It's only bait if you bite on it, as you did. I did as well, because I could see it was a Quanta link, and found it quite interesting. Would I have clicked on it if the title was "The Kelley--Meka bounds for sets free of three-term arithmetic progressions?" Probably not. So in this case, I consider myself fortunately baited.
So wait, you're saying that people should just accept that headlines are uselessly hyperbolic, and either (A) click every one of them to see if they're worth your time or (B) never click any, to avoid "biting" and getting "baited"?
Eminently practical approach, but we can hope for a better world where this isn't necessary...
It seems that there is actually (C) somewhere in there, which would be "apply some judgement" i.e. look at the source, and maybe (D) let someone else on HN bite on it and get a synopsis there.
Well for (C) I don't have time to memorize the "clickbaityness" of every single news outlet on the internet (of which there are probably hundreds of thousands), so that's a non-starter in reality. For (D) that seems like a practical solution, but now I have to read all of the top-level comments (of which there may be many), to see if one of them tells me if it's clickbait, before clicking on the article?
Hey, you know what, while we're assigning WORK to other HN members, why don't we just ask that people submitting science news do a little digging and find a non-clickbait headline? Why is that unacceptable, while your assertion is acceptable?
it may be clickbait but it does provide information about the crossing over of fields, which is interesting, particularly when those fields are computer science and maths