You know, “this” used to be a perfectly innocent word. Nothing special, but a solid citizen of the grammar ecosystem. Who could have predicted it would turn into a major clickbait villain, meaning “We’re not going to tell you what this article is about until you click on it.”
FWIW I think I’m not alone in consciously avoiding clicking on such links.
If the link is not self-descriptive, and the poster does not provide a description, I am very unlkely to click.
@PeterLudemann @timbray demonstrably false. Case in point, Keith's Komix in Schaumburg illinois going out of business after 30 years due to tarrifs among other industry squeezes. A place where a younger me was accepted and loved. Beloved member of the community lost to attrition.
@ghostrunner @timbray
Yes, there are *some* popular businesses that stop because the owner retires or the lease isn't renewed or rent becomes too expensive. Those can indeed be "beloved", although "family business", "local landmark", or some other less-used cliché would be nice.
I'm tired of lazy click-bait pseudo-journalism.
@timbray I came to dislike very much the interrogative forms: “how”, “why”, “what” too.
It is in most of articles titles now.
I have seriously been thinking about a web site that has the title… which is a link… and the answer to what “this” (or the equivalent) is.
That’s it. That is the whole thing.
You know, “this” used to be a perfectly innocent word. Nothing special, but a solid citizen of the grammar ecosystem. Who could have predicted it would turn into a major clickbait villain, meaning “We’re not going to tell you what this article is about until you click on it.” FWIW I think I’m not alone in consciously avoiding clicking on such links. #enshittification
@timbray Just came across an article about this phenomenon:
Link: This one headline-writing tactic has Mastodon users raging
@tridral @timbray It’s almost like you need a second subscription to interpret the news source you thought you were paying for
This idea first occurred to me 30 years ago … as a sort of time-saving digest … but it wasn’t until the last decade that I realised how much the broken pattern was not broken but designed to work that way
@timbray Bad news for you: according to this study, the #headlines of traditional #news sources got #clickbaity as well:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04514-7
In my case, most articles I stumble upon were recommended here on the Fediverse or came through #RSS or #Atom feeds.
As the written word has moved online, new technological affordances and pressures – such as accelerated cycles of production and consumption – have changed how news headlines are produced and selected. Previous literature has linked certain strategies (e.g., clickbait) and linguistic features (e.g., length, negativity) to the success of text online (e.g., clicks). We tracked changes in the prevalence of those features in a sample of ca. 40 million news headlines across the last two decades from English-language outlets worldwide, focusing on the period in which the headline format adapted to the online context. We drew from a broad set of lexical, syntactic and semantic features from the literature to find the signature of the transition to online formats in the journalistic output of the last two decades. Many – but not all – of these features have become more prevalent over time, such as length and negativity. This systematic shift appeared across news outlets from different countries, political leanings, and of different journalistic quality. This may indicate an adaptation to the new affordances and pressures of the digital, online environment, and raises questions for the design of online environments in the future.
@timbray haha … it was 1987 when a new kid joined grade 5 and started using “this” in the modern sense of “a”
I spent a couple of weeks asking him to identify which thing, in his immediate vicinity, he was referring to, until I cottoned on to his out-of-town dialect … which was taking over our area anyway
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