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Does every question mark deserve a Betteridge?(dynomight.net)
11 points by zdw 15 hours ago | 11 comments
rich_sasha 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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_ 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 "

aaron695 13 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

taneq 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Son of a

ButlerianJihad 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 13 hours ago | parent [-]

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 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Falsehoods programmers believe about Betteridge's Law.

unzadunza 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Betteridge's Law is dead, long live Betteridge's Law

treetalker 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nation beset by interrogative titles: Betteridge

wewewedxfgdf 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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