Colm O'Regan: You simply won't believe these 10 things about clickbait headlines

And don't forget about deathbait and anxietybait — this stuff is happening because the system is broken. We’ve never had so much ‘content’, we’ve never paid less for it and we’ve never been more discontented

Colm O'Regan: "The race to just puke out anything at all to get eyeballs on a thing that just ends in disappointment doesn’t seem like a thing that should be the basis of an economy."

You won’t believe the straw that broke this camel’s back. Click here to read more! Then reject 54 Legitimate Interest cookies, one by one. Read the disappointing article in four bits surrounded by ads, two of which seem to be following you. Click the X to get rid of the ads. No! You’ve clicked on the ad so now you’re getting tips on getting ripped in your 60s.

This is the internet now. If it were a newspaper, it would be like seeing a front page headline, only to find the story is spread across the entire newspaper, and someone keeps waving a tea towel in your face as you turn the page. And the story is shite.

The most recent one is my own fault. I clicked on a link promising ‘Roy Keane’s hilarious four-word response to a story from ages ago’. Welcome to Clickbait 2025.

Another feature of enshittification of the internet. (‘Enshittification’, coined by tech-writer Cory Doctorow, is the process whereby the online products and services just get worse over time, deliberately.)

Clickbait is nothing new. Online headlines have always promised more than they delivered but now it’s reached the stage where even the Pope is giving out about it. In October he urged journalists not to betray their duty to tell the truth by “selling out” to the “degrading practice” of clickbait. 

I don’t know what it was that tipped the Pope over the edge. Was it Biblical clickbait? Was it “Jesus had this one-word response for the Pharisees” or “John the Baptist has hilarious anecdote about Love Is Blind Star.”

Maybe it was the story highlighted recently by the Anti-clickbait Society Facebook page... a Daily Star headline: “Banned part of Bible showed violent Jesus and dramatically changed Christianity.” It’s a story they got from Lad Bible in September who got it from the Daily Mail a couple of years ago which they got from the Dead Sea Scrolls which have been a thing since 1947.

If it isn’t Jesus or Roy Keane (It’s mostly Roy Keane. Nearly every human alive now has a memory of some Roy Keane moment), it’s deathbait.

Deathbait is the headline which shocks you into believing that a ‘Beloved star of the Die Hard movies has died’ and you click thinking it’s poor oul Bruce Willis but it’s not. It’s the person who played Hans Gruber’s henchman #4’s understudy.

Not that they aren’t mourned or beloved by their loved ones. But I doubt they need their loved one’s death to be driving advertising revenue on a banter site.

Or it’s anxiety-bait where a link seems to indicate a shocking murder occurred in your local area, confirming your fears the country’s gone to the dogs. When in fact it happened in 1932 in Kansas.

This stuff is happening because the system is broken. We’ve never had so much ‘content’, we’ve never paid less for it and we’ve never been more discontented. Because it’s slop. Sometimes written by humans under pressure to respond to the latest trending phrase by churning out 500 words under the headline ‘So and So was on the Late Late and all viewers are saying the same thing’ (they’re not).

I get everyone has to make a few bob. God knows there’s plenty things I’ve written that won’t be hung in the Louvre. But the race to just puke out anything at all to get eyeballs on a thing that just ends in disappointment doesn’t seem like a thing that should be the basis of an economy.

The solution involves disincentivising this shite being made. Follow writers — and where they write — rather than platforms. Subscribe to good stuff. Resist our stone age brain’s immediate reaction to feed anxiety or confirm our biases.

And this one simple trick that doctors don’t want you to know: if it feels like a trick, don’t click.