Sure, you can prevent it, just hire journalist to vet every story. It's not cheap, and we're not paying for HN -- so yeah, we get what we pay for :) And even

Sure, you can prevent it, just hire journalist to vet every story. It's not cheap, and we're not paying for HN -- so yeah, we get what we pay for :) And even when you hire journalist, they are then skewed towards allowing click-bait and false outrage articles, because that drives user engagement. And it's hard to find a to finance journalism without revenue being linked to user engagement (whether ads or subscription). It's kind of sad, because low credibility news stories is why many corporations are careful about how they communicate; indeed the advice the PR department can give you is often to not reply -- because replying keeps to story alive longer, even if it is all false nonsense outrage over nothing. </rant> I have no solutions, it's hard to change incentives for journalism in a capitalist system, and while "independent" state-sponsored media (NPR/BBC) may be complement, we probably don't want to rely state-sponsored media :) It's not much, but we can take comfort in the fact that this is not a new problem: click-bait is as old as newspapers; I'd even dare to wager we can find cave paintings exaggerating the size of the game that was hunted.