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How is that an experiment? Unless you have controlled groups, the experiment is useless. You have no idea how many people are going to see your domain and the
by smokinn 17y ago
How is that an experiment?
Unless you have controlled groups, the experiment is useless. You have no idea how many people are going to see your domain and the title and figure it's a repost and never click through because of that.
- snprbob86 17y agoI never said it was a carefully designed experiment. This post has been up for an hour and already my site has surpassed the number of hits it received in the previous 24 hours. That implies to me that the title makes a significant impact. You don't need to have a control group to learn something interesting with a reasonable degree of confidence.
- stcredzero 17y agoThe conclusion is that the HN population has become prone to sensationalism?
- Confusion 17y agoI think your implicit assumption that the HN population previously wasn't prone to sensationalism is unfounded. Press the correct psychological buttons and almost every human will respond. Personally, I think the HN population is probably more aware of the reason why they chose to follow a particular link, but they still follow it. In this case, the button is curiosity?
- stcredzero 17y agoSorry: "become more prone to sensationalism" -- fixed!
- aarongough 17y agoMy mother always said: Always judge a book by it's cover. I would have thought that if the aim was to share your thoughts with as many people as possible and generate traffic then you would have used a catchy title by default. That is definitely a major rule in any type of marketing: You only get one chance to make a first impression.
- snprbob86 17y agoMy aim in writing blog posts is primarily to crystalize my own thought processes. Writing things down is really useful to me. I submit them here to hopefully receive some feedback and spark interesting discussion as a bonus. I'm not pushing an agenda. I only reposted because of the amazing gap between the number of people who expressed interest in this follow up post and number of people who actually came to view it.
- aarongough 17y agoI didn't mean to imply that you were being 'commercial' or only submitting content to gain popularity. I found both the pieces informative, so I'm hardly going to complain! I was just trying to express my surprise that you were not expecting such a large difference in traffic between the two posts. If I have a book in each hand and one is titled 'Australia' and the other is titled 'Australia: Mayhem and Sabotage' I know which one I'm going to choose...