I would suggest that this can be more 'evil' that just trying to get more clicks.
A number of times I have seen on some place like Facebook where the initial article has some extreme headline, and then hours after when engagement is up, the headline is swapped to one that is less inflammatory. A few more extreme-perspective friends will send me an article saying "see?!?!" - and by the time I see it it's already been rewritten.
A few times I would click on an article going viral and find the headline in the article itself doesn't match the one cached by Facebook. Remember that most people aren't even reading the headlines and just assume that NYT are trustworthy. The first headline is the one they end up internalizing.
Bare in mind, there is zero consequence for doing this either. The newspaper and claim they were "correcting an editorial error", whilst openly spreading misinformation about some hot topic.
I think at the very least it should be mandatory to maintain a list of edits to an article once published - and to indicate to the reader clearly that the article has received a number of edits.
Having worked in A/B testing in a loan marketing company, where we were pushing 300% payday loans in Mexico (you read that right), I can talk of evil.
I think, when you're in the day to day of a web platform, you really just simplified everything from your hiring to your board meeting to one metric: click.
Everything is number of click, it becomes no more evil than a Lion in the Savanna, you just must increase your number of clicks somehow and you forgot why.
It can lead to interesting "let's remove the legal text away and see what gives", "let's color ever buttons blue vs pink and see who wins", let's reorder the search result independently of what a normal human would expect (as in... cheapest first?)".
I see what you mean, but it's not evil anymore. It's now part of nature, they must hunt your click. They can't stop and they can't explain why. They could put one headline "Myanmar military coup" then replace it with "Myanmar cabinet reshuffle" to see which one you click on with little input from any writer and no philosophical debate whatsoever.
I know you weren't trying to suggest this, but A/B testing doesn't necessarily imply evilness, of course.
It's definitely evil in the parent commenter's and the article's cases, but if it's testing color schemes for your blog or a signup flow for your productivity app, there's a pretty good chance it's fine (depending on the underlying ethics of the blog/app).
But I overwhelmingly agree that ubiquitous or bureaucratized doesn't mean "not/no longer evil". If anything, there's possibly a light positive correlation. That comment's espousing one of the worst and most cynical philosophies I've ever encountered.
There might even be some natural/game theoretic phenomena at play here, too. Information wants to be free, and evil wants to be normalized.
Before: "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret"
After: "What Are the Ethics of Taking Tainted Funds?"
To be fair, its not only the NYTimes that does this. One that was circulating around Twitter yesterday was: "How I got COVID after taking the vaccine" with a footnote in the story: "Author did not get COVID". The headline was changed to "Why could you still get COVID-19 after receiving a vaccine?"
Some comments on newly-released YouTube videos will restate the title of the video at the time the comment was made simply to annotate that fact for future viewers, and such comments are often highly upvoted.
An interesting reactionary adaptation to this "temporary sensational title" exploit.
If they consistently go from "max outrage to grab attention" to "more clinical, for posterity", that's not benign. It's dishonest. Either be a tabloid or don't be.
A number of times I have seen on some place like Facebook where the initial article has some extreme headline, and then hours after when engagement is up, the headline is swapped to one that is less inflammatory. A few more extreme-perspective friends will send me an article saying "see?!?!" - and by the time I see it it's already been rewritten.
A few times I would click on an article going viral and find the headline in the article itself doesn't match the one cached by Facebook. Remember that most people aren't even reading the headlines and just assume that NYT are trustworthy. The first headline is the one they end up internalizing.
Bare in mind, there is zero consequence for doing this either. The newspaper and claim they were "correcting an editorial error", whilst openly spreading misinformation about some hot topic.
I think at the very least it should be mandatory to maintain a list of edits to an article once published - and to indicate to the reader clearly that the article has received a number of edits.