[ahussain]

A little disingenuous I feel. Sometimes people click 'click-bait' links precisely because of how ludicrous they are, not because they are looking for a hack. I can imagine people clicking some of these thinking 'Ha, who would possibly fall for this?' rather than 'Gosh, I hope this works!'.

My 2 cents - still a fun experiment

[liamgooding]

Yeah 100% agree, particularly with the "Instagram selfie tips to raise a seed round" link, I think people were more likely to be clicking to laugh at the article/author!

Worth noting, I churned a few twitter followers during his period too who I suspect were pissed off at being link-baited :-(

[onion2k]

If you agree that people are clicking to laugh at the ludicrous claim of the author, why then do you say;

The conclusion I’ve drawn from the data you’re about to see, is that we’re all looking for the ‘hacks’. The shortcuts. The non-obvious variables we can change to have a directly causal effect on helping us to get the things we really, really want: raising investment, getting MRR (and as you’re about to see) getting a date!

Surely, as you apparently agree, the conclusion is that people aren't looking for hacks, but rather they're looking for idiots to laugh at. The only causal effect going on here is that people who tweet stupid links cause people to laugh at them.

[yebyen]

Isn't there another possibility, that people are looking for hacks, but they're also very good at detecting link-bait, and even then they still click it for the lulz?

[ramykhuffash]

I think it's a lot about curiosity and not necessarily to laugh at the author.

I doubt you'd do this experiment again, but an idea might be to ask those who clicked why they did it and what they were expecting to find.

[chippy]

If I am honest with myself I will click them and then decide why I clicked them if I feel duped! It's like I suspend judgement just in case.