alt.hn

7/29/2026 at 2:29:12 AM

Does every question mark deserve a Betteridge?

 https://dynomight.net/betteridge/

by zdw

7/29/2026 at 5:34:53 AM

I suppose for a non clickbaity use of a question in the title, the article should be about the question not the answer. I would think an article about the (so far inconclusive) search for extraterrestrial intelligence headed by "Are we alone in the universe?" to be aptly, non-clickbaitily titled.

by rich_sasha

7/29/2026 at 2:36:05 AM

No.

Even the often linked Wikipedia article said -

"A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".[11]

A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".[12]

In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine "

by downbad_

7/29/2026 at 3:59:31 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

7/29/2026 at 3:18:11 AM

Son of a

by taneq

7/29/2026 at 3:05:34 AM

Betteridge's Law Not As Accurate As We Thought

We Tested Ten Laws of the Internet: the Results Are In

Answer Rhetorical Questions with This One Weird Trick

Historical Deep Dive: Betteridge Before the Invention of Punctuation

You Won't Believe What Betteridge Wore to the WH Correspondents Dinner!

High Court Poised to Grant Stay Against Appeal of Injunction in Betteridge Case Before Gag Order Motion Deadline Takes Effect

by ButlerianJihad

7/29/2026 at 3:19:59 AM

Betteridge's Law Considered Harmful

Headline Slams Betteridge's Law

Betteridge's Law: Here's What We Know

Sitcks Nix Betteridge's Law Pix

by enlightens

7/29/2026 at 3:39:40 AM

Ask HN: Is every headline just a Betteridge headline now?

We analyzed 10M articles and found most questions don't need answers

I built a classifier that tells you if a headline ends in a question mark for engagement

We replaced all headlines with statements and traffic disappeared

by mopsi

7/29/2026 at 5:17:32 AM

Falsehoods programmers believe about Betteridge's Law.

by dredmorbius

7/29/2026 at 12:48:25 PM

Betteridge's Law is dead, long live Betteridge's Law

by unzadunza

7/29/2026 at 4:21:27 AM

Nation beset by interrogative titles: Betteridge

by treetalker

7/29/2026 at 3:24:16 AM

I've stopped using question marks they are no longer needed and offend people.

by wewewedxfgdf