I also hate titles with colons in them and avoid them like the plague as an author. I would love to see a causal estimate for how much adding a colon reduces article impact

i'm really cool, obviously

Oh you’re going to haaaaate an upcoming paper of ours.

So, a title with a colon needs a cleanse?

There are a few studies that found a positive association between a colon in the title and citations (but I do not recall seeing a negative association)

A paper a fears ago (from Tse and co) showed that hyphens in titles can negatively affect citations. This was not due to human behaviour though, but indexing databases being confused.