The title is the face of the article. People judge the article by the title, before reading the article. Sometimes people don't read the article and instead comment based on the title. So I guess the title is pretty important.

People can as well judge based on the cover image (for example Twitter) or based on tags (for example dev.to).

Below are some random thoughts about titles meant as conversation starter.

Styles

Some authors have a recognizable style, for example:

• Lucas Chen: "Redux is seriously overrated. Change my mind" or "TypeScript is a waste of time. Change my mind".
• jsmanifest: "14 Beneficial Tips to Write Cleaner Code in React Apps", "22 Miraculous Tools for React Developers in 2019".
• Ananya Neogi: "HTML can do that?", "CSS can do that?".

Have you noticed some style that you like?

How to measure "quality"?

I notice that some of my posts get a relatively big number of likes, but a small number of views. It means that whoever opened the article liked it, but the title probably wasn't attractive enough so not much people opened it.

Do you track "click-through rate" for your articles (titles)?

Cliche

Cliché - a saying or remark that is very often made and is therefore not original and not interesting.

-- Cambridge Dictionary

I've been taught that cliches are bad and that I need to avoid them. But it seems that this rule doesn't work for dev.to (cliche titles work quite well here). I may be wrong about this one. What your thoughts here?

Propaganda

Propaganda targets the emotional part of the brain (which we all have). For example:

• sensational titles (used by tabloids and yellow papers) works with those feeling: 😮, 😲, 🤯("Man bites dog")
• provocative titles use those feelings: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, 😡, 🤬
• etc. it can use all spectrum of human's feelings, like fear, anger, love

Those methods are known for a long time in mass media and now people rediscover it again for blogging. Is it morally acceptable to use those tricks for dev.to posts? It seems not directly prohibited by CoC (or am I wrong?).

Photo by Elijah O'Donnell on Unsplash