Lol this is funny because many years ago I owned one of the largest viral sites that got billions of visits per year, and then sold it, before clickbait became popular, during its rise, and then during its fall.
In fact I've written tools in the past to analyze virility of headlines (around ~20,000 of them)
This is all beside the point... because my original comment wasn't about trying to go viral and get views.. that is easy. It was not being extremely fucking unoriginal.
I didn't stop when it became a thing, I stopped after running the site for over 5 years and algorithms changed and it became more of an adops arbitrage opportunity than actually "going viral." The occurance rate of true virility dropped orders of magnitude once everyone started leveraging the same headlines, etc.
I think you're thinking I'm doubting some ability you have to go viral, I'm not even talking about that at all. I never was, I just brought it up because you made some point like "just be sure you go viral as well", and it was a curious (hilarious) thought that I owned one of the largest viral sites.
My original comment was really simply just about....... giving your writing the headline it deserves, one that highlights your unique perspective/life experience, one draws me in. Shows me some curious aspect about your perspective I can learn from
Thats' what I want to read, not another garbage in garbage out bullshit headline.
i realize it's the internet, people lie, blah blah. But not everything out of the ordinary is a lie. Consider for a moment it's true.
The amount of people that just immediately reject something with the answer "prove it or you're lying", this in itself is such a basic idea, its surface level, 1 dimensional layer of thought. Try to read between the lines, because you are basically closing your mind off to thousands of potential factors, this complex web of cause and effect, and immediately rejecting some idea out of the gate simply because .... I don't name something?
At even the most simplest of levels, your method of thinking doesn't even work. I could just lie, I could say I owned X site, and X tool. I could literally google in 2-3 mins, find a random viral site from the time period I'm talking about, and then some tool similar to buzzsumo, and I could say "yes I built that"
IMO - Life is far better with an open mind by default, than a closed one
Just because I said your headline is unoriginal as shit doesn't mean you have to rubber band reflex the other direction that "I MUST BE A LIAR!!!" as the only explanation.
> Just because I said your headline is unoriginal...doesn't mean you have to rubber band reflex the other direction that "I MUST BE A LIAR!!!" as the only explanation.
I only got to that point when you gave a claim you would not back up, not because of your "headline is unoriginal" opinion.
To answer your opinion, look at my archive [1]. I have some original titles:
* "Your Loved Ones Are Prisoners, and You Made the Chain"
* "The Scourge of 00UB"
* "Head in the Hurricane: Securing a Web Server"
The one thing those headlines have in common is that they did not go viral.
Sure, a headline may be unoriginal, but if it gets more people to read it than an original headline does, why wouldn't I do that? I think my writing deserves reading more thwn it deserves original headlines.
