I haven't spent long on Lemmy, but I see a lot of posts with their title literally being "Title". Is it meant to be a joke? Is it because the title would otherwise be a quote ripped from the image/post itself, and the posters don't want their fellow Lemmites to get bored from reading the same bit of text twice? Reason why I ask is because I recently posted something where I took the title from the body of text in the post, and I'm wondering if people find it less annoying to read a single placeholder word before clicking into the main post than to end up rereading a bit of the body later.

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[–] 46 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I always thought it was because the person don't know what title to write. So they simply write "Title" as in generic

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    That's exactly the reason.

    OP, it's no big deal.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I see now, thank you. I was just wondering. Now that I look a little more at the 'Title' posts as examples for others to look at, the more I see that it's usually for stuff that's hard to title without spoiling the content of the post (e.g. typing out the entire text of a meme would be really annoying)

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When it's not lazy or technical (as others said) i think it's sometimes used when the post itself is entirely self-explanatory or self-contained in some way, and having a title in addition would detract from it. Like when the entire joke setup and punchline all belong in the body text, and any title would spoil it.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I looked through several of these 'title' posts, and that does seem to be the most common use for that now that I look at it. Though I do occassionally come across stuff that you could probably come up with a decent title for, but might take longer than is worthwhile. Thank you!

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Could you link an example or two?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago*

    Just got two specific ones in my reply to @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone. You can probably find a few more by going into search, filtering it to post only, and typing in 'title' as the search text. Usually I don't click into them, so I can't recall any specific ones that stuck out at me from my history, but I remember seeing some in my feed time to time, enough to make me wonder why it's relatively common.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I haven't seen posts like that, but if I had to take a guess, those posts are probably posting from Mastodon or some other service that doesn't use subject lines. So Lemmy has to work around the lack of subject line, given that lemmy posts require them.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    That sounds like it could be a plausible answer, so I looked for some posts called "Title" (or some variation), but both the users I happened to find who did this have a Lemmy site as their home instance.

    • Title OP's instance: iusearchlinux.fyi
    • title OP's instance: lemmy.world

    So there must be another reason. I also wasn't aware that your posts from Mastodon could federate to Lemmy. I thought the two platforms were incompatible, since here all content has to fit into a specific community, but there you have to use hashtags, which don't seem to correlate to any specific Lemmy communites (though I've only lurked on a few Mastodon instances; I don't have an account)

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    You can post to a lemmy community from Mastodon just by tagging the community in your post. Your first line becomes the subject normally, but it didn't always work that way.

    As for the two images you posted, they were both just meme posts from months ago, and the poster looks to have just been using a generic subject line because there was no need for text...

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Thanks for explaining the Mastodon-Lemmy compatibility thing. I've been confused about it for quite awhile. My alt's instance blocks a bunch of Mastodon servers, and I've always wondered why, since I almost never see any content from Mastodon users on here anyway. I always assumed it was simply a gesture for the admins show that they disapprove of that server's policies or something.

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