Talk:Clickbait/Archives/2020

Primary reason is advertising profit

I don't think this is sufficiently emphasised - apart from deliberately malicious ones the primary purpose in getting you to open a fresh page is that this triggers an advertising fee. This is eventually obliquely referred to, but it should be in the lead, and at the head of the article. 86.187.165.77 (talk) 17:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Neutral point of view?

The article says the term clickbait is sometimes used for any article that is unflattering to a person (this appears to be supported by the citation) and then claims that "In such cases, the article is not actually clickbait by any legitimate definition of the term." This is an opinion however, and who is deciding that a particular definition is not a "legitimate" definition? The definition that a word has is related to, and established by, the *usage* of that word. Personal definitions or opinions that definitions are not "legitimate" are not allowed to override this. If the word is used for any unflattering article and becomes generally used to mean an unflattering article (being an article that the person describing it as "clickbait" thinks is unflattering), then that is what the term means and is what one of its definitions is - it is not for anyone to say the definition isn't "legitimate". A definition, once established, is a definition that a word has and cannot be obliterated or claimed not to actually be a definition simply because someone thinks it isn't legitimate. I note the source referred to does say "I’ve found that a tech mogul will generally call anything unflattering I write 'clickbait'..." If people, or a group of people such as tech moguls, "generally" call something a particular word, then that is general usage of the word to mean that and therefore it does mean that, or carries that meaning within the section of people that are tech moguls. If people generally call something that is unflattering "clickbait" then that is clickbait. It is what the word is understood to mean through that usage and therefore is the meaning of the word in that context - the matter of legitimacy or its absence doesn't enter into it. aspaa (talk) 01:30, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

I guess it's just a badly-written way of saying that as a pejorative, the term "clickbait" can be used dismissively to insult something that isn't actually clickbait. But this goes for a lot of things, and doesn't seem as big a deal as an often-employed pejorative like fake news or daylight robbery, particularly when the source is just one journalist's personal experience. I think we can lose it. --Lord Belbury (talk) 09:11, 6 September 2020 (UTC)