All News Headlines Are Ragebait Now

Hello,

So I've reflected over the past ten months about why I left Beehaw. I wasn't entirely satisfied with my initial feelings about it - I knew it wasn't just the atmosphere of political commentary being everywhere, and people's responses about it seemed understandable.

I still check back in on the central feed every few months to see how things are going, and I've formed a theory as to why I found things so uncomfortable.

I think it's this: All news contemporary news headlines are formatted and designed with a dilberate desire to upset people and spread misinformation.

My example for this is a recent thread: Link.

It directly borrows the headline of the article it's about, which is:

Claude-powered AI agent’s confession after deleting a firm’s entire database: ‘I violated every principle I was given’

If you examine it, you'll notice that it's designed to provoke people who understand LLMs into correcting it, because it presents subtextual misinformation about how LLMs work - attributing them motive and internality that they do not possess. This, in turn, causes people who have been persuaded by corporate propaganda and misinformation campaigns to oppose those people, creating the image to third-party observers that there is an undecided discourse about what is true regarding LLMs and their capacities.

This, in theory, drives traffic to the article, but in practice causes this post and article to be part of an argument that is almost a ritual at this point - no new information is really obtained, nor is actionable advice given, it just causes a pointless, played out argument that creates stress, hurt feelings and alienation.

As an example, I think it displays the central problem that I have - By reproducing the headlines of news articles verbatim, you expose people to a statement intentionally designed to provoke a strong, often negative response, while the underlying article offers basically nothing new to any ongoing discussion.

Conclusion/Tl;Dr

I think that people should consider reading the article and providing a summarizing title of their own instead of providing the headline as the thread title. If they do this, and possibly even provide commentary in their initial post, the resulting discussion will be more productive and browsing will be more pleasant.