Yesterday we posted one of our open source projects to HN, and ended up on the front page for most of the day. The biggest complaint in the comments was that we had chosen a bad title for our posting. Yet the post was very successful, it lead to 10k+ views, and 700 stars of the project on GitHub. So would we have done even better with a better title, or was the bad title part of the secret of our success?
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An old advertising formula tells that customer's satisfaction is the quotient of what they actually got and what they expected to get. In other words, if you want to increase satisfaction (in this case upvotes), you need to improve the actual content, or lower expectations. This, of course, assumes that your title is good enough that people will click through and it won't get editted by the mods.
We haven't found a way to test this theory yet, but if you do, let us know!
Orion Blastar 2:15 PM on February 27, 2013
You need a catchy title that is not too long or short. This is a problem that newspapers had to face. First know your audience, what words do they like to read? Check other stories on the same topic before you post. Find common words on front page stories that relate to your story. Second eliminate anything that sounds offensive or is easily misunderstood or taken out of context. If not you will issue an apology for it later. Third don't make the content too long and get to the point and stick to the facts. Remove any bias and try to make it a neutral point of view. Don't add in extra words and remove words that don't make sense or don't add to the points or main topic.
Anonymous 5:54 PM on March 13, 2013
At 1065 stars on GitHub (at the time of this post) https://github.com/HubSpot/messenger, I'm not sneezing either way.