How To Win Titular Metagames

Attention is your scarcest resource; considerate creators respect your attention. Good titles help internet curators efficiently route information to relevant aggregators. Good titles permit readers to quickly estimate the relative value of articles, essays, videos, etc. Everybody wins when titles are accurate.

This is how I title my essays.

These concepts also apply to book covers, video thumbnails, etc.

Notice the title. It's not "How I Choose Titles for My Essays". No, no, you wouldn't have clicked on that title.

Here's the dilemma: I want you to read this, but I mustn't produce (or promote) misleading clickbait.

Don't ask me why I want you to read this. My blog earns negative dollars and dubious street credit. I am clearly an insane person.

A proper title (1) spreads information to those who would benefit (2) without wasting anybody's time.

Quantifying Clickbait

"Clickbait" is a relation between title, article, and reader.

Titling is a binary classifier. We can model this relationship in a confusion matrix:

We can also model clickbait as an epidemic. Let's call it "influenca". Here's one way to estimate a title's basic reproduction number ("R-value"):

R₀ = β / γ

• β (transmission rate) ≈ (shares + comments) / (viewers × exposed users)
• γ (recovery rate) = 1 / D, where D is days until interest fades

If R₀ > 1, the title spreads virally; if R₀ < 1, it fizzles out.

I wish I had more time to develop how these mathematical models interact, but alas. The rats.

In this framework, a good title (1) transmits its content to as many people as possible (2) without incurring false classifications.

Some folks try to maximize reproduction regardless of false classifications. These people are scoundrels. They poison our communication channels with spam. Ethical titles accurately represent content that reduces suffering.

How Titles Spread

Titles spread three ways:

1. News: e.g. Reddit, X, LinkedIn, HN, search engines, newsletters, etc.
2. DMs: e.g. "you might enjoy this", "this study shows …", "maybe we should try …", etc.
3. Content: e.g. linking citation, providing context, podcast notes, riffing on a joke, etc.

Good titles are pointers to a latent space. The latent space is vast, but titles act as coordinates in the collective consciousness. Say "shape rotator" to someone who knows, and you invoke the whole essay.

Titular pointers follow different lifecycles than their referents:

1. News: People (and algorithms) who share/cross-post links often skim (or skip) the main content. Moderators (and algorithms) often curate these news feeds based on headlines. And yet other people (and algorithms) upvote/downvote/comment solely based on those titles.
2. DMs: People often share headlines because a title's claim confirms/disconfirms some shared knowledge. For example, I would eagerly share "Gremlins 2 Voted Greatest Film Of All Time" with my friends to remind them of the enduring legacy of the Gremlins franchise. In such scenarios, the headline acts as an invitation for discussion -- neither sender nor recipient need to open the linked webpage.
3. Content: Great headlines point to great ideas. In real-life human conversations, I have said that "you can't reach the brain through the ears" and "there's no speed limit" and "attention is your scarcest resource" and "don't shave that yak". In this way, a title develops a life far beyond its intended usage, while its original content remains stable (and searchable) forever and ever, amen.

These pointers themselves become data; headlines often propagate without regard for the quality of their referents. This machinery creates perverse incentives.

The Titular Metagame

The Buzzfeed-esque clickbait/thumbnail metagame continues to tempt creators/publishers toward short-sighted sensationalist headlines. It's tiresome -- titles can be so fun, so wonderful, so powerful.

If you convert humanity's precious attention into pennies, I will forever resent you for polluting this wonderful world.

But yes, you can totally prey on human bias. Enjoy that race-to-the-bottom, you fool.

We eventually grow immune to yesteryear's influenca. Some of these headlines might evoke a visceral autoimmune response:

• What This 19-Year-Old Knows About Headlines
• Scientists Discover the Clickbait Formula (It's Not What You Think)
• I Tried Writing Honest Headlines for 30 Days. What happened.
• This ONE WEIRD TRICK Gets a Trillion Clicks
• The Surprising Reason Boring Headlines Actually Win
• J.R.R. Tolkien's Magic Headline Formula
• We Need to Talk About This Headline You Just Clicked On
• This Is Clickbait. But Here's Why It Works.

If you publish media in this world, I invite you to reject parasitism. Choose symbiosis. It is not a choice you make just once -- it is something you choose again and again, whenever you share information.

If you browse my archive of essays, you'll discover that I am indeed a repeat clickbait offender. It's flagrant hypocrisy. Self-awareness does not excuse my past or future behavior. In this essay, I'm processing my shame here and trying to transmute it into real human flourishing. This is my best; it's all I can offer.

Titling Tips

Some patterns that work:

• Makes a strong claim: e.g. Huel is Fine, We can and should domesticate racoons, Maybe you're not actually trying, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, Spaced repetition can lower the stakes around destructive inbox-maintenance operations
• Plays with words/grammar/punctuation: e.g. Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All, AI is bad/good actually, Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization, America against china against america, Lady Tasting Brine, No Retvrn
• Juxtaposes: e.g. Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Scratch 'n' Sniff Stickers and the Indianapolis 500, Race in My Little Pony, Moai in Video Games, Magnets and Garlic, Tracing the history of "Asian" Barbie
• Invents vocabulary/phrase/system: e.g. No S Diet, Impureim sandwich, Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade, Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business, Opinion Detox, Don't specialize, hybridize, Arsebestos, Cyborgs vs rooms,

Additional tips:

• Commit to one title. Don't sneak a subtitle via a colon or hyphen, e.g. "Lorem Ipsum: Sit Dolor Amet".
• Don't confuse punchlines and headlines. A title must stand on its own.
• Differentiate from comparables. If your title sounds like a thousand others, add a distinguishing word. Javascript Tutorial is noise; Confucian Javascript Tutorial is signal.
• Don't riff on famous titles. Patterns like "What I Talk About When I Talk About X" and "X Considered Harmful" are cliché. They relay "couldn't think of my own title" energy to potential readers.
• Be almost too specific. Vague titles aren't mysterious -- they're unremarkable. "I Did Something Cool Today" invites skepticism. "I Learned to Backflip Today" invites curiosity.

This Titular Metagame

To find an essay's true name is to find its core narrative thread. I often know an essay's headline before its first sentence has been conceived; it's natural when I'm trying to explain a singular claim or coinable phrase. But sometimes I "finish" an essay, start choosing a title, and then realize I actually need to cut 60% of the damn thing.

This is how this essay's title evolved:

1. How to title media
2. How I title my essays
3. Write better headlines
4. Universal clickbait theory
5. On influenca
6. The clickbait meta evolves yet
7. We are vulnerable to advanced clickbait
8. This is how this essay's title evolved
9. How to win titular metagames

Here I tried to select an ethical headline that would (1) pique your interest (2) without wasting your time. I hope I delivered the titular goods. Thank you for reading.