How to title your blog post or whatever

choose a classifier

So you’ve made a thing. I’ll pretend it’s a blog post, though it doesn’t really matter. If people read your thing, some would like it, and some wouldn’t.

You should try to make a good thing, that many people would like. That presents certain challenges. But our subject today is only how to give your thing a title.

My advice is: Think of the title as “classifier”.

When people see the title, some are likely to click on it and some won’t. Abstractly speaking, the title adds a second dimension to the above figure:

A title has two goals. First, think of all the people in the world who, if they clicked on your thing, would finish it and love it. Ideally, those people would click. That is, you want there to be people in the like + click region:

Other people will hate your thing. It’s fine, some people hate everything. But if they click on your thing, they’ll be annoyed and tell everyone you are dumb and bad. You don’t want that. So you don’t want people in the hate + click region.

I find it helpful to think about all title-related issues from this perspective.

1. Everyone is deluged with content. Few people will hate your thing, because very few will care enough to have any feelings at all about it.

2. The good news is that it’s a big world and none of us are that unique. If you make a thing that you would love, then I guarantee you at least 0.0001% of other people would love it too. That’s still 8000 people! The problem is finding them.

3. That’s hard. Because—you don’t like most things, right? So you start with a strong prior that most things are bad (for you). Life is short, so you only click on things when there’s a very strong signal they’ll be good (for you).

4. Say you write a post about concrete. Should you call it, “My favorite concrete pozzolanic admixtures”, even though 99.9% of people have no idea what pozzolanic means? Well, think of the people who’d actually like your thing. Do they know? If so, use “pozzolanic”. That gives a strong signal to Concrete People: “Hey! This is for you! And you know I’m not lying about that, because I’ve driven away all the noobs.”

5. So ideally you’re aiming for something like this:

6. Be careful imitating famous people. If Barack Obama made a thing called, “Thoughts on blockchain”, everyone would read it, because the implicit title is “Thoughts on blockchain, by Barack Goddamn Obama”. Most of the titles you see probably come from people who have some kind of established “brand”. If you don’t have that, you probably don’t want to choose the same kind of titles.

7. The title isn’t just about the subject. I called this post, “How to title your blog post or whatever” partly because I hope some of this applies to other things beyond blog posts. But mostly I did that because it signals that my style is breezy and informal. I think people really underrate this.

8. Some people choose clever punny titles. If you have a big audience that reads all your things, then your title doesn’t need to be a good classifier. I’m not in that situation, but I sometimes find a pun so amusing that I can’t resist. “Fahren-height” was worth it. “Taste games” was not.

9. Traditional advice says that you should put your main “message” in the title. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it provides a lot of signal. On the other hand, it seems to get people’s hackles up. The world is full of bad things that basically pick a conclusion and ignore or distort all conflicting evidence. If you’re attempting to be fair or nuanced, putting your conclusion in the title might signal that you’re going to be a typical biased/bad thing. It will definitely lead to lots of comments “refuting” you from people who didn’t read your thing.

10. Putting your conclusion in the title may also ruin your “story”. Though you should ask: Do the people who’d like your thing really care about your story?

11. A difficult case is things that create new “labels”. Sometimes there’s an idea floating around, and we need someone to make a canonical thing with a Name. To serve that role, the thing’s title needs to be that name. This presents a trade-off. A post titled “The Waluigi Effect” is great for people who want to know what that is, but terrible for everyone else.

12. For the best title ever I nominate, “I’m worried about Chicago”. It doesn’t look fancy, but do you see how elegantly it balances all the above issues?

13. You’d think that, by 2025, technology would have solved the problem of things getting to people. I think it’s the opposite. Social media is optimized to keep people engaged and does not want people leaving the walled garden. Openly prohibiting links would cause a revolt, so instead they go as close as people will tolerate. Which, it turns out, is pretty close.

14. Boring titles are OK. I know that no one will click on “Links for April” who doesn’t already follow me. But I think that's fine, because I don't think anyone else would like it.

15. Consider title-driven thing creation. That is, consider first choosing a title and then creating a thing that delivers on the title. It’s sad to admit, but I think there are many good things that simply don’t have good titles. Consider not making those things. The cynical view of this is that without a good title, no one will read your thing, so why bother? The optimistic view is that we’re all drowning in content, so what the world actually needs is good things that can find their way to the people who will benefit from them. In practice, it’s often something in the middle: You start to create your thing, then you choose a title, then you structure your thing to deliver on the title.

16. My favorite thing category is “Lucid examination of all sides of an issue which finds some evidence pointing in various directions”. Some people make fun of me for spending so much time researching seed oils and then lamely calling my thing “Thoughts on seed oil”. But what should I have called that instead? Lots of bloggers create things in this category, and no one seems to have solved the problem.

17. [Insert joke about how bad the title of this post is.]