How to title your blog post or whatever

Agree with that too. I like watching people debate, and oftentimes it feels like magic when someone can thoughtfully counter a hard hit. It stings being on the receiving end of it, but the confidence grows when you counter a few of those. It also teaches you to debate yourself, which makes future work easier to defend. I guess I'm just saying that after a while this can become a calm/enjoyable hobby. Like giving talks in front of an audience for some people (something I haven't been able to push myself into.)

You might like SponsorBlock, from the same dev as DeArrow.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

> SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube videos. Users submit when a sponsor happens from the extension, and the extension automatically skips sponsors it knows about using a privacy preserving query system. It also supports skipping other categories, such as intros, outros and reminders to subscribe, and skipping to the point with highlight.

If there is one area I feel being expert, this is titles. I’ve been running a community website for over 15 years and it’s been 10 years since my only moderation activity there is fixing titles while other people moderate comments for hate speech and obscenities.

When I first started moderating titles, users took it personally, so I had to back off manual post-moderation and built a dozen pre-moderation filters that forced people to write proper titles. I blocked long sequences of uppercase letters, obscenities, too short and too long titles, duplicate postings, greetings, improper use of punctuation, series of exclamation and question marks and god knows what. It worked, but it drove away some users.

A few years later, I relaxed the pre-moderation filters and reintroduced post-moderation. This time, I sent automatic notifications to users as titles of their posts changed. I kept receiving complaints, I so I developed a few tricks that would reduce the number of complaints. Instead of rewriting a title, I took user text that represented the essence of the post and put it as the title, keeping the original spelling and even case, so that the user clearly sees that the titles comes from his own post.

Later on, I joined a media company and observed editors rewriting titles of journalists, detecting patterns in the changes. I followed Huffington Post’s research on A/B testing of titles and read blogs of their admirers. I even did some A/B testing on titles myself.

At some point, I even shook the dust off my machine learning skills and searched for correlations between titles and the votes on comments below.

It’s been a few years since I adopted a new approach to title moderation.

I removed titles. Entirely.

Users are presented with a generously sized textarea to write their post or comment, and the title is generated from the first few words of it. There was a bit of magic first, like skipping the greeting, but I ended up removing almost all of it. New users are confused by the apparent lack of title, but this only forces them to think through the text. Oldtimers know exactly what to expect in the title and adapt accordingly.