'Clickbait' has become a cliched term on sites like Reddit and HN. The purpose of a headline is to encourage people to read the article, not to provide a concise but accurate summary of the article.<p>The problem with clickbait is that the article doesn't live up to the promise of the headline. If I click on an article about "34 ways to get a flatter stomach - you won't believe number 7" but there's just a long list of debunked remedies and unfounded assertions, that's a problem with the article, not the headline. People then share the article without reading it, so crap articles end up polluting search result pages and newsfeeds. So now we've started to associate enticing headlines with poor quality articles, because so often it's true.<p>But getting rid of good headlines isn't going to solve the problem of poor quality articles, or people not reading content that they share.