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by kbenson
2614 days ago
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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. |
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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)