Heh. Damn right it's linkbait. My entire scientific outreach efforts are linkbait. Dude, I talk about zombie brains to the public.

Do you know how hard it is to get the most of the non-science public to care about science? If I can get people reading about the stuff that I find cool and mindblowing, and that makes them want to learn more on their own, then hell yeah I'm going for the linkbait title.

I'm not making money off this site. I don't give a damn about my SEO or bouncerate or whatever. I write this in my free time because I love the brain. And hopefully some of that accidentally rubs off on people.

Thank you! I read this thinking, "I wish more scientists would blog about their research like this!" Very approachable, very informative, and with citations! Astounding!

There are a lot of people that would love to read this sort of fascinating stuff, but don't have the technical understanding to read the papers you cite, for example. Those people are mostly stuck with the occasional Cracked article along the lines of "6 Insane Bugs You Didn't Know Existed", and Cracked has linkbait down to a science.

Oops, forgot to respond to this! You're welcome. Don't get me wrong, Cracked can be very good for spurring on interest as well, but sometimes it's good to have references. :)

Yes, this is a case where perhaps title editing would be beneficial. If a user sees the title on ketyov.com they won't be terribly misled. But on a link aggregation site like Hacker News, most people would assume as wccrawford did.