Comment by jpmattia

Well, you got me thinking about "What exactly is clickbait?"

So full disclosure: I've directly interacted with John Carlos Baez only in social media, with the topics as disparate as music and observational astronomy. My own QFT & GR background is grad course level but with little actual usage in my career. (I've done more solid-state + high-speed electronics work, with a bunch of programming as well.) With that background, and turning the pedantry dial up to 11:

To me, one distinguishing element of clickbait is that the post is ultimately disappointing. The usual M.O. for clickbait is that the website needs eyeballs for advertising, so they beef up a headline of an uninteresting article with the expectation of getting extra monetization compared to an honest headline.

I would venture a guess that he doesn't actually care about monetization, or really even extra clicks, with this post. The screenshot with the big red X through the popsci article sets the expectation pretty quickly, and the tone of the rest of the post is really a rant that mediocre science made it into PRL and then into the popular science literature. He explicitly calls out the popsci journalists for laziness, but in a clever (I'm pretty sure Mark Twain would approve of his name being taken in vain) and erudite (correct use of the subjunctive) way.

Would I have clicked on the title without seeing the authorship johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com? Maybe but I doubt it. There is so much bad popsci physics out there that I'm pretty trained to ignore obviously inadequate headlines. So on a scale of 1-10, I'd rate the click-baityness of the headline no more than a 3. He got me to click, but only because I knew it was his post.

As for others, the set of people who understand that Hawking radiation exists has nearly 100% overlap with those who know that black bodies and spinning magnets radiate, so for those folks who are in the set who are also unfamiliar with the author, perhaps it's more clickbaity.

[edit: And I can't believe you got me to write that many words on the clickbait philosophy. Have I been baited? :) ]