TIL that writing prompts with 'you wake up with no memory' get 10x more replies than any other setup I've tried

I ran a little experiment last month on a writing forum and posted 12 prompts over 4 weeks, and the two amnesia ones blew up while my careful character-driven ones got crickets. Has anyone else noticed certain prompt formats just outperform others for no good reason?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew_jones311mo ago

Whoa wait, you actually ran a whole experiment on this? That's wild. I'd have guessed the amnesia thing would do better, but not 10x better. I've definitely noticed that 'puzzle box' setups get way more traction than quiet character studies, even when the character stuff is objectively better written. Maybe it's just that people like the instant hook of a mystery they can solve along with the character, you know?

hayden_craig951mo ago

dude, the "crickets" part hit me right in the chest. i did something similar last year with short story prompts on a discord server and the amnesia ones always got like five times the reactions. i spent days on this one prompt about a carpenter who finds an old letter in a wall and nobody said a word. then i threw up a "you wake up in a white room with a note that says 'dont trust the window'" and it had 40 replies by morning. it stings a little when the stuff you put heart into gets ignored.

keith_bennett1mo agoProlific Poster

@drew_jones31 that puzzle box thing is spot on, my buddy posted a haunted house prompt and got two replies, then wrote "you wake up in a coffin" and it blew up overnight.