[HN Gopher] 100M Posts Analyzed: What You Need to Write the Best...
___________________________________________________________________
100M Posts Analyzed: What You Need to Write the Best Headlines
Author : vitabenes
Score : 110 points
Date : 2021-04-01 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buzzsumo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buzzsumo.com)
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| First, 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.
| chc wrote:
| They 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.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I would call ##m meaning "## million" common parlance. You
| seemed to understand the difference
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| Yuo 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 wrote:
| And how can't you empathize with a fellow HNer's OCD? (:
| renewiltord wrote:
| Have you actually been diagnosed with this condition too?
| Or are you being facetious?
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| That 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.
| fake-name wrote:
| s/best/highest engagement/
|
| These are _not_ the same. The fact that they 're so commonly
| conflated is a major problem.
| passivate wrote:
| I'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?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The NY Post is good at writing catchy headlines that attract
| attention. Yet the Wall St Journal exists. Why?
| datavirtue wrote:
| NY 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 wrote:
| Well, content is targeted by audience type, and the
| headlines reflect that?
| fake-name wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| But nobody said this was how you write the best articles.
| fake-name wrote:
| But they did say it was about how to write the best
| headline.
| jpttsn wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| Yeah, but these days it will probably be about a guy
| named Rod who is the best at fishing...but not really.
| fastball wrote:
| Right, 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| fastball wrote:
| An irrelevant headline will not drive engagement, so no.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Depends on the context.
| passivate wrote:
| But 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?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I will make it simple: they are asserting 'popular=good'.
| They are not asserting if the headline is misleading,
| whether it's an accurate summary, etc. Just popular.
|
| Well, Hitler was popular too.
| zepto wrote:
| Persuading 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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.
| passivate wrote:
| >This is meaningless to agree with or disagree with since
| the value of the results is what is in question.
|
| How are you judging the value of the results? I am not
| understanding your point here. Again, back to my original
| question, please propose alternate metrics, otherwise
| we're just arguing over minutia that misses the meat of
| the discussion.
| zepto wrote:
| > I am not understanding your point here.
|
| I know.
|
| > Again, back to my original question, please propose
| alternate metrics
|
| That's not actually necessary in order to understand what
| I'm saying. In fact it would be a distraction.
| passivate wrote:
| I much rather steer the conversation towards solutions
| rather than engage over abstract "good" and "bad" terms
| which you don't seem to want to define. In any event, we
| have reached a point of disagreement, which is fine with
| me, so lets leave it at that. Have a nice day.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Easy. 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.
| uoaei wrote:
| You 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/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#Cobra_effec.
| ..
| passivate wrote:
| Nobody in this thread is proposing a solution. I would much
| rather discuss those.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The 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.
| schemescape wrote:
| I'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 ;)
| datavirtue wrote:
| The 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.
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| We used to write poetry and aspire to higher states of
| consciousness.
|
| Anyway, nice in-depth article. The results will surprise you.
| Especially point 6.
| selljamhere wrote:
| > Anyway, nice in-depth article. The results will surprise you.
| Especially point 6.
|
| I wonder how this line would fare in their headline analysis.
| Wohlf wrote:
| There is almost definitely more poetry and literature in
| general being written today than in the past, you just have to
| search for it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| There may be more in absolute numbers but relative to spam it
| practically doesn't exist and when you search half your
| search results are spam too.
| visarga wrote:
| Find authority sites on contemporary poetry.
| markdown wrote:
| > The results will surprise you. Especially point 6.
|
| I see what you did there.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i 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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| discussion the last time they did this in 2017
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643488
| kazinator wrote:
| I 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 frequency histogram of those headlines themselves.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| One 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.
| anchpop wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Right.
|
| 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]
| minimaxir wrote:
| The 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.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| [Adds "stationarity" to vocabulary]
| [deleted]
| airstrike wrote:
| That's what you have to do if you want to have good
| vocabularity
| Wistar wrote:
| Indeed. The least one I added from HN comments was
| "Tsundoku."
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i occasionarily create new words basing it on existing
| constructs.
| wunderflix wrote:
| How creativeneous!
| joebob42 wrote:
| Or, maybe even better, they need to keep coming up with new
| nonsense to put in headlines. After a year or two people know
| "one weird trick" articles are in fact spam, so it becomes
| necessary to produce new phrases to put in headlines to entice
| / trick unwary readers.
| sbr464 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Took me an unhealthy amount of time to search for this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25053553
| sbr464 wrote:
| --- 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.
| [deleted]
| sn_master wrote:
| Speaking 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.
| mayli wrote:
| aka click bait
| mbaytas wrote:
| Well "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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Now do that for HN posts.
| di wrote:
| Disappointed 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!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tareqak wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Typically 50 chars for the subject, 72 chars per line for the
| body.
| tareqak wrote:
| Oh sorry, you are correct.
| jansan wrote:
| I thought it was undisputed that the best headline ever written
| was "Headless Body in Topless Bar"
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-01 23:01 UTC)