Polygon’s Annoyingly Cryptic Headlines Are a Waste of My Time

Readers shouldn’t have to jump through hoops simply so sites can boost their engagement metrics.
A woman with her head in her hand looks at a tablet
(Kelly Sikkema)

I’ve been reading Polygon for a long time now, and I recently noticed that they’ve adopted an “interesting” editorial approach to their articles’ headlines. Instead of telling you upfront the name of the movie or TV series that’s being covered, their headlines are often cryptic and obtuse, and highlight seemingly arbitrary details like box office returns and runtimes. Consider these recent examples:

I assume the goal is to intrigue you so much that you feel compelled to click on the headline so you can finally solve the mystery of which “unforgettable zombie movie” or Mark Wahlberg film they’re talking about. (For the record, that would be Zombieland and The Family Plan, respectively.)

Now, I confess to sometimes clicking on such headlines out of curiosity, but I always feel a bit frustrated afterwards, like I got duped into clicking. And I’m not the only one. Aftermath’s Luke Plunkett notes this behavior on other geek-centric sites owned by the Valnet media company (e.g., ScreenRant, CBR), and he finds it perplexing and annoying, even offensive.

We’re people trying to get by on the internet here, and being treated like an article is a puzzle box that feels designed solely to torment someone into juicing a pageview, rather than inform or entertain a reader, is a demeaning experience. Nobody should have to dance for their supper just to find out some folks have rediscovered The Wire again.

The more I see these headlines, the more I feel like one of the last living humans on an internet increasingly written by machines for machines. What are we even doing here, when headlines aren’t being written for the people reading the website? What even is a website without that? There’s nothing in these headlines making me want to click on these stories, and there’s very little in them to warrant the deception in the first place. It’s smoke and mirrors from top to bottom.

I can think of at least one reason for this behavior. The last headline in the above list is actually about 2015’s Sicario. But you don’t find that out until after you’ve clicked on the title and then scrolled past the second paragraph — along with a couple of ads and a completely unrelated video that you might be distracted enough to watch.

From a metrics perspective, all of that might look like the behavior of an engaged reader. “Engaged,” however, is not the same thing as “informed.” In fact, “engaged” in this context is more likely just another way of saying “inconvenienced.” But, engagement is apparently what really matters to Polygon and Valnet, and less so informing, or even entertaining. And so I’ve decided to stop following Polygon. I have better things to do with my time than play their editorial guessing games.

(In years past, Twitter accounts like HuffPoSpoilers and Saved You a Click became infamous for summarizing clickbait articles so you didn’t need to click on them. I wonder if someone’s offering a similar service for cryptic headlines like Polygon’s.)

There’s certainly an art to writing good headlines. It’s harder than it looks to write headlines that are clever and intriguing, but also clear and informative. (I still think about the discussion surrounding Greg Storey’s “A Better Tighty Whitey” piece from — checks notes — 2004.) But given how people tend to read online, and how much content’s actually out there, it’s best to always err on the side of clarity. (The same, by the way, goes for your site’s URLs.)

Headlines should be written to benefit human readers, not boost some executive’s marketing metrics or serve the AI bots currently hoovering up the web faster than we can create it. But alas, this is the online media landscape in which we now live.

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