Roll your own LinkBait headline
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
For comparison, real headlines on HN right now: "I Can Crack Your App With Just a Shell (And How To Stop Me)", "A Wiki written in 80 lines of Javascript", "How Facebook Ships Code", "Piracy Doubled My App Sales", "Why Learning to Fly (or Code) Is Easier Than You Think"
I think -- but I'm not sure -- that given a few days of work, I could make a HN front page that would be indistinguishable from the real one.
Is that a form of Turing test? Beats me. I don't know. All I know is that I had to stop because I was spending too much time clicking the dang "hit me" button! Amazing that just a small number of humorous headlines can be motivation enough to keep clicking until I find one. Interesting.
It was a fun little micro-project.
I believe there have been studies showing that this is actually the best motivation of all. That's why we all check for new email obsessively. Pressing the button is most addictive when you only get a pellet - uh, I mean email - occasionally.
Used in moderation enticing headlines are a valuable tool, as proven by this little parody; I would have loved to read a third of the articles generated or some variants of them.
The most important thing still is to deliver with your content. If you have a hyped headline, ensure that your content is just as awesome.
Your Idea Is The Last Thing You Should Be Thinking About
How to Fire a Great Bash Programmer
The Death of Twitter
Leading scientist: Edw519 Discovers Fifth State of Matter
Official: Farmville Creator Completes Grand Unification Theory
and finally:
Startups: How I Sold my Company to Google In Less than a Week Using Only Git
Hilarious.
If somebody could honestly write that, I would read it (And probably upvote it too!)
Today, I met Jack, a former hobo from the east side who turned everything around when he got some seed money by threatening to cut a passer-by with a rusty can of beans. Less than a minute later, he used this to bootstrap his run-anywhere cloud access application, 'Beanstalk', which went on to make him the success he is today. There's a lesson in this for other entrepreneurs: are you hungry for success like Jack? Have you considered using every resource at your disposal, even a rusty can of beans?
Stay tuned for part two: 'Run your web company from jail and lower overhead by 98%!'
AAAAAAHH
Watch How Insects Controlled By A Computer Capture Wild Giraffes
But a majority of these are realistic:
Secret Details Leaked of Apple Killer Product How I Learned C++ in 20 Days Startups: How I Wrote a Top-Ten App In Two Hours Using Only A Small Javascript Widget Secret Details Leaked of Bing Killer Product
Now that's a headline I wouldn't mind seeing.
Title: "Is Steve Jobs really an alien?"
Body: No, he's not.
Both. And some troll on the side.
#{famous person} doesn't like #{programming language}
These are all brilliant and funny. I got
Assange doesn't like VB. Obama doesn't like Perl.
I would love if someone would write any article in this format.
I didn't think this was noteworthy at all till I saw just how relevant the titles would still be.. 21 Reasons to Totally Make a Crappy Rails Tutorial, Totally Make a Revolutionary E-Book Without Assistance! So much but so little has happened since 2006..
"Startups: How I Found out What Customers Really Wanted In the Middle of a Lunar Eclipse Using Only This Simple Coding Trick"
I think if everyone is using the same argument, then it is something many people believe in and therefore should be looked into.
(obresult: Watch How Intelligent Agents Capture Wild Giraffes)
But funny nevertheless :)