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.
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.