibility might factor into people’s judgments, whereas emotion should dominate in early and more involuntary responses. However, both late and early brain responses showed dominant influences of headline emotionality independent of credibility. In the spirit of being critical even when we want to agree with or believe the conclusion: how "good" are these EEG studies? I recall some scandal several years ago in which fMRI data was being promoted as far more useful than it really was, due to some buggy clustering software and maybe also p-hacking. Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid?

guenthert 6y ago
> Are these types of results generally reproducible? How do we know they are valid? It's a new study, so no-one had the opportunity to reproduce their findings yet. Generally in the scientific community, one tries to find the flaw in their argument/methods, rather then presuming them to be faulty. It doesn't seem like a very complicated, time consuming or costly experiment (compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson), so I'd think it's reasonable to expect another team to reproduce the results in the near future, if there is sufficient interest.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  My question was more about the EEG method in general. Even if this one result is new, surely this method has been used many times in the past. So no, I am not just assuming the study is faulty. I am asking a specific question about the validity of one of the core study methods.
- canadaduane 6y ago
  > compared with e.g. the search for the higgs boson Understatement of the month, haha. I don't suppose you debate in engineering circles?

nomoreusernames 6y ago

"nlp works"

shanemlk 6y ago
You were able to condense my comment from 29 words to 2. Nice job.

Natales 6y ago

Although as a non-expert, the methodology of the study seems sound to me, I find its conclusion depressing. I know it wasn't their intent to attempt to provide solutions, but it bothers me having absolutely no idea how to even begin to solve this problem at scale, in a world where it's becoming easier and cheaper to influence such large amounts of people. Every single idea I've thought can either be defeated, exploited, or ignored, and I haven't seen a project or effort that seems strong enough to go to battle for. Has anyone here seen something worth exploring?

crmd 6y ago

The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed: * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason Then I simply don’t click on it. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-world-of-youtube-thumbnails https://www.vice.com/en/article/zme97a/inside-the-strange-wo...

firebaze 6y ago
Can't agree more. Any headline which invokes a "what, really?" response should not be clicked, instead the keywords (like $villain or $unflattering_third_person or $unique_despicable_action) should be searched (for pro's, in a private window via DuckDuckGo or if that sucks (like, most of the time)) with google (may involve skipping the first, second or even third page of results for _hot_ clickbait topics). With some luck there'll be a really credible secondary, or even better, the primary source. Those usually come without clickbait headlines. This is much better that an ad-blocker, since it doesn't increase click count for the attention-seeking clickbait news provider, and yields no money for them. In the long run, this drains their money stream. At least I hope so. It is also simple enough to understand and follow to pass over to most non-IT-friends and acquaintances.
gryfft 6y ago
I use the same rubric but go one step further and tell YouTube not to recommend any videos from that channel.
- CompuHacker 6y ago
  Have attempted to do this with recommendations for 30-120s clips with 500,000 to 2,000,000 views from old TV shows, cartoons, and movies. It's not working. I'd rather read a spreadsheet with a list of public YouTube video IDs/metadata than experience the silence in the downtime between worthwhile videos.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago

m463 6y ago

I find the new york times sort of annoying now. I like them and even set up a script to pull down the homepage as a .pdf each day to read it. Today's would be: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/12/30/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf But I found the articles I generally read (mostly links from hn) have a different quality than the front page. The front page articles seem emotional. They seem opinionated. Bit they're not marked "opinion" Even if I agree with the opinion, I think they could take the high road.

johncena33 6y ago
Lot of traditional liberal media including NYT have resorted to yellow journalism. This is probably because of advent of internet. But that doesn't absolve them from the wrong-doings. Lot of published articles are "technically true", but intentionally misleading. Lot of articles are very clearly politically motivated, but packaged under the guise of some good cause. The identity politics born in universities and made mainstream by Twitter has essentially ended ethical journalism and gave birth to activist journalism.

stingblue 6y ago

It may be that believing what we hear / see is an evolutionary survival trait, a built-in cognitive default. I think this because the young of ancient humans had a FAR better chance of survival if they believed their elders. Examples: don't play in those woods or you may get eaten; don't eat THOSE pretty berries or you will get sick and maybe die; here is how you hunt or harvest food; and so on. It is hard to overcome this natural tendency, and without education and effort and a wide variety of sources one can be pretty easily deceived and brainwashed.

firebaze 6y ago
Humans are 1-2 orders of magnitude more influenced by habit instead of genetic predisposition. There are plenty of sources for that argument. In other words: educate your children, peers and acquaintances how to escape emotional headlines a.k.a. clickbait. I know you know.

shanemlk 6y ago

Basically they hooked gizmos to peoples' brain and found if they force people to read emotional words, their brain indeed feels some impact... cool. Thanks for that, great read.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

onlyreply 6y ago

the sky is blue regardless whether you agree or not

JacobSuperslav 6y ago

"humans have emotions"

frongpik 6y ago

That's a big reason what makes HN successful: a blanket ban on emotional content. Edit. I've been thinking of an idea that for us knowledge sharing resembles neuron connections, based on my limited knowledge of that topic. Each of us watches a few channels of information and makes a choice to forward/retweet a piece of information so your subscribers would see it, ignore it or block a channel if it sends you bogus data. Every time we do this, we adjust the rating of the source. So I've been thinking that if we could set up such a network in a more formal way, and if the network would grow to at least a few thousand "neurons" (that are people), would it exhibit some unexpected higher level effects?

permo-w 6y ago
If your definition of success is popularity, I think it’s also possibly why HN isn’t more successful. Emotional content draws people in and keeps them there. Obviously the kind of people drawn in by that aren’t the desired audience of HN, especially as it doesn’t rely on ad revenue
tayo42 6y ago
I think this site gets emotional content. It might not be political flame war baiting topics. There's plenty of rust is great, microservices suck, npm continues to be trash, hot new thing considered harmful. Reinforces the my team wins ideas
ReactiveJelly 6y ago
Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations? Maybe it could work by changing the incentives. If you had a magical perfect AI that was loyal to you and ran on your PC, it would always act in your interest - Spidering the web and returning interesting things based on your feedback. Whereas the current model is, none of this stuff is self-hosted, it has to run on Somebody Else's Computer. SEC costs money to run, so they have to make that money back by tweaking the recommendations, and none of the big ones inter-operate. YouTube will never recommend videos from the Fediverse. So anything that's not self-hosted (which is just a specific form of a subscription payment, anyway) will never have your best interests at heart, it can only have some of your interests at heart. This same problems comes up in politics - Companies have no interest in creating public goods and we shouldn't expect them to do so. But anyway, I think this is where some of the good stuff will fall out of AI in the next 10 or 20 years - Having intelligent agents that try to cut through the BS of the web on behalf of their owners.

nillium 6y ago

This is why we're building a news platform that sets up a different incentive structure than the current status quo. If publishers aren't desperate for clicks, there is no reason to stoop to outrage porn. https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-platforms/ https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...

baby 6y ago
> Yesterday, my cofounder wrote a controversial post on this blog But to bootstrap your project some controversial posts help right :P?

tedk-42 6y ago

The funny thing is that I find this headline to be impactful regardless of it's credibility. A self proving headline

gsmo 6y ago

Not a surprise. Though anecdotal, I've noticed an increase in the use of "blasts", "slams", and "lashes out" in U.S. news titles over the past few years.

hnracer 6y ago

Is there a good discovery mechanism for finding individual journalists producing quality content on eg substack or medium? I want to find their content but I don't know where to start.

darig 6y ago

This article got everything completely wrong. Responding to headlines with comments denying the premise, while having never read the article, has the largest impact regardless of the credibility of the source. Everyone knows that. There is more of an impact if you say everyone knows that, and things like "largest". Everyone knows that.

FartyMcFarter 6y ago

One corollary is that you should completely block news sources that have the most emotional headlines. Google News has a feature for blocking specific sources, fortunately. I had done this out of irritation with crappy articles. Bad articles seem to be correlated with emotionally manipulative headlines, so it's interesting to find out that there are other good reasons to do it!

failrate 6y ago

I've also found that reading news with images and color removed lessens the emotional reaction I have to the news (e.g. text.npr.org).