2 ms·

Clickbait headline, but the article is great!

• joshfee 3y ago
  Surprisingly I think this usage of clickbait is totally reasonable because it matches the author's initial thoughts/experiences of "what?! this can't be right..."
• saghm 3y ago
  I think there might be a range of where people draw the line between reasonable headlines and clickbait, because I tend to think of clickbait as something where the "answer" to some question is intentionally left out to try to bait people into clicking. For this article, something I'd consider clickbait would be something like "Rust std fs is slower than Python?" without the answer after. More commonly, the headline isn't phrased directly as a question, but instead of saying something like "So-and-so musician loves burritos", it will leave out the main detail and say something like "The meal so-and-so eats before every concert", which is trying to get you to click and have to read through lots of extraneous prose just to find the word "burritos". Having a hook to get people to want to read the article is reasonable in my opinion; after all, if you could fit every detail in the size of a headline, you wouldn't need an article at all! Clickbait inverts this by _only_ having enough enough substance that you could get all the info in the headline, but instead it leaves out the one detail that's interesting and then pads it with fluff that you're forced to click and read through if you want the answer.