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Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

hu-berlin.de

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Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#61

Post by Blikkentrekker »

ianhorn wrote: post #3

It’s so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?

Because a man rarely realizes how often they mislead, when the headline tell him what he wants to hear.

All the very rational criticism often put forth about such principles is seemingly saved for disagreement and scrutiny for what one does not wish to hear.

I daresay that many on H.N. would relish a sensationalist haedline such as “How Microsoft and Intel planned for RISC-V to never take the market.”, which upon closer inspection in the article would be less sensationalist than what the headline suggests.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#62

Post by Blikkentrekker »

renewiltord wrote: post #7
ianhorn wrote: post #3

It’s so widely acknowledged that headlines mislead, and also that people often only read the headline. Why does the editorial practice of shitty headlines persist so strongly? It seems like journalistic integrity goes so much further with article content than article headlines, so why do they put up with it?

Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having. One strategy for success is to be the fall guy for everything. And then be paid for it. Journalism ult…

> Because it is a market optimal strategy. Since consumers express strong preference for emotional headlines, it is optimal to give them that. Consumers frequently lie that they prefer honest headlines, but that is merely a mismatch between their true beliefs and the identity they wish to project themselves as having.

It is also a fine explanation as to why countries often have all these noble rights in their constitutions, and everyday technicalities by which they are legally evaded.

The people don't want these rights to exist, they want to claim they want them to exist. They want to say “Better a thousand guilty men go free, than a single innocent man be in prison!”, but what they really want is conviction upon præponderance of evidence, together with the all to common mentality of “It won't happen to me.”.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#63

Post by spicymaki »

wnevets wrote: post #55
crmd wrote: post #13

The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed: * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason Then I simply don’t click on it. [1] https:…

I had to stop watching Scotty Kilmer because of his thumbnails/titles. At one point it felt like every new video was click baited with him being sent to prison, dying, retiring or being forced to shut down to business. I'm willing to tolerate the o-face from channels who put out good content on a regular basis tho.

Yes, I did the same thing about a year ago. I enjoyed his insight as a mechanic, but could not stay for the unsavory click bait. Unfortunately the technique seem to be effective and might be the only method for some of these channels to grow after a certain threshold.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#64

Post by forgingahead »

justin66 wrote: post #37
crmd wrote: post #13

The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed: * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason Then I simply don’t click on it. [1] https:…

That might be a good strategy for dealing with youtube videos but it's not an equally good strategy for dealing with print media. The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be. A great article by a great author will quite often get a ridiculous headline from an editor, for all the bad reasons an editor might have: baiting t…

The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well. Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom - for a brief moment in history, there was a nice thought that the subscription revenue model would allow more fair and balanced reporting compared to the ad-revenue models (since they wouldn't need clickbait headlines/stories).

Turns out that people don't want to pay to hear things they don't like. So it's all become more polarized, and those of us who really would like to know what is going on have no clue what is true or not any longer.

Break the legacy institutions by boycotting them, and encourage individual journalists to self-publish. The credibility of the person will reign, and there is a huge market for independents who are actually interested in what is happening around the world without all the partisan spin.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#65

Post by frongpik »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #56
frongpik wrote: post #39

That's a big reason what makes HN successful: a blanket ban on emotional content. Edit. I've been thinking of an idea that for us knowledge sharing resembles neuron connections, based on my limited knowledge of that topic. Each of us watches a few channels of information and makes a choice to forward/retweet a piece of information so your subscribers would see it, ignore it or block a channel if it sends you bogus da…

Like a web of trust, but for link recommendations? Maybe it could work by changing the incentives. If you had a magical perfect AI that was loyal to you and ran on your PC, it would always act in your interest - Spidering the web and returning interesting things based on your feedback. Whereas the current model is, none of this stuff is self-hosted, it has to run on Somebody Else's Computer. SEC costs money to run, s…

My idea is a lot simpler and doesn't need any ML. Think of it as the linkedin feed: if you upvote a post, it'll be shown to your contacts, but if you upvote too much junk posts, your contacts will unsubscribe.

This idea is relatively trivial to implement as an alternative UI of HN. That site would show the very same html, but will hack the upvote and downvote buttons. You upvote to subscribe to someone and downvote to unsubscribe. If someone in your watchlist upvotes something, that something gets shown in your feed. You'd still use the main HN feed for discovery. Eventually this would form a network that propagates information in some way. That network could be even visualised in some way to see how certain posts travel thru it. The topology of the network, its dynamic properties and whether it'll remain connected are interesting open questions. The entire thing can be written as a one file python script with a sqlite db running on a 5 bucks vps. The biggest challenge is getting enough folks on hn to use it.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#66

Post by nerdponx »

[deleted] wrote: post #58
nerdponx wrote: post #6

The subjects' brain activity was recorded using an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they made judgments about the individuals. Fast, involuntary brain responses can be distinguished here from slower, more controlled responses. The researchers had expected the latter to involve consideration of the source's credibility in addition to emotion, and thus that credibility might factor into people’s judgments, whereas emot…

[deleted]

That was my fear. Do you have a reference for a meta-analysis or something?

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#67

Post by tshaddox »

justin66 wrote: post #37
crmd wrote: post #13

The only solution is not to engage with emotionally manipulative content. Even, for example, with nerdy YouTube channels that I love, if a video shows up in my feed: * with a title $villain $unflattering_third_person_present_verb $something * with the format $hero $flattering_third_person_present_verb $something * a person in the thumbnail making an o-face[1] for any reason Then I simply don’t click on it. [1] https:…

That might be a good strategy for dealing with youtube videos but it's not an equally good strategy for dealing with print media. The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be. A great article by a great author will quite often get a ridiculous headline from an editor, for all the bad reasons an editor might have: baiting t…

> The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be.

That shouldn’t really change your policy. Some of those YouTubers might not have a choice in their thumbnails either. This doesn’t change the fact that the person or group is attempting to get you to consume some content by using irrelevant emotional manipulation. It sucks that some people in the group are probably well-meaning and competent.

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#68

Post by [deleted] »

forgingahead wrote: post #64
justin66 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a good strategy for dealing with youtube videos but it's not an equally good strategy for dealing with print media. The thing to remember about magazine or newspaper articles is that the author does not typically have any input on what the headline will be. A great article by a great author will quite often get a ridiculous headline from an editor, for all the bad reasons an editor might have: baiting t…

The best thing then is to ignore/block print media as well. Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom - for a brief moment in history, there was a nice thought that the subscription revenue model would allow more fair and balanced reporting compared to the ad-revenue models (since they wouldn't need clickbait headlines/stories). Turns out that people don't want to p…

[deleted]

Re: Emotional headlines have an impact regardless of the credibility of the source

#70

Post by ryandrake »

baby wrote: post #51
fabatka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a youtube client (or browser extension) that accepts a whitelist of channels and only shows videos from those? This got me thinking... A browser extension deleting everything from the front page except videos from the given channels might not even be that complicated. Hm, I might end up creating a simple extension like this... Edit: Sorry for being OT

I think this is what we need: plugins that protect users. Allow users to vote against webpages that are too “sensational” or something.

You can't crowdsource good taste. All you'll end up with is popular content gets upvoted and unpopular content doesn't. Every voting system open to the masses ends up this way. So many problems on the Internet stem from people confusing popularity with quality.
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