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100M Posts Analyzed: What You Need to Write the Best Headlines
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fake-name 6y agos/best/highest engagement/ These are not the same. The fact that they're so commonly conflated is a major problem.
- passivate 6y agoI'm curious, what other metrics would you use to judge them? Isn't the whole point of a headline to get you to read the article?
- fake-name 6y agoThe point is getting someone to read the article doesn't make a headline "good", it just means someone read the article. You could have a "good" headline that catches the attention of a large number of people who don't really care, or a "bad" headline which catches the attention of a small number of people to whom the article is very relevant and really care. Which do you want to optimize for?
- fastball 6y agoBut nobody said this was how you write the best articles.
- fake-name 6y agoBut they did say it was about how to write the best headline.
- jpttsn 6y agoIf I see an article about “the best fishing rod”, I’ll assume it’s in the context of catching fish, not being a fish.
- datavirtue 6y agoYeah, but these days it will probably be about a guy named Rod who is the best at fishing...but not really.
- fastball 6y agoRight, but headlines don't really have a "quality" to them outside of attracting readers. So "best" is in fact "highest engagement", when it comes to headlines.
- colpabar 6y agoI disagree. In my opinion, an ideal headline should be a condensation of the content into a few catchy words. If engagement is all that matters, is "READ THIS ARTICLE OR YOU WILL DIE!!!" a good headline?
- passivate 6y agoBut you didn't answer my question. What other evaluation metrics are you proposing? >The point is getting someone to read the article doesn't make a headline "good", it just means someone read the article. It actually does. The headline did its job. >Which do you want to optimize for? That is a false choice. Why are these the only two options?
- zepto 6y agoPersuading someone to read an article which is irrelevant to them is likely a bad thing. Just because you don’t have a good metric for something doesn’t mean that what you can measure is better. A metric can simply lead to bad results, and thefore be a bad metric.
- passivate 6y ago>Persuading someone to read an article which is irrelevant to them is likely a bad thing. You're conflating content targeting with headline writing. Those are two separate points. >Just because you don’t have a good metric for something doesn’t mean that what you can measure is better. Certainly, if a metric is 'bad' in that it is not producing results, nobody wants to waste their time and keep using it. However, the engagement metric is producing results for many folks. Do you disagree with that? >A metric can simply lead to bad results, and thefore be a bad metric. Anything "can" lead to anything. That doesn't really make for much of a discussion without data to examine.
- zepto 6y ago> You're conflating content targeting with headline writing. Those are two separate points. No. >Just because you don’t have a good metric for something doesn’t mean that what you can measure is better. Certainly, if a metric is 'bad' in that it is not producing results, nobody wants to waste their time and keep using it. However, the engagement metric is producing results for many folks. Do you disagree with that? This is meaningless to agree with or disagree with since the value of the results is what is in question. >A metric can simply lead to bad results, and thefore be a bad metric. > Anything "can" lead to anything. That doesn't really make for much of a discussion without data to examine. So you agree that the metric could be bad.
- dev_tty01 6y agoEasy. I want a headline that accurately reflects the content of the article. That is my, and perhaps a few others, personal definition of a "good" headline. That is not being measured. Given that definition, I may not go read the article because it doesn't interest me. It is still a good headline. I didn't waste my time. On the other hand, if I am interested in the content, I would have read the article and would not be irritated that I had been mislead about the content. The metric being used in the article here in no way leads to this definition of a "good" headline. More likely the opposite.
- ModernMech 6y agoThe point of a headline is to get you to view ads. The article is incidental. It keeps you on the page so more ads can be shown.
- uoaei 6y agoYou seem to be implying that "only things which we can measure should be used for decision-making" and I would caution against that limitation for the reason that this is exactly how perverse incentives are realized. We are seeing it now when we conflate "good" with "gets engagement" or "makes money". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Cobra_effec...
- passivate 6y agoNobody in this thread is proposing a solution. I would much rather discuss those.
- Spooky23 6y agoThe NY Post is good at writing catchy headlines that attract attention. Yet the Wall St Journal exists. Why?
- datavirtue 6y agoNY Post usually has solid content that matches the assumption taken by the headline. Can't say that for most of the major "news" domains.
- passivate 6y agoWell, content is targeted by audience type, and the headlines reflect that?
- Spooky23 6y agoExactly. “One weird trick for maximizing return on equity” doesn’t really work for the WSJ. “Man bites dog” is appreciated by Post readers.
- fakedang 6y ago"Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is." "Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?" "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits."
- hellbannedguy 6y agoAnd I still won’t buy a subscription. I’m waiting for the first paper to reinvent itself. Meaning the digital, and the print, is so good it will be something I need to subscribe to. Maybe those days are gone? I was just thinking would I pay for a HN subscription. A site I have viewed since day one. Right now—-no.
- schemescape 6y agoI’d take it one step further and say that following these tips makes what I consider to be the worst headlines. I’m surprised they left out the obnoxious “one weird trick” phrase ;)
- ClearAndPresent 6y agoWe used to write poetry and aspire to higher states of consciousness. Anyway, nice in-depth article. The results will surprise you. Especially point 6.
- Wohlf 6y agoThere is almost definitely more poetry and literature in general being written today than in the past, you just have to search for it.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoi generally scoff at poetry from a respective of blissful near-ignorance. Most dorms at least, but i recently saw a piece and thought to myself oh.
- selljamhere 6y ago> Anyway, nice in-depth article. The results will surprise you. Especially point 6. I wonder how this line would fare in their headline analysis.
- markdown 6y ago> The results will surprise you. Especially point 6. I see what you did there.
- kristopolous 6y agoMarketing exists purely in thought space. It's currency is the imagination. Like most art, we commercialize it until our categories are diffusive. But it's still there.
- ghastmaster 6y agoOne thing to remember is that the most appealing headlines to the audience may have not changed, rather the frequency of titles containing the top clicked metric may have changed over time. eg. More headlines may be using the number 10 than 4, so 10 is more likely to be the most trending headline. Similarly, in the lottery, the frequency of winners who picked their own number is dependent on the frequency of people picking their own number.
- minimaxir 6y agoThe charts use median engagement, which helps normalize against frequency. That said, a boxplot with 25th and 75th percentiles would likely indicate there is a heavy skew, as tends to be the case with social media data.
- anchpop 6y agoThe thing to know here is the bayes factor. That’s the true positive rate divided by the false positive rate. In this context, it’s the percent of successful articles that have a property (like using the number 10) divided by the number of unsuccessful articles that have that property. This removes any advantage a property gets from being more common.
- throwawayfire 6y agoRight. The result for headlines of 65 chars - shared 50,000 more times than 60 chars or 70 chars - seems too incredible to occur at random and suggests instead that a popular news source has implemented a 65 chars policy. [Edited to note: Yep. YouTube is dominant as the popular publisher in this review, and truncates headlines at 66 chars - that's what this article observes]
- an_opabinia 6y ago> On Facebook, there is 100% difference between the top 20 headline phrases in 2017 vs 2019/20... We can attribute this stark change to a few things; algorithmic maturity, audience preference and the publisher landscape. Or that means you're measuring the completely wrong things about headline authoring, because the data have no stationarity at all. They allude to this, but it would appear that the only thing that matters is Facebook's editorial, laundered through an algorithm. So maybe a more valuable article would be hacking into Facebook and just finding out what it is they idiosyncratically value in a headline.
- Wistar 6y ago[Adds "stationarity" to vocabulary]
- airstrike 6y agoThat's what you have to do if you want to have good vocabularity
- marshmallow_12 6y agoi occasionarily create new words basing it on existing constructs.
- wunderflix 6y agoHow creativeneous!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Wistar 6y agoIndeed. The least one I added from HN comments was "Tsundoku."
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sm4rk0 6y agoFirst, you need to know that (at least in SI) "m" is for "mili" - a thousandth part of something, and "M" is for "mega", which means "a million units". So, 100m is 0.1 headlines.
- jedimastert 6y agoI would call ##m meaning "## million" common parlance. You seemed to understand the difference
- sm4rk0 6y agoYuo cna undrestnad thsi, rgiht? One thing is if I could understand it and another thing is if the author's writing skills are good enough to advise others about writing. BTW, the submitter (or a moderator) seems to agree with me (check the current HN-entry title).
- sm4rk0 6y agoAnd how can't you empathize with a fellow HNer's OCD? (:
- renewiltord 6y agoHave you actually been diagnosed with this condition too? Or are you being facetious?
- sm4rk0 6y agoThat was meant more as a semi-joke (on me). Never thought about seeking a professional help because it's not affecting my life too much. I hope other people in my life would agree.
- chc 6y agoThey probably didn't intend for the headline to read "One hundred mega posts," so if anything you're arguing in favor of how they wrote it.
- mayli 6y agoaka click bait
- mbaytas 6y agoWell "clickbait" is hardly a property of the headline – it's a condition of the content failing to deliver on the headline's promises and implications.
- cgriswald 6y agoThe headline is the “bait” that is seeking the “click”. One can hardly fault the article which likely existed before the headline (for the clickbait; it can still be a failure as an article in general).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sn_master 6y agoSpeaking of which, does anyone know what's the story behind those comments on YouTube that are 3-4 sentences made up of a bunch of words that don't match up and look completely random? I see them on almost every new youtube video, almost same frequency as the 'vom' comments.
- to1y 6y agobeen wondering also. perhaps ai comments to create verified acc or the newest meme
- yossarian1408 6y agoMy guess would be something to do with the algorithm. Spam random words to trigger greater visibility in search results, boost 'engagement' metric - today's bump comment.
- hnedeotes 6y agopeople should start writing replies to them in the same logic they use
- datavirtue 6y agoThe news websites that entered the top running for headlines on facebook are all really bad. Just a lot of low quality, shady headlines. Not bored panda bad but pretty close.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoMainstream and social media are at near parity in terms of necessary informativeness. The reader has to seek-out reliable, independent media in order to stay informed. I wish news and mass-sharing were banned from social media, because it's too often low-signal noise like celebrity gossip, contrived/falsified outrage, or some new movie or product. Garbagé.
- nradov 6y agoOn Facebook at least it's easy to hide all posts from news and mass-sharing pages as they show up in your feed. So you'll see them once and then never again.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoNow do that for HN posts.
- tareqak 6y ago> 4. The ideal headline length is 11 words and 65 characters, according to the most shared headlines on both Facebook & Twitter. ~~That length is just shorter than recommended length for a commit message (72 characters if I recall correctly).~~ Compare that to 50 characters for a commit message’s subject, and 72 characters for each line in the body.
- david_allison 6y agoTypically 50 chars for the subject, 72 chars per line for the body.
- tareqak 6y agoOh sorry, you are correct.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agodiscussion the last time they did this in 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643488
- sbr464 6y agoI'll go first ShowHN: Mono(te): An offline first, Turing-complete, blindingly fast notes app written in 23 lines of (Rust) code. Oh, and it respects your privacy, and it's Open Source.
- ignoramous 6y agoTook me an unhealthy amount of time to search for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053553
- sbr464 6y ago--- hugodutka 4 months ago [–] --- The perfect Hacker News title has finally been crafted. I was thinking of that post or similar. Thanks for finding. I struggled w/ the decision to use Rust or Elixir.
- di 6y agoDisappointed this headline wasn't crafted to perfectly adhere to their own definition of an ideal headline (11 words and 65 characters): >>> headline = "100M Posts Analyzed: What You Need to Write the Best Headlines" >>> len(headline.split()) 11 >>> len(headline) 62 So close!
- cgriswald 6y agoWell, they don’t really define a word. Is “100m” a word because the characters are contiguous? Or is it two words because we say “100 m” or “100 million” in our minds? Or is it zero words because it’s literally a number followed by a letter, which isn’t a word?
- jansan 6y agoI thought it was undisputed that the best headline ever written was "Headless Body in Topless Bar"
- doggodaddo78 6y agoMy bad, it was me. I needed some head.
- kazinator 6y agoI don't see anything here which convinces me that the engagement figures versus headline word count is not simply more or less a mirror of the word count frequency histogram of those headlines themselves. The null hypothesis is that people share more ten-word headlines simply because there are more ten-word headlines. If you want to show they like to share them more, you need something else, like data about how many headlines people looked at versus shared.
- mattmanser 6y agoShock finding! Average headline length matches average sentence length!
- bigmattystyles 6y agoIt's not even a perfect analogy but I was instantly reminded of an episode of TNG where the Enterprise is booby trapped inside an ancient device that amplifies and redirects their momentum towards them as radiation (hurting the crew) and the ship cannot move. There is a way to quickly move the ship but it means handing control over to the computer and only has a 50% success rate. Failure means death. The crew refuses to hand over control to a computer* and, add a little Deus Ex Machina, and they determine that very slow thruster maneuvers could also free them. They do it old school, with skill and human (Picard's) intuition. Tada - I honestly instantly re-experienced this episode when reading that title; there's nothing wrong with analyzing data, in fact, I probably would and the article isn't suggesting a machine write headlines, but it feels like writing for humans should feel human and not be machine optimized... I realize I've just been rambling, probably connected with no one else on the forum but I've typed all this, so I'm submitting it.
- enkid 6y agoThe interesting thing is when machines will write something that feels more human than anything humanity could write. I believe that will happen sooner than people think.
- willhinsa 6y ago> more human than anything humanity could write Made me think of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyO18QrJ3zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyO18QrJ3zw (White Zombie - More Human Than Human, referencing PKD's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?")
- ahepp 6y agoIsnt that just AGI? I'm not gonna hold my breath.
- TheAceOfHearts 6y agoWe've made huge strides with GPT-3, which has arguably already surpassed at least some percentage of the humans with its writing capabilities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- doggodaddo78 6y agoMake the most awesome headlines with this one weird trick. Oh wait nm, there's some art and some science to it by evaluating reader interest fashions.
- habosa 6y agoThe best headlines _on Facebook_. Given that FB is the world's most notoriously bad/spammy content recommendation system this is like an article about “What you need to cook the best food” that focuses on the McDonalds menu. But hey, I clicked.
- Giorgi 6y agoI don't know why and how authors missed this but they are not factoring in pandemic effect which obviously dictated these movement.