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Discussion on: Stop rewarding quantity!

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valeriavg profile image
Valeria

My feed is particularly shitty today, may be due to the ongoing A/B testing or the position of stars, but still...

It's discouraging and it seems that I'll need to "optimise" my articles if I expect them to be read.

So, after careful consideration, I decided to stop giving a crap and join this rant instead 😁

The only reason I used this platform for so long is because I didn't need to care about anything but actual writing. Not consistency, not hyped topics, just writing articles. The better they were - the better they performed.

But lately even the weekly roundup promotes some fairly mundane creations, so I'm clearly not the target audience here either.

I hope it's the A/B test, though, I really do...

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke

I also tried to A/B test on optimizing articles, but not in a systematic way, and with so little articles and so many other factors (like @inhuofficial observed some "ideal times to release") I doubt it's anywhere above randomness either.

Probably there are some ways to optimize articles that don't require much effort and don't change your style of writing.

I tried to use emojis in headings and even in article titles, I tried giving more or less information in the title, adding more or less images, code, codepens, and third party content like videos, and I think this is the first article where I used the proper liquid tags to embed articles ({% post ) and mention other authors (using the at sign).

But like many others already said that their most important audience is the author, that they are writing for themselves, and if anybody else is interested, even better.

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valeriavg profile image
Valeria

Yup, I gave it it a try with "Learn X in just Y minutes", which got bunch of reactions, but today I've got a comment on my old "non-optimimal" article. User was thanking me for it and showing how they've used the technique I shared in their project. I'm still grinning, to be honest. I'd trade a thousand likes for such comment any day.