Yes it's clickbait, so I didn't upvote it; an accurate title would have been "Lessons learned upgrading Lichess from Scala 2 -> 3 and the need to tune the JVM". A drama-free title like that would have been fine, and I would have upvoted.

I agree. Clickbait titles are not universalizable. Kant would not be pleased.

The actual title seems to be Lichess & Scala 3 and the subhead is "Lichess gets a big upgrade. It doesn't go as planned."

Personally I'd never click on your proposed title as I have 0 interest in Scala, but I clicked on this one and was pleasantly surprised by interesting story. Making everything sound robotic is not the way.

Do you agree that title is clickbait? You are ok with titles that misrepresent or exaggerate to boost clicks (even if most of those viewers bounce upon discovering that)?

But the upgrade....didnt go as planned? In what way was it a misrepresentation? It was certainly generic but definitely not exaggerated. Felt fine for an editorialized title

sdwr's comment had already explained why this is clickbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34008009

They planned to have a much bigger hassle with the upgrade. That "plan" didn't materialize, as the upgrade was a lot smoother than they expected.

Sure the title is jazzed up a lot, but calling it clickbait seems to be a bit harsh.

You just described the exact reason why this is clickbait. You wouldn't have clicked but due to editorialized title, you did click.

Or maybe the actual title “ Lichess & Scala 3”

It is not the articles fault the first sentence was used as the title

INNOCENT dev migrates to Scala 3, what happened next will SHOCK you.

Spend a week of running the JVM in production without tuning it challenge [IMPOSSIBLE]

This should be a Leetcode hard test. Deploy a JVM for a large production upgrade without issues

Trick question, it's not possible

that's still conveying too much information

INNOCENT dev did THIS, and what happened next will SHOCK you

INNOCENT dev did THIS, and what happened next was <truncated text, click to follow article, followed by being bombarded by 20 ads which magically bypass ublock origin>

WHy iS NoOne Talking AbOut ThiS ? No7 SurpriZed Me ! :D

Is it clickbait when the top contributor/creator posts on his website? The same website that makes a strong promotion against ad tracking: https://lichess.org/ads

I clearly don't have the same definition of clickbait.

> The same website that makes a strong promotion against ad tracking: https://lichess.org/ads

What does this have to do with clickbait?

that's a great question. I had reviewed the Wikipedia page prior to my comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait

it seems there is no universal definition of clickbait. So I based my comment on this:

1. the article was posted on Thibault's own website that doesn't generate revenue per click. Isn't clickbait associated with the possibility of additional ad revenue?

2. Thibault recently called for help on the issue. This post recaps what he went through. He clearly expressed that the code upgrade process didn't go as planned for him. the post and sub-title feels genuine.

3. Clickbait (to me at least) indicates that there's either intent on generating revenue or self-promotion. I fail to see those conditions here

So that's my logic. So why would this be considered clickbait?

Clickbait is a sensationalized or misleading title meant to draw extra attention (in the form of clicks).

Both "big upgrade" and "didn't go as planned" are technically true, but overpromise. A big upgrade could be new features, improved UI, something that affects the user experience.

"Updated Lichess language version, had to tweak cache settings" is a title that isn't trying to sell itself.

I don't think there's anything wrong with an evocative title. In my mind, clickbait is when you never actually get what's promised, or it's vastly oversold. This title tells me, "we had a deploy that caused problems for a surprising reason," and I feel like needing to retune the JVM delivers on that. It's a weird, surprising issue. I'm sure there are old-hands who have deployed JVM apps at scale might be unsurprised and unimpressed, but I was surprised.

I think showmanship is okay if it's tasteful. The problem with clickbait is that it's manipulative and tacky and dishonest. After you read the article you feel like you've been had.

> I feel like needing to retune the JVM delivers on that. It's a weird, surprising issue.

Having spent several years in the running-JVMs-in-production trenches I would claim the opposite.

I did address this objection upfront:

> I'm sure there are old-hands who have deployed JVM apps at scale might be unsurprised and unimpressed, but I was surprised.

I've never done anything nontrivial with the JVM, so I'm totally willing to believe I was surprised because of my JVM ignorance, but I've never had to fiddle with my language VMs.

Regardless, I argue there's room for tasteful showmanship without it being clickbait.

>In my mind, clickbait is when you never actually get what's promised, or it's vastly oversold.

Clickbait is trying to bait you into clicking. This definitely falls under that. Is it the worst case of clickbait I've seen? No. But it is definitely clickbait.

By this definition any catchy or interesting title is clickbait, regardless of how descriptive or accurate. "Nixon Resigns" will certainly bait me into clicking the article for more details, even though it's basically leading with the punchline. For the term to not be meaningless I think some level of deception or withholding important info has to be involved, "Nixon Made a Shocking Decision....You'll Never Guess What It Is!!!" is clickbait.

Based on your first example, I know what happened and can make an informed decision about whether I need or want to know the details of how it happened. I'd argue that that is not click bait, as it leads with the most important piece of information first. The title could further be improved by writing "Nixon resigned because of XYZ", but that would be nitpicking.

The most beneficial title from the reader's perspective is a title which allows the reader to quickly decide whether they need to know the information and informs the reader with the necessary information as efficiently as possible. Hence the now long dead practice of writing in the form of an inverted pyramid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)).

The inverted pyramid isn't dead. Blog posts are more like feature articles. Feature articles never followed the inverted pyramid.

Do you feel this article did something wrong? Because from what I'm hearing it seems like you're saying it wasn't to your taste, which is entirely valid but a different matter.

I'm making an argument that the article is click bait, which it is. I'm not sure where you see a value judgement about whether click bait is wrong in my comments, or why you are defensive about it on behalf of the author?

I don't like click bait. I voiced that opinion. That's all.

The actual title on the article is "Lichess & Scala 3".

Whoever posted it to HN decided to go with the title of the first section of the article.

That title is just as poor, in the opposite way. It says nothing about what the article is about.

What's wrong with a title that is a one sentence summary of the article?

How about the title and subtitle be taken together, as intended.

I guess submitter thought it wasn't a good title for HN purposes too, and so he went with the subtitle rather than inventing his own.

So nobody intended clickbait.

It sounds like clickbait when read in the Hacker News context. But if I'd come across this in the Lichess blog directly, I would've immediately known it was kinda tongue-in-cheek or at least nothing serious. Context matters.

Yeah despite being an interesting post about Scala, I came for the harrowing tale of a big deployment gone wrong. Downtime, angry customers, seat of the pants debugging and straight to prod gambles to save a sinking ship.

Instead, a smug tale of a huge upgrade that went unexpectedly smoothly - with a performance problem swiftly solved. Still a good story, and kudos to the team. Just not the horror show I came for.