Technology

That's partially the reason for making my AutoTL;DR bot.

There’s just way too many articles being posted where at best the headline only implies something that isn’t actually true and at worst just plainly lies.

The funny thing is, even the article itself is often already correcting the headline, but I can’t imagine that more than 10% are actually reading every one, which means there’s a constant stream of misinformation being broadcasted. Not every one of these has high stakes, but still.

Here’s two examples that I just came across:

• Signal Denies Existence of Zero-Day Vulnerability on the App | Post. In the article: Someone posted unfounded claims about a vulnerability, Signal investigated but didn’t find anything, the person apologized and took the tweet down.
• Goldman Sachs exec reportedly said Apple Card savings account was a ****ing mistake | Post. In the article: "Mistake" isn't even part of the quote. A person is saying this before it started and that person may not have even been involved in the project after.

And because people are only reading the title, they upvote and move on. Even though the comments set it straight as well. There’s a lot more that I’ve come across. It’s infuriating.

I hate headlines. They’re written on purpose to piss me off and sometimes they work. Maybe I should stop reading headlines and just read the articles instead. Probably healthier than the other way around.

A lot of news sites seem to change the articles and headlines as the events go on, meaning you can post one title, and go back later to find a completely different take on it.

No. There are studies about that, see e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/misinformation-desk/202212/study-few-people-read-what-they-share for a more recent one. That's also why Facebook, Twitter & Co at various times implemented various features trying to push you reading the stuff you post.

This is the kind of thing where moderators need to put in a lot of active work to enforce some level of content and behavior standards or it'll simply collapse to the basic state of human laziness like most online communities.

There's not exactly anything wrong with that - it's perfectly normal - but people will always default to doing this kind of thing unless there's active effort to prevent it, and I haven't really seen any Fediverse communities interested in doing that work yet (which I wouldn't blame them for; it's nontrivial)

I try not to editorialize headlines too much when I post, which means if the headline is clickbait it stays, even if the article content that talks about something else. Depending on how egregious I'll add something to the body or append it to the title.

We really should moderate the titles more. I just realized that every article I ignored I basically accepted as truth. Or, at least, my brain accepted as truth in the background. I'll see the same lie twice a day everyday and start processing as fact.

From the Beehaw sidebar: "We do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites."

What if the focus of Beehaw and/or Lemmy in general is not as a link aggregation platform but instead a community of topic discussion? People are rewarded for posting links to articles with upvotes which only gives incentive to continue posting the same not-read content that they think the respective subs will like (upvote).

Instead, we should be rewarding people who are actively engaging with the community. Not broadcast posting the way it goes on mastodon or IG, etc., but actual back and forth interaction with the community.

Maybe take away the ability to upvote a link post and reserve that for the actual discussion parts that take place?

The issue is the way that news is consumed these days. You always used to have a catchy newspaper headline with a title to get you to buy it (extra extra read all about it insert catchy alliteration here) . People dont consume news. They dont read articles. They receive headlines and then immediately engage on some other website that profits off sharing this content.

Clickbate for all the woes exists because it works and people do click it. Or are more likely to click and share than if it was a dull informative headline. It's the same as on youtube. As long as the actual meat of the article is fine and the headline isnt too much of a BS article it doesnt bother me too much but of course there are limits to that.