Typical pattern: “Scientists find something strange when they look at a common whatever - and it’s not good!”
This kind of crap used to be the style of little blurbs at the side or the bottom of an article, but it’s in the headlines now. Until you click the headline you don’t even really know what the article is about anymore - just the general topic area, with maybe a fear trigger.
Clicking on the headline is going to display ads, but at that point the goal isn’t to get you to buy anything yet, it’s just to generate ad impressions, which the content provider gets paid for regardless of whether you even see the ads. It’s a weird meta-revenue created by the delivery mechanism, and it has altered the substance of headlines, and our expectations of what “headline” even means.
Nice idea - I remember on reddit some subs had a rule that required exact source headlines only, no user-written version. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have that restriction.
!News@lemmy.world is very similar on that rule. I don’t like it because I’ve had many links removed when I wanted to give a bit more context or the title is total click bait.
Yeah, it’s got advantages and drawbacks. /r/Europe had a fairly-strict implementation. It’s helpful to avoid people editorializing titles, which was definitely originally a problem there, and for some reason, I’ve rarely run into here.
However, it hits a couple problems:
Some publications have titles that are totally reasonable in the context of a reader of the publication, but which are unreasonable if you’re just skimming titles from many publications on a social media website. I remember people complaining about some title in a publication aimed at US Navy personnel, and people on /r/Europe complaining that it didn’t explicitly say which country it was talking about in the headline, which was talking about “the Army” or something like that.
A bunch of publications stick their name on the titles of their page, which is just obnoxious when social media websites tend to also show the domain name of submissions.
I see a lot of headlines with mis-escaped HTML ISO entities.
Sometimes it’s not immediately clear why a given story is relevant to the community. For example, maybe you’re on, oh, a community that deals with books. An article comes out titled “Trump tariff policy gets additional executive order updating policy”. In the context of the specific community, you might really want to know the fact up-front that the issue is that one of the items in the order is either books are excluded from tariffs or that there’s a global 200% tariff.
The Threadiverse does let one attach some text to a submitted article, which both partly brings back the issue with editorialization (if I’m putting anything that’d be potentially-controversial, I try to put it in a top-level comment rather than the submission text), but can let one do some of the “context-information-providing” stuff. But that’s not subject to community correction; only the submitter can deal with it. And it doesn’t show up in the list of articles, just when viewing the comment page for an article.
It would be better if they allowed for clarification in brackets or something after the original title.