I know it is a common practice among journalists to exaggerate the titles of articles, and also exaggerate the stories narrated in those articles, because they feel this is the only way to compete for the attention of readers. Unfortunately there is some truth in this, mainly because the majority of writers believe this is an ethical and necessary ‘innocent bending’ of the true facts, which is acceptable. If only few writers refuse to exaggerate and don’t use WOW titles, then the readers will not know this, and assume that even after exaggerating the title it could not excite their interest, so they skip it. They expect titles to be exaggerated (which is a sad thing) and this way they are themselves perpetuating the skewing of truth (basically encouraging writers to cheat them).

People are overwhelmed with information, most of which is either waste of attention or outright hoax, so naturally they are looking to read only the most interesting or promising titles. The problem is that they are looking for valuable content behind the glittery but fake wrapping of titles, because more often than not valuable content (important truth) can not be found behind WOW titles that deceive about the real information presented, and distort the true facts.

Anyway, I don’t like to exaggerate and to bend the truth in order to attract attention, not even if that results in low popularity. I consider those to be forms of cheating and lying. Nevertheless, my experience with posting replies to articles on the RMN front page is that it is not worth doing it. I am sure that everybody who takes the time to write a post does that because he/she wants people to read it. Now, if a post can get say 800-1000 reads as a stand alone post, while the same text would get only about 200 reads as a reply (as it often happens with my replies, compared to my stand alone posts) then it makes no sense to post replies at all. The longer the delay between the publishing of the original post and the posting of a reply, the less reads will the reply get. If I would be able to post a reply now to a stand alone post that was published a month ago, I doubt it would get even a dozen of views.

Therefore in the future I will write only stand alone posts for the RMN front page, even if they are addressing issues or articles that have been recently posted by others. I will include all necessary previous information to make it a stand alone post, and make it unnecessary to read the related initiating post. My replies will be restricted to CGI forum, because here there is no such huge difference in the number of views between original posts and replies. Thanks Susoni for moving our posts to the RMN front page.

Wish you happy holidays!

Morpheus