First, make me care
gwern.net
First, make me care
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Re: First, make me care
#2"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
Re: First, make me care
#3"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
Know your audience: Technical people want the details.
Most people aren't technical.
Re: First, make me care
#4This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts.
This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
Re: First, make me care
#5This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it answered its own hook somewhere the piece though.
I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.
Re: First, make me care
#6I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works).
Using brave on iPhone.
Firefox and Safari works…
Re: First, make me care
#7Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take it from there?
I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.
Re: First, make me care
#8"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
This is why good writing on the web is broken up into multiple posts split by concern, and with links to the others at the top of the article.
The real problem is when they SEO the shit out of it and replace those links with irrelevant trash meant to steal your attention and people only want to share the "make me care" posts.
The writers stop bothering even posting details when they have them. They bury the lede because it's what the "make me care" crowd forces them to do.
Re: First, make me care
#9I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.
Re: First, make me care
#10"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
Someone may have already been curious about the topic beforehand. I’m guessing they already have some kind of itch or curiosity. For example, someone who is interested in reading a dense technical textbook that gets straight into the details likely has a preexisting question waiting to be answered, which is why they care. That’s what motivates them to keep reading, even when the material jumps directly into the details