Negativity drives online news consumption

I used to work at a food/recipe publication and had a similar experience -- users constantly complained that they wanted more healthy recipes, but those types of recipes always performed poorly. Meatloaf and other comfort foods dominated traffic.

This has been a good opening for niche creators on Youtube and such -- i.e., there are plenty of people out there interested in vegan, oil-free recipes, and that audience can go to a specialist on Youtube and the creator can be successful covering only that one niche. But in aggregate it's not going to outperform food that provides more dopamine, so the major food publications have to deprioritize it.

I watched a farewell video of a very far right person dying of Covid. He didn't get vaccinated but I don't know if it was because he was anti-vax, didn't think Covid was real or didn't get a chance as this was early in the pandemic. It was a recording made from a hospital bed and uploaded to Facebook. As he was saying his goodbyes he said something like "...and tell Brandon (son) I love him, not to trust anyone, and no one will ever help you in life"

I realized that certain people indoctrinate their children, and this is the correct usage of the word, with a negative outlook on life. They ignore the altruistic nature of humanity for a distance based trust system. Assuming the son takes this message to heart he'll likely experience more problems because of his mistrust and when he examines his situation in life confirmation bias will prevent any self reflection. I don't understand why you reduce us to "scared and vigilant" and I wonder if that is a self fulfilling state.

A questionable headline- does it frame and try to link negativity with news, or choose this proposition because it's more likely to get clicks?

If I had unlimited cash and I was the editor, my front pages would be tongue-in-cheek nods to negative stories, like "CRIME ON PAGE 15" so they'd have to flip through a meadow of full page color ads of sakura trees, the textual equivalent of green noise.

Archive.org has a pleasant viewing experience if you flip through many of the fully-scanned magazines, simply because there are no digital popups- at least the ads on the pages are inert and unable to cause a virus.

The headline of the article is a concept that most of us are familiar with, but what I think is the novel part is how they quantified it. If you are not planning on reading all 8000+ words, scroll to the results section and look at table 2 for all the headline variations and click through rates.

Kinda like what P.T. Barnum once said: “There's no such thing as bad publicity”.