You Won’t Believe What Comes Next: The Solution for Clickbait Headlines
Summary
Clickbait headlines dominate sites like Hacker News and Reddit, where catchy titles outcompete quality content. The author calls this the "Law of Clickbait Headlines," a twist on Goodhart's Law: as people block or ignore clickbait, new versions appear, creating an endless cycle. One Hacker News user found "how did we get here" in 363 submissions and "this changes everything" in 571. The author proposes letting AI generate headlines that reflect actual content relevance, with high-karma community members editing them and feeding changes back to the AI. This could help quality content compete without marketing skills and push advertisers toward more valuable material.
We’ve all fallen victim to the irresistible allure of clickbait headlines. Whether it’s “You won’t believe what happens next!” or “10 secrets you need to know,” these tantalizing titles are designed to capture our attention and encourage us to click. While they may be effective at driving traffic, they often lead us down a rabbit hole of low-quality content and endless scrolling.
I've seen it firsthand on HackerNews and Reddit.
I call it the “Law of Clickbait Headlines”, which is a variation of "Goodhart's Law" for the endless work of protecting communities from submitting links with clickbait headlines. The proposition is simple: as people block or ignore clickbait, another one tends to take its place over time. Consequently, it becomes an endless cycle, making it increasingly difficult for quality content to break through the noise as people continue to game the system.
According to “dredmorbius” on HackerNews:
Algolia, at this writing, the words “how did we get here” appear in HN submissions (net of flags and edits) 363 times. That’s exceeded by the even more tiresome “this changes everything” (571 results). Both should be hellbanned IMO. I’m having an email exchange with dang over this presently.
— “How did we get here” search on hn.algolia.com
— “This changes everything” search on hn.algolia.com
The Problem with User-Generated Headlines
Headline-based websites like Hacker News and Reddit are notorious for their abundance of clickbait titles. These platforms favour advertisers and content creators who can craft attention-grabbing headlines, while quality content without the marketing flair often goes unnoticed.
The Veritasium YouTube channel, for example, is a great channel that talks about real science and shares valuable and credible scientific research but is compelled to use clickbait-style headlines and images for its videos to attract viewers. Unfortunately, this means that many people from the general audience do not have access to well-delivered evidence-based research simply because the researchers either lack the skills or knowledge to create good headlines.
But what if there was a way to break this cycle and prioritize valuable content over catchy headlines?
Enter Artificial Intelligence.
Instead of relying on user-generated headlines, AI could be employed to create titles that accurately represent the content’s relevance, leaving edits to trusted community members (high karma), which are fed back into the AI for tuning. By making AI responsible for crafting headlines, we can focus on the substance of the content rather than its clickbaitability (is that an actual word? 🤔).
AI-generated headlines have the potential to level the playing field, allowing quality content to shine regardless of the creator’s marketing prowess. Moreover, this approach could help discourage advertisers from exploiting clickbait strategies and instead motivate them to produce more valuable content.
