One-liner Headlines. Discuss. October 18, 2000 6:54 PM   Subscribe

One-liner Headlines.

One-liner quotes/sayings/quips are pretty common (and often very witty) on personal blogs, but that's your perogeta [sic?]. On MeFi however, I don't think I'm too fond of them, and have been seeing a lot more lately. It's obvious that a link with a good subject, description and question/thoughts up for debate will spawn a bigger/better conversation than a few witty words. Also, it helps people to know what they're clicking on, and can still lead to a hearty discussion even if the link itself goes bad. Other thoughts on the matter?
posted by tomorama to Etiquette/Policy at 6:54 PM (2 comments total)

It gets tricky sometimes. There was a while there where long headlines were being discussed as inappropriate, which I think lead to these short headlines becomming more popular.

What I find interesting is in this post grank (and I'm sorry to point you out specifically, you're just a recent example) one of his defenses of the link description is the entire news line was still maintained to 1 line across.

Grank's a fairly new user (welcome! and again I apologize as using you as an example, I'm not criticising, honest! :-) and it could easily be thought by new users that one-liners are the way to post things.

There's nothing in the guidelines about length of post, and I don't think there should be, because different links will need different amounts of description/provokation.

I do, however, think it's a good idea to encourage people to summarize what they're linking to, and to either pose a question, or point out what in the link prompted them to post it here.

A couple of what I think are good recent examples:

jamescblack's link to poetictech because it's brief, and prompts discussion ("I want desk x...") and it warns about the site's slowness, which adds another layer to the conversation.

and Dragonboy's what is a likely voter post. This one's mildly long, but nicely summarizes the link, describes his problem(s) with it, and generally opens the floor to discussion.
posted by cCranium at 6:53 AM on October 19, 2000


"prerogative".

Most unlikely word ever to appear in the title of a Bobby Brown song.
posted by baylink at 8:55 AM on November 16, 2000


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