Reddit Commenters And Our Commenters Were Right, We Whiffed On This One

So far this year, we’ve written 558 new articles. That’s a lot! Especially when you consider we don’t do AI slop or use outside vendors to create SEO-inflected, trending garbage. Did all of those articles land? No. Of course not. One in particular aroused a lot of interest, and not in a good way. We sort of whiffed it, and since I was around when it happened, I thought I’d explain what happened and what our guidelines are for this kind of thing going for it.

The article in question was proposed in Slack with the very suggestive headline: “If Americans Don’t Want Small Cars, Why Did This Honda Fit Only Depreciate $1,180 In Eleven Years.” That, to me, is a funny headline. When it was mentioned, I had a good chuckle. I wasn’t actively editing stories, and I didn’t think much about it at the time.

The car in question was a 2015 Honda Fit, in yellow, with somehow only 1,600 miles on the odometer. It sold for $18,000 on BaT, because of course it did. Low-mileage cars exist in a universe in which other cars do not, and extrapolating that out into a larger trend is, of course, kinda silly. Right there, we should have killed the headline, because no realistic version of that post could have lived up to it.

That doesn’t mean that the car wasn’t newsworthy. The larger point could have been that there are some people who do find these cars desirable, and the reversal of Obama-era footprint rules might create an opening for more small cars. Alternatively, people are obsessed with these cars, and a good post could be had just describing how beloved they are.

That’s not the post that got published. Instead, we wrote something that only very obliquely mentions the above and is way too nuanced for anything approaching a headline that bombastic. That’s our bad. That’s also my bad, because I gave a nod to the working headline without reading the post, and then moved on with my day. I didn’t realize something was wrong until I saw the comments on Reddit, where people were absolutely ripping us a new one. Sometimes Reddit can be unfairly harsh, because the critiquing of things is always easier than the doing of things. I don’t think that’s what happened here.

I rushed back to the site to actually read the website, and I gulped. The commenters here, as on Reddit, accused us of Clickbait and they weren’t wrong. I’ve gone back and changed the headline, but far too late to really matter.

The thing about Clickbait is that we write this stuff so people read it, which means we write the headline that we think people will read. That’s how bait works. The best version of a headline is one that gets you to click, and then overdelivers relative to your expectations. I think about this the way Costco thinks about Kirkland brand stuff. Costco, famously, demands that its store brand stuff be at least 1% better than whatever it’s meant to be duping. An Autopian story should be better than the headline that gets you to read it. That was almost impossible with that headline. [Note: I think the big issue is that the headline tries to make an incorrect point (that a lot of Americans like small cars) and the evidence is a cherry-picked low-mileage cream puff. It’s a bit insulting to the readers’ intelligence. And we have the sharpest readers in town. -DT]

What we usually say around here is: Are we earning a click or are we stealing a click? If we “steal” a click, that’s one pageview, and you never come back. That doesn’t work for us. A reputation is built on 1,000 articles and lost on one. If we “earn” a click, you hopefully read and, even if you don’t agree with us (ahem, timing belts), you at least know that we believe what we’re saying and understand that it’s a good-faith argument. It makes you want to come back.

In this case, we let down both the readers and the author, Thomas, by not interrogating it more before it went up. The post ended up in an uncomfortable no man’s land between Totally Sincere and Tongue-in-Cheek, and while plenty of commenters on both Reddit and here seemed to find some nuance in the article, it’s hard to blame anyone who didn’t. Going forward, we’re going to reiterate internally that our standards require us to overdeliver with our posts, and that, if you’re going to make a claim, there has to be solid proof to back it up. And if your claim is a joke, that has to be abundantly clear.

I’m just writing this to point out that we heard you and to say thanks. I sometimes get emails critical of a specific post, technology change, headline, or whatever. People are nice, and they usually say something like “I’m sorry to email you about this, but I think X doesn’t work” or “Apologies about bothering you, but I thought Y was a bad post.”

I always tell them that they don’t need to apologize. For every person emailing, commenting, or putting a note on Reddit or social media who dislikes something, there are probably at least a few more who aren’t going to tell us. I love it when people tell us how much they love the site, but I also appreciate it when people care enough to tell us when we miss. It’s the only way we can get better, and that’s what we want to do.

Almost all of the car magazines or websites you read are owned by one of a handful of large, often private equity-backed monoliths, and we’re not going to be able to compete with them if we don’t listen to our audience and take it seriously. It’s actually very helpful to get this kind of feedback. And though we believe we have the highest editorial standards in this business, we still have work to do.

Does this mean every story after this will be perfect? Absolutely not! We’re going to make more mistakes. I have some really dumb things that I very sincerely believe, but when I write about them, I want you to feel like it was worth it to spend a few minutes of your time listening to that really dumb argument.

Ok, you want a really dumb argument: VW should swap all of its cars, other than the GTI, with Cupra and Škoda models. That’s a freebie!