Powderhorn, thank you for responding to this. I wasn't intended to follow up on this post, because I primarily anticipated no response. I also do not expect any kind of action on the part of the community in response to this, but hopefully it would serve as a kernal of thought that people could build something useful for themselves on.

With that said, I shall respond directly.

My thesis is that contemporary headlines are not designed to inform people of the content of articles, but to provoke high-level emotional reactions that might lead to attention and click-thrus.

You can see this happening in the thread I linked - the majority of discussion is about the headline and not the content of the article.

So, following that, your response is a non-sequitor to my thesis. This isn't to dismiss your feelings or to attempt to harm you for social clout, but a statement of fact from my perspective - the fact that you try to choose low-impact headlines reinforces, rather than denies the idea I'm proposing - that the culture around writing the headlines is built to piss people off or scare them.

I, point of fact, chose my thread title as an example of this phenomenon - it's a dramatic oversimplification of my point.

Which is, to reiterate:

Contemporary headlines are meant to make you upset, because upset people pay attention and generate social fireworks that draw more attention.

You are a very important component of this community as someone who brings topics and concepts into the sphere of discussion, which prompts the socializing that is the lifeblood of any online community. I respect that and think it's a valuable and appreciable role to have.

This also means, however, that you are a curator of what enters the community discussion. Even if the headline of a news article is not directly, literally and transparently ragebait, it is very often going to be phrased in a way in which it can be misunderstood or be received as inflammatory.

This is true often enough that I feel like it would be better if something was done to decrease the chances of someone directly interacting with a sentence fragment intended to upset - it's cognitive work to cycle down from a state of aroused emotion, which decreases people's attention budget and also makes them less likely to feel the kinds of emotions that drive long-term social bonding and investment in a community.

All of this would be less of a problem if the larger social environment online was not so deeply in the thrall of this phenomenon that many people's only interactions with public-facing online communities is incredibly toxic. The ripple effects of this can be seen in how increasingly sensitive to subtextual statements everyone is becoming (Using sensitive to just mean sensitized and not any other connotation).

I include myself in this group. That's why I don't talk to people online anymore outside of small, private groups because those can form a culture and set of standards without being constantly bombarded by the cosmic radiation of writhing, desperate, capitalism-stranged systems that benefit directly from people's sense of anger, suffering and despair.

So, it is my recommendation that this minor change (Rewording all titles to fit a purely informative tone) could be helpful for the long-term health of this community. I can't participate here, but I do think it's a positive and fascinating experiment that I wish well.

Thanks for your time, Powderhorn.