As I’m reading this on the “recent” page, there’s a “7 blah blah” right below yours. What a coincidence.
My guess? 7 is an odd number, and that gets attention easier. 10 is expected. 5 is too short. 7 is perfect.
HN has this to say about lists:
If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we’d appreciate it if you’d crop it. E.g. translate “10 Ways To Do X” to “How To Do X,” and “14 Amazing Ys” to “Ys.” Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. “The 5 Platonic Solids.”
On that, I agree with Paul Graham. A list isn’t inherently bad; sometimes you can get some good stuff. But calling out the number of the list in the headline is attention-bating. “7 Ways to Hire Programmers” is catchier than “How to hire programmers”, but honestly, the number doesn’t mean anything more than “One simple trick” or “doctors hate her!”.
I wonder how possible it would be to create an automatic title rewriter following HN’s rules. It’s easy enough to create a blacklist filter if an article’s title matches a Buzzfeed-ism, but that’s very good content being removed simply for having an attention-bait title.
Because after 7 ate 9, all the other numbers are too afraid to show up.
I laughed purely because I never would expect a joke like this on a tech news aggregator.
As I’m reading this on the “recent” page, there’s a “7 blah blah” right below yours. What a coincidence.
My guess? 7 is an odd number, and that gets attention easier. 10 is expected. 5 is too short. 7 is perfect.
HN has this to say about lists:
On that, I agree with Paul Graham. A list isn’t inherently bad; sometimes you can get some good stuff. But calling out the number of the list in the headline is attention-bating. “7 Ways to Hire Programmers” is catchier than “How to hire programmers”, but honestly, the number doesn’t mean anything more than “One simple trick” or “doctors hate her!”.
Also, there is the most highly cited paper in psychology.
I dislike the ironic re-appropriation of Buzzfeed-isms because it desensitizes the audience over time into accepting them.
Disclaimer: I’m not known for my fun quotient.
Silently deletes working title of next blog post
I wonder how possible it would be to create an automatic title rewriter following HN’s rules. It’s easy enough to create a blacklist filter if an article’s title matches a Buzzfeed-ism, but that’s very good content being removed simply for having an attention-bait title.