Yes it’s called “marketing” and it has a huge impact on initial perception.

Consider each of these and think of which would catch your eye enough to click it, read about it, then come back and upvote it:

* Meta cheatsheet

* The only cheat sheet you need

* Cheatsheet.sh

* Cheat Sheetah

* Unified CLI Cheetsheet

People gaming the title is the reason for the rule that the title has to match the actual linked article. Though if you’re the creator of the content that’s not an issue as you can title it at the source however you want.

Also that "Meta cheatsheet" sounds like a cheatsheet for something called "Meta", and not being familiar with any such technology, I wouldn't be curious about a cheatsheet.

Unless something has changed in the repo, the Github description -- as close to a "headline" that a Github repo can get -- is: "the only cheat sheet you need"

I agree that "Meta cheatsheet" is not a very effective title. When the repo doesn't have a Github description, I usually go with:

      [repo name] - [first line of README.md]

In this case:

cheat.sh - Unified access to community-driven cheat sheets repo of the world.

(I modified it to abbreviate "repositories" to "repo" and to omitted the phrase "the best", to go along with HN's rule for avoiding sensationalism.)

It's not just the title, I'm guessing people are more reluctant to click an unknown URL.

Your submission points at cht.sh while the current submission points at github.com.

I think there are a few variables, like time of day and competing headlines. I saw some breakdowns of the concept on reddit a while back, it's seemingly pretty random.

It's not just the title. Time of submission affects which parts of the world will be seeing the submission.

Also, randomness.

Don't forget the timing in regards to adjacent headlines in the feed at any moment a user reads it.