6 ms·
Roll your own LinkBait headline
- komlenic 16y agoThis might be neat, but it doesn't work and throws an error in firebug.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- amccloud 16y agoMeta or Irony? I'm not quite sure how to describe this.
- sudont 16y agoI got: “Ask HN: How Do You Use Twitter?” Both. And some troll on the side.
- hvs 16y agoI found myself wanting to read a lot of those articles... success!
- swombat 16y agoFinally! I was looking for a source of new ideas for my articles on swombat.com. Next on the list: Your Idea Is The Last Thing You Should Be Thinking About How to Fire a Great Bash Programmer The Death of Twitter Leading scientist: Edw519 Discovers Fifth State of Matter Official: Farmville Creator Completes Grand Unification Theory and finally: Startups: How I Sold my Company to Google In Less than a Week Using Only Git Hilarious.
- lhnn 16y agoEffective Lean in VB AAAAAAHH
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago"Startups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In 34 Seconds Using Only A Rusty Can of Beans" If somebody could honestly write that, I would read it (And probably upvote it too!)
- EGreg 16y agoStartups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In 34 Seconds Using Only A Rusty Can of Beans
- swombat 16y agoThat looks a bit dishonest, actually.
- Natsu 16y ago> If somebody could honestly write that, I would read it (And probably upvote it too!) Today, I met Jack, a former hobo from the east side who turned everything around when he got some seed money by threatening to cut a passer-by with a rusty can of beans. Less than a minute later, he used this to bootstrap his run-anywhere cloud access application, 'Beanstalk', which went on to make him the success he is today. There's a lesson in this for other entrepreneurs: are you hungry for success like Jack? Have you considered using every resource at your disposal, even a rusty can of beans? Stay tuned for part two: 'Run your web company from jail and lower overhead by 98%!'
- mhlakhani 16y agoI would love to see this article: "3-Year-Old Makes 120K In 2 Months With Clever DropBox Hack"
- Luyt 16y agoI got just one after another: The Death of Google, The Death of Facebook, and the Death of Twitter. That's a lot web companies going titsup ;-)
- shadowpwner 16y agoMy favorite: Watch How Insects Controlled By A Computer Capture Wild Giraffes But a majority of these are realistic: Secret Details Leaked of Apple Killer Product How I Learned C++ in 20 Days Startups: How I Wrote a Top-Ten App In Two Hours Using Only A Small Javascript Widget Secret Details Leaked of Bing Killer Product
- jamesbritt 16y agoSix swombat Headlines You Must Know.
- acangiano 16y agoHere is the thing: LinkBait works because it makes people naturally curious about the content of the article. Technical people dislike it because they feel that it's a calculated attempt at manipulating your actions, making you click and/or link to it. Used in moderation enticing headlines are a valuable tool, as proven by this little parody; I would have loved to read a third of the articles generated or some variants of them. The most important thing still is to deliver with your content. If you have a hyped headline, ensure that your content is just as awesome.
- a-priori 16y agoNeeds more question marks. You can get away with any title, no matter how bogus, if you make it a question.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoReally?
- a-priori 16y agoI was joking, of course, but this is something you see with linkbait blog posts quite a lot. The title is an outrageous question that gets people to click on it, then the body is a mundane argument why the question is false. Title: "Is Steve Jobs really an alien?" Body: No, he's not.
- asolove 16y agoI like the ones that follow the pattern: #{famous person} doesn't like #{programming language} These are all brilliant and funny. I got Assange doesn't like VB. Obama doesn't like Perl. I would love if someone would write any article in this format.
- j_baker 16y ago"COBOL dies" Now that's a headline I wouldn't mind seeing.
- solipsist 16y ago> these stories themselves look all the same I think if everyone is using the same argument, then it is something many people believe in and therefore should be looked into.
- petercooper 16y agoI made one of these for Digg in 2006. I thought I'd look it up (I took it offline, boo!) but I had a blog post with some titles it generated: http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/001461.html http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/001461.html I didn't think this was noteworthy at all till I saw just how relevant the titles would still be.. 21 Reasons to Totally Make a Crappy Rails Tutorial, Totally Make a Revolutionary E-Book Without Assistance! So much but so little has happened since 2006..
- EGreg 16y agolol nice. I realized quickly that the input doesn't really seem to matter. I put in the same input ("xxxxxxxxxxxx") and got just random headlines. But funny nevertheless :)
- shadowpwner 16y agoThere is no input. The only user interaction is pressing the button "hit me".
- Semiapies 16y agoFun, but not enough "dead", "dying", "doomed", "over", or "obsolete" results for my taste.
- kalvin 16y agoAmazing. My favorites: "Startups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In Three Hours Using Only A GNU C Compiler", "John Carmack Severely Admonishes SQL", and "Torrent of all Apple Passwords" For comparison, real headlines on HN right now: "I Can Crack Your App With Just a Shell (And How To Stop Me)", "A Wiki written in 80 lines of Javascript", "How Facebook Ships Code", "Piracy Doubled My App Sales", "Why Learning to Fly (or Code) Is Easier Than You Think"
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI coded this in about six hours while watching TV yesterday. I think -- but I'm not sure -- that given a few days of work, I could make a HN front page that would be indistinguishable from the real one. Is that a form of Turing test? Beats me. I don't know. All I know is that I had to stop because I was spending too much time clicking the dang "hit me" button! Amazing that just a small number of humorous headlines can be motivation enough to keep clicking until I find one. Interesting. It was a fun little micro-project.
- zb 16y agoAmazing that just a small number of humorous headlines can be motivation enough to keep clicking until I find one. I believe there have been studies showing that this is actually the best motivation of all. That's why we all check for new email obsessively. Pressing the button is most addictive when you only get a pellet - uh, I mean email - occasionally.
- DanielRibeiro 16y agoI swear I've read this one somewhere: Watch How 3 iPhone Apps Tell Whether A Person is Lying
- j_baker 16y agoMy new favorite: "Startups: How I Found out What Customers Really Wanted In the Middle of a Lunar Eclipse Using Only This Simple Coding Trick"
- runningdogx 16y agoAwesome! It could use another pattern relating to the web video codec war. (obresult: Watch How Intelligent Agents Capture Wild Giraffes)
- cubicle67 16y agoGoogle's New Cloud App Capable of Designing Nuclear Weapons: Consensus