How Does Clickbait Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
862 words · ~4 min read
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What happens on this episode of TechWiki will absolutely shock you. Well, maybe
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not. And don't worry, we haven't sold the channel to Buzzfeed. Today's episode
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is all about clickbait, a certain style of content and headline writing that's
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geared towards trying to get people to click on something as much as possible,
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often at the expense of quality information. But what makes clickbait
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clickbay anyways? The answer lies in our own psychological tendencies. As
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different as people are, there are certain things that the brain generally
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just really likes. Information presented in an ordered list, for example, is
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especially appealing, which is why you always see the slideshows of the 17 most
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important One Direction moments or whatever. These work because they spread
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information in a structured way and also present themselves with a degree of
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authority. A list with a precise number of elements seems more certain and has
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more finality than a general headline. It's very appealing to our brains, which
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want to cut through the crap and understand things quickly. Very ironic
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considering the lists themselves are often completely freaking useless. And
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even for click- baity headlines that don't direct you to a numbered list, the
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use of authoritative sounding words such as science, the best, or destroyed is
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common in order to appeal to that same desire for certainty in our lives. Which
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also explains why many articles that try to promote half-baked things like
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political opinions claim that a certain argument destroys the other one. Other
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clickbait headlines flip the script of how journalism was usually done in the
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past by merely teasing at what the content has inside. Instead of dog bites
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man, you see this man confronted a dog
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and you won't believe what happened next. This encourages the user to click
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through instead of giving away the articles meat right in the headline.
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This kind of direct appeal to our natural curiosity results in the reward
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center of our brain lighting up when you find out what the answer to the
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click-baity question or tease in the headline was. Even if the content inside
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turns out to be totally stupid. This has often been referred to as the curiosity
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gap, which is a key part of how the website Upworthy operates. Upworthy's
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tendency to only place hints as to the actual content in their titles has led
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their articles to being some of the most shared content on all of Facebook. And
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of course, clickbait has gone beyond legitimate sites, well, as legitimate as
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they can be, to being used in ads designed to look like real articles.
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Although quite a few techsavvy users have developed an eye for what's
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legitimate content and what's advertising or just use an ad blocker or
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something, the enticing headlines still draw a lot of people and have for a long
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time. Indeed, the arguable ancestors of modern clickbait are the vapid but
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eye-catching headlines of yestery year. From the yellow journalism in New York
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City that preceded the Spanishamean War in the late 1800s to grocery store
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tabloids claiming that the royal family is actually from Mars. With this sort of
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sensationalism playing to some pretty fundamental aspects of human nature, I
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wouldn't expect clickbait to go away anytime soon. But don't worry, I promise
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you that you'll never see a TechWiki episode titled The 22 Cutest CPUs you'll
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your free 10-day trial. Thanks for watching, guys. Like it if you liked it, disliked if you disliked it. Don't
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forget to get subscribed, and let us know in the comments down below if
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there's some like psychology of something style episode that you'd like
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us to check out in the future. Don't forget to click on this video, which
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hopefully has a clickbaity title so you actually do it and has something to do
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with it's super fun or something. Have fun over there. You're you're super
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interested in what may or may not have happened. You'll never guess. Yeah.