

Roll your own LinkBait headline - swombat
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/01/roll-your-own-l.php

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kalvin
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"

~~~
DanielBMarkham
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.

It was a fun little micro-project.

~~~
zb
_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.

~~~
mahmud
You "refresh" your email? May I suggest .. an email client? Will save your
time and F5 key.

~~~
philwelch
You can still mash "get mail" on a mail client.

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acangiano
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.

------
swombat
Finally! I was looking for a source of new ideas for my articles on
swombat.com. Next on the list:

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.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
"Startups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In 34 Seconds Using Only A
Rusty Can of Beans"

If somebody could honestly write that, I would read it (And probably upvote it
too!)

~~~
EGreg
Startups: How I Closed My First Round of Financing In 34 Seconds Using Only A
Rusty Can of Beans

~~~
swombat
That looks a bit dishonest, actually.

------
j_baker
"COBOL dies"

Now that's a headline I wouldn't mind seeing.

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a-priori
Needs more question marks. You can get away with any title, no matter how
bogus, if you make it a question.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Really?

~~~
a-priori
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.

Title: "Is Steve Jobs really an alien?"

Body: No, he's not.

------
hvs
I found myself wanting to read a lot of those articles... success!

------
amccloud
Meta or Irony? I'm not quite sure how to describe this.

~~~
sudont
I got: “ _Ask HN: How Do You Use Twitter?_ ”

Both. And some troll on the side.

------
asolove
I like the ones that follow the pattern:

#{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.

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petercooper
I made one of these for Digg in 2006. I thought I'd look it up (I took it
offline, boo!) but I had a blog post with some titles it generated:
<http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/001461.html>

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..

------
j_baker
My new favorite:

"Startups: How I Found out What Customers Really Wanted In the Middle of a
Lunar Eclipse Using Only This Simple Coding Trick"

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solipsist
> these stories themselves look all the same

I think if everyone is using the same argument, then it is something many
people believe in and therefore should be looked into.

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runningdogx
Awesome! It could use another pattern relating to the web video codec war.

(obresult: Watch How Intelligent Agents Capture Wild Giraffes)

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DanielRibeiro
I swear I've read this one somewhere: _Watch How 3 iPhone Apps Tell Whether A
Person is Lying_

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Semiapies
Fun, but not enough "dead", "dying", "doomed", "over", or "obsolete" results
for my taste.

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komlenic
This might be neat, but it doesn't work and throws an error in firebug.

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cubicle67
Google's New Cloud App Capable of Designing Nuclear Weapons: Consensus

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EGreg
lol nice. I realized quickly that the input doesn't really seem to matter. I
put in the same input ("xxxxxxxxxxxx") and got just random headlines.

But funny nevertheless :)

~~~
shadowpwner
There is no input. The only user interaction is pressing the button "hit me".

