I mean, you're right that the personal adaptation everyone can start making today is to treat headlines and press releases with appropriate skepticism.
But this isn't some fringe HN phenomenon where riled up nerds focus on spurious details and make big complaints about them. Headlines matter. Before social media, headlines are what people read as they walked by the newsstand, what they heard from the crier, what they saw on the overlay on the TV news station in the lobby and at the gym. And now, in the age of social media, headlines are an even louder currency of fact. Almost all social media sites operate as headline + votes + comments. There are stories behind those headlines, a click (and maybe a paywall) away, and the minority of intellectually diligent communities like HN do a a good job of surfacing the details into the comments so that bad headlines are less toxic.
But our behavior here is already the exception and we do need to keep banging on misrepresentative headlines. While also a form of clickbait, they are a different and far more irresponsible class of it than the than harmlessly, wastefully vague click-for-the-mystery headlines that you're tired of hearing complaints about.
In some HN discussions, it seems that half of the comments are from people who only read the headline and are flaming about it, or who read the headline and the article and want to argue about whether they match, or whether the headline is overly sensational and promises something that the article doesn't deliver. Too much meta-discussion, not enough real discussion. And here I am engaging in it too, if only to push back.
But this isn't some fringe HN phenomenon where riled up nerds focus on spurious details and make big complaints about them. Headlines matter. Before social media, headlines are what people read as they walked by the newsstand, what they heard from the crier, what they saw on the overlay on the TV news station in the lobby and at the gym. And now, in the age of social media, headlines are an even louder currency of fact. Almost all social media sites operate as headline + votes + comments. There are stories behind those headlines, a click (and maybe a paywall) away, and the minority of intellectually diligent communities like HN do a a good job of surfacing the details into the comments so that bad headlines are less toxic.
But our behavior here is already the exception and we do need to keep banging on misrepresentative headlines. While also a form of clickbait, they are a different and far more irresponsible class of it than the than harmlessly, wastefully vague click-for-the-mystery headlines that you're tired of hearing complaints about.