It's Exhausting Trying To Read Video Game Website Headlines - Aftermath - eviltoast
You're not the Riddler, just tell me what this is about
  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    361·
    1 year ago

    I love how this headline, too, doesn’t tell us what it’s about. But fair enough, it’s a good way to poke fun at the clickbait problem.

    And frankly, the shitty part is that by now clickbait headlines/titles have become utterly ubiquitous. To the point where most users will no longer even notice, because they’ve become 100% of headlines.

  • avater@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    1 year ago

    a headline from the same page 😅

    I Don’t Really Understand What The Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It

    But in general I totally agree on that. Those clickbait headlines simply suck.

    • Goronmon@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I think for that title to accurately reflect the overall complaint it would be something more like “I Don’t Really Understand What This New Movie Release Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It” or to use the lower level comment’s example “You Can Finally Fall for Your Favorite Character In This Dating Sim Based on a Popular Recent Release”.

      Where the title is intentionally vague so that you need to read it to even understand what they are talking about. The original titles could be easily summarized as “Opinions on Five Nights At Freddy’s movie” or “Dating Sim based on character from Armored Core 6” just based on the title alone. So if you are aren’t interested in either of those topics, you can easily skip reading.

  • stopthatgirl7@kbin.social
    12·
    1 year ago

    I love how the comments so far are complaining about “clickbait headlines” when in the article he says he doesn’t consider these to be “clickbait” because the definition doesn’t fit these.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      1 year ago

      That’s probably because the definition is a personal one. In the very literal sense of the word, a headline baiting you into clicking onto it needlessly is clickbait. It baited you into clicking.

      And while the author is free to use a very narrow definition, it’s entirely reasonable - and has as far as I can tell become the norm - to define it as any headline where the article only says something that would have trivially fit into the headline to begin with.

      So for example, this very article could be better titled “Clickbait has made video game headlines exhausting to read”, and without being longer it would convey the crucial part of information - why is it exhausting?! - without someone having to first open and scan the article. Which, if the article were well-written, they’d still want to do, assuming the subject matter is of interest to them.
      And that’s the thing: clickbait precludes being allowed this choice. By not telling you the crucial piece of information, you are forced to open the article (generating ad impressions!) to find out whether you want to read it or not, often wasting time diagonally scanning said article.