That last blog post did something I have been playing with but never articulated.

A lot of folks seem stressed about writing titles to blog posts. Short posts are mostly title-less, and there’s this sense that picking a title is a point of friction. There’s also a concern that no one clicks links or keeps reading.

I think that’s all a bit silly, but I know that my own absence of some kind of hangup around writing titles doesn’t mean that others don’t feel it.

But there’s already a native social form for long posts that are supposedly “title-less” that many folks clearly read. And mostly, when they read those long posts, they’re doing the equivalent of clicking through, so that’s clearly not a barrier.

We call these long posts “threads”, but really, they’re just a series of sentences or paragraphs where the lead in sentence is meant to draw folks into what you’re about to say and warn them it will span more than once 280 character block.

We have another term for an initial short sentence or phrase that draws people in and warns them there’s more than 280 characters to follow – titles.

I wish folks who adopted long form, title-less writing would learn from threads on other social platform and just make their opening sentence or so the title of their post. That’s what the first post in a thread always was, and it gives me far more to go on than a randomly truncated paragraph. You can certainly craft a 200 character or so sentence or title to start your post. You probably already did. Just make that the title.