Psychology of Clickbait

uBlock Origin prevented 43 requests on this page. whoa, Wired!

39 for me. But on the plus side, it's pure bliss:

http://i.imgur.com/JhEobs1.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/hjyRkkD.png

I've custom-added to uBlock even the "see also" links from all websites. It means yes that I'm not "accidentally" discovering articles on wired, but at some point I decided it's okay. I'm probably not going to miss big things by doing this... (if Wired does come out with a great article, I'll probably get linked to it by someone somewhere).

I feel somewhat guilty that I do this to every site, it seems almost parasitic and not entirely in the spirit of the social contract. I think I'll give them $10 or something.

Seriously. When I use my wife's laptop my first thought is "why do all these pages look so different?"

Contrary to the article's claims, I click and visit the clickbaiters less and less. "Annoying but it works"... I disagree. For editorial content to work, it should appeal to long term readers.

Also, "psychology of clicbbait" isn't a clickait headline as they seem to suggest. Edit.. I see now they were referring to their own rather different headline, which I wouldn't have clicked on at all.

Well, it's not like those levers don't exist for HN readers, right?

HN Examples:

Python Quirks (hnclickba.it)

35 points by hnclickbait 4 hours ago | flag | 10 comments

>python quirks...the last article a couple of months ago basically was like `a,b=[[]] * 2; a.append(1); print(b)' and other such things I've known since my mother's knee, but may be there might be interesting nuggets this time, why not click.

Fusion (phys.org)

54 points by fusionnerd_plsgimmegrant 5 hours ago | flag | 20 comments

>Fusion results! Yeah, for the last year, every fusion article was a rehash of the same scientific, layman description of fusion, and a paragraph summarizing the latest result which pushed us incrementally towards it, but may be there is something really new here!

I'd like to think that HN has much more intelligent articles and a much more intelligent viewership, but we're driven by psychology too. Not to mention our biases, and while we endeavor to overcome them, they still drive us to an extent. I wager that decisions (like reading an article or not) is still a linear combination of interest, will, and yes, the psychology of anticipation and information gap as discussed in the article. The weights on subconcious driver "terms" in the linear combination might be lesser than the others but I'm pretty sure they still play a roll.