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Uniformity in tech article headlines
Why is it the vast majority of tech articles - easily more then half of them, have titles like "Why/how (subject matter)"?
I understand this is a bit of a nitpick, but it always kinda bugged me. People have experimented with robots writing articles, but that doesn't mean we have to act like them.
- DanBC 11y agoIt'd be interesting to have a content aggregator that does away with titles entirely. Submitters get a limited set of tags they can apply to articles. People viewing the site would get a list of domains and tags. I suspect it would be a massive failure. Clickbait works. :-/
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoObviously highly dependent on context, but keep in mind a lot of technical articles that follow these basic patterns are really just press releases, native advertising or war stories from startups, companies or individuals from their engineering blogs. They're going to naturally be self-promoting. Tech articles extend far beyond those confines, though.
- dang 11y agoProbably because, for some hard-wired reason, these titles work. They're effective at grabbing initial attention, and if all you care about is clicks, 2 seconds of attention from as many people as possible is what to optimize for. I say "hard-wired" because these tricks work just as well on a site like HN that's trying to go for exactly the opposite—quality over quantity. If we didn't edit most of them out, they would dominate the front page. It's tempting to think that dumb users upvote the baity titles while smart users don't, but that's not what the data suggest. I think they work on everybody, regardless of our better judgment.