I'm not really seeing what's so clickbait about the title? They discovered something very surprising in the area. The area has an incredible amount of sulfates but I don't think anyone actually expected to find elemental sulfur in a natural environment, i.e. native sulfur formations.
If anything the article actually understates how wild it is to not only find this but that many of the surrounding rocks also show the same.
This region is believed to have been formed predominantly by erosion from flows of water or landslides. Native sulfur really only comes from 3 things:
3. Reduction of sulfates into sulfides by bacteria under specific conditions that result in the production of elemental sulfur as a byproduct.
Given that none of these 3 were expected from this area, that leaves a pretty substantial question of how it got there, how it was produced, and if it wasn't produced locally, where it came from.
So again I'm not really sure if it was clickbait by any means.
It's clickbait in what I believe is the original sense -- the title could easily state what specific thing it is talking about (sulfur), but instead it uses a vaguer term ("a surprise") so that you have to click on it to learn what the story is.
Calling it "clickbait" here doesn't mean it's a worthless article. It just means that the title is vague in an obviously needless way.
That's why I have a chrome extension which sends hyperlinks for certain sites through a local llama3 instance, fetching the content of the link, asking if the link text is clickbait based on the content, and for an alternate objective headline, which the chrome extension then replaced the link text with.
I hadn't heard about that, I will look into it! The main reason I haven't packaged the extension for distribution is because it relies on the user also having ollama and I'd want to ship something self contained.
That doesn't sound unique or interesting. Sulfur? So what. Not clicking.
Surprise? Well, I was already pretty sure if it was water or life they'd have said so, but now I'm intrigued. I clicked and now I know why the find is actually pretty interesting after all.
Very, very few people are going to click on the headline you've suggested, and engagement with the public is pretty important for NASA. "Martian surprise" is something that will get people interested, if only to click the link to see the picture of sulfur crystals and then leave the page 5 seconds later. Other news sites will also run with that headline, spreading the engagement far more than just a NASA article.
Getting public engagement is a part of how they defend (and increase) their budget, so it makes sense that they would be more likely to use click-baity headlines. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They need the right type of public engagement. That hypothetical person who sees the picture of sulphur crystals then leaves 5 seconds later is unlikely to support NASA. If they have enough negative interactions, I would suggest that it would achieve the opposite.
There is also a difference between a clickbait headline and a headline that genuinely engages someone. Something like "Unexpected discovery of sulphur crystals provides hints about Martian past" provides vastly more useful information and will probably be more appealing to people who have at least some interest in science. (Or at least rock collecting!)
At least in my case, I decided to read the comments here before even considering a look at the article. Not only did the idea of a "surprise" leave me thoroughly disinterested, but I have been bitten by NASA's hyperbole often enough to be hesitant about pursuing a clickbait link. Which is sad, because planetary science is interesting and the article itself wasn't that bad for something directed towards a general audience.
I don't know about most people, but the number of news sources that use information rich headlines suggest that there is a significant number of people who react negatively to clickbait headlines. And I suspect that many of these news sources float clickbait headlines from time to time to test the response of their audience. (Such headlines certainly pop up periodically on most news sources. It is the motive that I am uncertain of.)
Personally, I find clickbait titles lends an air of tabloidness to a publication. I wouldn't be surprised if that is a common feeling. I will also actively avoid, clickbait titles even from trusted sources, simply because it would be detrimental in the long term. Granted, I suspect the active avoidance part is an unusual behaviour.
Headlines (at least in mass media) have always been a hook to get the reader interested. Back when you had competing newspapers for sale on a stand, people would glance at the headlines and maybe buy a paper if it looked interesting enough.
There is no doubt that the headline is an important hook. Yet there is a difference between a deliberately vague or misleading hook (which I would consider clickbait), and one that conveys what the article is about.
I don't like watering down the defition of clickbait to mean any headline that gets the reader to click on it. That sort of definition is mostly an excuse for bad behaviour (e.g. misleading the reader).
They're a scientific organization that lives or dies on the whims of people who have to win elections. Outreach is survival, and reach is essential to that.
Thats exactly why clickbait makes no sense. Who is it targeting? The lay person? They have no say in NASA's budget. If NASA wants funding they have to look at who holds the reigns in congress and give them pork. Thats it. That's their mechanism. When they were extremely well funded around apollo it was because they had pork a la advancing ICBM and surveillance satellite technology. Not because they got billy to tune in between episodes of will rogers.
They live and die on the whims of the CIA and military industrial complex. They are a platform for delivering spy satellites that's allowed to do a bit of science as a treat.
The public, for the most part, stopped caring about NASA after the US stopped going to the moon. Most of the rest believe NASA is hiding aliens or controlling the weather or some such nonsense.
From The Planetary Society: "None of NASA's budget is used for national defense or intelligence gathering programs; it is a civilian agency responsible for the peaceful exploration of space"
Do you have evidence to the contrary you could share?
GP is hyperbolic but essentially correct. Generally, states will move as much as science and technology research that is not militarily sensitive to the public sphere - such as NASA. This is because many scientists won't work for the military directly [1], but will work on stuff that has both military and non-military applications. This science is then used by the military for their purposes.
Many people have also written quite a lot about how the race to the moon was primarily funded because it was a military domination competition. Once the USSR decisively lost, the US stopped doing that expensive science. A good overview of the geopolitics of space exploration and research is the book Dark Skies by Daniel Deudney [2].
[1] Combination of ethical reasons and having to do security checks and your freedoms somewhat restricted.
I just visited the Johnson Space Center, and boy, was there a lot of PR for SLS and Mars on exhibit. I shouldn't have felt weird about it given the artists' depictions of planetary probes and spacecraft concepts I grew up with, but I've read too much about the reality of the program to get into a Mars expedition in a decade.
Meanwhile the miracle that was the asteroid hunter probe got an easily-overlooked station with an actual sample it brought back from Bennu in an inadequate magnifying display case.
Even more likely, the user won't click to the article.
But two days later she'll mention to either me or another space nut like me "Hey, what was that surprise that NASA found on Mars?". And the conversation that sparks will be engaging and interesting for her.
I think clickbait gets clicks, but doesn't build favorable sentiment or interest. I think this is true for the general public as well.
To this end it might make sense for a company/website paid based on click through engagement, but you will notice that most of those institutions are generally despised by the public.
I don't think being annoyed by clickbait is unique to nerds or such a sophisticated concept that the General Public can't comprehend it.
It's not like when NASA comes up for Budget approval being known as the agency that creates shitty clickbait articles will help them. In fact, I think it is exactly the kind of brand that they wouldn't want to build
They don't get budget by clickbait. How do I even as a registered voter have anything to do with NASA at all? I don't vote on their budget. I've never been offered to vote on a funding package for them. I chose from maybe two candidates as my representative on various levels of government, and am beholden to whatever platform they come up with.
They come up with their platforms based on donors and their advertisers. Advertisers set the narratives in public discourse that inform public opinion. Politicians know where their bread is buttered. If NASA wants more money they should consider doing more secret squirrel stuff like they’ve done in the past. Its why satellites were funded. Its why apollo was funded. Its why the shuttle was funded. Little academic exercises are only going to get so much money compared to how much is sloshing around in defense related spending. Unfortunately for them I’m sure much of this space defense money they might have gotten otherwise goes to space force and other agencies that weren’t around or operating in space in the 1960s.
The law everywhere does prohibit a LOT of jerk behaviours and a lot of jurisdictions have jurisprudence (I live in a common law country where jurisprudence is enormous) that amount to ''don't be a jerk''.
Well the law shouldn’t be responsible for stopping someone from being a “total jerk”, but yes you should be upset at the law for not meeting your expectations
when the majority of the population in America suffers from brain rot, it behooves Nasa to engage the public with clickbait. it's not like Nasa gets the best funding in the world from our government compared to military and all our other genocidal ventures.
