Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]
However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn’t suggest a different person to blame, or that you’re wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?
In defense there, that’s often taken as implicit and or likely. It’s a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with “Authors don’t make their own headlines” doesn’t fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.
Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go “erm actually, it’s the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines”. And understanding that allows us to look at the actual questions.
Is there an actual issue now that we understand the real cause.
Is there an actual fix?
If it’s “authors keep making bad headlines” that seems more fixable than “financial incentives reward bad headlines and good headlines literally die off”.
Yeah in Bob’s defense I’ve done the same in the past (gently informed someone that the writer wasn’t responsible for the headlines under the illusion that I was helping). Though overall I’m not sure this story checks out.
I think there are incentives pushing both towards misleading headlines and non-misleading (or less misleading) headlines. Incentives for the latter include people cancelling their subscriptions, people getting bit by misleading headlines one too many times and stop paying attention to certain sources known for the misleading headlines, journalists or other staff quitting because they’re embarrassed to be associated with the terrible headlines, internal complaints that don’t rise to quitting, etc. Part of the value of complaining about misleading headlines is to (slightly) increase the cost of said misleading headlines[1].
Each individual complaint doesn’t do much, but people complaining about the headlines aren’t independent of the incentives the companies face.
I don’t think the headline equilibrium is anywhere near maximum slop (you can imagine a result where each headline is RL’d to maximize click-through rates and is completely independent of the article in question), so I want to caution against a sort of weak nihilism that looks something like “What Can I Do, It’s Just the Incentives.”
I’m not sure about the empirical picture here, but my general impression is that at least in the English-speaking ~educated internet, headlines in the last ten years have on average gotten better rather than worse at not being misleading.
In defense there, that’s often taken as implicit and or likely. It’s a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with “Authors don’t make their own headlines” doesn’t fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.
Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go “erm actually, it’s the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines”. And understanding that allows us to look at the actual questions.
Is there an actual issue now that we understand the real cause.
Is there an actual fix?
If it’s “authors keep making bad headlines” that seems more fixable than “financial incentives reward bad headlines and good headlines literally die off”.
Yeah in Bob’s defense I’ve done the same in the past (gently informed someone that the writer wasn’t responsible for the headlines under the illusion that I was helping). Though overall I’m not sure this story checks out.
I think there are incentives pushing both towards misleading headlines and non-misleading (or less misleading) headlines. Incentives for the latter include people cancelling their subscriptions, people getting bit by misleading headlines one too many times and stop paying attention to certain sources known for the misleading headlines, journalists or other staff quitting because they’re embarrassed to be associated with the terrible headlines, internal complaints that don’t rise to quitting, etc. Part of the value of complaining about misleading headlines is to (slightly) increase the cost of said misleading headlines[1].
Each individual complaint doesn’t do much, but people complaining about the headlines aren’t independent of the incentives the companies face.
I don’t think the headline equilibrium is anywhere near maximum slop (you can imagine a result where each headline is RL’d to maximize click-through rates and is completely independent of the article in question), so I want to caution against a sort of weak nihilism that looks something like “What Can I Do, It’s Just the Incentives.”
I’m not sure about the empirical picture here, but my general impression is that at least in the English-speaking ~educated internet, headlines in the last ten years have on average gotten better rather than worse at not being misleading.
Though if the business model is truly clickbait, there is of course some backfire risk.