Top Clickbait Technical Articles That Are Easy to Fall For

Introduction

What is Clickbait? Clickbait is online content, often a headline or title, that uses sensational or misleading information to entice users to click. Its primary purpose is to drive traffic to a website to increase page views and potentially boost ad revenue.

Clickbait often creates a “curiosity gap,” where the content itself doesn’t deliver on the promise or value implied by the title.

Clickbait can damage a site’s credibility and worsen the user experience. But don’t get me wrong, an alluring title doesn’t have to be Clickbait.

I thought it would be interesting to dive into some of the more common examples we see today, specifically in the realm of software engineering.

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Example 1: The End is Nigh

Headline bait: “Docker/Helm/Python/Kubernetes/VS Code is Dead!”

Here we take a popular, successful technology — the more well known the better, and pronounce its demise. Often this is accompanied by the sentiment: “I’ll never use Python again after trying X” or “After a weekend of using alternative X, I’ll never go back to Python.”