I have news.google.com as home page.
BBC World is also good.
Both are free.
Holy shit, my eyesight is going bad - I thought the OP said “dick bait”.
I’m outta here. Unless, I can get my money back, or can someone point me to a way to fix my bad vision.
I use Yahoo as my homepage as well. I search from Google, but that way, between the time I pull up my browser window and type ‘google dot com’, I got some news tossed in my face. I’m always surprised at how much stuff disappears when adblock kicks in. But there’s still quite a but left that’s ‘sponsored’. Like others said, just don’t click on it. Yahoo is also good at catering to what you click on. Click on sports, they’ll start serving up more sports, click on a few stock columns, you’ll get more wall st stuff. If you’re complaining that there’s too much celebrity junk on your yahoo home page, it’s likely because that’s what you’re clicking on.
And, no matter what I do, I won’t click on anything that goes to a Zergnet page. It’s worse than click bait. It’s bait and switch. You’ll see the headline, click on it and it’ll take you to a page with 30 other articles, you’ll have to find that headline, if you can, it’ll spawn a new tab with a slideshow. Lot of clicking just to see a list of 5 movies someone decided belong on a list.
I use Al Jazeera America for news.
FORGET GOOGLE, PEOPLE ARE USING THIS FOR SEARCHES! Really? Who besides you and your desperate client?
I don’t think their developers check pictures linked to articles that much. For the longest time, I saw Get Rich Quick schemes accompanied with pictures of homeless guys.
I hate click bait but sadly this is what happens when news divisions have to make money. I would prefer it if the headline contained as much information as necessary to get the gist of the article without having to read it to find out what its “really” about. I would love to rewrite the articles so that:
“The one food chef Eric Ripert won’t eat” becomes “Chef Eric Ripert talks about food”. For those wondering, he wont’ eat brain because he hates it. That’s it. Its a throwaway answer in a long interview and he doesn’t even go into some story about why he doesn’t eat it. He just doesn’t like it, the end.
Or how about “Sephora is selling an inappropriately named lipstick that has people disgusted”. This article should be named “Sephora sells lipstick named ‘Underage Red’” That’s the whole story really. The article says the line is from Kat Von D but there’s conflicting reports about whether Sephora already dropped the line as of the article going live
But those are slightly forgivable. Omitting some information is bad, but not sinister. I like a tease but only in sex and entertainment, not my news, which is supposed to be factual stuff that really happened. Teasing me with the news doesn’t make it any more relevant, its just annoying. More unforgivable is when the headline is actively misleading, such as:
“Matt Barnes tackles James Harden, prevents 1st down”. If you didn’t know who these two are, and are not a fan of basketball, you might think this was an unremarkable football play. In fact, it was an unremarkable basketball foul, a slightly more seriously one than a regular foul but no more uncommon that someone getting a technical. But it was written that way to generate hype for a story that wasn’t there. I hate when media tries to create a story when there is none. I can understand why Marshawn Lynch doesn’t like to talk to them. The real title of this story should be, if there must be a story at all, “Clippers player Matt Barnes earns flagrant foul penalty during game”. I wouldn’t even mention Harden, his name is just there because he’s a big star now. Fouls are usually more to do with the player causing them than the one receiving it, so I would omit Harden’s name completely as its irrelevant information.
There’s much more examples, but I don’t feel like going back any further to look for more. But I think another type of headline worth mentioning is one where they exaggerate the vitriol between two people or two groups much more than what is actually there. Pretty much every time I see a “Obama slams X” or “someone rips someone” its usually some disagreement where the parties use very nice words towards each other and simply disagree. However, more and more you’d see the GOP actually saying those things, so I guess the misleading part is that it makes it seem like both sides are doing it when in fact its usually the GOP that actually is overreacting to some perceived slight.
This thread has been helpful. I started out with MSNBC stayed with it for a number of years. Went to CNN, and stayed with it for a few years as well, but it has went bat crazy with advertisement. I 'm skeeered to just click on to anything, never knowing where it is going to take me. They disguise it to where if you want more of the news story, you really have to go to the very bottom of the page, and in between the story on top, and where you have to click on the bottom, are often several more things which give the impression if you want to know more of the news story, you have to click on it, but often you find you’ve clicked the wrong thing and just on to more advertisment. I’m done with all of that.
So I took others advice, and tried Google. It was okay, with advertisements and all, but just didn’t seem to offer as much. So, I thought I’d try the BBC next. A few days of it, and I’m much happier with not near as much ads, and their coverage of US news is quite good too, so think I’ve found a home now.
I went through the same CNN->BBC migration. However, is it just me or has even the BBC started using click-bait?
What we need is a “describe the click bait, so we won’t have to click on it” thread.
Someone takes one for the team, so the rest of us won’t have to.
Except me. No way am I clicking on any “plastic surgery fails.” Ugh.
Two twitter accounts help with this a bit - @SavedYouAClick and @HuffPoSpoilers.
It’s a start, at least. 
My go to is Google News. It’s a little frustrating at times, but it’s the best aggregator I’ve found yet.
A sponsored article and clickbait are not the same thing. It’s just that now clickbait sites are using sponsored articles to advertise. I remember when sponsored articles were instead trying to get you to buy a product rather than just getting more views for their web page.
Clickbait has two major properties: it withholds information from you and promises something it won’t give. It often uses hyperbolic language, but that’s only a side effect of the first two. You don’t have any substance in the title, so you have to play up how much you’ll enjoy the information you’ll get if you click.
This method has universal appeal, unlike describing the actual content, which may only intrigue the people who would actually be interested. If ad providers started paying for the amount of time you spent on the page, it might work better. Or maybe they’d just clickbaiting you repeatedly–I don’t know.