Headline-only news app

In the late 2010’s Meta conducted a study where ~75% of participants shared links with others without reading the content or even opening it. Another study indicates about a 25% of people don’t read articles, only headlines. This is not surprising, but also fairly alarming given how littly context can be given with a sentence or two.

It’s hard to change human behavior. That being the case, I wonder if it makes more sense to bend the platforms to tailor to the behavior of the user, rather than trying to get them to read more. For example, what if there were a news app that was just headlines? No authors, not metadata, just the article title with no caption.

While this wouldn’t be a ver functional app, I do think it would lay bare how absurd many of the headlines we come across on a daily basis are. I don’t think there’s a long-tail application of something like this, but it could be a nice shock to the system and help people (myself included) think a bit more critically about the media they consume.

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