[mrtksn]

Which makes me wonder, why people insist on having a headline AND an article in 2020?

It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.

[TeMPOraL]

The headline is there to make you want to click on it and view the article.

The article serves two purposes. It's primary job is to be a scaffolding for delivering advertisements to the reader. The secondary purpose is to be a word soup that makes the article appear in search results related to some popular topic.

That's it. Many people don't realize that the job of a headline is not to be truthful, accurate, or even sensible. It only has one job to do: make you click through, so that ads can be shown to you. Similarly, the job of a news article isn't to inform you about anything, but to keep you scrolling until the end, so that you may see more ads along the way. That's why you don't see the Inverted Pyramid anymore[0].

That's modern journalism in a nutshell.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

[names_are_hard]

That got me thinking of an idea for a startup: let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content (since no one reads the articles anyway), and then other people can reply to the headlines. To make sure that authors stick to the rules, we'll limit the length of each headline to 140 characters. Side benefit: users can post their headlines via a single SMS message.

[duckmysick]

Let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content and then generate the content based on the comments or the responses.

[mrtksn]

I made a sketch of it on a napkin: https://imgur.com/UHLAdxQ

[jaywalk]

I thought I was so clever and was going to reply "you've invented Twitter!" and then I read the rest of your comment, and realized that was your point. Damn it.

[names_are_hard]

In case it wasn't clear, this was tongue-in-cheek. This service exists, it's called Twitter.