Hacker Read

insomagent · 2023-06-20 03:16:33

Sometimes a headline is all you need. Often times people won't read past the headline.

craftyguy | karma 7076 | avg karma 2.04 · | 2018-12-07 22:23:03+00:00

That's why it is usually helpful to read more than just the headline.

colecut | karma 1075 | avg karma 2.73 · | 2024-05-23 06:41:47

The goal of a headline is not to tell you everything that you want to know, it's to make you click it.

arp242 | karma 17029 | avg karma 3.74 · | 2023-01-30 19:25:30

Headlines are too short to inform. There's almost always context and nuance that's just as important as whatever the headline is about. Even the full article often fails to go in enough depth on this, and it's pretty much impossible to summarize that in the headline unless you make it a "headparagraph".

d11z | karma 142 | avg karma 4.06 · | 2023-07-23 12:34:07

Especially since many (most?) don’t even bother reading past the headline.

pchristensen | karma 13106 | avg karma 3.91 · | 2008-05-07 10:21:25

Ambiguous headlines are a classic technique to get people to read your work.

rockskon | karma | avg karma · | 2023-11-15 12:31:54

A lot of authors need to realize that the headline is the most important part of their article's content and not some extraneous bit information they can simply distance themselves from.

open592 | karma 81 | avg karma 3.24 · | 2024-05-28 17:17:09

This assumes that the majority of people read past the headline.

throwaway1777 | karma 1385 | avg karma 1.78 · | 2023-04-22 10:08:46

Of course. But people will only read the headline.

moonsu | karma 17 | avg karma 0.85 · | 2020-07-12 19:44:14

Do you expect a headline to tell you the whole story?

rtkwe | karma 9876 | avg karma 2.03 · | 2021-01-24 19:30:15+00:00

If a headline could convey everything in an article why write the whole article? There's always more than could possibly fit in a headline; "yes, buts", etc.

Multiplayer | karma 382 | avg karma 2.65 · | 2020-01-10 17:06:02+00:00

Headline matters 10x more than the content I have read, as people won’t read more than a paragraph.

wallflower | karma 56532 | avg karma 8.26 · | 2010-07-20 12:57:00+00:00

The power of a headline that grabs your focus

fixermark | karma 5217 | avg karma 2.47 · | 2018-04-03 13:24:29

Sometimes, a headline is just so good you don't even need to read the article.

Armisael16 | karma 1015 | avg karma 2.1 · | 2022-05-04 11:01:11

How would you re-write the headline? This feels more like a case where people just won’t read it regardless of what’s written.

accountface | karma 332 | avg karma 2.84 · | 2017-02-27 08:06:19

I mean... it's a headline. The point is to read the story.

MWil | karma 813 | avg karma 1.78 · | 2014-02-25 03:21:43

Or someone clued them in to the same thing I mentioned, that they didn't really NEED that headline. It still read very well without it.

dtjb | karma 1331 | avg karma 7.88 · | 2021-07-23 09:24:45

Every editor knows that the headline shapes the conversation more than the article.

Ajedi32 | karma 11678 | avg karma 4.23 · | 2018-01-25 17:05:08+00:00

Just because the title is technically accurate, doesn't mean it's useful. An ideal headline should accurately and succinctly communicate the contents of the page it links to.

rdam | karma 5 | avg karma 0.83 · | 2014-07-20 13:18:19

The purpose of a headline is to attract the reader's attention so yours is not better. But you already proved that yourself by clicking on on title and reading the article.