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Titles in this format - Is some usually unremarkable X actually radical Y? - have conditioned me to instantly answer "No", sometimes audibly. I think it's the

Titles in this format - Is some usually unremarkable X actually radical Y? - have conditioned me to instantly answer "No", sometimes audibly. I think it's the disingenuity masquerading as curiosity. You're not actually pondering that question, I should not expect an insightful dialectical exploration of the topic. You've made your mind up and you're exploiting my open mindedness to trojan your one-sided conclusion in there. Is it time for X to Y? No. Should X be Y? No. Is X actually Y? No.

dvh 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
djeiasbsbo 6y ago
The same also goes for: "Learn X in Y". People not only learn at a different pace, they also learn in different ways that take shorter or longer. And in most cases, this is just an introduction anyway and in no way enough to really learn X. But I think we're at a point where clickbait has been too normalized. Content creators have to do it to be competitive and get their content seen at all. And consumers have just accepted that. The best example of anti-clickbait I've seen is concluding/explaining the title directly in the thumbnail of a video.
2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
From the Wikipedia article linked below, you’re better off assuming the answer is “yes”. The real answer is that these titles are just click bait and don’t really provide evidence one way or another. A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals that set out to test Betteridge's Law and Hinchliffe's Rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[13] A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions.[14] Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[14] In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine (all percentages rounded by Linander).[15]

dvh 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

djeiasbsbo 6y ago

The same also goes for: "Learn X in Y". People not only learn at a different pace, they also learn in different ways that take shorter or longer. And in most cases, this is just an introduction anyway and in no way enough to really learn X. But I think we're at a point where clickbait has been too normalized. Content creators have to do it to be competitive and get their content seen at all. And consumers have just accepted that. The best example of anti-clickbait I've seen is concluding/explaining the title directly in the thumbnail of a video.

2muchcoffeeman 6y ago

From the Wikipedia article linked below, you’re better off assuming the answer is “yes”. The real answer is that these titles are just click bait and don’t really provide evidence one way or another. A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals that set out to test Betteridge's Law and Hinchliffe's Rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[13] A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions.[14] Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[14] In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine (all percentages rounded by Linander).[15]