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by t_mann 1437 days ago
Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out).

So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".

3 comments

I really hope Dang or one of the others in charge here is reading this and is willing to consider it.

The change suggested here would be one of the greatest single improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio on this site, and even news in general.

It would be a policy change rather than a tech change really, and would need some enforcement. Just a reminder on the submission page, and perhaps a banner at the top of the home page highlighting the policy change, and directing people to flag titles in the wrong form.

(Or, failing that, does anyone have any suggestions for good tech news sources where the titles are in this format, this is definitely something I want to see)

It would also be easy to prompt you to consider rewording if your title has a question mark. There would be some false positives, but I'd think the vast majority would benefit from rewording.
Yes. We've changed the title to a representative sentence from the first paragraph.
I read once that a headline that ends in a question mark is almost always a no. I think the thought is that positive answers to a question are shared as a statement. Much like you shared. It saves me a few clicks?
You ended with a question mark, so I must assume it doesn't save you a few clicks.

I'll take my downvotes now.