Article is about Prototaxites which were giant fungus -like organisms that existed 400 million years ago.
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Yeah, the Defector did not do me any favors here with that headline. Both the historical perspective on the way that scientists participate in rather hostile discourse and the actual organism under study were interesting to me.
It would be nice to include a summary in the post. We're in an internet now where clicking a link has enough overhead that people want to know ahead of time whether the result will interest them.
I’m not particularly interested in discussing things with people who don’t take the time to read the article, so that’s a feature not a bug for me.
It's clickbait if the post says nothing about the article's actual topic. Not good.
The word clickbait for me is a value judgement about the contents of an article, rather than about the headline. I agree it is a poor headline, but since I believe it is an article worth clicking through to, I don’t think of it as clickbait.
The headline here tbh conveys no more info about the article than a bunch of random hex digits would. And "clickbait" is absolutely about the headline. It's an attempt to get people to click and resolve an unanswered question raised by the title. The article itself can't be clickbait since the person has already clicked by the time they see it.
I dunno. I’m not really sure how you can claim it is clickbait when nobody was baited into clicking? For me, there are effective headlines and ineffective headlines. Clickbait is when you have an effective headline that accompanies an article that isn’t worth clicking into, which baits you into clicking through to show you ads, and doesn’t deliver on its promise. For me, this is the opposite of that, it’s an ineffective headline because no-one clicked through, but had they, the article overdelivers on its promise. And on further reflection, I think you’re right that headlines can be inherently clickbait-y, independent of their contents, but it still doesn’t feel like it applies here — for me, the bait in clickbait is like the bait in a rabbit trap, and you don’t bait rabbit traps with bait that rabbits don’t enjoy. This doesn’t fall into the clickbait category for me, it’s just ineffective. But that’s mostly semantics, and I don’t begrudge you a different definition. I just…kinda don’t really mind it that much? I got a commenter with high media literacy to engage in a good discussion, and no drive-bys from people who didn’t read the article? And generally speaking, I would much rather the Defector use their scarce resources to pay quality writers, rather than an SEO specialist who gets people to click through?