from Hacker News

How to title your blog post or whatever

by cantaloupe on 5/12/25, 4:11 PM with 33 comments

by boznz on 5/12/25, 7:54 PM
Click-bait titles like "All the best programmers know this..", "Breakthrough might make fusion a reality.." or any other type of title that does not give a hint of what the actual thing is are immediately discarded by me regardless of the creator. I actually wish there was a way of blocking these but they are usually the first items I see on YouTube or reddit.. sigh!
This title problem is even worse as an author where you get one-chance for people to notice/read your book, but if the blurb or the cover picture is even slightly misleading or sub-par to the readers expectation they are likely to review it poorly and then the algorithm kicks it down the listings. I seriously miscategorised my first book and it did not do it any favors.
by tibbar on 5/12/25, 8:19 PM
My best engagement on Hacker News has come from submitting great discussion topics; content is secondary. You're trying to think of something that people would really enjoy talking about if they just got the chance. So if you can notice systemic issues and perhaps give them a name, you're halfway to the front page already. When they read your title, people think of all kinds of related ideas that they've been dying to discuss! Indeed, with a good enough title, you barely need an article at all...
by billyp-rva on 5/12/25, 7:09 PM
> You’d think that, by 2025, technology would have solved the problem of things getting to people. I think it’s the opposite. Social media is optimized to keep people engaged and does not want people leaving the walled garden. Openly prohibiting links would cause a revolt, so instead they go as close as people will tolerate. Which, it turns out, is pretty close.
I'm not at all sure it would cause a revolt. Most people probably wouldn't notice at this point.
by turnsout on 5/12/25, 8:52 PM
Just have to say, the title of the actual blog post is gold. I would not have read the article if it didn't have the "or whatever." But follow point 6 people—don't just add "or whatever" to your posts.
by MattBearman on 5/12/25, 8:56 PM
One of my favourite YouTubers, superfastmatt, uses a similar title pattern. Eg: “Insulate Your Camper Van. Or Just Watch Me Do It. Whatever”
by DonHopkins on 5/12/25, 10:10 PM
My favorite is Peter Norvig's contradictory clickbait url:
https://norvig.com/21-days.html
Entitled: "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years"!
People who just see then click on the URL must be really disappointed when they read the actual title.
Doesn't hurt that it's a great article, too!
by sam_lowry_ on 5/13/25, 8:13 AM
If there is one area I feel being expert, this is titles. I’ve been running a community website for over 15 years and it’s been 10 years since my only moderation activity there is fixing titles while other people moderate comments for hate speech and obscenities.
When I first started moderating titles, users took it personally, so I had to back off manual post-moderation and built a dozen pre-moderation filters that forced people to write proper titles. I blocked long sequences of uppercase letters, obscenities, too short and too long titles, duplicate postings, greetings, improper use of punctuation, series of exclamation and question marks and god knows what. It worked, but it drove away some users.
A few years later, I relaxed the pre-moderation filters and reintroduced post-moderation. This time, I sent automatic notifications to users as titles of their posts changed. I kept receiving complaints, I so I developed a few tricks that would reduce the number of complaints. Instead of rewriting a title, I took user text that represented the essence of the post and put it as the title, keeping the original spelling and even case, so that the user clearly sees that the titles comes from his own post.
Later on, I joined a media company and observed editors rewriting titles of journalists, detecting patterns in the changes. I followed Huffington Post’s research on A/B testing of titles and read blogs of their admirers. I even did some A/B testing on titles myself.
At some point, I even shook the dust off my machine learning skills and searched for correlations between titles and the votes on comments below.
It’s been a few years since I adopted a new approach to title moderation.
I removed titles. Entirely.
Users are presented with a generously sized textarea to write their post or comment, and the title is generated from the first few words of it. There was a bit of magic first, like skipping the greeting, but I ended up removing almost all of it. New users are confused by the apparent lack of title, but this only forces them to think through the text. Oldtimers know exactly what to expect in the title and adapt accordingly.
by paulpauper on 5/12/25, 8:40 PM
I disagree about negative attention being bad. People who dislike your content but still share it out of spite to "tell the world how wrong you are", can lead to more traffic and readers from spillover effects.
by andy99 on 5/12/25, 8:25 PM
Personal pet peeve is the "I made a" prefix to titles. It adds nothing but an apparently selfish shift to the author/creator as opposed to their work.
by eCa on 5/12/25, 8:41 PM
> You should try to make a good thing, that many people would like
Personally, I would care (much) more about making a good thing over doing something many people likes.
by cosmicgadget on 5/12/25, 8:29 PM
> Consider title-driven thing creation. That is, consider first choosing a title and then creating a thing that delivers on the title. I
For better or worse, my process is:
1. Write something
2. Create a title that is sometimes literal or sometimes a theme if the post covers multiple topics (I know, I know)
3. Rely on a one-sentence rss/html description to provide a clear preview of the content
by mac-attack on 5/12/25, 6:53 PM
Good read, I'm going to subscribe to your blog via RSS now.
by amw-zero on 5/12/25, 7:25 PM
Eh. I like to wing it and call it whatever I like. If the content is good, people will find it.
by AlienRobot on 5/12/25, 8:31 PM
If you don't care about SEO, why not just lie blatantly? Title "How I made 5 million dollars in a week working from home" then talk about your vacation to a local beach or something.