[baxuz]

You could add any title that's formulated as an imperative. "You won't believe..." "Guess which..." "You should..."

Also titles that are formulated as a simple subject - predicate - object sentence: "XY considered anti-pattern" "Trump is right" "Hitler did nothing wrong" "Drunk girl shows tits" "Homeopathy is the future of medicine"

Same works if formulated as a question: "Is Trump right?" "Has Hitler done nothing wrong?" "Is homeopathy the future of medicine?"

Bonus points for exclamation marks, pound signs and uppercase words.

[minimaxir]

I wrote the original article visualizing clickbait from scraped Facebook data: http://minimaxir.com/2016/08/clickbait-cluster/

Yes, there are obvious tropes of clickbait. Facebook, however, is cracking down on them, so there's been a slight brinksmanship between "how do I get people to click articles without following the tropes?"

From the visualization in my article, you can see there is a spatial blend between sources like the NYT and BuzzFeed when subjects like kids and Pokemon are brought up.

[abhisvnit]

The point that the article is trying to explain is clickbaits cant just be classified only by using these titles. The content of the webpages also plays a big role :)

[mtgx]

Not all clickbait headlines are written like that.

For instance: "Russia hacked US power grid" doesn't have any of those, and yet it was a completely clickbait/sensationalist/borderline fake news headline from WashPost. How is AI going to deal with those?

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/31/russia-hysteria-infects-...

[hyperpape]

That wasn't clickbait. Arguably it was worse. "You'll never guess what happens when she starts to sing!" isn't likely to contribute to increased military tensions between nuclear powers.

To put it as a triviality: just because two things are bad doesn't mean they have to be bad in the same way.

I also wouldn't classify that story as "fake news"[0]. Those were things like "Revealed: Obama says Clinton would be terrible president", or "Revealed: Trump under investigation by European Court for Human Rights". Those were straightforward false claims, with zero actual sourcing, by people who knew they were lying. This Washington Post article was shitty reporting, using thin sources, that fit a currently popular hysteria. And it was completely inaccurate. But the authors didn't sit down and say "what can we make up." They got some sources and didn't do any due diligence, because it was too hard to pass up on such a juicy story.

I'm not wedded to the idea that these articles aren't fake news, but I'm confident it doesn't make sense to call them clickbait.

[0] Of course, this relies on the idea that fake news doesn't just mean "news that is wrong", which has been with us forever, but more about a social media driven trend within the past year or two.