With every item it posted, Upworthy would write twenty-five different headlines. Software allowed Upworthy to automatically publish all twenty-five, and then determine the most clickable of the bunch. Based on these results, Upworthy uncovered syntactical patterns that were close to sure hits. (Upworthy found tremendous success when it used variations of the sentence “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”) These formulas were so effective that they became commonplace across the Web—so overused that readers grew wise to the tricks and the formulas lost their powers, which led to the frantic
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