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Yes, that is obviously true. Both points. The problem lies in presenting your fact to other people. Theres a very surface level way to do it which is "me fact
by Exuma 3y ago
Yes, that is obviously true. Both points.
The problem lies in presenting your fact to other people.
Theres a very surface level way to do it which is "me fact. smash fact into ur hed. now ur fact. gronk smash"
Another is to actually attempt to be persuasive, to build curiosity, to let the reader step in for a moment into your mind, where they can pick up a gem they might not have in their own life experience, and directly apply it. What does this person know that i do not? what is he considering that i am not?
Its a subtle approach, that is nuanced.
It isnt extremely blunt, as if your only way to build curiosity is to state blunt facts as truths, hoping that people either agree and click to validate opinions, or disagree and generate a bunch of comments saying "youre wrong".
This in itself wouldn't be so bad, but its just legitimately the most NOT creative, MOST generic way to do it. It's the "salt" of headlines. If any person has any self respect for their writing I suspect they wouldn't want to serve the most important meal of their lifetime using the only ingredient as salt.
You can just look at the huge swaths, oceanic waves of generic "THIS IS A FACT" headlines. Its so fucking painful at this point, that I immediately reject them in the same way that I reject ads and news.
It has nothing to do with the person's actual opinion, it has nothing to do with even the fact that the headline is written as a fact (which in itself is a useful device sometimes), its that 10 million other headlines do it. It's like the lowest form of headline, and it is as unoriginal as it gets. and THAT is what painful, unoriginal people being unoriginal yet still doing it. Perhaps they do not care, I do not know.
There are absolutely better/more creative ways to build curiosity though.
A good example is viral youtube videos... I can't think of any viral youtube headlines that are written in this way. A good headline takes serious thought and creativity. Imagine if every youtube video was just stated as "Code is Not Technical debt", and the next video "code is technical debt" and the next video "code is life" and the next video "code is death"......... super yawn
- gavinhoward 3y ago[flagged]
- Exuma 3y agoLol this is funny because many years ago I owned one of the largest viral sites that got billions of visits per year, and then sold it, before clickbait became popular, during its rise, and then during its fall. In fact I've written tools in the past to analyze virility of headlines (around ~20,000 of them) This is all beside the point... because my original comment wasn't about trying to go viral and get views.. that is easy. It was not being extremely fucking unoriginal.
- gavinhoward 3y ago[flagged]
- Exuma 3y agoNo, I'll pass. But you're welcome to not believe me.
- gavinhoward 3y agoThen I have no choice but to believe that you are lying.
- Exuma 3y agoOnce again, this is a very unoriginal take. i realize it's the internet, people lie, blah blah. But not everything out of the ordinary is a lie. Consider for a moment it's true. The amount of people that just immediately reject something with the answer "prove it or you're lying", this in itself is such a basic idea, its surface level, 1 dimensional layer of thought. Try to read between the lines, because you are basically closing your mind off to thousands of potential factors, this complex web of cause and effect, and immediately rejecting some idea out of the gate simply because .... I don't name something? At even the most simplest of levels, your method of thinking doesn't even work. I could just lie, I could say I owned X site, and X tool. I could literally google in 2-3 mins, find a random viral site from the time period I'm talking about, and then some tool similar to buzzsumo, and I could say "yes I built that" IMO - Life is far better with an open mind by default, than a closed one Just because I said your headline is unoriginal as shit doesn't mean you have to rubber band reflex the other direction that "I MUST BE A LIAR!!!" as the only explanation.