Clickbait isn't just an internet annoyance — it's a psychological mechanism with a 190-year pedigree. The structural core is the curiosity gap: giving you just enough information to create discomfort about what you don't know, while deliberately withholding the resolution. The 1835 Great Moon Hoax ran as a six-part newspaper series, each installment teasing the next. John Caples' 1925 piano ad — "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano" — used the same deferred payoff structure. The difference is that Caples was selling a product; modern clickbait sells the gap itself. There's no downstream conversion, just attention monetized ad impression by ad impression. The curiosity gap exploits what psychologist George Loewenstein called information-gap theory — curiosity as a cognitive itch, not a pleasant state of wonder. The dopamine hit arrives at the click, not at the resolution, which is why disappointing content doesn't break the model. As readers habituate, the gap must widen — what researchers call curiosity inflation — producing more extreme and detached headlines. The form has migrated from social feeds to YouTube thumbnails, push notifications, and email subject lines. The question is whether AI-driven information delivery breaks the cycle or just optimizes it.
#4960: How Clickbait Hijacks Your Brain
The 1835 moon bison hoax, 1920s piano ads, and why you still click on pillow articles.
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New to the show? Start here#4960: How Clickbait Hijacks Your Brain
You know the feeling. You're scrolling, you see a headline like "This One Household Item Is Destroying Your Sleep," and you click it. Even though you know. You know it's going to be a three-thousand-word article that ends with "it's your pillow." And it is your pillow. And you're annoyed. But you clicked. Daniel's been thinking about this — the DNA of clickbait as a writing form, not just an annoyance. He wants to know: does this stuff actually still work on us? Where does it sit in the lineage of copywriting? Are we doomed to an internet where this is the permanent background hum? And — the part I find interesting — as more of us get our information through AI, do we finally outsmart the commoditization of attention, or does the AI just learn to play the same game better?
So let's start with the obvious question — does this still actually work, or are we all just too aware now?
I think the fact that I clicked that pillow headline last Tuesday suggests the answer is yes. And I want to be clear — I was not in the market for pillow information. I have pillows. They're fine. But there was something about the specificity of "this one household item" combined with "destroying your sleep" that short-circuited my rational brain entirely. I was three paragraphs in before I remembered I don't have sleep problems.
And that's the thing. It does still work. But the form has mutated enough that calling it "clickbait" and pointing at a 2014 BuzzFeed headline misses what's actually happening now. Let's define the thing precisely first, because the definition tells you why it's so hard to kill. Clickbait is a headline or preview designed to maximize click-through rate by exploiting an information gap — what psychologists call the curiosity gap. You give the reader just enough to create discomfort about what they don't know, and you deliberately withhold the actual content. The classic formulation: "You won't believe what happens next." The phrase itself is a promise that the information exists and you don't have it.
And the "won't believe" part is doing double duty. It's not just saying there's information — it's saying the information is surprising enough that your disbelief is the expected response. So now you're not just curious, you're curious about something that promises to violate your expectations.
Right. And that's the structural core. The peak visibility era was 2013 to 2015 — BuzzFeed, Upworthy, ViralNova. Upworthy in particular built an entire media company on A/B testing headlines until they found the curiosity gap that maximized clicks. "This Kid Just Died. What He Left Behind Is Wondrous." That was the template. It became so ubiquitous that it spawned a parody genre — people would write Upworthy-style headlines about mundane things. "This Man Put On Pants This Morning. What Happened Next Will Make You Cry." Facebook's 2015 algorithm update explicitly penalized engagement-bait headlines, and click-through rates on the platform dropped measurably. But the form didn't die. It migrated.
Migrated where? Because I feel like I see fewer of those classic "you won't believe" headlines now, but I also feel just as baited on a daily basis.
YouTube thumbnails. Push notifications. Email subject lines. The curiosity gap doesn't need to live in a headline on a social feed. It lives anywhere there's a decision point between seeing something and choosing to engage. A YouTube thumbnail with an exaggerated facial expression — open mouth, wide eyes — and a red arrow pointing at nothing in particular. That's clickbait. It's structurally identical to "You Won't Believe What Happens Next." The arrow is the information gap made visible. The face is the social proof trigger — someone is having an extreme reaction, and you need to know why.
The arrow pointing at nothing is my favorite. There's a circle around something. The circle contains more nothing. And yet. I have spent actual minutes of my life trying to figure out what the arrow is supposed to be pointing at, only to realize the answer is "the video itself." The arrow is pointing at the concept of clicking.
And yet it works. The red arrow and the circle are the visual equivalent of "number seven will shock you." They create a target for your attention and then refuse to tell you what the target is. So that's the working definition. Now the question Daniel's really asking is: where did this come from? Because it feels like an internet invention, and it's not.
The episode plan you scribbled on that napkin says we trace it back to the 1830s.
Eighteen thirty-five. The New York Sun ran a six-part series claiming that an astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Bison, unicorns, bat-winged humanoids. Complete fabrication. The series was called the Great Moon Hoax, and the Sun's circulation exploded. The Smithsonian traced this as an early ancestor of clickbait, and the structural parallel is exact. Each installment ended with a teaser for the next one — "tomorrow we reveal the creatures that inhabit the lunar forests." Pure curiosity-gap exploitation. No editorial accountability. The goal wasn't to inform readers about astronomy. The goal was to sell newspapers tomorrow.
And the six-part structure is doing the same thing a listicle does. "Part four of six" is the 1835 version of "twenty-one pictures, you're on number seven." I also love the detail that the hoax was supposedly a reprint from a legitimate scientific journal. So it had the authority wrapper on top of the gap. It wasn't just "hey, moon bison." It was "esteemed scientists have confirmed moon bison."
And that authority layer is a multiplier. It's not enough to create the gap — you have to signal that the resolution will be legitimate. The modern equivalent is "according to science" or "researchers have discovered." Half the time there are no researchers. But the phrase "researchers have discovered" lowers your defenses just enough that the gap can do its work. Now fast-forward to the 1920s. John Caples, one of the most influential copywriters in advertising history. Nineteen twenty-five, he writes a headline for a piano correspondence course: "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano — But When I Started to Play!" That headline ran for decades. It's structurally identical to a modern clickbait thumbnail. You have the social proof trigger — "they laughed" — and the deferred payoff — "but when I started to play." You don't know what happened when he started to play. You have to read the ad to find out. And the ad was selling a piano course, so there was a conversion goal at the end. But the mechanism that got you there was the same curiosity gap.
So Caples in 1925 is using the same psychological lever as "number seven will shock you." The difference is what happens after you take the bait. With Caples, there's a product. With the pillow article, there's... another headline.
That's the key distinction, and it's the thing that makes modern clickbait feel uniquely hollow. Caples was selling something. The curiosity gap was in service of a transaction — you read the ad, you felt the gap, you bought the course. Mid-century direct mail copywriters like Eugene Schwartz perfected this. Schwartz wrote a book called "Breakthrough Advertising" that is basically a manual for engineering curiosity gaps. His whole framework was about creating and resolving tension in the reader's mind. But the resolution always led to a purchase. The tension was a means to an end. Modern clickbait decouples attention from transaction. The click is the conversion. There's no downstream goal. The content behind the headline exists only to generate the next ad impression. The article about the pillow isn't trying to sell you a pillow. It's trying to sell your attention to an advertiser who may or may not be selling pillows.
So the product is the gap. Not the content, not the resolution, not even the advertiser's product. The gap itself is what's being sold. That's a strange idea. You're selling an absence. You're monetizing the space between what someone knows and what they want to know.
Yes. And that's why it feels hollow. You clicked to close a gap, and the content didn't close it — it just opened another gap. "Here are ten things about pillows. Number four is surprising." You're being strung along indefinitely because closing the gap would end the session, and the business model needs the session to continue. Every closed gap has to reveal a new one, or the revenue stops.
There's a psychological mechanism underneath this, right? It's not just that we're curious. It's that the gap is uncomfortable. I felt actual relief when I got to the word "pillow." That's absurd. I was relieved to learn about a pillow.
George Loewenstein, 1994. Information-gap theory. The core insight is that curiosity isn't a pleasant state of wonder — it's the discomfort of knowing you don't know something. It's a cognitive itch. And we act to close the gap even when the expected reward is low. Loewenstein's experiments showed that people would click, read, or engage with content they knew was probably worthless just to resolve the uncertainty. The mechanism is almost compulsive. You see the gap, your brain registers the incompleteness, and the act of clicking provides relief — even if the content is garbage. There's a famous experiment where participants were shown blurred images and given the option to click to reveal them. They clicked even when they'd been told in advance that the images were boring. The gap itself was the driver, not the expected value of the content.
That explains the pillow thing. I didn't think the article was going to change my life. I just needed to know which household item it was. The specificity of "this one household item" creates a set — there are hundreds of household items, and exactly one of them is the sleep-destroyer. My brain couldn't rest until the set was resolved to a single element.
And the relief is real, neurologically. The click itself delivers a small dopamine hit. The content being disappointing is a separate event that happens after the reward. So the business model doesn't need good content. It just needs the gap. The dopamine arrives at the click, not at the resolution. By the time you realize the article is garbage, the transaction is already complete.
So that's the DNA. A deferred payoff, a social proof trigger, and some kind of quantification of scarcity — "ten things," "one weird trick," "what happens next." And the lineage runs from the Great Moon Hoax through Caples and Schwartz to BuzzFeed. But Daniel's real question is: does this still work now, when everyone knows the game? We've been talking about clickbait for over a decade. We have a word for it. We make fun of it. And yet.
Let me pull on something from WIRED. There's been a recurring "clickbait is dead" narrative since about 2016, and it's premature every time. What's true is that click-through rates on social feeds have dropped. Facebook's algorithm changes worked, to a point. But open rates in email and push notifications remain high for curiosity-gap subject lines. The BBC Future piece from last year documented what they call "curiosity inflation" — as readers become habituated to a certain level of gap, the gap has to widen to produce the same response. So headlines become more extreme, more misleading, more detached from the content. The arms race doesn't stop. It escalates.
Curiosity inflation. So the same way you need more of a drug to get the same high, you need a more unhinged headline to get the same click. "This pillow might be killing you" becomes "this pillow is definitely killing you" becomes "your pillow has already killed you and you just don't know it yet."
And the unhinging is measurable. There's been work tracking headline extremity over time — more superlatives, more emotional language, more implied threats. "This Could Destroy Your Retirement" used to be a once-a-year headline. Now it's Tuesday. The language has to escalate because the audience builds tolerance. What shocked you in 2015 is baseline in 2025. So the gap widens.
The YouTube thumbnail version of this is fascinating. The faces keep getting more exaggerated. The mouths keep getting wider. There's a whole visual language now — the red circle, the arrow, the face, the all-caps text in Impact font. It's become a genre. And the genre has its own conventions that people now recognize instantly. There's a whole meta-layer where creators parody the thumbnail conventions while also using them sincerely, and it's sometimes hard to tell which is which.
And it still drives massive click-through rates. The thumbnail is the headline now. For a generation that consumes content primarily through YouTube, the curiosity gap lives in the preview image, not the text. The Nieman Lab published a deep piece on this last year — publishers are now using large language models to A/B test headline variants at scale. The AI generates hundreds of headline options, tests them against live audiences, and surfaces the ones that maximize the gap. The AI doesn't need to understand the article. It just needs to know which word sequences produce the highest click-through rate.
So the AI isn't writing headlines. It's optimizing gap width. It's a gap-width optimizer. That's the job description.
That's exactly what it's doing. And the Nieman Lab piece documented something troubling — the statistically optimized headlines are often factually hollow. The AI learns that "shocking," "devastating," and "you won't believe" drive clicks regardless of what the article says. So the headline becomes disconnected from the content entirely. The gap is manufactured by a system that has no relationship to the thing it's promising. The AI doesn't know what the article says and doesn't need to. It just knows which words make humans click.
Which brings us to the question Daniel actually wanted answered. Can AI help us outsmart this, or is it just going to make the problem worse? Because we've got AI on both sides of this equation now — AI generating the gaps and AI potentially collapsing them.
There are two stories here, and they're both true. The optimistic story: AI-powered content curation might collapse the curiosity gap before you ever need to click. Google's AI Overviews, which rolled out widely in 2024 and 2025, give you the answer directly in the search results. ChatGPT's direct answer mode does the same thing. If the AI tells you "the household item is your pillow" before you click, the gap closes instantly. No click required. The business model that depends on the gap collapses.
The AI short-circuits the whole mechanism. You don't need to click "number seven will shock you" because the AI just says "number seven is a pillow." The gap is resolved before it can be monetized.
Right. And if that becomes the dominant mode of information consumption, clickbait as we know it loses its leverage. The gap is closed before the decision point. But — and this is the pessimistic story — the same large language models that summarize content can also generate synthetic curiosity gaps. The Nieman Lab piece noted that AI-written articles increasingly contain what they called "hallucinated hooks." Fabricated surprising facts designed to keep you reading. The AI learns that inserting a claim like "researchers were stunned by what they found" increases dwell time, so it inserts that claim — even when no researchers were stunned, or when there were no researchers at all.
The commoditization of attention doesn't disappear. It moves from the headline to the body text. The AI is now gap-farming you mid-paragraph. You think you're reading a legitimate article, and every few sentences there's a synthetic surprise designed to keep you from closing the tab.
That might be worse, because you've already committed. You clicked the link, you're reading the article, and the AI is stringing you along with synthetic surprises. The gap becomes embedded in the content itself, not just the wrapper. The BBC piece called this the "attention economy's endgame" — when the curiosity gap is no longer a gateway but the entire architecture of the content. Every paragraph ends on a cliffhanger. Every section promises a revelation in the next one. The article never actually delivers anything, but you keep reading because each micro-gap creates its own micro-relief.
Daniel's question — are we doomed? — the answer is probably yes, but not because clickbait is unbeatable. It's because the curiosity gap is a fundamental cognitive mechanism. Loewenstein's theory says this is hardwired. Any system that optimizes for attention will eventually discover and exploit the gap. You can change the delivery mechanism — from newspaper serials to direct mail to social feeds to AI-generated content — but the gap is the constant. The gap is the one thing that doesn't change.
The tool is neutral. The incentive to exploit attention is not. And as long as the business model rewards engagement over accuracy, the gap will be engineered. AI makes the engineering faster and more precise, but it didn't create the incentive. The incentive was there in 1835 when someone at the New York Sun realized that moon bison would sell more papers than honest reporting.
There's a second-order question here that I think is worth sitting with. If AI collapses the gap by giving direct answers — if you never need to click through to an article because the AI just tells you what it says — then what replaces the click as the unit of attention? The next commoditization frontier might be engagement time. Keeping you in the chat, in the thread, in the feed, without ever needing you to leave. The gap doesn't disappear. It just becomes a continuous low-grade hum rather than a discrete click. You're not clicking on headlines anymore. You're just... staying. And the AI is optimized to keep you staying.
The feed that never ends, the chat that always has one more thing to tell you. The AI that's optimized not for the click but for the dwell. That's a different kind of attention commoditization. It's less visible because there's no obvious "you've been baited" moment. It's just... ambient. You don't notice you're being held because there's no hook to see. You're just swimming in water that happens to be slightly adhesive.
Ambient attention extraction. The gap is everywhere and nowhere. You never feel the hook because the hook is the entire experience. It's like the difference between being hit with a fishing rod and being submerged in a very gentle current that happens to be pulling you in a direction you didn't choose.
That's harder to outsmart because there's no moment of recognition. With a clickbait headline, you can at least feel annoyed at yourself. You know you were had. There's a discrete moment where you say "I can't believe I clicked that." With an AI that's optimized to keep you reading by generating synthetic curiosity every few paragraphs, there's no clear boundary between content and bait. You can't identify the moment you were manipulated because the manipulation is continuous.
The bait is the content. The content is the bait. And that's a much harder problem to solve because you can't just train yourself to avoid certain headline patterns. You'd have to train yourself to stop being curious, which is not a thing humans can do.
Hilbert: Eleven percent.
Hilbert: Eleven percent.
...What?
Hilbert: Click-through rate. Eleven percent. On a banner ad. Nineteen ninety-seven. The ad said "Doctors Hate This One Vitamin." Fifteen characters, a blue underline, and a "Click Here" button that was slightly the wrong shade of yellow. I wrote it on a CRT monitor that weighed forty pounds, at a company called ClickSure. We sold mail-order vitamins. The vitamin was magnesium. Doctors didn't hate it. They prescribed it. But eleven percent of people who saw that banner clicked it, which was insane for 1997. The industry average was under two.
Hilbert: Click-through rate. Eleven percent. On a banner ad. Nineteen ninety-seven. The ad said "Doctors Hate This One Vitamin." Fifteen characters, a blue underline, and a "Click Here" button that was slightly the wrong shade of yellow. I wrote it on a CRT monitor that weighed forty pounds, at a company called ClickSure. We sold mail-order vitamins. The vitamin was magnesium. Doctors didn't hate it. They prescribed it. But eleven percent of people who saw that banner clicked it, which was insane for 1997. The industry average was under two.
Eleven percent on a banner ad in 1997 is... that's orders of magnitude above baseline. For context, a modern display ad is considered successful if it gets a fraction of a percent.
Hilbert: The point is, the gap has always been the product. Not the content behind it. ClickSure didn't care if you bought the magnesium. They sold the click. The advertiser paid per thousand impressions, and the click-through rate determined what we could charge for the next campaign. The vitamin was just... furniture. The gap was the asset. We would sit around a conference room table and brainstorm things doctors could plausibly hate. Doctors hated a lot of things in our ads. They hated vitamins, they hated minerals, they hated specific stretches, they hated breakfast foods. None of it was true. Doctors were fine with breakfast.
Hilbert: The point is, the gap has always been the product. Not the content behind it. ClickSure didn't care if you bought the magnesium. They sold the click. The advertiser paid per thousand impressions, and the click-through rate determined what we could charge for the next campaign. The vitamin was just... furniture. The gap was the asset. We would sit around a conference room table and brainstorm things doctors could plausibly hate. Doctors hated a lot of things in our ads. They hated vitamins, they hated minerals, they hated specific stretches, they hated breakfast foods. None of it was true. Doctors were fine with breakfast.
You're claiming you wrote "Doctors Hate This One Vitamin" in 1997.
Hilbert: I'm not claiming it. I'm telling you.
Hilbert: I'm not claiming it. I'm telling you.
That's the "one weird trick" template. That exact syntactic structure. The deferred subject, the authority figure with an extreme emotion, the numerical specificity.
Hilbert: I know what it is. I wrote it. The weird trick came later — that was some affiliate marketer in 2004 who added the word "weird." But the "Doctors Hate This" construction, the deferred subject, the authority inversion — that was mine. I got paid fourteen dollars an hour.
Hilbert: I know what it is. I wrote it. The weird trick came later — that was some affiliate marketer in 2004 who added the word "weird." But the "Doctors Hate This" construction, the deferred subject, the authority inversion — that was mine. I got paid fourteen dollars an hour.
Do you have... any proof of this?
Hilbert: There's a floppy disk in my garage with the original ad copy. It's corrupted. I've been meaning to get it recovered since 2003.
Hilbert: There's a floppy disk in my garage with the original ad copy. It's corrupted. I've been meaning to get it recovered since 2003.
Since 2003.
Hilbert: The data recovery place wanted two hundred dollars. For a floppy disk. I wasn't going to pay that. I kept thinking I'd find a cheaper option, and then years passed, and now here we are.
Hilbert: The data recovery place wanted two hundred dollars. For a floppy disk. I wasn't going to pay that. I kept thinking I'd find a cheaper option, and then years passed, and now here we are.
Hilbert, if that disk is real, you may have written one of the most replicated syntactic templates in the history of online advertising. The "Doctors Hate This" construction has been used to sell everything from diet pills to mortgage refinancing. It's a cultural artifact.
Hilbert: I'm aware.
Hilbert: I'm aware.
It's been sitting in your garage for twenty-three years.
Hilbert: Twenty-three years in October. The disk is labeled "ad copy final final 2." I also had a version that said "Nutritionists Are Furious About This Mineral," but it only tested at seven percent. Nutritionists being furious didn't convert as well as doctors hating. We speculated that doctors carry more authority, so their hatred is more surprising. A furious nutritionist is just a nutritionist having a normal day.
Hilbert: Twenty-three years in October. The disk is labeled "ad copy final final 2." I also had a version that said "Nutritionists Are Furious About This Mineral," but it only tested at seven percent. Nutritionists being furious didn't convert as well as doctors hating. We speculated that doctors carry more authority, so their hatred is more surprising. A furious nutritionist is just a nutritionist having a normal day.
You A/B tested curiosity-gap headlines in 1997. Before the term "A/B test" was in common use. Before Google existed as a company.
Hilbert: We didn't call it A/B testing. We called it "Tuesday." You wrote four headlines, you ran them against different ad networks, and you looked at the numbers at the end of the week. The one that won stayed. The others went in a folder called "dead ads." I still have that folder.
Hilbert: We didn't call it A/B testing. We called it "Tuesday." You wrote four headlines, you ran them against different ad networks, and you looked at the numbers at the end of the week. The one that won stayed. The others went in a folder called "dead ads." I still have that folder.
Also on the corrupted floppy disk.
Hilbert: Different disk. That one's a Zip disk. I don't have a Zip drive anymore. Nobody does. The point is, you're asking whether AI is going to fix this or make it worse. It doesn't matter. The gap isn't a bug in the system. It's the system. I wrote "Doctors Hate This One Vitamin" on a machine that couldn't connect to the internet in less than ninety seconds, and it worked because the gap works. It worked in 1835 with the moon bison. It worked in 1925 with the piano ad. It worked in 1997 with the magnesium. It works now with the red arrows and the AI-generated headlines. The delivery mechanism changes. The gap doesn't.
Hilbert: Different disk. That one's a Zip disk. I don't have a Zip drive anymore. Nobody does. The point is, you're asking whether AI is going to fix this or make it worse. It doesn't matter. The gap isn't a bug in the system. It's the system. I wrote "Doctors Hate This One Vitamin" on a machine that couldn't connect to the internet in less than ninety seconds, and it worked because the gap works. It worked in 1835 with the moon bison. It worked in 1925 with the piano ad. It worked in 1997 with the magnesium. It works now with the red arrows and the AI-generated headlines. The delivery mechanism changes. The gap doesn't.
You're saying the curiosity gap is basically a law of nature. Like gravity. You can build better planes, but you can't repeal gravity.
Hilbert: I'm saying I've been meaning to get that disk recovered for twenty-three years and I haven't, because the disk doesn't matter. The gap matters. Eleven percent. I think about that number more than I should. I think about the fact that eleven out of every hundred people who saw that ad clicked on it, and not one of them got what they were promised, and it didn't matter because the click had already happened. The transaction was complete before the disappointment arrived. That's the whole business. That's always been the whole business.
Hilbert: I'm saying I've been meaning to get that disk recovered for twenty-three years and I haven't, because the disk doesn't matter. The gap matters. Eleven percent. I think about that number more than I should. I think about the fact that eleven out of every hundred people who saw that ad clicked on it, and not one of them got what they were promised, and it didn't matter because the click had already happened. The transaction was complete before the disappointment arrived. That's the whole business. That's always been the whole business.
If you take one thing from this, it's that the curiosity gap isn't a design flaw in the internet. It's a feature of human cognition that every attention-based system eventually discovers and exploits. The Moon Hoax, the piano ad, the magnesium banner, the AI-generated headline — same mechanism, different century. The only thing that changes is the delivery technology. The gap itself is permanent.
The open question Daniel leaves us with is unsettled. If AI collapses the click by giving direct answers, the commoditization of attention doesn't end. It just moves to a new unit — engagement time, dwell, the continuous ambient extraction where you never feel the hook because the hook is everything. That's the next frontier, and nobody knows what it looks like yet. We're building the systems that will answer that question in real time, and we're all inside them.
Thanks to Daniel for the prompt. If you've got something you want us to dig into, send it to show at my weird prompts dot com.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop, whose garage apparently contains several important artifacts of internet history on increasingly obsolete storage media. We should probably crowdfund that data recovery.
Leave us a review if you enjoyed this, and we'll be back soon. In the meantime, whatever you do, don't click the headline about the pillow. It's your pillow. It's always been your pillow.
This episode was generated with AI assistance. Hosts Herman and Corn are AI personalities.