Please stop with the clickbait thread titles

Never going to happen. Most of the threads with "clickbaity" titles are just that. It's done on purpose. Sucks for us.

 

Before I click on a thread title, I hover my mouse pointer over the title, so it opens up a "preview pane". From there, I can then decide if the rest of the thread is worth reading. I don't lose much sleep over the wording; some of the more verbose thread titles are snooze-fests, too.

 

Since we're airing out grievances, can we please switch from carrots to something else? It's 2021 for god's sake, the world's moving forward!

 

I thought I was alone in despairing over all these click-bait titles. Please stop.

 

My favourites are the NEED HELP PLEASE CLICK URGENT threads where it’s some guy trying to decide what colour bass to get.

 

Yup. I'm not opening threads like that. My other "favourite" are the titles that, while not clikbaity, are just waaay to vague, for example a thread titled "bass strings" in the Strings subforum etc.

 

This is the interwebs.
It won't change.

/

 

It could be as simple as many posters all over the internet are barely literate.

 

Kolokethia?

 

Kumquats, then?

 

Is this a spillover from, say, FB? Maybe they confuse TB for FB?

These kinds of thread titles are less than adolescent, IMO.

 

I think this deserves a site-wide poll masked under a clickbait title.

 

Vague topic titles are a common occurrence on internet forums. Some forums contain an FAQ to use a meaningful topic title. But some continue to use vague and generic topic titles any way.


Moderators don’t want to delete them. Don’t read them. If everyone would respond to vague topic titles by giving vague replies, the vague topic title starters might take notice.

 

You won't believe what happens next!

Seriously - who gives a rat's back end about thread titles?

 

He Clicked On The Thread - and you'll never guess what happened next!

 

It's a struggle between complaints like this and TL;DR complaints, frankly. Titles should get you interested, but as someone suggested you can hover over the post to read enough of the OP to decide if you're interested. If there's room for more descriptors, sure, but eyes glaze over when titles are too wordy.

I don't see the incentive to draw people in with clickbait since none of us normal people make any money from clicks here. But a lot of us were taught in English class to make the first sentence intriguing, so there's probably a piece of that here, too.

And then sometimes we just assume that most people have been around the internet long enough to know what's meant by certain phrases. Maybe we're wrong about that. "It's not an airport" has been around for years as a retort to dramatic online exits. When I started that thread about my temporary hiatus it never occurred to me that someone on the internet would not know what that meant.

 

I had never heard that one and I've been online for quite a while by now. And of course you never actually left anyway (?), as so often seems to be the case.

 

No

 

Actually I was gone for about two weeks, which was about the time I needed to rest my hand. I did pop in now and then to say hello, as I also said I would, since a few people asked me to.

I'm thinking maybe people whose online world is limited to here might not be so familiar with some of these internet conventions but "It's not an airport, no need to announce your departure" is the common response on every Facebook group when someone announces they are angry and leaving a group there. There are dozens of memes with that saying and pictures of airplanes

it's not an airport no need to announce your departure - Google Search