Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Clicks

Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by blatherard on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @09:51AM (#11073073)

The WaPo-owned slate.com has been doing frequent renaming of articles for a while now. I suspect they've been a testbed for Bandito or a similar system. One very frustrating side-effect is that I am often drawn to click on the same article multiple times. That's because it shows markedly different headlines for the same article, sometimes even on the same page simultaneously.

Case in point, as of right now, slate shows a headline: "What Bernie Sanders' Victory Means"

and lower on the page: "It's Official: Bernie Sanders Just Won New Hampshire"

both of which link to the same article, which sports the quotidian title "Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire".

The two front-page headlines are not just tweaked variants of each other, they sound like substantially different articles, one a reporting-the-news article and the other an analysis piece.

This is super-frustrating to me, because I keep feeling like the site is wasting my time and attention. It's starting to drive me away from slate overall. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens to the WaPo.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by apendleton on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @10:40AM (#11073427)

Not disagreeing with the headline behavior, but just FYI, WaPo doesn't own Slate. They were both once owned by the Washington Post Company, but the Company sold only the paper to Bezos, and renamed itself to Graham Holdings shortly thereafter. It still owns Slate.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by 1812Overture on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @01:24PM (#11074754)

My favorite is on Bloomberg where as the market moves throughout the day you'll see: "Markets up on good jobs numbers" "Markets unmoved by good jobs numbers" "Markets down despite good jobs numbers" I actually wonder if they have an algorithm automatically changing the headlines.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by alanh on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @03:34PM (#11075752)

I recently noticed a very poorly named / linked article on the New York Times. Something to the effect of “What’s Next for Hillary”, only to find an article with 8 paragraphs, each merely summarizing the primary results for 8 candidates after New Hampshire. It was a stunningly bad title and I was distinctly left with the feeling I didn’t get what I came for and that the clickworthyist link text was chosen instead of an accurate title.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by benologist on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @11:40AM (#11073916)

CNN also does this, headlines change all throughout the day.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by glass55 on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @12:24PM (#11074286)

The Huffington Post have been doing these kind of tricks for a long time too. Despicable, I hate being taken for an idiot and tricked into clicking like that. I just boycott websites that do that now.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by cbowal on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @01:01PM (#11074557)

I've just noticed Vox.com doing this too - very annoying.

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Re:Washington Post’s ‘Bandito’ Tool Optimizes Content for Cl... by ratfacemcgee on Wednesday February 10, 2016 @06:12PM (#11076981)

its not just U.S. based, news.com.au does it too.

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