Could the low effort comments, indicate a criticism of the article selection itself?

If we create a culture in which those who are upset about “question headline article” enter these threads to vent their frustration through low effort comments, it’s not necessarily a criticism so much as it is a culture we’ve created. Think about what kind of content does well on Reddit or Twitter - often times people are engaging in a way because they know the community will respond in a way and they’re looking for that particular kind of validation or engagement.

We need to take a step back from time to time and think about what we’re encouraging and whether that’s helpful. If you are uninterested in interacting with “question headline article” than simply don’t. If many people share your opinion and don’t want to interact with these threads, they’ll die off and not get engagement and discussion whereas articles which don’t suffer from the same problem will have active and healthy discussions.

Not every discussion is for you, and that’s okay, but engaging with content in a way that can be easily seen as negative is generally not helpful. In fact, it’s a lot worse than “not helpful” - we talk quite a bit about how we want to have an explicitly nice space and how nice spaces evaporate quickly in the face of behavior like this. There’s a good deal of nice people who don’t like being told “law of headlines, no” and will quickly leave the space if that’s the kind of engagement they see. In order to encourage these kinds of people to stick around, we need to be careful about when we choose to criticize them.

I understand that you care a lot about whether a headline is reflective of the content and are triggered easily by headlines which are clickbait-y. But this isn’t a sentiment shared by everyone and some of the people who don’t share that sentiment are not being actively malicious. They may simply not have the time or the energy to correct what the author did, and are simply excited or happy to share an article they found interesting. They might be doing so because they’re particularly interested in some insights and want to share in the joy of those insights with others. Or they may want to spur a discussion on which is elaborated upon within the article. The hyperfocus on the title and how it’s presented and leaving an ultimately negative comment which discourages discussion and can leave the poster disheartened is not helpful to creating a nice environment.