Defending Clickbait

Come to think of it... Assuming that you, dear reader, are just as appalled at the rampant abuse of clickbait titles and headlines as I am, the title of this post qualifies as clickbait.

Why would anyone want to defend clickbait? Clickbait is after all used to lure people into clicking on headlines that are specifically designed to enrage, exaggerate or misinform, thereby trapping them in their own confirmation-bias bubble and widening the divide between political, cultural and ideological factions. It's the stuff the "culture war" is made of, right? Why defend it then?

Well, that's all right; in fact the above would be my reaction if someone told me outright they want to defend the use of clickbait. But, like most things in life, there's more sides and dimensions to the whole clickbait phenomenon. I clicked on the video that's linked below this post, and its title is "Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective." I have to claim guilt here and say that I expected the video to confirm my own opinion on clickbait; I expected my bias to be confirmed. The question I have to struggle with is what this says about me. I like to think of myself as someone who actively seeks other opinions, someone who tries to break the effect of the social platform algorithms by regularly clicking on videos and articles I know to be from the other side of the ideological divide. But this particular video I selected with the certain expectation that it would be a scientific argumentation for all the bad things I and many others associate with clickbait...

But I was deceived, and I'm glad to have been deceived. Again, what does that say about my preconceived notions on clickbait? Here we have clickbait that gave me the opposite of what I was expecting, yet I'm glad to have fallen for it. I'll ponder on those questions and in the meantime I'd like you to do the same, and invite you to please watch the video. It's made by Veritasium one of my favorite channels on science. It's a channel that tries to educate people, like myself, on many science-related topics, and in the video it's explained why they use clickbait for all the good reasons. The main reason is simple, really; if you want to reach the largest possible audience, you simply HAVE to use clickbait to even have a chance for your video to be seen on YouTube. Have you ever seen your favorite YouTuber change the title or thumbnail of their videos? Well, that's probably because they're experimenting to determine how to lure as many people as possible to their content. Anyhow, it was good for me to see another side of the clickbait debate, a term that's automatically linked to bad things in my subconsciousness; maybe it's good for you as well. And maybe not; maybe you're way ahead of me and don't need it. In either case, thanks for visiting and I hope you'll be back tomorrow :-)

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