[kbenson]

The question the title raises is answered in the first paragraph, which consists of two sentences.

I really wish we could get past this phase of referring to every title that tries to gather interest by using a little bit of mystery as clickbait in a pejorative way. There's a middle ground between writing being manipulative and misleading and writing being fact based and dry.

[Joe-Z]

I do not. Calling bullshit out is exactly what I want to see. There's like 20 links on one page of HN for me, I don't need "a little bit of mystery" when I want to scan what I may be interested in

EDIT: It's 30 links...

[moate]

What about this title wouldn't give you the information you needed to decide if this is something you may be interested in?

[mrob]

I already know that killer whales attack great white sharks. I'm only interested in reading the article if it's about some other predator, but they deliberately omit the identity from the title to force me to click to find out. That is clickbait.

[Joe-Z]

I just want to be able to browse a news aggregating site and have a rough idea of what the article is about. So why have me click on the article only to find out "oh, it's about interactions between great whites and orcas" when you can just put that information in the title.

Sure, if I'm clicking on anything fish-related anyway that may not be a problem. But the title as it is phrased now clearly leaves out a key bit of information, namely who this predator is. That's disingenuous and the reason why I support calling it out as clickbait (i.e. "click on this link just to find out what it is actually about!")

[navigatesol]

>There's like 20 links on one page of HN for me, I don't need "a little bit of mystery" when I want to scan what I may be interested in

Right, because your life is so busy with important things like "scanning HN" that you can't spare 15 seconds finding out what "the predator" is by clicking the link.

>I don't need "a little bit of mystery"

The site doesn't exist to cater to your specific desires.

[kbenson]

Have you considered that the way the title is written can act as another channel for information about the article?

Is the informational content the only reason to read something here? I've read plenty of entertaining things here that I have no utilitatlrion use of the information (if there exists one) afterwards.

Do I really care that great white sharks are scared of orcas? Will that likely ever be useful to me beyond an anecdote in conversation? No, likely on both counts. But I enjoyed it, and in a way I likely wouldn't have had it been a dry listing of events.

Could the title have been "a recounting of select cases of great white shark and orca interactions"? Yes. But while that would have accurately described the content, it would not have accurately described the article, which is presented in the specicifc style the author chose.

Asking for all artistic liberty to be removed from titles is like asking for some machine learning algorithm to succinctly distill factual information as a title. That isn't always making things clearer, often it's just reducing the content of one channel of information in order to increase the content of another. Sometimes that can be useful but since each channel excels at communicating a different thing (facts vs emotion and tone), I think there is a decrease in how useful adding more of one typeof information is when there's little present of the other. I think this is a net loss in utility.

[Joe-Z]

I also appreciate HN for the interesting things I find out about the world that I would've never otherwise found out. I also not only read it for the informational content but can appreciate good writing.

And yes, of course there should be artistic liberty in choosing an interesting title. But this title I think is just disingenuous. There's nothing lost if you put the key information you clearly left out in the title. It is clearly only worded this way so people click on it to find out who this mysterious predator is. That's why it's called clickbait (kind of funny actually, considering it's a story about marine life... but I digress)

[navigatesol]

Some people on this site will complain or ask for a TL;DR if the content isn't written like AWS documentation. Is normal.