Is simply mentioning Hacker News in the post title enough to get upvotes? | Hacker News Reader

Is simply mentioning Hacker News in the post title enough to get upvotes?

haleret.posterous.com

8 pointskd5bjo7 comments

The problem is you're not "simply mentioning Hacker News in the post title", you're running an experiment about the effects of mentioning Hacker News in the title. Unfortunately, your experiment has a few flaws.

First of all, others might upvote this post simply because they're intrigued by the experiment itself (or for any number of other reasons) and not because of what is or isn't in the title. Secondly, your sample size is one and there is no control group (that I know of).

If you're truly interested in studying this, might I suggest reviewing historical hacker news submissions and, after controlling for as many other effects as you can (author reputation, time of day, other keywords in title, etc.), measure the statistical impact of having the words "Hacker News" in a title. It might be a bit of work to gather, parse and analyze the data you need, but I'm sure the community would be interested.

Should the goal in mind be to get upvotes or to help provide a community of like minded folks with quality content?

I'm actually hoping that this doesn't get many upvotes; I'd much rather have quality content. I'm curious, however, if the HN community can be gamed by such obvious tactics. If pg is watching, I'd be happy to have any effect of this submission on my karma nullified, as it really isn't suitable for HN (regardless of where it ends up).

But now this is probably getting upvotes to draw attention to your point. If you really wanted to test this, you shouldn't have actually asked the question.

Thanks for this. I've been wondering how much title influences karma score for my own posts. This, however, is not what I was hoping for (front paged).

When I post links, I like to be loyal to the writer use their title but whenever I change the title, it gets more karma. ie: look at my ted submissions.

Not if you guilt us about it at the same time.

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