Does every question mark deserve a Betteridge?

(dynomight.net)

11 points | by zdw 9 hours ago ago

10 comments

  • rich_sasha 6 hours ago ago

    I suppose for a non clickbaity use of a question in the title, the article should be about the question not the answer. I would think an article about the (so far inconclusive) search for extraterrestrial intelligence headed by "Are we alone in the universe?" to be aptly, non-clickbaitily titled.

  • downbad_ 9 hours ago ago

    No.

    Even the often linked Wikipedia article said -

    "A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[11]

    A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[12]

    In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine "

  • taneq 9 hours ago ago

    Son of a

  • ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago ago

    Betteridge's Law Not As Accurate As We Thought

    We Tested Ten Laws of the Internet: the Results Are In

    Answer Rhetorical Questions with This One Weird Trick

    Historical Deep Dive: Betteridge Before the Invention of Punctuation

    You Won't Believe What Betteridge Wore to the WH Correspondents Dinner!

    High Court Poised to Grant Stay Against Appeal of Injunction in Betteridge Case Before Gag Order Motion Deadline Takes Effect

    • enlightens 8 hours ago ago

      Betteridge's Law Considered Harmful

      Headline Slams Betteridge's Law

      Betteridge's Law: Here's What We Know

      Sitcks Nix Betteridge's Law Pix

      • mopsi 8 hours ago ago

        Ask HN: Is every headline just a Betteridge headline now?

        We analyzed 10M articles and found most questions don't need answers

        I built a classifier that tells you if a headline ends in a question mark for engagement

        We replaced all headlines with statements and traffic disappeared

        • dredmorbius 7 hours ago ago

          Falsehoods programmers believe about Betteridge's Law.

    • treetalker 7 hours ago ago

      Nation beset by interrogative titles: Betteridge

  • wewewedxfgdf 8 hours ago ago

    I've stopped using question marks they are no longer needed and offend people.