Declickbait Elfeed

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Using an RSS reader instead of visiting Youtube or other social media has many advantages, including that you have to deal with much less energy-sapping, will-eroding clickbait. Unfortunately feed entries can still have clickbaity titles that can DESTROY your patience! So I wrote a dumb-as-rocks declickbaiter for Elfeed. You WON’T BELIEVE the results!

The Before (The After will SHOCK you!):

The After:

The Code:

(add-hook 'elfeed-new-entry-hook #'elfeed-declickbait-entry)

(defun elfeed-declickbait-entry (entry)
  (let ((title (elfeed-entry-title entry)))
    (setf (elfeed-meta entry :title)
          (elfeed-title-transform title))))

(defun elfeed-title-transform (title)
  "Declickbait string TITLE."
  (let* ((trim "\\(?:\\(?:\\.\\.\\.\\|[!?]\\)+\\)")
         (arr (split-string title nil t trim))
         (s-table (copy-syntax-table)))
    (modify-syntax-entry ?\' "w" s-table)
    (with-syntax-table s-table
      (mapconcat (lambda (word)
                   (cond
                    ((member word '("AND" "OR" "IF" "ON" "IT" "TO"
                                    "A" "OF" "VS" "IN" "FOR" "WAS"
                                    "IS" "BE"))
                     (downcase word))
                    ((member word '("WE" "DAY" "HOW" "WHY" "NOW" "OLD"
                                    "NEW" "MY" "TOO" "GOT" "GET" "THE"
                                    "ONE" "DO" "YOU"))
                     (capitalize word))
                    ((> (length word) 3) (capitalize word))
                    (t word)))
                 arr " "))))

elfeed-title-transform can be replaced with something much better, like a grammar aware title formatter (AI or otherwise), or with information extracted from the content or video description of the entry. But I’ll settle for this pareto solution for what was half an hour of live coding in the dark:

Okay, the above screenshots were chosen as a joke. Here’s a more representative version of the declickbait effect:

Before:

After: