>Hopefully the mystery will bring more people in? haha ;)
I know that's why people use mysterious titles, but trust me - that's done, it's over, it's the old and busted of social news.
It's one of those things that may have worked when social news was new and interesting and still a novelty, and people would click all sorts of stuff wily-nily just to see what neat treasure lies underneath.
But we're all over that, and now what we're dealing with is information overload - how to manage the signal:noise ratio in the information we consume and maximize the signal.
The expectation of informative titles is a key part of that, so all mysterious titles do now now is piss people off for making them click to see what the article was about, instead of just telling them in the submission title, which is what it's for.
You as a submitter (or advertiser, I've seen studies on this for SEM) are much better served writing a concrete, informative title. You may have less clickthroughs (but sometimes more - specifics are very effective), but every single one of them will be someone interested in whatever you linked to (or are selling, in the latter case), more likely to read, buy, participate, etc., and less likely to close the window annoyed at having been tricked into wasting a few seconds and attention on something they don't care about.
I know that's why people use mysterious titles, but trust me - that's done, it's over, it's the old and busted of social news.
It's one of those things that may have worked when social news was new and interesting and still a novelty, and people would click all sorts of stuff wily-nily just to see what neat treasure lies underneath.
But we're all over that, and now what we're dealing with is information overload - how to manage the signal:noise ratio in the information we consume and maximize the signal.
The expectation of informative titles is a key part of that, so all mysterious titles do now now is piss people off for making them click to see what the article was about, instead of just telling them in the submission title, which is what it's for.
You as a submitter (or advertiser, I've seen studies on this for SEM) are much better served writing a concrete, informative title. You may have less clickthroughs (but sometimes more - specifics are very effective), but every single one of them will be someone interested in whatever you linked to (or are selling, in the latter case), more likely to read, buy, participate, etc., and less likely to close the window annoyed at having been tricked into wasting a few seconds and attention on something they don't care about.