There's too much click bait on Yahoo

In My Humble Opinion
1

I used to go to CNN for news, but they changed their website for more pictures and fewer stories. MSNBC lost me a long time ago when they went to their Short Attention Span Theatre format. So I look at Yahoo.

Approximately every fifth link is ‘Sponsored’. They have some interesting titles. ‘12 Films That Changed Science Fiction’ ‘Where Are They Now: The Cast Of “The Stupid Show”’ ‘10 Of The Weirdest Weirdos Who Ever Weirded’ That sort of thing. (NB: I made those up.) Each item requires like three clicks to see. Click on the link, see a picture of whatever. Click Next to get to some sort of explanation. Click Next to see the final image and caption for that thing. Then repeat for the others. You end up clicking like 50 times.

I learned months ago not to click on those, no matter how interesting they look. I’ve no time for clicking through things. And I object to having to make unnecessary clicks to increase someone’s revenue. Fair enough they do that, but I don’t have to play. But now, as I said, every fifth link is click bait. It annoys me.

2

Yahoo isn’t exactly known for its hard news so I’m a bit mystified why you think it WOULDN’T be mostly clickbait.

You want less clickbait, go to BBC News, Guardian, even Google News. Or shell out a bit of cash and subscribe to the New York Times. The news is out there, just not on Yahoo!

3

This.

Yahoo makes my head hurt on the rare occasions I end up on their website.

4

Yahoo truly sucks as a source for news.
It should be renamed “Click Bait by Yahoo!”

5

Yeah, I know they are light on hard news. But since CNN went to the Dark Side, it’s convenient. I do have BBC News bookmarked, and I do read it. I’m not going to pay to subscribe to a news site. The stories are out there (often linked here). I don’t mind there being ads on a page. But click bait disguised as articles annoy me.

6

He posted on a message board. What happened next will blow your mind

7

And I can’t tell you the number of times a Yahoo headline mentions a photo or video that doesn’t even show up in the story. I mean, for Pete’s sake, the headline is ABOUT A SPECIFIC PHOTO-- put the dang photo in the linked story!

8

I prefer YahooHole, or YaHole!

9

This is my biggest pet peeve and it is everywhere. Any why can’t they just provide a good old fashioned LIST and not force you to click through to another screen to see what’s next??? Drives me insane & I always end up closing out due to impatience.

10

Because advertising payments are per page served with the ad on. One page with list on - one set of payments. 10 pages each with one item from the list - 10 sets of payments.

And since you get paid extra if an ad is clicked on - masses of adverts which look ‘next page button’-ish clustered around where you must click for the next page. And popup adverts floating over the next-page button.

11

Avoid ever seeing clickbait on Yahoo with this one weird trick!

12

if it wasn’t invented by a “local mom” I’m not interested.

13

I also pay for the NY Times. I understand the general sentiment that you shouldn’t have to pay for online content. However, it costs money to collect and report news. If they don’t collect money for subscriptions, they are going to keep pulling shit like clickbait, and will also tend “go to the dark side” to attract the kind of readers who click on clickbait. I think of my subscription fee as a $20 a month contribution towards maintaining western civilization.

14

I am so tempted to pay for the NYT. In my opinion, they are the best news source out there. They have well-written articles by competent reporters. But dang, is it expensive!

15

I am usually adamant about not paying for online content, but the NY Times is worth it. It’s actually cheaper for me to get the Sunday-only paper delivery which includes all the online access. Plus I get an physical paper once a week.

16

Slashdot is a great example of a site that’s turned into clickbait. It was bad enough when they started running stories about bitcoin every day, but now that they’re trying to synergize with Dice, their parent website, every third story is trying to beat a horse that died years ago.

Yes, Linus doesn’t like C++. We don’t need to talk about the validity of a post he made 8 years ago.

17

Much like the “Network Decay” or “Channel Drift” phenomena in American broadcasting, I feel like Internet media sites exhibit a similar deterioration in both quality and focus as they evolve or worse, are acquired by bigger media fish. Slate used to be a middle-brow quality news site which has devolved into half click-bait and an occasional decent article by a holdout author like Dahlia Lithwick. The Atlantic has suffered a similar decline (although starting out higher, they haven’t reached so low yet).

I fear this may just be the new normal for Internet journalism, a constant churn of decaying stars and occasional supernovas to replenish the quality.

18

I started subscribing to the NYT Sunday-only edition a couple of years ago. It’s expensive, but you do get a great way to spend a Sunday (reading an actual printed newspaper with articles and columns written by actual professional writers), in addition to the access to the online edition whenever you want. Like Greg Charles, I’m also paying for it out of a sense of duty to make sure that solid journalism stays around as long as it can. All things considered, I think it’s a tremendous value.

19

Here’s my take on all this.

My first-go-to sites for news are (1) Yahoo (first because I can get through the useful stuff quickly, there being so little of that), then (2) Google News.

I’m okay with Yahoo News, given what it is. They are good enough to label all their click-bait headlines with the word “Sponsored” so I know to skip right over those. Of the remaining stuff, the news they produce in-house is pretty crappy. And all the rest is way too heavy on celebrity news, sports, more celebrity news, entertainment, and more celebrity news. Oh, and did I mention they are heavy on celebrity news? There are enough links to external news articles that I can get a bit of useful news there.

Then I go to Google, where there is more better news, and more links to external sites with actual articles.

What I like about news aggregator sites like these is the collection of news from so many different sources, nationwide and worldwide. Starting at either Yahoo or Google, I then read articles from NYT, LAT, slate, salon, HuffPo, AFP, any number of other Euro sites and even occasional Russian and Asian sites; Christian Science Monitor, etc. And a spectrum of political viewpoints, including places I would never go on my own (Fox, Daily Caller, etc.)

And once I get into any external site, the articles there will usually have sidebars with links to their other current articles, or a link to their home page. So I can branch out to look at those. I often click on articles whose headlines DON’T interest me, just to get to an external site like CSM or Reuters or whatever and see what else is there.

That is the real advantage of these free aggregator sites, compared with paid subscriptions to specific sources: That they are portals through which to roam through the news media of the world.

20

I don’t see it. Yahoo has plenty of cruft, but is much lower on the clickbait, “one weird trick” etc. than “real” news sites like Huffington Post. In short, much of it is fluffy People Magazine-type crap, but not ads. And you can sort that stuff out. They do sometimes put political hackjobs up, but at least they’re bipartisan.

One thing I note is that foreign editions of Yahoo are even less news driven, where the default emphasizes sport(s) much more.

Also, the OP or anyone else didn’t (explicitly) suggest this, but just so we’re clear: most of the stories on Yahoo are written by AP or Reuters or someone else, so you can’t blame the website if something’s wrong. It’s there, just not in big text always. Sometimes feels like I’m shouting into the wind here.