There are many genres of linkbait. You&#x27;ve mentioned some, but indignant denunciations are another, and so are personal appeals, especially negative ones (&quot;no, you are not foo&quot;, &quot;I am not your bar&quot;, and so on.) Such formulas are bait because they grab people&#x27;s attention due to human hard-wiring, not anything interesting. Worse, there&#x27;s a misattribution-of-arousal effect [1] where the excitement they induce is enough to guarantee upvotes—lots of upvotes. HN moderation tries to counter that effect. We don&#x27;t get every call right, but I bet you&#x27;d be surprised how consistent we are.<p>I&#x27;m happy to have conversations about this stuff, but can imagine little more soul-destroying than having to come up with a bureaucratic taxonomy of it and a punctilious rulebook to match. That wouldn&#x27;t be in HN&#x27;s spirit anyhow. This place has always been about having a small number of informal principles and interpreting them as best we can. The principles are long established; there&#x27;s a reason why we change the site guidelines so rarely.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Misattribution_of_arousal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Misattribution_of_arousal</a>. I originally wrote &quot;mere proximity&quot; but that was the wrong effect.