26
votes
Require decluttering clickbaity titles?
I suggest we require decluttering clickbaity titles. The rule can be: if the title leaves you asking "Which X?", include that X in the title; if it asks you "Why X", change it to "X Because Y". It can be a spoiler, but I'd rather have an idea of the content than the suspense, which with this sort of articles is almost never really gratifying. What do you think?
I'd appreciate if we* could have something like the Hacker News guidelines; relevant bits for this discussion as follows:
*I think it's important to remember that Tildes is more than a link aggregator when having these discussions - whatever the rules end up being, they need to include guidelines for text posts as well as link posts.
I don't like altering titles, and I don't like it when others do it either. Nine times out of ten it ends up editorialised or twisted to suit the OP's take on things. If the published headline is shit, look for the same story from another publication. If no other site is carrying the story post a comment explaining that.
My personal behavior has been to always use the title, but if it is lacking or sparse, append the subtitle or a passage from the article.
Another alternative that I used to apply as a moderator on Reddit, and which I've done occasionally here on Tildes, is to take the lede from the article, or find a suitable sentence from the body of the article. Even if the headline is clickbait-y, that doesn't mean the article itself is unworthy of being posted - and there usually is a better quote from the article that can be used as the post title.
I'd agree it's probably nine times out of ten - on other, lower-quality websites. We intend to keep a higher bar here on many things, and this should be one of them. Change the title if it improves the quality of the link. Don't change the title if it doesn't.
I agree on the not altering titles thing. I usually try to make up for poor titles in the tags.
I also sort of think we're worrying a bit too much about click-baity titles. If it's super click-bait, then yeah, change it, most having a title draw your attention is not a bad thing. It's really what titles are suppose to do.
The very-obviously-clickbaity title was what I was talking about, sorry for not making it clear enough. The inspiration for this post was indeed such a title I saw this morning, which was like "Bla bla this thing, bla bla bla" (I've forgotten the actual one, should've linked), where the title would have been significantly improved if "this thing" was replaced with what it actually stood for. Maybe we can find some criterion to spot and fix the most annoying and/or obvious clickbaits. But then that leads me to the question whether such content is worth being here anyways. And I think generally no, but sometimes a clickbaity article is indeed interesting and we could include it after a bit of a treatment, I reckon.
Edit: It was actually this post, where the title was "Mark Cuban says this skill will be critical in 10 years, and Elon Musk agrees" (emphasis mine). Later the title seems to be edited to replace the part in bold w/ "the ability to think creatively". I guess we could reliably say that a title objectively gets better if "this X" is changed to "the [more specific phrasing of X]".
I guess my tolerance for click baitiness is just really high. I'm happy to give any tilderno the benefit of a doubt that if they post something, it's worth clicking into the article. If it's just a clickbaity title, I have no issues. If the title and the article is bad, it's worth pointing out in comments. The title alone, I personally don't think is worth much discussion.
Edit: I honestly don't find that title all that clickbaity.
This is a tricky topic. I generally agree and will often try to rewrite titles on my own posts when I don't think the article's title is great, but it's a hard thing to do well, and often the new title is just as bad as the original but in a different way.
There's also a bit of a difference of "responsibility". If the submitter uses the original title and it's bad, that's annoying, but it's still the article author's fault, and you can't really blame the submitter. But if the submitter writes their own title and it's bad, half the comments in the thread will be complaining about it because the commenters know they're talking to the person that wrote it.
Tildes does have the ability to change titles after submitting (currently I'm the only one that can do it), so we can certainly try to figure out guidelines to do this kind of thing. It's definitely not simple though.
Headline writing is extremely difficult. I often find though, that the subtitle does a better job than the headline. The downside is then a load of complaints about not using the publishers headline.
If editing titles becomes available to "the masses" it'd have to be used incredibly responsibly, because people tend to write with their emotions when they need to be writing dispassionately. Newspaper editors agonise over headlines, and they're professionals, so a bunch of amateur critics have the potential to make a right pig's ear of things.
My two pence worth is that title editing should only be in the hands of a few very trusted people, and saved for the worst of the worst mangled posts.
Yeah, it's absolutely one of the functions where the concept of a "trust system" is really important. It should only be granted to people that have proven themselves to be trustworthy users over time, and if they misuse it they should lose access to it.
I think the issue is how much editorializing will be acceptable (from a community standpoint, not from a rules standpoint) when it comes to submission titles. I saw a click-baity post earlier today, and the thing is that the OP posted verbatim the article title. "Post the article title as it was written" is the standard rule in a lot of content aggregation sites. And I think that's generally a good rule, most of the time.
That being said, I think it's more on us as the community to not give attention to clickbait posts. This site is new, and I think too many formal rules will stifle new users and new ideas. But we can set how we want this community to act by leading through our actions. If clickbait posts just don't do well, then people will get the message on their own as they onboard with the community.
Maybe more to the point, if you're reposting the title verbatim, and it's click-baity, maybe the article isn't worth posting at all?
Sometimes even clickbaity posts have something worth discussing in them.
For the post earlier today, any discussion about the importance of liberal arts degrees in the future was totally derailed by people not liking the post itself. The article wasn't high-quality, but there was an interesting topic in there anyway.
Thanks! I thought so as well but definitely accept the criticism from others. I'll work to do better moving forward. :)
I thought it was an interesting idea, even as I criticized the articles title lol.
I would hate for this sort of reaction to drive people out who are just seeking a discussion.
/meh I've posted a good amount of content. Some of it is bound to fall flat.
And doesn't this demonstrate that we could use some limited rules to rephrase a bad title? I think it depends on whether we can develop a guideline strict and clear enough that in most cases only those titles which really need altering are edited.
In some Reddit communities, mods may add explanatory text flairs to problematic post titles.