Amazing. My favorites: "Startups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In Three Hours Using Only A GNU C Compiler", "John Carmack Severely Admonishes SQL", and "Torrent of all Apple Passwords"
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 coded this in about six hours while watching TV yesterday.
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.
Amazing that just a small number of humorous headlines can be motivation enough to keep clicking until I find one.
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.
Here is the thing: LinkBait works because it makes people naturally curious about the content of the article. Technical people dislike it because they feel that it's a calculated attempt at manipulating your actions, making you click and/or link to it.
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.
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
> 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%!'
I was joking, of course, but this is something you see with linkbait blog posts quite a lot. The title is an outrageous question that gets people to click on it, then the body is a mundane argument why the question is false.
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..
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"