Unfortunately clickbait sells -- just look at Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News. It's the cost of the visual-focus on stock imagery and headlines (without subheadlines, descriptions, or text). But I can relate, I definitely get frustrated when I write a technical article that gets 10 claps when someone writes "12 GitHub Repos You Need to Know" for the 3rd time and gets 2000 claps.

Here's a question, though. Is this clickbait: https://medium.com/better-marketing/pepsis-40-billion-typo-caused-deadly-riots-3d671295d1bd

Because that article easily made $5,000 in its first week -- 20,000 claps. Whether or not it was curated, it did so well simply from the headline (Pepsi [...] caused deadly riots). So is it clickbait, a great story, or a great headline? I'm curious of your opinion.