âŚthereby reducing Upworthyâs utility from 0.01 to zero.
The only reason this hasnât happened earlier is that CNN is so behind the times and out of touch with reality they hadnât heard of clickbaiting until now.
Despite the fact that I think they are bastards for turning tragedy into clickbait marketing, I still find myself fighting the urge to follow the linkâŚ
Will no commenter reveal the mystery and save us from having to click? I guess the task falls to meâŚ
The headline: âPolice: Girl, 14, stabs sister 40 times because she felt unappreciatedâ. The little sister was 11 and later died. The 14-year-old called 911 and initially tried to lie about an attacker barging into the home. The girls lived at home with their mother.
I see this as just going full-circle â CNNâs been using the âstay tunedâ method for news reporting on TV for ages. Well, not just CNN. Tune into almost any news broadcast and they typically talk about a story 3 or 4 times before they actually report on it. Wasnât there a boingboing post about just that?
Iâll have more details after this commercial break. And coming up next, whatâs up with this banana? The truth may surprise you.
Iâll question calling out Upworthy for the clickbait type headline. This style has been used by ad people and spammers for a long time.
The Upworthy titles do often use a variation of this but Iâve found them more clever that âthis one wierd trickâ
Simpsons mocked this years ago with Kent Brockman teasing the news. âOne of these top soda will kill you. Tune in at 11 to find out which one!â
The clickbaityness doesnât surprise me or even particularly bother me, since news headlines sent out as tweets are, like headlines themselves, intended to be âclickbaityâ enough to get you to read the article in the first place.
What bugs me is âthe reason why will shock you.â No, CNN. The fact that it happened at all is the âshockingâ part. Feeling unappreciated is just one of several non-shocking reasons why a teenager might lash out. If she stabbed her sister once to see if sheâd deflate and fly around the room like an untied balloon, and 39 times more in order to make a more pleasing symmetrical pattern of cuts, maybe that reason would be shocking.
But as it is, violent teenage sororicide, regardless of motive, is shocking.
What a weird thing for me to get all pedantic about.
They had one job.
Downworthy (a chrome extension) can help deflate the hyperbole - http://downworthy.snipe.net/
You wonât BELIEVE how this programmer fixed the ENTIRE internet with this one weird trick!
As if there are reasons why that wonât shock you.
ââŚMeh, everybody knew little Susie REALLY had it coming to her for quite a while nowâŚâ
Isnât the whole point of these âshockingâ type headlines, is that they allow the editors to not go into any details?
Isnât the whole point of twitter is to cut out the insignificant details?
âWhat this tweet says will shock you! Hold on, thereâs still more space to tweet? Shocking!â
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