Hacker News Reader

Comment by powersnail | Hacker News Reader

> The images just need to get across a vibe, they don't need to be perfect

I dislike super generic stock photo at the beginning of an article. It’s completely pointless, sometimes aesthetically unpleasant, often disconnected with the actual content, and hence a distraction.

If neither you nor the reader cares about the stock photo, why not just forsake the thumbnail or use your website’s logo?

View on HN

It seems pointless but it works. Our monkey brains like aesthetics. From the article:

> Blog posts with images get 2.3x more engagement

Those metrics imply that what images are being used is completely irrelevant. Either that's true, and we could all just use the same photo everywhere (I suggest the one of St. IGNUcious, Your Mileage May Obviously Not Vary - all hail the irrefutable and infallible 2.3x metrics!) or it could still be true that a "super generic stock photo at the beginning of an article" is, indeed, pointless.

I wonder if that is because of social media. In which case add the silly image to the metadata for embedding as a tweet, but keep it out of the post.

That number refers to actual images in blogs, not specifically stock photo thumbnail.

Perhaps I’m just an outlier; but every time I see a thumbnail that has nothing to do with the title, I scroll past it. It’s a negative for me.

Yes also due to shortening attention spans

Reply on news.ycombinator.com