Clickbait events are a common anti-pattern in event-driven systems where events carry only an identifier and no meaningful context, forcing subscribers to query back for data. This creates chattiness, exponential API calls, tight coupling, and race conditions. The root causes include thinking synchronously, misapplying 'keep events small' advice, and not treating events as a proper API contract. The fix is to enrich events with all relevant data so subscribers can act without additional queries. Exceptions exist for webhooks, privacy/PII concerns, and blob data, where a versioned URL (Forgettable Payload pattern) can be a reasonable tradeoff.
