Clickbait

Is it just expected that everything these days has to rely on clickbait to get people into their stories? I understand the idea of writing an interesting or intriguing headline, but it's getting taken to an extreme lately.

Today while reading a newspaper online, there was a link that was something to the effect of a specific skill you have to have in order to be accepted into the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Of course, reading the article never stated a specific skill. It said something about how you would need to be a good singer, and they did talk about how just being a good soloist wasn't enough. They have classes to help learn what they expect. But what was the skill? I still don't know.

I have noticed on some newspaper websites that sometimes a page will load partially, and you can see most of the article titles, but then at some point while the page is loading some titles will change. Usually one version of the title will be fairly boring and the other one extra clickbaitish. Other times, you don't see the title change while the page is loading, but if you refresh the page or navigate around and come back to an article list, it will be a different headline than the last time you looked at it. I'm sure there's some type of A/B testing going on. That means the key to stopping the clickbait is to never click the link if it looks too good to be true.