| HN Mirror

I want to preface that I may get long winded, because I didn't expect my little comment to get so much attention!

I believe it's important to discern the author's intent before labeling it as clickbait and deeming them a misleading person. And maybe that's the part where the two of us differ on why this post is or isn't clickbait.

In my eyes, I treat clickbait as articles whose content is vastly different from any meaningful interpretation of the title[0] or containing purposefully shallow content[1]. Heck, I may even leave satisfied by the latter post, but deep down I know I was clickbaited, haha!

I say all that because I take a step back when I read personal blogs on HN to determine if they were written explicitly to get posted here or written for another purpose and subsequently ended up here (and that doesn't have to be and probably can't be a completely black and white scale). It seems disingenuous to expect authors to write a title covering every possible way to misinterpret something when their intention probably wasn't to get it posted on HackerNews. I've read through a few of Ben's articles since this comment chain started, and he comes across as talking to a specific audience of folks in and around the game dev, VR dev, and the Handmade game communities. Lots of overlap between there and here, but still a different group with different expectations and understandings.

In essence, it boils down to this author just wrote an article for a personal blog where the title is not close to a lie at all, especially when you consider the context of his audience, he follows it up with detailed and relevant content, and his other blog posts also seem to be made up of content he put effort into[2]. I understand it can be argued that the title should have been editorialized, and I wouldn't be angry if a [4 running Dreams] had been added to the title during submission; however, I wouldn't call it clickbait just because he said PlayStation instead of PS4, especially because I wouldn't want to be faulted by anyone for saying "Jak and Daxter was the first game I ever beat on my PlayStation" even though it was on a PS2 and the game was technically called Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. It doesn't change that much for the group I would be talking to, just like how his title doesn't change much for his main audience.

With all of that said, it's hard for me to agree that Ben or the submitter azhenley were trying to clickbait or mislead anyone at all, and I hope I've made it more clear why I feel that way, because in the end feel it comes across as mean-spirited to insinuate the author doesn't understand that a PlayStation 1 existed almost 30 years ago and is therefore trying to clickbait and mislead everybody for some gain.

Ben & Austin - if you happen across this sometimes, apologies for having your post semi-derailed!

[0] - For example, "should you use an electric or gas powered mower in 2023?" and it's just a full page ad for a lawn care company with no pros/cons and no meaningful content related to the topic/question being discussed

[1] - All of those "how to do X in Y language" where the inner content consists of a link to an npm package and the rest of the content is just copy + pasted code from the project's readme.

[2] - And to cover my bases here, I didn't read every article, so who knows maybe there's one lurking that's just 200% clickbait, but I will say I thoroughly enjoyed the WASM article!