Can we stop it with "and the results are terrifying", "and you won't believe what I found", "the <x> situation is insane", etc.? The over-hyping of low quality, low effort content is making it hard to find actually interesting or informative things.
When you reach for the most exaggerated, over-the-top word possible when describing something relatively mundane, what will you use when you talk about something that actually is "terrifying?"
If that were true, it wouldn’t be such a popular problem. Right? Clearly HN is falling into the same pattern of all the other sites. Engagement hacking blah blah blah.
You continue to view this through the self-centered eyes of the consumer. But you’re actually the product so your perspective doesn’t matter to the seller or the buyer. That’s why this problem doesn’t get fixed.
"better", "more accessible"? What the hell are you talking about? Clickbait doesn't make anything better or more accessible.
Instead, it makes it impossible to pre-select for interesting information. Instead of telling you what something is about, it tells you how you should feel about it. That's not improving accessibility.
Oh completely. But my perspective is that we all should individually punish clickbait by not clicking. More broadly, we should strive to keep HN full of quality tech content rather than clickbait.
> “Every day, millions of developers paste sensitive code, API keys, passwords, database queries, and proprietary business logic into free online tools.”
Comment is a bit of an aside, but it's a shame what happened to JSONFormatter.org. The UI was preferable to alternatives for me, it ranked highly in Google so I could just search "JSON formatter" and access it, etc.
Now the site freezes 50% of the time when loading it on my Mac and when it doesn't freeze, there's a 5 second period of waiting before I can paste any input. Not to mention ads taking up 40% of the screen. The classic tech cycle of life.
:)
local first.
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